Hello! Welcome to our first issue of the year!
We’re really excited to welcome all the Freshers to the University of Gloucestershire. We’ve already had a great start to the year with our brand new quiz night at Smokey Joe’s. It was a fantastic introduction to the revamped Creative Writing Society, and we’re looking forward to meeting lots more of you at the Open Reading, Compass launch and the other upcoming events that you can read about in this issue. We also had the opportunity to grill the new lecturer on the block, Lania Knight. She’s an excellent addition to the team and you can read all about her in the interview on page 16. Most of all, we hope you’ve all had a great Summer. Once again, welcome and welcome back. Enjoy Issue 6! It’s going to be a great year. The Editors Charl Harrison & Ash Hartridge
For Freshers and the academic explorer alike; A map of the best bookshops, stationery dens and writerly hideaways. This town has a lot more to offer...
Derbyshire-bound, MA playwrights followed the poets to production.
The ultimate survival guide. Don’t forget your magnifying glass!
Our top pick of events that connect to the Creative Writing modules.
6. The Ultimate Freshers’ Writing Kit
13. Meet the Creative Writing Society Team
8. Writing for your First Workshop
14. The Buxton Fringe Festival 27. How to Get Involved with & the Journey from Dymock Show Don’t Tell
9. Five Tips for Freshers
16. An Interview with Lania Knight
10. A Writer’s Guide to Cheltenham 12. Survival Guide to Secondhand Bookshops
20. Be Inspired: Reading
26. Cheltenham Literature Festival
28. Dates for your Diary 29. What Hunter S. Thompson Would Have Ordered at Smokey Joe’s
22. Page Burner & Page Turner 30. Upcoming Events 24. Theatre Hotspot
Get your hands on these essentials to fill your toolkit and let the ink flow...
Don’t lose any quotations for upcoming essays.
You need these for inspiration and for your RCUs.
Your vocabulary in your pocket.
For on the bus, or on your lunch.
For jotting down those sparks of imagination.
English Breakfast is fine - but don’t be scared to drink fancy.
For writing. A pen that’s passed the test.
A tried and tested way of getting things done.
Keep a jar of change for pens, papers and secondhand books.
For a lockable room. Sometimes privacy is a priority for writing.
An on-the-go book for long notes.
One for show. Note: it doesn’t have to be fluffy.
What else would you drink from?
Because one stick is easier to carry than seven notebooks.
A long night ahead? No writer should go without snacks.
And, your very own book of tips and triggers.
WRITING FOR YOUR
FIRST WORKSHOP Your first submission looming and your page is still blank? Want to write a short piece for the new issue but no clue where to start? Use the following to inspire you and get you in the mood...
1. Write about a simple board game that turns its players into pie-eyed cutthroats. 2. Write a scene in which a pair of shoes figures prominently. 3.Write about a person whose reputation rests on the appearance of an inanimate object. 4. Fill in the blank: When I first told my family about _________,they didn’t believe me. 5. Finish this: I could have avoided all that trouble if only I’d remembered to...
These triggers and more tips can be found inside The Pocket Muse by Monica Wood.
Your first year is going to be busy and will most likely involve a lot of trips to pub, a lot of late night Domino’s orders, and maybe a couple of last minute assignment struggles. To avoid the latter, here are five tips to help you get into some good study habits from the start. Do your assigned reading. It sounds obvious I’m sure, but you’re going to be busy. I guarantee most of you will have a moment of standing outside your lecture talking to your friends when one of them will ask you if you’ve read that David Foster Wallace story Mike was nearly crying about, then you’ll pause awkwardly and realise that you were going to do it but then Barry or whoever you’re living with wanted you to play Ring of Fire instead. So no, you didn’t remember to do the reading. Get into the habit of doing it from the start; it will help you develop as a writer and understand the things you’re getting taught in lectures. Write. Edit. Re-write. Repeat. Editing is one of the most important skills that a creative writing course can teach you. It’s a harsh truth but no first draft is “good”. They can be okay, satisfactory, or have a noticeable potential in them, but a refined and polished quality of writing? That can only come from editing. It is a rarer occurrence that a writer can produce a good draft first time, but these will still always improve with edits.
