Oxford Poetry Library with Tarot Cards

Thanks to everyone who turned out to launch How to be a Tarot Card (or a Teenager) at the Oxford Poetry Library, and thanks to Phoebe and team for hosting.

Here’s a couple of photos and recordings to give a flavour of the evening.

Introduction

How to be a Tarot Card (or a Teenager)

Jennifer is launching again in London on 1st November at Keats House with Anna Fodorova, our other October author, with her novel, In the Blood. Free, cake, soft drink etc as usual! Get your tickets

And will be taking part in an online event with our friends In Words on 29th November. To register for this one you need to contact irena(at)in-words(dot)co(dot)uk and she will send you the link in good time.

 

A Voice Coming from Then On Tour

This Autumn we’re taking A Voice Coming from Then on tour in Wales, to celebrate the collection winning the English Language Poetry Category in the 2022 Wales Book of the Year Awards. Join us at one of the events below for readings and conversation with poet Jeremy Dixon (and occasional guests).

Links to tickets for all the events will be updated as they become available.

COMING UP

29/11/2022 Typewronger, Edinburgh details
30/11/2022 Lighthouse Books, Edinburgh details

If you would like any more information about any of these events, please contact outreach@arachnepress.com.

CATCH VIDEOS HERE SOON FOR EVENTS THAT HAVE ALREADY HAPPENED

IN THE MEANTIME HERE’S A TASTER

05/10/2022 The Hours, Brecon
06/10/2022 (National Poetry Day)  Waterstones, Carmarthen
06/10/2022 (National Poetry Day)Waterstones, Cardiff
13/10/2022 Cardiff Central Library Hub, joint event with George Sandifer-Smith

All the events above are free.

 

A470 on tour, Hen Bost, Blaenau Ffestiniog

Videos for day three of our A470 Tour, at Siop Llyfrau Hen Bost in Blaenau Ffestiniog.

Simon Chandler, Sara Louise Wheeler, Haf Llewelyn, Lowri Williams and Sian Northey read their poems in English and Cymraeg, Cherry Potts (in English only) and Sian Northey (both) talk about getting the book together, and the accidental joys of GoogleTranslate (Don’t worry, we had professional translators…)

Our next date is this coming Thursday 30th June at 7pm, at The National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth details and free tickets

buy the book in print or ebook

Cherry Potts

Sian Northey

Haf Llewelyn

 

Lowri Williams

 

Sara Louise Wheeler

Simon Chandler

Launching in Waves: Paper Crusade

We have a few events planned for the launch of Michelle Penn’s book-length poem, Paper Crusade, starting on publication day…

Tuesday 21st June 2022 10:30(ish) an experimental (ie we don’t know if it will work) live zoom to our Facebook page Enchanted Island Books. Michelle will talk about which six books she would save if she was shipwrecked on her island. We will record as well, just in case.

Wednesday 22nd June 2022 19:00 online launch with readings, Q&A, chat and optional audience participation involving Shakespearean insults and Haiku, get tickets

Friday 24th June 2022 18:45 for 19:00 in person Launch at Keats House Library 10 Keats Grove NW3 2RR There will be readings, discussion and cake (very bad for you, anyone whose been to a launch before, you know, everyone else you’ve been warned.) get tickets

Arachne Press at Lambeth Readers and Writers Festival

We’re pleased to announce that we will be at Lambeth Readers and Writers Festival on Tuesday 17 May with a panel event based on Where We Find Ourselves: Poems and Stories of Maps and Mapping from UK Writers of the Global Majority.

Join us at Clapham Library for readings and a Q & A discussion with:

Ngoma Bishop

Marina Sánchez

Nikita Chadha

Farhana Khalique

Rick Dove

Emily Abdeni-Holman

L Kiew

The event is free, but ticketed.  Book your tickets here.

You will be able to buy a copy of Where We Find Ourselves at the event, or you can buy one from our webshop now.

Favourite memories of Solstice Shorts

Solstice Shorts – our annual celebration of original poetry, stories and music for the shortest day – is rapidly approaching. We asked Solstice regular, poet and writer Rob Walton to share some memories of the festival, and accompanying anthologies, from years gone by. This year’s theme is Words from the Brink – writing and music in response to the climate crisis.

Rob Walton: I count myself lucky to have been included in more than one of the Solstice Shorts books, and fortunate indeed to have had my work performed/read by others. It was a great thrill to hear ‘Words on Paper’, a story of which I’m very fond, read aloud in Carlisle. It’s a story that’s close to my heart, and I’m chuffed it was recorded for posterity and also appeared in print.

Ben Brinicombe reads Words on Paper by Rob Walton, BSL translation by Karen Edmondson

I’ve definitely enjoyed seeing some of my more, er interesting pieces reach a range of audiences – I wonder what the crowds (I’m guessing) in Lisbon and Maryport made of ‘The Dowager Duchess of Berwick-upon-Tweed May or May Be Bottling It’? I’ve written micro-fictions shorter than that title!

This year’s offering, ‘Mr King Has Decided to Pursue Other Avenues’, is inspired by a long-standing commitment to environmental change and, possibly, that time I had to leave my primary school class behind on the beach trip when I was stung by a weaver fish. These things stay lodged somewhere and appear, transformed, years later…

Read an extract from ‘Mr King Has Decided to Pursue Other Avenues’:

It was a liberal and progressive school – some would say slack and lackadaisical – and when Mr King said he wanted to stay at the beach at the end of the trip, they wished him well and happily set off without him. It was almost time for the long holiday, and when he wasn’t there to take registration the following morning they arranged temporary cover, and later replaced him with somebody younger with a similar name and the same tattooist. (Mr Prince would be pleased to get the job because Hokusai’s expertly inked The Great Wave off Kanagawa, which covered all of his back, had been very expensive. And quite painful. Also, he knew it would be a star turn on a staff night out.

