The Cambridge launch of Words And Women: Two!

Lora Stimson

Guinevere Glasfurd-Brown

Melissa Fu

We had a fantastic time last night at Hot Numbers Café in Cambridge, celebrating the launch of Words And Women: Two. Many thanks to Melody Causton for her wonderful singing and to our writers Patricia Debney, Louise Ells, Melissa Fu, Guinevere Glasfurd-Brown, Anthea Morrison, and Lora Stimson who read their work so brilliantly. Leigh Chambers compered and organised the event along with Anthea. They put on a similar event for us last year and below is a blog post from that time where Anthea describes the whole process. It’s worth a repeat because it’s full of useful tips on how to run a reading event:

Patricia Debney

“Several months ago Words and Women put out a call for volunteers to organize an event in Cambridge to celebrate the launch of the Words and Women Anthology: One. Being a strong supporter of the W&W principles of giving women writers a voice, and always on the lookout for opportunities to meet other writers, I put my name forward. Lynne Bryan put me in touch with Leigh Chambers, another Cambridge W&W volunteer, and together we set the wheels in motion. 

Anthea Morrison

The event, held on 3rd June, was surprisingly easy to organise. Leigh and I are both big fans of Hot Numbers Café here in Cambridge, and with its laid-back vibe and enthusiastic support for the arts, it seemed the ideal venue to hold a reading.

We contacted contributors to the Anthology who live in the Cambridge area, and they were very keen to come and read. Some of them had not read in public before, so I sent them a link to some excellent advice I found on the Thresholds Short Story Forum website - here is the link if you’re interested: http://blogs.chi.ac.uk/shortstoryforum/are-you-sitting-comfortably/

Once we had our readers lined up, the next step was to publicise the event. Leigh has many contacts in the writing world in Cambridge; she studied for her MA in Creative Writing at Anglia Ruskin University, and she presents Bookmark, a fortnightly radio show on Cambridge 105 featuring Cambridge-based writers. I created a flyer and we emailed it to everyone we could think of. We put posters up around town, and spread the word on Twitter and the W&W website.

I had a last-minute jitters worrying that either no one would turn up or that we would be turning people away. We had absolutely no idea how many to expect, but on the night we had around fifty people, just the right amount for the venue. It really was a wonderful evening. It was immensely satisfying to bring people together who have a shared passion for writing and literature, and to see the audience having such a good time. Of course the stars of the show were the readers, and they all told us they enjoyed performing their work, in spite of some inevitable nerves. 

Having a live musician to play in between readings provided a perfect contrast. Polly Paulusma is an extremely talented local folk singer, and had everyone entranced during her songs. The Independent described her as ‘the most literate songwriter of her generation’ and we were really lucky that she wanted to come and support our event. I urge you to go to one of her gigs if you ever get the chance. 

Volunteering to help organise the event turned out to be a fortuitous step for me in other ways too. When I told Leigh that I had only recently moved to Cambridge and was looking for a writing group, she invited me to join hers.  It is exactly the kind of group I have been looking for, and has already helped me progress with my writing.

So, thank you Words and Women for the opportunity to get involved. And to any W&W members thinking of organising a similar event, I would say go for it, it’s such a worthwhile and enjoyable thing to do. I will leave you with my top tips for organising a reading:

1.      Include some live music; it makes the event

2.      Choose your venue carefully, avoiding harsh lights and echoing spaces.

3.      Create an intimate atmosphere with candles and low lighting

4.      Make sure your readers know how to prepare for reading aloud

5.      Make sure the venue has a PA system or take your own – don’t rely on readers having loud enough voices

6.      Keep readings to five minutes – any more and you risk losing the audience

7.      Ask readers to provide a biog in advance and introduce each one personally “

Come along to the Cambridge launch of Words And Women: Two

Melody Causton

The event is free and there’s a great line-up. We have music by highly acclaimed local singer-songwriter Melody Causton and readings by a brilliant array of women writers who live in or near Cambridge. Hear Anthea Morrison and Louise Ells, Lora Stimson and Melissa Fu read from their stories included in our second anthology of prose writing, hear the exciting work of Patricia Debney and Guinevere Glasfurd-Brown who both have books coming out this year and next. Leigh Chambers of Bookmark on Cambridge 105 is compere! See below for everybody’s profiles.

The event takes place on June 2^nd at Hot Numbers Café, on Gwydir Street.  Doors open at 6.30pm, and there will be opportunities to meet the writers and enjoy a drink at the bar before the readings at 7pm.  Everyone is welcome, and copies of the book, praised as ‘an excellent anthology of imaginative and superbly written pieces’ (Eastern Daily Press), will be on sale.

Our writers and performers on the night:

Melody Causton has released her first EP, supported a number of respected folk acts such as Megson and has won 'Best female solo artist' at Cambridge's NMG awards for the last two years running. https://melodycauston.bandcamp.com/

Leigh Chambers

Leigh Chambers hosts the fortnightly radio show, Bookmark, on Cambridge 105 and also a mid-morning show. Last year she signed with DHH Literary Agency and is currently awaiting news about her first novel, Scapa Flow, set in 1940s Orkney.