Remember to prepare workshop feedback. Workshops are like relationships: you can’t put in nothing and expect to get everything. Read everyone’s work and make notes so you have something prepared to contribute for each piece. The workshop environment is all about helping each other and the better you get at critiquing the work of others, the better you get at self-editing. Do not fear the lecturers. Okay, maybe fear them and their rather eccentric qualities a little, but if you’re really struggling with something do not be afraid to ask for their advice. There is nothing worse than being stuck on an assignment idea and doing nothing about it all semester. If you’re struggling, talk to them, or you’re more than welcome to talk to any of the society members. Enjoy it. Writing is hard. It takes a lot of work and commitment, but all of this is worth it if you love it. Enjoy the reading, enjoy the workshopping, the lectures, the strange and wonderful personalities of the people teaching you, enjoy the open readings and the socials, and enjoy watching yourself get so much better over the next three years.
Who’s who in Creative Writing?
The Buxton Fringe Festival is an annual open-arts showcase in Derbyshire, which included a play written by four MA students. Matthew Pinnell tells Show Don’t Tell all about the trip to the Dreamshed. By now, you will inevitably have been asked the question. Perhaps it was asked by an obnoxious uncle, or a cynical
apprenticeship friend. The question, of course, is this: “So, what exactly do you hope to gain from a degree in Creative Writing?” If you’re a first year and new to the world of the creative writer, I can inform you that your answer will usually begin with “Well…” Then will follow something similar to “because it’s what I want to do”, or “because it called to me” neither of which your cynical apprenticeship friend will understand, because it has nothing to do with ‘prospects for
your future, career or money’. Of course one can state reasons such as “it teaches you how to edit”, “it teaches one how to speak and write convincingly”, or even “it teaches one to become a thinker, which is good for any job”. But, let’s face it: none of these answers will convince your obnoxious uncle. “You can’t just ‘learn’ to be a good writer”, he’ll say, “such a course is a waste of time and money”. How do you argue with something like that? How do you convince your obnoxious/cynical uncle/ friend of the value of the course you’ve chosen to engage with? You do it with three very simple concepts. CONTACTS. COMMISSIONS. OPPORTUNITIES. Allow me to tell you a story...
This, then, is what a Creative Writing course can offer: fame, adventures, and, most importantly, opportunities to be published. You will not finish your course as yet another person with a degree: you will finish this course as an Author.
New lecturer on the block, Lania Knight, tells Show Don’t Tell about her teenage adventures, guilty pleasure book and her recently finished novel... So, why did you decide to come to the UK? Last year I was a visitingprofessor at a study abroad programme in Lincolnshire. It was 150 American students, eight American professors and ten British professors and staff and faculty. We stayed in a manor house a lot like Hog-
warts. That was last fall in 2014. When I got home I just had to go back… I absolutely loved it. The setting really affected my writing, being around people who talk all kinds of English in different accents. And people love to read here. On the tube in London: people are reading books, on their iPad, their iPhone. So yeah, I just wanted to come back to the UK because I just loved it here and thought it’d be really good for my writing and I was ready for something different. Tell us about your novel Three Cubic Feet? I wrote it when I was a grad
student at the University of Missouri. It’s about a gay teenager. It started in a grad workshop. One of my fellow students submitted a story and I knew I was going to hate it from the opening lines. I didn’t really like his writing or his personality, but because he submitted the story I knew I had to read it and comment on it. So, I promised myself the next thing I started, I was going to write something really interesting to me. I was going to treat myself. In Spring Break, we went camping with a bunch of other families and there was this one teenage boy among all these young kids and he was alone and separate
from everyone else. He became the character. I decided I wanted to write about something I know and I did a mash up of a teenage boy and being attracted to men. I didn’t intend to write a political novel, it just sort of turned out that’s who he was. Because I'm not male, I'm not sixteen and I'm not gay, I had to do a lot of research. I have a lot of gay friends so I talked to them and followed them to different places. I went to a lot of gay bars. It got to the point that I saw so many gay films, it was weird to see a man and a woman kissing. But, the more that I wrote it, the more I realised it was about me in a lot of ways. I left home when I was sixteen and I was very much a tomboy. I grew up in Texas and there’s a very strict gender delineation. So, I got to rewrite some of my teenager-hood. There’s a fight scene in there between Theo and his crush and I realised after I wrote it that it’s also about my first marriage. I never had equal footing. I was always outgunned basically. In that scene they’re equally matched. Now I feel like I have this experience of how to hold your own with an equal. Tell us about your recently completed novel? It's working title is Remnants. It’s a completely different
