Phillip Zarrilli

Phillip Zarrilli – Kalarippayattu weapons training, CVN Kalari, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala

On 9^th March 2020 when Phillip received the news from his oncologist that the cancer he had been living with for fourteen years had begun to ‘seriously party’ (his words) he said to me ‘this is our last adventure together.’

I have been so fortunate, having this great mind, this gentle and generous man as my companion in so many ways – loving, working, living, travelling, thinking, writing and making performance alongside him for twenty one years, with and without The Llanarth Group. The journey may continue, but now it is in parallel, perhaps, not our accustomed hip-to-hip together.

Phillip died on 28^th April 2020 at 13.52 UK time. He rode out on a breath – like so many times in his teaching he spoke of riding the breath to that moment of completion at the end of exhalation – the space in-between at the end of one cycle before the impulse of the next inhalation begins. This time came no inhalation.

It was the ‘good death’ he wanted, I think – calm, pain-free, unsentimental – me holding his hand.

I keep thinking of the Tagore line: ‘Let it not be a death, but completeness.’

There is a fullness to Phillip’s last months and year: the trip to Kerala in January 2020 and all that happened there:

Phillip Zarrilli and Jo Shapland performing ‘Told by the Wind’, The Llanarth Group. Photo: Kaite O’Reilly

Performing Told by the Wind at the Kerala international festival, giving talks, workshops and teaching at Calicot University, seeing Kathakali with Rustom Bharucha and meeting again with his Indian family –visiting the significant people and places, too many to name in full here, but including Sathyan (G Sathyanarayanan) and family at CVN Kalari in Thiruvananthapuram, Phillip’s ‘brother’ Kunju Vasudevan and family, and an extraordinary Koodiyattam performance at the temple in Killimangalam, visiting his friend and former Kathakali teacher MPS (M.P.Sankaran Namboodiri) and family, to name just a few. He said that he felt all that happened that month was a full circle turning, a completion, and he was full of gratitude. We sensed this would be his last trip to Kerala, and were so grateful to be able to go, to have him so visible, connecting, being honoured by those who were so important in his work and life.

Phillip Zarrilli being honoured by Sathyanarayanan G at CVN Kalari in Thiruvananthapuram, January 2020

 

Five days after our return to the UK in February we began our final collaboration, co-directing the 5 star reviewed The Beauty Parade at Wales Millennium Centre – delighting in a sense of having possibly fulfilled what we could achieve together, a synthesis.

Phillip Zarrilli and Kaite O’Reilly in rehearsals ‘The Beauty Parade’, Wales Millennium Centre, February 2020. Photo courtesy of WMC

2019 had been a significant and prolific year, full of achievement and creativity. October 2019 brought the publication of his last, great book (Toward) A Phenomenology of Acting (Routledge), which launched at ITI (Intercultural Theatre Institute) in Singapore.

Phillip Zarrilli at launch of his last book ‘(Toward) A Phenomenology of Acting’, ITI, Singapore, October 2019

His scholarship continued, and there are various essays forthcoming, including a chapter on his lifelong engagement with traditional Asian disciplines of body-mind training in Generating Knowledge Through Interweaving (working title) for the International Research Centre: Interweaving Performance Cultures, Berlin, where we were both fellows for many happy and stimulating years, with wonderful colleagues. Our collaborative essay An Irreverent richard iii redux: Re-Cripping the Crip is published later this month in Playfulness in Shakespearean Adaptations (Routledge). Phillip was writing increasingly for performance and we relished the subversive crip’ playfulness of our co-written script richard iii redux [or] Sara Beer is not Richard III which Phillip directed, produced and also performed in, shortlisted for the International James Tait Black Prize for innovation in drama, August 2019, and published in my collected The ‘d’ Monologues.

2019 was a rich year for directing. His production of Lie With Me with the graduating cohort of Intercultural Theatre Institute [formerly TTRP] in Singapore completed that long relationship with Sasi (T. Sasitharan) and Beto (Alberto Ruis Lopez) and ITI.

‘Lie With Me’ company, ITI 2019 cohort, Theatres in the Bay, Singapore

He had just begun work on Carri Munn’s No.74, and earlier in the year directed Cosy, my play about end of life, with long-term collaborators Gaitkrash for Cork Midsummer Festival. Phillip was always keen to encourage audiences to talk about death and to have agency in how they would like their lives to end – but not to stop living until the very end.

