Read an interview with poet Carmina Masoliver
poet interview
Author: Francis H Powell
What better way to put all my angst into short stories. Born in a commuter belt city called Reading and like many a middle or upper class child of such times I was shunted off to an all-male boarding school aged eight, away from my parents for periods of up to twelve weeks at a time. In such an institutions, where I was to rest until my seventeenth year, there was no getting away from the cruel jibes hurled at me from taunting tormentors. My refuge was the arts room, where I started to find some kind of redemption from the stark Dickensian surroundings, whose aim was nurture the army officers, businessmen, and gentry that dominate the class ridden world I was born into. The seeds were sown, I was an outsider, Happier times were to follow, I went to art school, where I attempted to exorcize my time spent at school. At eighteen I turned my back on a parentally enforced weekly visit to church and my head was filled with a range of nonconformist ideas. While at my first Art college through a friend I met a writer called Rupert Thomson, who was at the time in the process of writing his first book “Dreams of leaving”. He was a bit older than myself, me being fresh out of school, but his personality and wit resonated and despite losing contact with him, I always read his latest published books with not only great expectation and unabashed admiration, but also a fascination for a person I had really looked up to, his sentences always tight, shooting arrows that always hit the mark. My yearning to be creative stayed strong and diversified, from my twenties through to my thirties and forties I made electronic music, doing concerts, in front ecstasy infused crowds, at a point I was making videos and short films. When the age of the internet arrived I was really able translate my creative endeavors into something really tangible. To earn a living I have worked as a teacher. I moved to Austria where upon I thought I would try writing. It is sure that my writing at that time was rough and rugged and without direction. I dived into a story about immortality, the story remains vegetating on some dusty floppy disk. Then tried short stories for children with illustrations to go with them. It wasn’t until I was in my mid-forties that my writing took shape. I was at this point living in Paris, France. I spotted an advert for short stories. The magazine happened to be called Rat Mort (dead rat) I sent off a short story, in the hope it would match the seemingly dark world the magazine seemed to embroiled in. I got no answer. Not put off I sent two more stories. Finally I got an answer. It seemed the magazine editor was a busy man, a man prone to travelling. It seemed my first story really hit the right note with him. His name was Alan Clark. He had a flat in the Montmartre area of Paris, where he seemed known to all, especially those who frequented his favorite drinking haunts. He offered me many words of encouragement. I was writing stories that were coming into my head at regular intervals, as if a monster had suddenly awakened. I was writing them on scraps of paper, less I would forget them, while I travelled on the Paris metro, going about my teaching work with staid business types. I had found a format for writing that worked, as well as a hunger to write about the demons of my past that still haunted me. Moving closer to present times, the desire to put together an anthology seemed to resonate in my mind. The Flight of Destiny evolved slowly. Many trans-Atlantic exchanges between myself and two editors seemingly far away. This evolution took my writing to a new level and the stories more depth and resonance.
Support our kickstarter campaign to raise money for Together Behind Four Walls
Please support our kickstarter campaign to raise money for our book. Your support will enable us to get the book printed as well as promoted and if the book is a success, it will raise money for Marie Curie Nurses. The book has contributions from poet Wendy Cope OBE award winning Roger Robinson, John Hegley, Ian McMilan as well other many other professional poets and writers, as well as illustrators.
Writers challenge for Coronavirus
If you want to participate, you only need to write a paragraph, and it is part of project for a good cause
https://francishpowellauthor.weebly.com/anthology-for-coronavirus.html
or email your idea powellfrancisvid at gmail.com
Coronavirus Anonymous Meeting
Add you own part to the story
It is a meeting like alcoholics anonymous, where people express their phobias, guilt, regrets, or make accusations; The councilor is called Jennifer. Invent a character? It can be your own character or it could be one from the prompts below, then present them to others in the group.
