THE LANGUAGE CLUB with Contemporary Music Preview

The Language Club is collaborating with the Peninsula Arts Contemporary Music Festival on a preview event Poetry in Performance at Plymouth Arts Centre, Saturday 7 February at 7.30pm. Guest readers: Simon Jenner and Norman Jope, with open mic and bar, tickets £5 and £3.

    Simon Jenner edits Eratica magazine. His latest poetry book About Bloody Time was published by Waterloo Press in 2007. Plymouth writer Norman Jope's The Book of Bells and Candles is also just published by Waterloo. Norman will be performing a contemporary music collaboration with Alexis Kirke.

    The Peninsula Arts Contemporary Music Festival this year is themed for the Darwin 200 celebrations with special Darwin related commissions and performances. Composers, sound artists and writers in attendance will include: Michael Stimpson, Ian Pace, Maggini Quartet, Rebecca Stott, Karen Wimhurst, Eduardo R Miranda, John Matthias, Jane Grant, Nick Ryan, Miso Ensemble and Miguel Azguime, Sam Richards, Simon Ible, Ten Tors Orchestra, Roland Perrin. 

PLYMOUTH READING BY MARK FORD

LATEST ARTS COUNCIL AWARD

Tom Vowler is the latest in a cluster of MA Creative Writing graduates to be awarded an Arts Council grant. In Tom's case, £5000 to develop his writing and work on a novel by extending a short story 'Old Enough' that was originally written for an MA workshop. He's writing a blog about his progress with the project and hoping to interact with other writers at Old Enough Novel. Tom was an editor of Ink magazine.

    His stories have been published in the journals Brand, Words and Riptide. Last year he won first prize in the HappenStance short fiction competition.

POET AND PAINTER

MA Creative Writing graduate Rupert M Loydell has had two poetry collections published by Shearsman Books of Exeter, the most recent is An Experiment in Navigation with a beautiful cover painting by the artist and poet. Jane Routh writes: 'More than ever, Rupert Loydell's new book reminds me that he is a painter. I don't mean that his writing is primarily visual, but that he rejoices in discovering what his medium is capable of . . . Echoes, alphabets, series and collage are part of the sense of play and pleasure with which Rupert Loydell makes order from disorder. These are mixed media poems. They are serious and they are full of games. Running through them all is a quiet and open-hearted voice.' 

    Rupert is editor of Stride magazine, a wide ranging online compendium of new writing and reviews, worth checking for both. He is Lecturer in English with Creative Writing at University College Falmouth and lives in Cornwall.

BOOK LAUNCH for TIM ALLEN

Tim Allen read to a large and appreciative audience at THE LANGUAGE CLUB, Plymouth Arts Centre, on Saturday night, December 6, to launch his new book Settings, which is just published by Shearsman of Exeter. Tim read from his new book for the first half and was followed by Plymouth regulars Steve Spence, Kenny Knight, Philip Kuhn, James Turner, Jean Symons and others for the open mic set. Tim Allen is co-editor (with Andrew Duncan) of Don't Start Me Talking: Interviews with Contemporary Poets, Salt, 2007.

MARY JACOBS ON MI5 SURVEILLANCE

On December 3rd, Mary Jacobs gave an apparently lighthearted and entertaining talk on the twenty-year long MI5 surveillance of writer Sylvia Townsend Warner and her companion and lover Valentine Ackland. It was great fun to hear about the ludicrous mismatch between senior MI5 officers and local police investigating a couple of leftist literary women (members of the British Communist Party) living in remote rural Dorset. The information came from recently released MI5 archives. Despite the humour of class and lifestyle incomprehension, it was moving to learn of this radical writer's sustained and practical political commitment: working in Spain for the Red Cross during the Civil War, attending the congress of anti-Fascist writers there, and organising accommodation and financial help for Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany. Mary's most recent article on Warner appears in the Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society, she is Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at the University and teaches Life Writing on the MA.

AT THE GATE

MA Creative Writing graduate Ann Gray's latest poetry book At the Gate is just published from Headland publications. Ann has published three previous collections. Her work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies including The Forward Book of Poetry (Faber, 2008) and Making Worlds: One Hundred Contemporary Women Poets (Headland, 2003). Clive James has written: 'Ann Gray's poetry is a measured but sumptuous revelation, like the sun coming up a few inches at a time. Very few women and no men at all, can write from a good soul and bad conscience with quite her combination of tact and recklessness. This collection is the garden of the heart laid bare'. Ann Gray lives in Cornwall. The cover image for the book is 'The Lovers' by Michael Scott (copyright, 2005).