Kaite O’Reilly, Phillip Zarrilli and Seamus O’Mahoney discussing end of life scenarios, Cork Midsummer Festival June 2019

Phillip lived with cancer – creatively, fully and without complaint – for fourteen years. He always spoke of how grateful he was to have been able to teach, create, perform, direct and, most importantly, complete his books, constantly giving thanks to the brilliant skills and ideology of universal free healthcare offered by the UK’s NHS (National Health System). We are both hugely grateful to Hospiscare in Exeter, UK, who gave Phillip such tender and expert palliative care, and in the most challenging of conditions, in the middle of a pandemic. Against all the odds, they allowed me to be with Phillip, showing such compassion.

Owing to Covid19 there will be no funeral, but we hope that when we are able to travel and gather again, we all will find opportunities to celebrate Phillip and our relationship with him, to tell our stories and sing the old songs, all across the world. He is much beloved, and he also loved – his son Barth and daughter Samara, his grandchildren and great-grandchildren – and he cared deeply for his many  decades-long friends and collaborators, valuing the wealth of students, actors, and scholars he shared his time, skills, and thoughts with, and who enriched his existence.

I believe Phillip inhabited every second of his life until he departed, soaring, on a breath.

A week of celebrating words and creativity

Book tours are strange old things. Not that what I’ve been involved in this past week has been formally a book tour – but I have been touring around and it has all been about books.

Well, one book in particular, my version of Persians, published by Fair Acre Press, and launched with great joy on Sunday 30th September 2019 at the Mid Wales Art Centre, organised by dear friend and fellow launcher, Chris Kinsey. Poetry Party pushed Persians and Chris Kinsey’s From Rowan Ridge into the world, joined by readings from fifteen fine poets all raising their voices in a celebration of words.

The following Saturday it was the turn of Small World Theatre in Cardigan, where I led a workshop Singing the old bones about remaking ancient stories, then gave a lecture/reading in the evening. The workshop participants were an ideal mix of artists, makers, poets, dramatists, storytellers and folklorists, so a lively time was had by all. We used the beautifully light and sunny dance studio for the workshop – and I’m delighted to be returning for a further workshop in November, shared with Chris Kinsey, details below.

Kaite reading at Persians launch at Mid Wales
Arts Centre. Photo: Liz Hinkley

Writer and critic Adam Somerset attended the lecture/performance I gave that evening, reading from Persians. To my surprise, he wrote a short review of the evening (thank you, Adam!), which you can access here.

Welcoming all writers workshop at:

Cardigan’s Small World Theatre @theatrbydbychan

November 23 @ 1:00 pm – 5:30 pm

Spend a stimulating afternoon with award winning writers relishing words and honing craft in two distinct writing workshops, then finish off the evening with celebratory readings and a book launch. Chris Kinsey and Kaite O’Reilly will each lead a two-hour workshop, welcoming all writers from all forms – poetry, prose, spoken word, live performance – beginners and experienced.

Chris Kinsey – Blood from Stone
1pm – 3pm
Embodying the elemental & environmental. Writing the real using the senses and heightening impressions through metaphor and sound choices. Dig deep and mine the elemental world to write with passion and clarity. Engage with the natural world through a variety of guided prompts and shared experiences.

Kaite O’Reilly – Planting the Seeds
3.30pm – 5.30pm
Immersive writing from the senses, memory, and imagination. Writing is a process of discovery and exploration. In a series of structured exercises participants will be encouraged to investigate texture, dynamic, and the visceral when writing for the living voice, and along the way, plant the seeds for possible future work.
£30 (entry to evening performance included in the workshop fee)

My previous workshop at Small World sold out very quickly, so I’m hoping there will be even more interest with the brilliant Chris Kinsey involved. For details and booking, please press here

A final recommendation is the current free exhibition at Small World/ Theatre Byd Bychan:

Hands Up: defining 40 years of puppetry – an exhibition of Ann Shrosbree’s and Bill Hamblett’s work

