Until We Go To Gigs Again In Stroud by Crispin Thomas

Until We Go To Gigs Again In Stroud
By Crispin Thomas

until we go to gigs again
I'm trawling way down mem'ry lane
the posters and the tickets too
the things we put on here for you
'cause Covid's got me looking back
at things I miss and things we lack
the times we tried with heart and head
to turn an empty old Goods Shed*
into a place for you and me
back when we set up SMRT*

at Roxburgh House* they turned the place
one New Year's Eve to Outer Space
and ev'ry time they came to gig
K Passa made us twirl and jig
and Afterhours on Paddy's Night
or Ted and Blurt with flags and lights
so if you're from a certain time
you might recall and even find
you also felt we'd always be
that way at gigs eternally

the wild Lets and Greenpeace shows
that went on til whoever knows
the nights we met and laughed and cried
to dance or watch and feel the vibe
the setting up each afternoon
for Baka and Kangaroo Moon
the parachutes* the home-made bar
when hippies came near and far
to smoke whatever they could find
back in those special crazy times

the Sub Rooms nights when we would be
still sweeping joints til two or three
when music from around the Earth
would make us groove for all we're worth
the Afro beat that shook the age
the speakers swaying on the stage
the bouncing floor the mighty noise
Four Brothers to the Bhundu Boys
so til we go to gigs again
I'm trawling back down mem'ry lane
the posters and the tickets too
the things we put on here for you

I first got involved in on putting on gigs here in Stroud in '89 for SMRT. Stroud Music Recreation Trust was set up (naively) to raise a million pounds through benefit gigs (!) to turn the then derelict Brunel Goods Shed into a music resource centre for people of all abilities. My first foray into the actual nuts and bolts of setting up an event was not great .With the clock already on 9.30pm, and over 300 waiting to party but with no band in sight, I discovered, to my horror, that the trustee responsible for 'booking' Zoot & The Roots from Leeds, had done so without a contract and the dates had been muddled. At incredibly short notice local faves Spies In The Sugar with sax maestro Patsy Gamble were somehow setting up while the enigmatic Alan Burke of popular locally based Irish Band Afterhours was tasked with the un-evious job of wooing over an impatient dance-driven crowd, which he did impeccably.

In a serendipitous chance meeting and moment, it led ,with the help of Hazel Kayes to my managing Afterhours for 7 years, to quitting my local paper job to set up a music agency for touring acts from the UK, Ireland ,Zimbabwe and Senegal…something I still do today with Hazel O'Connor , Murray Lachlan Young and Johnny Coppin at Christmas. It also resulted in my putting gigs on here for the past 30 years, of which the selection of posters above are just a few. Bless.

Earth Protector Communities: Youth Voices Week

“It’s like living in the future now” says Ellen McCormack, one of the Youth Voices, involved with a week of activities happening on Facebook and Instagram in the last week of May from Wednesday 27th to Friday 29th organised by Earth Protector Communities (EPC).

Youth Voices Week has been organised to engage young people in positive action that encourage a sense of wellbeing in the community, in challenging times, when young people have so many big issues to contend with. There will be a series of interviews with young people, music, poetry and performance to enjoy, including a film short from the Stroud based Flies On The Wall Youth Theatre group, and an interview and virtual performance by the Birmingham-based group, Highbreed, whose songs are futuristic and mindful of Earth care.

Ellen McCormack, a year 13 student, who has been doing volunteer work for EPC, said, “When I found out about the work of Stop Ecocide and Earth Protector Communities through involvement with XR Youth, I just thought it was incredible: positive and hopeful; it feels so important. And with Earth Protector Communities, the idea of living as if the law against Ecocide was already in place I think is brilliant.”

In tandem with London Arts for Health encouraging nationwide Creativity and Wellbeing, this week, Earth Protector Communities Youth Voices will be interviewing Ruth Davey (look-again.org) on Friday 22nd May, whose organisation, Look Now, runs regular events to support wellbeing through photography, for a range of different groups. They will also be doing live interviews on Friday 29th May with Robin Ellis, founder of the Youth XR movement, and Cheltenham-based blogger, Tolmeia Gregory, ethical and sustainable fashion activist.

On June 12th, Earth Protector Communities are offering a free online mental health first aid course. Sarah Frazer, an integral member of the EPC core team and Healthy Being group is a qualified Mental Health First Aid practitioner, and the EPC team are hoping that this offer will help to support young people in adjusting and dealing with the challenges of the pandemic, as well as supplying them with skills that will benefit them post-pandemic. The course is or 16-25 year olds. There are a limited number of places so interested individuals need to book their place well in advance by emailing

Conscious of the importance of maintaining a positive outlook in these current challenging times, Earth Protector Communities have teamed up with Jasmine Tribe, organiser of the Oceans Festival in Bristol who works for City to Sea, founded by Natalie Fee, to offer a special treat for World Environment Day on Friday 5th June. There are free tickets which can be booked online by going to the EPC facebook page for the virtual screening of the film 2040. This film is so inspiring and uplifting, EPC felt it was important to make this available right now. There are a limited number of tickets available though, so to book one for your household, it’s recommended that you do that as soon as possible!

Earth Protector Communities is a charity inspired by the visionary work of Polly Higgins, the Earth Lawyer, who died last year. They are a sister organisation to the Stop Ecocide campaign group. EPC inspires local regenerative responses to our current ecological crisis and is working with a growing local and global number of community groups, including businesses, schools, health and inter-faith groups to protect our land, soil, water and wildlife; and the wellbeing of all through this means. They endorse the work of Stop Ecocide but encourage a ground-level up perspective, looking through a lens of ‘first do no harm’ to address the systemic changes which are needed.

Follow Earth Protector Communities on instagram facebook and twitter for news and updates and earthprotectorcommunities.net for further info

For the latest developments in the Stop Ecocide campaign visit stopecocide.earth and click here for our article on the recently published book Dare To Be Great by Polly Higgins.

Stroud Children's Books

Following our recent Stroud Authors Books guide this time we delve into children’s books featuring a selection of titles by Stroud based illustrators and authors…

Some of the writers are also featured on our Good On Paper Kids TV page where you will find them reading chapters from their books, instructional films on how to draw some of the characters, music videos and more!

SHOP LOCAL - Many of the books can be ordered and delivered through our local bookshops! Contact Stroud Bookshop on 01453 756646 or Yellow Lighted Bookshop via their website yellowlightedbookshop.co.uk for further info.

Long live the printed word.

Rebecca Ashdown: How To Train the Perfect Parents
How to Train the Perfect Parents is every child's guide to raising model parents. It's easy - just follow Mimi's simple steps. Sometimes, Mimi's parents don't seem to get the hang of all that training, but Mimi knows her rigorous routine of strict discipline has worked when her parents agree to get her a puppy . . . Suddenly the roles are reversed and Mimi has to learn that being trained is sometimes very hard work.
Publisher: Templar
Other titles: The Whooper, Bob and Flo, Even Fairies Fart, the Glump and the Peedle

Tracey Corderoy: Shifty McGifty and Slippery Sam: The Aliens Are Coming!
Three more slapstick adventures from our favourite doggy detectives, all set in the summer sun. And things are hotting up! Someone is cheating in the sandcastle competition! There’s something fishy about the new cafe! But it’s the Alien invasion that really makes Shifty and Sam lose their cool! Anyone for an iced bun?! Brilliant stories hilariously told by Tracey Corderoy and beautifully brought to life by Steven Lenton’s illustrations.
Publisher: Nosy Crow
Other titles: Sneaky Beak, Hubble Bubble series, Seaview Stables Adventures series

Eve Coy: The Huffalots
When Mum wakes up her Huffalots, nothing is right they don’t like their clothes, their breakfast is yucky and they just don t like each other. When one of them trips over, the other offers a hug and they magically transform into Huffalittles, then Lovealittles, and finally, with a big cuddle they become Lovealots. But it s been a long day and Mum is now grumpy and tired. Good thing the Lovealots know exactly what to do...A gorgeous picture book that explores how moods change through the day, and what we can do to help others feel better.
Publisher: Andersen Press
Other titles: Looking After William, Daddy Sitting

John Dougherty: There’s A Pig Up My Nose
What if a PIG got stuck up your NOSE? How ever would you get it out? When Natalie has to go to school with a pig stuck up her nose, her whole class gets together to find a way to get the pig out. But how will they do it? The zany humour of Sue Hendra (of Supertato and Barry the Fish with Fingers fame) meets Babe the Pig in this funny picture book. This delightfully silly tale, brought to life by warm, comical artwork from rising star Laura Hughes, will have children giggling and oinking out loud to try to work out how to get a farmyard animal out of someone's nose. The perfect picture book for boys and girls aged 3 years and up – or for anyone who has ever got something stuck up their nose!
Publisher: Egmont
Other titles: Stinkbomb and Ketchup Face series, Mark and Shark series, Dinosaurs and Dinnerladies

Jamila Gavin: The Wheel of Surya
A beautiful new edition of the first volume in the Surya Trilogy by Whitbread award-winning author Jamila Gavin. India, August 1947: Fleeing from their burnt-out village as civil war rages in the Punjab, Marvinder and Jaspal are separated from their mother, Jhoti. Marvinder has already saved her brother's life once, but now they both face a daily fight for survival. Together they escape across India and nearly halfway around the world to England, to find a father they hardly know in a new, hostile culture… A powerful story of culture, class, family and faith set against the backdrop of Indian independence and the Partition of India and Pakistan. Perfect for fans of The Bone Sparrow, Morris Gleitzman’s Once, and Katherine Rundell’s The Wolf Wilder.
Publisher: Egmont
Other titles: Coram Boy, Blackberry Blue and Other Fairy Tales, The Whistling Monster - Stories from Around the World

Eugene Lambert: The Sign of One
On Wrath, a dump-world for human outcasts, identical twins are feared. Only one will grow up human, while the other becomes a condemned monster with ‘twisted’ blood. When sixteen-year-old Kyle is betrayed, he flees for his life with the help of Sky, a rebel pilot with trust issues. As the hunt intensifies, Kyle soon realises that he is no ordinary runaway – although he has no idea why he warrants this level of pursuit. The hideous truth they discover could change the fate of Wrath and its harsh laws forever. Their reluctant, conflicted partnership will either save them – or bring about their destruction.
Publisher: Egmont
Other titles: Into the No-Zone, The Long Forever

Tom Percival: Dream Team - Attack of the Heebie Jeebies
Meet the Dream Team! Turning nightmares into incredible adventures! Erika's had a bad day. But going to sleep upset means bad dreams. She finds herself stranded in the Dreamscape along with a mob of hungry Heebie Jeebies - and to make matters worse, she's being hunted by a terrifying Angermare! Enter the Dream Team! Can they help Erika overcome her worries and get home, or will she be trapped forever? Attack of the Heebie Jeebies is the first in a fun and engaging colour illustrated series, exploring anxiety in in children through action and adventure.
Publisher: Macmillan
Other titles: Perfectly Norman, Ravi’s Roar, Ruby’s Worry, Little Legends series

Hannah Shaw: Unipiggle the Unicorn Pig - Unicorn Muddle
Welcome to Twinkleland Kingdom, where everything is 100% perfect. Except Princess Pea – she loves getting muddy and having fun and she’s not keen on choosing her own perfect unicorn at the Royal Unicorn Parade. Until the final unicorn turns out to be a podgy, pongy, proud, magic-horned…pig? And so the adventures of Princess Pea and Unipiggle begin! Meet the princess who loves breaking the rules, and her Royal Unicorn who happens to be a pig… or, rather, a Unipiggle!
Publisher: Usborne
Other titles: The Disgusting Sandwich, The Scruffs series, Bear On A Bike

Stroud Authors Books

A list of books published by Stroud dwelling authors, writers and poets featuring 25 titles covering everything from thrillers, food, comedy, biographies, poetry, romance, history, music and more…

SHOP LOCAL! Many of the books can be ordered and delivered through our local bookshops! Contact Stroud Bookshop on 01453 756646 or Yellow Lighted Bookshop via their website yellowlightedbookshop.co.uk for further info.

