Do you write play scripts or make short films? INK Festival welcomes submissions for its 2017 festival!

With the support of patrons Helen Atkinson Wood and Esther Freud, INK is returning to its home at the Halesworth Cut, Suffolk, for the festival on April 21^st, 22^nd and 23^rd 2017.

INK is a springboard festival, which champions new writing from East Anglia in an unmissable weekend of quality live back-to-back performances. INK provides a unique opportunity for writers in East Anglia to showcase their new work with a team of professional actors and directors. Have you ever dreamed of seeing your play performed live? Perhaps you have scripts you started but never finished, or a finished film but nowhere to screen it. INK breaks down the barriers of complicated entry procedures or “who you know, not what you know” policies, and offers writers the chance to showcase their new work in a safe and supportive environment, or start their career in the industry altogether.

Our writers from previous years, have gone on to have their plays performed at Latitude in Suffolk, Hotbed festival in Cambridge, The Pleasance theatre in London, and won awards such as the Velvet Trumpet Best New Comedy award. Following the huge success of INK 2016, selected plays from the festival will be a part of the INK SPILL, whereby the plays have been developed into full length performances and will be performed at the Pleasance Theatre in London this November.

With such a wide range of entry categories, INK has created opportunities for everyone to get involved, established writers and those who have never written before too. The entry categories are NEW PLAY, SHORT FILM, THEMED PLAY ‘By the sea’, RADIO PLAY, YOUNG WRITER (18’s and under), and FILM SCHOOL. Check out our website for more details, the deadline for short plays is the 21^st October 2016, and please send in short films by 6^th January 2017.  Get writing, dust off the scripts nobody has ever seen and send them to INK! Join us for the journey.

INK are also very excited to announce that we will be teaming up with the Young Filmmakers Club to encourage children to make their own films! The Young Filmmakers Club run fun, educational courses in primary schools and after-school clubs for children. The clubs are geared towards providing a high level of care whilst giving children a challenging and enjoyable filmmaking experience. Children work as both cast and crew to plan, shoot and produce their own films. The Young Filmmakers Club will be holding a FREE weekend film course at a primary school in Norfolk (location and date TBC), and the film made at this weekend will be screened at INK Festival 2017.

In addition to this, the Young Filmmakers Club will be running a FREE film school for children over the festival weekend, with the final film that the children make being screened on the last night of the festival.

With this FREE film school for children, creative writing workshops, short plays and films as well as live music in a dynamic venue, INK provides the perfect arena for creative expression, as well as huge variety for audience members.

If you would like to get involved in other ways with INK, such as publicity, fundraising, advertising, volunteering, set design, props, costume, technical or stage management, please contact emma@inkfestival.org

INK: The New Writer’s Festival

Michelle Sewell writes about INK and the free playwriting workshops which she will be offering as part of this fabulous Festival:

"As a playwright based in East Anglia, the opportunities to develop and share work are somewhat… well… dull… compared to the spotlight promised by London... although that comes with quite a hefty price tag! Which is why opportunities to see and be part of new writing festivals in East Anglia are so valuable. INK Festival, based at The Cut Theatre, Halesworth, is one such event that inspires audiences to come see professional emerging writers, directors and actors create new work. 

The Festival itself is led by a determined team. Emma Struthers, the Festival director, and Julia Sowerbutts, the Artistic Director, are two kick-ass women who form part of a team which has created this Arts Council Funded event with their own set of awards and further development and networking opportunities for artists in the region. The INK Festival is dedicated to promoting new work in the East Anglian region. Fifteen short plays will be performed, numerous short films will be screened, there will be poetry, music, talks and workshops led over a weekend- all dedicated to the notion that theatre is alive and well in East Anglia and we need not look so far to London for a little light in our aspirations to be on the stage.

Michelle Sewell

Last year, my play, Write Into A War, was performed at the INK Festival. It was such an incredible opportunity to see my play performed in front of a full house. This experience led me on to be a writer on attachment with Arcola Theatre, Menagerie Theatre and the North Wall. It inspired me to write plays that have been on in festivals around the UK, such as my play, The Tinder Game, which has been published and performed at The Hotbed Festival and is currently in development for a tour to Edinburgh Fringe Festival. My play that will be performed at INK this year is Border Control. It’s a post-dramatic performance that scrutinises a relationship from the point of view of workers at the UK Border Authority. 