Patricia Debney

Patricia Debney’s recent publications include Gestation (Shearsman Chapbooks, 2014) and a collection of prose poems, Littoral (Shearsman Books, 2013). Her first collection, How to Be a Dragonfly (Smith Doorstop Books), won the 2004 Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition; her next collection Baby is published by Liquorice Fish Books in 2016. A former Canterbury Laureate, she is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Kent.

Louise Ells

Louise Ells has a Creative Writing MA from Bath Spa University and is now pursuing a PhD at Anglia Ruskin University.  Her thesis comprises Lacunae, a collection of thematically linked short stories, and a critical commentary examining Alice Munro’s revision strategies in Dear Life.  She’s recently had stories published in The Masters Review and Harts & Minds.

Melissa Fu

Melissa Fu is writing a collection of memoir-style pieces based on growing up in the Rocky Mountains. She is an active member of the Angles writing workshop, based in Cambridge.  In 2014, she started leading and facilitating Writing Circles, small writing groups in Cambridgeshire designed to create community and cultivate writers' voices. 

Guinevere Glasfurd-Brown

Guinevere Glasfurd-Brown’s short fiction has appeared in Mslexia, The Scotsman and in a collection from The National Galleries of Scotland. Her first novel, The Words in my Hand, which won the 2014 Pen Factor Award, is out in Germany in September and January 2016 in the UK. The novel tells the story of the secret love between French philosopher, Rene Descartes, and Dutch servant maid, Helena Jans - a story kept hidden at the time and almost lost from history since.

Anthea Morrison

Anthea Morrison grew up in Hertfordshire and has lived in London, Cambridge and New York, where she first realised her passion for creative writing at the Gotham Writers’ Workshop. Now back in Cambridge, she is an active member of the local Angles writing workshop. Anthea has had stories published online, and is studying for an MA in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway University.

Lora Stimson

Lora Stimson studied creative writing at Norwich School of Art & Design and UEA. She has published stories and poems with Nasty Little Press, Unthank Books, Ink, Sweat and Tears and Streetcake Magazine. In 2014 she was mentored by novelist Shelley Harris as part of the WoMentoring scheme. Her first novel, about sex, grief and model villages, currently hides in a drawer. She has higher hopes for her second novel, about twins, which received an Arts Council England grant and is now in its final edit. Lora won Words And Women’s prose writing competition 2014/15.

Come along to the Cambridge launch of Words And Women: Two

Tuesday June 2^nd sees the Cambridge launch of Words And Women: Two, the second

collection of short prose by women writers in the East of England, featuring the winners of our annual prose competition and four commissioned scripts for ‘About’, our project on women and place, supported by Arts Council England.

The free event at Hot Numbers Café, on Gwydir Street, organised by Words And Women supporters Anthea Morrison and Leigh Chambers, features an exciting and eclectic line-up of contributors reading from the anthology, with live music from highly acclaimed local singer-songwriter Melody Causton. 

Doors open at 6.30pm, and there will be opportunities to meet the writers and enjoy a drink at the bar before the readings at 7pm.  Everyone is welcome, and copies of the book, praised as ‘an excellent anthology of imaginative and superbly written pieces’ (Eastern Daily Press), will be on sale.

The event will see overall prize winner, Lora Stimson, reading her short story ‘Cornflake Girl’ as well as women writers who live in or near Cambridge.

‘We had such great feedback from last year’s event when we helped to launch the very first anthology that we couldn’t wait to help celebrate Words & Women: Two. The standard of writing is incredibly high and there’s something very special about hearing writers read their own words. We’re also so pleased to have local singer songwriter, Melody Causton, performing at the event. The evening will be a real celebration of women’s creativity,’ says Leigh Chambers.

Entry to the annual competition is open to all women writers over the age of 16 who live or work in the East of England.  Fiction, memoir, life-writing and creative non-fiction are all welcome. Entries should be no longer than 2,200 words.  This year’s competition will be open for entries from September. Keep checking this blog for details.

Further information about the writers appearing at our Cambridge event will be posted here in a week’s time.

Daisy Black: writing and circus performing

(c) Johannes Hjorth

It is midnight in Paris and I am cleaning broken glass off the soles of my bare feet.  I’ve just danced a tango on a bed of broken bottles. An hour before the show, I could be found on the rooftop smashing bottles wrapped in a gingham table cloth with a lump hammer (bottles and hammer kindly provided by the bar – the Eurostar do not take kindly to this sort of equipment – transporting my hula hoops is difficult enough).  Freshly smashed glass is very sharp. I get changed quickly. Next up: hula hoops.Tomorrow, or next week, I will be in a different city, with different people. 