Long live the printed word.

Felicity Everett: The Move
Karen has packed up her life and is making The Move. She’s on her way to the idyllic country cottage which her husband has painstakingly renovated for her. They’re escaping the London bustle and the daily grind. And they’re escaping their past. A fresh start in a beautiful, peaceful village. It will be different here, right? But something is awry. The landscape, breathtaking by day, is eerie by night. The longed-for peace and solitude is stifling. And the house, so artfully put together by her husband, has a strange vibe. Now that Karen is cut off from her old friends and family, she can’t help wondering if her husband has plans of his own, and that history might be repeating itself.
Publisher: Harper Collins

Katie Fforde: A Springtime Affair
Gilly runs her own B&B business from her much-loved family home, which she doesn’t want to part with – at any price. But that's before she meets handsome estate agent Leo, and soon she begins to wonder whether selling up might not be such a bad idea after all. Meanwhile Gilly's daughter Helena has a budding romance of her own. A talented weaver, she's becoming very close to her new landlord, Jago, who's offered to help her at an upcoming craft fair. It’s what friends do, and they are just friends. Aren’t they? With spring in full bloom, Helena and Gilly begin to ask themselves the same question: Might their new loves lead to happily ever after?
Publisher: Cornestone/Penguin

Jonny Fluffypunk: Poundland Rimbaud
Poetry, flash fiction and threadbare philosophy fused together into something that is part memoir, part suburban escapism and part lavishly illustrated cry for help. Includes the transcript of the author’s extensively-toured no-fi solo stand-up spoken word theatre show Man Up, Jonny Fluffypunk: One Man’s Struggle With Late-Onset Responsibility – fully annotated to enable the reader to recreate the thrills of live performance in the comfort of their own bedroom. Or bath.
Publisher: Burning Eye Books

Nell Gifford and Ols Halas: Gifford Circus Cookbook
Giffords Circus has been touring the south of England every summer since 2000. It is a traditional village circus with a uniquely British flavour, blended with extraordinary acts from all over the world. Their restaurant Circus Sauce is headed by chef Ols Halas and seats circus goers in a beautifully decorated tent on site. They offer a new menu every week and use seasonal and local produce from the surrounding area. They serve freshly baked bread, roast chicken and truffle suet pudding, smoked ham hock in pastry, dressed crab with samphire, queen of puddings, mounds of Eton mess, and lots more, with some guests returning several times in the summer to experience a new menu within familiar surroundings. This extraordinary book is a celebration of the food that brings the circus and its audience together, alongside the story of the circus itself and its vibrant community. Full of colour, personalities, stories and images of the circus and its slow journey through the English summer countryside, the book's 100 recipes are nothing but delicious, joyful and hearty.
Publisher: Hardie Grant

Melanie Golding: Little Darlings
A terrifying encounter in the middle of the night leaves Lauren convinced someone is trying to steal her new-born twins. Desperate with fear, she locks herself and her sons in the bathroom until the police arrive. When DS Joanna Harper picks up the list of reported overnight incidents, she expects the usual calls from drunks and wrong numbers. But then a report of an attempted abduction catches her eye. The only thing is that it was flagged as a false alarm just fifteen minutes later. But Harper chooses to investigate anyway. There’s nothing on the CCTV, and yet Lauren claims that the woman is still after her children. No one will listen to Lauren – except Harper. And now Harper must ask herself, is Lauren mad, or does she see something no one else can?
Publisher: Harper Collins

Chris Head: A Director’s Guide to the Art of Stand-up
Stand-up: it's the ultimate solo art form. Yet, behind the scenes, you will increasingly find the shadowy figure of a director. For comics themselves and for those who support them, this is the first book to give the director's perspective on creating and performing stand-up comedy. Drawing on his own experience of directing stand-up alongside speaking to comedians and their directors, Chris Head produces a revealing perspective on the creative process, comic persona, writing stand-up, structuring material and delivering a performance. Directors interviewed include Logan Murray, John Gordillo and Simon McBurney, who between them have directed Eddie Izzard, Michael McIntyre, Milton Jones, Lenny Henry and French & Saunders. With a foreword by BBC arts editor Will Gompertz and contributions from many other interviewees including Oliver Double (author of Getting the Joke), this is the only book that goes all the way from one-liners to theatre via comedy club sets and full-length shows.
Publisher: Bloomsbury

Polly Higgins: Dare To Be Great
This is a book unlike any other. It does not tell you what you must do, it does not set out a guide for the 10 definitive steps to becoming great by next Thursday. Dare To Be Great is both a playful, inspirational conversation and a heartfelt, lived call, daring each one of us and our society as a whole to become truly great. Celebrated Earth lawyer Polly Higgins was a luminary in the environmental justice movement as she worked to Stop Ecocide across the globe. She was a beacon for how to live the brave, bold lives that, at our best, we imagine for ourselves. This book shares insights from her own remarkable journey, inspiring us to recognise and step into a greatness within - that is not about grandiosity but something far more exciting: aligning with our unique purpose in service of a better world.
Publisher: Flint Books

Adam Horovitz: The Soil Never Sleeps
Adam Horovitz, also author of Turning and A Thousand Laurie Lees, was the Pasture-fed Livestock Association's poet in residence for a year, staying on four of their farms over four seasons. The Soil Never Sleeps urges a better understanding of our interactions with the natural world and weaves the farmers' voices into the poems. Following the collection's success, Adam was commissioned to spend time on two Exmoor farms. In this Second Edition, new poems address the farming challenges and beauty of Exmoor over two seasons, culminating with lambing.
Publisher: Palewell Press

Cynthia Jefferies: The Outrageous Fortune of Abel Morgan
1660, England. War is at an end, yet for Christopher Morgan his personal conflict rages on. Haunted by the tragic death of his wife, Christopher is desperate to escape the pain her memory brings, although looking into the eyes of his young son, Abel, he cannot help but be reminded of what he has lost. Over time, father and son develop a strong bond until they are callously torn apart when Abel is snatched by smugglers and sold overseas. From the shores of Constantinople to the coast of Jamaica, time and tide keep them apart. Christopher will sail across oceans to find Abel, never losing faith that one day they will be reunited, and, as the years pass, Abel will learn that fortune favours the brave.
Publisher: Allison & Busby

Alice Jolly: Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile
As the nineteenth century draws towards a close, Mary Ann Sate, an elderly maidservant, sets out to write her truth. She writes of the Valleys that she loves, of the poisonous rivalry between her employer's two sons and of a terrible choice which tore her world apart. Her haunting and poignant story brings to life a period of strife and rapid social change, and evokes the struggles of those who lived in poverty and have been forgotten by history. In this fictional found memoir, novelist Alice Jolly uses the astonishing voice of Mary Ann to recreate history as seen from a woman's perspective and to give joyful, poetic voice to the silenced women of the past.
Publisher: Unbound/Penguin

Bill Jones: The Life and Times of Algernon Swift
Our young and earnest hero, Algernon Swift, returns from his travels abroad and must once more face the trials of life, love and the English language. Back at home, Algernon tries to cope with the exorbitant passion of the exquisite Mavis (a woman with X on her mind) and his elderly uncle, Reverend Hawker, and his exasperating inability to mean one thing at a time. Well-meaning in a world of double meanings, can Algernon avoid becoming another of Mavis's Xs or, at least, plunging into an existential crisis of his own? Amidst perpetual solicitude, can Algernon find both solace and solitude? Punning on subjects as diverse as Henry VIII's wives, Pre-Raphaelite painters, mathematics and fairy tales, we are taken on a hilarious and punishing journey of jokes – both high-brow and homespun – as Algernon attempts to make sense of, and even delight in, the world of word-play.
Publisher: Head of Zeus

Rachel Joyce: The Music Shop
1988. Frank owns a music shop. It is jam-packed with records of every speed, size and genre. Classical, jazz, punk – as long as it’s vinyl he sells it. Day after day Frank finds his customers the music they need. Then into his life walks Ilse Brauchmann. Ilse asks Frank to teach her about music. His instinct is to turn and run. And yet he is drawn to this strangely still, mysterious woman with her pea-green coat and her eyes as black as vinyl. But Ilse is not what she seems. And Frank has old wounds that threaten to re-open and a past he will never leave behind …
Publisher: Black Swan/Penguin

Elisa Lodato: The Necessary Marriage
Jane is sixteen when she first becomes aware of Leonard Campbell. He is a tall, gentle man with full lips and no ring on his left hand. He is her teacher. As Leonard begins to show her attention, giving her novels to read and discuss over dinner, their attraction grows and they fall in love. It is only once married, tied down with two children in 1980s suburbia, that Jane realises she might have settled too early, losing much of herself in the process.Then Marion and Andrew, a couple whose passion frequently tips into violence, move in next door, forcing Jane to confront feelings she didn't know she could have. And when Marion abandons her family, Jane steps in to help with the couple's two boys, setting in motion a series of events, all of which expose the push and pull within every relationship. As desire and loyalty are blurred, it becomes clear that nobody can escape the devastating impact of a family falling apart.
Publisher: Weidenfeld and Nicolson

