Bournemouth Writing Festival 2025
What a weekend!
I’ve only just recovered from The Bournemouth Writing Festival, after three days of volunteering, talks, workshops, networking, and hosting my Non-Fiction Writers’ Genre Breakfast event.
The organising team put son much effort into making sure the event runs smoothly and offers an exciting programme, which for the first time this year also included a naked writing workshop (not for the faint-hearted).
This year I volunteered at sessions for adults and for children, and it was inspiring to see young people crafting their characters and thinking about the adventures they could send them on in their stories. I also enjoyed hearing what magic spells children would include if they were writing a Shakespeare-style story. My favourite was a spell which would turn all staircases into escalators. Practical and energy-saving. I like it!
Gary Dalkin and Sophie Beal’s ‘Organising Chaos' session was designed to push us in the right direction to edit our novel-length works and make some sense of them, and I will certainly be using some of their advice as I move forward towards publication.
For the poets, the bandstand in the lower gardens became the poetry hub and invited everyone to contribute to the Community Poem, which will now be displayed in Bournemouth Library. For a small donation you could try out the Poetry Vending Machine, which would produce a card with a poem on it and some seeds to plant in your garden. This is the poetry machine which previously stood in Kingston Lacy (National Trust) for their Blossom Festival, and I believe that somewhere inside lurks a haiku I contributed about springtime.
Estelle Phillips’ ‘Write Nature Poetry Now!’ workshop was the session that most inspired me to pick up my pen though. Her encouragement, advice, and enthusiasm for playing with words carried us all to a place where we believed we could have a poetry collection out by the time the next Bournemouth Writing Festival comes around. We’ll see…
Thankfully, my office isn’t quite this bad. Yet.
A fantastic idea! Pop in a coin and out pops a poem.