Hey Open Mic-ers!

‍It's almost time for this month's Spoken Word! Our next open mic is Wednesday 19th November at 7pm, in the East Quay Kitchen. This month's guest speaker will be Sophie Dumont. The invitational theme is What Holds Water? Sophie will be introducing her debut collection, Sculling.

As November deepens, trees become spare and the UK grows damp with rain. Puddles spread across paths and every surface reflects the dimming sky. Water, in its gathering, becomes a mirror, a keeper, a vessel.

This month, write into what water holds. Does it cradle memory, silence, grief, or light? How does it blur and distort the view from the window? What are the rivers carrying or the waves coaxing as we draw the year to a close? Let the rain and the reflective surfaces of November shape your lines.‍

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Poetry Prompt: 

LEAF 

by Sean Hewitt

For woods are forms of grief
grown from the earth. For they creak
with the weight of it.
For each tree is an altar to time.
For the oak, whose every knot
guards a hushed cymbal of water.
For how the silver water holds
the heavens in its eye.
For the axletree of heaven
and the sleeping coil of wind
and the moon keeping watch.
For how each leaf traps light as it falls.
For even in the nighttime of life
it is worth living, just to hold it.‍

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Introducing Sophie:‍

Sophie Dumont is a poet and copywriter based in Bristol. Her poetry won the Brian Dempsey Memorial Prize and has appeared in The Rialto, Magma, The Moth, Ink Sweat and Tears and Mslexia among others. Dumont has an MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University and has held writing residencies along Bristol Harbourside with Boat Poets and Exeter Quay through Literature Works. Her debut poetry collection Sculling is available to pre-order and will be published on October 2nd.‍

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About Sculling:

In her unflinching and tenderly obsessive collection, Sculling, Sophie Dumont explores a deeply personal relationship to the River Avon, as she circles the curses that unravel from a canoe club.

At the age of sixteen, Sophie Dumont trained to be a canoe coach before her own coach and partner of three years died suddenly in an aquaplaning road accident, which led to five of his organs continuing at least seven people’s lives. His heart was donated to a young man studying in the same city as he did.

Using the kayak as a vessel to traverse life’s accumulation of losses, Sculling speaks of how this bereavement caused Dumont to reflect on her relationship to bodies of water, from her own body to the state of pollution in UK rivers. Here, she explores the campaign for rivers to be given personhood status for rights to protection and inspects the symbiosis of her body and the river’s.

Sculling is a powerful investigation into categories of haunting, from a body living on through donated organs, through dementia’s slow erasure, and through witnessing her niece learn object permanence – that things continue to exist when they are not visible.

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You can find Sophie on Instagram: @sophie_dumont‍

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How the evening works:

· Open Mic Sign Up opens from 6:45pm for a 7pm start.

· MC Introduction and Guest Set 

· Open Mic - 2 poems each (but bring a 3rd in case we have time for more)

· Please give trigger warnings for any topics that listeners may find upsetting.

· I shall close the evening and tell you what’s happening next month!

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We look forward to seeing you there!