From early work as Dandelion Puppets for Centre for Alternative Technology 1979, through Arts and Development work in Africa, Asia and the Middle East to the present day. Visitors will learn how the company grew into Small World Theatre in 1996 and created a near zero carbon arts space, Theatr Byd Bychan in 2008. The exhibition will continue online throughout 2019. Exhibition open times: Tuesday – Friday, 10am – 4.30pm

US premiere of ‘peeling’ opens in Seattle

I’m delighted that the US premiere of ‘peeling’ has opened with Sound Theatre in Seattle. ‘peeling’ is a play in its seventeenth year (originally commissioned, directed and designed by Jenny Sealey for Graeae Theatre Company in 2002). Suddenly it is finding more productions and viewers than ever before. Earlier this year Taking Flight Theatre Company toured the play around Wales, and it will be remounted for an Autumn tour (details here). This is of course hugely gratifying, but given its themes of war, eugenics, representation and women’s autonomy over their bodies, its relevance in 2019 is regrettable. As one of the Chorus in this meta-theatrical performance laments “Haven’t we been here, before?”

In ‘peeling’ I’ve played with the device of the Chorus in a fictionalised production of ‘The Trojan Women: Then and Now’, which carries on around – and often in spite of – the Deaf and disabled female choral performers. They suspect they’ve been cast just to be ‘the ticked box on an equal opportunities monitoring form’ and long for a time when they will be centre-stage, in an accessible environment giving them the opportunity to perform ‘properly’ – with ‘an all-signing Chorus’, perhaps. Given the descriptions of many of the inclusive productions currently rocking Edinburgh and beyond, this play was (and perhaps remains?) ahead of its time….

Sound Theatre production of ‘peeling’ by Kaite O’Reilly. Photo: Ken Holmes

In an interview with Broadway World, Teresa Thuman, Director of Sound Theatre said:

“Seattle has never seen a play like this before. The very nature of theatre is to expose and make public all that is human — in every form, every ability. For those who live on the margins, theatre is a way to bring them to the center as fully human beings.”

The full interview can be read here. What follows are images and text from the production, which runs until the end of August:

peeling weaves audio description, sign language, and theatrical spectacle into a no-holds-barred play about representation, women, reproduction, war, and eugenics.  

Sound Theatre production of ‘peeling’ by Kaite O’Reilly. Photo: Ken Holmes

With brisk wit and domestic backstage comedy, O’ Reilly’s storytelling style has earned comparisons to Beckett and Caryl Churchill. In anoverproduced, postmodern production of Euripides’ The Trojan Women, Alfa, Coral, and Beatty have been cast in bit parts to fulfill a playhouse’s misplaced diversity program; but as tokens, the trio never experiences true inclusion. Sound Theatre centers disability justice by assembling a production team and cast that brings authentic lived experiences to this groundbreaking production.

Information about the theatre company and the production can be found here

Sound Theatre production of ‘peeling’ by Kaite O’Reilly. Photo: Ken Holmes

ARTISTIC TEAM

Teresa Thuman – Director 

Monique Holt – Assistant Director and Director of Artistic Sign Language

Andrea Kovich – Dramaturg

Parmida Ziaei – Scenic Designer

Taya Pyne – Costume Designer

Adrian Kljucec– Sound Designer

Jared Norman – Projection Designer

Richard Schaefer – Lightning Designer/Technical Director

Robin MaCartney – Props Designer

Zoé Tziotis Shields – Wardrobe Crew, Sound Board Operator

Roland Carette-Meyers – Accessibility Coordinator

Francesca Betancourt – Movement Director

Residency at UCC Cork – talks, readings, book launch 3-10 November 2018

‘Kaite O’Reilly has always been a rule breaker.’ Exeunt magazine

What follows is an interview with Joe Turnbull for Exeunt magazine. You can read the original feature here

With thanks to Joe and Exeunt.

 

Kaite O’Reilly has always been a rule breaker. Her 2012 play, In Water I’m Weightless set a precedent by having an all Deaf and disabled cast. She’s pioneered creative access throughout her career, informed by her longstanding affinity with Deaf culture. Plays such as The 9 Fridas, subvert traditional theatrical form and aesthetic. And even when she deliberately sets out to make mainstream work she can’t reign in her recalcitrance. She describes the Almond and the Seahorse, her 2008 play which got a five-star review in the Guardian, as her ‘Trojan Horse’: “I created what seemed to be the most commercial theatre script I’d ever written. Only it’s got subversive politics in its belly.”

