How many chapters should a book have?

It’s a straightforward question, but one I haven’t considered before. The obvious, and obviously flippant, answer is it should have as many chapters as it needs. But how many is that?

This topic came up in a group discussion recently, kicked off by a member asking if any of us sets a target for the number of chapters in their novel in the same way you might set a word count target. Interesting question, because we know that some genres do come with an expectation of overall word count (thrillers tend to be 80,000 to 90,000 words, for example, whereas sci-fi or fantasy can run well over 100,000 words).

I discussed word counts earlier this year with :

But the number of chapters didn’t come up at all. It doesn’t seem to be part of the criteria that publishers or agents look for.

I have plenty of books on creative writing, with lots of advice on everything from character development to plotting, from sentence construction to dialogue. I couldn’t find anything with advice on chapters, which suggests either that it really isn’t high on the list of things a writer should worry about, or that it’s an under-discussed aspect of writing a novel.

I did find one resource - the author David Lodge published The Art of Fiction in 1992, a collection of his articles from the Independent on Sunday and the Washington Post. And there it is, among a host of ruminations on Suspense, Point of View, Showing and Telling, a chapter called… Chapters etc.

It contains no advice, though, instead concentrating on examples of how different authors have approached the task of breaking up long text into smaller units. Lodge notes that some of the earliest novelists, such as Daniel Defoe, didn’t have chapters at all, preferring to write in “continuous, uninterrupted streams of discourse.”

It’s not just the early novelists. Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels are not broken into chapters; he transitions between scenes with blank line spaces.

So, not all writers even use chapters. In fact, not all writers break up the narrative into scenes, or even paragraphs. The novel Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellman, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2019. It is written in one, long sentence.

And it is 1020 pages long.

A 1020-page sentence: no thank you.

Which brings us to what a chapter is for. If you were turned off of the idea of reading Ducks, Newburyport as I was, it’s probably because you were daunted by the notion of an uninterrupted sentence that goes on for over a thousand pages. You want to be able to take a break.

And that is what a chapter is for, surely - an opportunity to give the reader a break?

Yes, but also no.

A reader is going to take a break anyway. A chapter ending is a natural place to do it. So, from an author’s point of view, a chapter ending comes with a different imperative. It should actually give the reader a reason to keep reading. How? With a hook - a question that must be answered, or a character left in dire straits.

Another way of looking at it is that a chapter is just a section of a larger whole - a slice of a cake. How big should the slice be? Whatever you need it to be to tell the story, to give it momentum, or to slow it down. Or to indicate a shift in momentum.

We might therefore define a chapter as a unit of dramatic or informational momentum.

The point is that the story decides how big the slice is, and how many of them there are, not the other way round. Nobody bakes a cake thinking, “it needs to be 12 slices big.”

Aiming for a pre-determined number of chapters will likely lead to one of two things: padding it out to hit your number or compressing it too much to do the same.

Instead of asking how many chapters my book should have, maybe it would be more useful to write the first draft and then ask: “how many times does my story’s momentum shift?”

What you’ll then be doing is a structural edit. And you’ll end up with the right number of chapters.

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Fourbears Books News/Events

Last week I told you about a launch party event for the new Gruffalo book (the first in over 20 years) being held at Fourbears. This has now sold out, but if you have any little Gruffalo fans in your family, they might be interested in a free read-along event in the shop on Saturday 12th September at 10.30am.

Alex will be reading each of the books in the Gruffalo series, including the brand new book Gruffalo Granny.

You can sign up for this free event on the Fourbears website at the link below:

RSVP to Gruffalo Trilogy Read-Along

Our Last Meeting

Write Night: Your Work in Progress

We had a productive meeting this week, with lots of members making headway with their works in progress.

A couple of members reported that they spent much of the writing hour reflecting and thinking, which is something that we perhaps overlook at this event. Time to think is an essential part of the writing process, but when we lead such busy lives, shoehorning our writing sessions into our schedules wherever we can, we feel a pressure to ‘be productive’ - which usually translates into word count.

It’s perfectly understandable why we do this, word count is a tangible measure of progress. But if we haven’t thought enough about what we’re going to write and why we are writing it, if we haven’t worked through in our minds first what our book or story is really about, then pretty soon we’re going to hit a brick wall.

There are many reasons why the dreaded ‘writer’s block’ might afflict us, but maybe an overlooked one is that we just haven’t given ourselves enough time to think?

Next Week's Meeting

Writes & Bites - an in person social event!

Wednesday, September 9 · 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM BST

Our regular social event, in which we meet at a local restaurant and chat about all things writing, has a guest limit of 10. It’s the only event where have a limit on attendees, because it’s the only one where we have to manage a booking with a venue and give them accurate numbers. Also, we’ve found that more than 10 people round a table makes it difficult for everyone to interact and chat with each other.

All of which means there’s usually a waitlist on these events on our Meetup page. I’m usually pretty relaxed about non-attendance at our events - life gets in the way, stuff happens - but if you sign up for this event and simply don’t show on the night, that’s depriving another member of the opportunity to come along. That’s why there’s this statement on our Meetup page for Writes & Bites events:

If you sign up but later realise you cannot make it, please ensure you change your RSVP status to 'not going' so that other members can be moved up from the waitlist. Failure to do so may result in your removal from the group. Thank you.

