An echo of a moment settled on my shoulder like the gentle squeeze of a warm hand. It moved from the drumming of my ears to the breeze that knocked on the door of Chalkwell Hall. Inside was Metal alive and breathing.

The walls of the house spoke of a journey. Each voice echoing the story engraved on the wooden crevices. Where the day was spoken for by the writers at the Hot Desks and the warmth of the Metal team, the night was a wild canvas for the house to speak. Built in 1832, the house had a breath of an ocean, ignited by the rising moon and the falling night. The creak of the floorboard- a wave of an ocean’s tell. The sound of a halo waiting to be noticed.

I felt that age-old house complimenting the blood running through an artist. The blood which carries the essence of generations of warmth and trauma. The blood that has the power to feel emotion in its deepest dot; beating through the heart ensuing into an expression profound in emotion. A testament to an artist’s lore. The agefulness of the house speaking of the wisdom of a true expression that courses through an artist’s blood.

Where, in the night, the house resonated the power in the creases of an artist’s hand, the morning filled the house with a potential to manifest that power.

In doing so,

I was introduced to Metal by Rosalind Green as a volunteer for the Essex Book Festival. Stepping into Metal at Chalkwell Hall was a feeling akin to being picked up from the world in to a story book. The experience carried a warmth necessary to a writer’s endeavour and a disturbance, like a ripple in water, necessary for the quill to breathe.

“You can have anybody come through the door and help them put different areas of their practice together,” said Paige Ockendon. An artist is, often, figuring out their idea and they’re required to produce a “shiny, polished finished piece,” we encourage the process to that final piece. We aim to provide that “creative satisfaction.” While in conversation with Ockendon she emphasised “social engagement is very important to what we do here.”

Furthermore, the “project team has your wider interests at heart too” being artists themselves.

I feel an artist finds a charm in solitude. An irreplaceable comfort. For one to come out of that solitude, a place has to be worth it. Upon conversations with the writers at the Hot Desks, I felt how the space welcomed their journeys. Invited them to express their calling. “I feel safe here,” said one of the poets at the Hot Desks and I found myself wondering, what could be more inviting to an artist than a safe space. A space which expanded to provide the elements necessary to build their final masterpiece. Or, as Ockendon expressed, Metal was the bonding of a collective.

Where I saw the Hot Desks embracing the journeys of writers, I heard a story unfolding as I climbed down the stairs. It was ‘story time’ for the kids.

By the morning light the air felt the colour of ideas brewing in the minds of children, while the setting sun brought the journey of the Polish writers Wioletta Gregorewska and Maciej Hen in light. The same air, now, carried the heaviness of their journeys. The struggles and the beauty with which they unveiled their stories was a testament held by the breath of Metal in that room.

I heard the language expand in to a presence. Although a whisper, it was heard louder than a shriek. It was refreshing to see artists thrive in a setting; to see voices being heard; to see souls feeling safe in sharing their endeavour in all nakedness of emotion. I saw emotion move in to expression.

It was emotion that brought the artists together. The heart beating a beat regardless of time and space. The heart open to receiving emotion as emotion is. Nothing more nothing less while the being ached to express it.

Time at the Essex Writers House came to me while I was writing my poetic piece, ‘A Moment’s Call’ drenched in paintings. It spoke of, when time stands still and the space expands for you to speak. ‘A Moment’s Call’ began with a broken breath, in my crooked pupil’s form. It began in a moment of stillness. A timelessness speaking of time itself. A spacelessness creating space itself. Its essence lies in: If poetry is like an inhaled breath, painting is like an exhaled breath. It is the unravelling of that which lies between an inhaled and exhaled breath. That which is referred to as the moment.

Metal came to me like a physical manifestation of a space at a time I was writing, ‘A Moment’s Call.’ I found myself embracing its warmth like a droplet of fire untouching the horizon.

While gazing at the petals, unplucked in the rose garden where one could gaze at the expanse of Chalkwell Hall, I felt time speaking, “this was still the era- it could end later in that famous decade.” A decade where the purity of soul was embraced. Where being human meant more than what is prevalent in the world of today.

This space was a reminder of a speck of hope in the hourglass where time could beat to the rhythm of the heart. Where there was hope for a breath to breathe in a world consumed with everything else. Like all fleeting moments, this moment too passed in to the sun kissed breeze of the Thames Estuary. The emotion, however, had the power to be eternal. And eternal it is.

The rising sun brought saffron in to the horizon. The beginning of the Radical Pilgrimage which was headed by Lora Aziz, ‘writer, wild crafter.’ We were to walk the Saffron Trail to “…a journey never journeyed before…’’ as expressed by Aziz, in the presence of the legend that a saffron corm was smuggled to England from the Middle East in a pilgrim’s ‘hollow staff.’

