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Invitations from Cinnamon Press:

Events and launches calendar

We hope you will be able to join us for an event near you. This page is regularly updated so please visit often.

We have a wide range of events and venues for June and July 2010 plus two writing courses in Harlech and France with a chance to win a place on the Harlech course and a fabulous special offer from Gardoussel of only £200 for a week including full board

Join Steve Griffiths

reading from An Elusive State: entering Al Chwm

Wednesday 2nd June,

Steve Griffiths gives an Anglesey Retrospective,

celebrating the island that gave him his core imaginative landscape.

Beaumaris Leisure Centre, Anglesey, 11a.m.

• June 3^rd 7.30 p.m. Bar One, Wales Millennium Centre, free event with bar.
• June 4^th 7.00 p.m. Dylan Thomas Centre, Swansea, £4.00/£2.80 (£1.60 with Swansea Passport to Leisure)
• June 6^th 1.00 p.m. Hay Festival, Hay on Wye
• June 7^th 7.30 p.m. Trinity Ffrinj Festival, Trinity University College, Carmarthen £4/£3
• June 8^th 7.00 p.m. Bookshop, Aberystwyth Arts Centre, free event with refreshments.
• June 9^th 7.30 p.m. Blue Sky Cafe, Bangor, free event with bar.
• June 10^th 5.30-7.30 p.m. Lloyd George Museum, Llanystumdwy, nr Cricieth, free event with refreshments.
• June 11^th 7.30 p.m. St John’s Church, Hoxton, N1, free event with refreshments.

“powerful reading and an opportunity to engage with Zimbabwe in a cultural and hopeful manner”

Sara Maitland

Cinnamon Press is grateful to all those who have made these events possible with generous sponsorship: Academi, The British Council in Wales and in Zimbabwe, The Dylan Thomas Centre, Hay Festival, Trinity University College, Ty Newydd, Gwynedd Council and St John’s Parish, Hoxton

An extract from Sunflowers in Your Eyes

Mitu’s Spice Tour

It’s raining, wet and muddy. Stop one—Hamida’s on the phone.

Jackfruit tastes like pineapple mixed with banana,

dorian is a fruit that tastes like heaven but smells like hell;

not allowed in many places.

Use henna leaves to make the dye.

Stop two—Celia’s lost a shoe in squelching mud.

Soursop, also known as elephant apple

gives hair gel if you soak the seeds.

The coconut plantation is owned by the government;

there are three types of palm.

The crooked one was struck by lightning.

Stop three—a lady is bitten by something on wings.

To make red dye take annatto seeds,

related to the litchi, makes natural lipstick.

Cardamom and vanilla need the shade.

Papaya wine makes you blind for a while,

with seventy-one percent alcohol—very bad hangover.

Stop four—in single file we are baking in the sun.

Cloves cure diarrhoea and stomach-ache,

the neem is very bitter but better than malaria parasite.

Boil bark or leaves and drink tea for seven days.

Cures up to forty ailments.

Last stop—don’t feel so good.

Walked too much, drank too little, didn’t have a hat;

but, thank you ladies and gentlemen, for your kind attention,

lunch is served shortly on the bus.

Join three Cinnamon Press authorsat the Hay on Wye Festival

Sunday June 6 th 11.00 a.m.

Welsh Literature Tent

in conversation with editor Jan Fortune-Wood

talking about writing teenage protagonists who expose the fragility and hypocrisy of an adult world and raise important questions about how life is lived.

A free Cinnamon Press Book for everyone attending this event to celebrate five years of Cinnamon Press.

TAG by Stephen May

Mistyann is fifteen, unpredictable, and violent. She’s also gifted. And now she’s on her way to Wales for a special residential course for talented youth. An American psychologist wants to unlock her potential. God help Wales. God help us all. Jonathan Diamond is forty-one and he’s going to Wales too. A failed musician and recovering alcoholic he’s now an Advanced Skills Teacher and he’ll be in loco parentis for the week. Together the two of them develop an unlikely and dangerous alliance as they are forced to confront difficult truths about themselves.

