Home straight

Only three more days of Lowdham Book Festival to go. You can find the remaining programme on http://www.lowdhambookfestival.co.uk/. Today we went head to head with the footie with Daisy Hay talking about the "Young Romantics", Byron et al. She was wearing a rather nice dress with a daisy design. I wanted to ask if she always wears daisies. OK, our audience of 75 was a shade less than the tens of millions watching the football match, but still, not bad for an afternoon event. Maybe we need to make little Lowdham Book Festival flags we can put on our cars and bicycles. We also had our celebration of Alan Sillitoe. The biggie for this will be in Nottingham on October 2nd, but Alan was a great friend of the Festival and we wanted to mark that. We had a full house, and people were particularly pleased that David Sillitoe read some of Alan's work. Tomorrow we go Italian, Friday some Five Leaves irregulars, Berlie Doherty, John Harvey and Jon McGregor talk about their fave books. And then "the last Saturday" - 26 free events, a big book fair, cafe. I never get to see any of the speakers. My role is to stand in the one place and say "The WI is down there" or "No, I don't have any blutack" and "Right, I'll get more toilet roll". The cutting edge of literature.

New this month at Five Leaves

Old City, New Rumours is available, Poems of C Day-Lewis and The Tolpuddle Boy will be out mid-month, Scamp and Rain on the Pavements will be available in late June. Any or all can be ordered meantime from bookshops or from http://www.inpressbooks.co.uk/.

Danger: Left-wing sensibility at work

Our friends over at the internet magazine The Recusant have published an interesting and long review of The Night Shift. A small sample is extracted below. You can find the full review on http://www.therecusant.org.uk/#/night-shift-review/4541311913. It is awkward to print out, what you do is copy it by covering the text and sliding down till it ends on the screen on the website, then simply pasting it into Word afterwards. But it is a bit fiddly. If reading on screen simply keep scrolling down.

"With so many contemporary poetry anthologies attempting to define a zeitgeist aesthetic of today via a relative handful of ‘academy’ graduates, it is heartening to read an anthology which takes a more diverse sweep of voices and styles to emphasize the timelessness of certain poetic themes. The Night Shift is an ambitious anthology – beautifully produced by Nottingham-based press Five Leaves in A5 hardback – themed around ‘night’, and comprised of three sections: ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ (night shift work), ‘In The Forests of the Night’ (nocturnal animal kingdom), and ‘The Crumpled Duvet’ (insomnia). This is not therefore an anthology with a literary agenda; politically, there is a certain welcome left-wing sensibility at work, particularly in the in the first section, but this is par for the course with radical presses such as Five Leaves; this is essentially an anthology in the original sense of the word, a collecting together of poems across the literary canon, past and present, all linked by theme of ‘night’. There is a thoughtful Foreword by Welsh broadcaster John Humphrys, and three introductions by the editors to their respective sections."

Colin Ward, Anarchist, 1924 - 2010

'Think of others...'
Memorial and Celebration of Colin's life and work
Saturday, 10 July 2010, 2.00pm-5.00pm
Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1
All welcome
Ken Worpole: Colin Ward and the anarchism of everyday life
"Colin Ward in conversation with Roger Deakin", introduced by Mike Dibb
Harriet Ward: On meeting Colin Ward
Stuart White: Colin Ward: making anarchism respectable, but not too respectable
Peter Marshall: Colin Ward in the history of Anarchism
Tony Fyson: Colin Ward at work
Dennis Hardy: On the margins

Plus ca change

Ginsberg found himself confronted with the typewriter. A story a day, that was his minimum task; two thousand words, preferably with a plot, development, a climax and a twist. After six months of this routine, he was beginning to feel an intense hatred of the short story, in fact of all writing. What an abominable occupation it was! What a struggle! For what meagre prizes! Only the middlemen, he felt, were to be envied; the publishers, editors, anthologists and functionaries who stood between the raw material and the public purse. ...the thought of writing another short story disgusted him. He had had enough of battering his head against a brick wall. In six months, three acceptances, by obscure magazines published from addresses deep in the countryside. Three stories at three or four guineas each; a little over ten pounds for six months' hard labour, exclusive of expenses or paper, postage and so on. He put the cover on the dusty typewriter...
From Scamp by Roland Camberton, republished soon by New London Editions

Tolpuddling around

Five Leaves is putting out a new edition of Alan Brown's (or rather Alan James Brown as he must become because someone else nicked the franchise on his first name) children's book, Tolpuddle Boy, in time for the annual Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival in July. Rooting around on the Tolpuddle Museum's website I was strangely thrilled to find God is our Guide: the Tolpuddle Martyrs and their Methodist Roots. This pamphlet tells of the Tolpuddle Martyrs and how their faith guided their actions but made them rebels in the eyes of the established church. The booklet tells of the Tolpuddle Chapels built by the village Methodists. It is published by the Dorchester Circuit of the Southampton District of the Methodist Church. I think it was the publisher that made it an exciting find. Who needs HarperCollins?

Lowdham at eleven

The programme for the eleventh Lowdham Book Festival in Nottinghamshire (15 June - 1 July) is now available online at http://www.lowdhambookfestival.co.uk/, though the box office is not in operation until Monday. Five Leaves jointly organises the Festival with The Bookcase in Lowdham. The Festival was meant to be quite slimmed down after the big tenth Festival, particularly as we did not attract Arts Council funding, but, y'know, 75 writers and an even longer Festival. It just happened. If you have never been before come on the 26th June - 26 events, all free, a children's programme, a large book fair and a cafe. And if you only have one evening free, come on June 21st to hear Mark Cocker on birds followed by quite a lot of bat stuff, or on Friday 25th when John Harvey, Jon McGregor and Berlie Doherty talk about what they read, rather than the books they have written, or on... You could also put your name down for our literary weekend in Paris. Email info@fiveleaves.co.uk with your address if you want a printed programme sent.