“I am xxxxx”
CHARACTER IDEAS
A priest who has no visitors to their church
A teenager who finds the confinement a waste of time and ridicules the effects of the virus
Somebody who met a policeman, having just stepped and was fined unfairly (in their view)
A parent with unruly children
A frustrated writer, who has writer’s block who fears they will get dumped by their publisher unless they come up with a masterpiece
An alcoholic who is finding it hard to adapt, (he/she usually goes down the pub, most days of the week)
An old woman who has no family and who is isolated
An ex prisoner who has just been released from prison and has to adapt to isolation
A panic buyer (there could be many) who bought unnecessary amounts of products in a fit of panic
A vigilante who has spotted their neighbours breaking the isolation rules
If you can’t make up your character’s name
TRY
https://www.name-generator.org.uk/?i=2aazwgzt
The start of the story is
Jennifer
“Hello everybody, and welcome to coronavirus anonymous, where you get the chance to get everything off your chest, your anxieties, your frustrations, and how you are managing in these testing times, is everybody two meters apart, nobody has moved their seats I hope? Right remember to cough into the crook of your arm, I am Jennifer and I would like you to share your feelings, who would like to start?
Harry Hoarder
“Yes, my name is Harry Hoarder and I’d like to admit, to everybody here present, I am a panic buyer, I recently stuffed in my cellar, I have about two hundred toilet rolls, which I can tell you will last Aida, she’s my wife and me, 1600 days. I have twenty cans of bake beans, fifteen fray Bentos cans, ten packets of pasta and a fifty kilogram bag of rice. I could go on, I can hardly move in my cellar, but when I watched the news I panicked, I imagined being stuck inside, no food, nothing left in the shops, we are living in a warlike situation.”
Jennifer
“Thank you Harry, for that, we can understand your anxiety, but don’t you think you are over-anxious and taking things a bit too far, if everybody behaved like you, those who can’t make it to the shops, would be left with empty shelves, surely this is a time to think about the vulnerable, or health workers working long hours?”
Harry Hoarder (sighing)
“You are right, Jennifer, I overreacted, I can’t help myself, it’s my nature, spent my life imagining nuclear wars, asteroids hitting the planet, plagues and pestilence, you name it, I’ve imagined it.”
Authors and Poets,please write something during this period of isolation, for coronavirus
Authors and Poets,please write something during this period of isolation, for coronavirus
Hello, I am pooling together with writers and poets, artists, comic creators to put together a book, I suppose at the moment it would have to be an E book…with poems devoted to people’s thoughts on being isolated due the Coronavirus…I was thinking of putting a poetry anthology together of good meaningful poetry and short stories (it could be people experiences) proceeds to a worthy cause. Any thoughts, contributions, commercial advice much appreciated. Send me a message. Also if anybody has a photos or cartoons PLEASE SHARE THIS ON ANY BLOG. PLEASE TELL YOUR FRIENDS WHO ARE POETS
powellfrancisvid at gmail.com
Adventures of Death, Reincarnation and Annihilation Book Tour w/ Exclusive Excerpts & a Giveaway!
Adventures of Death, Reincarnation and Annihilation
by Francis H. Powell
Genre: Horror, Fantasy, Scifi Short Stories
What if the human race was considered irrelevant and then each being was just uploaded then locked away on hard drives called “brain pods” ?
What if a sub species was to come into fruition, then the human race turned on it, hunted it down before trying to annihilate it? Imagine you found out you were an ancient soul, who is reunited with another being from your former life?
Set in different times in a variety of settings and time periods, the past, the present and the future, the book explores the inevitable unknown that lies before us all “death”. Death can arrive in a multitude of forms. Each part of the book explores different themes. There are characters who following their demises have to face up to their lurid pasts. There are some…
View original post 2,700 more words
Adventures of Death, Reincarnation and Annihilation Book Tour w/ Exclusive Excerpts & a Giveaway!
Adventures of Death, Reincarnation, and Annihilation Book Tour & Giveaway!!
Adventures of Death, Reincarnation and Annihilation – Book Tour and Giveaway
Check this out
Adventures of Death, Reincarnation and Annihilation
by Francis H. Powell
Genre: Horror, Fantasy, Scifi Short Stories
What if the human race was considered irrelevant and then each being was just uploaded then locked away on hard drives called “brain pods” ?
What if a sub species was to come into fruition, then the human race turned on it, hunted it down before trying to annihilate it? Imagine you found out you were an ancient soul, who is reunited with another being from your former life?
Set in different times in a variety of settings and time periods, the past, the present and the future, the book explores the inevitable unknown that lies before us all “death”. Death can arrive in a multitude of forms. Each part of the book explores different themes. There are characters who following their demises have to face up to their lurid pasts. There are some…
View original post 258 more words
