BOOK, PRINT, ART, VOICE - WORDS AND WOMEN'S LATEST BOOK LAUNCH

We had a fabulous week of happenings related to Words and Women's launch of their fourth anthology.  Words And Women: Four.

Words And Women: Four is the latest showcase collection of short prose by women writers nationally over the age of 40 and at any age in the East of England. The memoir, fiction, and creative non-fiction inside reflects the brilliance, boldness and depth of women’s contemporary writing.

 This year’s anthology is an eclectic collection of high quality prose, a many-layered read of subtlety, passion, and depth. There are startling, compelling and moving texts, an insight into the dark and crippling relationships between husbands and wives, the love between a father and daughter.  Nocturnal visitors bivouac on the edge of vision, the lost follow a winter’s map, there is a rapid intellectual joy ride with a Komodo dragon. There are memories of haunted trees, the struggle for recognition and change, living with the threat of sectarian violence and so much more. This book reflects the way we live, hope and love now.

This is a book for the reader who wants to peel back the layers and wander through rich and complex worlds featuring winning entries from our annual new writing competition. This year’s guest judge Naomi Wood, author of ‘The Godless Boys’ has selected a range of texts that show us what it is to be alive in a time of change. 

Order from Amazon, Waterstones, Unthank Books or from the following link: https://wordery.com/-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Below is a blog posted on the Writer's Centre comment pages outlining what we got up to from March 7th to 11th...

Red umbrellas, loose text, logos, and a pint of pvc, white boxes, missing bios, wandering programmes, tight deadline for book orders, more text pressed onto vinyl, plastic or glass? Fruit Juice, Wine, Beer, Water? Too groovy Fem(ale)? Timelines, schedules, endless emails, train times, risk assessments, social media, insurance, art, picture frames, flyers in hand, posters on watering hole walls and literary haunts, a countdown of tasks. The peculiarly knotty problem of creating stencils when hours are shaved off night and day.  Lists extend.  It is that month, then that week and then the day.

It is our latest Words and Women celebration of International Women’s Day and the launch of our fourth anthology, Words and Women: Four.  This time it is a week of happening.  We like to vary what we do.  Last year we marked our fifth anniversary with a sell-out night at Norwich Arts Centre with readings from winners of our annual competition featured in our anthology published by Unthank Books. Louisa Theobald, a brilliantly funny and observant compere, introduced not only last year’s winning writers but music so powerful from Sink Ya Teeth, Emily Winng and Sargasso Trio followed by the incomparable Karen Reilly and the Neutrinos that we knew this year had to be entirely different.  Last year was a rich anniversary, it felt golden, honestly, and it was BIG.  This year had to be completely different.  We turned on our pinhead and came up with City of Women, a week of Book, Print, Art and Voice.

'Going High'

It is also a year of many collaborations.  This is what we can sometimes do through Words and Women - draw in other creatives to help celebrate and launch a book – and it feels so good.  We habitually try to claim a bit more public space for women and in commissioning new work where we can.  This year, we approached Print to the People, the Norwich-based print collective to create original artwork in response to the national and regional prize winning stories. Deborah Arnander’s complex short story The Wife, winner of our new national prize for women over 40, and Melissa Fu’s elegiac non-fiction piece Suite for My Father, which won our regional award. Nunns Yard Gallery on St. Augustine’s Street is now under occupation for a week.  The work is up. Images inspired by story…even the exhibition title These Stories are like Paths has been hooked neatly out of Deborah’s fictional telling, and neatly leads us from the gallery to 13A, a small shop front additional exhibition space just down the road. In here, local artist Clare Jarrett, is creating an installation over seven days, inspired by all those words spilling out from the pages of our anthology.

Artist Jo Stafford

We still needed to mark International Women’s Day.  And since our audience was spread over a week and our launch event with Naomi Wood, this year’s guest judge, was ticketed, although free, with a limit on entry, we needed something spectacular for the day itself. Not only that but something uplifting in these politically and socially darkening days.  That’s where the umbrellas come in.

