INTERVIEW: FIRE & DUST MEETS ROY MCFARLANE
We first met Roy at the Big Comfy Lit Fest in 2016, where the audience loved him and his performance, so we were delighted to welcome him back for Fire & Dust in May. After the gig, we caught up with our special guest to ask a few questions…
INTERVIEW: FIRE & DUST MEETS MATT DUGGAN
In June 2019, Matt Duggan travelled from Bristol to be our Fire & Dust headline poet and treat us to the first ever live reading from Woodworm. We caught up with him after the event, to ask a few questions…
INTERVIEW: FIRE & DUST MEETS DWANE READS
Based in Derby, Dwane Reads has been kicking around in different artistic guises since 1985. A member of the DIY Poets in Nottingham, and the 2017 winner of the Derby Poetry Festival competition, Dwane is educated in Fine Art, has trained as a teacher, and plans to keep writing and performing his work. He has published several books, including ‘The Annoying Megaphone Pigeon’ (2013) and ‘Slogans Soundbites & Poetry’ (2017). […]
SABOTEUR AWARDS 2019
As you remember, we were chuffed when our monthly poetry event in Coventry, Fire & Dust, was shortlisted for Best Spoken Word Night (2018). This year, what we’d really love is for Here Comes Everyone to be put on the map by being shortlisted for – or, even better, winning! – Best Magazine. To do this, we need your help. It’s time to vote again […]
REVIEW: JO BELL’S ‘KITH’
Each of us speaks our chosen language most clearly, Bell suggests, when we are in the element that suits us best – it is this, perhaps, that is our true kith. A boat in dry dock is “A welded tongue; she’s fluent wet/and dumbstruck dry”; in Lancashire, brass bands play “music turned on lathes…borrowed songs, but spoken in our tongue”. Language transcends mere words. It […]
REVIEW: JANE COMMANE’S ‘ASSEMBLY LINES’
Assembly Lines, Commane’s subtle, complex début collection, explores the impact of growing up in an era of decline, and the ambiguity of emotional attachment to its landscapes. To vistas that are “nondescript”, “forgettable” and like “Morris, Austins and Talbots, slightly crap, even when new”, she brings an appreciation more traditionally applied to the natural world, together with a determination to […]
REVIEW: BEN ARMSTRONG’S ‘PERENNIAL’
“The whale king extends a flipper, walk with him”. To get the most from Ben Armstrong’s début collection, Perennial: Notes from a Weatherproof Journal, set aside your hesitations about the weirdness of this command, and go with it. You will be rewarded with a trip through an internal landscape that is spare, surreal and in places impenetrably strange; but which also […]
Announcement: Contributors to The Rituals Issue
In The Rituals Issue (January 2019), “everyone” was…
FIRE & DUST MEETS: HOLLY WATSON
We don’t want to pigeonhole you, so – in your own words, can you tell our readers what you do and what you’re about. I write a blog called The Coventry Conch about growing up on the outskirts of the city in the 90s and early 00s. […]
INTERVIEW: FIRE & DUST MEETS PETER RAYNARD
PRECARIOUS BY PETER RAYNARD Smokestack Books
ISBN 978-0-9957675-9-1 £7.99/95 pages
“Young Timmy knows how to enjoy himself, / he cleans double breasted windows, / or checks under the sink for some / scantily clad plumbing, before delivering / a whipped cream double entendre […]