One, Two, Three… Blast Off (by sarah)

Before covid we were running a story telling night called The Moving Story Telling Cafe but it was derailed and not just by covid - we sadly lost one of our trio to cancer. So last month we relaunched but this time without the Moving - The Folk of Gloucester have kindly offered us a permanent home and also house one of the other Legacy projects of Chloe The Midnight Story Teller... The Story Telling Library.

Last month was a special launch and opening of the library with lots of guest story tellers who all knew Chloe personally - that means the this month is going to be the first actual Gloucester Story Telling Cafe and it happens to fall on May the Forth. One of the reasons the three of us... Chloe, Jane and myself worked so well was that we are unashamedly geeks but perhaps not so obviously geeks to those with narrower ideas of what a geek is. We love our sci-fi and fantasy and I had a request from the Gloucestershire Poetry Society to have an event that geeky poetry would be welcome... well how could we resist such a set up.

So we are blasting off with a Starwars joke and a sci-fi author whizz reading a poem from their sci-fi novel!

Chris Hemingway is a poet, prose writer and musician from Gloucestershire. His book “The Future” was published in 2016 and was described by Cheltenham Poetry Festival as ‘darkly witty, like “The Man Who Fell to Earth “ meets “The Office”’. He has also had published two poetry pamphlets ‘party in the Diaryhouse’ and ‘paperfolders’. That’s a lot of ‘p’s’…

I have used a picture of my dad dressed up an explorer of space when he was a little boy - my Granddad took arty pictures and with my Nanny loved to make outfits for my dad and I am so lucky that copies of this one still existed in Australia and that a cousin kindly sent a copy to me.

Doors open at 7 on May the 4th 2013 at The Folk of Gloucester 99-103 Westgate Street Gloucester, Gloucestershire, GL1 2PG

There is a cafe and bar. Entry is free but we will have a pay what you want pot out!

We are open to all story telling types from traditional to memoirs, to flash fictions, to novel extracts, to oral and of course narrative poetry!

Our Moto is "story telling for all/everyone" and as such not only do we have some fab guests lined up as well as music but we have an open mic were we would love people to come and share. Open mic slots are a max of 10 minutes.

This is the years itinerary - first Thursday of every month except January as lets face it - it is nearly always going to be too close to New Years Eve for most people and I can't be dealing with that!

Here is the Facebook event for tomorrows: One Two Three... Blast Off! and May the Forth be with you!

event

I am very excited about where this is all going - Story Telling and Gloucester have a long history and I hope a longer future!

WoPo – And the Poetry Reboot (by sarah)

Many years ago I set up a poetry writing group for a group of student writers who I met at NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) and so of course this manifested as a month of writing poetry and the first year there was a pledge sign up and a private forum and the website with prompts and all the social media and so on. I had guest poets and so on and it was great but a lot of work. I tried to pay others to do some of the work whilst I was pregnant with Mary but it just didn't really happen and so I scaled the event back. Then the physical group all finished university or drifted away and others couldn't do feb so I started doing it as a more year round thing and dropped the specific URL and tried to go with just World Poetry rather than a month writing drive.

But...

Turned out some people like the month drive thing so its ended up as a bit of a miss match and half forgotten project which is a shame as when I went through the archive for its tenth anniversary I realised there was a lot of writing prompts and exercises and lots and lots of awesome poets stories and of course many of the poems written from the prompts have indeed gone on to be published.

Last year the prompts when up on Instagram mainly because I was dealing with hospitals and things and it just wasn't going to happen any other way. But this means I need to think about where this is all going? I feel February just is the main thing but other bits through out the year works fine - I might even manage to do some physical meet ups this year. This has already prodded me into sorting out a little poetry outing last week at The Folk Gloucester to be inspired by Cedric Titcombes work - it is amazing and I wish I had all the money to buy some of those images - each one is a liminal space in and of itself - but that is another story for another time!

Basically I can not run the sort of this I did in the first year by myself - it just isn't possible but covid did impact us as a family in drastic ways plus obviously the bereavements so the site is a mess, stuff is spread over multiple platforms and so on.

So there will be prompts and I will share them - they may not be exactly daily (I do not want a repeat of the year the scheduler did not work) but I will try and I am also trying to get myself back out to some poetry events. I want to take part in the zooms and things but the clipping and things is quiet exhausting so like with the physical events I am reserving my energy for the ones that have asked me to perform - it is purely an energy thing - I would love to attend so much stuff but I just can't.

And that brings me onto the fact that I am just having to take it all slowly and build myself and the projects back up slowly - I suck at this aspect as I want to do everything NOW!

In summary - if anyone does want to take part here are the links - there is loads of archive material so you don't have to wait and if you meed or want the prompts in another format please just say ie there are little booklets for the older prompts and so on.

insta

website

Facebook - there is also a group but it is reserved for people I know

Twitter it was under TheMonsterBlogs but twitter has broken many things including the tools that let me switch accounts easily so if anything goes up it will be just under my own account Saffy.