We decided to busk inspirational words written by women around the city centre.  Triggered by Michelle Obama’s exhortation – ‘when they go low, we go high’ - this part of a week of happening had its own title too… ‘Going High.’ Enter our next collaboration, this time with Chalk Circle Theatre Company and my insomniac wrestling with stencils and black paint. 

Installation by Clare Jarrett

We found a range of women, happy to read on the street, all the texts, personally selected, personally meaningful. For strong visual impact and the staging of an arresting and moving spectacle, we called on Adina Levay, artistic director of Chalk Circle Theatre Company.

Next came the red umbrellas, women dressed in black, and a schedule of appearances.  We could reach out. It plays on protest. It is protest to put good strong words onto the street.

National prize winner Deborah Arnander, two guest judges, Naomi Wood and Emma Healey and former runner up Rowan Whiteside.

Anna Metcalfe reading

We have the city that does different to thank for its support and we collected for ECPAT UK, a charity campaigning against child-trafficking and transnational child exploitation, and raised £162 in a few hours.

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Words and Women is a voluntary organisation set up and run by Belona Greenwood and Lynne Bryan.  It is a showcase for women writers who live in the East of England, or nationally over 40, at all stages of their professional careers in an annual celebration of regional creativity on International Women’s Day, and through commissioning opportunities and an annual new writing prize.
http://wordsandwomennorwich.blogspot.co.uk/

Words and Women has twice been shortlisted for the national Saboteur Awards and, this year for the second time, Words and Women were runners up in the Women in Publishing award for ‘pioneering venture.’

Belona Greenwood

Poem inspired by Tapestry

I, Miss Lorina Bulwer

The words spill out,

Tumble over themselves.

They say, why am I here?

The rant goes on at length,

Suddenly lucid thoughts prevail

Slow and deliberate,

Speaking of people she has known

With Royal connections

The Maharajah of Kelvedon

Caught in a tapestry web

Dr Pinching from Essex was the bearer

Of the good news.

A properly shaped female

Not a eunuch or hermaphrodite

But Aphrodite!

Did her birth confuse them?

And send her to the workhouse?

Sister and brother sealed her fate,

Parental death bore her there

On sibling’s arms.

To that place where nothing lives

Except despair

And Turnbridge and Powell.

Lives preserved in linen and thread

Lives preserved in linen and thread.

Shame on famous families

Great names hide there,

Gurneys, Bulwers of Wood Dalling,

Did they know?

The plots are uncovered

One by one by this tortured soul.

It hurts me to read,

I feel sick and tired,

Reality holds her with a thin thread,

Fate sealed here, but she knows

Truth will appear one day.

For now, she hides it

In a cupboard to preserve.

Hilary Hanbury  January 2017

Lorina was an inmate in the lunatic wing of Great Yarmouth workhouse where she angrily embroidered her letters on trailing lengths of patchwork fabric, venting about being locked up and abandoned by friends and family. Her furious hand-stitched letters, painstakingly sewn together while she was incarcerated, have long fascinated me.

The tapestry was found long after her death over a hundred years ago and has recently been on display at a number of Norfolk Museums.

I am presently writing a novel inspired by her story.

Change of Date for next Rural Writes meeting in Gorleston.

Our meeting which was to be held on 7th Feb is cancelled and as the following week falls in half term, the next meeting will be 11.30 - 13.30 on 21st February. 

If anyone from the other groups which make up the Rural Writes team of writers would like to visit one of the Gorleston meetings you will be made very welcome. 

Poem by Lyn McKinney

Julia Webb's Poetry Masterclass at Gorleston Rural Writes group encouraged one of our members to pen the poem below. It was inspired by our current theme,  the Women of Norfolk.

There will be more following very soon.

Thank you Lyn for the lovely engraving which is featured with the poem.

MARY EASTEY AND REBECCA NURSE

Leaving Yarmouth town Plough Monday

Sisters board the brig as though it were

A stepping stone to a dream.

A crescent moon hangs low

Over the black waters of the Yare

Showing their path to the stars.

Ropes are cast and the lights of familiar places

Fall away in the deepening gloom,

Sails flapping, salt spray flying, she’s away

Out into the bay on the rising tide.