While I embarked on the journey to walk the Saffron trail, I gazed back at the house that had spoken to me by the rising moon and the falling night. It spoke to me, then, by the saffron coloured day, painted against blue:

“I haven’t found any exotic shells but I live in hope.” – Linda Hibbin.

As we stepped forward, away from Chalkwell Hall, I smiled, Saffron- the exotic in Essex.

The earth hummed to the beat of the heart. I closed my eyes to hear the language come forth. For it was time to hear the lament of a beat fractured by its own.

Images by Nawaziest Ul Bushra

For the month of June 2023, Metal Southend hosted the sixth edition of Essex Writers House, a much-loved strand of Essex Book Festival.

Hosted at Chalkwell Hall in Southend on Sea, the programme was a chance for people to engage with interesting stories and to meet readers, writers and creative thinkers from across the county.

Thank you to Nawaziest for capturing the wonder that is Essex Writers House so beautifully in this piece of writing.

You may also be interested to read No Place for Elephants – a piece written by Essex Book Festival Director, Ros Green, about Essex Writers House.

The post Metal – The Movement of Emotions appeared first on Essex Book Festival.

Seven years ago, Syd Moore, Writer and Founder of Essex Girls Liberation Front, Colette Bailey, then Artistic Director and Chief Executive of Metal Culture, now WOW’s [Women of the World Foundation] Executive Director, and myself sat around The Water Table in Chalkwell Hall, Metal’s Southend-on-Sea basecamp, brainstorming ideas for the next Essex Book Festival.

We discussed collaborating on a series of writer workshops for new and emerging local writers; hosting writers’ events and poetry slams; coffee mornings and book clubs; running international residencies in partnership with other organisations: English PEN, Index on Censorship and the British Council were quickly in the mix for that one.

We chatted about what writers need to write. The issues they face in terms of carving out time and a space to write. Particularly women with young children. What constitutes a writer. The challenges of imposter syndrome. How everyone has a story, if not an epic 800-page novel, within them, and how they should be supported and encouraged to tell it. The idea of a creating a new writing community… A house for writers… A writers house. Until finally, we ‘dropped anchor’ at the Essex Writers House.

The conversation spilt over into a follow-up meeting with Sarah Perry, Essex Book Festival Patron and award-winning writer, now Chancellor of University of Essex, and Chris Gribble, then Founder and Chief Executive of National Writers Centre, now Chief Executive of The Forum in Norwich. It wavered between a ‘bricks and mortar’ dedicated building with real coffee, desks and bookshelves, to an online digital space with a live-chatroom and a well-stocked, regularly updated database of agents and publishers. Both options containing everything a writer needs to get going and get published.

The Elephant in the Room – money – quickly made its presence felt with a deafening trumpet. Where are we going to find the money for a ‘bricks and mortar’ writers’ house, and where will we build it? Harlow, Chelmsford, Colchester, Southend, Thurrock, Maldon, Brentwood, Saffron Walden? Essex is a big county. One of the biggest in the land. A website, on the other hand, would be easy to fund and maintain, and accessible to everyone. At least for those with access to the Internet, Syd interjected. The momentum swiftly leant towards the latter. The thinking being that it’s always better to do something, than expend a lot of time and energy on something that most likely won’t happen. Common sense prevailed. The Elephant nodded approvingly.

As soon as Sarah and Chris left, however, it quickly started to swing back the other way. So much so that we decided to throw the Elephant out of the room and focus on what we really wanted for Essex: a ‘bricks and mortar’ Writers House.

It doesn’t have to be a big house, we agreed, but it does have to have real-life walls and windows, chairs and tables, books and coffee mugs, the odd bed or two if possible, and a view to write for. Somewhere for people to write, to chat, to drink coffee and wine, to share their work. Most importantly, somewhere for writers to gather. Something along the lines of The Red House of Culture and Debate in Sofia, Syd suggested. Or The Writers House in Tallinn, I added, having just returned from HeadRead Literary Festival in Estonia.

We went round and round in circles trying to conjure our dream house, while actively blanking the banished Elephant and its endless rude gestures through the window. It’s not that we didn’t have enough money to build a house or to renovate an existing building, it’s just that we had zero money and no palpable means of getting any for a project on this scale.

Then Colette had a brainwave. Of course, she did. Perhaps we were already sitting in it, she said. Syd and me were suddenly all ears. Even the Elephant lifted an enormous ear to the window. Ignoring the Elephant, Colette continued. We could turn Chalkwell Hall into a pop-up Essex Writers House for the duration of the festival. It’s got everything on the ‘House’ wish-list, including two lovely bedrooms to host our international writers’ residencies, and a spectacular view over the Thames Estuary.

