Moon Mega Make – Update! (by sarah)

This week the Moon Mega Make community textiles project has been out twice in both Gloucester and Cheltenham 🙂 Someone even started stitching the Sun which made me very happy!

Part of the outings was also to put up posters and give out flyers and have further meetings about Moon Mania. This lot of flyers cover the Spoken Word and Creative Writing aspect of Moon Mania which currently comprises 4 events, the first of which also includes the Mega Make at the First Thursday in Cheltenham - an Arts Quarter event that happens once a month unsurprisingly on the First Thursday where the Wilson Museum and Art Gallery is open late and July's event is Moon Themed for the 50th anniversary of the first human on the moon!

There is lots of awesome moon themed stuff happening 6-9 pm 🙂

Cookes Coffee and Curios is also supporting the Moon Mania Mega Make giving us a space for the Moon Meets and popping my posters and flyers up in their wonderful coffee shop! The photo below is of my mum stitching away over a coffee.

And last but certainly not least - Gloucester City is having a wonderful Earth and Moon Festival opening with Gaia a giant inflatable Earth that is going into one of the loveliest historical landmarks around - Llantony Sucunda Priory. This amazing artwork is by Luke Jerram and is open to the public on the 28-30 of June 2019. Check out the Facebook event here. To my utter joy I get to take the Mega Make along to this event - extract timings for me are yet to be called but I am hoping to make an appearance on all three days so if you are local come along see the art and add a stitch!

The Moon Mania Mega Make even ended up at the Gloucestershire Steam Punk Society's get together this month where there were cogs and moon chatting and much much more!

And last but certainly not least my prototype t-shirt has arrived - I don't like the black rectangle around the moon so am attempting to get rid of that in future prints but this one shall be mine for events to go along with the space dresses, moon skirts and leggings 🙂 I am hoping to sell these to help fund some of the other Moon Mania events and I would like to be able to give these to all the poets and story writers who are providing works for the Moon Miscellany!

Haiku Poetry Day (by sarah)

Moth guide bright, globe that glows -
through to slivered nothing,
Lunar is your name

The Young Adult Reading Group who meet in Waterstones Gloucester sometimes at the same time as my monthly poetry events asked me if I'd written poetry lately as it was Haiku Poetry Day - I hadn't because I have been too wrapped up in my emotions to write anything creative unless it is about my dad and then I tend to get over emotional and have been unable to finish a single piece.

But part of dad's legacy is my writing so I have been trying with novels and comic books and poetry but mainly just staring blankly.

I managed to write this - it is not a Haiku in the way Europeans understand Haikus and it certainly is not a Japanese Haiku but I love Japanese poetry and am obsessed with the moon at the moment so I tried to make something that bit into that essence of existence.

It is slightly different to the tweet version I sent were I wrote Lunars as I think it works better this way.

If you want to know more about the poetry form of Haiku I would suggest you start with wikipedia and then go on from there!

The date of the newly discovered (by me) poetry day is the 17th of April so I am hoping to catch it a little better and more prepared next year.

Things We Are Up Too :) (by sarah)

Sun 20th of Jan - Waterstones Presents Villanelles with the Gloucester Poetry Society 2-4 pm in the cafe Waterstones Gloucester free entry

Thurs 31st of Jan - an evening with Holly McNish and fellow poets at Blackfriars Gloucester (sold out)

February World Poetry Writing Month - or WoPo - a writing drive I have been running for nearly a decade now, it runs through out Feb and I pop up writing exercises and various inspirational bits including guest bloggers and I have some fantastically talented people lined up as guest posters this year 🙂 There is also a Facebook group and page and posts will appear on TheMonsterBlogs twitter and the Pinterest board.

Thurs 7th Feb - First Thursday The Enduring Eye at the Wilson Museum and Art Gallery Cheltenham Sarah will be presenting a poetic response to the polar exploration exhibition, free event and part of regular series: On the first Thursday of the month a cultural hub of food, music, performance, art and retail – all within walking distance and outside of traditional working hours – will come together along Clarence Street, Royal Well Road, St George’s Place and Church Street. First Thursdays is a public event and free to attend. The cultural quarter stays open until 9pm or later on the first Thursday of every month

Mon 11th of Feb - Cheltenham Poetry Festival Slam Qualifier 7:30 pm Playhouse Theatre Cheltenham, £5 tix

Sun 17th of Feb - Waterstones Presents Villanelles with the Gloucester/shire Poetry Society 2-4 pm free event - this event is now on the third Thursday of each month bar April as it clashes with Easter Sunday.

Sat 23rd of Feb - Folk Craft and Story Telling at the Folk Museum Gloucester (also known as the Life Museum) this is a free event as part of the Folk Trail during the Gloucester Folk Festival. Based in the Dairy and Victorian School Room out the back of the museum - sadly due to structural work the actual museum will be closed but the diary, cider press room and garden will be open. We will be running Rag Rug and Barge Painting workshops in the Dairy and story telling (including Aethelflead the puppet) in the Victorian School Room!