Her latest work Cosy, which is set to premiere at the Wales Millennium Centre on 8 March, very much falls into the latter category. It’s ostensibly a traditional family drama encompassing three generations of women, which tackles the thorny issue of end-of-life scenarios and ageing.

“I’m deliberately taking different perspectives of a family coming together. It’s familiar – the family all get together and all these discussions and events happen in the family home. But perhaps some of the content and arguments and perspectives being presented are not the ones we would usually hear”.

It turns out O’Reilly’s dissident sensibilities are in her blood. “My family were always rebels, they were always the dissenting voice that would shout up from the back”. As O’Reilly regales me with her backstory, I’m transported to the West Midlands in the 1970s.

O’Reilly’s father, an Irish migrant is holding court amidst a bustling farmer’s market. A proper working-class Irishman, his sales patter is a performance aimed at punters as he tries to flog his sheep. Back at the O’Reilly family home, get-togethers also provide a stage, and everyone is expected to deliver, whether it’s a poem, song or a story. This is the theatre of everyday life. It clearly had quite an impact on the young Kaite.

“The performative aspect that comes culturally from being working class Irish was huge. As I get older I understand how formative that was because it was always about entertaining, engaging, challenging, provoking.”

It isn’t something that they can teach at drama school, nor is it something you can read in a book. “I think that right from the get-go, if you’re going to be a playwright it’s got to be about the living words in the mouth. You know as soon as something sounds stagey. There’s something about engaging with language in the absolute moment that you have to be able to dazzle and create and engage with words.”

But her working-class Irish heritage isn’t the only aspect of her identity that has been seminal to O’Reilly’s work:

“Identifying politically and culturally as a disabled person was essential, because it changes you. It affects everything about how you perceive the world. I think that is huge as a playwright because we’re trying to – as that old hackneyed Shakespeare quote goes – ‘to hold as ‘twere the mirror up to nature’. Well if you are actually seeing nature and the notion of normalcy as being different from what the majority culture says, then there’s some really interesting things happening”.

O’Reilly doesn’t shirk from the label, she has always embraced it, even in her work, whether that’s using integrated casts, embedding creative access or by directly addressing disability themes. As is common for many successful disabled artists, O’Reilly finds herself at times awkwardly straddling the two worlds of mainstream and disability arts. Cosy is perhaps a sign of things to come for O’Reilly as something of a middle ground between the two. Although the play doesn’t address disability political issues directly, it was inspired by her thoughts around assisted dying which is a very important topic for the disability rights movement.

“I started to think about ageing, about end-of-life scenarios, our relationship to the medical profession and how industrialised care has become. What are the family dynamics in end-of-life scenarios? So basically, Cosy is quite a dark but sophisticated comedy looking at whether we truly own ourselves.”

O’Reilly is eager to acknowledge that her perception of language and working process as a theatre maker have been massively influenced by her work with Deaf collaborators, such as performer and director of visual language, Jean St Clair. “Seeing what language can be through the prism of Deaf culture and experience has been really important; the form, the means, the aesthetic and the possibilities were broadened as I began to learn sign language”.

“I’m notorious for my bad signing,” she tells me, wryly. “Jean teases me all the time about it. Whenever I threaten to go and learn BSL she says ‘no don’t because I actually like what you’re doing, because it makes me think differently’”.

Due to budgetary restrictions, not to mention the changes in Access to Work benefits, O’Reilly regrets that Cosy won’t be the “all-singing, all dancing, all-signing access-fest” as previous works such as In Water I’m Weightless. The play will be captioned, and they are also trialling an app which encompasses different languages and possibly audio description. In spite of the restraints and her past successes, O’Reilly is still not taking anything for granted, displaying the enthusiasm and passion of a young upstart. “Every day I wake up smiling and thankful that we’ve got this opportunity from Unlimited, it’s an incredible gift”.

Perhaps it’s fitting for these austere times that Cosy sees O’Reilly going back to basics in more ways than one. “Cosy isn’t breaking new ground in terms of form or aesthetic but I think it’s interesting that we have reached the point of maturity, where we can have a big growling play with these different perspectives all mashed up and arguing together.”

