It turns out that we were not the only ones who thought this project would be a good idea. We were overwhelmed by the support and smiles that we have received in bringing together all the stories into this zine.

Using the premise of furthering the story, our contributors have followed the life of the protagonist after the final chords have ended, reflecting the feeling that the song insights. The stories are varied; subjects spanning a whole spectrum of emotions, events and styles that rightfully demonstrates the wealth of talented writers involved in this project.

Read, listen and enjoy x

Stories From Songs.

Francesca Baker & Jamie Malcolm

An eclectic range of styles, traditional forms, rolling free verse, the collection represents a broad range of backgrounds, ethnicities, ages and political convictions through the short vignettes to whole lives that are ignored. Sex work is still something of a taboo, hidden under the veil of social norms, gender politics and embarrassment.

Here there’s no judgement, but also it’s not romanticised. These women might work in the sex industry, but they are not only sex workers – workers, mothers, realists, feminists, victims, dreamers, saviours and healers.

But of course others judge, compartmentalising women into one part of their lives. They are shunned at the school gates while the ‘dad that picked you up like milk’ retains his role as family man says Darina in for the regular last Friday who asked what i want. Desire features heavily, as does violence. Sharifa is and was ‘abused…misused…amused…confused…refused’ she explains in give us a reason. Sylvia becomes desperate, taking vouchers to buy a new argos lamp broken by her last client.

There’s also hope. Some of this comes through a sense of solidarity and sisterhood. In olympic dreams 2012 Sharifa speaks of why she is here, reflecting that ‘mostly, if I do this work, then it means at least one less girl / is being taken against her will to have a body part put inside / her as she cries for her passport, her mother, her child. Daily life goes on. Tali works in a bakery, and in sunday is able to practise yoga and feel ‘ my body is mine tonight / lungs exude your touch.’

Through these distinctive and authoritative voices articulated in beautiful poetry, How You Might Know Me sheds some light on the exploitative and hypocritical industry worked by women with lives, loves and passions. It asks us to leave perceptions behind, and enter another world. But it also highlights that this world might be closer to us than we realise.

Published by Outspoken Press. Read this review on New London Writers.

Most recently it was all about life crises – at whatever age. Whether it’s the stereotypical mid-life crises or the anxiety that comes in your twenties when you realise that the rules and plans mapped out before you are either falling away in the face of financial and social insecurity, or bear no resemblance to the life you actually want to lead, there’s been some great books written about these critical points in existence.

Chaired by comedian Will Smith, formerly of Radio 4’s Crisis Management, we heard from  journalist and broadcaster Miranda Sawyer, whose book Out of Time describes not just her own experiences of facing 44, but recounts the stories of many others who are navigating this period and journalist Marisa Bate, who knows all too much about the challenges facing those in their twenties and thirties. Using their books as a means to ponder the messiness of life, this evening of creative and critical thinking was a lively lift to the new year.

The mid-life crisis is one of clichés and stereotypes. An ageing man seeking a younger woman and a fast car as he goes of to discover his youth. For Miranda Sawyer there were no cars or girls involved, but she did find herself at the age of 44 experiencing a moment of mid life panic, and asking herself the crises criteria. Is this it? Can I start again? Have I done it all wrong?

For Marisa Bate, journalist for The Pool, it’s more of an insidious creeping. Surely, as you get older you get more sorted, you have knowledge and achieve the things on the list of life milestones. But she and many of her peers are still eating white wine and crisps for dinner and find themselves so broke at the end of the month that they must retreat back home as they know their parents will buy them dinner.

Sawyer and Smith have news – you never get it sorted. Especially if you’re a young person today, living in London. As Sawyer says, you can’t get it sorted, due to the times and society we live in. Young people have been sold a dream that it impossible to reach, and career panic, broken housing market, sky-high rents, internet anxiety, infertility scare-mongering and no pensions are all a symptom of the crisis that society creates. ‘You can’t reach your dreams not because you’re a failure’ says Sawyer, but because ‘they were ludicrous dreams to start with.’

Following a year of disaster, at least in the eyes of our predominantly left liberal panel and audience, the election of Trump and Brexit means that there’s been a huge crash of confidence not just on an individual basis, but we’re experiencing ‘social, economic, political crises’ says Bate. ‘Me and my friends sit there and just go “what the fuck?”’ What the fuck indeed. The solution, or at least part of it, are discussions like these. But just talking isn’t enough. You have to get angry, believes Sawyer, and it starts at the grass roots.

