Wild Arts in rehearsal for Eugene Onegin, on tour this summer (Photo by Anastasia Tikhonova)
News
I’m excited that my book To Hear the Trees Speak is out now. It tells the story of my journey to listen to and learn from ten trees on five continents, a blend of nature writing, travel writing and memoir. Ben Goldsmith has called it ‘A poetically-written testimony of our own deep relationship with the natural world, and of nature’s own resilience.’ It’s been seven years since the original idea – I now understand why it can take so long to get a book into the world! I’m speaking at a number of events over the summer, details on my website.
– Olivia Sprinkel
As well as being a brand voice strategist, I run Dirty Laundry, a live storytelling and poetry night based in Frome, Somerset. It’s become a well-loved local event, blending grassroots energy with top-tier spoken word. Over the past few years I’ve hosted poets like Harry Baker, Vanessa Kisuule, and Jonny Fluffypunk, and we’re now stepping into new spaces – both online and in collaboration with the Frome Festival and the Crysse Morrison Prize for Poetry.
On Wednesday 4 June, I’ll be hosting a one-off online workshop with the brilliant Jonny Fluffypunk: stand-up poet, rabble-rouser and owner of ‘England’s most pretentious moustache’.
Join us live on Zoom for an inspiring hour and a bit of writing and creativity. Jonny will perform his poetry, unpack the process behind it, and guide a series of writing prompts designed to spark new work.
– Olly Davy
I interviewed indie pop icon Will Joseph Cook earlier this year over on my writing site, Pantoscope. My piece introduces Aki Oke, Will’s collaborative project that pushes past and mixes multiple music genres, retaining his distinctive sound while blending it with layers that are beat-driven, electronic, and experimental.
– Anushka Shah
Recommendations
I’ve been a particularly scatty editor this month (and deliberately created a mini-project that only requires editorial input from next month). That’s because we’ve been in rehearsals every day for two operas, Eugene Onegin and The Elixir of Love, going out on the road from mid-June.
It’s been a wonderful process for a number of reasons, but Eugene Onegin is directed by Dominic Dromgoole (veteran theatre director and Artistic Director of the Globe from 2005 to 2016), and the process of bringing a large-scale theatre director into a small-scale environmental opera company has been a delight; as has the very fact of working on Eugene Onegin (to me one of the greatest operas of all time, and certainly the first I truly fell in love with).
Meanwhile, The Elixir of Love is a revival of the first show I was involved with at my company (Wild Arts). It’s shamelessly frivolous, and irrepressibly joyful. We’ve a little way to go before opening night (on 17 June at the stunning Layer Marney Tower in Essex), but the whole thing is lining up to be very special, so if anyone can make it (or send a hoard of friends!) please do!
(And have a read of my interview with Dominic, which sheds light on Eugene Onegin, and the thoughts behind the production; or of the piece written by Siofra, the translator, about “Realising Pushkin”)
– Max Parfitt
I’ve just finished the fourth book in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet. I wrote about the first one in my February members’ recommendations; it’s called My Brilliant Friend and it was selected as the New York Times No.1 Best Book of the Century. I’ve not read a book series in a really long time, and I loved reading these. The series follows the lives of two girls living in post-war Naples, centering around their complicated friendship, but spanning much more. It appears that nobody is quite sure who the author is, and as the protagonist shares her first name and is also a writer in her adult life, I’m curious to know how much of it is inspired by the author’s own experiences.
– Anushka Shah
Max and I slipped away to Bath for the bank holiday weekend, and amidst our coffees and wanderings we particularly enjoyed The Museum of Bath at Work, a reconstruction of the nineteenth-century industrial workshops behind the manufacture of everyday items, from furniture to soft drinks. The engineering shop is a true highlight – with the press of a button, the old works came to life, screeching and hammering away as they would have done in Victorian times. Ghosts in the machine!
– Chloe Green