book, and it’s Science Fiction. I never really did much with my first degree apart from working on farms. A few years ago on this long drive, I started listening to audio books and in particular Botany of Desire. The premise is that the way we describe plants is that they’re domesticated, but if you think about it we do all the work for the plants. When I was driving to work, I saw one of those lorries they have when they’re taking pigs and cows to slaughter and I thought what if there were people in there instead of animals? the idea of humans being livestock. Then I found this character and I realised she was a clone and she was the last clone from this evil person someone I had marched against when I was young who then had a lot of genetic material. She doesn’t realise she’s a clone; she’s living on a farm and is being plumped up. I read a lot of stuff about cloning. I re-read all the books I read for my undergraduate. It was interesting because I had these thoughts that I thought were my own but they were really things I’d already read. I wanted to write a more complicated book. I wanted the challenge of doing that. I’m writing from different points of view; each character knows a little bit more than the other
about what’s going on. It’s also a journey kind of book; they go on a trek. So yeah, it’s completely different but it’s still sort of about me. She is around thirteen and comes to this realisation of who she is and just has to escape. Where do you find your inspiration? Everywhere. You should absolutely be reading as much as possible and as widely as possible. I read all the time but they’ll be moments when I'm open and I'm looking for something to present itself to me. When I'm looking around, I'll be looking at people and I'll think ooh, why are they wearing that today? Currently, what is inspiring me is Tyler's book The Drive. When I went to England last year I started setting goals for myself as a writer. One of the things I've done really well since the beginning is dialogue. I have a good ear for dialogue but there are other things I need to get better at. One of my goals was to write more sensory details, so I would sit and just describe what was around me. One of my goals for myself right now is to be funny. I've had a lot of really dark things happen in my life and some people respond in a funny way and some people
don’t. I've always loved reading other people who are funny, but I couldn’t create it myself. So I've been reading more funny things. I picked up Tyler's book at the library and he’s just hilarious. My goal is to keep nourishing this funny voice I've recently created. I've just finished a novel so I feel ready now, I feel like this character is coming to me. What would you say is your specialism? That’s hard. The things that come to mind are physicality, like a sense of the body and how that plays out in the character. Also a sense of place. It’s really important to me, like I'm really sensitive to where I am; location, sunlight, people around me... When I lived on a farm we used to play a game of can you guess what time of day it is? and I always used to get it within the minute, like part of me just knew the sun was going across the sky. Dialogue, for sure, is one of my strengths. I was trained to be a writer and a scholar scholarly work being when there is no first person. But that doesn’t work for me. Instead, the writing usually always has something to do with who I am, even if I don’t realise it at the start.
What’s your guilty pleasure book? Dear Sugar, a.k.a. Tiny Beautiful Things, by Cheryl Strayed. It’s based on an advice column called Sugar Says. People write in about these terrible, difficult, complicated questions and she addresses what they’re asking but she does it through writing a narrative about her own life. She’s been through so much. I love how honest she is. There’s no time for bullshit. It keeps me honest. I think what would Sugar say? When I got this job, I linked to one of her columns which was called “Write Like A Motherf***er”. If you couldn’t be a writer what would you be doing? I'd be in broadcast journalism like at the BBC. I didn’t know that that kind of thing existed when I was growing up. The only kind of news on the radio was if something big happened. They’d stop the music and announce someone’s died. I would find stories in other people’s lives and bring that to radio. If I couldn’t do that, one thing I wanted to do was to be a translator. I was learning German when I was young - I even started to dream in German. But then I made other choices. I left home on the back of a motorcycle. I was sixteen and had some other adventures instead.
“I’m not looking for reassurance anymore, I know I’m a writer” Is there a moment when you felt like a ‘true’ writer? It happens in little steps. Of course, getting a publication like a book is a big thing. Another thing is people, who aren’t invested in your life, saying: “This is good”. What really took me a long time was the things I know I'm good at now. I think I was intuitively a storyteller, but I couldn’t talk about what made a story work. I felt like because I couldn’t explain it maybe it wasn’t really there. In ceasing to compete with other people and then letting go of my ego, I learnt from other grad students who did know how to do it. Now I understand why it works and that helps me as a teacher. It took me a long time, and part of that is just experience. Maybe it happened last fall when I was in England. I had enough publications, enough people telling me it was good, all my classes were going well so I had good feedback to give to my students. I'm not looking for reassurance anymore, I know I'm a writer now.