I started performing during my time on the Creative Writing MA at UEA.  I have performed in sumptuous mansions, famous Wintergartens, the world’s largest green house (in Vienna), and alongside some incredible and inspirational artists. At festivals and cabarets all over Europe, from the dingy to the breathtaking. My dressing rooms have been everything from a leaking, muddy tent or a disabled loo with no light bulb, to an eighteenth century bedroom with silk wallpaper, or an exquisite library filled with tame owls.

Between these sojourns, back at home I’ll make breakfast for my five year old and do the school run. I marvel at these different versions of myself, these skins, jostling up against each other. Back at the house, I traverse the steep ladder (far more death-defying, with a cup of scalding coffee in one hand and a laptop in the other, than the feats I perform in my other skin) to the attic, my eyrie, and write.

I realise now that whether it’s staring down a blank page, wondering how a collection of words can be made transportive, or holding onto a rope seven metres in the air, while it bites a tightening tourniquet around your thigh, plucking up the courage to let go - the discipline required is the same. It is about pushing mind or body to its limits, to where you are not sure it’s safe to go, or not sure that if you do return, you will ever be the same. It’s also about training; most mornings I train intensively, not only flexing familiar muscles and rehearsing, but also pushing myself. Then I close my laptop, get changed and head to my training space, and do the same with my body. Learning circus as an adult has been a challenge: the body isn’t as forgiving, and the mind interferes –overthinking when what you need to harness is the childlike willingness to try something without judgement.

(c) Neil Kendall

When inspiration (though the word is not visceral enough to convey the sensation) flows through you, as when the light is perfect and the painter must put oil to canvas, it can flow. Whether it’s circus performing, writing, music, or oil paints – to me, all these mediums are different outlets for the same outcome: you strive to connect, to elicit an emotional response. But you won’t always feel inspired. I saw a picture recently: on one end of the spectrum, absolute narcissism; on the other, crippling doubt. And in the centre: Art.  A large proportion of the battle to succeed in any art form is just carrying on. My 500 words a day are my training. I won’t necessarily use what’s in them, feel like writing them, or even like them, but just like when I’m having an off day training, or tired or injured it feels futile, I just have to trust that my body is remembering, my muscle memory is percolating: it is a process of accumulation.  A very good friend of mine recently asked me why I forgive myself more in the process of physical learning than in writing: I may get frustrated when I keep dropping the hoop when learning a new trick, but I understand that dropping it is part of the process. We accept that there is gravity: sometimes, you will drop the hoop. It took me much longer to understand this in relation to writing, but learning the process through which physical skills, and performance skills, are attained has made me better at the process of writing. You let go of the rope and after some freefall, you know that it will catch you because you trust yourself.

Performing; this is a different beast. At the moment my book exists in solitude, and when it is published, whether I write another book or not, I will be judged by it again and again. When I perform, it lives and dies in the moment. We connect. I tell my story. The feedback is instant. It is over. And tomorrow I’ll do it again, and it will be entirely different, even if it’s the same act. This is where the road forks.

I grew up surrounded by a family of artists. My mother has quietly accepted that I appear to have chosen just about the most ostensibly unstable career path possible. Not just one of them, but two of them. And did I mention that my partner Alex reads minds for a living?  You can imagine the conversations we’ve had when applying for a mortgage. 

In 2012 my partner Alex and I created Gossamer Thread’s Vaudeville Co. Both of us foster a love for the era of vaudeville; the aesthetic, the variety, the stories. As well as our individual disciplines, Alex and I perform double-acts and we are working on a full two-person show. We also produce sell-out circus and cabaret shows, predominantly at the Norwich Arts Centre (“Quite simply the best show in town’-Marc Gracey, Future Radio). I want the audience to never know what they are going to see next, but when they do to feel it is so right that it couldn’t have been anything else. Much like plotting a novel.  Each act tells a story. The next show is ‘Gossamer Thread’s Kubla Khan Cabaret,’ 12^th June, based around Coleridge’s poem. We book performers from all over the country. Alex and I often create bespoke new acts: favourites of my own have been a conjoined twins aerial hoop act and an aerial silks act in which I was Alice, tumbling down the rabbit hole – narratives, journeys.

I have found a pattern which works: five hundred words every morning; training in the afternoon. Then teaching circus or performing in the evenings. Our son has seen us both perform; he is surrounded by a network of family and friends.  I want him to see that it is possible to do whatever he wants to do.

Daisy Black  (aka Daisy Bourne) is freelance circus performer based in Norwich. Co-director of Gossamer Thread’s Vaudeville Co., she performs aerial hoop and silks, hula hoops and sideshow. She is also a producer and teaches circus skills in Norwich. She writes short stories, and is working on two novels, the current one is about the ‘father of modern circus’, Philip Astley. She graduated from the Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia in 2013.

Tickets to Gossamer Thread’s Kubla Khan Cabaret are available from the Norwich Arts Centre website: https://norwichartscentre.co.uk/events/gossamer-threads-kubla-khan-cabaret/

www.thedaisyblack.com

www.facebook.com/GossamerThreadVaudeville

www.alexthemindreader.com

http://norwichblog.com/category/gossamer-threads-vaudeville-co-2/