Susie Wild's Blog: Wildlife, page 31

Next Two Gigs: Cardiff and Newport

NEW POETS: SHOWCASE Emily Blewitt, David Foster-Morgan, Susie Wild, Katherine Stansfield, Stephen Payne.Seren Poetry Editor Amy Wack introduces these mostly Cardiff-based poets who have all published acclaimed first collections in recent years.Duration: 1 hourLocation: The Pantry Cafe, Cornerstone, Charles Street, CardiffType: Poetry readingFor event information contact Amy Wack: 07943-819271Buy £5 tickets

Gig Update: New Poster Dates for 2018

Gig Notice: Cornerstone's Seren Poetry Festival 2018

Apologies lovelies, life has been getting in the way of blogging. I've much to update you on but first, this, my next reading in Cardiff in some excellent company:

Brown's: The Perfect End to the Better Houses Launch Tour

Oh what a joy it was to be in Laugharne in the gentle quiet of December to wrap up the Better Houses tour. They treat their poets well there.

It was also joyful that Torben could escape work and join me for the night away. I always love it when he's able to make my gigs. On arrival we had Brown's to ourselves, a rare treat to those used to be there for the standing room only of the festival, and, it being the sleepy time of year, we had a wonderful room to stay in there complete with a free-standing bath that I could have spent the whole stay in.

The evening reading was cosy and informal, with us going around the room and each reader standing to do one piece, interspersed with four short sets from myself. There were some wonderful readings including an inventive collaborative piece with 'music'.

Afterwards we were easily persuaded to try all the gin and prop up the bar talking talking talking until close.

In the morning, after a hearty breakfast we took advantage of the winter sun and wandered down to sit outside the boathouse and top up our caffeine levels (and cake levels for himself), before heading back to Brown's to warm and read by the fire.

I couldn't have had a more perfect end to the running around of the months before, and it was dead romantic too.

Now I am wrapping up work before the gift of a long festive break to get myself back to human ready for 2018! My next 2018 gigs are as follows:

FEBRUARY
17th: New Poets Showcase, Seren/Cornerstone’s Poetry Festival, Cardiff (11am) 21st: Open Mic Spoken Word Extravaganza at Ye Olde Murenger House, Newport (7.30pm)
MARCH
14th: Satellite of Love, The Greenbank, Easton, Bristol (8.30pm) 
APRIL

22nd: Melville Centre, Abergavenny (11.30am)
Have splendid festive seasons my dears! I'll leave you with some snaps from Laugharne:

'Readers of all types will find something marvellous here.'

'Perhaps this is the message she wants to leave us with, the importance of opening doors and allowing for reintegration within an individual as well as across relationships through decency and kindness. Readers of all types will find something marvellous here.'
– Mary Jacob reviews Better Houses on gwales.com

Can Openers Bristol

I had a lovely time at Can Openers in Bristol this lunchtime, reading poems from Better Houses and listening to a very high standard of open mic. Thanks so much for having me along, and to those of you who bought my books. The event is held in a dance studio at The Station, where I have fond memories of seeing exciting circus happenings when I used to live in the city. I thoroughly recommend this event, as a very supportive space for new readers too. For more info see: http://www.poetrycan.co.uk/new-events/1613-canopeners-2.html

For once I didn't take any photos, so you'll just have to take my word that it happened!

On the cover of a magazine: Cardiff Life Interview

Cardiff Life interviewed me and you can read it in the new issue, out today, and my name is on the cover!

Sion Tomos Owen Sketch from Bad Ideas Relaunch

Apparently this is what I looked like at last night's reading... 

Gig Alert: Bad Ideas\Chemicals Cosmic Relaunch

I'll be reading a few poems at Lloyd Markham's event at the Full Moon with other performers and musicians... Come along! Here's the poster:


Following that I will be giving a lunchtime reading at Can Openers in Bristol on 1 December, and then hosting and reading at Brown's Poems & Pints in Laugharne on 7 December...


Then I'm taking a little festive season break before returning with gigs in Carmarthen, Bristol, Cardiff, Newport and more in 2018.
Susie x

Gig Alert: Wild Words at The Wheatsheaf

Hello Lovelies,
How are you all doing? Great, I hope! I am almost back to 100% and ready to kick off the tour again this Saturday 25 November by hosting Wild Words at The Wheatsheaf in Fitzrovia, London. This is the London launch for Better Houses, in my birth city, so I will also be reading, but before that I will be introducing some wonderful writers from Parthian Books and our friends. Here are the bits and bobs:
Join us for an afternoon of poetry from Wales and the World at The Wheatsheaf. We will be featuring poets with links to London and Wales and poetry in translation published by Parthian Books and their friends. 

