When? 9 December 2016
Where? The Sun Pub, 21 Drury Lane, London WC2B 5RH
Time? 7:30pm

InkTears is celebrating the launch of two of their most recent short fiction collections from award-winning writers Melanie Whipman and Joanna Campbell.

With Llama-themed decs and plenty of wine and nibbles, we invite you to join us for a convivial evening of readings, hosted by our own Agnes Meadows.

Here is some more info about our two authors:

LLAMA SUTRA by Melanie Whipman
“Melanie Whipman’s stories weave a hypnotic spell of menace and anticipation that stick in the memory long after reading.” – Iain Pattison (author of best seller, Cracking the Short Story Market)

In these beautifully crafted tales of escapism and rebellion, the surreal flickers around the margins of the everyday: Mrs Noah falls in love with a lion, a singing fish saves a marriage, and a teenager prepares to shoot his teacher. Melanie Whipman’s bold debut collection offers a series of unsettling portraits of the lost, the young and the marginalized.

WHEN PLANETS SLIP THEIR TRACKS by Joanna Campbell
“These stories are funny, dark and very unexpected.” – Jilly Cooper

With light comic flair, we see extraordinary events imploding mundane lives, as Campbell shatters your expectations in the award-winning stories that make up this collection. Whether it’s a lame girl’s friends disappearing on a bleak mountain, or a schoolboy nursing a doll during a lesson; a babysitter caught in her own web of lies, or a mother watching her pram sink in the river, Campbell makes you look at the world with a sharper eye, allowing you to see pictures in the flames, or faces in knots of wood.

Contact name: Sara-Mae Tuson, Editorial Director, saramae@inktears.com, Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/inktearswall, @InkTears

Hi gang,

I’ve been asked to share the following, so get our your biro or flex your fingers:

From Annabel Hervey-Bathurst:

New website: Stories for lipreading

We are hoping to help deaf people to practise vital lipreading skills through watching short stories being read aloud online, on a free-of-charge website which we are setting up. I have hearing loss and attend lipreading classes, and have seen what a huge motivation it is for students to be following a gripping story – and what a massive difference lipreading skills can make to deaf people’s lives.  There’s very little online provision of lipreading practice at the moment, and almost nothing good that’s free of charge in UK English, so we’d love to do something to fill the gap.

We are contacting a few Hampshire writing groups and tutors to see if their members might like to submit unpublished short stories which we can use. As the project is entirely run by volunteers and the website will be free of charge to all users, we sadly aren’t able to offer the writers any financial incentives. However, we hope that the unusual nature of the project and the requirements which it imposes on the writing style might be sufficiently challenging to interest writers. The project is still in its initial stages, but we hope to select stories and film the lipreading videos over the summer.

I attach a document outlining the project and giving writing guidelines.  If you have any questions, or would to discuss the project, I would be absolutely delighted to hear from you.

 Please get in touch with:

Annabel Hervey-Bathurst – info@storiesforlipreading.org.uk

Download: Short Stories for Lipreading – invitation to submit work March 2016 to get more information about what sort of stories are suitable.

Best,

Sue

We all had a fab time at the recent soiree hosted by Agnes. As we commiserated with each other on being the only losers not on holiday in August, some fabulous performers and new blood to Loose Muse made the evening a delight.

Afterwards we slurped down red wine and a promise was made by one Lauren Westwood (oh yes, we haven’t forgotten!) to bring, construct and eat a Jaffa cake and pickled onion kebab at our next official Loose Muse event (Wednesday 9 September, if you’re interested). Yes, she is a woman of the epicurean tendencies as you can tell, and, as such, a natural Loose Muser.

Take a look at these marvellous videos of the poems ’22’, ‘Fairy Tales’ and ‘The Transition’ by Natalie Moores, and ‘Romeo and Juliet on Ket’ by Charlotte Robinson.

The girls belong to another poetry group called Part-time poets and we were delighted to have them in for our lovely event.

Check them out here.

The Family Matters tour has been travelling around the country, bringing these highly personal stories from four of London’s best-loved poet/writers (Agnes Meadows, Patricia Foster, Janett Plummer and Linda Shanovitch) to life.

Feedback has been great, with people telling us:

Here are some pics from the Winchester performance:

Patricia Foster performs
‘A Caribbean Pied Piper’

Janett Plummer performs ‘The Unhappy Mother’

Agnes Meadows performs ‘Love on the Eastern Front’

Agnes Meadows

These astonishing stories are drawn from the writers’ own families, illuminating the ways in which we are all connected. Join them for a revelatory ride, as the cast spill family secrets, and they examine the ties that both connect and bind us.

There’s still a chance to catch them here:

Thursday 21 May – Burgh House & Hampstead Museum, New End Square, Hampstead NW3 1LT, 7.30pm – 9.30pm. £8. To book, call 020 7431 0144 or buy online @ www.burghhouse.org.uk

Wednesday 27 May – The Library @ Deptford Lounge, 9 Giffin Street, London SE8 4RJ. 7pm – 9pm. Free! To book a place call the Albany Box office on 020 8692 4446

Wednesday 10 June – Family Matter performance at Loose Muse @ The Poetry Café, 22 Betterton Street, London WC2H 9BX. 8.00 pm, £6.00/£5.00.