Caroline Gill, "Driftwood by Starlight"

Caroline Gill lives in Suffolk with her archaeologist husband, David. Her first full poetry collection, Driftwood by Starlight, was published by The Seventh Quarry Press in 2021. Caroline graduated in Classical Studies from Newcastle University in 1982, and gained a PGCE from the University of Exeter, followed by a TEFL Certificate from the Bell School of Languages in Norwich. She has worked as a teacher, an EFL tutor, and a Cataloguing Assistant in the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge. 

The Holy Place, a ‘Poet to Poet’ chapbook shared with Monterey-based poet, John Dotson, was published by The Seventh Quarry Press (Swansea) in conjunction with Cross-Cultural Communications (New York). The Holy Place was launched in 2012 at the Dylan Thomas Birthplace in Swansea. ‘The Figure at the Phoenix Mine,’ a sestina, was awarded First Prize in the General Section of the International Petra Kenney Poetry Competition (2007). ‘Raft Race’ took Overall First Prize in the ZSL ‘Conservation’ Poetry Competition (2014). ‘Penwith Fingerstone’ was awarded Third Prize in the Milestones Competition (2017), judged by Brian Patten. Three poems were included in The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics Including Odd and Invented Forms by Lewis Putnam Turco (4th edition, University Press of New England, 2012). 

Caroline has read her poems at the Hay Festival, the First International Poetry Festival in Swansea, Poetry in Aldeburgh and Winchester Poetry Festival. She has taken part in several short writing courses, including one run jointly in 2014 by the Poetry School and the Polar Museum (SPRI, University of Cambridge). Another, The Write Stuff, was organised by Disability Arts Cymru. Caroline’s outlook is shaped by her Christian faith. She loves to watch puffins, and many of her poems reflect her concern for the planet. 

Caroline's website is here. 

About Driftwood by Starlight

Driftwood by Starlight by Caroline Gill was published by Peter Thabit Jones of The Seventh Quarry Press in June 2021. While many of the poems have a coastal theme, some concern wildlife, landscape and archaeology. The majority have settings in England, Scotland and Wales. The author has a life-long love of Cornwall; the cover photograph, showing Cadgwith Cove under moon and stars, was taken by Laurence Hartwell. 

You can read a review of Driftwood by Starlight on Everybody's Reviewing here. You can read an interview with Caroline Gill about the collection on her blog here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection.

From Driftwood by Starlight, by Caroline Gill

Penwith Fingerstone

           SW437374, Treen, beside B3306

Zennor Quoit, Robin’s Rocks, Great Zawn
and Gurnard’s Head ripple off the tongue,
raining their music on this granite land.

I tilt my neck and watch the sky display
its spectral colours as the clouds recede;
two farm dogs scamper up the hill. I walk

towards the fingerstone, which hides
between the tarmac and a Cornish hedge;
a snail trail shimmers in the afternoon.

I check the surface of the milestone block.
A hand points to Penzance: it’s ‘6M’ up
and over to the arc around Mount’s Bay.

This ‘stone with benchmark’ sends me on
to find a town called ‘ƧTIVƧ’, without an ‘e’
in Ives. Each ‘S’ is back to front: was this

through lack of learning? It could be
the maker was left-handed for when I
was small and shaping letters into words,

my text ran right to left, which seemed
its natural ebb and flow. I filled the pages
of my stapled book, flicking from the end,

until convention’s channels turned the tide.
My current ‘S’ advances in a coil of surf,
unlike these stone-based characters,

which chime when rain comes pelting
down: Gurnard’s Head, Zennor Quoit,
Robin’s Rocks, Great Zawn …

The Ceilidh House

The peat fire crackles and burns with stories;
footsteps scurry through mist and mountain
to warm a Hebridean hearth with stories.

A figure crosses turf where St Columba
knelt long ago beside the Snizort;
the crofter’s creel is laden with stories.

He pauses to watch the snow-stars drifting
on the loch, with its kelp and pebbles;
hares in the lazy-bed leap with stories.

The crofter enters his neighbour’s parlour,
rests on the settle while divots smoulder;
a plaintive skirl fills the room with stories.

Shadows dance round the doleful piper,
whose music makes the embers tremble;
the single oil lamp flickers with stories.

