Download our Tenth Anniversay report (annual report) for photos and details of (almost) everything we’ve done this year, from our epic Book Cover Art Exhibition to BSL poetry workshops and quite a few books! Find out what’s gone well, what the people we surveyed think, what’s gone not so well, and what we’ve got planned.
Click to access 10th-Anniversary-Report.pdf
Still to come …
Saturday 22 April 2 – 4pm
Manor House Library 34 Old Road, London, SE13 5SY
Memoir and Monologue
Using memory and humour to create a short piece that has the potential to be
performed. With author, comedienne and Polari Prize judge, VG Lee.
Saturday 13 May 2 – 4pm
Catford Library 23-24 Winslade Way, Catford Centre, SE6 4JU
Exploring Creativity
Using visual and physical prompts related to the body to spark ideas. Particularly, but not exclusively, open to anyone thinking of submitting to Arachne Press’s LGBTQ+ poetry anthology Joy//Us. With author and editor/publisher at Arachne Press, Cherry Potts.
Book on this link or in person/by phone at the relevant library
FREE!
The Library at Deptford Lounge 020 8314 7299
Manor House Library 020 8463 0420
Catford Library 020 8314 8816
A reminder that this anniversary festival is all the work of our authors, from making suggestions as to what they would want to attend, to putting together the events. We just promote and host!
I thought it would be useful to give you all a bit more detail about the authors who have put together our amazing, eclectic anniversary events.
For our fourth week we have events on Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Sunday (two events)
Tuesday Jan 24, 2023 6pm The Business of writing– The Society of Authors This is very kindly being run for us, by two of the coordinators of the Society of Authors Poetry & Spoken Word group: Johanna Clarke and Mathilde Zeeman
Johanna Clarke has been an advisor at the SoA since October 2021. She advises writers on publishing contracts and issues, and works closely on their outreach programme. Johanna is one of the coordinators of the SoA’s Poetry and Spoken Word Group.
Mathilde Zeeman joined the SoA in 2022. She recently transferred from the Membership team to the Advisory team where she will continue her work advising writers on publishing issues, and is a coordinator of the SoA’s Poetry and Spoken Word Group.
[not part of the festival, but on Wednesday 25th, 7.30pm Jeremy Dixon is reading from his award winning poetry collection, A Voice Coming from Then at Verbatim, at the Poetry Pharmacy in Bishops Castle, Shropshire.]
Thursday Jan 26, 2023 7pm The Empire Writes Back: “Space, place and belonging” is being run by Nikita Aashi Chadha
Nikita is a writer, poet and social commentator who advocates for an intersectional lens and approach to be utilised – she is committed to spotlighting the ‘other’, those who are chronically unheard and underrepresented within society. Her poetry focuses on the experiences of the South Asian diaspora, mental health and identity. Nikita’s poem Jallianwalla Bagh appears in our anthology Where We Find Ourselves, and she chaired our Writing the Diaspora panel. Nikita is also a patient voice advocate, lead facilitator and speaker for Cysters (a non-profit that specialises in supporting marginalised people with reproductive and mental health problems. Instagram: @nikkaayyy_c @didacticdiaspora @cystersgroup
Friday Jan 27, 2023 6.30pm Using family history/photos as inspiration for poetry with Seni Seneviratne
Seni was born and raised in Leeds, of English and Sri Lankan heritage. Published by Peepal Tree Press – Wild Cinnamon and Winter Skin (2007), The Heart of It (2012), Unknown Soldier (2019). She is a fellow of the Complete Works programme for diversity and quality in British Poetry and has collaborated with film-makers, visual artists, musicians and digital artists. She is one of ten commissioned writers on the Colonial Countryside Project: National Trust Houses Reinterpreted. She is currently co-editing a Bloodaxe anthology of post-independence Tamil, Sinhala and English poetry and working on her fourth collection. She lives in Derbyshire and works as a freelance writer. Arachne published Seni’s poem,Triptychs Without Borders, in our Global Majority anthology, Where We Find Ourselves, and Seni took part in our writing the Diaspora panel.