This month we’re meeting at Coconut Bar & Kitchen in Reading, a Pan Asian restaurant serving Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesian & Malaysian food. If you want to put your name on the waitlist, or if you need to change your RSVP status to not going, please do so at the link below:

RSVP - Writes & Bites

Free To Join, Free To Attend

As you know Caversham Writers is free to join and free to attend and I want it to remain so. That doesn’t mean it is free to run, though. I organise the group meetings on Meetup.com who have seen fit to double the fees paid by group organisers over the last year.

This has led to many groups shutting down or moving platform. I like to think of Caversham Writers as a local group with a global reach and I want us to remain open to voices from all over the world. Meetup provides that global reach so I intend to stay there, but would welcome any contributions toward the costs of running the group.

So if you enjoy this free newsletter and our weekly free events, please consider helping out by buying me a coffee at the link below.

Buy Me A Coffee

What would you do if money were no object?

It’s the type of question you often see in self-help books. You know the type. Ones with titles like 6 Figures in 6 Minutes a Week, or Grift Your Way To Greatness.

The intent is to get past the initial ‘spend spend spend’ response and determine what’s really important to you. Assume you’ve paid off the mortgage (or bought that villa in Spain), say you’ve bought the flash car and the boat you’ll only ever go out in once.

Now, how are you going to live if money were no object? What does your day to day look like? It’s a thought experiment designed to accelerate you through Maslow’s Hierachy of Needs and contemplate the final level - Self-Actualisation: reaching your full potential, and finding true self-fulfilment.

This in turn involves creative self-expression (“I will finally write that book!”) and the pursuit of purpose and meaning. Often, the latter is found in a cause outside of ourselves. We find it in helping others.

Which brings me to Dolly Parton. In the wake of her death this week there’s been so much coverage of her career, her quotes (“It costs a lot of money to look this cheap”), and her business acumen.

It was the philanthropy that stood out for me, though. For Dolly, money was no object, and this is one of things she did with it:

A free book. To one in seven children. Every month.

It’s not limited to the US either. It’s expanded to Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and the Republic of Ireland.

All books in the UK Imagination Library program are published by Penguin Random House UK and are selected by an independent panel of early childhood development and literacy experts. The current UK book list is published on the Imagination Library website.

The program is delivered in regional communities by partner organisations such as local charities, councils, Rotary clubs, or businesses. In the UK, there are over 300 local ‘Champions’ acting as partners in the program, funding the delivery of over 670,000 free books a year to tens of thousands of young readers across the country.

Historically, the Reading area (where Caversham Writers is based) has had a strong connection to the scheme - Reading West was the second constituency in the entire UK to launch the program back in 2007, according to then MP Martin Salter.

But I’ve just searched for our local Champion on their Find My Program page and it currently comes up blank. There are Champions in nearby Bracknell and Newbury but not here.

I’ll be writing to Reading Borough Council and Reading’s Economy & Destination Agency (REDA) to encourage them to remedy this. I suggest you do the same.

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Member News

On the theme of young readers, here’s some news for young writers.

500 Words is the UK’s largest story-writing competition for 5-11 year-olds. This year, entries open from Tuesday 29 September and will close at 9pm, Friday 6 November.

Find out more on the BBC’s 500 Words page and spread the word to any young aspiring writers in your life.

Fourbears Events

It’s been 20 years since the last Gruffalo story from Julia Donaldson and to celebrate Fourbears Books is holding a launch party for an hour of stories and themed activities for little Gruffalo fans.

Tickets are on sale now on the Fourbears website, but places are limited so be quick!

Gruffalo Granny Launch Party

Our Last Meeting

Prompt-Write Night

It’s always gratifying when we are joined by members from overseas when we hold our Zoom based events. This week we welcomed writers from Leipzig and Prague as well as Chattogram in Bangladesh. Tanjena joins us regularly from there, which we very much appreciate given the time difference means it’s 2am for her by the time our event finishes.

It was a bit later than that this week, as we needed an extra 10 minutes or so to hear all the responses to Amy’s prompt on the night: “Ah yes, now I remember!”

We had a mix of poems, short stories and memoir. A prompt on remembering is a natural fit for memoir, which is what I went with, a rumination on how a recent school reunion provoked old memories.

Abigail was able to use the prompt to further her work in progress fantasy story, which is always a useful approach.

New member Freddie (welcome, Freddie!) is a scriptwriter, and he came up with a fascinating treatment for a short film about two old veterans meeting up long after the war.

More than one member wrote about dementia, albeit with very different approaches. Moira’s poem was a first person imagining of the condition, while Amy produced the following in response to her own prompt.

Who is this person washing my toes

And holding a tissue up to my nose?

I’ve not seen them before, they’re a stranger to me

So that’s why this feels pretty odd, can’t you see?

“Get off me!” “No, I don’t want any dinner.”

I’ve already eaten, don’t say I look thinner!

How rude of you to imply I don’t eat…

Would I like a chocolate? Oh yes please, aren’t you sweet!