Long listed for Wales Book of the Year 2009 and winner of the Readers’ Award TAG is part bleakly comic confession, part twisted romance, at heart an elegy for dreams that refuse to die, Full of wit, drama and an eye for the absurdities of the way we live now.

The Schoolboy by Holly Howitt

A Clockwork Orange meets American Psycho and The Catcher in the Rye, The Schoolboy is all this and more—controversial, dark and funny; an astonishing psychological study of a disturbed adolescent mind and a commentary on morality and society. This gripping readfollows Nick in his last year at school. Plagued by secrets, self doubt, guilt and fury, the flaws in his character inevitably lead him into the hands of the damaged, unscrupulous and malevolent. With his options rapidly closing Nick, as insecure as he is angry, has to make decisions fast

The Horses by Elaine Walker

Stranded while on holiday at a remote Scottish croft after a strange ecological disaster, Jo and his family face personal as well as global tragedy, when the arrival of a mysterious herd of horses heralds the chance for a future they could ever have imagined. This powerful first person narrative uses magical realism to stunning effect; the disruption of the boundaries of the physical and the psychological and a constant sense of strangeness add to a powerful story that is as compelling as it is important, taking Jo from a teenager to a young man in a world that must be remade.

Felicity and Barbara Pym

Harrison Solow

Out this month this genre-defying book from award winning author, Harrison Solow is set to become one of our best-sellers:

Original, controversial, academic, readable, serious, light-hearted, sensible, charming – there is no end to the words that could be applied to Felicity and Barbara Pym. ...The underlying premise of this splendid book is the importance of the appreciation of literature... Students and tutors and, indeed, everyone who has ever found enjoyment in reading, will be grateful for this delightful book.”

Hazel Holt

“A fascinating, intriguing presentation which demands a sequel.”

Dr Christopher Terry, Cambridge University

“Although we read only one side of the correspondence, we see both minds at work – the student’s untrained assumptions ...refined by the professor’s cool, witty (and occasionally snobbish) demands for clear-eyed analysis, precise thought and appreciative intelligence. ...Lucky for us that Cinnamon Press has made it into a book for the common reader.”

Mayo Simon, author of The Audience & The Playwright

“...a dazzling performance, and it fills me with the most exquisite professional envy!

Thomas Vinciguerra, deputy editor, The Week

"...seamlessly weaves form and content... masterfully done."

Heather Hughes, Harvard University Press

An extract from Felicity and Barbara Pym

Why should you read literature?

Perhaps you should not.

However, I suspect you feel you would like to, and that is the basis of your irritation with silly men, mousy women, tea, religion, and quotations. Is this worthy of the august company of Dante, Proust, Dostoyevsky? It may interest you to know that Barbara Pym felt as you do, when she was about your age ― reading Aldous Huxley, and imagining herself in a more glittering, a more significant, world. And so to protect herself from an unbearable exclusion from that world, she wrote a novel, Young Men in Fancy Dress, in hope, her biographer says, of becoming part of it.

Her irritation with silly men was no different from yours, or mine, or anyone’s really, you see. The only difference is what each of us regards as ‘silly.’ Literature, or at least, books (I will not presume to add Pym to the Masters, as you call them ― although surely there are degrees of literature) offer a way out ― out of a time, a space, a life, a status, a level of experience that is unsatisfactory to the reader. Not by virtue of escape, but by metamorphosis, via instruction. As you are being offered a way out of literary exile by the recommended guide ― books, maps, and in the end, one hopes, transportation to the inherited literary land of Barbara Pym. And although you may not now want to arrive in such a place, you have chosen it as your destination. But I suppose you must. After all, it does not make sense that you should have chosen to enter a fictional world you find irritating (though you may realise that it is possible to learn something from it).

 

 

Join Sheila Hillier

launching A Quechua Confession

at the Barbican Library

Silk St, Barbican, London, EC2Y 8DS

Friday 18th June, 7.00 p.m.

rsvp: jan@cinnamonpress.com 

An extract from A Quechua Confession Manual

Internal Exile

Let’s go tomorrow, live in a small town

with three bridges and a river running through,

where everyone’s a stranger, we’re not known.