Bingo. We were in and the Elephant was out. At least for now.

More Than A House, A Family

Anyone who has spent any time at Chalkwell Hall will know that it is so much more than just a House. It is a Mecca for creativity.

Take The Water Table: an innovative collaborative project between Southend Parks Team, Metal and Essex and Suffolk Water, which formed part of a drought-resistant garden for Hampton Court Flower Show, and which remains the ‘chief-gathering’ point for all of our Writers House brain-storms. Needless to say, it won GOLD.

The central feature of The Water Table is the brassica, which carries along its many veins the names of all of the people and tributaries who have been instrumental in engineering and water. This includes Joseph Bazalgette, the brain behind a sewerage system for Central London that radically reduced the city’s cholera epidemics, and took The Great Stink of 1858 to task too. Add to that the spade hidden underneath the table that marks all of the people who actually dug the drains but went unnamed and unrecognised for their work, and you will start to get a feel for what Metal is about.

That’s The Water Table covered, next up Metal Culture, one of the most intriguingly dynamic and nurturing cultural organisations I have had the pleasure to work with.

Founded in 2002 by Jude Kelly CBE, Metal has been active in Liverpool since 2004, in Southend-on-Sea since 2007 and in Peterborough since 2012. In each place, it works from buildings of historic significance which it has transformed from an empty or derelict space into a vibrant cultural community hub.

Metal believes that everyone deserves a rich, cultural life, and that where people live should not be a barrier to this. It creates time and space for artists of all ages and backgrounds to forge new ideas and realise their potential, while celebrating places, building local connections, and encouraging experimentation, collaboration and co-creation.

While I can’t speak for its ‘sister’ buildings in Peterborough and Liverpool, I do feel qualified to talk about the Chalkwell Hall ‘experience’. Whenever I cross its threshold, I have this overwhelming sense of coming home. Of putting down my bag, and everything else, be it a half-finished funding application or roadworks on the A13, simply fading away. Time stops, and the important stuff, the excellent conversations and invigorating brief encounters, the catching up with old friends and making new friends – the family stuff – begins. Because unlike any other cultural organisation I know, Metal is a family and Chalkwell Hall is a home.

That’s not to say Andrea, Paige, Hannah and the rest of the Metal team aren’t hard at it running a busy cultural centre, they certainly are, but rather it’s the way they do it. The time and space that is dedicated to artists and curators, workshop participants, and anyone else who happens to be there on any one day. The care and respect they show to everyone. The nurturing. Which is why Chalkwell Hall is the perfect place to host the annual Essex Writers House.

A Place for Writers

Looking back over the last seven years, firstly, I can’t believe how quickly they have passed, and secondly, the sheer volume of things that have taken place under the auspices of Essex Writers House, both in Chalkwell Hall and other related venues.

Who knew that we would be hosting our first radical silent disco in The Commander’s Room in Kelvedon Hatch Secret Nuclear Bunker as part of Estonian poet Pavvo Matsin’s international writing residency at Metal? Or hosting the first stage of our Radical Pilgrimage along The Saffron Trail from Southend to Saffron Walden at Chalkwell Hall led by British Egyptian writer and artist Lora Aziz? And, that aside from Lora, we would be hosting three other international writers in the House this year: Polish writers Majiec Hen and Wioletta Greg whose residencies were supported by the Polish Cultural Institute, and Pakistani blogger Nawaziest-Ul-Bushra, who is currently based at the University of Essex.

Meanwhile, the free Writers Hot Desks in the Attic Studio have literally become ‘hot desks’ as writers at all stages of their career now rush to nab one as soon as they go online. Why not take advantage of that spectacular view over the Thames Estuary? We knew they’d like it. Then there are the workshops, all free, and all fascinating in their own way.

This year we had Placemaking Poetics, a walking workshop exploring place-based writing through techniques such as concrete poetry, psychogeography and mark-making. We also have live author events with a special focus on local writers.

We were thrilled to welcome Essex writer and author Rose Cleary to come to the Writers House in June to talk about her debut novel How to be a French Girl, and to host our first Lucky Dip, a writers’ social with a twist and secret guest where writers could come along and meet new people, share notes and be entertained. The list goes on and on, and will continue to grow and evolve.

I am writing this from my lofty perch in Studio 459, a beautiful white house in Portugal set in a garden of orange and lemon trees surrounded by olive groves, which fauna aside, bears more than a passing resemblance to Chalkwell Hall, both in terms of the look of the place, and also its creative ethos.