What are you doing? That plate’s mine! “You’re stealing!”

I’m not confused, don’t tell me how I’m feeling!

What do you mean? Why are you saying all that?

I don’t understand what you’re trying to get at?

You came back today to spend time with your wife?

I’ve never seen you before in my life!

You’re off your rocker - stop gas-lighting me.

Actually, yes, I’d like a cup of tin…? Tub…? Tea!

Sorry, my words get mixed up on occasion

It’s like my brain’s under alien invasion.

I don’t recall where my husband has gone

His name is… Jack? Brian? George? Wait, it’s John!

What do you mean, you are married to me?

I think first we’ll see how we get on with that tea…

My daughter’s upset? I don’t have a daughter.

Where has that nurse gone? The one with the water.

She told me her name, but I can’t quite recall

Wait a moment, she’s back, “Love, there’s no need to bawl…

Your own mother doesn’t know who you are any more?

That’s sad, there there, don’t cry, are you sure?!”

“I’m certain she loves you still, even so.

I’ll bet that’s what she would want you to know.

I had a daughter once… born 6th of December.

Oh you were too?” Ah yes, now I remember…

© Amy Huntington

Thank you to Amy for setting this week’s prompt, and for allowing me to publish her poem.

Next Week's Meeting

Write Night: Your Work in Progress (Online event)

Wednesday, September 2nd · 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM

This writing session is a chance for you to work on (or start) a project of your own. It's your space and time to use as you wish. You don't have to be in Caversham, or even the UK, to join us online.

This event will be online via Zoom, so please make sure you sign up to attend via our Meetup page to get the link:

Sign up for Write Night

Free To Join, Free To Attend

As you know Caversham Writers is free to join and free to attend and I want it to remain so. That doesn’t mean it is free to run, though. I organise the group meetings on Meetup.com who have seen fit to double the fees paid by group organisers over the last year.

This has led to many groups shutting down or moving platform. I like to think of Caversham Writers as a local group with a global reach and I want us to remain open to voices from all over the world. Meetup provides that global reach so I intend to stay there, but would welcome any contributions toward the costs of running the group.

So if you enjoy this free newsletter and our weekly free events, please consider helping out by buying me a coffee at the link below.

Buy Me A Coffee

Have you ever wondered why old-fashioned local landline telephone numbers were seven digits long?

Of course you haven’t. You’ve got better things to think about.

I don’t have better things to think about, so strap in. (In my defence, I used to be an IT Consultant specialising in communications, and assigning numbering schemes to network addresses is both an art and a science that I was fascinated to learn about.)

Addressing schemes are strictly hierarchical - they have to identify a specific, individual person, device, or location (in other words, work locally) and at the same time allow users to find that specific address from anywhere in the network (in other words, work globally).

The first telephone exchanges had manual switchboard operators who physically connected lines from one caller to another. Phasing out manual switchboard operators needed an automated dialling system which in turn needed a scalable numbering plan.

In 1947, AT&T and Bell Labs established just such a system. Each local telephone exchange switchboard was physically wired to handle up to 10,000 individual subscriber lines, numbered 0000 through 9999. This was the local address - your home number was four digits long. Each telephone exchange had its own 3-digit code, making for a 7-digit telephone number that was both local and global (in the sense that it spanned the network, which was national).

In 1956, Harvard University psychologist George A Miller published a paper in the Psychology Review journal that looked at short-term memory limits. It turns out that Miller’s Magic Number for optimal memory retention was seven - participants in his experiments were able to remember seven ‘chunks’ of information in their short-term memory.

The telephone engineers got it spot on a decade earlier - phone numbers of seven digits are ideal for people to be able to remember (I can still rattle off my grandmother’s landline number from 1976).

All very interesting, I can hear you saying (or not, as I can hear yet more of you saying), but what business does all this have in a newsletter for a writing group?

Poetry, that’s what it has to do with.

More specifically, it has to do with rhyming schemes in poetry.

And more specifically still, it has to do with rhyming schemes that work better when performed or recited for an audience over rhyming schemes that work better on the page.

At this week’s Writeshare Night, Abigail read out a poem she’d written and afterwards asked the group if they’d picked up on the rhyming scheme. On first listen, most of us hadn’t.

That’s because we all have short term memory limits - rhyme only “works” for a listener if the echo lands while the first sound is still active in short-term memory. On the page, a reader can read back, notice a pattern retrospectively, even mark it with a pencil. An audience can’t do that. They only get one pass, in real time.

The key variable is interval - how many syllables or lines separate a rhyme from its partner. In a rhyming couplet the second line rhymes with the first.

Roses are red, violets are blue,
Sugar is sweet, and so are you.

Or, updated for the Tinder generation:

Roses are red, violets are blue,
Your profile picture looked better than you.

Longer couplet versions all follow the same rhyming scheme: AA BB CC

There are variations on the theme, such as an alternate rhyme ABAB where lines 1 & 3, 2 & 4 rhyme. We all know a limerick or two, which follow an AABBA scheme.

The longer the interval, or the more complicated the rhyming scheme, the harder it is for the ear to pick out the pattern.