Do you have any hobbies outside of writing? Walking. Which is a part of writing because I'm thinking. I let my mind be free and look at the trees and the sky and all these ideas come to me. I love going to plays. I can’t get away from stories. I love anything to do with forests. I don't know if you know this, but my first degree is in plant science and environmental conservation. I'm fascinated by the natural world and how it acts upon us and our place within it and what we’re doing to it which is not good. Here, you don’t see a lot of the effects, but when I was in China I saw a lot of yellow soupy air and that air is just contaminated. What’s the biggest difference between the UK and the US? Driving. When I moved here, I made a commitment to not get a car and only walk or take public transportation. It’s really affected the way I react to the world and my pace. I got angry a lot while I was driving. There were no options, you had to have your own car where I used to live. Another thing is the physicality. I'm really aware of how different it feels to not have to fold yourself into a car everyday and be angry. Another big difference is the sense of hu-
mour here. There’s several layers to the way I'm observing people interacting with each other. Humour, and considerateness. People observe each other. I'm renting a room with an older couple and you can tell they’re watching out for me, like they’re watching to see if I can use this utensil or something. All the British people I'm interacting with are considerate, like people holding the door open. That’s a big Southern thing in the States. I thought people in the UK would be in too much of a rush. What’s your favourite thing you’ve done since moving to Cheltenham? Probably, going to Bristol with Mike and Lucy. We went to see the play, An Oak Tree. We went to four different pubs. It’s got all the different things I love. I got to hang out with my colleagues, saw a play, and of course we discussed it afterwards. I love pub culture and we took the train and I love trains. There’s been nothing I haven’t liked since I've been here, apart from one interaction at the post office. Another thing is the march in London for the refugees. I marched in that and it was incredible. There were all kinds of people there and it was great to reconnect with
activism and with what it means to be part of a group again. It was really amazing. Now you're here, what are your plans? Write. Write. Write. I'm in the process of getting a flat which is very exciting. I want to get furniture. I want to get to know this region. I'm going to go to Winchcombe this weekend, Sudeley Castle, is it? I’m going to a “Car Boot Sale” too… Although we don’t call it that in the States. And I want to write. I love teaching too, I love students, and I’m so glad students are on campus. The balance is of digging in with work and hanging out with my awesome new colleagues and then on the weekends doing some regional travel and then eventually some more adventures. Thanks, Lania. Welcome to the team!
If you’re a writer that lacks the inspiration for new stories, reading should be one of the first things you try to get back into your creative happy place. Alright, if you have a piece that needs to be submitted at midnight and you’ve got no idea what to write, reading probably isn’t the best choice for you. If you do have a small amount of time each day, I’ll show you just how helpful reading can be to a writer. The Pros: It is said that one of the most common problems new writers face is that they rarely write for themselves. Reading helps you overcome this. Read a variety of genres and learn what you love to read. Then, write the story you want to read. It’s as simple as that. Another reason to read is that it will develop your vocabulary. This usually happens without you realising it but sometimes you can discover a very interesting written ‘voice’ of an author and it can inspire you to develop your own. Sometimes, the best way to make your writing sound original is to copy the styles of others and work out what feels most comfortable to you. Also, by emulating the authors you read, you will pick up on the methods they use to tell stories and in doing so, you should be able to come up with your own techniques that will inspire the next generation of writers.
The Cons: The most obvious ‘con’ of reading is that you’re not actually writing. You want to be inspired, so you picked up that bestseller you’ve been meaning to read. It’s now 3AM and you’ve completely forgotten about writing. Yeah, that happens. Also, as you get sucked into someone else’s written world, you can find yourself feeling like your writing is inadequate in comparison. Just remember, they probably spent a long time working on that piece to get it to that standard, while you’re still trying to write the first draft. Another issue with reading is that you may find someone has written a story similar to your own and so you will need to return to the drawing board. This appears to be a nightmare but it can often be a blessing in disguise. So, someone wrote a story you had an idea for? Brilliant! Now you don’t have to do all the hard work. Read that story, work out what they did well, what you might have done with it and then come up with a new, original story using the inspiration generated from this exercise. What Writers Say: Many writers have been inspired by other authors and poets during their creative process. One example of this is Mark Had-
don, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. In an article for The Guardian, in 2004, Haddon said that he was inspired by Jane Austen when writing his bestseller. He states that he used her concept of taking a character that seems to be bound by so many rules and putting them into the type of book that the character would read. As identified earlier, this is one of the positives with reading, and here is a prime example of a successful writer who has taken a method from another author and used it to create his own story. The Technical Bits: Reading doesn’t require much in the way of effort and planning, but if you were to think ahead in terms of how, when and where, there are a few things you could consider. As a student writer, or a writer on a low budget, buying new books can seem like the hardest thing to do. You may want to buy them but it probably won’t do your bank balance any good. So, to the library! Libraries are perfect for writers. Not only do they provide you with a place to read books for free but also, if you like a quiet writing environment where you are surrounded by books, look no further. Sometimes they have desks near the windows, and if you need a character for your story, inspiration could come from simply looking out of the window. So, considering that my ‘cons’ list is made up of trying to turn positives into negatives for the sake of this article, you can see just how good reading can be for a writer. Think of it as the equivalent of your five-a-day. Aim to read five pages of a book per day. It’ll probably take you a long time to finish the book if you’re doing that, but I’m sure you’ll find lots to inspire you in those few pages (though you’ll probably have gotten absorbed into the book by then and have read twenty pages before you notice what has happened.)
