Category: Circaidy Gregory Press
-
What’s Nigel doing these days?
In the front of our first ever poetry anthology, Routemasters and Mushrooms, I wrote, “the works speak for themselves. We hope you enjoy them as much as we do. We intend this collection to be the first of many.” That was 2006. The winning poem, which opens the book, is by Nigel Humphreys. The writers…
-
Earlyworks Press and Circaidy Gregory Press have left the Creative Media Centre
But they have not disappeared! This is a catch-all message for anyone I didn’t manage to notify individually (sorry!). The press is still running, and the books are still available but we will no longer be using the Creative Media Centre address. For now, if you need to get in touch with me, or have…
-
We girls were double-divided
There’s a puzzling range of controversies raging over ‘entertainment’ and ‘the arts’. Social justice warriors are busy finding items – books, films, statues, to condemn for racism, and whilst libraries obediently bury offending books, the women’s movement battles over misogynistic and mind-bending traditions such as nightclub drag queens crossing yet more boundaries to present as…
-
Under-rated heroes and forgotten wives
Happy anniversary, Gustav and Isobel Holst A guest post by author Philippa Tudor Fame and fleeting, modest fortune Aspiring but not-yet-famous composer Gustav von Holst and Isobel Harrison were married on 22 June 1901. It was a quiet wedding in Fulham Register Office (a former workhouse), witnessed by Isobel’s brother and Gustav’s aunt, who had…
-
The beginning of a lifetime’s work?
A guest post by Philippa Tudor I first encountered Holst’s music through singing his beautiful 8-part Ave Maria as a teenager, and knew that he had taught at James Allen’s Girls’ School in Dulwich – where I live – but I never got round to discovering more until 2012, when I ordered a secondhand copy…
-
If you comment on this post, please avoid the ‘A’ word
Guest post by William Wood When my anthology Stories for Sale was published by Circaidy Gregory Press in 2013 I little suspected the changes to come: changes in my own life and in our geopolitical lives. We now live in a different world. Let me start even further back. When Philippe Delerm published his bestseller…
-
Blog of blogs for Earlyworks Press
Greetings to all the authors and friends of Earlyworks Press! I’m sorry for the long silence on the competitions and website fronts. COVID blah blah recession blah blah need to earn a living – you know how it is. For those who signed up to our newsletter for competition news, I’m afraid there isn’t any…
-
Left Books Forward
Heads up – this looks like a political post, and it is – but mainly, it’s one of my ‘Books for Christmas’ soapbox posts… We in Hastings were quite surprised when we heard that Momentum was an organisation for wild young Trots. We in Momentum Hastings thought we were a group of all sorts of…
-
The Astonishing Worlds of Mandy Pannett
How many years ago did I jump on a train to Arundel to have lunch with Mandy Pannett, and talk about organising a poetry collection competition? It happened before the Corbyn movement swept me away for several years of single-minded battle; it happened before the most urgent women’s campaign of my lifetime, and before COVID,…
-
Can you see us under all these bushels?
I always thought it was something leafy and twiggy we were hidden under but it turns out it’s a kind of bowl. Bushels (or in some translations, ‘vessels’) “And no man, when he hath lighted a lamp, covereth it with a vessel, or putteth it under a bed; but putteth it on a stand, that…
Kay Green 