Congratulations to Iris Anne Lewis, whose poem ‘The World Tilts’ is featured in Ink Sweat & Tears this month. The prestigious, UK-based webzine runs an annual Twelve Day of Christmas feature highlighting specific works on each day. ‘The World Tilts’ will be featured on December 21.

There will be a chance to hear more of Iris’s work this Monday ( December 11) when she is the guest speaker at Writers in the Library, a monthly event at Cirencester Library from 2pm to 3pm. Everyone is welcome.

Our poet of the month is Frank McMahon, who imagines mid-winter life in pre-Christian times in “Winter Bleak”.

Frank has been widely published, including two collected volumes of work, “At the Storm’s Edge” and “ A Different Land”, both produced by Palewell Press. Last year he won the GWN Poetry Prize, and this year, read at both the Cheltenham Poetry and Literature Festivals.

He’s also helping promote the Poetry Together Initiative, which brings children and older people together to share the pleasure of poetry. He’s one of the founding members of the monthly Writers in the Library sessions.

His third collection of poems, “The Light Will Always Return”, is being published by Tim Saunders Publishers in April 2024. 

You can read “Winter Bleak” here.

Writers in the Library, Cirencester, will hold a special event to support the national initiative, ‘Poetry Together’ on Monday, November 13th, from 2pm to 3pm.

Pupils from Powell’s School will be sharing their poems on the theme of “Happiness.” 

Poetry Together aims to bring children and older people together to share the pleasure of poetry.

Older people are invited to come along to read their own poems on this theme, max. 14 lines.

Among those appearing on the stage at last month’s Cheltenham Literature Festival was Graham Bruce Fletcher, who read a Drabble – a story of exactly 100 words – about the way writers’-group members enter lots of competitions!  There’s even a Drabble in the group’s anthology “Off The Wall” available from Amazon, which also features recordings of group members reading their stories and poems which you can hear by scanning QR codes alongside the printed versions.

Graham has been writing since before he went to primary school. His work has been featured in a wide variety of publications, and performed at many spoken-word events.  He has also been an editor and written non fiction, journalism and commercial copy.

You can read ‘Competition’  here.

Somewhere Else Writers made their debut as a group at this year’s Cheltenham Literature Festival. Although many members have read as individuals at the Times-sponsored event, the group as a whole featured in a half hour slot in the festival’s ‘Huddle’, performing a mixture of poetry, prose, and drama. The event drew a crowd from both Waterstone’s bookshop, and the food hall, with extra chairs being drawn up so that people could listen. Many congratulations to all those who took part.

This month’s poem is by Tina Baker.  ‘Childhood Clips’ is included in the group’s anthology “Off the Wall” available from Amazon, and you can hear Tina read it by visiting her page on the group website here.

Tina began writing as a young child and loved to create puppet plays which she performed in her front garden in the hope of entertaining passersby.

As an adult, she had a variety of jobs, including the design and production of technical manuals, assisting an editor in the heady world of publishing occupational health and safety journals and, finally, organising major events.

Later in life, she remembered the pleasure of creating stories, so she undertook a two-year creative writing course, and this encouraged her to write her first novel, which she hopes to be published, one day.

National Poetry Day saw the announcement that Iris Anne Lewis’s poem ‘Swedish Fairytale’ has been highly commended in the Poetry Society’s Stanza competition.  

It is the culmination of an amazing year of successes for the group’s writers, which were celebrated at the annual meeting in September. 

Iris has had 17 poems published in journals and anthologies this year (Black Bough Poetry, Acropolis, Dawn Treader. The High Window, Wildfire Words, The Elements Anthology, and Ink, Sweat and Tears). She has also been placed in four poetry competitions, including the Wales Poetry Award 2022. 

Frank McMahon’s poems have appeared in four anthologies: The Wild Night Sky, Dialect Writers, Yew Tree Press and GWN Voices. Individual poems have appeared in Wildfire Words, Acumen, Erbacce and Sarasvati. He also read at the 2022 Cheltenham Poetry Festival and the Cheltenham Literature Festival.  

Peter Deacon published his second novel, The Long Double Cross and another novel is well on its way. Sophie Livingston’s novel The Green March Hotel has attracted the interest of an agent after being one of the 12 finalists in the 2022 Mslexia First Novel competition; Selwyn Morgan was Highly Commended in the National Association of Writers’ Groups competition for his short story, The COOP Hamper, and Dave Walklett successfully completed his master’s in creative writing and is hard at work on his first novel.  

Frank and Iris have been involved in co-founding ‘Writers in the Library’ — a monthly event with guest authors open to all.  

Most importantly, the group continues to encourage and support all its members in their writing ambitions, whether or not they are aiming for publication, with weekly reading and critiquing of work. 

The guest speaker at the next Writers’ in the Library session on October 9th is author Chloe Jacquet.

Chloë is a multicultural, multifaceted, multi-slam winning spoken word artist based in Gloucestershire. She was 2017 Oxford Hammer & Tongue slam champion and reached the semi-finals of the National Slam Finals at the Royal Albert Hall in both 2018 and 2019. 

With a preference for straight talking and a penchant for rhymes and opinions, Chloë’s poetry is both entertaining and meaningful. Her work deals with a wide variety of subjects, ranging from workplace discrimination and mental health, to the pressures placed on modern men, via her short term relationship with a biscuit. 

As well as her own headline slots at poetry nights and festivals across the UK, she has supported artists such as Elvis McGonagall, Joelle Taylor and Hollie McNish and her work has featured several times on the BBC. She has been published in several magazines and anthologies and her poem “First Festival Back” was selected by the BBC to be included in a special archive at The British Library of Covid-related materials “for the benefit of the nation”.  

Her first collection Take It By The Line is published by Black Eyes Publishing UK and is available now. 

Located upstairs in Cirencester Library, sessions run for an hour on the second Monday of each month at 2pm. Tea and coffee are available, and the sessions are informal and friendly. You are sure of a warm welcome.