Robert Louis Kreamer: The Hippie Trail - After Europe, Turn Left
In 1977, a twenty-year-old naive American takes a break from his university studies to undertake an epic nine-thousand-mile overland journey from Munich to Kathmandu. With his camera and his journal, he records and recounts his journey, wanderings and musings with candor and humor through cities and countries that are now inaccessible and too dangerous for the modern backpacking tourist. Like a later-day, international doppelganger version of "On the Road," the search for universal truth and the meaning of life tramps alongside the author while visiting places like Beirut, Damascus, Tehran and Kabul with a casual nonchalance, and revealing a seemingly lost era of more freedom, openness, tolerance, and promise.
Publisher: Fonthill Media

Ian McEwan: Machines Like Me
Charlie, drifting through life and dodging full-time employment, is in love with Miranda, a bright student who lives with a terrible secret. When Charlie comes into money, he buys Adam, one of the first batch of synthetic humans. With Miranda’s assistance, he co-designs Adam’s personality. This near-perfect human is beautiful, strong and clever – and soon a love triangle forms, which leads Charlie, Miranda and Adam to a profound moral dilemma. Can you design the perfect partner? What makes us human? Our outward deeds or our inner lives? Provocative and moving, Machines Like Me explores whether a machine can ever truly understand the human heart.
Publisher: Vintage/Penguin

Elvie McGonagall: Viva Loch Lomond!
Viva Loch Lomond! is the first full length collection of poems published by the stand-up poet, comedian and broadcaster Elvis McGonagall. It features pieces from his hit Edinburgh Fringe Festival shows One Man and His Doggerel and Countrybile together with a number of greatest hits, B-sides and previously unpublished gems. Deftly witty, satirical but not afraid to be plain daft, Elvis McGonagall's work takes aim at our septic isle of zero-hours contracts, food banks and Kirsty Allsopp cup-cakery and beyond. From Scottish independence to the "war on terror" via turbo-capitalist greed, from Blair and Bush to Dave and Boris via the death of Thatcher, from William Wallace's taste for cheese to the Queen's love of gangsta rap, Elvis kicks against the pricks and the injustices inherent in austerity Britain but still finds time to wax lyrical about the joys of whisky, Greek islands and the godforsaken rural idyll where he currently abides. His tightly written quick-fire verse, shot through with his customary moral umbrage and rhetorical power, is here annotated with his own irreverent explanatory notes highlighting the workings of his befuddled mind as he scribbled these poems from the dubious comfort of his revolting armchair at the Graceland Caravan Park.
Publisher: Burning Eye Books

Nikki Owen: Subject 375
The first installment in the Project Trilogy. Plastic surgeon Dr Maria Martinez has Asperger’s. Convicted of killing a priest, she is alone, in prison and has no memory of the murder. DNA evidence places Maria at the scene of the crime, yet she claims she’s innocent. Then she starts to remember…A strange room. Strange people. Being watched.As Maria gets closer to the truth she is drawn into a web of international intrigue and must fight not only to clear her name but to remain alive.
Publisher: Harper Collins

Hannah Persaud: The Codes of Love
Ryan and Emily appear to have it all, successful jobs, a beautiful house and the secret to a happy marriage. A secret that involves certain ‘rules’. Beneath the surface trouble is brewing in the shape of Ada. Whimsical, free spirted and beholden to no-one, she represents the freedom Emily’s been striving for, and the escape that Ryan didn’t know he wanted. As they are separately, and secretly, drawn to her, things start to unravel. The ‘rules’ are still the rules, to be taken seriously, not to be broken….This is a wonderfully compelling portrait of a marriage by a striking new talent.
Publisher: Muswell Press

Rosie Price: What Red Was
Throughout their four years at university, Kate and Max are inseparable. For him, she breaks her solitude; for her, he leaves his busy circles behind. But loving Max means knowing his family, the wealthy Rippons, all generosity, social ease and quiet repression. Theirs is not Kate’s world. At their London home, just after graduation, her life is shattered apart in a bedroom while a party goes on downstairs. What Red Was explores the effects of trauma on mind and body, the tyrannies of memory, the sacrifices involved in staying silent, the courage of a young woman in speaking out. And when Kate does, this question: whose story is it now?
Publisher: Harvill Secker/Penguin

Kate Riordan: The Stranger
Cornwall, 1940. In the hushed hours of deepest night a young woman is found washed up on the rocks. Was it a tragic accident? Or should the residents of Penhallow have been more careful about whom they invited in? In the midst of war three women arrive seeking safety at Penhallow Hall. Each is looking to escape her past. But one of them is not there by choice. As the threat of invasion mounts and the nightly blackouts feel longer and longer, tensions between the close-knit residents rise until dark secrets start to surface. And no one can predict what their neighbour is capable of…In a house full of strangers, who do you trust?
Publisher: Penguin

Mandy Robotham:The Secret Messenger
Venice, 1943. The world is at war, and Stella Jilani is leading a double life. By day she works in the lion’s den as a typist for the Reich; by night, she risks her life as a messenger for the Italian resistance. Against all odds, Stella must impart Nazi secrets, smuggle essential supplies and produce an underground newspaper on her beloved typewriter. But when German commander General Breugal becomes suspicious, it seems he will stop at nothing to find the mole, and Stella knows her future could be in jeopardy. London, 2017. Years later, Luisa Belmont finds a mysterious old typewriter in her attic. Determined to find out who it belonged to, Luisa delves into the past and uncovers a story of fierce love, unimaginable sacrifice and, ultimately, the worst kind of betrayal…
Publisher: Avon Books

Katri Skala: A Perfect Mother
A bracing, hypnotic story of mid-life crisis about the complexities of love, relationship and legacy. During a visit to Trieste in Northern Italy to research his long lost great-grandfather, Jacob meets Charlotte and Jane, and the three are forced to confront their individual and shared histories. Their sense of themselves is challenged and they must piece together a future none of them saw coming.
Publisher: Hikari Press

Stroud Short Stories vol.2
Declared by the Cheltenham Literature Festival to be “possibly the best short story event in the South West”, Stroud Short Stories’ reputation is based on the quality of the stories read at its events. This, the second Stroud Short Stories anthology, covers the period from November 2015 to May 2018. That’s six events and nearly 60 stories written and read by the cream of Gloucestershire’s authors – some professional, some amateur – but all inspired by the challenge of creating an exciting and inspirational evening of short stories.Stroud Short Stories organiser John Holland has edited an anthology of stories in a diverse range of styles and with an extraordinary array of themes, which will in turn amuse, enchant and challenge the reader.
Publisher: Stroud Short Stories

This Is Not A Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook
It's time. This is our last chance to do anything about the global climate and ecological emergency. Our last chance to save the world as we know it. Now or never, we need to be radical. We need to rise up. And we need to rebel. Extinction Rebellion is a global activist movement of ordinary people, demanding action from Governments. This is a book of truth and action. It has facts to arm you, stories to empower you, pages to fill in and pages to rip out, alongside instructions on how to rebel - from organising a roadblock to facing arrest. By the time you finish this book you will have become an Extinction Rebellion activist. Act now before it's too late.
Publisher: Penguin

Tamsin Treverton Jones: Windblown
The Great Storm of 1987 is etched firmly into the national memory. Everyone who was there that night remembers how hurricane force winds struck southern Britain without warning, claiming eighteen lives, uprooting more than fifteen million trees and reshaping the landscape for future generations. Thirty years on, the discovery of an old photograph inspires the author to make a journey into that landscape: weaving her own memories and personal experiences with those of fishermen and lighthouse keepers, rough sleepers and refugees, she creates a unique portrait of this extraordinary event and a moving exploration of legacy and loss.
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Pieter Tritton: El Inferno
Caught in an Ecuador hotel room with 8kg of cocaine, Pieter Tritton was no mule or dupe. He had planned and organised everything. The consequence: a 12-year sentence inside one of the world’s deadliest prison systems, where gun fights, executions and riots are a part of everyday life. As a Brit banged up abroad, Pieter had to learn how to survive – and fast – because one wrong move would mean death. This is the insider account of what it’s like to live in a place worse than hell and come out a changed man on the other side.
Publisher: Ebury Press/Penguin

Polly Higgins: Dare To Be Great

Photo: Lupe de la Vallina

By Judith Gunn

“It was about fifteen years ago when she had a kind of epiphany,” Jojo Mehta, co-founder of Stop Ecocide, reflects on her friend and fellow campaigner Polly Higgins, whose book Dare To Be Great is published today (Fri 10th April).

So what was the epiphany?

“She had just won a case for a really difficult client on a trial that had been going for a couple of years. She was in the Royal Courts of Justice and she looked over London and thought - ‘it’s not just my client that needs protecting; it’s the earth, the earth is in need of a good lawyer.’” With that Polly Higgins turned her back on her career as a barrister and set her mind to protecting her new client. Her initial research took her to the Rights of Nature movement and the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth in Bolivia in 2010. “But” says Jojo “what she realised fairly quickly is that rights are only any use if you have corresponding responsibilities and that is what criminal law provides. It’s all very well to have a right to life but unless murder is a crime your right to life isn't worth an awful lot.”

Ecocide was not a new concept. It was originally intended to be in the Rome Statute, the governing document for the International Criminal Court (ICC) established in 1998. It is the top legal document in the world, it lists ‘crimes of most serious concern for humanity’, sometimes known as ‘crimes against peace’. But ecocide was the missing crime from the Rome Statute, says Jojo. “It literally became the mission of Polly’s life to reinstate that missing crime.”

In 2010 Polly submitted a definition of ecocide to the UN – a definition, says Jojo “that is good enough for the Pope!” (In November last year Pope Francis called for recognition of ecocide crime, using Polly’s wording.) In 2013, Polly came to the first SEED Festival at Hawkwood College and together with her husband Ian Lawrie QC made the move to Stroud.

“Polly wasn’t a kind of ‘on the street demo’ person at all, and in fact the first two years we worked together we worked very much in parallel”. Jojo’s early activism included the anti-fracking movement and opposing the incinerator and her working relationship with Polly was complementary - Jojo helped Polly with communications and Polly offered legal advice to support activism.

