Lowdham Book Festival 2013

Lowdham Book Festival is over for another year, though with our monthly First Friday lectures, our winter weekend, an autumn season planned and the annual "Lowdham Lecture" it can be difficult to tell.
But the summer festival is always our best attended event, our highlight of the year, which this year featured 46 individual events. This summer was our fourteenth.
Family problems in Scotland limited my personal involvement in 2012 and we were unable to run our "last Saturday" that year, which has always been part of my contribution, so it was great to be fully involved and to bring that particular day back. My colleague Jane says that is "the heart of the festival". I am less sure on that, as the festival has no shortage of hearts, but it certainly felt great to have hundreds of people rushing from event to event or spending money at the - this year - 33 bookstalls. Ten or twelve of the seventeen events for adults on that day had house full notices up and the children's events were pretty busy. You can't always predict what will be popular - who would have expected 60+ people to turn up for a talk on women in the Sudan? But that is the nature of a day which provides a showcase for many regional writers and a leavening of authors from elsewhere. What else was popular? A talk on fairytale in fiction, on Vesuvius, the poetry of the first world war, John Clare, London Fiction... That day is the day we really do aim to merge the idea of a literature festival with a village fete so a lot of people come to meet their friends and just soak up the atmosphere. The most popular stall? Cleeve Press from Leicester showing off their letterpress printing, allowing people to print out their own cards, and Ed Herington to make up the illustration here.
We basked in sunshine, which always helps, but did miss the local allotment-holders stall this year, missing due to a bad spring affecting their produce. They'll be back next year.
I've heard good reports on the events on that day - but my role is to stand in the one position to say "the Methodist Chapel is down the road", "sorry, I don't have any Blutac", "Thank you for telling me the women's toilets are blocked..." and to clear the café tables in the spare moments. Thirteen years of that particular day and I've yet to attend an event. But the toilets have only blocked twice, so I can't complain.
Of the other events over the festival, my favourite day was the Victorian Day at Bromley House Library (Lowdham Book Festival on Tour) which was magical. We could only seat 40 people at this great venue, a Grade 2 listed building in the centre of the town, and the lucky 40 had a set of speakers whose contributions all flowed into one another - Michael Payne on Victorian Nottingham, Judith Flanders on Victorian London, Michael Eaton on the Victorian criminal Charlie Peace and Ann Featherstone on Victorian fairs and entertainment. Throw in a guided tour of this fascinating building, rather a lot of cake, and it was a day hard to beat.
What else? Impressed with Simon Mayo, enjoyed interviewing Kerry Young, Hazel O'Connor got two standing ovations... I could go on, but I do want to mention how much I enjoyed the reading of Will Buckingham, accompanied by his own playing of classical guitar. That was magical and rather unexpected.
Problems? Not a lot. One author missed a train and just got there in time; there was a technical problem on a highly illustrated talk which meant I had to interview someone at five minutes notice about a television programme I'd never seen and a book I'd never opened. It was an exciting five minutes preparing questions. No floods (we remember that year well...), no overhead power lines going down (another year to remember)... it all ran rather smoothly. Thanks, of course to the team - the front of house volunteers and the Warthog group that runs the music events during the Festival - and, especially, my colleague Jane Streeter and her staff from The Bookcase in Lowdham. One of the authors emailed afterwards to say "A very enjoyable day and the Festival was clearly a real success. Many congrats to you and Jane and all your helpers for an excellent job. It's really hard work putting on something like this and you all seemed to do both very well, yet in a stress-free and good-humoured way. Quite an achievement! I was delighted to be a small part of it." I'm a bit embarrassed printing this comment, but for once, let's boast.
Lowdham moves on... our First Friday programme is sorted. Our big event this autumn is a reading from War Horse with Michael Morpurgo and accompanying musicians John Tams and Barry Coope, in the wonderful setting of Southwell Minster. You can join Lowdham Book Festival's email list via janestreeter@thebookcase.co.uk or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
Meantime, I've got lots of new reading material.
 

