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Forked at Sea Change Festival – A Review by Seren Kiremitcioglu

This year Totnes held their very first Sea Change Festival. Hosted by Drift Record Store, it was the first of its kind to bring a host of artists and musicians to the small town of Totnes, and of course we at Apples and Snakes just had to be a part of the small revolution. We headed over to the Birdwood House on Saturday 27th August to present Forked with Mama Tokus, Rose Cook, Rob Barratt, Jackie Juno and Londoner headliner, Kayo Chingonyi!

Making my way on the train to …

Home Cooking: Knights, Monsters & Spiders

We continue to explore the theme of ‘Europe’ in our monthly poetry podcast, Home Cooking…

Henry Raby, Dave Jarman and Stu Freestone discuss poetry of national identity and the current feeling regarding Europe, migration and refugees.

…

Home Cooking: Swimming Home by Megan Garrett-Jones

Performance artist and occasional poet Megan Garrett-Jones embarked to have people swim the shortest distance between the UK and mainland Europe in a continuous loop on a small stretch of the Kent coast. A mere 20.6 miles!

Here she shares her writing tracking the process of this project and her explorations of the waters of the English Channel through swimming.

www.meggj.com | facebook

This is the fourth season of Home Cooking podcasts commissioned by Apples and Snakes and shifts focus to Europe, hear from poets and collectives across England.…

Talia Randall – Twisted tongues, innuendo and bumbling grammar; the foundations of my spoken word.

Apples and Snakes’ Poet of The Month for May, Talia Randall, talks about the unique power of Spoken Word, and her new show Bloodlines…

A foreign mother.
Dyslexia.
Substandard English education.

These are the things that make spoken word my home.

I don’t know nothing about grammar. I’m not well-read. I don’t have any training in writing, performance, nothing.

But…

I come from a people whose language was nomadic; who carried entangled tongues across Europe and the Middle East. They stuffed their saddlebags with syllables and idioms. Like …

Home Cooking: Riot Nrrrd Tour

In March 2015, two nerdy poets set forth unto the world to bring hope, spoken word and angry feminism to the ears of budding audiences.

Henry Raby is based in York, Jenn Hart is based in Bristol. They both like punk, nerdiness, politics, feminism and saying poems about these topics in front of audiences.

DIY or Die!

The Riot Nrrrd Tour consisted of:
15th March: Nerd Hutch, Newcastle
16th March: Verbal Remedies, Leeds
17th March: Empty Shop, Durham
18th March: Poems, Pints & Prose, Harrogate
19th March: Away With Words, …

Tommy Sissons – Why I Write, For Whom I Write

Apples and Snakes’ Poet of The Month, Tommy Sissons talks materialism, poetry in education and the inspiration behind his debut poetry collection ‘Goodnight Son’.

The young people of Britain today are raised on mass consumerism. Everywhere we look, someone is trying to sell us something; whether it be the latest mobile phone, the swankiest car or the celebrity-endorsed designer shoes. This creates a culture of materialism. The issue with this is that those from poorer backgrounds are denied the lavish lifestyle they see glamourised on television because they do not …

Tees Women Poets Storm the Fine Art World – again!

Apples and Snakes’ Regional Co-ordinator, Kirsten Luckins talks to us about her time running workshops, making poetry and kicking some serious (eye) balls with the Tees Women Poets at the Middlesborough Institute of Modern Art (that’s ‘mima’ to you!)

It was a real pleasure for me and the Tees Women Poets to be involved in another mima exhibition last weekend, as we’d been hoping for a return ever since our highly successful performance in the Louise Bourgeois exhibition last year.

The fab curatorial team at mima invited us (and many …

A Lie

Hi, Francesca here, lurching out of my social media black-out cave (like Fight Club, but just me) to talk about my new show, A Lie. Honestly, it’s a misleading title. The show explores imagination, memory, language and the stories we tell about ourselves. It asks the question: ‘How do we know what is real and what is make believe?’

I haven’t yet been able to answer that question. Fortunately, I did find the answer to these questions:

‘What is the meaning of life?’
‘Who are we?’ and
‘What were we …

A Week in Arvon: Cecilia Knapp

In our second entry from one of our Writing Room participants, Cecilia Knapp talks about her time at Arvon, accessing old memories as part of a week’s writing retreat.

I’ve just got back from Arvon to a grey, busy and loud London where quite frankly there aren’t enough open fires, communal dinners and writing sessions.

Arvon is a charity that runs residential creative writing courses and retreats. I was lucky enough to go to their Hebden Bridge centre, which is Ted Hughes’ old house. A big stone cottage looking out …

Picture the Poet in Sunderland: Sky Hawkins

Continuing on from the success of the National Portrait Gallery’s ‘Picture the Poet’ exhibition, we chatted with featured artist, Sky Hawkins, about her time facilitating student workshops at Sunderland College.

I was very excited when I was told I would be working with thirteen second year students from Sunderland College. They had all performed other people’s poetry but never their own. In six weeks, my job was to inspire them to write their own poetry for the first time and be ready to perform it and alongside …