The next Telltales will be on Tuesday 23 May at Dolly’s Wine Bar in Falmouth. Come along at 7.15 for a drink and a chat before the readings start at 7.30.The theme is Souterrain. Think earthworms, the French resistance, Hades, the realm of the subconscious… we’re very excited about this theme.

Don’t be shy. We’d like to hear from you. Please upload your work via this website. The absolute maximum is 1600 words and it can be in any genre. If you’d like to get your work out there but are too diffident to read, tell us and we might be able to find a reader for you.

The deadline for submissions is at midnight on Sunday 14 May.As always there’s no charge for sending in work, or for coming along to listen on the night.

Artists Afloat

It was an absolute honour to be in Falmouth Art Gallery on 28 March. Megan Chapman started off the evening with her suave rap piece set at Falmouth Docks, commissioned by the BBC. Jenny Scolding took us back almost two hundred years, her fictional writing recreating an actual sea voyage undertaken by the Arctic explorer Franz Boas, her approach reminiscent of epistolary novels of the time. Sticking with the theme in Ice Island, but defying any kind of genre – speculative fiction, perhaps? – Henry Purbrick entertained us with a pink toothbrush and a surreal universe with an uncanny resemblance to our own.

David Mason brought the room to utter stillness with his mesmeric poetry, not read but delivered from memory with his eyes shut. George Mackay, reading her work in public for the first time, knew exactly how to bring out the humour of her story and not a word of it was wasted. Ian Stevens with dour reluctance fed out his dark tale like a coil of slippery, wet rope, until, like it or not, we were in his grip.

All evening we were surrounded by the paintings of Henry Scott Tuke and Charles Napier Hemy. In the interval we drank and strolled amongst them, but it wasn’t until Henrietta Boex, Director of Falmouth Art Gallery, began to talk about the paintings: the time, the technical challenges of being an ‘artist afloat’ and the colours, that the unique privilege of being among those works really hit home, creating a link not only to those artists but to the fishermen and sailors they depicted who used to walk the streets and sail the waters of Falmouth Harbour.

This point was taken up by Dominic Power in a poem inspired by a Tuke watercolour, which reflected on the way a work of art will often outlive its owner. We were also treated to his perfectly-weighted sea poetry and a joyous, eclectic celebration of the Ship of Fools in art and literature. Our evening ended with the compelling account of how bereavement and grief became the driving force for new creation in the establishment of The Chintz Symposium, Falmouth. The sensitive and skilful piece was read by Amy F Matthews.

If you’d like to see more photos from the event, please visit the Telltales Facebook page. You can also find us on Twitter.