Poets performing include Eleni Cay (A Butterfly's Trembling in the Digital Age, Parthian, 2017 in translation from Slovakian), Christina Thatcher (More than you were, Parthian Books, 2017), Rebecca Parfitt (The Days After, Listen Softly London, 2017), and Tracey Rhys (Teaching a Bird to Sing, Green Bottle Press, 2016).
More special guests TBA! Contact susie@parthianbooks.com if you'd like to read on the day too!

Social / Drinks from 2pm, readings start from 3pm and will wrap up by 7pm. Free entry, books for sale, CASH ONLY... BRING CASH!
The Wheatsheaf, 25 Rathbone Place, London W1T 1JB

ELENI CAY
Eleni Cay is a Slovakian-born poet living in Manchester, UK. Her poems were published in two pamphlets - Colours of the Swan and Autumn Dedications - and featured in MK Calling 2013 & 2015, anthologies (e.g. Mother's Milk); poetry magazines (e.g. Envoi, Atticus Review) and as the 'best poetry videos on the web' (Moving Poems). Eleni is currently studying the MA Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. Several of her poems have been re-imagined as poetryfilms, dancepoems or multimedia poems, shared widely on social media networks. She has performed her poems in bookshops, at local schools and poetry events in Slovakia, Germany, Austria, USA and England. A Butterfly's Trembling in the Digital Age has been translated into English for the first time by John Minahane.

CHRISTINA THATCHER:
Christina Thatcher is a PhD student and postgraduate tutor at Cardiff University where she studies how creative writing can impact the lives of people bereaved by addiction. Christina keeps busy off campus too by delivering creative writing workshops across south Wales, running projects for organisations including Making Minds and the Welsh Writers Trust and coordinating literature events for the Made in Roath Festival. Her poetry and short stories have featured in a number of publications including The London Magazine, Planet Magazine, Acumen and The Interpreter’s House.
To learn more about Christina’s work please visit her blog: https:// collectingwords.wordpress.com or follow her on Twitter: @writetoempower.

REBECCA PARFITT:
Rebecca Parfitt is originally from Brighton but now lives and works in Cardiff. She has been working in publishing for almost a decade, beginning her career in London before moving to Wales. She is Founder and Editor of the Ghastling – a literary magazine devoted to ghost stories, the macabre and the oh-so-strange. She has published many poems, short stories and reviews in anthologies and magazines. Some of her work has appeared in the Boston Poetry magazine, Dream Catcher, Story Shack, Silver Apples, Dagda, Cheval, Poetry Wales, Wales Arts Review and the Delinquent. She was shortlisted for the Bridport International Poetry Prize, (2010); the Cinnamon Press debut poetry collection award, (2013); she was a finalist for the Aesthetica Creative Writing awards in 2015. Rebecca has recently been given a ‘Writer at Work’ residency by Hay Festival and Arts Council Wales to develop a novel. Tipped as ‘one to watch’ by Cinnamon press who described her poems as: ‘poised images shimmer with clarity, making the everyday world of relationships brim with unsettling surprise.’

TRACEY RHYS:
'By turns tender and outraged, these poems are written from the perspectives of both mother and her autistic child. Tracey Rhys is developing into a superb poet and her first collection contains several powerful pieces that celebrate one child’s life and his vivid imagination. Moving, funny, true and imbued with a gorgeous lyricism, Tracey Rhys’s poems are the real thing. Highly recommended.' – Robert Minhinnick
'Tracey Rhys displays a lyrically inventive and unique voice in these touching yet unsentimental poems about her autistic son, from his birth to his diagnosis. A wonderful debut from a distinctive Welsh poet.' – Rhian Edwards

SUSIE WILD:
'These poems are spells whose words bewitch the ordinary and transform the objects and routines of our human world with their word-magic.' – Gillian Clarke
'The world shifts and transforms itself in these subtly disconcerting poems: words into bees, surgical stitches into mascaraed eyelashes, a fossil oyster into a lover's toenails. The effect can be darkly sinister or exuberantly witty, but it's always new and refreshing. This is an exciting and assured poetic debut.' – Matthew Francis
‘Susie Wild writes with poise and precision about the places we inhabit, casting a benevolent spell over her reader.’ – Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch
'The voice is concentrated, urgent; the material is often tender, even domestic. There is no contradiction in this. The poems come from raw edges of the spaces between people, and a sense of how provisional the tender things can be.' – Philip Gross
'Poems carefully built to be inhabited.' – Cynan Jones