Metal has teamed up with its wonderful owners Mark and Joao to support artist residencies for members of the extended Metal ‘family’ – those have taken part in Metal residencies over the last twenty years. I for one am honoured to have been invited to savour the experience and hospitality, and feel sure that this marks a new stage of Essex Writers House.

Quite how, or what form it will take, has yet to be revealed. Of one thing I am certain, the Elephant will not be entering this room.

Main photo: Chalkwell Hall in Southend by Mark Massey and Studio 459 in Portugal

The post No Place for Elephants appeared first on Essex Book Festival.

The festival will be running from 1-30th June in 40 venues across Essex involving over 200 artists and writers.

We are launching the festival at the wonderful refurbished Electric Palace Cinema in Harwich on 1st June where we will be welcoming award-winning poet Blake Morrison and our favourite East Anglian Ceilidh band The Hosepipe Band to perform Shingle Street & Other East Anglian Poems.

Other highlights include Radio 4’s Today Programme presenter Justin Webb, who will be talking about his memoir The Gift of a Radio: My Childhood and Other Train Wrecks at Hylands House as part of our special one-day The Pleasure Garden event on 19th June.

Patrick Gale will be chatting at Chelmsford Library, likewise Maggie Gee at Brentwood Library. We have the Guardian columnist John Crace providing insights into the state of affairs at Westminster, while award-winning stand-up comic Rosie Wilby will be guiding us through her hilarious book The Break Up Monologues: The Unexpected Joy of Heartbreak in the excellent company of writer Syd Moore at Anglia Ruskin University. You don’t want to miss this.

In fact you don’t want to miss anything this June. You particularly don’t want to miss us launching into Space with the Essex Steamettes, a group of young female coders (9-19 years) based in South Essex who will be running free coding workshops at Hyland House, and the Midnight Robber, the giant skeleton puppet which will be let loose at our Criminally Good Day hosted at High House Production Park, Purfleet-on-Thames on 11th June. Fun is the order of the month.

Get ready to start booking your tickets on 5th April, and in the meantime see below for a few early events which you can already book…

Essex Writers House

Thanks to the blood, sweat and brilliance of our partner, Metal, Chalkwell Hall has once again metamorphosed into the Pop-Up-Writers House, this time for the whole month of April.

If you are a budding writer, or are simply seeking the inspiration and space to get started on that long overdue novel, the Essex Writers House is made for you.

To find out what’s on the menu go to essexwritershouse.com

See you there!

In My Steps: Radical Walks in Essex

Another one with a bit of a ‘head start’ on the rest of the festival programme is our special series: In My Steps: Radical Walks in Essex.

We will be putting our best foot forward on 21st May with architect Emma Twine who will be taking walkers on a tour of the iconic Bata Estate, starting at East Tilbury Library and ending on Tilbury Marshes.

To be swiftly followed by a walk through Epping Forest on 28th May with poet Robert Hamberger. Robert will be retracing the steps of ‘Peasant Poet’ John Clare, an inmate at High Beach Asylum for several years before finally escaping and walking home to his family in Cambridgeshire.

Other Radical Walks include travel writer and walking aficionado Peter Aylmer who will be leading people on a tour of Harlow’s Sculpture Trail and more, followed by artist Elsa James who will teaming up with writer Syd Moore for a fascinating walk in the footsteps of the Witchfinder General and others.

We have limited spaces for these events so get in quick to avoid disappointment. Tickets are on sale now at essexbookfestival.org.uk

Stand Up For Diversity

Date and time: Thursday 14th April, 7.00pm

Venue: Metal at Chalkwell Hall, Chalkwell Avenue, Southend-on-Sea, SS0 8NB

Tickets: Free, booking advised

All are invited to an evening of three-minute mini-talks, short soap-box shout-outs that put a spotlight on diversity, writing, words and storytelling.

Hosted in partnership by Essex Cultural Diversity Project and Essex Book Festival, for this event we have teamed up with Metal and their Essex Writers House.

The event will bring together people who want to champion and celebrate diversity in the arts and in our communities, share the work they do with others, and collectively celebrate strong diverse voices.

Free, food and refreshments provided.

Booking essential – let us know you’re coming by registering here at Eventbrite.

In partnership with EA Festival

We’re proud to announce our continuing partnership with EA Festival this year. One of the highlights of Essex Book Festival is our co-produced event with Maggi Hambling and James Cahill on 12th June.

EA Festival is a multidisciplinary festival taking place over the weekend of 11/12 June at Hedingham Castle.
Their line-up includes Paul McKenna, Luke Wright, Bessie Turner, Hugh Johnson and many others.

Visit eafestival.com to see their full programme.

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