This month’s featured poem is The Walled Garden in July by Iris Anne Lewis. Widely published, Iris has been featured in Black Bough Poetry and has won and been placed in a number of competitions, including being highy commended in the Wales Poetry Award and the Poetry Society’s ‘Stanza’ competition. Her first collection ‘Amber’ was published in 2024 and is available at £8.00 from Amazon here.

A founder member of the Somewhere Else Writers Group in Cirencester, Iris enjoys the group’s weekly meetings with their supportive atmosphere and constructive criticism of members’ creative writing.

She is also a leader of ‘Writers in the Library’, free to all at 2.00pm every second Monday of each month at Cirencester’s Bingham Library

You can read her poem, The Walled Garden in July by clicking here.

Poetry met art at the Lansdown Gallery in Stroud last month. The exhibition, Faces, Forms & Forgeries, showcasing artworks by local artists, also included some poems responding to the paintings. One of the poems, Listening to a Painting, was written by Somewhere Else member Iris Anne Lewis and was displayed next to  Lake Keitele, the painting which inspired her poem. The key to writing a poem in response to visual art is not simply to describe what you see but to bring a new perspective to it. In Listening to a Painting, Iris, (pictured with the painting), invokes the sounds which might be heard in the landscape.

This month’s story is a reworking of a classic tale by Selwyn Morgan.

Selwyn started writing short stories and poems late in life, and even had the time to write a novel, Going Up Camborne Hill, about the dispersion of Cornish tin miners across the world. This novel also drew on Selwyn’s own life experience of growing up in a mining community in South Wales. His work often portrays the humorous side of life, even if the subject matter involves the hardships to be found in the lives of our ancestors. Selwyn is well-travelled, having lived and worked in Kuwait and Jordan, countries in a region whose recent history has been a fertile source of his writing inspiration. He remains active in the community and has often been found treading the boards of various local theatres playing roles as varied as the Mikado and Captain Smith of the Titanic. You can read Pandora’s Box here.

This month’s poem is ‘All else happens in blue’ by Alan Passey. Alan has been writing and making up stories for most of his life. He’s amazed at how little has survived despite having a loft full of boxes. You can read his poem here.

A reminder, too, that Frank McMahon will be reading at the Cheltenham Poetry Festival at Cheltenham Playhouse Theatre on Wednesday 14th May at 2.00pm Tickets are available here.

Frank has recently had his fourth book of poetry, ‘The Canticles of Spring’ published both in hardback at £15.99 and paperback at £9.99 – it is available at Waterstones, other good bookshops, and on Amazon here.

Iris Anne Lewis’ debut collection ‘Amber’ is also available on Amazon here.

Sophie Livingston wrote her flash fiction piece ‘Breathing Out’ some years ago but decided it could do with another airing after listening to the recent debate on euthanasia.

‘Some elements of what I wrote as a science-fiction piece may be about to become a reality,’ she said.

Sophie worked as a journalist for 15 years. Her work has appeared in local and national magazines and on BBC Radio.

In 2011 she read at the Cheltenham Literature Festival after winning the Gloucestershire Writers’ Network short story award and in 2015 was invited to judge the short story element of that competition. She was long listed for the Fish Short Story Prize in 2020 and in 2021 her debut novel, ‘The Green March Hotel’, was one of the 12 finalists in the Mslexia First Novel Competition judged by Hilary Mantel. In 2024, her story ‘Hawk in a High Tree Nest’ was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize.

You can read her story here

 

Cirencester’s Writers in the Library are thrilled to welcome poet Iris Anne Lewis as their guest reader this coming Monday.

Iris will read from her first poetry collection, Amber, which was published to great acclaim last year. The session, which will take place on Monday, February 10th from 2 to 3 p.m., will be followed by an open mic and refreshments. It is free and open to everyone.