Lowdham Book Festival 2012

The programme is now available, at www.lowdhambookfestival.co.uk, where it can be viewed or downloaded. This is the thirteenth Festival, and though the programme is in the name of Jane Streeter and I, Jane has had to do most of the work this year. Every draft copy of the programme seemed to add another event or two. These range from a dog walk (there is a bookish reason, but nonetheless a rarity at book festivals - next year we go for the gerbil market) through to an evening with Ben Fogle. The Festival runs throughout June, with the last ten days being the core. Several Five Leaves "irregulars" put in an appearance - John Harvey, Jon McGregor, Chris Arnot, Stephen Booth, John Lucas, Alan Gibbons - but the only event dedicated to one of our books is Peter Mortimer talking about his new Made in Nottingham on 30th June.
Lowdham regulars will immediately notice that the traditional "last day" jamboree is not happening this year. This is largely because that has always been one of my jobs and I've not been around much, but it will return, refreshed, next year. Nevertheless the Festival includes 36 writers, 7 musicians, several craft workers, two storytelling troupes, one dog walker, six writers groups (in the fringe festival) and one rather large food festival.
Back in the mists of time, after the first Festival, we surveyed our public - did you want us to carry on with book festivals or would you prefer an arts festival? Opinion formers said "arts festival", but vox pop said "book festival". At the time such things were less common, and we concluded that people liked the prestige of a book festival, but were happy for us to cover other arts under that banner. So we've done theatre, film, early music, rock music, classical music, sports (OK, that isn't an art form, not even at my home town team of Hawick Royal Albert), and we've dabbled in food - but an all day food festival is new.
If you can't go to everything... my recommendation is our annual Readers Day (on June 30), with Jon McGregor performing his own man show based on This Isn't the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You after which he will interview John Harvey. Oxygen Books is running a "City-Pick Nottingham" session, reading from local writers from the past and present. The whole day costs £20, which includes lunch, tea and coffee and a comp copy of McGregor or Harvey's latest hardback. A bargain. This annual day is being used as a model around the country.
I may not have had such a big hand in the Festival this year, but Pippa at the Five Leaves office did, designing and typesetting the programme.

Happy Birthday, The Bookcase

The Bookcase in Lowdham is 15 tomorrow. The shop is a village bookshop, about eight miles from Nottingham, the village having about 2,000 residents. It was a brave move to start a shop there but the owner, Jane Streeter, had worked in legal bookselling in London before moving back to Nottinghamshire where she had three children. She kept up her subscription to The Bookseller, with the long term aim of setting up her own shop. The rumour is that her accountant husband, Andy Streeter, worked out it would be financially better to open a shop than to have another child and a shop was duly opened. The first shop was very small. If too many customers came in, others would have to leave. But it thrived. A couple of years later - at our first meeting - we decided to start a book festival in the village. Book festivals were not as trendy or as numerous as they are now. We wanted to have a festival that combined the notion of a high quality book festival with the life and rhythms of the village - using venues like the Primitive Methodist Chapel and the WI. It worked, and continues, with some events attracting up to 450 people.

Meantime the shop moved to bigger premises, developed a school supply side and uses every opportunity to sell books. It is, and will always be, a shop orientated to the needs of the village, selling gifts, and tickets for any local shows. but it is a village that has retained its pubs, its post office, a butcher and a co-op, a very busy village hall and a great cultural life. Jane Streeter has engaged with the wider literature community, launching books by local writers, developing a dedicated local books website (http://www.nottinghambooks.co.uk/), running bookstalls and the shop now provides jobs for several other booksellers. Always active in the booktrade, Jane became one of only two or three women to become President of the Booksellers Association, and the first person from a village bookshop to have held the post. She is one year in with another to go, and she is involved nationally (and internationally) in every aspect of bookselling. The slogan "think global, act local" has been turned on its head to be "think local, act global". Congrats to the whole Bookcase team. http://www.thebookcase.co.uk/

Lowdham - a round up

"I love Lowdham, mostly because it is a village festival and isn’t suffocating. There is always something I want to go to, somebody I want to hear... Anyway, who can fault a book festival that one year featured cartoonists Posy Simmons, Steve Bell and the irascible Martin Rowson." This from an interview with the cartoonist "Brick" in LeftLion, online. Brick has spoken at the Festival a few times. Over on www.dumbles.co.uk there's a nice flavour of the Festival as well. There have been many other comments, but I like this website because we've always tried to create a quality book festival, but with the atmosphere of a village fete and that comes across. These days we also have events in other local villages, Caythorpe and Woodborough, but the heart of the Festival (for me) is the "last Saturday" in Lowdham, where we have a complete day of free events, a book fair, a cafe, a children's programme. We joke that my fellow organiser Jane Streeter's job is to bring in some big names over the Festival to make a profit, which I blow on marquees in one day. The biggest name this year was Stella Rimington (stepping in at the last minute for John Simpson - Lowdham must have been too scary for him). Stella is a spy novelist who used to head up MI5. Not so much the spy who came in from the cold as the spy who came in from Nottingham Girls' High School. She was certainly one of the best speakers we've had in our twelve years. There is some irony that the profits from her event, attended by 450 people, enabled us to put on an introduction to anarchism, held in the heartland of rural revolution, the Lowdham WI. Except it is not irony. We love and need "big names" at the Festival but have no time for Festivals that are only that. Equally important to us has been a range of smaller events - this time, for example, we included a talk on Buddhism and a friend of the Festival organised a Byron bike ride. But even small events are not that small - about 50 people came to the intro. to anarchism and a talk on the Moomins and philosophy was packed out. We also do our best to give platforms to East Midlands' writers - this year being particularly pleased that Stephen Edden (AKA Steve Hill) is now the second person in the village to become a professional writer (the other being the children's writer Elizabeth Baguley). The Festival also hosted the first East Midlands Book Award, with two of the Festival team and two others close to the Festival making up the Trustees.