But it just wouldn’t be an O’Reilly play if it wasn’t pushing the boundaries in some way. Cosy has an integrated all-female cast of disabled and non-disabled actors with ages ranging from 16 to 76, “how gorgeous and delicious is that?” she enthuses. Even more significantly, the roles with the most power in Cosy are predominantly staffed by people who identify culturally and politically as disabled, including the director (Phillip Zarrilli) and assistant producer (Tom Wentworth) in addition to O’Reilly herself as the writer.

“I think it’s interesting that the powerbase is coming from a very open identification as disabled. Often they’re the ones who are non-disabled and the people that are being cast are disabled. I wonder if that’s a shift that has come from Unlimited and their legacy, that we’re now becoming more and more in the position of the powerbase.”

In concert with the launch of Cosy, O’Reilly also has a book entitled Atypical Plays for Atypical actors being published by Oberon Books. It will feature a selection of five plays and performance texts spanning nearly 15 years of work, each of which is informed by disability politics. Clearly, there’s no chance of this rebel being assimilated by her mainstream success.

And like all true revolutionaries, O’Reilly isn’t content being the sole dissenting voice in what can at times be a very homogenised profession. Instead she’s looking to use her profile as a vanguard for others. “There are things that I’m trying to do through my practice and engagement that I hope is going to help shift things and provide opportunities for other people as well. For me it’s very important that we have people in leadership and positions of power who are not only disabled and Deaf, but who identify culturally and politically as so.”

Cosy is on at Cardiff Millennium Centre from 8-12th March. Tickets and info here

 

Welcome to AtDAC, our new blog

AtDAC

Hello!
It is my great pleasure as Patron of DAC to initiate this new feature on the weekly newsletter – a short personal note from a member of the team, giving you an insight into our weekly activities. Apart from introducing you to the staff, we want to feature some of the talented artists and writers involved in our many creative projects, now and in the past. DAC have advised, supported, trained, and showcased the work of hundreds of disabled and Deaf artists, dancers, writers, musicians, composers and performers over the years and we’re keen to share your stories. If you would like to be featured, please get in touch at post@dacymru.com
As usual, DAC’s office is like a hive, buzzing with preparations for forthcoming projects. As a writer and playwright, I’m particularly excited by their inaugural poetry competition – a response in words to DAC’s current visual art exhibition…

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Vital Disabled Student Support to be Cut. Save DSA!

Please support this campaign against these cuts and read the post reblogged here.

The Hardest Hit

Cross-posted from Sarah Campbell, Rolling with the Punches

Spread the word. Tell your MP. Write blogs. Let people know what is happening. We must try to stop this.

You can write to your MP online here.
Please also sign the e-petition here.

Share and Retweet this #ProtectDSA.

After becoming disabled as a teenager, I went to university, obtained a first class degree, then completed a PhD.  While I worked extremely hard, none of this would have been possible without the support of Disabled Student Allowance (DSA), which covers the extra costs for equipment and assistance disabled students may require in order to study at university.

This is why I was aghast to learn that the government has just announced plans to cut DSA.
Couched under the language of “modernisation”, “targeting funds at those who need it most”, “fairness”, is hidden the reality of an estimated 60 to 70% cut in…

View original post 830 more words

Grace, fluency, and facility… Poet Chris Kinsey on writing and re-writing.

Writers are notoriously curious about how everybody else does it. Apart from the endless fascination with other peoples’ process, we also know there are wonderful lessons to be learned, tips to gather, knowledge to be shared. A few weeks ago the poet Chris Kinsey shared a document with me which she had written for her students about writing and re-writing. I’m delighted she gave me permission to reproduce that here.

 

Chris Kinsey: A personal view of writing and re-writing.

 

I write mainly out of excitement with experiences and from a desire to re-enact and re-live them.

I want to record the physicality and sensations of certain experiences. (Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes and Gerard Manley Hopkins were the first to make me want to pay attention and write.)

I write in order to find out what it is I want to write. Many writers prefer to have a plan but I’ve never liked to fit into the Procrustian bed of a plan. I need to make discoveries to maintain my motivation. Good ideas mostly fail because they’re good and there’s nothing to work out. It can feel like drudgery to record them.