I found the following table, which lays out a number of different rhyming schemes.

Good luck writing your Petrarchan sonnet and even better luck getting a listening audience to recognise it by ear.

Abigail’s poem followed an ABCDEABCDE rhyming scheme, where line 1 in the first stanza rhymes with line 1 in the second stanza, and so on for each of the 5 lines in the stanza. This isn’t one of the standard named rhyming schemes that I could find. It also has an interval between rhymes that is way more apparent on the page than it is to the ear.

Well done on trying something new, Abigail! But here’s the question to consider when writing something experimental like this - is it intended to be felt on the ear or discovered on the page?

What name should we give Abigail’s rhyming scheme? Answers in the comments. I’ll go with Repeated Quintain.

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Member News

Richard Stephenson will be performing at the Rising Sun Arts Centre’s fundraiser Variety Night on Saturday 29th August. More on their website here, including details of how to get a slot to perform:

“We want spoken word, musicians, drag acts, comedians, authors, dancers, magicians, poets, bands and anything else that fits on our stage. We can’t guarantee that everyone will be offered a slot.

Each night includes one 30 minute featured slot that pays £60. There are up to six 15 minute bookable slots. If the line up isn’t full, there might be slots available for previous Variety Night performers on the night.”

This Saturday 22nd August at 11am there’s a Poetry in the Park event at Tutu’s Ethiopian Table in Palmer Park, hosted by our friends at Reading Poetry Writing Meetup. It’s a monthly poetry circle where you can share or listen to poetry, have a chat and enjoy refreshments at the always excellent Tutu’s.

What’s On

Reading’s local history and culture are celebrated annually through the Heritage Open Days festival, which this year runs from September 12th to September 20th. This free festival features guided walks, historic building tours, and special exhibitions centred around this year’s “Everyday Histories” theme.

The aforementioned Rising Sun Arts Centre is hosting one of the open days on Sunday 13th September as it is the Grade II listed site of the former Victorian Temperance Tavern.

The Reading Temperance Tavern built in 1877 is one of the less well-known local buildings designed by Alfred Waterhouse. Explore the historic context with guided tours, temperance drink tasting, magic lantern exhibition, music, readings & talks.

Bookface Chapter 17

Also at Rising Sun Arts Centre, on Saturday 11th September, is Bookface Chapter 17 - an annual artist-led book fair. Entry is free, open from 11am to 4pm. “Discover beautiful artists’ books in their many forms. Zines, sketch books, altered books, mixed media, exhibition pieces, independent publishers, handmade and limited editions; using textiles, photography, illustration, printmaking and poetry.”

Our Last Meeting

Writeshare Night - Read Your Work To The Group

We’ve initiated a tighter schedule for Writeshare Night, and this was the first go at paying more attention to the clock! The objective is to allow for more readings and give each reader equal discussion time. From now on, the schedule for these events will look like this:

7.00 to 7.10 - Welcome & introductions
7.10 to 7.30 - First reading & discussion
7.30 to 7.50 - Second reading & discussion
7.50 to 8.10 - Third reading & discussion
8.10 to 8.30 - Fourth reading & discussion
8.30 to 8.50 - Fifth reading & discussion
8.50 to 9.00 - AOB

Each reader will still get up to 10 minutes to read their work, but the discussion afterwards will only go on for about 10 minutes before we move on to the next reader.

I hope it didn’t feel too rushed for those taking part. I was certainly conscious of time while hosting - I hope not to the detriment of facilitating a relaxed session with a free and open discussion but do let me know how you think it’s working as we do more of these.

Next Week's Meeting

Prompt-Write Night (Online event)

Wednesday, August 26 · 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM BST

Feeling stuck? Unblock yourself in this writing session where I set a prompt or theme for members to use as a jumping off point for an hour of writing. You can use it to write fiction or non-fiction, poetry or prose.

This event will be online via Zoom, so please make sure you sign up to attend via our Meetup page to get the link:

Sign up for Prompt-Write Night

Free To Join, Free To Attend

As you know Caversham Writers is free to join and free to attend and I want it to remain so. That doesn’t mean it is free to run, though. I organise the group meetings on Meetup.com who have seen fit to double the fees paid by group organisers over the last year.

This has led to many groups shutting down or moving platform. I like to think of Caversham Writers as a local group with a global reach and I want us to remain open to voices from all over the world. Meetup provides that global reach so I intend to stay there, but would welcome any contributions toward the costs of running the group.

So if you enjoy this free newsletter and our weekly free events, please consider helping out by buying me a coffee at the link below.

Buy Me A Coffee

Apologies to the late, great Bonnie Tyler for that headline. Despite my strained pun it wasn’t a total eclipse, and the partial eclipse on Wednesday night didn’t totally eclipse the artist in question either - author Owen B. Lewis - who came to talk to Caversham Writers for one of our occasional Ask the Author events.

With the eclipse peaking at 7.12pm, we gathered at the back of the bookshop to see how dark it would get, before heading back in start our chat.

Two years after his first visit to Caversham Writers (on a Zoom session in September 2024), Owen came to Fourbears Books this week to talk about The Wildfire Hurrier, the recently-released second instalment in his Wilcroft Chronicles fantasy trilogy.