JK Rowling writes The Cuckoo's Calling in a postPotter mindset, hidden within the pseudonym of Robert Galbraith. The novel, the first of the Cormoran Strike series, now has a sequel and a BBC adaptation on the way. Writing in pen-name secrecy offered a freedom from 'expected' criticism. Rowling's earlier book The Casual Vacancy received m a n y critiques h i g h lighting the lack of H a r r y Potteryness. A pseudonym allowed for genuine unanchored review and the book generally re-
ceived a good range of praise and opinion. The Cuckoo's Calling is undeniably Rowling-esque. It has the realistic description that was so highly praised in her other work, perhaps a factor that lends itself to easy adaptations. This detail is accompanied by its ease of reading. It is essentially the formula for summertime beachreading. It is the average premise for crime -fiction. There has been a death, in this case a suicide, and there is evidence that urges the investigation into the case. The characters are convinced of an innocent suicide, offset by one character who believes it to be a murder. The narrative is
formulaic, and the odds are stacked up against the murder investigation. The Cuckoo's focus on this tiniest of doubts almost makes the story seem pointless and irrelevant. Being heavily categorised as crime-fiction, coupled with book cover of shadowed male in lamplight, creates certain expectations; we expect the outcome to be murder. The detail in convincing the reader otherwise is well-researched but the back-and-forth is repetitive. The result is a story without enthusiasm. The pull of a good book just isn't there. Yet again, Rowling has created something that serves better as part of the ever-growing pile of books waiting to be adapted into TV and film. An easy read and something to gloss over, but it certainly lacks that extra imagination that could have made it stand out as a worthwhile addition to crime fiction.
My reading speed is a wildly variable thing. Occasionally, I burn through a short story in the fifteen minutes before the lecture. I don't advise that. Rushing a story defeats the point of reading it. Other times it can take months. I closed the final page on Roberto Bolaño’s Last Evenings on Earth two months after I opened the collection. They are clever stories, trading the mechanic of punch-lining stories with an ending that leaves an ambiguous, haunting tone that resonates throughout the collection. The Chilean author leads you to the close, and lingers in the vicinity of that expected ending. Then he turns to one side, rather than turning his back on it, and writes his final page, or paragraph. His stories span weekends, decades and lifetimes. Each covers a wide variance of topics: relationships – the ro-
mantic, familial, and platonic – and the collapse and ruin of them; isolation and alienation, cultural and geographic displacement, and ultimately, the fragility and intrinsic sadness of the human condition. I predicted only a couple of the endings, and when I did, it felt satisfying. Not in the sense that I’d outmanoeuvred Bolaño, but more that I understood him. His stories left me in a state of sombre fascination: I wondered what I had missed. And this happened over and over. Rich, gritty characters, with a loosely intertwined connection, or a lack thereof. Something clicked between two relative strangers, or more, some-
thing failed to click. Something constantly seemed missing to the reader, yet the stories felt right when finished. The endings do not ‘fit’ the framework of a traditional, Western -English style story, and this furthers that disorientation of a vastly different culture. Bolaño intended for his readers to contemplate the details of his work; with his interpretation of humanity, with all his characters enduring hardships, making sacrifices and being forced out of comfort zones, so that we could experience the stories he wanted to tell. In doing that, he asks for our most precious resource as a trade. Our time. Suddenly the title of the collection (and one of the stronger stories) feels all the more potent: what would you do with your last evening on Earth?
by Harry Carr This summer I had the opportunity to spend a few days at the Buxton Fringe Festival. With around thirty different art and theatre shows a day, I was treated to a variety of performances, but for me the most unexpected, entertaining and gripping piece was Rhinoceros. This interactive board game pits us, the audience, against the poacher Victor Slung; our task being to stop him in his mission to kill all rhinos in existence. Going into the venue, this was all the information I had. Having not had much experience of interactive theatre, I was expecting a little audience interaction here and there but primarily a one man show by Carr. What we got was much more inclusive of the audience, involving everyone who wanted to participate throughout the duration. It was fast paced and lively from the start. Once the audience were seated, he immediately got them all up to dance along to his annoyingly unforgettable rhino song.