The feeling of possibility that Sawyer felt when she ‘blagged’ her way into music journalism after Smash Hits took pity on such a sad sap and her obsession, or the time she bought a black cab and lived in the back of it in Paris, simply isn’t available now. The internet often gets a bad rep, but we can’t deny its impact on our lives. Sawyer believes that when she was in her twenties there was a freedom and liberation to have fun, whereas the scrutiny is now far greater. Comparisons are exacerbated through social media, whereas now there is a far greater obsession with not stepping out of line, being contained and controlled both my rules, be they clean eating or gratitude practice, but also by what others see. Whilst this obsessive sculpting of the idealised image might make you look good, it does involve ‘no fun or friends or food.’ So much for progress. Bate’s career is on the internet, and so her need to keep up to date with the changing landscape much greater than many – and thus more anxiety promoting. The ‘internet gives you this feeling of being thirty seconds off falling of the end of a treadmill’ the panel acknowledge. It’s not a nice one.

Sawyer recommend that you ‘go out. Sit on a night bus, go for  walk, whatever. Something happens. I worry for you young people with your no alcohol and nights in.’ Whilst Sawyer does acknowledge that things are easier for her in ‘middle age’ – primarily due to the fact that she doesn’t give a fuck any more – that doesn’t mean she’s sitting back. When dealing with children and mortgages there is a different kind of energy required, ‘constantly trying to maintain revving.’ But it’s certainly not a riding downhill. Apparently even chimpanzees have a dip in happiness in midlife – all we have to do is ride it out

Adjust your dreams to suit you. Accept what is, drop the should, and find what gets you up in the morning. For Sawyer it’s jogging slowly round the park twice a week which ‘gets me off my nut’ but it could as easily be reading a magazine, having a bath. And never feel guilty. ‘Guilt is a waste of time.’

Crises or not, this was a reminder to live life on your own terms. It’s one we all need to hear.

At least not according to the prolific and talented Dame Margaret Drabble. And, as author of nineteen novels, twice editor of the Oxford Companion of English Literature, married to Michael Holroyd and younger sister of AS Byatt, she knows a thing or two about reading.

So too do her inquisitors, Susan Elderkin and Ella Berthoud, bibliotherapists and here at Folkestone Book Festival to ask Margaret about her reading history, influences, and prescribe some literary cures for any ailments she may be having.

Rather a practical lady, she seems to not have too many worries that might need curing, even with the duo’s hefty and brilliant compendium, The Novel Cure, sitting and waiting to be consulted. She clearly has a real love and affinity for literature, and as a young person fell in love with classics like The Marmalade Cat series by Kathleen Hale and was absorbed in the worlds of local Yorkshire authors the Brontes, but struggles to remember many more. She wishes she had kept a journal of the books she’d read, but now scribbles voraciously in the margins, and loves to go back and read the annotations, ‘a commentary on one’s life.’ Having always been a ‘big reader’ Margaret says that she only became a ‘circumstantial writer.’ Writing was a convenient career to have around children. Following the adage to ‘write what you know’ her novels are similar to Doris Lessing’s, one of her heroines, in that they are about the subject matter of women’s lives, or as Lessing said of The Needle’s Eye, ‘shabby houses and small children.’

It’s rather lucky that Drabble was so good at the career that she so understatedly describes her entry into. Her latest book, The Dark Flood Rises, is about dealing with ageing, and features a cast of characters who all approach it in different ways. We have Francesca, who keeps busy and tries to delay its occurrence through running, Claude, with a blasé attitude and lazy way of life, and Sir Bennett Carpenter, who continues to sustain a life of ego and wealth. There’s bits of Margaret in all of the characters, and a humorous conclusion – but the conclusion doesn’t mean that she has cracked the whole age, life and death thing. Although she has no worries about death – ‘I worry more about life’ – she does still have the same struggles and torments existence. Her biggest and most consistent issue is ‘what to have for dinner tomorrow’ and not getting bored at parties.

For the latter issue, Susan and Ella suggest that she reads Room by Emma Donoghue, which will at least make her appreciate human and physical world interaction. As a parallel to the theme of ageing and making peace with life, they suggest Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. However, Margaret has made her peace. Even with the Trump debacle. She won’t be writing about that anytime soon.

‘I write from the point of view of eternity, not the next terrible ten years.’

On which note our window into a bibliotherapy session and the inside world of Margaret Drabble ends, and the audience sighs – but at least we’ve always got our books to cure us.

Beginning with a Callow’s impassioned reading of Sonnet 87, the room was silenced. The experience of love is an individual one, yet all could relate to it. In fact Callow believes that Shakespeare’s quintessential point is our shared humanity and that we’re all in it together.

Griffiths discussed how Shakespeare helped her out of manic depression, although seemed a little quick to see the illness evident in every one of Shakespeare’s characters, including Hamlet, Lear, Antonio, Prospero and more.

