Reviews of 2003 events
Reviews of 2003 events
Words at Frome - a town rich in talent
The depth of local literary talent in Frome provided a wide and varied programme of events at this year's Frome Festival. Among the highlights of Words@fromefestival was the Literary Lunch at Mendip Lodge Hotel. Lindsay Clarke, author of The Chymical Wedding, which won the Whitbread Fiction Prize, gave an inspirational talk about myths and their relevance to all our lives.
" We are born into a world of stories and we tell our lives in stories. That is how we communicate. Our entire sense of the reality we inhabit is shaped by the stories we give credence to.
" That means we must also keep our imagination in check by considering the consequences of our stories on other people. An extreme example is the story that Adolph Hitler told.
" In a very real sense, the world is fictional. Stories draw a map through the unanswerable questions and that is what attracts me to myths," he said.
Clarke, who lives in Frome, read an excerpt from his current work, a retelling of the Trojan War in two volumes, which is due to be released in the new year as The War At Troy. He is also close to completing a new novel, Sun At Midnight, which is based on a dream he had in the 1970s.
Speaking afterwards, he said: "Frome has a rock solid Somerset heart but still has enough talent and energy to field an event like the festival. I am sure part of its charm is having such a mixed community living in a collection of old buildings. I like it because you can live anonymously here." Later in the week, London literary agent
Jane Judd gave a talk about what publishers look for. "I like novels that come from the heart. They have to seduce me, entrance me and captivate me," she said.
Judd said would-be authors should take heart from some of the books that had been published in 2002, including Without Regret: A Handbook For Owners With Canine Amputees and Living With Crazy Buttocks.
Judd said she first came to Frome in a Mini 20 years ago. "It was part of a tour of the West Country and I remember it as one of the highlights," she said.
She was joined by debut novelist Kate Harrison, novelist Karen Sainsbury and non-fiction writer Trevor Day, who shared their first-hand experiences of getting published.
Other events included writing workshops by local authors Crysse Morrison and Alison Clink and a Poetry Cafe Special featuring Jill Miller and Hazel Stewart as 'fn, or `Feminists in Fishnets'.
Local author John Payne, who wrote the acclaimed Journey Up The Thames about William Morris, said the response to the events at this festival had been unprecedented. "We have created an interest and a demand that simply was not there before this year's festival," he said.
Frome writers host an alternate Prose Cafe and Poetry Cafe on the first Monday of each month at the Garden Cafe, Stony Street, Frome, from 7.30pm. The next meeting is a Prose Cafe on Monday August 4. Bring along your work to read out or simply come to listen.
Stephen Tate
FROME FESTIVAL 2003 REVIEW
The Somerset market town of Frome used to be dubbed the best kept secret in the Southwest, but the annual Frome Festival is changing all that. Having
celebrated its 3rd summer in 2003, this event is now firmly on the national calendar for writers.
As well as music, performance, and visual arts, Frome Festival has a strong literary strand and is noted for innovative and interactive events. Workshops with local writers, all well attended and much enjoyed, included poetry and fiction crafting,ways to kickstart creativity for beginners and a crime master class.
Among the highlights of the week for writers:
Whitbread winner Lindsay Clarke's eloquent and fascinating address at the Literary lunch, convincing a rapt - and well fed - audience that " Imagination is the prime agent of human perception".
The 'words, wine and cheese' evening - a delightfully new concept in which the library became for one night an international cafe with round-the-world
samplings of fiction extracts read by local authors, accompanied by appropriate nibblings and sippings.
A balmy night in a beautiful garden for the Poetry Cafe, crowded out with readers and listeners. Top-quality lyrical entertainment as poets from miles around joined regular performers with FnF, 'Feminists in Fishnet', topping the bill with their cutting-edge chic and witty ditties
" If you believe in your work eventually someone else will believe in it too" - Kate Harrison inspiring the wannabe-published audience at the Readers & Writers Roadshow on 'What Do Publishers Really Want?'. Much invaluable advice was given by a strong panel of experts, with London literary agent Jane Judd summing it all up: "All I can say is: seduce me, entrance me, and captivate me."
Frome Festival falls in the first week of July. If you missed it this year, there's always 2004, so bookmark the website
Crysse Morrison
Angel Bride: Installation with Light, Sound and Text
Angel Bride, the art installation with light, sound and text displayed at Frome's Merlin Theatre on 5th and 6th July - sequel to Angel Voices, which was featured during Frome Festival 2002 - was a startlingly powerful piece of art.