“Victor Slung� - Harry Carr
Rhinoceros
There were a series of bad rhino themed jokes which went on for so long that I started to feel awkward, but that was all part of Slung’s character. I was then taken up on stage and blindfolded, along with the rest of the participating audience members. One member acted as Susan the Rhino and had to hide in the venue while we tripped over chairs to find him. The first person to catch him won a rhino horn (these were the prizes awarded throughout the game.)
The rest of the play was no less bewildering and nonsensical. The next game involved one member of the audience attempting to steal party ring necklaces from the rest of us as we shot him with water pistols. Then we sat down for an actual board game - made out of cardboard and broccoli - in which we had to eat bananas and cream, and attempt to slide after eights down our faces.
Victor’s character was entirely convincing. He was so brutally horrible, deranged and determined that there was nothing left to do but laugh. I’ve never been so thrilled to be shouted at by an angry South African poacher. It was a whirlwind of entertainment which ended with us receiving flyers. I assumed they were for donating to preservation causes, but turned out to be forms requesting the rhinos be adopted into the WWF (World Wrestling Federation). A laugh from start to finish. The only downside to this performance was the specific target audience, meaning it can only be performed in certain situations. Although the majority of the au-
dience got involved, one older gentleman stayed seated and was reluctant to get involved. For me, this created a slightly uncomfortable atmosphere as, if we’re all joining in and being as silly as each other, it’s easy to lose oneself in the childish artifice, but as soon as one person steps back and is merely a spectator, the illusion is shattered. Carr is an actor, writer and comedian and this is his most recent interactive play. Others include a version of ‘Jaws’ adapted for the stage and ‘Journey to a Sex Colony 01’ which includes voodoo ritual, shadow puppetry, game show and haute cuisine. This is a unique style of theatre that Carr handles extremely well and I hope to see more from him in the future.
Shalalalee @ The Everyman Studio Theatre, Cheltenham. 8th - 10th October, £10.50/£9. Dreamshed Theatre Company. Set in the late 1960s, using archived material from the time, we see the lives of Janice and Tony unfold in front of a backdrop of sixties hits and growing football fever.
Five Kinds of Silence @ The Playhouse, Cheltenham. 21st - 24th October, £10/£8. Samuel French Ltd. An in-yer-face piece written by Shelagh Stephenson which looks at an abusive relationship between a man, his wife and his two daughters. Dark and ominous; not for the faint-hearted.
Strictly Balti @ the Tobacco Factory, Bristol. 15th - 22nd November, £12/£8. Travelling Light. Written and performed by Saikat Ahamed, Strictly Balti is a thought provoking, humorous play about a man torn between his life in Birmingham and the mysteries of Bangladesh. ‘A show for anyone who ever had to grow up, a show about being a second generation immigrant in the UK but feeling like an English man abroad’ – Theatre Bristol.
Tuesday 13th
Tuesday 3rd
Tuesday 1st
Open Reading
Open Reading
Issue 7 Magazine Launch
The Frog & Fiddle
The Frog & Fiddle
Smokey Joe’s Coffee Bar
7:30pm
7:30pm
7:30pm
Tuesday 20th
Tuesday 10th
Tuesday 8th
Literature Quiz Night
Workshop Session
Open Reading
Smokey Joe’s Coffee Bar
Smokey Joe’s Coffee Bar
The Frog & Fiddle
7pm
7:00pm
7:30pm
Thursday 29th
Tuesday 17th
Thursday 10th
Halloween Social: Horror Hall of Fame Fancy Dress
Literature Quiz Night
Christmas Social
Smokey Joe’s Coffee Bar
SU Bar
SU Bar
7pm
8:30pm
8:30pm
Tuesday 24th Open Reading The Frog & Fiddle 7:30pm
*Please note these are subject to change. Sign up to our newsletter or like our Facebook page for information about upcoming events.
Got a book lying around that you’re not going to read again? Wrap your book up and hand it in! Then, grab a new book to delve into!
Bring an idea or a short piece along for friendly discussion over coffee in a mixed years group of students.
Come along for tea, cake and literary discussion once a month! You’ll be notified of our book club choice and discussion questions a month in advance to give you time to read.