Writer connections

 I’ve actually been to a few in person events recently, and it’s got me thinking about the value of writer connections.

At Bristolcon I finally  got to meet Gareth L Powell and Adrian Tchaikovsky in person.  I love both of their work, and it was great to be able to sit and listen to stories about their creative processes and the inspirations for their books.

I also briefly said hello to Julie E Mckenna.  I first met Juliet face to face at a con a few years ago, and we regularly interact on Twitter.  She has a new series of rural fantasy books out, and I was able to buy them in Bristol and and get them all signed by her.

I came home from that con to performing a spoken word piece the next day.  It was part of a Portsmouth Climate Festival event.  This was arranged via a very different set of writer connections.

My good friend Helen Salsbury founded an environmental writing project called Pens of the Earth a few  years ago.  I’m a slush reader/editor for the stories which people submit for the project’s open submission calls.  I’ve also submitted some of my own work to that project, which is published on the Pens website.

It was one of those stories I was reading an extract from on Monday night,  Titled Fire and Blood, it’s the story of an unhappily-married woman leaving her husband.  The story is wound around a young oak tree in Victoria Park, Portsmouth, which my character visits very day.

The other readers that evening were people I know through yet another connection, the spoken word group  I perform with, T’Articulation.  The climate festival event brought together people I know who belong to thee different writers’ groups.  They belong to T’Articulation, they’re part of Pens of the Earth, and they’re part of Portsmouth Writers’ Hub.  And to add to the complexity, two of the readers are lecturers at the university also.

I’ve been aware of this tangled web of connections for some time, but Monday night’s event made me realise how interconnected my writer friendships are.