Where The Waterfall Warrior followed siblings Hannah and Callum across two worlds on a quest to bring Hannah home, The Wildfire Hurrier focuses more on warrior Fay and her partner Rowan as their relationship collides with a more overtly political storyline. Owen spoke candidly about how his own experience standing as an independent candidate in the Senedd elections fed directly into the book’s world of invented political parties and inherited privilege. As he put it:

“I am prejudiced myself... to the elitists, the ones with power. But it’s always good, as a writer, to see the other side of things.”

In making Rowan a more central character in this book, Owen found himself writing a character whose background he instinctively distrusts. In finding sympathy for him anyway, it turned out to be one of the book’s richest threads.

The conversation ranged well beyond the page. Owen talked openly about how gruelling the “difficult second book” proved to be, trying to manage a writing routine while juggling politics, a bookshop job, and his own mental health, before landing on a book he now describes as more hopeful than he expected:

“It’s really weird how something that’s quite negative at the time writing it... it’s actually become a hopeful book. And I’m really proud of it.”

He also gave the group a useful look behind the curtain of hybrid publishing - reflecting on his ongoing relationship with Troubador/Book Guild across two different contracts, what he has and hasn’t paid for in terms of marketing support, and why he’s weighing independent publishers for a future, unrelated project.

Elsewhere, Owen touched on the craft choices behind the book: keeping Fay and Rowan’s relationship emotionally present even while the story keeps them physically apart for long stretches, the “eureka moment” in a coffee shop that finally unlocked the plot, and why he’s decided to give one of Therrhain’s animal characters a voice of their own in book three.

The full 90-minute conversation - covering all of this in far more depth, including member questions on pacing, worldbuilding and how he handles secrets between characters - is embedded below.

I really enjoyed chatting to Owen, he’s an honest and engaging character who’s full of enthusiasm for his work. Put the kettle on and have a listen.

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Member News

Three members of Caversham Writers (Richard Stephenson, Gill passman and Louisa Guise) performed as part of Dreading Slam at Here Comes the Sun Festival last Saturday at the Rising Sun Arts Centre. The show, organised by Gill, went down really well - here are some pics from the day:

Next Week's Meeting

Writeshare Night - Read Your Work To The Group (online event)

Wednesday, August 19 · 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM BST

In this event members have the opportunity to read out their work to the rest of the group and get some instant feedback. You do not have to read anything out if joining this event, just listen and comment if you wish.

What to expect: We shall take turns to introduce and read out our writing (10 minutes maximum) and then have a short discussion on the piece we’ve heard (also limited to 10 minutes). Anyone that doesn’t get a turn this time we will prioritize for the next one.

We’re going to try out a new schedule for this one, to keep things tight and moving along, and to give as many people as possible the chance to read:

Schedule:
7.00 to 7.10 - Welcome & introductions
7.10 to 7.30 - First reading & discussion
7.30 to 7.50 - Second reading & discussion
7.50 to 8.10 - Third reading & discussion
8.10 to 8.30 - Fourth reading & discussion
8.30 to 8.50 - Fifth reading & discussion
8.50 to 9.00 - AOB

This event is online via Zoom; you’ll need to register on our Meetup page to get the link:

Sign up for Writeshare Night

Free To Join, Free To Attend

As you know Caversham Writers is free to join and free to attend and I want it to remain so. That doesn’t mean it is free to run, though. I organise the group meetings on Meetup.com who have seen fit to double the fees paid by group organisers over the last year.

This has led to many groups shutting down or moving platform. I like to think of Caversham Writers as a local group with a global reach and I want us to remain open to voices from all over the world. Meetup provides that global reach so I intend to stay there, but would welcome any contributions toward the costs of running the group.

So if you enjoy this free newsletter and our weekly free events, please consider helping out by buying me a coffee at the link below.

Buy Me A Coffee

Caversham Writers met this week for our regular social get-together, Writes & Bites, at a new establishment opened just a few months ago. Pathaan’s is an Afghan and Pakistani restaurant in the premises of what used to be Persia House back in 2019 (and later became Persian Palace). Going back there brought up memories of the early days of our group, when things were a little different.

In the first year and a half of Caversham Writers, we were somewhat nomadic, meetings were in-person only and we had no regular meeting place, or even a regular night of the week.

We met in different pubs and restaurants in the area, usually on quieter Monday or Tuesday nights. One week we’d meet to write in the Griffin pub, the next week in Alto Lounge, or The Island.

Persia House became something of a favourite. We wrote while sipping delicious mint or jasmine tea, served in beautifully ornate samovars. Back then we only had two meeting formats - a writing session for our works in progress and Writes & Bites, which was an excellent way for the group’s Canadian founder, , to get to explore the eating out options in the area. Before returning home to Toronto, Crystal started a third meeting format - a feedback event.

For a while, four of us shared the responsibility of running the group before I took it on alone. At the time, I joked mine would be a “benevolent dictatorship” but the truth behind that is I’ve never wanted Caversham Writers to be run ‘my way or the highway.’ It has to work for all of us, or it doesn’t work at all.