A mother stirs her three-legged cauldron;
sisters spin, or weave at the handloom,
infusing a homemade plaid with stories.

Hailstone tears pound the snow-flecked Cuillin,
recalling the Clearances, emigration:
the Ceilidh House overflows with stories.

Dan Coxon and Richard V. Hirst (ed.), "Writing the Uncanny: Essays on Crafting Strange Fiction"

About Writing the Uncanny

From M.R. James to Shirley Jackson, the Uncanny has long provided fertile ground for writers – and recent years have seen a notable resurgence in both literature and film. But how does the Uncanny work? What can a writer do to ensure their fiction haunts the reader’s imagination?

Writing the Uncanny sees some of the best contemporary authors explain what drew them to horror, ghost stories, folklore and beyond, and reveal how to craft unsettling fiction which resonates. Authors such as Jeremy Dyson, Alison Moore, Jenn Ashworth and Catriona Ward share their insights on psychogeography, fairy tales, cultural tradition and the supernatural, and offer practical advice on their different approaches to the genre.

Writing the Uncanny is an essential guide for both the casual reader and the aspiring writer of strange tales. It features essays by: Jeremy Dyson, Alison Moore, Nicholas Royle, Gary Budden, Catriona Ward, Jenn Ashworth, Robert Shearman, Claire Dean, Michele Roberts, Lucie McKnight Hardy, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, Chikodili Emelumadu and Timothy J. Jarvis.

About the editors

Dan Coxon is an editor and writer based in London. His anthology This Dreaming Isle was shortlisted for both a Shirley Jackson Award and a British Fantasy Award, and his debut short story collection, Only the Broken Remain (Black Shuck Books, 2020), was nominated for two British Fantasy Awards. His non-fiction has appeared everywhere from Salon to The Guardian.

Richard V. Hirst is based in Manchester. He is the editor of We Were Strangers: Stories Inspired by Unknown Pleasures and That’s the Colour: Stories Inspired by Low, both published by Confingo Publishing. His writing has been published in The Guardian, the Big Issue, Time Out and others.

You can find out more about Writing the Uncanny on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the Introduction to the book.

From the Introduction to Writing the Uncanny, by Dan Coxon and Richard V. Hirst

Just over a hundred years ago, in 1919, Sigmund Freud published ‘The Uncanny’ (Das Unheimliche), a paper which developed a theory for a particular kind of response to certain phenomena: a mixture of fear, repulsion and distress, all of which, Freud argued, are rooted in our everyday experiences. The paper took in inanimate figures that seem to be alive, severed limbs, doppelgӓngers and – perhaps most importantly for our purposes – storytelling.

In exploring his topic, Freud undertook a psychoanalytic deconstruction of E.T.A. Hoffman’s short story ‘The Sandman,’ eventually concluding that the peculiar potency Hoffman’s story holds over its reader was an ‘unheimlich’ one – that is, specifically in opposition to ‘heimlich,’ which can mean homely and familiar but also secret and concealed. The ‘uncanny,’ therefore, was not merely something unknown, but something that had been hidden or repressed. He famously called it ‘that class of frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.’

‘The Uncanny’ remains a relatively minor component in Freud’s overall legacy, yet in the artistic world it has become a key text and its influence remains significant, creating an ever-spreading shadow which stalks our mainstream culture. While Sir Walter Scott defined the literary style of the nineteenth century with his tales of Romantic heroism, it is Edgar Allan Poe’s obscure Gothic tales that have the longer-lasting legacy; although The Great Gatsby regularly tops readers’ polls of their favourite twentieth-century novels, few would deny that Franz Kafka, with his patchwork oeuvre of anxiety and surrealism, feels like the bracingly authentic voice of the age; and while the dominance of post-war Hollywood glitz seemed to find its apotheosis in the films of Steven Spielberg, it is David Lynch’s demented and dreamlike Americana that presents the more truthful vision. Increasingly, the owls are not what they seem.

