Arctic Diaries online launch- Poems part 2

Here are the final poems from the online launch for The Arctic Diaries by Melissa Davies from back in April. Explore Fleinvær, off the north coast of Norway in poems.

The Arctic Diaries

Melissa is taking part in Edinburgh BookFringe, reading and talking about The Arctic Diaries, at Typewronger bookshop on Monday 28th August at 6pm get your tickets!

They Call Him the Salmon King of Norway

Seaweed

Treasures from the first boat

Bird Wife

Lookout Men

Værøy

Bird wife

 

Arctic Diaries online launch- Q&A part 2

Here’s the second half of the Q&A from the online launch for The Arctic Diaries by Melissa Davies from back in April. Explore Fleinvær off the north coast of Norway in poems. Melissa, a Cumbrian native, talks about the impact that Fleinvær has had on her writing and her life, complete with map and live feed to the island! The poems read at the launch will follow…

The Arctic Diaries

Melissa is taking part in Edinburgh BookFringe, reading and talking about The Arctic Diaries, at Typewronger bookshop on Monday 28th August at 6pm get your tickets!

 

Arctic Diaries online launch- Poems part 1

Here are the first poems from the online launch for The Arctic Diaries by Melissa Davies from back in April. Explore Fleinvær, off the north coast of Norway in poems.

The Arctic Diaries

Melissa is taking part in Edinburgh BookFringe, reading and talking about The Arctic Diaries, at Typewronger bookshop on Monday 28th August at 6pm get your tickets!

Collectors

Coffee

The Fisherman remembers a Boy Disappeared

Halibut

 

Guardians

Fleinvaer is Made up of 365 Islands

Vanishing Act

Arctic Diaries online launch- Intro and Q&A

Another slow start on my part – here’s the first half of the Q&A from the online launch for The Arctic Diaries by Melissa Davies from back in April. Explore Fleinvaer of the north coast of Norway in poems. Melissa, a Cumbrian native, talks about the place, people and stories that inspired the book. The rest will follow, when it’s been captioned!

The Arctic Diaries

Melissa is taking part in Edinburgh BookFringe, reading and talking about The Arctic Diaries, at Typewronger bookshop on Monday 28th August at 6pm get your tickets!

 

Crab Pots and Coffee: Writing The Arctic Diaries

As publication of The Arctic Diaries approaches, we spoke to poet Melissa Davies to ask about the inspiration for her debut collection and her experiences on Sørvær – a tiny island in a remote Norwegian archipelago.

Here we are, The Arctic Dairies is about to go out into the world and what am I feeling? 

In this moment, I find myself thinking often about the people living on Fleinvær. The handful of residents, the weekenders and friends I’ve spent another winter with. I picture them reading it and try to imagine what they will feel. After all, every poem sits in their landscape, not mine.

Listen to Melissa Davies read ‘Bird Wife’, on location in Norway

The Arctic Diaries truly started in the spring of 2017 with a Facebook post asking ‘Do you want to live and work in the Arctic?’ to which I replied yes! Months later a Skype call with the jazz musician who founded an artist retreat on Sørvær (one island in the archipelago of Fleinvær) and in November 2018 I was on a plane to the north of Norway to run The Arctic Hideaway for two months….which turned into six. My husband and I landed in the middle of an arctic storm to quickly learn the way of life here: weather rules winter and it is futile to resist that fact.

Sørvær is one of two year-round inhabited islands in the archipelago and during that first winter we spent many of the cold afternoons of polar night with the only other couple overwintering there. It was over kaffe, lefse and boknafisk (semi-dried cod) that I heard the tales that eventually became The Arctic Diaries. The book really began to form when I realised that many of these stories—eroded through family retelling—would disappear with the passing of the people we came to call friends. Not just traditional or folk tales but vocabulary unique to the landscape, ways of living and happenings that continue to tell us how it is to be here.

