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Advance Heretics and be Recognised

Greetings Reading Addicts! My name is Barry Fentiman-Hall and I am an accidental writer. Accidental? I hear you cry. What did you do? Trip and fall while doing the dusting and get a pen stuck in your hand eh? Ooh I’m ever so sorry doctor, It’s not what you think, is there any way you can get it out…

No. Not like that. I had faffed and faddled with poetry as a youth and had a fling with journalism at university but I had by and large packed it in as an adolescent pose. Then about 5 years ago a butterfly flapped its wings in a particular way somewhere in the region of Bhutan and I found myself in a relationship with a playwright by the name of Sam Hall (and yes reader I married her, she’ll be chatting with you good people shortly so I hear). It turned out that she also ran a writers group called ME4Writers after the Medway post code that we live in.

 

In the spirit of joining in I began to do bits and pieces with them and after a few boozy evenings a fledgling magazine was started by the name of Encylcopedia Citaecephale (spelling has always been variable for that title) which we used to leave for free on buses and such. This eventually morphed into a paperback anthology of the best bits in the form of City Without A Head. So there you go. Published writer and all that. By accident.

This book was published by Wordsmithery which is an all round publishing and literature development powerhouse run by Sam and assisted by me. It is our current project that I am mainly here to talk to you about.

An Assemblance Of Judicious Heretics is what I call a Litart project which we started last year as part of the 2014 Rochester Literature Festival. Basically it involves us calling out to local writers plus a few guests to write some poetry or a short prose piece on a particular theme. This year they were writing around and in response to The Road Not Taken, Robert Frost’s classic 1920 poem.

What we then do is render them anonymous and send them out to local visual artists (and guests) to interpret in any way that they see fit. Apart from paintings and drawings we have had demonic dolls, collages, pottery, and this year apparently we will be moving into textiles. But why that title you may ask?

We are many and disparate and we have banded together to make this thing – we have assembled.

We know what to discard and what to keep – we are judicious.

We challenge any literary or artistic doctrines we encounter – we are heretics.

And the original title was unknowingly used by another exhibition once we’d already started, so we had to think of something quickly…

The range of artists both literary and visual is deliberately broad. This year we are honoured to have the likes of Medway Poet Bill Lewis and the editor of Poetry Scotland Sally Evans writing for us. From the world of the canvas wielders we can boast the amazing Wynford Vaughan Thomas and star of the mandala Laura Chuter. But the point is that we are essentially a community. An assemblance if you will. It is one of the few rules that we have. There must always be people involved who are previously unpublished or unexhibited alongside those who have been there and done that.

This year the exhibition will be held throughout September at Rochester Library. There will be a launch event on the 3rd of September when all the written art will be performed in front of the visual art they inspired. This is another piece of knowledge gained in learning the way of the heretic. Words are art too.

It is very important to us that the writers are valued every bit as much as the visual artists. What we are putting together is an exhibition of images, evoked in paint, ink, clay, cotton, ink, and Microsoft word. There will hopefully be a publication of all the contributions later this year. We will of course let you know all about that when it happens. And hey, if you are in the area, advance heretic and be recognised. We will be back in 2016…

This is a guest blog by Barry Fentiman-Hall, below is his written piece for the project, we hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

England My Dandelionheart

Oh England
My dandelion heart
What have you done
With that cross that you carved?
A horde of golden fools
Marching the meadow
Did you believe it marked
The spot?
An X factor expedition
Seeking riches that will
Always remain the other
Side of the screen
Oh my England!
A grasping scar that
You have made
Across a land that
Could have been greener
And more pleasant
Now so far away it seems.
This lion now has
Lost it’s teeth
Whipped dogs they are
Digging for something
They do not know they need
So what do they think
They’ll find down there?
A bigger car? An empire?
Eldorado? An avocado?
Or the knowledge
Plain and simple
That they haven’t hit
The bottom yet….
Oh England
My dandelion heart
That dream that I am clinging
To, now ploughed
Beneath the muck
Of suburban dreamers
Avaricious digging
Bowing down they scratch
With a mug of
Schadenfreude to match
All in it together
Pressed and serried
Though all they’ll
Find I fear
Is where the bodies
Are buried.

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