Lastly I feel I have failed slightly at the World part of the WoPo - I do have participants from all over the world but I had wanted lots of articles on poems from other languages and cultures etc and that just never really happened even when I had a budget to pay people to write articles - so I don't know weather I should be changing the name or not. Also on that note a lot of the prompts get used by writers for stories and things too which might be a stretch of the poetry bit but what do people think?

Pan Dumb Moan I Am (by sarah)

This year has not been what I thought it would be - that is often the case but this year more so than normal and this time not just for me. Global events have shaken all our lives to a greater or lesser extent. This upheaval has cost many their lives and upended others, I myself ended up very sick and having a nice trip to hospital in an Ambulance whilst wondering if I was ever going to see my family again.

The pandemic of covid-19 has stirred up feeling in society I had hoped were extinguished with the libration of the concentration camps at the end of the second world war but if I am honest I already know that the festering puss of eugenics was always in a shallow grave and just waiting to pop back to the surface. I am seeing the disabled and chronically ill being side lined and even told to just get on and die by those who are supposed to be our friends and protectors, authorities and work colleagues alike. I am also seeing people going out of their way to help regardless of their own hardships and that is something else - the flip side - an amazing.

Lock down has been hard on people especially mothers who have had their support networks basically made illegal whilst meeting and laughing in a pub by mostly men is absolutely fine. This stark contrasts and contradictions plus back peddling and muddled thinking define the crises here in the UK, especially as the year has drawn on and floods and storms have added to the stresses. Unemployment and employment shifts have abounded with backs fluctuating between being magnanimous and strike you whilst you are down.

Erosions of human rights especially LBGTQ+ community have begun with barely a whimper from anyone outside of the community thanks to the manufactured war between the different types of feminism and rainbows. It is a mess and a wedge driven too deep by those that once added balm to the cuts and bruises of the general bigotry of life. Allies now fight.

Many of us have lost our jobs, or in my case my entire industry - it is not a good time to work in events.

And in all of this pain and stress and confusion people were sharing memes about how Shakespeare and other such artistic heroes created and made master pieces whilst in quarantine so that's obviously what we should have all been doing - and they meant it well and mainly it was them kicking themselves up the back side but others were seeing it as duty to create and record the goings on and were telling others off for not doing so. But people where (and are) dying and we couldn't even attend the funerals except by weblink and it stank and hurt and was not... just not something that was conductive to creation for many.

I have written very little this year - I have started to loose count of the people I have lost, I keep forgetting people are now dead and that is horrendous. I missed a funeral because I couldn't get zoom to work - it is laughable and I did laugh until I cried and then I laughed and then was in a weird sob-laugh state.

And that's another thing - I was asked to perform and take part in the fantastic online array of performances and events but... I have little to no voice, I am horse - I can not sing or read out loud to the kids even so there is no performing for me - no live streams or recording my poetry for youtube. Nope - just lots of sipping various beverages and brews in the hope that they might in some way help. Add to that that I just did not have good enough tech until the middle of last month for the preferred ZOOM to work for me :/

The virus affects eyesight as well - as does the extra autoimmune system disease it has left me with so I have had to learn to adapt to even worse eye sight than I had previously - my glasses can no longer correct everything and I risk further damage before this is over. I have premature ageing of the eyes and a host of other issues. But my new glasses have made it so that I can sit at my computer again and work.... half a year into the illness.

And tentatively I have started to create again but I am not looking at producing more than normal.... oh no I keep having bouts of being poorly again or having to home school the kids due to them having a temperature and waiting for tests or isolations/lockdowns happening and I have my elderly mother to look after - no I am facing the fact that I missed a lot of the writing challenges - I started and aborted them and yet I feel I want to at least revisit those as they are normally important project drivers for me.

As such I have lists of things I can dip in and out of but I do not need to complete anything.

Fevers and Graves Disease have made my normally vivid dreamscape into living visions or hallucinations with beautiful landscapes and narratives that would make epic films. I have begun trying to record them but only have vague notes from the worst of it as I wasn't entirely conscious when they were really bad. Also until this month I had written a few poems this year - as in under ten and generally composed on twitter or facebook as they had just started as comments on the political situation.

I have been tagging the art and poems with ArtFromMyCovidBed and yes I am still spending a lot of time there and I hate it, I want to be up and running but getting up the stairs leaves me panting and coughing and gasping for breath and it is ridiculous.

My mantra is this is a pandemic and the only thing you have to do in quarantine is SURVIVE.

Having said that I am now just beginning to create again and I have lots of ideas that have been brewing in the nightsweat insomnia that plagues me and there are now a number of political and pandemic based poems. These I hope to weave into a few related collections mixed in with some of the art and stories spun from the fever dreams. They may just be chapters of a larger work or collections in their own right. They are:

Pan Dumb Moan Am I

Pan Ick

Pan Damned It

These will be specifically themed on the pandemic and on going crisis, where as Art From My Covid Bed is just any art I have produced during this recovery period.

I like these titles as there are rings and knots of meaning to them - but that will have to wait for another post.

To the world in general - Health, Hope and Happiness <3

(this piece was cross blogged from my poetry blog Turquoise Monster)

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.