Sunday Jan 29, 2023 11am Writing About Mental Health in YA fiction: Cormorants & #cornishgothic with Clare Owen
After working as an actor and arts administrator in London, Clare married a boat builder and moved to Cornwall. She promptly had three children and set up an improvised theatre company, re-enacting the stories of their audiences around the county. More recently she has co-written and performed with the all women ensemble, ‘Riot of the Freelance Mind’ and she regularly reads her short fiction at spoken word events and local festivals. Her first YA novel Zed and the Cormorants, was published by Arachne Press in April 2021 and is the winner of the Holyer An Gof YA prize and the Ann Trevenen Jenkin cup. Clare also had a story in our anthology, An Outbreak of Peace, both the short story and the novel explore various aspects of mental health through the lens of a young adult protaganist, and the way the natural world can help.
Sunday Jan 29, 2023 3pm Marketing on a Tight Budget for Writers with Saira Aspinall
Saira is our marketing expert. What she can achieve with no budget and in only one day a week is positively miraculous, you really want to hear what she has to say!
I thought it would be useful to give you all a bit more detail about the authors who have put together our amazing, eclectic anniversary events.
For our third week we have events on Tuesday, Saturday (two events) and Sunday
Emotion as Ignition Tuesday Jan 17, 2023 7pm with Kavita A Jindal
Kavita A. Jindal is an award-winning poet, fiction-writer and essayist. Her novel Manual For A Decent Life won the Eastern Eye Award for Literature 2020 and the Brighthorse Prize. She has published three slim volumes of poetry: Raincheck Accepted, Raincheck Renewed and Patina. She served as Senior Editor at Asia Literary Review and is co-founder of The Whole Kahani writers’ collective. Kavita’s workshop is aimed at short fiction and poetry writers, and is about harnessing emotions for creativity. She says that her story Cocoon Lucky in Where We Find Ourselves came out of anger, and I can relate to that, as it was temper that created Arachne Press!
On Saturday 21st our first event is at 12:00, when we have the first of our looking after yourself as a writer sessions, Resilient writers with writer and coach Neil Lawrence.
Neil taught Wellbeing Education in secondary schools for 25 years. He is now a Life coach and Organisational Consultant. Keenly creative, he is a musician who has performed on the acoustic circuit as well as being an impassioned writer.Neil sent this little video to explain his workshop.
The second Saturday workshop at 3.30 is Deaf poetry and BSL translation with DL Williams, Lisa Kelly and Mary-Jayne Russell de Clifford
We had a huge BSL translation project for What Meets the Eye, and the conversations between writers and translators were fascinating and I really wanted to share them, so this is our first attempt at that. this workshop will be conducted in BSL with english interpretation and auto captions
DL is a deaf queer poet fluent in British Sign Language and English. Working with such different languages has inspired a deep interest in translation and how her work can be made accessible to signing and non-signing audiences. They have performed around the UK including at the Edinburgh Fringe, the Millennium Centre and the Albert Hall, as well as in America and Brazil.
Lisa Kelly is one of our two guest editors for our Deaf Anthology What Meets the Eye? The Deaf perspective.
We have published Lisa’s poems in Solstice Shorts Anthology, Shortest Day, Longest Night and Dusk
Lisa Kelly has single-sided deafness. She is also half Danish. Her first collection, Lisa is co-editor of The Deaf Issue, Magma 69. She has been shortlisted four times for the Bridport Prize, longlisted for the National Poetry Competition in 2016 and 2018 and won the 2016 University of Lancaster (MA) ‘Reading’ Prize. In 2019, she read at Poetry International, Southbank Centre for d/Deaf Republic: Poets on Deafness. In 2020, she was commissioned by Nottingham Trent University in partnership with the Science Museum to create a film-poem in collaboration with other poets responding to telephony from a d/Deaf and marginalised perspective. She is currently studying British Sign Language, and is a freelance journalist writing about technology and business. Her latest pamphlet, From The IKEA Back Catalogue, is published by New Walk Editions 2021.
