Hello all! I am back! Welcome to the "new normal" from me. It has been more than four months since I have last written a blog post of any kind, but I finally have the motivation to write about something again - and in this blog post, we are going back to books and authors! Let's get going on this little adventure, starting off with a run-through of the Ipswich Book Festival.
Ipswich Book Festival (4th and 5th of October 2025)
As is usual in my blog posts, I would like to start off by giving out some background information about the festival. So, the Ipswich Book Festival was a new book convention that was run to gather together authors, academics and readers and share their experiences about poetry, prose fiction and the more mundane matters that were happening in between. The Ipswich Book Festival ran in a number of different locations across Ipswich from the 3rd to the 5th of October. Nearly all of the events were ticketed, with the price to attend many events ranging between £5 and £10 a pot.
So, the first talk that I went to was about "The Joy of Writing Things Down", a journaling book written by Megan Hayes, that was run in the old Superdry unit in the Buttermarket shopping centre. I have to say that I really enjoyed hearing the author's talk about their switch between psychology and creative writing, the general zen atmosphere, how writing improves one's overall health, and more interestingly, losing 93% of your emotions in an email message. At one point, we got to do some writing exercises from the book that revolved around creating a positive impression of ourselves - I have to say that they flowed really well with the increasing difficulty in between each one of them. As you will find out, the theme of my writing from all of the exercises revolve around aspirations to return to fantasy map making some day (as it's been a long time since I have posted something on this blog around that theme):
After that, I then went to the author's showcase that was happening in the pop-up space at the Ancient House. Along the way, I was soapboxing my way around the place with Get on the Soapbox, had some interesting conversations with Sue Wallace-Shaddad, which included some chats about her "Once there was colour" poetry collection, detailing experiences of Sudan around the start of the 2023 war, among other things, as well as getting to meet a ton of other local writers who have published a collection of fantasy, horror and crime novels, and everything else in between.
The following day (which happened to be the day that Ipswich Town and Norwich City were playing the derby), I got the chance to attend a talk from Scorpius Books on how to write and publish books that are targeted at dyslexic adults. Getting into the Ipswich School was very interesting, as the main entrance looked like a place full of ghosts, with nobody inside, and with the side entrance looking just as secure as the main entrance, the event staff had to guide us through an entrance that looked very much like prison reception before being escorted through the grounds up to the library.
Moving aside to the actual talk, it was really fascinating to hear how they would design their books to make them more accessible - using the Verdana font, increasing the spacing of the text, as well as making matte covers to make the blurbs easier to understand (not to mention getting rid of the annoying glare!), and getting to hear the stories of two published authors who support the Scorpius values. But hearing the circumstances around the founding of the publishing house also shocked me - while there is a wide range of dyslexia-friendly children's material, dyslexia-friendly material for adults was almost non-existent, and compounding the issue was that the major dyslexia advocacy groups weren't originally aware of the scale of the problem. And remember, although e-book devices already have options to make text dyslexia-friendly, it shouldn't be the principal method of access to a novel - you should be able to go to a book shop and buy an accessible physical copy of an adult novel.
Later that same day, after coming out of the Scorpius Books session, I went on to successfully outrun the football fans as I made my way to the Unitarian Meeting House, where Dr Lindsey Scott was overseeing a group of three people from the University of Suffolk Creative Writing community read out their stories that were published in the Suffolk Haunts anthology - and every piece that was read out to the audience had something to pack a punch; whether it's the spooky landscapes surrounding Alton Water, the story of an Orford Ness fisherman whose experiences didn't quite go to plan, or the strangely vibe that was coming out of the organs at St Mary's Church in Ipswich. To make the long story short, it was without a doubt the best way to end the book festival.
And as the next picture will suggest, it was time to move on to the next writing event, some five days later...
Amanda Hodgkinson - Arrivals (10th October 2025)
Having enjoyed Amanda's previous workshop in May on historical fiction and houses (trust me, that was a load of fun), I was so looking forward to going to another one of her workshops when I noticed an event pop up on creative writing on the Suffolk Archives website - with the theme of arrivals and migration being so closely related to my fantasy worlds in general, and originally having the desire at one point to want to go to the 22 Britannia Road workshop over 18 months ago, I just couldn't resist putting it down as a must-go session.
So I arrived into the Hold at around 9:30am, and I have to say that unlike the workshop on houses, there were no gatekeepers to guard us from Amanda this time round - we were just able to go straight into the education room, get settled and have a few casual conversations while waiting for the session to start. After the introductions were given out, it was straight to the icebreaker, where we would move around to talk to three different people and share our own lived experiences at two minutes a pot. My conversations with the people that I spoke to were well, very interesting, as I was teleporting in between future aspirations, the state of Ipswich as a place, as well as cultural differences when moving to a different country - the experience of the latter topic being something that I was certainly going to need for what was coming up ahead.
With the icebreaker out of the way, we then got to the real action, reading out "The Ferry" by Katia Kapovich and critically analysing the lines out of that poem. I have to say that there was a very diverse range of topics that were evoked from the workshop participants - the sense of longing for something, the infrastructure, the environment, wildlife, and landscape (as well as the "compass needle dances" just to give a sense of the direction messing around with you).
