£3
Join author Pauline Kirk for a fun, accessible writing workshop. The workshop will give you lots of ideas to work on afterwards, as well useful tips during the session.
Join a friendly group, open to new and established writers whether writing in poetry or prose. Pauline is a well known local author, poet and novelist. Her workshop will give you lots of ideas to work on afterwards, as well useful tips during the session.
£12.50 or £10 with a York Card
Tickets General admission: £12.50
£3
Explore ways of establishing yourself as a novelist via an ‘apprenticeship’, writing short stories, getting publications in small-press anthologies, becoming involved in writing communities and more.
Join York SF writer Tim Major as he guides you through getting your work published. Tom’s most recent novel is Snakeskins and his stories have appeared in Best of British SF and Best Horror.
£5
Women of the Dunes was Waterstones Scottish Book of the Month in March 2019.
Join author Sarah Maine as she talks about her award-winning novels and their rugged atmospheric Scottish settings.
Sarah Maine was born in England but grew up partly in Canada, returning to the UK for university where she studied archaeology. She now works as a freelance researcher, lecturer and writer, combining an interest in the past with a love of travel and an outdoor life. She is the author of three historical novels set in Scotland, The House Between Tides, Beyond the Wild River and Women of the Dunes.
£5
Sail with Cook at a reading of Remarkable Occurrences – Patrick Lodge’s third collection of poetry including a sequence celebrating Cook’s first voyage. York musician Judith Haswell provides appropriate musical interventions.
Between 1768 and 1771, Cook circumnavigated the world in a refitted Whitby-built collier, re-named the HMB Endeavour. Ostensibly to view the transit of Venus across the Sun from a vantage point in the South Seas, Cook’s secret instructions required him to search for a mythical southern continent. In so doing he sailed around and New Zealand as well as mapping the west coast of Australia. It was probably the greatest feat of seamanship the world had seen since the original navigation from Polynesia of the ancestors of the Maori.
Patrick Lodge’s third collection of poetry from Valley Press – Remarkable Occurrences- takes as its title the title of Cook’s journal of the first Endeavour voyage. The second half of the collection comprises a long sequence of poems celebrating Cook’s voyage. Not a history, a narrative nor a biography, the poetry is a personal reaction to Cook’s, to paraphrase the captain of starship Enterprise, boldly going where no –one had gone before.
Patrick Lodge will be reading from the sequence and other poems from the collection. He will be accompanied by the accomplished York-based multi-instrumentalist, Judith Haswell in a musical/poetical collaboration celebrating Cook’s voyage.
£15
“Everything ..depends on the quality of the moment; whatever kind of poem it is, it’s the moment that gets you in.” Clive James
A poetry workshop that will offer moments to ignite your own poems, and help you to find your own
A fast moving practical workshop which will focus on memory – of sight, sound, touch and empathy as the basis for re-imagining those moments that are significant, around which a poem can grow.
You’ll explore the elements that dramatise a poem – the who, the where, the when, the what and the why – and use imaginative memory to recreate and share them.
In two packed hours you’ll do five or six writing tasks; you’ll be offered lines to start you up, and structures to keep you going; if you want to you’ll have a chance to share some of your writing, and to recognise when you’ve created those moments that ‘get you in’.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re an established writer or a beginner. When we look at that blank page, we’re all equal. You won’t have time to worry about it.
John Foggin is a prize-winning poet, and writer about the teaching of writing.
His work has appeared in The North, Magma and The interpreters house, and in anthologies including The Forward Book of Poetry [2015, 2018].
In 2016 he was a winner of the Poetry Business International Pamphlet Competition judged by Billy Collins.
He has published five pamphlets and two collections of poetry. His new pamphlet Dark watchers is published by Calder Valley Poetry [June 2019].
More than 75% of his published poems started life in workshops; he says that if he didn’t go to them he probably wouldn’t sit down and write.
The workshop is presented in partnership with York Literature Festival
£7.50
A conversation and demonstration with Swallows and Damsons founder, Anna Potter.
Fox Lane Books and York Explore bring you Swallows and Damsons founder, and author of The Flower Fix, Anna Potter. We’ll be chatting to Anna as she demonstrates her floral-design skills, and talking all things floristry and learning more about Anna’s unique approach.
Founder of Swallows and Damsons in Sheffield, Anna’s originality and quirky approach to floral art has attracted thousands of followers on Instagram.
There will be the opportunity for questions as well as the demonstration making use of seasonal and local flowers.
Anna’s book, The Flower Fix, will be available to buy and have signed at the event.
There will also be raffle tickets for the chance to win Anna’s demonstration bouquet.