However, I don’t see The Arctic Diaries as an archive. The characters I’ve written are fictional, they are not two dimensional drawings of the people I met, I could never do them justice. Instead, I hope that readers will take from each poem what they need, along with a raised awareness or reminder of what we are losing as industrial fishing and fish farming continue to devour Norway’s coastline.

Having said that, the book is also a diary of my first winter on Fleinvær. An exploration of being ‘other’ and the personal demons I was facing at the time so I kept the diary title, structure and dates.

As someone from rural Cumbria, it was interesting to see so many of the difficulties facing Fleinvær and wider Nordland county reflected in the issues facing my own home. I write about the coastal Arctic because it’s the landscape that speaks to me but many of the poems sing a mourning song familiar to the fells too. So as you dive into sea orms, crab pots and eider nests please remember, The Arctic Diaries is only the first chapter in a project that has more to give, especially as art cements a place in the forward momentum of climate activism and Europe swirls with questions of borders and migration.

Pre-order a copy of The Arctic Diaries through our shop.

Arachne 10th Anniversary – the Authors – a short series

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.

Tonight, our Three Takes on Place, started as three separate event proposals, perhaps given our propensity for what is apparently known as ‘psychogeography’ (not entirely sure what it is, but if the cap fits…).

Diana Melissa & Sherry

We’ve published  all the authors in at least one of our Solstice Shorts anthologies, and Diana is also in our bilingual Cymraeg/English poetry anthology A470. They all have work forthcoming – Melissa Davies’s The Arctic Diaries in April this year, and Diana Powell’s Ravellings and Sherry Morris’s Another Motherland on a promise for our next-but-one funding bid.

The writers live in Cumbria, Wales and Scotland, and Melissa (Cumbria) writes about Norway, and Sherry (Scotland) writes about her native America, Ukraine (where she lived for a while) and her adopted scotland, and Diana writes about Wales. And I don’t mean travel writing, I mean poetry and mythology and humour and that weird stuff that we are so fond of that is hard to categorise. With such a wide ranging spread of places to write and talk about, I asked how they felt about collaborating, even though it would mean whatever fees they made would be shared.

They have put so much work into this event, and decided to make it a donation option, so its as cheap as you need it to be.

There really is something special about our authors, they are so keen to share their ideas and generous with their time.

Arachne10 Anniversary Festival Week 2

Week 2 of the festival, continuing our author-led readings discussions and workshops, and this week we have online events on Friday night, Saturday afternoon and evening and Sunday afternoon and evening.

Please register via Eventbrite to attend!

Fri 13/01/2023
7.30pm
Three Takes on Place
readings and discussion from
Diana Powell, Melissa Davies & Sherry Morris
free/donation details and tickets

Saturday 14/01/2023
11:00-13:00
Tales of Transformation: Bisclavret workshop
Elizabeth Hopkinson
£8 details and tickets

and at 3pm
Joy//us – LGBTQ poetry reading, open mic and discussion
Jeremy Dixon, Rick Dove & Cherry Potts
free/donation details and tickets

Sunday 15/01/2023
11:00-12:30/13:00
14 great pickup lines, a poets guide to sonnets workshop
with Jennifer A McGowan
£10 details and tickets

and at 3pm
Barddoniaeth Cymraeg Gweithdy Cyfieuthu/ Welsh poetry translation workshop
with Lowri Williams
participatory workshop on translating Welsh poetry into English
Nod y gweithdy hon yw cyfieuthu cerdd Cymraeg i fewn i’r Saesneg, drwy trafodaeth/cyfieuthu mewn steil grwp
pay what you can £3/5/8 details and tickets

Arachne Tenth Anniversary Online Festival

To celebrate our tenth anniversary we are having an online festival throughout January 2023, mostly weekends and Thursdays, although a couple of Tuesdays and Fridays have snuck in.