Photo: Giancarlo Gallinoro 

In 2017 that working relationship became an organisation and Ecological Defence Integrity was co-founded by the two women. This began a chain of events that has produced the Earth Protectors movement and the rebranding of the public campaign from Mission Life Force to Stop Ecocide. “We realised it needed to do exactly what it said on the tin and the tag line was ‘change the law’.” That decision was made at Polly’s last work meeting in the garden of her home last year. Jojo recalls “It was the most bonkers two weeks of my life – I was looking after Polly, running the campaign because she was ill and supervising a total rebrand all at the same time. Just having the word ‘ecocide’ front and centre made a huge difference. We got our first thousand placards printed just in time for the first rebellion (Extinction Rebellion) and they were everywhere”. The rebellion kicked off with an ‘ecocide’ protest on the South Bank which saw the words ‘For Polly’ spray-painted on the side of the Shell Building.

Polly saw it in the last week of her life. “She was absolutely thrilled,” says Jojo. “She watched the video again and again... It was amazing for Polly because it was her last week and she was in hospital and she was watching it all on Facebook and on the internet and for the first time after a decade of work she was seeing her work on the streets… so there was actually a groundswell of people saying ‘Stop Ecocide’. The whole conversation around ecocide has expanded globally since then – two states have even officially called for it to be recognised as a crime. She would have been so excited to see that.”

Polly and Jojo were also great friends. “She was a real maverick and I miss that,” says Jojo. They both shared a love of fancy dress and ran parties for supporters, and Polly had insisted that an Alice in Wonderland party be held after her death.

Dare to be Great is Polly Higgins’ personal account of her journey and work to stop ecocide. “So many people feel disempowered and Polly was all about empowerment. It’s the closest thing you will get to having a conversation with her, as opposed to reading her legal treatise.” Originally titled ‘I Dare You to be Great’ it is an inspiration and a call to action for those who want to protect the planet.

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Dare To Be Great will be published on Good Friday, April 10th (featuring a cover by award winning local filmmaker, artist and illustrator Joe Magee) via Flint Books (flintbooks.co.uk) - the new imprint by Gloucestershire based publisher the History Press (thehistorypress.co.uk).There will be an online launch featuring contributors from the book, including: Marianne Williamson, US ex-Presidential candidate, who wrote the Foreword; Jojo Mehta, who wrote the introduction; Dr Jane Goodall DBE and Michael Mansfield QC, who wrote Afterwords. Other endorsers of the book include: Caroline Lucas, Charles Eisenstein, George Monbiot, Gail Bradbrook, Roz Savage and Simon McBurney. There will also be a live Twitter chat on the day after Earth Day, on April 23rd, to mark Polly’s anniversary and discuss key themes arising from the book. 

For further info on Stop Ecocide visit stopecocide.earth and pollyhiggins.com

Judith Gunn is a frustrated screenwriter and the author of Dostoyevsky: A Life of Contradiction. She has two stories in the latest edition of Stroud Short Stories and is the creator of online educational content and books. She does this while tutoring students online and writing the great novel. judithgunn.com

From the Archives: Dennis Gould

Photo: James Kriszyk

By Leah Grant
Issue 3, June 2015

“This is the inking table and the press and you hand ink each time before you drop the paper on and then pull the roller over.” We are in Dennis Gould’s letterpress workshop surrounded by lovingly created cards and posters, the air permeated with the smell of wet ink and hard graft. It is in this small room where I meet Dennis for a quiet chat on a Tuesday afternoon and come away with armfuls of his iconic artwork. “I tend to print just cards and posters. I like the ephemeral nature of them and they’re accessible to most people.”

Born in Burton-On-Trent and raised in Derbyshire, Dennis Gould is not just a man defined by his letterpress printing, although for this he has become renowned in the local area and beyond. His background is marked by his pacifism, by a stint in the army and a spell in prison, and finally, by his poetry. “DH Lawrence was a major influence on my writing, on writing poetry, because he’s well known as a novelist, but he’s also a brilliant poet…I began writing after reading his essays and letters and poems because they seemed very simple, but of course simplicity is the hardest thing in any field.”

In printmaking, Dennis has found a way to present his poetry that perfectly echoes the beauty of his prose and in combining these two passions he has created a career that spans almost twenty-five years. But life wasn’t always so straightforward and the circuitous route Dennis took to get to this point has had a dramatic impact on the man and his art.

After leaving school at sixteen, Dennis spent two years as a trainee hotel manager before joining the army: “I saw these wonderful adverts – ‘join the army, see the world’ - and I was very naïve, but I did ask if I could make maps.” Dennis was enrolled at the School of Military Survey near Newbury and spent eighteen months there before being posted to Cyprus. (Interestingly, he frequently utilises maps in his artwork, contrasting their fine detail against the heavy print of his letterpress.) On leaving the army, Dennis spent a year with the International Voluntary Service and then became involved with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Committee of 100. It was during this time that Dennis and thousands of others were imprisoned, yet he speaks passionately about the peace movement of the sixties and it is clear in his work that this is a subject close to his heart.

In a roundabout way it was Dennis’s pacifism that brought him to Stroud in 1989, when he came to visit his old friend and fellow peace activist, John Marjoram. But it was printmaking and the beautiful countryside that forced him to return; when asked what he loves most about the area, Dennis said, “I like the diversity of the people, the fact that it’s a working town and it’s got lots of craftsmen and artists, poets and writers. And I love the countryside, I write a lot of poems about my cycle rides and the landscape.”

Dennis’s smooth transition into life as a ‘Stroudie’ is evident in the vast quantities of his work that is sold both on his stall in the Shambles market every Saturday morning and at Made In Stroud on Kendrick Street, yet despite the popularity of his prints (which are replicates of both his own poems and the works of people he respects such as Bob Dylan and Lawrence Ferlinghetti), Dennis admits that for the first ten years of letterpress printing his lack of technical knowledge meant he still considered himself an apprentice. Now, he passes his skills on to those wishing to experiment in the trade themselves, opening up his shared workshop for free and demonstrating the process of setting a poem or a business card: “The essential thing is for people to feel relaxed when they come in here…”

It is this generosity of time and knowledge that perfectly characterises Dennis. As I leave his workshop, keen to explore my armful of goodies, I find myself inspired by his unique adaptability and as I search through the pamphlets and poems, newspaper and barely-dry prints, I soon find myself reaching for my notebook eager to pen a verse of my own.

Leah Grant is a writer and photographer with a keen interest in art and literature. On her blog, Bellyful of Art, you can find reviews of exhibitions, installations, dance performances and literary events as well as her own lovingly created pieces of short fiction.

UPDATE! On Thursday 9th April we will be screening a 25min Dennis Gould documentary by local filmmaker Alasdair Ogilvie on our YouTube channel. Click here to watch the screening at 8:15pm and here for the facebook event page for further info…

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As well as our recent project (Good On Paper TV) following Good On Paper’s current hiatus over the next few month’s we will be putting up articles from our archives for our readers to easily access and share…Community and culture can carry on in different ways. For now….

From the Archives: Laurie Lee - The Lost Recordings

By Matt Shinn
From Issue 44, November 2018

“I went to see Laurie Lee and he was happy to do it. So we made a TV programme about him.”

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Except that Laurie Lee didn’t ‘do’ TV: he didn’t like the way he came across on the small screen. So when, in 1994, a local documentary film-maker made a TV programme about Laurie, it was pretty much unique: this was the only time that Laurie really let his guard down, in front of a TV camera.

And now the full set of tapes that were made for the programme has come to light, after more than twenty years. Taken together, they provide an important record of Laurie’s views on his writing, on his childhood, and on the Slad Valley where he grew up.

So how did David Parker succeed in getting Laurie to agree to a TV programme, when so many others had failed? Approaching him at the right time, and in the right way, seems to have been key.

Together with his wife Wendy McLean, David had recently set up a TV production company, Available Light Productions, and was looking for ideas for programmes, ideally with a focus on the West Country. How about a documentary on Gloucestershire’s most famous literary son?

True to form, to begin with Laurie wasn’t keen. He said no, but agreed to meet David Parker in the Woolpack pub to talk about the project. Laurie relented a little, saying that he thought the programme was a good idea and that he would like to help, but just didn’t want to be in it – still not much use for a TV film about him. But then Laurie took David to visit various locations in Slad, and began talking about his work, his music, and what the locations meant to him. Returning with a film crew, David took Laurie slowly – over the course of five days – through the formative events of his early life, in the places where they had taken place.

So why the change of heart, on Laurie’s part? As well as the clear affinity between the two men (at the end of filming, Laurie inscribed a copy of Cider with Rosie ‘to David, a fellow traveller’), David Parker believes that the timing of his approach may have had something to do with it. “In 1994 Laurie was in his eightieth year”, he says, “and so he may have thought that his time was limited, and that this would be an easy way of telling people a little more about his past (the parts that he wanted to talk about, at any rate). As if it were his swansong.”

Quickly it became clear that, in person as well as on the page, Laurie Lee was a wonderful storyteller. “We sat him on a bench overlooking the cricket pitch, we sat him on a chair in the school, we took him up to Miserden church to see Frank Mansell’s grave. And we took him to Swift’s Hill, where he leaned on a gatepost. We got him to talk about his life, the influences on his writing, the techniques that he used in his books. He also spoke about his perception of the social structure of Gloucestershire when he was young, and the landscape and how it shaped the people and the language that he knew, and therefore how it shaped his writing.”

Much of this covers similar ground to Cider with Rosie, of course. But for David, “what you don’t get from Cider with Rosie is how Laurie came to write the book: the culture, the history, the anthropology and the geography of that valley, which shaped his thinking and the way he wrote. For example in the interviews he talks about the people in the valley not having a big vocabulary, but ‘by God’, he said, ‘they had a command of that vocabulary’. They learned their English from the King James Bible. Some of them couldn’t read, but they heard it. Laurie said ‘my God they could tell a story, like a sailor in Homer’s time’”.

In the interviews for the TV programme, Laurie even re-told some of the stories from Cider with Rosie: for example the tale of the man who returns to Slad, having made his fortune far away. But for David, “where the interviews take off from the book is where I was able to say things like ‘but Laurie, you returned also: how did you feel about coming back?’”.

Issue 44, November 2018 - cover by Mark Levy

In all, David recorded some 30,000 of Laurie’s words – far more than were needed for a half-hour programme. Once it was aired, Available Light moved on to other things, and David had thought that the original recordings had been thrown away, until they came to light in 2017 during an office move.

In time for the 60th anniversary of Cider with Rosie in 2019, David is finishing a book (to be published by Little Toller), which is comprised mostly of Laurie’s words from the interviews, but with the addition of comments from people who knew him. These include the poet Roger McGough, who became friends with Laurie after sharing platforms with him at poetry festivals, the classical guitarist Julian Bream (who Laurie used to accompany on the violin), and the ‘real’ Rosie of Cider with Rosie (Rosie Buckland), who was able to give David her side of the story, shortly before she died.