Families huddle below creaking decks

As the cradle rocks ominously.

Father Towne watches over his girls,

Sleeping in their woollen shawls,

Their arms around each other.

Was it God who called him to Paradise?

How can he know

Their dark destiny?

Six bells, and a bleak, uncaring morning,

Only the brave are there to see it;

Rough seas break across the bow,

Making the timbers creak in pain.

There are few takers for the bread

And thin soup.

Six year old Mary holds Rebecca’s hand,

Lest she should lose her footing

And be pulled overboard by the sea serpents.

But her sister keeps them at bay,

With stories of lions and tigers,

And kindly strangers.

Two months at sea, with pale faces anxiously

Scanning the horizon, until a lengthy shoreline looms.

There is a service of thanksgiving where  

Mary clutches her doll and smiles up at Rebecca.

Who knows what devilment awaits them

In Salem, Mass?

by  Lyn McKinney

Poetry Masterclass in Gorleston

We all agreed that the Poetry Masterclass with Julia Webb was very enjoyable and has given us all some great ideas for the future. Here is the group at the Library 

POET JULIA WEBB DELIVERS MASTERCLASS IN GORLESTON

Julia Webb is delivering a masterclass in poetry to the Gorleston Rural Writes group and she is hoping to tease some autobiographical poetry out of the women. The workshop is generously supported by the Norfolk Arts  Project Fund and will be held in Gorleston Library, another partner in the community writing project. Julia is an experienced tutor, her latest collection reviewed below, is a beautifully moving and complex series of revelations.

Bird Sisters is a quest to understand the tangle of family and especially the river of a relationship that runs between siblings.  It is a brave book, a tense, personal evocation of life in a family overshadowed by the rule of a ‘Sun Father’, and his punitive severity blighting the lives of the children – and the shadowy orbit of ‘Moon Mother.’ Webb conjures childhood memories into enchanted, surreal motifs that fuse with the authentic detail of the everyday.  We are carried through the universe, only to land in a snatched sexual encounter outside the chicken abattoir, which twists into a mythical transformation.

To me, as a reader, I found the prose poems, the accounts of things that happened at home, compelling, like The Piano Lesson – (refused by Daddy), Lent and Rain.  This is a world of slights, longings and cruelties, darkness and difficulty, spiky, complex relationships, and acts, however small, of a rebellion and resilience.  There are wonderful images, ‘Her mother darns the window.’  - ‘Like a baby dandled on the knee of the sea.’ And lines that completely twine the natural world, the local, regional, recognizable world into the being of the characters that populate this collection – ‘you send your snaggle fingers down/into Breckland’s thin soil/snare rabbits in the net of your tresses.’ (From the Same Cloth).

This is an intriguing book, myth and miasma, real and sobering, as if the writer is still puzzling it all out.  A great read.

Bird Sisters, Julia Webb, Nine Arches Press, 2016.

Belona Greenwood

Words and Women

Still going strong in Gorleston

Hi, I'm Hilary the administrator of the Blog for the Gorleston Rural Writes group.

For your information, we meet every fortnight at Gorleston Library. Our next meeting will be on 31st January when Julia Webb will be giving a Masterclass in Poetry. The group are very much looking forward to this and to prepare, we are each composing a poem to be read on the day of Julia's visit. We have moved our original meeting date of 24th January to accommodate Julia's visit so our next meeting after 31st will be 7th February and every fortnight after that.

All our work this term is focused on Women of Norfolk to celebrate International Women's Day on 8th March. Our aim is to have enough material to produce a small book of prose and poetry later in the year. As we no longer have the services of Bel or the editing skills of Lynne in our armoury, we would like to call on our opposite numbers in both Swaffham and Watton to become our 'critical friends'! We are happy to return the favour too!

Over the next few weeks, we will be posting some of our work on the blog and would appreciate feedback from members of the other Rural Writes groups ( or indeed Bel if you want to contribute!). 

If the administrators of the other groups would like to contact me you should already have my email as I sent it to you before Christmas, if not, Bel has it and I am sure will forward to you.

Meanwhile, let's make sure that we keep the flag flying for Norfolk Women Writers!