Mary-Jayne is a theatre maker and workshop facilitator. She is passionate about deaf / disabled theatre and empowering people through the use of theatre and drama. Mary-Jayne has a degree in Theatre Arts, Education and Deaf Studies from the University of Reading, and since graduating in 2005 has have worked as a freelance facilitator, scriptwriter, BSL storyteller, actor, stage manager, ambassador, director and BSL poet. She has taught BSL poetry, with a focus on poem translation from BSL to English rather than English to BSL.
And finally (for this week) Sunday at 6.30pm, a second looking after you workshop, What’s it about? Synopsis and Pitch with Katy Darby. Katy has co-edited several of our anthologies, teaches creative writing at City, University of London and co-runs London Live Lit series Liars’ League. I’ve heard her accurately reduce a doorstop of a book to 9 words, so she knows what you need to pitch and write a synopsis, difficult tasks at the best of times.
I thought it would be useful to give you all a bit more detail about the authors who have put together our amazing, eclectic anniversary events.
15th January and our second Sunday, and we have two events.
First at 11am we have 14 great pickup lines, a poet’s guide to sonnets presented by Jennifer A McGowan
Jennifer A McGowan
Jennifer has been published by us consistently, from a single poem in our very first poetry anthology The Other Side of Sleep, to her first full poetry pamphlet With Paper for Feet and her most recent collection, How to be a Tarot Card, (or a Teenager) which we published in October. Jennifer lives in Oxfordshire. She has been a semi-professional mime and performed in five countries as well as more traditional work as researcher, editor, and writer for a strategic management company. She has taught both at several universities, in subjects as varied as English, history, and heritage studies. Jennifer is also an historical re-enactor who disappears out of the 20th Century for weeks at a time. Jennifer was diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome at age 16, and has had long covid for most of the past 2 years, and can still come up with a snappy and beguiling title for a workshop!
Later in the day at 3pm, we have Barddoniaeth Cymraeg Gweithdy Cyfieithu Welsh Poetry Translation Workshop with Lowri Williams.
The root cause of our bilingual anthology, A470 Poems for the Road/ Cerddi’r Ffordd was realising there were Welsh poets writing (beautifully) in English, who weren’t confident enough in their Welsh to write poetry in their native language. If ever there was an overhang of English cultural imperialism, there it was staring me in the face, and I was outraged. You can’t get specific grants for translation into Welsh, only out of it. I was more outraged! So I decided to do something about it. So this workshop is very much in the same mode of enabling people in their goddess given right to write in their native language. My welsh is limited to Diolch (Thank You) Bore da (hello) and what I read on road signs – appropriately – and I’m very grateful to Lowri for taking it on!
Lowri is a Creative Writing graduate from MMU, nature writer, and bilingual poet for BRAG magazine. She loves the sea and spends her spare time surfing at Porth Neigwl. During the evenings she’s a cocktail bartender who enjoys drinking Margaritas with her aunt. Lowri’s poem in A470 proved very useful when I was driving up and down that very road, touring the book to bookshops and libraries – here’s why. I pretty sure she’ll be great company for the workshop!
I thought it would be useful to give you all a bit more detail about the authors who have put together our amazing, eclectic anniversary events.
Our second saturday, and we have two events.
First at 11am we have Tales of Transformation: Bisclavret presented by Elizabeth Hopkinson.
Elizabeth Hopkinson
We’ve published Elizabeth in our 2018 women only Liars’ League anthology We/She and our 2019 Solstice Shorts anthology Time and Tide, and our 8th anniversary anthology No Spider Harmed in the Making of this Book.
Outside Arachne publications, Elizabeth has written loads of stories which have been published in anthologies and magazines. More recently she has published three books of revisionist mythology, Asexual Fairy Tales, More Asexual Fairy Tales, and Asexual Myths & Tales.