The different art forms of sculptor Marian Bruce and writer Crysse Morrison complement each other extremely well, and the poetry workshop on Sunday afternoon, with Crysse as facilitator, captured some of the range of responses and interpretations.
Such a distinctive and magical collaboration between such talented women is an inspiration to other creative women, and indeed two of the poems read at Monday night's Poetry Café special were inspired by Angel Bride - with several more in progress.
Hazel Stewart
Poetry Cafe Special
"Session to be held in the garden, weather permitting" the brochure stated, and the weather permitted, offering a beautiful balmy night on Monday 7th July as seventy poets and listeners gathered at Frome's Garden Cafe for three hours of top-quality lyrical entertainment
Poets from as far afield as Bristol, Pilton, and Salisbury joined with local writers, some familiar faces and others making their debut. Readings ranged from the shortest poem ever written -"My newt's minute" - to Villanelle, Haiku, and free verse, with personal styles varying from elegiac to comical.
Highlight of the evening was the featured performance from FnF, those 'Feminists in Fishnet' who refute the charge that feminism has become fuddyduddy with their cutting-edge chic and witty ditties. A truly inspiring night, and a wonderful event.
Crysse Morrison
Literary Lunch with Lindsay Clarke
The Literary Lunch is traditionally a particular highlight of Frome Festival's literary events, and this year's was certainly no exception.
Lindsay Clarke is a wonderfully talented writer and respected academic with a deep commitment to the significance of stories in our daily lives as well as in the enterprise of the novelist.
He began his lively and entertaining talk by explaining how the magic of mythology, with its transformative potential, captured his imagination in childhood.
For Lindsay, storytelling represents the means through which we process the raw events in our lives into experiences of significance and meaning, and the stories we tell ourselves determine the world we inhabit, for 'reality is always porous to the imagination'. Refreshingly, he raised a point often forgotten or overlooked - that of ethical concerns; the imagination's limitless potential is anarchic, including the possibilities of both good and evil consequences. Individual responsibility and awareness is a crucial element of his work.
He read an extract from his new book, War of Troy, due to be published by Harper Collins in April 2004, which demonstrated his masterful and lyrical narrative technique, this time in the re-telling of the Trojan War and its aftermath. The open forum session which followed brought questions from his audience ranging from specifics on his writing process to books which have influenced his thinking and writing, all of which Lindsay answered with disarming honesty.
His last book, Parzival and the Stone from Heaven, was a re-telling of Wolfram von Eschenbach's version of the Holy Grail story. In the preface to
Parzival, Lindsay says of von Eschenbach 'the many qualities of his writing reveal a man with broad cultural horizons, and one whose highly developed sense of the integrity of the individual conscience was always enlivened by a wryly humorous vision of life that was widely tolerant in its
sympathies'. It seems to me that this is equally true of Lindsay Clarke himself.
Hazel Srewart.
Readers and Writers Road Show
 Karen Sainsbury |
 Kate Harrison |
 Jane Judd |
The room was packed with people eager to find the magic formula to writing success and the answer to the all important question 'what do publishers really want?'
Jane Judd, a well established literary agent from London told us the short answer - that she really didn't know what publishers wanted, except that certain types of fiction were on the way out, such as 'chick lit' and 'lad lit', and that other topics such as the two World Wars were still in. Kate Harrison, an author from London whose first novel 'Old School Ties' will be published in September described her own route to success via a competition and then submitting her work directly to a publisher. Whilst Karen Sainsbury, a writer from Frome whose novel 'Powder Monkey' was published last year put her phenominal success down to contacts she made on the MA Course at Bath Spa University.
The debate about whether agents are really necessary for all writers, and whether courses aid success was opened up to a lively and enthusiastic audience. Local writer, Trevor Day, chaired the evening and shared his own unique insight into the way non-fiction writers battle their way through the world of publishing.
Alison Clink
Words@FromeFestival runs as part of the Annual Frome Festival.
The information on this website supplements the Frome Festival Brochure where you will find full details of booking conditions and further information about the festival. General enquiries and details of disability access are available from the Frome Festival Office:
Hotline 01373 453889