For two days of the Festival, I’m proud to be hosting a series of free creative writing workshops. They have been designed especially for INK; where professional and aspiring writers- or even those who just love to write- can come and share a bit of what they know and learn a bit from others and hopefully gain a little bit of craft from myself. I’m currently a script reader for Theatre 503 in London and so I hope to share a little knowledge from the point of view of a writer and reader for a professional theatre and share tips on how to get past the first entry gate and get your script on the stage!

Playwriting can be such a lonely and difficult art form, and it’s a form that requires the assistance of others to bring it to life. INK Festival is being led by some truly inspiring women in East Anglia who are paving the way to a brighter future for theatre in the region."

Come along to watch new performances by artists in East Anglia:

Where? The Cut Theatre, Halesworth

When? 8th-10^th April;  11am-9.30pm 

More Info? http://inkfestival.org

Words & Women went to Wymondham

And had a very nice time! Thanks to the Wymondham Words team, our readers, performers and the audience for a great night. Unfortunately we had a camera malfunction and only managed to get two decent shots of the event but here they are...!

Andrea Holland

Audience & Matilda Pine

Our next event, which is the official launch of our prose competition 2014, will be on Friday 3rd October, 6.30pm, at The Book Hive in Norwich. Please come along to hear all about the competition and what our guest judge, Sarah Ridgard, will be looking from the entries.

And talking about competitions. About, our special commissioning competition, supported by Arts Council England, closes for entries this Friday at midnight. See our dedicated blog page - 'About comp' - for more details.

Art, Gardens And Words is part of the Chelsea Fringe!

The Plantation Garden

On May 24^th we will be holding a garden festival at the beautiful Plantation Garden on Earlham Road, Norwich. Shortly we will be putting a page on this blog dedicated to this project so you can find out more. In the meantime we've received the exciting news that the garden festival is now part of the Chelsea Fringe, a first for this region!

Here’s a little bit about the Chelsea Fringe:

Now in its third year, the Chelsea Fringe is an alternative gardening festival based across the UK and beyond -- celebrating everything from guerilla gardeners, community projects, large-scale installations, performance art, food events, street happenings, performances and much more in between. It's an open-access fringe festival, which means that if it's about plants, gardens, flowers or landscape, and it's interesting or original and quirky -- then it's in. The Chelsea Fringe is fringe to the RHS Chelsea Flower Show -- but it’s different because it spreads far and wide, covering everything that could be conceivably linked with gardens, plants, landscape and environment. The three weeks of the 2013 Fringe covered more than 250 events and attracted more than 162, 000 visitors, and included a range of installations at iconic Battersea Power Station, a remarkable garden made out of a disused gents toilet in Peckham and a BBC Gardener's Question Time Fringe special from Hoxton Hall.

Click here for our page on their website:

Words And Women in the EDP!

The Words And Women event at Thetford Library  was featured in the Eastern Daily Press on Saturday. The article can be found here and also a good pic of Clare Jarrett, one of our readers. 

The Breckland Literary Festival - Watton

Today a slice of Words And Women read at Watton Library as part of The Breckland Literary Festival. Here are photos of two of our readers – Beth Settle and Deborah Arnander, and also of Anna Mudeka who provided the music.

Paul Young of the Breckland View has written a piece about the reading which can been found here. He also interviews Karen Kidman of Creative Arts East, Anna Mudeka, and Words And Women organisers Bel Greenwood and Lynne Bryan.

Words And Women will be also be reading at Thetford Library on 23rd March as part of the Breckland Literary Festival. 

 

Belona Greenwood and Lynne Bryan

Bel is the founder of Words And Women and for the past couple of years has organized it with the help of Lynne. They are both currently shattered but looking forward to Friday very much!