For this year’s Stroud Book Festival, David will also be giving an illustrated talk, exploring what the recordings tell us about Laurie Lee and the influences that shaped his writing. The event will include a screening of the 1994 film in its entirety, plus clips from the interviews that were not originally included in it. A rare chance to hear Laurie Lee speaking at length, in his own voice.

Laurie Lee: The Lost Recordings, a talk by David Parker takes place on Sunday 11th November at Lansdown Hall from 6-7pm. Tickets cost £8 and are available now from the Subscription Rooms. Visit stroudbookfestival.org.uk and davidparkertalks.co.uk for further info.

Matt Shinn runs Whole New Chapter Ltd, a Stroud-based editorial and design agency. wholenewchapter.co.uk

UPDATE! On Sunday 12th April we will be screening the 24min documentary over on our YouTube channel. Click here to watch the screening at 8pm and here for the facebook event page for further info…

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As well as our recent project (Good On Paper TV) following Good On Paper’s current hiatus over the next few month’s we will be putting up articles from our archives for our readers to easily access and share…Community and culture can carry on in different ways. For now….

Crispin Thomas: On Lockdown Here in Stroud

Photo: Crispin Thomas

On Lockdown Here in Stroud
By Crispin Thomas

to walk with you in times like these
above the world we know
we keep our distance ev'ryone
while gentle winds do blow
on skies as blue as blue can be
as people know their space
the sun in Spring is ev’rything
you need upon your face
these eager dogs they have no clue
and go about their day
it’s just another welcome run
to sniff and while away
and birds remain oblivious
they fly and burst with song
the beauty all around us
denies that something’s wrong
but here upon these common hills
a girl is drumming loud
and you would never know that we’re
in lockdown here in Stroud

this state of being now imposed
we share with ev’ryone
and though we do not know their names
the word is on their tongue
it filters in between us now
as we both rise and fall
from time to time a knowing nod
reminds us of it all
as some wear masks and some wear scarves
and some prefer to be
alone or with their loved one
the same as you and me
we’re doing just as we’ve been told
with what we are allowed
it’s only been a week or so
on lockdown here in Stroud

we have no need to walk on streets
and so we stay away
and do whatever we must do
to keep this thing at bay
for town is just like Christmas Day
the shops and cafés closed
the lady in the pharmacy
is wrecked with overload
the nurses in the hospital
they will not show their fear
how brave they are to risk their lives
for those in need out there
I hold your hand much tighter now
and others here do too
as each of us hope we are safe
to see these moments through
beyond the graveness of the news
our faith and trust remains
the Earth is almost whispering
reminding us again
surrendering to ev’rything
my heart is beating loud
for those beyond our little homes
on lockdown here in Stroud

From the Archives: Michael Horovitz

By Amy Fleming
From Issue 20, November 2016

Not far from Stroud, a few miles beyond Slad, is a relatively remote nook, known as The Scrubs. One Guy Fawkes’ Night in the late 1970s, the ground thick with sodden leaves, five bards stood here in the dark, huddled around the back end of their hired van.

Tom Pickard, Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky were due at a poetry reading in town, but had got stuck in the steep valley where their hosts - fellow poets Frances and Michael Horovitz - lived. Orlovsky was Ginsberg's long-term partner, often referred to as "Ginsberg's wife, or husband," recalls Michael Horovitz. "A solid, heavyweight chap," he continues, "which came in handy when we had trouble getting the van to go up the hill again".

Horovitz had started publishing works by Beat poets, also including Jack Kerouac, William Boroughs and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, after launching the periodical New Departures in 1959 - his final year as a literature student at Oxford. During the 1970s, he toured the US often, where he and Ginsberg used to sing William Blake poems together. Horovitz has also been a driving force behind performance poetry for over 50 years, from his role in helping to gather an audience of 8000 to the Royal Albert Hall in 1965 (Ginsberg headlined), to over 35 years of Poetry Olympics events, up and down the country. Notable Olympians include John Hegley, John Cooper Clarke, Benjamin Zephaniah and Damon Albarn.

Musical collaborations have been many, including a recording in 2013 of his poem Ballade of the Nocturnal Commune, accompanied by Albarn, Graham Coxon and Paul Weller, which sold out on Record Store Day that year. The ballade was a rural rhapsody he had written many years before, at the family cottage in The Scrubs.

The Horovitzes moved to, what Michael describes as their "wild offshoot of the Slad valley," when their son Adam (who still lives and writes in Stroud) was a baby. The cottage was an idyllic antidote to the congestion of London, with stunning views. "On a clear day," he says, "the postman used to say, 'I can see them having breakfast in Slad today'." The first decade of living there, he says, was "Frances' happiest, but more or less her last decade."

When it came to poetry, he says Frances was "kind of a purist," whereas he was "very much a jazz poet and performance poet. We were creative counterweights to each other." She died of cancer in 1983. "We had so much joy and then so much misery and despair, missing her," he says.

Phase two, in the cottage, saw Horovitz, "trying to be a good dad and make up for Fran's absence and get Adam through GSCEs and A levels." In spite of their loss, they managed to have quite a good time, he recalls, discussing books, going for walks and "playing hand tennis across the dry stone wall."

Michael Horovitz at the Royal Albert Hall, 1965

Horovitz lives in London, now, but he will return to perform in November at the Stroud Book Festival. "There were always a lot of artists and poets around Stroud, as there still are," he says. "We did a lot of gigs that drew big audiences around here, so I'm hoping this book festival will do the same." He and Frances, he says, "pioneered literary festivals and particularly sundry overlaps between different art media." However, he is distressed that most "so-called art and literature festivals" these days, seem mainly to be concerned with booking best-selling stars, and making money, rendering them "pretty predictable and often downright boring."

That's not to say that some of the stars aren't authentic, but the scene has become too commercial. "My whole stance on society and art is very much with William Blake," says Horovitz. "Ignore commerce and hype and corruption, and instead stick to what we know matters, which is doing the best work we can and moving society away from greed, bad behaviour, intolerance and violence. As Blake put it, 'where any view of money exists, art cannot be carried on.'"

2007 saw the publication of a 500-page book by Horovitz, called A New Wasteland: Timeship Earth at Nillennium (the title, a reference to T S Eliot's The Waste Land), bemoaning, he says, “ruthless mega-marketing, the degradation of arms manufacture, trading and wielding on the part of political bleeders such as Bush, Clinton, Blair, Putin and Trump, sucking up to corporations and plutocrats, and telling everyone they've got to compete like mad to get to the top of the pile – which ignores everybody except those at the top of the pyramid, which of course crushes the majority." A sad state of affairs, but on the other hand, he says, "it seems to me that Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott and Caroline Lucas and other such idealists keep the faith, and many poets and artists worldwide are concerned with continuing the resistance movement against these monstrous extremes of homo rapiens."

At his upcoming Stroud performance, Horovitz will read from his 1986 poem, Midsummer Morning Jog Log. "It's ostensibly a memoir of jogging round the valley," he says. All 679 lines of it were published in a hand-printed booklet, with delicate nature drawings by Peter Blake and a posthumous dedication at the front to Frances.

Horovitz will perform, as he often does now, with his partner of the last four years, the singer-songwriter-guitarist Vanessa Vie. "She grew up in Northern Spain," he says, "but she's been in England the last 15 years. We are doing a lot together as a duo." A CD is in the works. "We'll be performing our settings of some Blake songs, including ones where we get audiences to join in. Blake's Laughing Song, for instance, which has refrains where everyone chants Ha Ha Hee, to lighten things up.”

Michael will be appearing with Vanessa Vie at the Subscription Rooms on Saturday 19th Nov for an evening of music, song poems and other word sounds. Visit stroudartsfestival.org for tickets and further info.

Amy Fleming is a writer and editor for the Guardian, who also contributes to Intelligent Life, the FT, Vogue, Newsweek, New Scientist and more.

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As well as our recent project (Good On Paper TV) following Good On Paper’s current hiatus over the next few month’s we will be putting up articles from our archives for our readers to easily access and share…Community and culture can carry on in different ways. For now….

From the Archives: Adam Horovitz

By Jill MacKeith
From Issue 34, January 2018

“I wrote that one in a frenzy”, Adam Horovitz explained, talking of The Abattoir. “I had to get it all out and work through what I thought about it”. And indeed, there was a lot to get out – save one other, it is the longest poem in the whole collection of The Soil Never Sleeps, his latest book.

As a vegetarian poet, Adam does not often find himself in abattoirs. In fact, becoming poet in residence of the Pasture-Fed Livestock Association (PFLA) for 2017 was not something he could have predicted, despite his connection to the pastureland surrounding the beautiful Slad Valley where he was brought up.

As a writer, Horovitz told me, he’s always been interested in the relationship between mankind and the landscape, eager to “tease out the more metaphysical connections between man, land and animals”. Indeed, that was a large aspect of his previous book, A Thousand Laurie Lees: The Centenary Celebration of a Man and a Valley, which focuses on the land and landscape of the Slad Valley. While Adam was in the midst of writing about this landscape of the past (in 2013), John Meadley (Chair of the PFLA) approached him and asked him to consider a residency, looking at a landscape into the future. The challenge was too enticing to let pass, and so, over four seasons and travelling to four farms across England and Wales, from the Yorkshire Dales to Cornwall, Kent to the Black Mountains, Adam immersed himself in the life and landscape of the PFLA farming community.

Armed with “a moleskin notepad and a pen that could withstand driving rain”, Adam shadowed the farmers and explored the land, taking photographs that not only acted as an aide-memoire for writing, but also proved invaluable to artist Jo Sanders who provided the striking ink illustrations accompanying Horovitz’s words on the page. “Jo illustrated my previous book, A Thousand Laurie Lees”, explained Adam, “and I was keen to work with her again. She’s managed to really capture the essence of the farms I stayed at and has woven parts of the poems into the artwork”. It’s a beautiful representation. The poems in the collection follow the order in which Adam visited the farms: Spring, Autumn and Winter 2016, followed by Summer 2017. The EU Referendum took place in the middle of the residency, the outcome of which provided much food for thought for the final section of the book, which investigates the ethics, politics and future of farming.

Two poems from the collection, The Soil Never Sleeps and Three Options for Farmers were written at the Oxford Real Farming Conference, January 2017, well in the wake of Brexit. Adam explained how he conceived them. “They were essentially cuttings from words and phrases that I had heard the farmers use during the conference which I grafted together and presented back to them”. Some of the farmers were rather bemused by his residency: “They asked John Meadley, ‘What are you doing getting a poet?!’. So they were then rather surprised to hear their own voices presented back to them in that way, rather than just as a curious set of facts”.

