You are currently browsing the monthly archive for April, 2007.
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Costa del Lumb Bank eh? Here at Moniack Mhor, we too are enjoying el scorchio weather with the added package holiday ambience of droning diggers and radios blaring out music of the dance, trance, or prance ilk.
This, I hasten to add, is actually good news and, as we have no courses at present, not a problem. Our next course is a month away – Poetry with Ann and Peter Sansom – by which time all will be Highland tranquil again with the trill of skylark and plaintive kee of buzzard the only distracting sounds.
Our tutors will be delighted to hear that from now on they have the luxury of en-suite bathrooms in the cottage. We have also increased parking space (previously we only had room for two cars and a sheep) and now have vehicle access to the front door of the main house which should help those with walking difficulties.
Now, it’s away from the musings on the benefits of change and back to dealing with the needs of the best builders in the world – ever!
Looking forward to a long, warm, happy summer – best wishes from a tired and dusty Andrea.
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Hugo Williams, poet, travel writer and Freelance column writer in the TLS, wrote about the Arvon writing course he led with Greta Stoddart last week at Totleigh Barton in Devon. One of the course students was Jerry Hall, who wrote a piece in the Independent just before coming on the course.
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Arvon Friends has been bounding with optimism and enthusiasm for Arvon ever since it was set up spontaneously thirty years ago. Arvon Friends care about writers and literature. They support Arvon’s work to provide creative writing experiences to as many people as possible. If you have a passion for words, want to help support the provision of unique creative writing experiences, are a writer, join Arvon Friends to ensure others enjoy the magic of the written word as well.
And just because Arvon Friends is over thirty years old doesn’t mean it can’t be forward thinking and adept at new media! Arvon Friends Online is the special creative writing and reading space for Arvon Friends to keep in touch with Arvon wherever they are. When you become an Arvon Friend, you receive a username and password - your unique key into your online blue notebook. From there you can read more writing, specially picked for you, and you may even be able to upload writing (if you are a Laureate or Angel). There’s competitions too, and the website will also act as an archive for Arvon Friends’ rich literary past. Currently on the site we have Judith Barrington on the art of writing memoir as well as Hugo Williams, Robert Macfarlane and Jacob Polley.
Even though it seems we might be revelling in our postmodern condition in this age of new media (somewhere between the fax and robotics), Arvon Friends can’t help themselves from still using, and enjoying to use, pens and paper. Our Arvon writing houses don’t have wifi, but they do have writing huts. You open the door, mind a few cobwebs, sit inside and look out through the window, let yourself be swallowed up by the hollow sound of calm. And you write. For all the blogs, for all the pdf files whirling about, for all the things we can do online these days, we’re going to be with books (and for books) for a long, long time. We’ve even started to sniff them.
Philip Cowell
Arvon Friends Coordinator
p.s. Arvon Friends can currently get a discount on Theatre with David Eldridge (Market Boy) and Robert Holman (Holes in the Skin), as well as access to a special Arvon Friends Writing Retreat this year at Lumb Bank, Yorkshire, November 5 - 10 (for a reduced fee of £350, call Ilona on 01422 843714).
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Totleigh Barton prepares for a long hot summer.
After the last three weeks of August weather we are strangely relieved to find ourselves in the traditional April showers this week. It is not that we don’t appreciate the slice of mid summer we’ve been given. It’s just that we want to make sure this part of the world is at it’s greenest this year as we will be piloting the food writing course with Sophie Grigson and Alastair Hendy this summer and some rain now will make sure we have the best and finest Devon produce come 2 July. So bring on the rain, but not too much please…
Last week we had a group of mad writers who had come to do the screenwriting course tutored by Paul Fraser and Lucy Scher. The Friday night was used to show some short films as they were shot that afternoon. It was amazing to see how they had managed to capture Totleigh Barton, putting the spotlight on the remoteness in a hilarious short about a woman trying to find a mobile phone signal which, and this should surprise nobody who’s ever been here, she hopelessly failed to find. Truly a great week with a fantastic party afterwards, can’t wait for the next one.
And we have just welcomed the next group who have come to do the fiction course with Jane Harris and Richard Beard. We’ve just served our Monday night dinner and The Arvon magic has already turned all the individuals into a group that is excited about their stay at Totleigh Barton, eager to talk to Richard and Jane (and us) and looking forward to the rest of the week. They seem terrified about the cooking though but I’m sure we will still end up with a good meal every night this week. I’m sure. Well, fingers crossed anyway…
In short, it is good to be at Totleigh. Very good.
Huib Boekelman, Centre Director
Totleigh Barton, Devon
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First course of the year and everything you could ever want on a course at Lumb is coming to pass. Unnaturally Mediterranean weather, lovely, lovely tutors (Mark Illis and Louise Doughty), inspiring guest reading from double Carnegie medal winner Berlie Doherty (celebrating the twenty-fifth year since publishing her first book) and best of all an interesting , hard-working and delightful collection of emerging writers.
And then today we got a message from someone who was on our journalism course back in September telling us that a piece he began here has just won him Computer Science Writer of the Year.
Vindication for everything that we do here.
Stephen May, Centre Director, Lumb Bank
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As ever, it’s a bright blue sunny day here at the Hurst, made lovely by the presence of golden daffodils, budding azaleas, dappled things of all make and main, and the delightful presence of our current phalanx of poets - tutored by Patience Agbabi and Patricia Debney - wandering about and capturing the speech rhythms of delirious nature in delicate, limpid verse or brusque, urgent quatrains.
Yes, spring has come to the Hurst, and with it those merry-makers of the English language, the poets. We’ve got a terrific group this week – we have a terrific group every week at the Hurst – who have grasped the Arvon bull by the horns, and are churning out poems by the fistful, as well as cooking up a storm, engaging in exciting debates about issues of import, and having a quiet drink at the end of a long day to celebrate a job well done. Then a quick dip into the dream world of the unconscious, before another day behind the mule that is poetry.
Last week – playwrights, under the wonderful, entertaining tutelage of Tim Fountain and Natasha Betteridge. It was our first open programme week of the year, crowned by a final day of performing plays by all 14 participants, in perhaps the most epic day of theatre since Euripides pulled up stumps, took his bat and ball home, and declared the Greek Empire decayed beyond the reaches of satire.
We’ve got more theatre coming up, of course, with David Eldridge and Robert Holman spending the week with us from May 7 to 12. The guest will be Dominic Cooke, Associate Director at the Royal Court Theatre, who will be joining us in a week famous in theatrical circles for the first performance of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger on May 8, 1956. And as we’re in Mr Osborne’s lodgings, we were very excited when Dominic accepted our invitation.
So if you have the next Look Back in Anger lodged in you and you just can’t get it out, why not join us in early May? The daffys will be on their last legs, but that’s only because they have to make way for the rhododendrons, blue bells and, you know that flower that’s sort of pink, but kind of white? The thingy-whatsit? Lotsa them, too.
Right, back to the garden to pound out some unsprung villanelles.
Respect.
Pete
(Peter Salmon, Centre Director, Hurst)