A low-roofed house standing on its own,

no gates or hedge, a creaky glass lean-to.

Let’s go tomorrow, live in a small town.

We’ll walk the High Street on the note of noon,

visit dark parlours at the back of shops, go

where everyone’s a stranger, we’re not known.

Feed the stray dogs, slipping out at dawn;

at the plain butcher’s, stay silent in the queue.

Let’s go tomorrow, live in a small town

where a path slopes by a bean-field, down

to the river-bank, through a copse of red willow.

Where everyone’s a stranger, we’re not known.

When we leave who’ll notice that we’ve gone?

We’ll make no friendships, nothing to undo.

Let’s go tomorrow, live in a small town

where everyone’s a stranger, we’re not known.

Join Arlene Ang, Mark Fitzpatrick

Launching Seeing Birds in Church is a Kind of Adieu

& By Way of Dust and Rain

& Claudia Jessop reading from This is the Woman Who

Pages of Hackney Bookshop

 

Sunday 27 th June 2p.m.

An extract from Seeing Birds in Church in a Kind of Adieu

What the Tabby Scratched Today

The lampshade on the end table

is crooked. In the room, there are

signs of violence: a spilt vase,

the flowers crushed by fallen

books, the torn curtain, blood

on the sofa, animal fur on the rug.

My skirt is frayed at the hem,

the sole of my left boot threatens

to come off. The lights have gone out

the way a chameleon’s tongue

furls back into its mouth.

A door flaps; this house has bats.

On my mother’s desk, there’s an old

Gratta e Vinci ticket. The price,

2500 lire, is half-covered by socks

she failed to mend. A black Labrador

licks its wounds by the dying fire.

An extract from By Way of Dust and Rain

Built to Code

For all its stark geometry the blinds

suppress a tenderness. The stairs are where

you put them, but less than what was climbed.

Refuge rescued from remorse, these walls tore

down trees, the majesty of natural

canopy, the blue jay’s perch. It will take

time to bring the outside in, unravel

the carpets, brighten walls, finish the deck.

Time to avoid the neighbors. And why not

a pergola above the front entrance?

A roof garden over the garage? What

do you surmise? A fence? Why, yes, a fence

replete with recrimination, a gate

before beds of black-eyed Susans, your gaze.

An extract from This is the woman who

Day Starting on an Upper Floor

Early morning

I raise the blind, and see

the stacked city

re-invented by sunlight.

Other people’s windows turn

to changing screens

of marbled inks

where glass records the change of days,

a face, suddenly framed

or a glimpse

of someone, folding

white clothing, carrying

a child from room to room,

buttoning a shirt while walking

over the floor.

I am so high up here,

attending to the detail

I think I am alone with it,

but a woman

watering a plant

raises her face; we share her pouring stance, arrested

over her green leaves,

we see each other

before the day.

Join Gill McEvoy Launching The Plucking Shed

Alexander’s Bar,

Chester Monday 19th July 7.30 p.m.

rsvp: jan@cinnamonpress.com

 

An extract from The Plucking Shed

Dip your hand in my skull,

pluck out a branch,

grow it from the earth of your palm.

Wind slithers through my head of leaves,

moss coats my chin,

rain dribbles from my beard of oak,

lichen crusts my skin.

Ah, but my body oozes

honey, sap.

Come, dip.

Cinnamon Press Writing Weeks

Inspiring your writing for 2010

Courses from Cinnamon Press are a great way to bring energy and commitment to your writing. The autumn course in Harlech is now full, but there is still a chance to win the last slot on this course by entering the competition – just £12 and your story or poems could get you a place. www.cinnamonpress.com/birthday

The course at the stunning retreat centre in Gardousel, France in June has a few remaining places and promises an amazing writing holiday to bring your work to life. Sharon Black, the retreat owner is offering a fantastic discount on the last available places – only £200 for the course plus full board for the week in your own room (or bring a non wiritng partner for only £150)

The workshops will focus on making your writing come to life, whether you are working on fiction or poetry. We will explore starting points, imagery and structure and ways of bringing precision and vividness to your language. Each group will be limited in size to allow plenty of time for mentoring sessions. There will also be opportunities to workshop each others’ work and to share work in progress as well as time to write, relax and explore the beautiful locations.