Around this time, in 2020, two things happened - the Covid pandemic hit and Fourbears Books opened (Alex actually opened his doors for the first time between the UK’s two big lockdowns and had to close again just weeks later). These two events led to big changes for Caversham Writers - we moved online and held meetings via Zoom and I arranged with Alex for us to have monthly meetings in the shop once things opened up again.

This in turn led to more changes. I made Wednesday nights a fixed day of the week for our meetings, giving members (and me) a structure around which to plan their week. It also meant a rethink for the type of meetings we had. Writes & Bites was no longer an option (albeit temporarily) and I felt we needed to have a little more variety. We introduced Prompt-Write Night, Writeshare Night, and Bookshare Night at this time.

The notable thing about all those new meeting formats is that they were member suggestions, not my initiatives (benevolent dictatorship, remember?)

Through Alex at Fourbears, I was also able to bring successful, published authors to the group to share with us some expert advice on everything to do with writing and publishing, giving us the benefit of their own experience.

In the years since we have continued to rotate through those meeting formats, both online and in person. The ongoing challenge for me is finding the balance between having a regular, structured schedule that members can organise their writing lives around (should they wish to) and keeping things fresh and interesting.

To a great extent, the latter is ensured by a constant supply of new blood as new members find us and become regulars. It’s also the case that all members are always coming up with new and interesting writing to inspire the group.

But I want to remind you all that I welcome suggestions from members on what more we might do to help and support each other, and make (or keep) the meetings fresh, exciting, and stimulating for attendees. After all, that is the purpose of the group - to provide mutual support so we can all improve as writers, to work on our craft and move closer to being published, if that’s your goal. If members of the group are not getting that from attending meetings, then this whole thing is little more than an ego trip for me (and believe me, I need no encouragement in that direction!)

So please, let me know if you have any thoughts on how the group, or individual meetings, are run; on how we might improve things to the advantage of all. Just remember, although we have no written constitution or mission statement, there are guiding principles for how I believe Caversham Writers should be - I want it to be inclusive and open to all; I want it to be a safe space where members can feel free to open up with their writing; I want it to be diverse in terms of the genres we write in and the backgrounds of those doing the writing; and finally, I want it to be a place where people with all levels of writing experience, from absolute beginners to professionally published, can feel welcome and able to contribute.

“If you write, you’re a writer,” said Crystal at our first ever meeting nearly 8 years ago, and that remains the group’s ethos and only qualification for membership.

Happy writing, everyone.

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Member News

The Dreading Slam Poets will be performing at Here Comes The Sun Festival this Saturday, the 8th of August for the 5th year in a row. Gill Passman will be organising the act and is really excited about her plans for this year’s performance. Caversham Writers poets Richard Stephenson and Louisa Guise will be reading their poetry along with other Dreading Slam regulars.

Dreading Slam will be entertaining the audience on the Tree Stage at 5.15pm. Please come along and support them and the other artists who will be performing at what is always a great afternoon and evening out.

Advance tickets for The Rising Sun Art Centre’s main fundraiser can be purchased using the following link or are £20 on the door. Here Comes The Sun 2026

Next Week's Meeting

Ask the Author! Meet Owen B. Lewis

Wednesday, Aug 12 · 7:00 PM to 8:30 PM BST

We spoke to Owen B. Lewis on a Zoom session a couple of years ago (listen back here). This time Owen will be joining us in person at Fourbears Books to talk about the latest in his YA fantasy series, The Wildfire Hurrier, which was published in June.

And as I’m now working at Fourbears, you can buy or order books on the night in the shop. Owen will be signing bookplates for any of his titles, which I’ll then order for you.

Sign up for Owen Lewis event

Free To Join, Free To Attend

As you know Caversham Writers is free to join and free to attend and I want it to remain so. That doesn’t mean it is free to run, though. I organise the group meetings on Meetup.com who have seen fit to double the fees paid by group organisers over the last year.

This has led to many groups shutting down or moving platform. I like to think of Caversham Writers as a local group with a global reach and I want us to remain open to voices from all over the world. Meetup provides that global reach so I intend to stay there, but would welcome any contributions toward the costs of running the group.

So if you enjoy this free newsletter and our weekly free events, please consider helping out by buying me a coffee at the link below.

Buy Me A Coffee

This Week’s Meeting

Bookshare Night - Your Summer Reading

At Caversham Writers we usually focus on the “write a lot” part of King’s quote, with meetings in which we gather to write or to give feedback on our writing.

Occasionally, we cover the “read a lot” part by sharing some book recommendations with each other. Members can select their favourite book ever, the one that means the most to them and which has influenced their own writing more than anything else. Or they can simply recommend a book they have recently read and want more people to know about.

So if you’re looking for inspiration for your summer reading list, here’s some recommendations from Caversham Writers members.

My Picks

Enchanted Islands by Laura Coffey

In last week’s newsletter I wrote about translations of The Odyssey, after finding an old copy of T. E. Lawrence’s translation of Homer’s epic poem. My first recommendation is a book inspired by the Emily Wilson translation (by the way, Wilson’s review of the Christopher Nolan movie is an interesting read, it’s on the London Review of Books website).