He acknowledges that the experience was an extraordinary learning process. In the introduction to The Soil Never Sleeps, Adam admits, “Growing up I had a mythic sense of the landscape instilled in me; most of my understanding of its minutiae, of what made it work and what work it made, came from reading.” I asked him if he felt more connected with the land now. He answered that the experience of this residency and resulting collection has provided him with “a stronger sympathy for the pasture farmers and a better understanding of what drives them. They’re essentially taking an old style of farming and adapting it for the future, to allow everyone a future”. Horovitz added that, with regard to mainstream farming, “something has to change, even Michael Gove has been quoted in the Guardian as saying that the UK is 30 to 40 years away from ‘the fundamental eradication of soil fertility’”.

With the uncertainty about the future of British agriculture hanging in the balance since the referendum result and the realisation of the state of our soil fertility, one could be forgiven for bracing oneself for expecting a melancholic read. Horovitz, however, refrains from woe and urges us to be guided by balance and hope. Indeed, the closing poem, ‘Three Options for Farmers’, is encouragingly optimistic, imploring the reader to:

. . . go into the towns and cities laden
with produce and stories,
your tongues ripe with carefully
disguised science, the bare
bone facts dressed in the muscle
of myth and memory.
Too much fact runs off busy people
like water from compacted soil.
Learn how to open them
to the seeds of ideas.
Water them with stories.
Watch them grow.

I asked Adam how he would promote the book if money and time were no object. He said he’d “love to tour with it around the country, through the landscape like the minstrels or bards of old, stopping at ale houses along the way, giving readings and spreading the word – ¬¬to go out there, tell people, change their minds.” Me? I am already converted.

The Soil Never Sleeps is out now via Palewell Press (palewellpress.co.uk), and was launched at the Oxford Real Farming Conference 2018, a gathering of the UK's sustainable and organic food and farming movements. Visit adamhorovitz.co.uk for news and updates and click here to read an exclusive extract from the book.

Jill MacKeith is a Stroud based freelance researcher, project manager, budding writer, curator and mother of two.

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As well as our recent project (Good On Paper TV) following Good On Paper’s current hiatus over the next few month’s we will be putting up articles from our archives for our readers to easily access and share…Community and culture can carry on in different ways. For now….

From the Archives: Rachel Joyce

By Nikki Owen
From Issue #30 September 2017

Words. Words can fly off the page and create such magical worlds that, often, it’s hard to believe they are not real. And yet, they sing to us, don’t they? They sing to us, words on such a level that we start to step back, we start to think about life and love and the way in which we view each other. And in that context, I give you the wonderful writer of words that is, Rachel Joyce.

I met Rachel one Friday at the Star Anise cafe, and I’m going to admit now that I am a big fan. Huge. I’d read Rachel’s first, bestselling novel, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, several years back when it first came out, and I was blown away. Here was a novel about real people. I knew Harold was made up, and yet he seemed so life like, so true. This is the talent of a good writer: to be able to create worlds that not only do you feel you can touch, but worlds that touch you. And in Rachel’s latest book, The Music Shop, souls and hearts are most definitely touched, and not simply by words, but by melody and song, too.

The Music Shop is set in 1988 and centres on a man named Frank, who owns a music shop. It is jam-packed with records of every speed, size and genre. Classical, jazz, punk – as long as it’s vinyl he sells it. Day after day Frank finds his customers the music they need. Then into his life walks Ilse Brauchmann. Ilse asks Frank to teach her about music. His instinct is to turn and run. And yet he is drawn to this strangely still, mysterious woman with her pea-green coat and her eyes as black as vinyl. But Ilse is not what she seems. And Frank has old wounds that threaten to re-open and a past he will never leave behind. It’s a novel about learning how to listen, learning how to feel and it’s something that Joyce does extremely well, but crucially, as with her other books, it’s the sense of community that proves to be both the catalyst and the saviour to people’s lives. In fact, a local, Rachel actually did a lot of her research at The Trading Post in Stroud, chatting to the owner, Simon, and observing what happened in the shop.

Rachel herself is unassuming, long, flowing brown hair, petite frame, with a gentle manner and a kind, bright smile. And yet, considering the enormous success of her career to date (she’s a Sunday Times best selling novelist, long listed for the Man Booker Prize and published in over 30 languages, plus is also an established writer in radio and has written over 20 original plays for Radio 4, dramatising both classic and new novels, and has written a period drama for BBC television) Rachel queries her success. “I have doubts all the time,” she says when I ask her about how she felt when The Music Shop was about to come out. “You always have that worry of how it may go – it’s an odd time.” Certainly, we all have doubts, but for Rachel, it’s today’s world of social media – and how it affects people - that both concerns her and interests her. “The worry these days is that there are so many opportunities to remain alone, and if you are introverted, you could quite easily get lost - social media contributes to that.” Rachel revealed that she not big on social media. “It’s not good for me. I think you have to keep a little bit of yourself back. This constant narrative - people commenting on themselves – it takes you outside yourself. I think it’s important to keep dignified and happy - that’s why community is important, real life. It’s about taking your place in a real way and be with real people.”

To that very end, community is at the heart of The Music Shop novel – community and, of course, music. So what, I asked Rachel, sparked the idea for the book, a book that, excitingly, is accompanied by its own Spotify playlist. “Fourteen years ago, I moved out of London. My husband, Paul, he couldn’t sleep. He was in this music shop in Cheltenham, and Paul happened to tell the owner of his sleeping issue. And the owner went and found a CD to help – it was classical music, and it began a journey in my head: a man with gift for music. It stayed in my mind. I went back years later to the shop, but it had gone.” The fact that the shop had disappeared proved poignant to Joyce’s novel – the fictional Unity Street in The Music Shop is under threat from developers. Indeed, the theme of modernization – and what we do with the past - runs strong in the novel. Said Rachel, “We bought a record player few years ago. It’s such a physical thing, that taking off the record and turning it over, it’s magical. That’s why the novel is set in 1988 - the year when vinyl is taken over by more modern CDs. To me, this meant everyone was going to throw away what they had, and it made me think: you have to be very careful about what you chose to lose.” What you chose to lose. Wow. Yes. For a second, after Rachel said that, I just sat in thought, thinking about her words. Make no mistake – Joyce has a knack of making you stop and think – whether it’s spoken, written or set to music. It’s amazing - no wonder she’s so successful.

I finish the interview with Rachel telling me that her next novel will be based in a small hamlet, possibly in France, in a mountain landscape, post world war in a remote community. And as I listen to her, one thing becomes very clear: Rachel Joyce knows that to create a reality in the world of words, you can’t just sing one tune – you have to create an entire symphony. Because you see, do that, and you have produced a fictional world that sings not only to the mind, but to the soul. And, at the end of the day, isn’t that what we all want?

The Music Shop is out now via Penguin and available in all good independent book stores and on-line. Click here for further info…

Nikki Owen is an author and writer. Her third and final book in the Project Trilogy – The Girl Who Ran (Harper Collins), is out now. Follow her on twitter @nikkiwriter and nikkiowenauthor.com

Obituary: Rick Vick

By Nick Broomfield

My best friend, Rick Vick, who has died aged 71, was well known in Stroud for his inspirational teaching and passion for encouraging creativity in others. He also contributed to the research and writing on my recent film, Marianne and Leonard: Words of Love, as well as editing Tracking Down Maggie and Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer.

I met Rick at the city of Westminster College when we were both 17. It was a gathering ground for eccentrics and originals who generally had been expelled from their previous schools. We very quickly become best friends and somehow, we knew right away that we could always depend on each other. We have remained best friends for the last five decades.

Rick was definitely rebellious, mischievous, swashbuckling, handsome, and full of tricks; how to avoid paying tube fares, how to gate-crash the best parties, how to get the most beautiful girls, but I also noticed he was unusually in-tune with the weakness and suffering of others. I never saw Rick being cruel or mean even when tipsy or drunk he was always a kind and funny drunk.

Rick welcomed me into his family. After a particularly boozy party I would often sleep overnight as his family’s house. Sometimes on the floor, sometimes on the couch; something I could never imagine doing with my own family. I met Amanda and Phillipa his sisters and his parents Richard and Judy. They instantly accepted me and I loved the chaos and openness of Rick’s family. There was very little judgement even though Rick’s father was a high court Judge.

Rick came from a family of some social standing, though Rick was far too modest to ever trade on it. His Grandfather had been the Lord Mayor of London and I came to realise there were a lot of expectations and pressures placed on Rick to perform accordingly. Rick, though really had no interest in being a part of the British establishment, much to the dismay of his Father.

Fortunately, though Rick did manage to introduce me to the wild world of debutante parties. We’d dance all night and then knock off crates of Champagne, which we’d sell back to the vintners the next day. We’d hang out at the Phoenix and Chelsea Potter, take poppers and drink far too much and then drive ancient old cars at breakneck speeds around the city. Some of our friends died in some awful accidents, but that somehow made Rick and I even closer, it gave us a keen sense of being alive.

Nick Broomfield and Rick Vick

Rick went on to work as a Fleet Street journalist, at first writing the social column and then graduating to writing more and more about crime and violence. I could see that what he was experiencing in writing these stories was beginning to really upset him. Rick had always had the incredibly impractical ambition of being a poet and writing about crime was definitely not what he had in mind.

Rick did manage to escape, travelling to the Amazon rainforest and then single0handedly sailing a 40ft boat without a motor from Rio de Janeiro to England. He spent a month going through the doldrums, which gave him the opportunity to write some of his finest poems.

When we were in our twenties, I happened to go to a small Greek island called Hydra. On my suggestion Rick went there for a 2-week holiday, but ended up staying for 14 years.

Hydra gave him the calm and peace he had always wanted. Beneath the openness of his family, which I had grown to love, there were a lot of tensions, which came to haunt Rick for most of his life. Some of this is beautifully expressed in his poetry and writing, which has benefited from some of the very conflicts that made his life, at times, so difficult. It has given his work an honesty and strength that always touches me.

I would visit Rick from time to time on Hydra and wrestle him away from his rather possessive girlfriend, who probably rightly knew that we would be up to no good. We’d go for great escapades across the Peloponnese picking up Girls, reading Ulysses and Rick would give me tips on Greek dancing. He had a particular kind of beauty to him, a most beautiful man, the only man I’ve ever fancied, I must confess I was particularly attracted to his back, one of the most beautiful backs I’ve ever seen. Late one night after a great deal of retsina we even discussed the possibility of having an affair, but I think wisely, decided against it, to preserve the longevity of our friendship.