We invited our authors and friends to run the events they wanted to see, to set their own prices and number of tickets. It’s quite an eclectic mix, readings, discussions and workshops for writers, and about writing, or the business of being a writer. We invite you to join us! Visit the Eventbrite Collection

Saturday 07/01/2023 11:00-13:00 Cath Humphris
Why Flash Fiction? (Writing Workshop)
12 places, donation recommended £5
details and tickets

Saturday 07/01/2023 17:00-19:00 Readings from authors
Hiatus eBook Launch
95 places, FREE
details and tickets

 

Sunday 08/01/2023 19:00-21:00 David Turnbull
Longevity In Fiction: Time Bestowed, Time Stolen (discussion)
30 places £6
details and tickets

 

 

Thursday 12/01/2023 19:00-20:30 Jackie Taylor
Writing the Climate: Questions for Writers (discussion)
12 places free/donation
details and tickets

 

 

Friday 13/01/2023 19:30-21:00 Diana Powell, Melissa Davies & Sherry Morris
Three Takes on Place (reading)
95 places free/donation
details and tickets

Saturday 14/01/2023 11:00-13:00 workshop Elizabeth Hopkinson
Tales of Transformation: Bisclavret (workshop)
12 places  £8
details and tickets

 

 

Saturday 14/01/2023 15:00 reading/open mic/discussion Jeremy Dixon & Cherry Potts
Joy//Us LGBTQ Poetry
40 places  free/donation
including 10 open mic spots of 3 mins each – max 2 poems!
details and tickets

 

Sunday 15/01/2023 15:00-16:30 Lowri Williams
Translating poetry from Welsh into English (workshop)
suitable for advanced learners of Welsh and native speakers.
10 places – pay what you can £3/£5/£8
details and tickets

 

 

Tuesday 17/01/2023 19:00-20:30 Kavita A Jindal
Emotion as Ignition (workshop)
20 places £20
details and tickets

 

 

Saturday 21/01/2023 12:00-1:30 Neil Lawrence
Resilient writers (workshop)
10 places £20
details and tickets

 

Saturday 21/01/2023 15:30-17:00 DL Williams, Lisa Kelly, Mary-Jayne Russell de Clifford
Deaf Poetry and BSL translation
20 places Free/Donation
details and tickets

 

 

 

Tuesday  24/01/23 18:00-19:30 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

free tickets

Thursday 26/01/2023 19:00-20:30 Nikita Chadha
The Empire Writes Back: “Space, place and belonging” Interactive lecture/workshop
15 places £10
details and tickets

 

Friday 27/01/2023 18:30-20:00  Seni Seneviratne
Using family history/photos as inspiration for poetry (workshop)
20 places £12-£20
details and tickets

 

 

Sunday 29/01/2023 11:00-13:00 discussion/reading Clare Owen
Cormorants and #cornishgothic: creative ways to write about YA mental health.
15 places £5
details and tickets

 

Sunday 29/01/2023 15:00-16:30 workshop Saira Aspinall
Marketing on a tight budget for writers
12 places £10
details and tickets

 

 

Announcement! 2023 Festival, Exhibition and Poetry Titles

We are delighted to let you know that we have a grant confirmed from Arts Council England, which will allow us to hold our 10th Anniversary online festival, of workshops and readings, and an exhibition of cover art at Stephen Lawrence Gallery in Greenwich, both in January 2023, and to publish the following poetry titles:

February: Saved to Cloud by Kate Foley
March: More Patina than Gleam by Jane Aldous
April: The Arctic Diaries by Melissa Davies
May: Unmothered by A.J. Akoto

We are thrilled, not to say relieved, to be able to continue publishing and to celebrate our 10th anniversary in style.

More information as details firm up!

Time and Tide Videos: Bird Wife, Greenwich

 

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

Here is Bird Wife by Melissa Davies read at Greenwich by Patsy Prince,

Many of the stories and poems were read at more than one of the venues, so there will be further opportunities to compare and contrast!

Limited edition illustrated book of the material available now only from our webshop or from our events .

We are videoing BSL translations of some of the material, and this will also be on the website in late March, to coincide with the launch of the bookshop version of the book on 21st March at The Old Royal Naval College Visitor Centre in Greenwich. more details soon!