There’s much do be learned from Shakespeare, on practical, psychological and emotional levels.  ‘Shakespeare’s plays are always on three levels: the soul, mind, body. He speaks to each level, but primarily to the soul.’ And he does it across the canon and in solo lies. Reading from Hamlet 2.2.2 Okri remarks that in only a few sentences Shakespeare speaks of the highest and basest levels of humanity, the sea, sky and solar system, heavens and hell…and then back again to the specific moment.

The debates about what Shakespeare would have made of Brexit and the language of Twitter (probably run with it and changed it, just like he did with most of the English language) were less powerful than the exploration of Shakespeare’s role at capturing the universal.

Bibliotherapy is predicated on the idea that reading and literature has a powerful effect. It’s not only that it makes us feel better though. Research from Professor Philip Davis from the University of Liverpool’s School of English says that Shakespeare’s language actually ‘shift mental pathways and open possibilities’ for what the brain can do. Stories and words are immensely powerful, for all people and all times. In our scientific and tech heavy age we can be too quick to dismiss their value. As Okri said, Shakespeare ‘speaks to our souls through fairytales. They are simple, but also complex and deadly.’ But also life affirming, which is why Shakespeare still matters.

Taking place at over 18th – 19th June 2016 in the beautiful and enchanting Boldshaves Gardens, Kent, where guests will be able to explore over 100 acres of surrounding woodland and farmland. This it’s first year, and the process from idea to fruition has been something of an organic one for founders and directors Andrew and Laura Willen.

Having been London dwellers for many years, they would ‘constantly plot our escape from the confines of the city to explore some of the countless wonderful places across Britain, often armed with little more than a sleeping bag, a book and a chocolate bar or two.’

This gave them a taste of not only the extraordinary diversity of the country’s landscapes but also the fragility of those landscapes, partly caused by the detachment from our surroundings. The modern lifestyle of a top floor flat, where you don’t know your neighbours, buying packaged food that does not resemble how it may have left the ground, glued to technology all indicate  a growing separation between us and our surroundings.

As a result, they’ve invited down a whole host of authors  who in recent years who have written inspiring books about the natural world, our sense of place and the ways in which nature can enrich our lives.

As Andrew explains ‘The idea behind the festival therefore is to celebrate not just the written word but also the subject matter of those books, i.e. the actual, living world around us. Given the everyday importance of the natural world in all our lives, we hope that the festival might appeal to people regardless of whether they are avid readers or not.’

The two days are jam packed with a programme of events, talks, readings, and conversations.  Apt for the location, Philip Walling will be telling the story of wool, money, farming and the soil as he discusses his book Counting Sheep: A Celebration of the Pastoral Heritage of Britain. There’s Patrick Barkham who walked the coastlines of Britain for his book Coastlines: The Story of our Shore, and Miriam Darlington & Charles Foster in conversation about their experiences with wild animals. Esther Woolfson will read from
Field Notes from a Hidden City, proving that nature isn’t only something that happens in rural locations, whilst Cynan Jones and Tom Bullough reflect upon the role of place and nature in fiction.

One concern of Andrew and Laura is the lack of access to nature for young people and those from more disadvantaged backgrounds. As a result, they’ve made accessibility key, with a range of activities appealing to young people, and tickets starting at only £5. Practicing what they preach, they have engaged with the local community and been working with nearby schools, universities, bookshops, galleries, businesses, artists, authors, farmers, producers and more to bring the festival alive.

Whether you’re a fan of words or the world, it’s definitely worth exploring the local landscape this weekend, engaging with the community and heading down to the Wealden Literary Festival.

It might even be sunny.

Published by Penguin/Hamish Hamilton, November 2015.

A night of creativity and inspiration for the thinking person

Music and words, stories and songs, poetry and performance all come together at The Harrison Bar, London, on Thursday 18th September for Scriggler: Live.
Celebrating the launch of Scriggler, a hub for words, a magazine, social network, publishing and blogging platform for anyone who wants to read, write and discuss any topic in any style, the evening is one of inspiration and imagination.
Scriggler: Live brings the online offline, this night of music, literature and debate continuing in the ethos of allowing stimulating and creative content to be shared. Featuring the best of both established and new spoken word artists, actors, writers, poets, musicians, the live events will enthral and entertain.
Advance tickets are only £5 (plus booking) and available from https://www.wegottickets.com/scrigglerlive and https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/scriggler-live-a-night-of-creativity-and-inspiration-tickets-12074929439
For more information visit:
www.scriggler.com
www.andsoshethinks.co.uk
@IScriggle
@andsoshethinks
The Harrison Pub, 28 Harrison St, London WC1H 8JF (King’s Cross)
7.30pm
£5 in advance / £8 on the door