It’s not only in the cinema that the Uncanny has come to prominence. On the printed page it has become one of the most persistent and adaptable literary modes of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, bubbling to the surface in Arthur Machen’s weird supernatural tales in the late 1800s and in M.R. James’s ghost stories at the start of the nineteenth century. H.P. Lovecraft then adapted the Uncanny to terrifying ends in his Cthulhu mythos tales, before it resurges in Shirley Jackson’s short fiction in the late 1940s – as well as in her novels The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle – and in the ‘strange stories’ of Robert Aickman in the 1960s and ’70s. The course of children’s fiction in the past century has also been guided by a strong current of the Uncanny, with novels like Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, Joan Aiken’s The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising proving hugely influential and instilling a lasting appreciation of the Uncanny among legions of impressionable readers.

In more recent times, the Uncanny has increasingly seeped through into mainstream ‘literary’ fiction. It might easily be detected in writers committed to horror like Ramsey Campbell and James Herbert, but when Andrew Michael Hurley’s The Loney won the Costa First Novel Award in 2015, it proved that the Uncanny was no longer simply a footnote in the history of modern literature – it has become one of its dominant features, easily spotted on high street shelves in new releases by Daisy Johnson, Sarah Hall and David Mitchell. In its sense of disquiet and unease, the Uncanny may be the perfect genre for the modern era, reflecting the political uncertainty of our times – and the disordering of our everyday world that has accompanied the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. 

Michelene Wandor, "Critical-Creative Writing: Two Sides of the Same Coin: A Foundation Reader"

 

Michelene Wandor is a playwright, poet, fiction writer and cultural critic. She has taught Creative Writing for over three decades, currently as tutor on the Distance Learning MA at Lancaster University. Her most recent poetry collection is Travellers (Arc Publications).

You can read more about Travellers on Creative Writing at Leicester here. Below, you can read about her new book, Critical-Creative Writing: Two Sides of the Same Coin.

About Critical-Creative Writing, by Michelene Wandor

Critical-Creative Writing: Two Sides of the Same Coin is a unique Reader, bridging the gap between Creative Writing (CW) how-to handbooks, and anthologies of Literary and Cultural Theory. This ground-breaking collection reveals the historical roots of many of the pedagogic concepts which underlie the critical study of CW. 

Graven images from the Old Testament are echoed in classical disquisitions on mimesis, which, in its turn, resonates within nineteenth-century realism and naturalism, all presaging one of CW’s most familiar mantras, ‘write what you know.’ The twentieth-century development of literary criticism travels alongside, and into, the philosophical and linguistic foundations of Literary and Cultural Theory, exploring received concepts of text, genre and point of view.

This is an indispensable text for CW lecturers, under- and post-graduate students. The Reader shows how seminal writers and thinkers have, over the centuries, considered imaginative writing: Aristotle, Plato, Montaigne, Milton, Sidney, Shakespeare, Pope, Browning, Wordsworth, Keats, Kant, Burke, Wollstonecraft, James, Ruskin, Quiller-Couch, T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis, Woolf, Barthes, Bakhtin and many others provide a roll-call of searching, sometimes contesting, voices.

Ruth Hunt, "The Single Feather"

In this article, author and journalist Ruth Hunt talks about her novel The Single Feather, and the experiences behind it. You can also read an excerpt from the novel. 

About The Single Feather, by Ruth Hunt

The idea of The Single Feather came to me as drastic benefit cuts for the sick and disabled working-age adults were announced, not only threatening the lives of those with disabilities but also causing a potential conflict between the younger disabled and the elderly.

I wanted a disabled lead character (Rachel) who was just as complicated as any of the other characters. My hope was as readers progressed through the novel they would see Rachel as a character, not a disabled character.

Rachel had just escaped from a traumatic experience. She was dropped into a community with people much older than her. This was just at the point when the ‘scroungers’ debate was going on. In the case of The Single Feather this ‘community’ was an art group. I chose art due to the ability for it to be transformative, especially when there has been trauma..

Of special interest was how the characters' (in some cases, secretive) pasts have shaped their futures, directing who they’ve become as people and how they interact with others. This was why I chose a quote from Chris Rock as my epigraph: 'When you meet somebody for the first time, you’re not meeting them, you’re meeting their representative' (Bigger and Blacker Tour 1999).

The title comes from Rumi:

          With friends you grow wings
          Alone
         You are a single feather in disgrace
         With them you master the wind
         But alone
         You’re blown in all directions.

