Friday 26 October 2018

Word Club, Friday 26 October 2018

Mark Connors has passed along details of what to expect from Word Club this Friday:


We are delighted to welcome three amazing poets to WORD CLUB this month, namely James Nash, Lesley Quayle and and Marie Lightman. They are all brilliant and wordclubbers are in for a reet treat with this super talented trio.

James Nash was born in London in 1949, and has been a resident of Leeds since 1971. James' first publication with Valley Press was the Kindle-exclusive A Bit of an Ice Breaker: Selected and Uncollected Poems, which collected the best of his writing prior to the 'sonnet era' – so called as, since 2009, James has written almost exclusively in the sonnet form. These were first collected in October 2012 with the release of Some Things Matter: 63 Sonnets, one of the best-selling and most loved VP titles from our first decade of publishing. A second edition in 2014 added a handful of new sonnets, first heard on BBC Radio 3. James' next publication was Cinema Stories, a collaboration with fellow Leeds-based poet Matthew Hedley Stoppard. Launched at the Leeds International Film Festival in November 2015, this collection celebrated the cinematic heritage of Leeds, and the experience of cinema-going in general. In 2017, James edited the gift pamphlet Fourteen Festive Sonnets from Candlestick Press. Most recently, October 2018 saw the arrival of A Bench for Billie Holiday: 70 Sonnets, continuing James' love-affair with the 14-line Shakespearean form, this time with a more obviously autobiographical edge to celebrate his 70th year of existence.

Lesley Quayle was born in Fife and spent most of her childhood in Glasgow. She lived for 30 years in Yorkshire with her veterinary surgeon husband and four children, a flock of Herdwick sheep and various dogs, cats, waifs and strays – both four legged and two legged. Co-editor of Leeds based poetry magazine Aireings for 10 years, she and her husband also ran Micklethwaites Folk Club in Horsforth. She was a winner of the BBC Wildlife Magazine Poet of the Year Award and the Trewithen Prize for rural poetry and was placed first in the Split the Lark and Envoi poetry competitions. Her poetry and flash fiction have appeared in many magazines, including The Rialto, The North and Interpreter’s House among others, also numerous online journals, such as Riggwelter, Ink, Sweat and Tears etc., and has featured on BBC Radio 4’s Poetry Please and local radio. Her latest pamphlet Black Bicycle was published in May 2018 by 4Word Poetry Press.

Marie Lightman is a poet and writer. With poems appearing in Lonesome October Lit, The Ofi Press,The Linnet's Wings and has been published in The Rat's Ass Review's Love & Ensuing Madness and StepAway Magazine. Her first pamphlet is coming out with Indigo Press Publishing in 2018. She hosts the spoken word night Babble Gum and is editor of The Writers' Cafe Magazine. She is also three times British Women's Othello Champion and has recently started gigging stand-up comedy. 

Please arrive for a 7.30 pm start. Usual open mic slots available. It's gonna be a corker, this one, but aren't they all?

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