Jan Fortune-Wood has taught creative writing for the Open College of Art, The Writer’s House, the Arvon Foundation (tutoring both adults and teenagers), Women on Tour writing courses in Spain and does mentoring work as part of the co-operative, Triskele Writes. Jan is a qualified teacher and member of the National Association of Writers in Education and Academi’s Writers on Tour scheme. Her books include novels , A Good Life, Dear Ceridwen and The Standing Ground and poetry, Particles of Life and Stale Bread and Miracles, a prose poetry collection which she recently performed at a reading with poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy. She is currently working on a poetry sequence exploring emotions through landscape and architecture of an abandoned slate mining village, Tŷ Schrödinger and a novel that ranges across three generations and two continents exploring issues of metamorphosis and identity, I’m Still Here.

Where? In the tranquil and nurturing environment of Gardoussel Retreat, a magical oasis of calm in one of the most beautiful and untouched parts of France, the mountains at St Andre de Valborgne, 1 hour from Nimes and 2 hours from Montpelier. Accommodation is in a range of single-occupancy rooms (unless you request sharing). Meals are delicious, home-made, organic and vegetarian. The area is stunning with walks all around.

When? Sat 19 – Sat 26 June 2010.

How much? The cost for accommodation (everyone will have their own room unless requested otherwise or you bring a non-writing partner), all meals and tuition is now at the special offer price of £200 (a massive reduction from the full price of £580). There is also the opportunity to bring a non-writing partner at a cost of £150 (reduced from £430) for accommodation and all meals. The area has plenty to explore and the centre can also offer a range of massages and Ayurvedic consultations at extremely reasonable prices.

Travel

There are various ways to get to Gardoussel. The fastest, simplest option is to fly to Nimes from Stansted or Luton (just outside London), or Liverpool, then share a taxi or travel up by bus (see below). Eurostar runs a train service from London or Paris to Avignon or Nîmes; you can then take a bus to St Jean du Gard. We can help to organise taxi shares and are happy to collect you from the village of St Andre de Valborgne and bring you to Gardoussel. Once the group has booked we will liaise to help co-ordinate travel arrangements.

Ethos

This is a family-run retreat and guests share in the life of the place while there. Guests help by lending a hand after mealtimes – clearing up afterwards and washing the dishes - stocking the wood burning stoves with logs (in winter or cold nights), caring for their rooms and looking after the communal living spaces. In reality, this requires about 20 minutes a day of each guest’s time.

The group?

This is a course for writers at a range of levels. There are only eight writer places available to maximise contact time and attention to individual work. Non-writing partners also welcome at a reduced rate.

Booking?

Contact Sharon for a booking form by email

sharonblack1969@yahoo.com

Win a late autumn Writing Break in Harlech

Where? In a beautiful North Wales house close to the coast at Harlech. Accommodation is in a range of twin and single-occupancy rooms. There’s a large kitchen, living room and extra dining room. The area is stunning with walks all around,

When? October 30 th – November 5 th — a late autumn/early winter break to breathe new life into your writing.

How much? There’s a sliding scale depending on room, allocated on first come first served basis. There is one place left in twin-room accommodation @ £490. The price includes food (we will share the cooking for the week using easy recipes and wonderful vegetarian ingredients), accommodation and all tuition.

The group? This is a course for serious writers at a range of levels with limited places available to maximise contact time and attention to individual work.

Booking? The course is now full except for one reserved place for the writing competition. Send a short story of under 2,000 words or five poems or five microfictions plus a cheque for £12 together with your details on a separate sheet to ‘Cinnamon Press Birthday competition’ by the closing date of July 31 st or pay here and email your entry to jan@cinnamonpress.com The winning entrant will be published in our spring 2011 anthology as well as winning a place on the autumn writing course. Two runners up will be sent 10 Cinnamon Press books each.