First drafts are like finding a load of fireworks – full of excitement at experimenting with voices and viewpoints and coining words and images with the most exact visual or aural effects. This stage can be intoxicating. I chase a stream of consciousness, memory and sensation as fast as I can and as close as I can to any event which excites me to write.

Re-writing is best done a day or two after the ‘first thoughts, best thoughts’ rush.

Sometimes it’s as painful and humiliating as a hangover – everything grates or clunks or seems hackneyed, clichéd, laborious, repetitive, monotonous, vague, waffling, tongue-twisterly, O.T.T……. Sometimes it only feels this way. Our feelings are not always the best guide to the quality of our work; especially if they’ve just been hurt by discovering that a first draft doesn’t represent total satisfaction or perfection. Usually there are plenty of nuggets to harvest and frequently this leads to the true or vivid aspects of the subject declaring themselves and a theme or shape emerges. Voice or tone stabilises and distillation begins.

Crop peripheral ideas and images, focus the main ones.

Strive for the most exact, apt images and nouns. Tone up verbs. Tweak and play with word orders (save every change – you may want to revert to an earlier form). Try your piece out on the ear. Cut clichés, repetitions, catch phrases, etc. Etc. Rest. Let it lie.

Return later  – this is the hard part – make sure you haven’t cut some crucial part. And this is the really hard part – make sure you haven’t stifled the life of your piece by over determining it.

Hope for grace, fluency, and facility. Try your work out on someone whose feedback you trust and respect. Someone who will tell you where the work made them stumble is valuable.

Good, spontaneous-sounding, ‘natural’, pleasure-to-read work, often takes between 15 and 30 drafts.

 

*

With thanks to Chris.

Copyright of the above remains with Chris Kinsey 16/2/14.

 

Gender and Playwriting Survey – invitation to participate

Tonic Theatre are currently working with eleven other companies across the UK, inviting playwrights to participate in a survey so they may find more about the connections between gender and playwriting.

Information gathered will contribute to research conducted as part of Advance, a programme exploring how the theatre industry can work more successfully with female artists.

I hope we are all aware of the inequality existing within the industry – a stubborn 2:1 male to female ratio. For a quick fix on stats and data gleaned  from research by The Guardian and Elizabeth Freestone, have a look at: http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/dec/10/women-in-theatre-research-full-results

Tonic are encouraging playwrights of any age, gender, or location in the UK to participate in the anonymous survey. It will take 10 minutes upwards to complete, depending on the level of your participation. “We know that it’s not often that playwrights are given the chance to comment on how the industry does or doesn’t work for them, and your response will be vital to the success of Advance and broadening our understanding more generally of the playwright’s experience.”

The Advance programme is exploring how the theatre industry can work more successfully with female artists. Tonic Theatre “..supports the theatre industry to achieve greater gender equality in its workforces and repertoires….Tonic’s approach involves getting to grips with the principles that lie beneath how our industry functions – our working methods, decision-making processes, and organisational structures – and identifying how, in their current form, these can create barriers. Once we have done that, we devise practical yet imaginative alternative approaches and work with our partners to trial and deliver them. Essentially, our goal is to equip our colleagues in UK theatre with the tools they need to ensure a greater level of female talent is able to rise to the top.’

A project worth participating in – and you can until Monday 24 March.

 

You can participate in the survey here:  http://fluidsurveys.com/s/AdvancePlaywrightSurvey/

Further information about Tonic, their projects and their work can be found at: http://www.tonictheatre.co.uk/

 

Uncovering New Writing – Poetry, Prose and Plays – Bare Fiction Magazine – Guest Blog by Robert Harper.

Bare fiction magazine

When Kaite O’Reilly asks you to write a guest article for her blog about your own project, you get that little warming feeling that the road you’re embarking upon might just be the right one. So I was delighted when she suggested I write about a new literary periodical I’m publishing called Bare Fiction magazine.

I’ve long been interested in the process of creating words on a page. How did our great 20^th century dramatists, poets and novelists manage to compel us to follow their every literary whim and where do our contemporary writers find the new bones of these fantastic bodies of work that the theatrical and publishing world has helped make flesh on which we joyfully feast.