The "last Saturday" started off with four full houses - talks on Roman Nottinghamshire, on England in the 1950s, on Shelley as punk rocker and on letter-writing in Jane Austen's novels. Meanwhile the children's marquee got going, which, later in the day, included appearances by the local Catfoot Theatre and children's writers Tom Palmer and Helena Pielichaty. By four the cafe was down to teabags - it was one of those days. But it was not the real last Saturday and we continued the next day with the Ian McMillan Orchestra in Nottingham (Lowdham Book Festival on Tour) and carry on, in fits and starts, until July 14th. The shape of this year's Festival is like a python that has swallowed a large meal - long and thin with a big bump in the middle.

One minor problem is money. After an exhausting tenth year (65 events in one week, plus a school's programme and a total attendance of about 6,000) the Festival was unable to secure Arts Council funding. We've had to scale back our schools' and outreach programme somewhat but still manage some work in nurseries, schools and care homes - calling in favours or drawing on our resources to pay for this important part of our work.

What does the future hold? Next year we enter our early teenage years. I hope we do more than sit in a corner and grunt or spend all our time staring at our mobiles, waiting from incoming texts. We'd like to revive our former schools' work, work with prisoners and excluded pupils, and we hope to put on the "green weekend" that we've been talking about for a few years but never got round to. All it takes is money and time... time and money. Meantime, there's a Five Leaves backlog to take care of.

Lowdham Book Festival

Regulars here, and anyone who knows Five Leaves will be aware that I jointly organise Lowdham Book Festival in Nottinghamshire, now entering its twelfth year - see http://www.lowdhambookfestival.co.uk/ - with Jane Streeter from The Bookcase in Lowdham. This year's Festival runs from 14 June - 14 July and includes about 40 events featuring 60 or so writers. This year's stars include John Simpson, Kate Morton and Gervaise Phinn, but they are all sold out already - in Simpson's case that means selling out a 450 seater in one week. We programme late and quickly and, unlike most book festivals, we release the programme about four weeks in advance, finishing the programming sometimes about one day or even on the day the presses roll. Don't think I am kidding. Jane is busy running her bookshop (this year and next also being President of the Booksellers Association) and I'm busy with Five Leaves so it suits our schedules to work that way. Scary though. A couple of years ago, being our tenth year, we had 65 events over ten days and a full programme for children. Boy, that was fun. It really was. One year we postponed printing the programme, feeling we were not there yet, and one week later did the same again. On the absolute last weekend we could possibly have printed and distributed the programme we booked three major acts which were the making of the Festival and people got barely any notice. That year our attendance was the biggest to date.

John Simpson, Kate Morton and Gervaise Phinn are hardly Five Leaves' writers and we do keep a curtain between the press and the Festival to avoid being seen as too self-serving though naturally we use our contacts, as Jane uses hers, and if it feels appropriate we programme Five Leaves' writers about as much as we would similar writers from any local publisher. This year, for example, Mark Patterson gives his first proper talk on Roman Nottinghamshire, John Lucas dusts off his talk on England in the 1950s, Danuta Reah represents the Crime Express lot and some other writers - David Belbin especially - are published by us but are speaking to their work with other publishers. The Festival also provides the venue for the first East Midlands' Book Award which Jane and I (and John Lucas and David Belbin) have set up and act as trustees for, with Ian McMillan chairing the judging panel. The winner gets £1000 and the shortlist has been promoted as widely as we could. We're not the judges though, and no Five Leaves' or Shoestring (run by John Lucas) writers, Bookcase contacts or graduates of the MA in Creative Writing (run until recently by David Belbin) are on the shortlist. Honestly, you ask the judges to act completely independently without fear or favour and then they do! What sort of world are we living in?

If you can only make Lowdham on one day, come on 25th June. We have a huge book fair, an all day cafe, a full children's programme and 16 events for adults. That day, all events are free and a we put up a pile of marquees to host talks and stalls. Traditionally that is mostly one of my programming days so we have talks on the Moomins and philosophy, anarchism for beginners and on Shelley, but this year Jane has sneaked in talks on the footballer Tommy Lawton (he used to run a pub on Main Street) and invited Jasper Fforde whose auntie lives in the village. I'm not complaining. We also have some talks over the festival on music - Rob Young on visionary music, Graham Jones on the last of the record shops and Ian Clayton on "Bringing it all back home". With the local Warthog Promotions we have live music too - Barbara Dickson and The Demon Barber Roadshow. All part of the fun, and while Barbara Dickson has written a book we never worry too much about that, and the Festival has included early music, rock music, classical music and Indian music. Nobody ever asked why Kiki Dee has appeared twice at the Festival, with not a book in sight. What is important to us is that we provide a platform for our local talent as well as provide entertainment or inspiration from "national" figures. And we can be a bit cranky, hence a talk on Buddhist meditation and a Byron bicycle trip. I should point out that Jane booked the former! Our first step into "inner life".