For years, friends on social media only met my ‘representative,’ the real Ruth unsure of just how people would take it if I revealed the nature of my ‘accident.’ Eventually I took a deep breath …

Thirty years ago

Problems emerged in the first year of my A-Levels when I had my first period of mania. Not that long afterwards I fell into a deep depression and had to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital.

By the time I was discharged I had only just emerged from the near-catatonic state I had been in, and my parents were concerned it was too soon. They were reassured by the psychiatrist who told them there would be community follow-up from a CPN. 

I started to get my energy back, but my mood was still low. One day I climbed up onto a window ledge, my body dropping between 35 to 40 feet and landing on the backs of my heels. The shock went straight up my back, breaking L1, L2 that were ‘burst,’ causing extensive damage including spinal cord damage. 

Emergency surgery left me as an ‘incomplete’ paraplegic with some sensation on the front of my legs, but apart from that a lack of mobility and sensation below my waist – which also meant my bladder and bowel no longer worked.

The move into journalism (2015 onwards)

I have since been diagnosed with kyphosis, and spinal cord-related osteoporosis. When I was in my thirties my right leg had to be amputated due to a neuropathic sore on my heel that had led to an infection in the bone.

Due to my disabilities deteriorating at a frightening speed in the period between The Single Feather being finished and the press attention, I knew it would be very difficult to write another novel. But being interviewed gave me the idea of moving into journalism.

I completed an Arts-based degree with The Open University, before studying for my journalism qualifications, finishing with a Postgraduate Diploma in Journalism. Throughout, I have been writing features with a focus on social justice such as physical disability, mental illness, and social care. Some of my work can be found here.

Life is still a struggle. I have about three hours a day when I am not affected by pain and the side-effects of heavy-duty medication, so must cram any writing work into that slot. When I look back to the few years before and since 2015, it seems unfathomable how I ever managed to write a novel and pass these qualifications.

Below, you can read an excerpt from The Single Feather. You can also see a review of the novel on Everybody's Reviewing here. 

From The Single Feather

(In this excerpt, the two main characters Rachel and Anne are meeting for the first time so that Rachel can show her the paintings and ask whether she can join the art group) ...

I was taken aback to see a tall lady, in her late fifties, I guessed, wearing a duffle coat, with a royal blue woolly hat and matching gloves.

‘Oh, I’m sorry I didn’t realise. Are you Rachel?’ She looked crestfallen.

‘Yes, do come in, er ...’

‘Anne, Anne Wilby.’

An awkward moment followed, as she didn’t give me time to move away from the door. Due to the stair lift and my wheelchair, space was limited in my hall, which meant she had to squeeze through the gap. It didn’t help she was plump, I followed her into the living room where I could see her bend over the coffee table and look at my painting.

‘Do you like it?’ I tried to moisten my lips with my tongue.

‘Who lives with you?’

 Anne sat down on the edge of the blue chair and took off her woolly hat to reveal light brown and greying hair, cut into a helmet style that framed her face. Her features were etched with wrinkles and looked as if they’d been barbecued in the sun.

‘Nobody.’ I nodded towards the coffee table. ‘That one took me a month to complete.’

‘A month? I can sometimes spend months and months on just one paining, it’s marvellous that with everything you can still paint, and nobody looks after you, not even your parents?’

Paul McVeigh (ed.), "The 32: An Anthology of Irish Working-Class Voices"

 

About The 32

The Observer recently described Kit de Waal’s My Name Is Leon and Paul McVeigh’s The Good Son as the 'exceptional working-class novels from the last few years' so it seems apt that Kit passed the baton from her bestselling Common People anthology to Paul McVeigh to edit The 32: An Anthology of Irish Working Class Writers.

Like Common People, The 32 is a collection of essays and memoir, bringing together sixteen well-known writers from working-class backgrounds with an equal number of new and emerging writers from all over the island of Ireland. There are contributions from Kevin Barry, Roddy Doyle, Lisa McInerney, Danielle McLaughlin and Eoin McNamee to name a few.

About the editor

Paul's debut novel, The Good Son, won The Polari First Novel Prize and The McCrea Literary Award, and was shortlisted for many others including The Prix du Roman Cezam. 