Now for some peculiar reason, though I’ve happily spent the majority of the last 20 years as a performer, I have always had a deep desire to produce a literary magazine. Perhaps it was initially fueled by long nights in my early twenties spent drinking bourbon with my dearest friend, imagining we were beat poets. Perhaps it stems from performing in some fantastic plays and feeling sadness that the words we shared may never find another’s ear or leapfrog off the page and be made whole by someone else’s brain.

Like so many creative artists, I found myself wondering how my endeavour was going to be different. What could I possibly do to make another literary title stand out from the many others on offer? Then I realised something that up to that moment hadn’t been apparent to me. Nobody else was including playwrights within their magazines. And by that I mean that I could find no evidence that dramatic texts were being discussed on their literary merit or published in part or in their entirety within another literary title. This should have been my eureka moment, but this was always my intention. It was so obvious to me that play texts and playwrights would be a part of my magazine alongside poets and poetry, authors and short fiction, that it never occurred to me that someone else wasn’t doing it already.

But why me? Why did I think I was the one to do it? As I said, I’ve been fascinated by the written word for decades and so it seemed like the natural time to do a little bit more study to back up my editorial journey by enrolling for an MA in Creative Writing. This fuelled the fires and I began to see that, like anything, you simply need the passion to succeed and with the kindness and support of a few friends, you can make it happen.

Except of course in these difficult economic times with grants for the arts and council subsidies being cut in every corner of the country where would we find the money to produce the print copies of the magazine. My fellow editors (Lisa Parry, Branwen Davies, Emma Andrew, Tom Wentworth and Amelia Forsbrook) and contributors were all adamant that they wanted to help the magazine get off the ground by offering their time for nothing, but we would of course need to fund the printing costs.

During the last few months visitors to the website have kindly been pre-ordering our launch issue which features some amazingly talented writers across all fields. We’ve work from acclaimed playwright, Forward Prize and Aldeburgh shortlisted poet Dan O’Brien with whom I’m also writing an article for the magazine. We also have the full text of Neil Bebber’s superb short play Breathe which was part of Dirty Protest’s Plays in a Bag season at the Almeida this summer. Amongst our poets we have Fred D’Aguiar, Boyd Clack, Adam Horovitz, Roger Garfitt, Dylan Thomas Prize shortlisted Jemma L. King, plus BBC Writer’s Prize winner Sarah Hehir. Short fiction includes work from Jane Slavin, Elvis Avdibegovic Bego, and Katie Bickell. The list goes on and you can of course see full details on the website.

I want to continue this journey of exploration of the uncovering of new work by writers at all stages of their career. To discover work of exciting promise and exceptional skill that wakes you up the second you read the first lines. But we need a little help along the way. We’ll be printing three issues a year from next March, but we’re kicking off with a bumper launch issue this December.

With that in mind we’ve created a kickstarter campaign to help fund the costs of the initial print run, distribution and promotion of 500 copies of the magazine and we need just £1600 to do that. As I write this our  campaign has been live for just shy of 48 hours and I’m thrilled by the support so far. But we still have 85% of our target left to achieve.

Please take a quick look at our promotional video (below) and visit our campaign page to pledge support in return for a digital or printed copy of the magazine. We’ve lots of reward options for you to choose from. Thank you and I hope you enjoying reading all the great new writing that we’re going to bring you.

Robert Harper

Editor

Bare Fiction Magazine

The launch issue of Bare Fiction Magazine is available to pre-order via the website or by pledging on the kickstarter campaign page and will be on sale from December 2013 through independent bookshops. Advertisers can also pledge via the campaign to secure advertisement space or visit the website for more details.

Links:

Magazine: http://www.barefictionmagazine.co.uk/

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/BareFiction

Twitter: http://twitter.com/BareFiction

Kickstarter: http://kck.st/15LHPlm

Video embed code:

Kickstarter widget code (for keeping up to date with a funding goal):

kickstarter url:  http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/743626153/bare-fiction-magazine-launch-issue-poetry-fiction width=480]

Kickstarter widget code (for keeping up to date with a funding goal): kickstarter url=http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/743626153/bare-fiction-magazine-launch-issue-poetry-fiction width=220