Laura Coffey only bought the Wilson translation to impress a boyfriend who then broke up with her. She went on a trip to get away from that, which turned into an odyssey of her own, retracing the steps of Odysseus around the enchanted Mediterranean islands of the title.

Her writing is so very sharp and witty, of the sort that makes you wish you’d come up with that line, and she evokes both people and places with a keen eye and ear. It’s a thoughtful, funny and at times sad read, as she is also coping with her father’s illness and, later, death.

Reading it makes me want to take the same trip, always a good measure of a travel book. It also makes me want to read more travelogues.

An Evil Cradling by Brian Keenan

In April 1986 Brian Keenan, a Northern Irish teacher in Beirut was kidnapped and held hostage for four and a half years, along with English journalist John McCarthy. The following year Terry Waite, the special envoy for the Archbishop of Canterbury sent to negotiate their release, was also kidnapped and held hostage.

All three would write books after their release, but this one by Brian Keenan is deeply affecting. When I first read it in the 1990s my immediate thought was how extraordinary it was that someone like this was captured - someone so erudite, so capable of expressing the psychological horror of captivity. Keenan’s background in literature and art meant that his account is rich with poetic imagery and lyrical prose, which sets it apart from the more journalistic accounts of his co-captors.

Keenan examines his friendship with McCarthy, his understanding of his captors as more than just villains, and his own mind as it descends perilously toward insanity.

It’s an astonishing read, one that nobody else could have come close to producing.

Stuart’s Picks

To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse by Howard Fishman

Connie Converse was a folk musician in Greenwich Village in the 1950s, a pioneer of the movement that would see Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell as household names a decade later. In 1974, at the age of fifty, Converse simply drove off one day and was never heard from again. In this biography Fishman sets out to document the life of an outsider and to discover what became of her.

The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh

If history is written by the winners, then America might be judged to have won the Vietnam War by sheer weight of the stories told by them. This book provides a Vietnamese perspective and a welcome counterpoint to typical Western narratives about the conflict.

Abigail’s Picks

The Lost Metal by Brandon Sanderson

Sanderson is something of a favourite among several Caversham Writers members. I was pleased to hear from Abigail that this volume in the Mistborn series shows a humour that many have accused Sanderson of lacking.

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

This wildly popular fable, first published in 1995, is a story of personal transformation, told through the journey of a young shepherd called Santiago.

Anastasia’s Pick’s

Veronika Decides to Die by Paulo Coelho

Inspired by Abigail’s pick, Anastasia remembered another book by Coelho that greatly influenced her as a teenager. Despite apparently having everything she could wish for, Veronika decides to end her life, with the story focusing on her changes in outlook after waking up in hospital.

The 7th Function of Language by Laurent Binet

This novel takes as its starting point the supposedly accidental death of Roland Barthes in Paris in 1980, asking what if Barthes was carrying a document explaining the seventh function of language – the ability to convince anyone, in any situation, to do anything.

Jacqui’s Picks

Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges

Every Bookshare Night we run highlights at least one embarrassing gap in my own reading history and this is right up there. (The gap in this case encompasses pretty much all South American literature, but Borges is a good example.)

This collection of short stories sounds like a great way into a much larger world.

Land by Maggie O’Farrell

This latest from the author of Hamnet has been staring me in the face every day since I started working at Fourbears Books. I can feel its pull - another one for TBR pile incoming!

Louisa’s Picks

How to Leave a Group Chat by Louisa Guise

Never one to be backward in coming forwards, Louisa has picked her own book but with good reason - the deal with her publisher has come to an end so she’s now going it alone in the marketing as she regains control of the rights. Watch this space for more news about her experience with Lulu in getting her book out into the world.

For those of you who don’t know, Louisa’s book uses the etiquette and misgivings people have around group chats and instant messengers to explore the wider topic of digital communications.

The Nowhere Man by Kamala Markandaya

“First published in 1972, The Nowhere Man depicts a London convulsed by fear and bitterness” says the blurb for Louisa’s second pick. London in 1972 is the place and time of my childhood, but this novel explores another version of London to mine - one in which Srinivas, an elderly Brahmin, experiences racism typical of the time. Sadly, this state of the nation book sounds more relevant than ever and it’s going on my TBR pile too.

Elaine’s Picks

Undermajordomo Minor by Patrick deWitt

The Librarianist by Patrick deWitt

Patrick deWitt is a Canadian novelist I feel like I should be much more familiar with than I am, maybe because of the film adaptation of one of his books (The Sisters Brothers) got some decent reviews when it came out in 2019.

Elaine has enjoyed all of deWitt’s books that she’s read so far and recommends them all but suggested we start with one of the two above. Looking through his bibliography, it seems deWitt is a hard one to categorise, with novels ranging from a darkly comic western (The Sisters Brothers) to a noir fairy-tale romance (Undermajordomo Minor) to a poignant character study (The Librarianist).

Jingyu Li’s Picks

Tuesdays With Morrie by Mitch Albom

This book, published in 1997, was as much of an iconic, bestselling success as The Alchemist was a decade earlier. Although both books are essentially about finding meaning in life, unlike the Coelho allegorical fable that incorporates elements of myth, the nonfiction book from Albom is a memoir relaying lessons learned from a dying mentor.