Words from the Brink is available to pre-order from our online shop.

Buy your tickets for Solstice Shorts 2021 on Eventbrite.

 

Upcoming Events – Summer 2021

Launch of Incorcisms by David Hartley, and 100neHundred by Laura Besley – May 27th 2021 

You can get tickets here, free; or for £8.99 to include a copy of ONE of the books; or for £17.98 to include a copy of BOTH books.  Books will be sent post free.

The evening will include readings by, and chats with, Laura and David, and they will also be joined by the narrators of their respective audiobooks.  Also, THERE WILL BE CAKE (BYO): we’d like you to join us in celebrating the launch by baking (or buying) cake to eat during the event, and drinking lemonade (the reason behind lemonade drinking will be made clear on the night!).   

There will be Q&A opportunities throughout the event, and even a chance to write your own 100 word story.  So put your thinking caps on, and start making a note of all those burning questions about flash/short story/micro fiction or anything else you may wish to know about these writers and their work.  And dust off those notebooks and pens.

You can also (pre-)order the books now from our Webshop.

Arachne at Brockley Max Online – May 30th, 31st and June 1st, 2nd and 3rd 2021

This year we are running THREE events at this brilliant community arts festival, as well as hosting an evening of readings by Writers of our Age (WooA).  All events can be booked through Eventbrite (see individual links below).

May 30th, 16:00 BST – Keeping Up With Paper and Pencil

Catch Clare Owen, author of our recent YA novel, Zed and the Cormorants, in conversation with Sally Atkins, who did the beautiful illustrations for Clare’s book.  Entitled Keeping Up With Paper and Pencil, Clare and Sally will discuss creating vivid characters through words and images – so one for both writers and artists.  They’ll share their notebooks, sketches, extracts from the novel and new ways to get characters up on their feet and ready to sprint off the page. 

You can get tickets here, free; or for £10 to include a copy of the book.

May 31st, 19:00 BST – Short, Flash, Poem? 

Join Arachne authors Laura Besley (100neHundred), David Hartley (Incorcisms) and poet Rob Walton (This Poem Here) for an evening of readings and discussions dealing with issues around their chosen literary forms and touching on questions such as, do authors know what a piece will be when they start writing it?  When is flash a prose poem?  Do poems sometimes change into stories? How dark does fantasy have to be to qualify as horror, and is it allowed to be funny?

You can get tickets here, free; or for £8.99 to include a copy of ONE of the books.

June 2nd, 19:00 BST – Imagined Spaces – A Writer’s Approach to Place

Join authors and ex-Brockley residents, Lily Peters and Jackie Taylor for readings and discussion around the use of ‘place’ in their forthcoming titles with Arachne, Accidental Flowers (Lily) and Strange Waters (Jackie).

You can get tickets here, free; or for £9.99 to include a copy of ONE of the books.

June 3rd, 19:30 – WooA – Back in the Water

Join Writers of our Age (WOOA), a well established, published mix of local writers, for readings of specially written stories under the heading ‘Back in the Water’.

You can get tickets here, free.

We’re still here and have plans to entertain you

There’s been some bad news in the book world, Gardners, the major wholesaler who supplies most independant booksellers has shut up shop for the forseeable. (Yes, this is C-19 related.)

This means it will be even harder to get books out to the public. We are however in the fortunate position of having the estimable NBNi as our distributor, which means bookshops can get books direct from them, if they have an account. All the big shops and quite a few of the smaller ones do. Phew!

WE ALSO HAVE BOOKS HERE.

Not in massive quantities, but enough to see us through of most titles. Yo can order direct and we will post them out to you, so long as they will fit through the post box slot, and so long as you have a large enough letter box. A couple of books might not suit – Outcome is probably ok, The Dowry Blade probably not.

Head over to our shop…

If for any reason our stocks dry up, or the royal mail goes into meltdown, we have ebooks available from your usual supplier, some reduced to 99p for the duration of the lockdown, and we are converting the poetry, which wasn’t converted before for format reasons, the first of these titles will be available 10th April with more on 17th and the last lot, the ones I think will be most difficult to work with electronically, on the 24th.

In the meantime we are working out ways to keep you happy.

We are organising some guest blogs from our writers, and some of them have offered to video readings. We are also getting them to interview each other. Some of these interviews will be video links (when I work out how) and some will be text based, but if you’ve always wanted to ask onr of our writers a question, we invite you to send some in! If there’s a particular author or poet you want to answer the question, let us know, and we’ll do our best. You can comment on this post to ask your question.

 

#IWD2020- Photos

Until I get round to editing the video files, here are some photos from Sunday’s event, where we launched Emma Lee‘s new collection, The Significance of a Dress, and thoroughly celebrated International Women’s Day with poems and flash from Laila Sumpton, Claire Booker, Sarah Lawson, Jenny Mitchell, Julie Easley, Cherry Potts, Michelle Penn, Shamini Sriskandarajah, and Emma Lee!

Time and Tide Videos: Holyhead

Uploading the videos from Solstice Shorts 2019, Time & Tide, continues.

Some music here, from the Holyhead event. Across, by Fiona & Gorwell Owen, and Storm by Tagaradr

Limited edition illustrated book of the material available now only from our webshop or from our events. The official trade version will be availabel from 21st March 2020