Bel was born in London, but lived and worked abroad for many years, After doing the MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia she found it difficult to leave Norwich. She won an Escalator award from The Writers Centre, Norwich, to write a book of creative non-fiction called Shadow Madonnas, a history of unmarried mothers, and she is a winner of the Decibel Penguin prize for life-writing.  Belona writes plays for adults and children.  She is associate playwright with Chalk Circle Theatre Company and her play The Shadow of Names is part of this year's European Contemporary Drama Review at the UEA.  Another play, Cafe de Sonhos, commissioned by the The Seachange Trust has a summer release at the community launch of St. George’s Theatre in Great Yarmouth. Her play, Alice's Adventure was produced as part of Tribunal 12, Europe in the Dock at last year's Norfolk and Norwich Festival.  She has formed a children's theatre company called The Greenword Tree and is part of Norfolk County Council's award-winning Artists for Climate Change.

 

Lynne is the author of a short story collection, ‘Envy At The Cheese Handout’ (published by Faber & Faber), and the novels ‘Gorgeous’ and ‘Like Rabbits’ (Sceptre). Her work has appeared in anthologies, has been broadcast on the radio and adapted for film. She teaches creative writing at UEA and for The Arvon Foundation.

Kelly Kanayama

Kelly was born and raised in Hawaii and is of Japanese/Visayan Filipino descent. She is a performance storyteller and has appeared at festivals, museums, schools and more in the UK and Hawaii, and was one of the featured tellers at the Society for Storytelling’s 2012 Gathering.  Additionally, she is a member of the award-nominated Norwich storytelling club Tales from the Undercroft.

Kelly also has an MA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from UEA, and has been published in Horizon, Gists and Piths, Ink Sweat & Tears and the Gatehouse Press anthology Spring. Her poetry focuses on the stories shared by various cultures – from folklore to TV and everything in between.

Kelly will be storytelling at our evening event in Fusion on the 8^th March and will be reading her poetry for Words And Women at Thetford Library on March 23^rd.

Kelly can be found online at https://www.facebook.com/KellyKanayamaStoryteller.

Bethany Settle

Beth has lived in Norwich since she moved here to study at the University of East Anglia, first as an undergraduate and later completing an MA in Creative Writing: Prose. She works both as an information librarian and a library assistant. Reading, writing and nature are her top three best things. Beth has recently had poems published in Birdbooks 1 and 2 (Sidekick Books). Currently, she’s writing a

novel that explores loss, and will be  reading from this at Watton Library on the 16^th March 2013, 12.00 – 1.00pm, and in the Fusion Digital Gallery, Norwich on the 8^th March.

Sarah Passingham

Sarah will be reading her work for us at the Thetford Library on the 23^rd March as part of the Breckland Book Festival. She is currently feeling her way into a novel, while finding a way out of the childhood memoir that has consumed her life for the past five years. Following an early career in London as a print designer and typographer, she moved into the field of professional entertainment, theatre and rock music. After twelve years creating and directing hundreds of events, she then published four books of event management for the voluntary sector.  

Today, her writing concentrates on more creative themes, with short stories and prose poems appearing in literary journals, and the Brittle Star anthology, Said and Done. Her work has been broadcast by the BBC and, in 2002, her libretto for the oratorio Julian - Mystical Revelations was recorded and released on CD and premiered in Norwich Cathedral, 2005. 

Find out more at: www.sarahpassingham.co.uk

Helen Ivory

Helen is a poet and artist and will be reading her work in the Fusion Digital Gallery, Norwich, during our evening celebrations there on the 8^th March. She will take part in our mini tour too, reading at Watton Library on the 16^th March.

Helen's  fourth Bloodaxe Books collection 'Waiting for Bluebeard' is due in May 2013. She has co-edited with George Szirtes 'In Their Own Words: Contemporary Poets on their Poetry' - Salt 2012.

Helen teaches for the Arvon Foundation, The Poetry School and mentors for the Poetry Society. She also edits the webzine Ink Sweat and Tears and is an editor for The Poetry Archive.

Alita Balbi

This year for the first time a slice of Words And Women will go on tour as part of the Breckland Book Festival ( http://brecklandbookfestival.com). Some of our writers and performers will be visiting Watton Library on the 16^th March 2013, 12.00 – 1.00pm, and Thetford Library on the 23^rd March 2013, 12.00 – 1.00pm.

Alita Balbi is a newcomer to Words And Women and will be reading her work at the Watton event. Alita was born in a small town in Brazil, and writes fiction both in English and Portuguese. She is currently a MA student on the Creative Writing Prose course at UEA.