Paul began his writing career as a playwright and comedy writer. His short stories have been in numerous anthologies, journals and newspapers, as well as on BBC Radio 3,4 & 5, and Sky Arts. He co-founded the London Short Story Festival and is associate director of Word Factory, London, ‘the UK's national organisation for excellence in the short story’ (The Guardian). He co-edited the anthology Belfast Stories, and edited Queer Love & The 32: An Anthology of Irish Working Class Voices. He has judged numerous literary prizes, including The Edge Hill Short Story Prize, The Dylan Thomas Prize and, currently The V. S. Pritchett Short Story Prize for the Royal Society of Literature. His writing has been translated into seven languages. His website is here. 

Below, you can read an excerpt from Paul's Introduction to The 32, which introduces this brilliant collection of personal essays and memoir.

From the Introduction to The 32, by Paul McVeigh

If one of the defining characteristics of the wealthier members of our society is the desire to pass on their riches and privileges to their progeny to maintain the status quo, I find that for the working class who’ve achieved success in the arts, many become passionate, if not warrior-like, about passing on their wealth in precious knowledge to those of their feather who are following behind, to bring about change; the cartography for navigating the obstacles on the way to joining them. I’ve also described it as ‘leaving a trail of breadcrumbs’ and Kerry Hudson recently in the Guardian as ‘send[ing] the elevator down.’ As a working-class artist, it can often feel that on your journey you watch others flying past because they have a car while you are on foot, watch others waved through at gatekeepers’ check points while you are stopped and found to be carrying the wrong papers. Successful working-class artists often travel between worlds and are likely to pull over and offer you a lift. 

Kit de Waal is a prime example. Having gotten a substantial three-book deal on the back of her debut, My Name is Leon, Kit de Waal used some of the money to set up an annual scholarship at a London University for a student from a marginalized background. She also came up with the idea, and raised the funding for, Common People: An Anthology of Working-Class Writers. The book contained thirty-two pieces of memoir about working-class life, sixteen established and sixteen new writers, including an essay by Dave O’Brien on the impact that class background has on your chances of breaking into the publishing industry as a whole. The statistics are shocking in the UK and you can check out that essay, or, online, find numerous surveys conducted by a number of organisations, such as the Society of Authors, some including data on Northern Ireland. Though some research has been done in Ireland recently, the statistics are largely unknown but you can read an essay which raises the subject at the end of this book from Dr Michael Pierse.

How did The 32 come about? The short version is, Common People was a huge success and while touring festivals in Ireland with the book, Kit de Waal was asked on many occasions ‘will there be an Irish version?’ and voilà! It was by no means a simple transplanting, however. Some questions I’ve been asked might be best answered here, briefly. The name change. The phrase ‘common people’ didn’t have the same connotations in Ireland as it did across the water, so we needed a new title. As there were thirty-two contributors and the book would be all-island, I thought The 32 would work and changed ‘writers’ to ‘voices’ as there were a couple of contributions that wouldn’t be from writers. 

Those commissioned were chosen due to a number of factors. Most, I, or in some cases Kit, had worked with in the past, we knew their background and interests, and that they could be persuaded to come on board to lend their talent and literary weight to the topic and the project. I tried to find a spread around the island and a variety of forms and genres. The expression ‘you have to see it to be it’ was on my mind. As a working-class boy from Belfast, I never thought I could be a writer. This may sound strange to some, but if I’d known a working-class boy from the north became the Books Editor of The Irish Times, I think it would have impacted what I thought might be open to me ...

Joe Orton Creative Writing Competition 2021: The Results

The School of Arts at the University of Leicester runs an annual Joe Orton Creative Writing competition that invites A-Level students to write an Edna Welthorpe letter. 'Edna Welthorpe' was the persona that Orton invented to embody the values he abjured - a middle-class, middlebrow, conservative. Through Edna's letters of complaint (or praise), Orton mocks social and sexual convention. 

The Joe Orton Creative Writing Competition is funded by a kind donation from Dame Vivienne Westwood. It runs annually. 

You can read the winning and runner-up letters, by Penelope Ogieriakhi and Bella Breen respectively, here. 

Below, Penelope and Bella talk about their writing processes, their experiences of writing Edna Welthorpe (Mrs) letters, and their success in the Joe Orton Creative Writing Competition 2021. Congratulations to both of them!

