We’re very excited that Cornwall Contemporary Poetry Festival will be casting its spell over Falmouth again this autumn from 22-25 November with poets such as Inua Elams, Anne-Marie Fyfe, Alyson Hallett, Isaiah Hull, Gerður Kristný, Sean O’Brien, Sandeep Parmar and Penelope Shuttle likely to be seen scribbling in cafes when not actually performing or running poetry slams.

We are running our very own special all-poetry Telltales on Tuesday 20 November. The theme of the night will be Seeing Voices and the event will take place at Dolly’s Wine Bar from 7.30 pm. If you would like to read at this event, please send us three poems on the theme. Or roughly on theme. Or not on theme at all. Please send us three cracking poems. The deadline is midnight on 11 November.

Jason Rosewell

Telltales celebrated its tenth anniversary on Tuesday, 31 July, at Dolly’s Wine Bar, with balloons and bubbly contributing to the festive atmosphere. We had Telltales’ signature mix of established and new writers, poetry and prose, including Kelly Stevens, Aimee Alibiston, Lally MacBeth, Samuel Fletcher-Wilson, Rosanna Smith and Too Long Dead. Clare Howdle, co-founder of Telltales, both read her own new work and looked back at its ten years of “encouraging and showcasing writers”.

We’ll be taking a break now. Please check back to see what happens next!

Telltales turned in a fine performance at Port Eliot yesterday! The six writers — Lally MacBeth, Too Long Dead, Amiee Albiston, Samuel Wilson-Fletcher, Clare Owen and Ben Beattie took us from Cornwall to Japan, dark to light, and playful celebration in language to a probing into new linguistic possibility.

And there’s more! Tuesday 31 July is our birthday event! Please join us at Dolly’s Wine Bar, Church Street, Falmouth, about 7:00 for a 7:30 start!

The Telltales evening at the Penzance Literary Festival took the festival theme of Taking Flight as its inspiration. Many thanks to all those who submitted stories and poetry for the event. From a substantial set of submissions the performers were: Clare Owen, Des Hannigan, Amiee Albiston, Rose Cook, Henry Purbrick, Heather Hosking, and two relative newcomers to the Cornish writing scene, performance poets Too Long Dead and Samuel Wilson-Fletcher. Too Long Dead (pen-name) draws in  the audience to self-reflections with her performance skills, while Samuel Wilson-Fletcher similarly engaged us in a different sense, with the searching nature of his engagement with the natural world and the interaction between it and the human animal. There were times in the entire evening when you could hear a pin drop. The theme naturally took us to many far- away places; from Middle Eastern refugees to strenuous holidaying; and to many internal and harrowing destinations: the discoveries of limitations set deep within the personality, and the botching of dreams by pure mistake. It was an evening whose depth bonded us all, as a number of people who were there have said.

We have two more events in July…quite close together.  The deadline for submissions for BOTH events is July 20 (send your submissions from the right side of THIS page).  First, our traditional spot at Port Eliot Festival.  This year we’re at the Tiddy Tent at 1 pm on Sunday, 29 July — the last day of the festival.  The theme is GAMES — language games, mind games, Olympic games, games with published rules and games of persistent mystery…playing alone, or playing with hundreds of thousands on-line.  We have only one hour, time for just SIX readers, BUT, they will get FREE festival passes!

We’re back at Dolly’s Wine Bar, Falmouth, on 31 July.  Please come at 7 for a 7:30 start.   The theme is Happy Birthday, because it’s Telltales 10th.  But please don’t be too strict with yourself about it…if you have something you’d like to read, and you can do it in ten minutes or less, please send it in!

COMING UP…

• Submissions are open now for Penzance LitFest, a firm feature of Telltales’ annual repertoire.  We’ll be performing at the Admiral Benbow, a lively pub on Chapel Street Penzance, at 7:30 on Thursday, 5 July.  Our theme – the festival theme — is Taking Flight.  Please send submissions on the right side of this page – just be sure to let us know which event you’re submitting for!  The deadline for submissions is 28 June.
• Things are looking good for Telltales at the Port Eliot Festival, 26-29 July.  It seems likely that our hour will be on Sunday, the 29th, but in any case, the theme is Games, and the deadline for submissions is Friday, 20 July. We still can’t promise readers  free festival admission, but it looks likely.  Watch the website!
• The next Telltales event is on Tuesday, 31 July, at Dolly’s.  The theme is Happy Birthday – Telltales turns 10 this year!  We’d be delighted to get submissions on the theme, but we’re very happy with other things too.  If you have something you’d like to read and you can read it in 10 minutes or less, send it in! (about 1200 words, or three shortish poems).  The deadline for submissions is Friday, 20 July.

AND JUST PAST

• The Great Estate : There’s a sheltered clearing called “The Whispering Woods,” just a few steps apart from the main thoroughfare at The Great Estate festival, Scorrier (near Redruth). In the early evening of 1 June, festivalgoers were taken to places near and far, now, then, and into the completely fantastic in the poems and prose from four Telltales readers, Penny MacBeth, Ben Beattie, Nancy Roth and Henry Purbrick.
• Telltales in May… Manet, Mermaids and Mars:  Telltales on Tuesday 22 May was just what we’d hoped for. Even from a glance at the programme for the night, it was obvious we were in for something a little different: Manet, mermaids, Mars – and everything in between. The clock chimed, the dog growled, the sounds of Falmouth town drifted up through the window. Des Hannigan started the evening off in fine form with his own subtly shifting version of the shipping forecast. Ben Beattie– reading at Telltales for the first time – stunned us with his tongue-twisting performance poetry inspired by genetically-modified mice and other obscure creatures. The theme for the night, INSIDE OUT, presented itself in unexpected places – in Rebecca Hooper‘s poem Little Human Lives, evoking life at twenty-three weeks; in Carole Inman‘s story The Smile, followed a young woman finding her way from a life based on other people’s values to a new one in keeping with her own, and in Chris Bruce’s monologue, we got inside the mind of Edouard Manet as he reflected with great visual sensitivity on his friend and fellow painter Claude Monet. As we approached the end of the evening, Clare Owen held the room spellbound with her short story Supper Time – skillfully laying bare the forces and fulcrums on which relationships operate. The evening ended with readings by Johanna Egar, quietly philosophical poems and an exceptional piece of flash fiction entitled Daddy and the Mermaid.