Sarah Ridgard

Sarah is another wonderful writer who will be reading her work in the Fusion Digital Gallery during our evening celebrations on the 8^th March. 

Sarah is a graduate of the MA in Creative Writing at UEA (2002), and was selected as one of ten writers from the East of England for the Escalator Scheme run by the Norwich Writer’s Centre. This was in 2009. Then in August 2012 Sarah’s debut novel, Seldom Seen, was published by

Random House and subsequently shortlisted for the Amazon Rising Stars Competition. 

Catherine Taylor – The Guardian – described the novel as “Death and mayhem in sleepy rural Suffolk… Ridgard's evocation of landscape, of farming, its seasons, cruelties and epiphanies, is striking...”

Sarah lives in Norwich with her husband and two children.

Deborah Arnander

Deborah, who will be reading her work during our evening celebrations in the Fusion Digital Gallery, was born in Northumberland and spent her childhood in Thailand.  She studied at the University of Sussex and has a PhD in French literature.  After leaving university she lived in Paris, San Francisco and Seville, and worked as a translator, researcher, speechwriter, house doctor, market trader, bingo-hall caller and bartender.  She was lured to Norwich by the siren on the ziggurat – she spent four years doing various courses in UEA’s continuing education creative writing programme – and her two young daughters were born here.  In 2009 she won an Escalator New Writing Award.

She has a short story in Unthank Books’ first Unthology, and has published poems on the webzine Ink, Sweat and Tears, and in the anthologies Not Expecting Fish, Gatehouse Press, and Voicing Visions, (Norwich Twenty Group Spring Exhibition 2009).  She is currently working on her first novel, about a G.I. baby, set in wartime Norwich and 90s California.

Eleanor Wasserberg

Eleanor will be reading her work as part of the evening celebrations in the Fusion Digital Gallery. She was born in Staffordshire, and  has a BA in Classics and English from the University of Oxford, and has worked as an english teacher in Paris and Trivandrum. In 2010, she graduated from the Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia, and Arts Council England recently awarded her a grant to complete her first novel Foxlowe. Foxlowe  follows a cult survivor as she remembers a childhood both hedonistic and chaotic, violent and magical. Set in the Staffordshire Moorlands, Foxlowe draws upon pagan sites and local folklore to tell a story of love and power, shame and redemption.

Megan Bradbury

In the lead up to Words & Women 2013 we will be posting profiles of the readers, performers and artists who will be contributing to our events on International Women’s Day.

The first is Megan who will be reading in the evening in the Fusion Digital Gallery. Megan is the current Charles Pick Fellow at the University of East Anglia. She graduated from UEA with a BA in English Literature and Creative Writing in 2004 and MA in Creative Writing Prose in 2005. Since when, besides pursuing her own writing, she has worked as an editorial reader and creative writing mentor.

Megan’s working on her first novel which documents the cultural development of New York City through the lives and work of four major figures from its history, namely the writer Edmund White, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, urban planner Robert Moses and poet Walt Whitman. An extract can be found at

http://www.newwriting.net/writing/fiction/one-thing-about-robert-mapplethorpe.

Expanding… Expanding…

2013’s event would be a little bit bigger we decided. It would grow but not too much, just enough. We wanted to keep the homespun, friendly feel. We wanted to keep it fun to organise as well as to attend. So we talked it over with Mitchell Albert from the Writer’s Centre Norwich (www.writerscentrenorwich.org.uk) who suggested we grow sort of sideways, tour some of our readers. Great idea we thought. Then a few more great ideas later, the event is expanding and expanding - in the nicest possible way. Here’s what we hope will happen at Words And Women 2013:

-       A reading of their own work by young women writers from local secondary schools and groups to take place in the Norfolk and Norwich Millennium Library

-       An art exhibition in The Forum Atrium by local women artists. 

-       A reading by older women writers in the Fusion Digital Gallery with compere, short theatre, music and wine.

-       And a tour of this reading as part of The Breckland Literary festival.

More details will follow as we confirm names and times. But already speclal thanks to The Forum Trust Limited (www.theforumnorwich.co.uk) for agreeing to house the art exhibition and the evening read.