By Penelope Ogieriakhi, James Allen's Girls' School, London  (winner)

Writing. There are a lot of other words that belong to that word. I could exchange it for questioning, imagining, confessing, remembering, exploring … the list goes on. I think that the essence of a person is enclosed in what they write when nobody has asked them to. My version of this is poetry - another word which owns many others. To me, poetry is writing without the need for convention, or rather, writing with no dress code: as fancy or as simple as can be. 

Scrolling through my school sixth-form weekly notices, I looked for something to prompt me to write. I wanted to turn away from my own thoughts and see what topics occupied other minds. I met Edna Welthorpe and instantly loved her character (however difficult she may seem!). Each letter was exquisitely fiddly and exasperating in its own fantastic way. What’s most successful about Joe Orton’s Edna is the universality of the dialogue. That is to say that there is a bit of Edna in everyone, which is the very reason why we can’t stop ourselves from laughing at what is quite frankly a reflection of the never-satisfied human brain. This, I thought, is writing with no dress code. 

Out of all the potential topics that came to mind, the idea of a neatly boxed delivery of organic vegetables seemed most ripe for satire. The subject seemed apt for the lampooning of a faintly Victorian sexual prudery still present in some quarters today. Beginning my ‘rant,’ I thought not just of myself but of all the people I’d encountered and how they would feel about each aspect of the experience. I was able to poke fun at the spectacle around trying to find the right words simply to express bourgeois hypocrisy and the culture of ‘saying not to say.’ An Edna Welthorpe letter was a great way to analyse modern society.

I was glad to find a new interest in Joe Orton, whose works are still very much relevant, thanks to this competition. As I wrote, I realised how easy it was to place importance on such trivial things. Writing about potatoes, carrots and mushrooms can bring as much joy as any other subject in poetry, which is pretty wonderful.

By Bella Breen, Colyton Grammar, Devon (runner-up)

As someone who perhaps spends a little too much of their free time spamming their friends with joke emails and letters, I was excited to hear that there was a perfect competition for my unusual hobby! 

Having been studying the play Loot at the time, my English teacher thought that writing a letter in the style of  Edna Welthorpe (Mrs) would be the perfect way to jump into the brilliant mind of Joe Orton. 

We read through a few of Orton’s ‘Edna’ letters during class and his work instantly reminded me of Joe Lycett, one of my favourite comedians, who is also well-known for mocking the ‘Edna Welthorpes’ of the world through his spoof emails. To be able to write something that momentarily brings joy and laughter to someone’s life, such as Orton’s letters did, for me, is the greatest reason to write at all. 

I couldn’t say that I had a plan when it came to writing my letter of complaint about ‘Peppa Pig’ because that would be a lie. I simply just started writing furiously before any of my ideas could fall out of my head. This is often the way in which I write. It’s always worthwhile to look up from my laptop screen and see my friend smirking as they read the nonsense email I’ve written for them about ‘A French Exchange Trip to Prêt à Manger’ or ‘The Crucial Difference Between Pesto and Pistou’ or, my personal favourite, ‘How Deadly Tuna Fish Will Kill Us All!’ 

I chose ‘Peppa Pig’ as my subject  purely because I found the thought of a grown adult being offended by a cartoon pig who enjoys jumping in muddy puddles  absolutely hilarious. I believed it was something a modern day Edna Welthorpe might waste her time obsessing over. 

I am grateful to have been able to take part in this competition because it has given me a sense of satisfaction in knowing that my love for comedic writing is shared with others. Overall I have greatly enjoyed the opportunity to put my creative skills to the test and take Edna Welthorpe  from the 1960s and bring her into how I believe she might look in the present day. 

Middleway Words: The Programme

We recently announced news of a new book festival based in the Midlands, Middleway Words, which will take place from the 5th to 11th September 2021. You can see the original announcement and information here. This is an online festival of books and literature across the Midlands, aimed at promoting authors and books in the region. There will be events, talks, workshops, readings and interviews, and all of it is free. 

You can now register for free tickets for the festival on Eventbrite here. 

You can download the programme for the festival on the Eventbrite site, or directly here. 

On Friday 10th September at 4pm, the festival includes a conversation between novelist Kerry Hadley-Pryce and Jonathan Taylor of the University of Leicester. All are welcome, and the event, like all others in the festival, is free.