At the same time, Rick has always been the most encouraging friend to me through his great ability to believe in his friends through thick and thin despite my occasional bad behaviour, and to see beauty and light all around him.

Rick became well known in the Stroud area as a poet and teacher. He taught creative writing at colleges, community and refugee groups, and rehabilitation environments such as the Nelson Trust. He was skilled in helping people use writing therapeutically, always encouraging people to write about their own lives and experiences. Typically, Rick formed very close relationships in these institutions and his spirit, honour and humility was an enormous support.

He published two books of his poetry - Ask the Ferryman He Passes all the Time, and A Coat of No Particular Colour - and several pamphlets, most recently Indian Eye, following a trip to India with his partner artist Gypsy Gee.

Rick died on Saturday 30th November 2019. He leaves behind three children, Lucian, Faye and Will.

Rick Vick: A Celebration will take place at the SVA Goods Shed in Stroud on Friday 31st January 2-6pm. All are welcome.

Obituary - Jay Ramsay

Jay Ramsay, poet (1958-2018).

By Kevan Manwaring, 31st Dec 2018

Jay Ramsay was a psychotherapist and poet who lived for 25 years of his life in Stroud, Gloucestershire. His chief influence and lasting legacy is within the modern iteration of the Romantic tradition of which he, as a prolific poet, was a significant contributor. He was a singular and influential presence on the alternative poetry scene for nearly forty years. With the rich timbre of his voice and his impassioned opinions he was a heartfelt ambassador for transformative spiritual, political and psychological awareness. Described by Andrew Harvey as ‘one of most authentic visionary poets’, he believed that poetry had a unique, catalytic role in our culture, taking Shelley’s famous notion that poets are ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’ and running with it. He corresponded with Robert Bly, Kathleen Raine and Ted Hughes, who were very encouraging of his work. Raine described him as ‘an unlocker of imprisoned souls, and true healer...’

Born John Ramsay Brown in London, in 1958. ‘Jay’ as he redefined himself, experienced a relatively conventional middle-class childhood and education that led to him studying English Literature at Oxford, but became alienated from its privileged, positivist world and the secular humanism that dominated. Rejecting the increasingly prevalent mainstream materialism he forged a counter-cultural path. In the early 1980s he founded the poetry gatherings known as ‘Angels of Fire’ in London, with an influential ‘happening’ at the Purcell Rooms, Southbank Centre. Through its cross art-form festivals, it found immediate success in establishing poetry as an inclusive and community-based activity. Jay contributed to many other festivals and literary events in Britain and abroad. An experienced reader and performer, he had a powerful and lyrical presence, inspiring, uplifting, challenging and entertaining. He often worked with musicians and dancers.

As well as many individual collections including Kingdom of the Edge (New & Selected Poems 1980-1998; Element Books, 1999), some classic Chinese translations Tao Te Ching, I Ching, Kuan Yin; Element, 1993/HarperCollins, 1995), and two acclaimed prose books about alchemy (1997 and 2005), he has also edited five anthologies of New British Poetry: Angels of Fire: an anthology of radical poetry, commissioned by Andrew Motion (Chatto & Windus, 1986), Transformation: the poetry of spiritual consciousness (RGP, 1988), Earth Ascending: an anthology of living poetry, 55 Contemporary British Poets (Stride, 1997), Into the Further Reaches: an anthology of Contemporary British Poetry celebrating the spiritual journey (64 poets: PS Avalon, 2007) and Soul of the Earth: the Awen anthology of eco-spiritual poetry (Awen, 2011). His later collections include Out of Time‚ Poems 1998-2008 (PS Avalon), The Poet in You (O Books) and Places of Truth: journeys into sacred wilderness, Monuments, and Pilgrimage (all from Awen).

Jay edited poetry for Kindred Spirit, Caduceus, and More to Life. In 2005-6 he was poet-in-residence at St James’ Church, Piccadilly in London (where William Blake, one of his guiding spirits, was christened). His sequence Anamnesis: the remembering of soul was displayed in the church, and bill-posted on A3 sheets on the main street outside. In 2010 he completed a residency in the Sinai desert for the Makhad Trust with a sequence of poems and photographs, and collaborated with Martin Palmer’s Alliance of Religions and Conservation. He also performed at Findhorn’s 50th anniversary celebrations, and was a guest tutor for Skyros and Cortijo Romero.

In addition to reviewing widely, Jay created ‘Chrysalis: the poet in you’, a 2-part correspondence course. The course combined poetry with personal development in a unique and transformative way. He also edited a number of individual collections for other poets. At the same time, he ran his own workshops in poetry and performance in the UK, in Ireland, Portugal, Malta, Greece, and the USA. He was a regular tutor at Hawkwood College, the Adult Education College in the Cotswolds, offering workshops in poetry and personal development. He also became a UKCP accredited psychosynthesis therapist and healer, in private practice in Stroud and London.

As a performer, Jay had a distinctive presence on stage, and gave numerous readings both solo and in collaboration, as Phoenix (a poetry group featuring, Jay, Gabriel Bradford Millar, Ella Whiting-Bloomfield‚ and others). With Gloucestershire artist and musician Herewood Gabriel, he got people dancing with his djembe drumming. And with priest, author and television present, Peter Owen-Jones, he found a kindred spirit with whom he often shared the stage at various events. Jay also became good friends with Mike Scott, lead singer of the Waterboys, after interviewing him for Caduceus magazine. Beyond his more famous alliances Jay had a wide network of creative, spiritual friends. He touched and inspired many lives.

In the last five years he began his move to Devon, near Totnes, with his partner Angela. Before he left Stroud he launched what was to be his swansong, The Dangerous Book, a bold poetic reworking of The Bible, with Martin Palmer (published by Fitzrovia Press), with a well-attended reading at St Laurence’s Church, Stroud, supported by fellow poets. He passed away peacefully in Devon on 30 December 2018. 3 months before he died Jay became engaged to Angela and is survived by her and her daughter, Ruby.

Poetry in Motion at Stroud Book Festival 2018

Dalijit Nagra, Wycliffe College, Thurs 8th Nov

The Stroud Book Festival returns for a third year on 7th November, and is thrilled to once again be hosting an eclectic line-up of poets and poetry from Gloucestershire and beyond.

The first poet on the bill is multi-award-winning poet and broadcaster, Daljit Nagra, on Thursday 8th Nov at Wycliffe College, one of the festival’s sponsors. Nagra, who was the first ever poet in residence at BBC Radio 4, will be reading from his latest book, British Museum, as well as earlier books, including the Forward Prize-winning Yes We Have Coming to Dover! “He’s a marvellous reader of his work,” says Stroud poet Adam Horovitz, who will be introducing him on the night, “and his questing, questioning, witty and politically pertinent poems are well worth discovering aloud as well as on the page.”

On Friday 9th Nov, the Stroud Book Festival Poetry Night offers up a wonderfully varied and immersive evening of readings, performance and music by a hand-picked bill of acclaimed poets, in two parts. The first part brings together three poets with Gloucestershire connections: Kate Carruthers Thomas, Patrick Mackie and Maria Stadnicka. It closes with acclaimed Welsh poet and singer Paul Henry and will be compered by Adam Horovitz.

“On Saturday 10th November we’ll be celebrating the work of Gloucestershire poet and composer Ivor Gurney with a one-woman show starring writer and actor Jan Carey, to mark the 100th anniversary of the end of World War One,” says the festival’s artistic director Caroline Sanderson. “Author, Composer, Soldier-of-a-sort: The Life and Work of Ivor Gurney is fresh from an acclaimed run at the Edinburgh Fringe this summer and we are delighted to bring the show to Stroud.”

“We round off our poetry programme on Sunday 11th November with a magical family event inspired by nature,” adds Caroline. “We hope that children of all ages will come and meet Frann Preston Gannon, illustrator of the poetry anthology I-am-the-seed-that-grew-the-tree. It’s a glorious new gift anthology of 365 nature poems for children, spanning over 400 years of poetry, and including the work of poets as diverse as William Blake, Roger McGough, Carol Ann Duffy, John Agard, Eleanor Farjeon and William Wordsworth. As well as a chance to enjoy the poetry-telling, Frann will be encouraging children aged 6 and above to create and illustrate their very own nature poem.”

Tickets are available now from the Subscription Rooms, by calling 01453 760900 or by visiting stroudbookfestival.org.uk where you can also download the programme for this year's festival.

Stroud Short Stories Anthology 2015-2018

Acclaimed by the Cheltenham Literature Festival to be “possibly the best short story event in the South West”, Stroud Short Stories’ reputation is based on the quality of the stories read at its events. This, the second Stroud Short Stories anthology, covers the period from November 2015 to May 2018. That’s six events and nearly 60 stories written and read by the cream of Gloucestershire’s authors – some professional, some amateur – but all inspired by the challenge of creating an exciting and inspirational evening of short stories.

Stroud Short Stories organiser John Holland has edited an anthology of stories in a diverse range of styles and with an extraordinary array of themes, which will in turn amuse, enchant and challenge the reader.

The Anthology, priced at £10, includes 57 stories by 46 Gloucestershire authors including Rick Vick, Joanna Campbell, Steve Wheeler, Chloe Turner, Simon Piney, Melanie Golding, Andrew Stevenson, Ali Bacon, Mark Graham, Judith Gunn, Emma Kernahan and Kirsty Hartsiotis.

To coincide with the launch of the Anthology at the Ale House tomorrow evening (see poster above!) Good On Paper have obtained an extract from one of the stories featured in the book. Click the button below to read the beginning of Wayland Smith: Warrior of the Milky Way by Mark Graham:

Following the launch the next Stroud Short Stories event takes place on Sunday 11th November at the SVA as part of this year’s Stroud Book Festival. Visit stroudbookfestival.org.uk , stroudshortstories.blogspot.com and pick up next month’s issue of Good On Paper for further info…

Alice Jolly: Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile

The year is 1887. In a decaying country house Mary Ann Sate, an elderly maid servant, nurses Mr Cottrell, a man she knew well in her youth. Mr Cottrell does not have long to live and so asks Mary Ann to write down the story of his brother, Ned, who fought for The People’s Charter and for improved wages in the textile mills of the Stroud Valleys.

But as soon as Mary Ann begins to write, anger takes control of her pen. Which story should she write? Maybe it is time for the truth about the Cottrell brothers to be told. As Mary Ann unravels the knots of the past, she comes to see how her love for the brothers destroyed the life she might have had.

Should she now avenge the dead? Or can the mere power of her faltering pen enable her to reclaim her own truth?