With everyone's thoughts expressed on the poem, oh yes, it was time to get on to the big writing exercise - writing about our arrival journey that revolves around the "I'm not telling you" prompt. Let's just say that my interpretation of the "I'm not telling you" prompt was very interesting in that it feels like you should avoid mentioning these things, but in reality, you are actually telling what is going on upfront. It works a bit like the "don't stuff beans up your nose" euphemism from Wikipedia, in that telling someone not to do it actually encourages that person to do the action that you are suggesting not to do.
For this exercise, I decided to stick to the style that I would normally use to write descriptions of fantasy worlds, one that described going across the different landscapes, plains and farmlands and reappearing in a strangely familiar environment - that being a massive port near a city, before setting off on a journey to another mystery place, which I could then write about on rinse and repeat (albeit slightly differently each time), as you are about to see here:
Moving on to the reactions, the little story that I wrote received overwhelmingly positive reception - in fact, Amanda described my example of travelling around my fantasy world in a truck as being one of the most pure examples of logistics and transportation in relation to going to different places, and overall, telling an incredibly powerful story.
And the stories that were evoked from the other workshop participants people were just as fascinating to hear - on one hand, there was this story of someone getting sick from the vertigo after a dreadful train journey and the subsequent descent to purgatory, and on the more positive side, another's story of those wheels taking off, flying across eight time zones and landing in the arrivals hall, just to mention a few (a strange sense of familiarity there, given that I had ridden the number 81 bus around Heathrow on my way back from Slough a few weeks ago and constantly heard the jets taking off to go all over the world as the bus was speeding along the Bath Road.)
With the big exercises out of the way, Amanda finished off the workshop with some lecturing that focused on fabled arrivals stories from other successful novelists, and analysing the texts using the concepts that we had learnt in the previous exercises. It started off with Tessa Hadley's story of Alice being the first person to arrive at a place, before realising that her key was not there (a normal human mistake) - compounded by the sense of being stranded in the middle of nowhere (the "receding" sound of the taxi going away springing into mind), the jostling of water, and of course, the phrase of insects being burrowed in the hills sounding like a complete metaphor in that they will always be there to disturb you.
And then it was on to the urban utopia that revolved around Alison Macleod's story of Tenderness, more specifically the passage that revolved around leaving the White House to get a copy of a banned book - but of course there was much more to the story than that, as well as other bits that will never be read out. The list of clothes to take. The time of year. General whereabouts. The aura and the environment.
But at the end of the day, it just goes to show that a very tiny passage from a novel can evoke a huge amount of meaning from them, and that ultimately, as writers, it's up to us to choose what we tell from our stories - and that means that sometimes we need to weave our way around certain characters and do other interesting quirks in our writing in order to reach the final objective.
After being left with a reminder to take a notebook wherever one goes and do some journaling in it (screaming a throwback to Megan's talk the previous week), it wasn't long before the workshop came to an end, and I decided to reward myself for all the work I've done by going to a cinema screening of Tron: Ares - which I have to say that despite what some critics might say about the film, to me it was really fascinating seeing the neon architecture, the Encom cyber-security computer labs and all sorts of weird computing quirks, and as in every film of this calibre, the huge levels of tension and the massive explosions rippling through the city of Vancouver.
Conclusions from the events
Well, let's start by saying what an interesting time it has been for me in terms of achieving things. I have to say that the Ipswich Book Festival was a highly successful event for it being the first event being run by the organisation. While I am not able to talk about each and every event that the book festival were hosting, overall, there was a really good mix of speakers and topics being discussed (the question session from Suffolk Haunts particularly stood out to me as being very lively in nature), and the best thing about it from a thematic point of view was that the events weren't just about the traditional novels and poems, but it was also really interesting to hear about other general topics, such as writing for wellness (I could be sitting around Megan's book and doing her exercises all day long if I wanted to), and the dyslexia talk at the Ipswich School really helped to bring the issue of book accessibility to the forefront.
Moving on to the experiences from the Arrivals workshop, I have to say that Amanda has managed to put on another spectacular performance for all of the participants in the room. While the workshop had a slightly more relaxing vibe compared to the more intense nature of Amanda's previous workshop around houses, it still didn't manage to lose its character - I really enjoyed the take around Katia's poem at the start with the lively discussions around atmosphere, infrastructure and direction; the writing exercise was incredibly challenging, but at the same time being very fun to do, and the environment in which we got to share each others' stories was highly collaborative and encouraged us to do further exploration in terms of subjects that we are passionate in writing about. And just like the previous workshop, some of the arrival stories that were taken out of famous novels evoked such a strong sense of creativity and debate that I wasn't even able to put what was going on into words.
With that, I hope you have enjoyed my coverage of the book-related events that I went to in the previous two weeks, and I am looking forward to seeing you follow me on the journey as I begin to embrace the "new normal". The British Library are about to run an exhibition on secret maps within the next few weeks, and so to wrap up the year of 2025, I will be striving to bring you the twists and turns from the exhibition, and the subject talks that come with it!
Signing off now,
Jakub
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