Shooting Stars (by sarah)

Last night I watched the Geminid Meteor Shower - my great Aunt died the morning before and I feel isolated and cut off from the family that surrounded me as a child - she was the last link I had to that really - to that older generation - we all knew she was ill and in her 80's but somehow it still sliced as a knife and I cried and I wasn't sure weather I was crying for her or crying for my nan or the child that was or something else but I just remember all her jewellery and sitting around the kitchen table and darting between hers and my nana house - they were in the council houses at the base of the tower blocks and my great gran was just over the road in the old peoples home and sometimes we'd all go and see her and take her food.

This year has had death and life in it sometimes that spell in-between did not even get to birth. And I am dwelling, the sorrows piling up and threatening to drown me and an apathy is calling as I see the pain once more of those who chose to leave transferred and intensified in those who they have left behind.

So many things to worry about and I can't seem to help stem the tied of hurt and pain and death, I am still trying but the trying is getting harder.

I made mulled cider, hot apples and chocolate milks of varying temperatures and invited people round - they were already invited but I enhanced and kept it that way so as not to disappear into a ball of misery. I had canceled the plans of the previous day as a void yearned and pulled at me and the tears poured from my eyes with both intensity and numbness and there was just me in a pool of warmth that I know was my husbands arms but I did not really see him.

And so I had to make sure we still did something so we watched the stars, my little ice gems of twinkling sky that I know are hotter than fire and ring like bells and the shooting stars are rocks that I love the crystal patterns of and the ripples of cold melt that coat their surface once they have - if they ever do - reach the ground.

When I came to try and write all of this, to share with others what the night of light smudged night was like, it came as a poem.

I watched the shooting stars with my family and friends, there were a few around at in the early evening though the youngest grew bored. The meteors were glorious later on - everyone else had buggered off including my family to great Morpheus or sleep or a warm bed at least - so it was just me and bits of burning rock from space and the mortality pain hit - all of this wonderfulness often over ridden by pain and anguish and all that getting to know the world and just as life fits like a well fitting shoe no long giving blisters - whoompf you are gone to goodness knows where - maybe riding the back of those steaks of light or sitting with the sky daddy, or to be cradled by the arms of Gaia or just a nothing.

I watched the shooting stars remembering that like me they too were star dust and named them after the loved until I ran out of names and then I beheld the others as the lost ones I could not or did not want to know, held them as the sorrowful lonely deaths because though we all ultimately face death alone some of us have to face life on our own in desolation and that is a bone chill blood curdle of a thing that slices at the very humanity of us.

I watched the shooting stars and they reflected in my tears for the losses of this and all years and tears of gratitude at the wonders and spectacles and love that those same years have also brung. I watched the sky rocks blaze. And then folded strips of paper to glow in the dark as wishes, they were of course what we have decided is a star shape though it is pointy and not spherical. Tonight again I will watch the shooting stars.

National Poetry Day UK 2018 (by sarah)

Today is National Poetry Day - so I shall be spending the day on various social media sites and blogs sharing all the stuff from the archives - namely the writing exercises and write ups on interesting writers.

Where you can find me:

Saffy
TheMonsterBlogs
Sarah Snell-Pym Writer and Artist
Pinterest Wopo Inspired
Google+

Where you can read my poetry:

Turquoise Monster
Snell-Pym Poetry
Orange Monster
Magenta Monster

Where you can find writing exercises:

World Poetry Writing Month
Magenta Monster

Poetry is a pretty big thing for me - I never thought it was going to be, I kind of thought the whole thing wasn't for me. I like what I like and that has little to do with the academic studies of the poetic form. I like poems in different styles from different times and cultures and so on. I find people being elitist and pretentious about it all... annoying and ignorant.

That is one of the reasons that I have backed the local poetry festivals the way I have - they offered spaces for voices that were rarely heard and the internet also helped.

This month I am lucky in that I am hosting events at the Gloucester Poetry Society and I am taking part in a Slam over in Cheltenham (still not sure about the competition part of the slam culture but I like the events over all and the people I see there - they are fun and diverse).

I've been going through my poetry and trying to decide how best to move forward with it all - I have singularly failed to actually submit work once again but thanks to people chasing me I am in a couple of pamphlets which are to be release later this month I believe.

I have several collections that were stalled with head injury and what not which I should really revisit and sort out and I have a few more zines that are pretty much ready to go!

But I also want to produce more books with other people - I liked WigglyPet Press's involvement with last years poetry anthology but it has now been out for a year so I feel that it is time for me to publish something new!

At the moment I am thinking of something themed around space, the cosmos, exploration and the unknown but I have not decided on the format yet!