Later in the day at 3pm, we are introducing the call out for Joy//Us, an anthology of LGBTQ poetry, which will be presented by Arachne editor Cherry Potts and Poet, Jeremy Dixon who will be the co-editor; and poet Rick Dove. We publish lots of LGBTQ writers but it feels like time to actually showcase that, and give a bit of focus to the work we are creating with our LGBTQ authors and poets.
Cherry Potts
Cherry Potts (me!) is the founder/owner of Arachne Press, which she started in a fit of anger after a fall out with her then publisher (a case of I could do it better myself... which I could, but my goodness, I didn’t realise it would be such hard work). She has published an epic lesbian fantasy novel The Dowry Blade and 2 short story collections Tales Told Before Cockcrow and Mosaic of Air, and has numerous stories in anthologies and magazines.
Jeremy Dixon
Jeremy Dixon has been published by us consistently, from a single poem in our very first poetry anthology The Other Side of Sleep, and in Solstice Shorts anthology Dusk, and our bilingual anthology A470, via three poems in Liberty Tales, to a poetry pamphlet In Retail, to Jeremy’s first full collection, A Voice Coming From Then which we publishedin August 2021 and WON the poetry category for Wales Book of the Year English Language Poetry. Jeremy is a great supporter of Arachne, providing workshops and hand made books for our crowdfunds.
Rick Dove
Rick Dove is joining us to give an additional example of our existing cohort of LGBTQ writers. We published a poem by Rick in Where We Find Ourselves, a long three part family history, which so delighted me I went in search of a biography of Ricks Great Aunt, the first black woman to sing on the BBC!
Rick is a mixed-race, London based poet whose work draws narratives, and styles, from wide influences, always takes a keen interest in both societal and personal change, and how these cardinal forces interact as we grow. A regular performer on the London poetry scene since 2015, Rick has been published in numerous poetry zines and the national press. His first pamphlet, Haigha’s Noosphere Canticles, was published in 2017 by William Cornelius Harris Publishing, and his debut full collection Tales From the Other Box, was published by Burning Eye in 2020. In July 2021, Rick became the UK Poetry Slam Champion for 2021.
Still thinking about our 10th Anniversary and how to celebrate…
We are planning a festival-come-party/celebration-come-conference type thing [FUNDING PERMITTING] which will include panel discussions, workshops and OF COURSE, readings from all our books. We’d like our authors, readers and collaborators to contribute ideas on this so there are a rash of surveys below, to help us choose the lineup. Vote for your favourite poem or story in each of the books. There is a prize draw of a selection of books (of your choice!) as well, if you give us an email address to communicate with you.
story/poem mix anthologies survey
Stories only survey
poems only survey
Solstice Shorts Festival survey This one is slightly different, as it will also lead to a ‘best of’ ebook to replace this year’s festival, so you get more than one vote. With the 10th Anniversary festival we can’t manage both, and our ambitious plan for the next Solstice Shorts required a weekend, so 2024 it is! There is also going to be a competition to choose one additional story and poem to add to the ebook.
We will deal with forthcoming books separately, and our YA books will get a separate showcase, probably in the morning.
Julian is disappointed that he does not get a vote.
Another delve into the archives. Lovers’ Lies was published in January 2013, but with the intention of hitting the Valentine’s day market. It didn’t quite meet the cloying chocolate ‘n’ roses standard, and more than one potential punter jibbed at the ‘lies’ element of the title. ‘I can’t buy something called that for my girlfriend’… Well. Quite.
Be that as it may, Lovers’ Lies celebrates love in its wildest and weirdest moments. It isn’t always easy, it isn’t always charming, it certainly isn’t always for the young, the heterosexual, the … human.
Here are some videos of readings from the launch at Keats House. If you’ve had a surfeit of sweetness, maybe this is the book for you – as we said on the cover, for cynical romantics, and romantic cynics.