In this astonishing return to fiction, the award-winning Stroud based Alice Jolly gives voice to the silenced women of the past. Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile is out now via Unbound and  in conjunction with the release  we have obtained an exclusive extract which you can read by clicking the button below:

Get a signed copy at the book launch which takes place at Stroud Valley Artspace on Thurs 28th June at 7pm. All welcome but please email mountvernonstroud@gmail.com to let Alice know you are coming!

Adam Horovitz: The Soil Never Sleeps

The Soil Never Sleeps - poetry from the pasturelands of Britain - is the latest poetry collection from Adam Horovitz, author of Turning and A Thousand Laurie Lees. This new collection is driven by the need for all of us to gain a clearer understanding of our complex interactions with the natural world. As Philip Gross writes on the back cover, “Personal journal and public statement, lyric observation and prospectus for radical care of the land, this is life-writing in a fundamental sense. Like Ted Hughes’ Moortown or Sean Borodale’s Bee Journal, it is grounded in living the life, and doing the work, day by day, of a place. Unsentimental, many-angled, this is poetry to think with, not to lecture readers but ‘to open them / to the seeds of ideas’ that the earth sorely needs.” 

In conjunction with the release  we have obtained an exclusive extract which you can read by clicking the button below:

The Soil Never Sleeps (ft. illustrations by Jo Sanders) will be released on 6th January via Palewell Press (palewellpress.co.uk) and will be launched at the Oxford Real Farming Conference 2018, a gathering of the UK's sustainable and organic food and farming movements. Visit adamhorovitz.co.uk and pick up the latest issue of Good On Paper (out now!) to read an interview with Adam by Jill Mackay.

Elvis McGonagall: Viva Loch Lomond!

Viva Loch Lomond! collects the greatest hits of stand-up poet, comedian and broadcaster Elvis McGonagall in one volume for the first time. Witty, satirical but not afraid to be plain daft, his work takes aim at our septic isle of zero-hourscontracts, food banks and cup-cakery. From Scottish independence to the “war on terror” via turbo-capitalist greed; from Blair and Bush to Dave and Boris via the death of Thatcher; from William Wallace’s taste for cheese to the Queen’s love of gangsta rap VIA BREXIT AND TRUMPERY, Elvis kicks against the injustices of
austerity Britain but still finds time to wax lyrical about the joys of whisky, Greek islands and life in a godforsaken rural idyll. Viva Loch Lomond! lays bare the workings of his befuddled mind as he scribbled these poems from the dubious comfort of his revolting armchair at the Graceland Caravan Park.

In conjunction with the release and the Stroud book launch at the SVA on the 2nd Dec we have obtained an exclusive extract which you can read by clicking the button below:

Viva Loch Lomond! Is out now via Burning Eye Books.  Elvis will be appearing at Mr Fluffypunk’s Penny Gaff together with Byron Vincent and Miserable Malcolm on Sat 2nd Dec at the SVA , John Street. Tickets cost just £8.50 in advance from sva.org.uk and £10 on the door. A framed print by Kitty Crossley of verses from the poem ‘9.3% Swing’ will be available to purchase on the night. 

Pick up this month's issue (out now!) to read an interview with Elvis by Lorna Davies...

Tamsin Treverton Jones: Windblown

Published to mark the 30th anniversary of The Great Storm of October 1987, Windblown is in the best tradition of English writing about our relationship with the natural world.

The Great Storm of 1987 is etched firmly into the national memory. Everyone who was there that night remembers how hurricane force winds struck southern Britain without warning, claiming eighteen lives, uprooting more than fifteen million trees and reshaping the landscape for future generations. Thirty years on, the discovery of an old photograph inspires the author to make a journey into that landscape: weaving her own memories and personal experiences with those of fishermen and lighthouse keepers, rough sleepers and refugees, she creates a unique portrait of this extraordinary event and a moving exploration of legacy and loss.

In conjunction with the release we have obtained an exclusive extract which you can read by clicking the button below:

Tamsin Treverton Jones is a Stroud based writer and poet. She studied French at Bristol University and went on to be Head of Press at the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Royal Court Theatre and Bath Literature Festival. She has produced and presented features for radio, programmed literary events for digital broadcast and published two oral histories for The History Press.

Windblown is published by Hodder and Stoughton and available now in all good book shops and on-line. Pick up this month's issue (out now!) to read an interview with the author by Jill MacKeith.

Tamsin will also be appearing at the Lansdown Hall on Sunday 5th November as part of the Stroud Book Festival. Visit stroudbookfestival.org.uk for tickets and further info...

Penny Parkes: Practice Makes Perfect by Nikki Owen

Ah, summer. A time for sunshine (hopefully), for barbeques and cold white wine, for jumping in a pool and, of course, a time for a nice bit of reading. Well, if you’re stuck for a good book this summer, look no further than local, award-winning author Penny Parkes, whose latest novel, Practice Makes Perfect, is out on 29th June. And to celebrate the book, you are cordially invited to its launch at Waterstones, Cirencester on Thursday 29th June at 7p.m for an evening of fizz-filled book fun.

But first, a bit of background. Practice Makes Perfect is Penny’s second novel in her popular Practice series. In 2016, her debut novel, Out of Practice (Simon & Schuster) was not only a best seller, but earlier in 2017 it won Penny the coveted Romantic Novelists’ Association Award for Romantic Comedy of the Year - a prestigious accolade that recognises the very highest standards of romantic fiction and attracts best-selling authors from around the world, including the global success, Jojo Moyes. 

Eager to find out more, I caught up with Penny in the run up to her launch...

Practice Makes Perfect is based in the wonderfully fictional village of Larkford and centers on a GP surgery filled with doctors and their complex (love) lives. I asked Penny what was in store for us in this delicious new summer read. “Well,” Penny says, “following Out of Practice, now with Practice Makes Perfect it’s back to The Practice in Larkford this year for more dishy doctors, dogs and devilment. The team have been nominated as a Model Surgery and, with the new structure in place – 4 partners, 2 couples – it seems like a risky gambit: as we know, shining a spotlight on things does tend to emphasise the flaws!”

So far, so perfect (you’re welcome.) And what about the characters? We love the Larkford team, but who’s new in the second novel? “Well, we also get to meet the wonderful Dr. Alice Walker,” says Penny. “She joins the team, along with her medical detection dog, Coco. Thankfully, as the pressure rises, she’s on the same page as Dr. Holly Graham, when it comes to prioritizing patients over plaudits. And of course, Larkford wouldn’t be the same without resident celebrity Elsie Townsend stirring up some trouble of her own.”

It’s a delight to hear Penny talk about her characters because, to us, they seem so real. So we wondered, what gave Penny the idea for her best selling book series? Says Penny, “Well, I have often joked that, as a family, we are a multi-generational drain on the NHS. It has to be said though, that if you spend any time surrounded by these wonderfully empathetic and caring medical professionals, it’s only logical to start thinking about what these same people might be like when they’re off duty – I certainly appreciate the way they use humour to cope with the stresses of their work. Sneaking behind the scenes seemed like a wonderful way to explore the ups and downs, the lights and darks, of a career in medicine. And of course, it had to be set in the Cotswolds!”

With all this expertise in medicine oozing from her books, you may be surprised to find that Penny herself is not actually a doctor, which just goes to show the extent of Penny’s talent at creating such believable worlds. As for Penny’s own career, it’s been full and varied. Before turning her attention to novel writing, Penny studied International Management in Bath and Germany, before gaining experience with the BBC. She then set up an independent Film Location Agency and spent many happy years organising shoots for film, television and advertising – thereby ensuring that she was never short of travel opportunities, freelance writing projects or entertaining anecdotes. The perfect (if you pardon the pun) ground for writing best selling romantic comedy novels, it seems.

So, has Penny always wanted to write? “I think my love of writing really began with an overwhelming passion for reading,” she says. “I certainly used to use the entire family’s library tickets to keep stocked up over the school holidays as a child. It was blissful escapism, coupled with a nosey curiosity to experience vicariously how other people lived and felt in certain situations. Writing became a natural extension of that, although I talked about writing for a long time before I actually plucked up the courage to commit to a project.”

Of course, every writer leans to others for support, and Penny is no exception. Based between Stroud and Cirencester, Penny is part of a growing group of Gloucestershire writers and authors who are taking on the world. Indeed, Penny counts Sunday Times bestselling author, Stroud-based Katie Fforde as a close personal friend (Fun fact: Penny originally met Katie at a talk run by Katie at the Cheltenham Literary Festival a few years back, and Katie encouraged Penny to submit a manuscript.)

So, when times get tough, where does Penny draw on support to keep on writing? “I find that my fellow writer friends are the best support system in this crazy new world I find myself in,” says Penny. “They really ‘get’ what it’s like to have spent all day working and to have deleted more words than you’ve written, or indeed those few days when The Edit begins when all confidence deserts you. Luckily, we’re a sociable bunch and I consider myself very fortunate to have some truly inspirational writers that I can call on for support, cocktails, or general distraction!”

Indeed, when Penny – who cites Jilly Cooper, Jane Fallon, Katie Fforde and Marian Keyes as her key writing influences - won her prestigious RNA Romantic Novel of the Year Award earlier this year, those writers were very much there for her. So, how did winning such a coveted award make Penny feel? “It was utterly wonderful, although I confess it took me rather by surprise. It was particularly special to be honoured by the RNA, as they have been so instrumental in getting me started on the path to publication.”

And it’s a path that just keeps on rolling out. Right now, fans will be pleased to hear that there are four confirmed books in the Practice series, with Penny currently busy cooking up next year’s offering. After that, Penny says of the next steps, “I guess we’ll have to see whether Dan and Taffy, Holly and Elsie are still capturing the hearts and imaginations of my readers.”

With Penny’s wonderful writing talent and her ability to create warm, engaging characters that make you laugh and cry all the way, something tells us that readers will certainly want more from the wonderful doctors and residents of Larkford very, very soon.

In conjunction with the release we have obtained an exclusive extract! Click the button below to read the first chapter:

Practice Makes Perfect is available to pre-order now from all good booksellers and online retailers. It will be available in the bookshops and supermarkets from 29th June. The book launch takes place at Waterstones, Cirencester at 7p.m. on Thursday 29th July.  Tickets are £3 per person and can be redeemed against book purchase price. To reserve a ticket, contact Waterstones, Cirecenester on 01285 658998.

Nikki Owen is an author and writer. Her third and final book in the Project Trilogy – The Girl Who Ran (Harper Collins), is out now. Follow her on twitter @nikkiwriter and nikkiowenauthor.com