Where The Alchemist is inspirational folklore, Tuesdays With Morrie maybe has more real-life, practical advice. You pays your money, you takes your choice…

The links above to each book are at our page on Bookshop.org - but of course you can also order any of them at Fourbears Books here in Caversham!

Over to you - what are you reading that you’d like to share with Caversham Writers?

Leave a comment

Member News

From Richard Stephenson:

Dreading Slam, Open Mic Poetry Competition returns to the Rising Sun Arts Centre (RG1 2ST) at 7:30PM (Doors 7:15) on Sunday Aug 2nd

Free entry to watch or read.

Dreading Slam is a friendly, open mic poetry competition

The winner gets the opportunity to compete in the Grand Slam in January 2027

Join the audience or take part an evening of live poetry entertainment.

In addition, the chance to read the works of any poet (max 3 mins) outside competition

There is also a lively quick-fire round of short poems this is up to 5 lines long, won by the loudest cheer August theme is “Summer”.

If you wish to take part in the Poetry Slam, please bring 3 poems of your own work.

Next Week's Meeting

Writes & Bites - an in person social event!

Wednesday, Aug 5 · 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM BST

This is our regular social event for members to meet and chat over a meal at a local Caversham/Reading restaurant.

We’re meeting at a new restaurant recently opened in Caversham this time: Pathaan’s Afghan and Pakistani Cuisine.

To better manage the reservation with the restaurant, numbers are limited for this event, and we already have a waitlist. People do drop out occasionally, so feel free to put your name on the waitlist on our meetup page:

Waitlist for Write & Bites

Free To Join, Free To Attend

As you know Caversham Writers is free to join and free to attend and I want it to remain so. That doesn’t mean it is free to run, though. I organise the group meetings on Meetup.com who have seen fit to double the fees paid by group organisers over the last year.

This has led to many groups shutting down or moving platform. I like to think of Caversham Writers as a local group with a global reach and I want us to remain open to voices from all over the world. Meetup provides that global reach so I intend to stay there, but would welcome any contributions toward the costs of running the group.

So if you enjoy this free newsletter and our weekly free events, please consider helping out by buying me a coffee at the link below.

Buy Me A Coffee

In an embarrassingly small section of classics, tucked away between never-thumbed copies of James Joyce’s Dubliners and Euripides’ Medea, I just stumbled across an edition of Homer’s Odyssey. How very topical.

I haven’t yet seen the Christopher Nolan movie, but I have taken notice of the public discourse surrounding the adaptation. Yesterday, the renowned white supremacist and melted Kim Jong Un lookalike Elon Musk weighed in on the subject yet again, saying “Before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer.”

Don’t waste your time trying to imagine what a historically accurate Cyclops looks like, Musk is really only upset that Helen of Troy is played by a black actor, the magnificent Lupita Nyong’o, and by the casting of transgender actor Elliot Page in the movie.

A more serious discussion of historical accuracy would have to focus on translation of the original text. The original text itself could be subject to accusations of historical inaccuracy, given that Homer’s version was the synthesis of multiple tales and songs that had already been performed in an oral tradition for 500 years. Who knows how many changes those stories underwent before Homer finally wrote them down?

Nearly 3000 years later, we have plenty of modern translations to choose from. You’ll note from the photo above that my edition was translated by Lawrence of Arabia himself, T. E. Lawrence. His version is in prose with no attempt to replicate the verse of the original. It’s considered to be an idiosyncratic curiosity told from a soldier’s perspective, with Lawrence taking many liberties with the text. He frequently inserted his own phrases, embellishments, and modern concepts that do not exist in the original Greek. In the Translator’s Note in my copy, Lawrence says “I have been free with moods and tenses; allowed myself to interchange adjective and adverb; and dodged our poverty of preposition”.

The most famous recent translation is by Emily Wilson, a classical scholar who took pains to keep poetic structure. Homer’s original text is in dactylic hexameter, which works for Ancient Greek, but sounds weird in English. Wilson chose to translate the poem into iambic pentameter, familiar to us from Shakespeare, Milton, and Chaucer.

She also wanted to render the language more straightforward to a modern reader, while maintaining a sense of how unfamiliar and alien that ancient world is to our modern minds. No easy feat.

In her Substack essay on translating the beginning of the Odyssey, Wilson says of Lawrence’s version: “none of the first two lines corresponds to anything in the Greek in that place.”

Here’s a comparison of both translations of the opening lines.

Lawrence:

O Divine Poesy, goddess-daughter of Zeus, sustain for me the song of the various-minded man who, after he had plundered the innermost citadel of sacred Troy, was made to stray grievously about the coasts of men…

Wilson:

Tell me about a complicated man. / Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost / when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy, / and where he went, and who he met, the pain…

I enjoyed her summary of Lawrence’s approach in that essay, saying he “refers to Homer’s great poem as a “novel”. It’s the Odyssey for lovers of H. Rider Haggard. For what it's worth, nine year old me adored King Solomon's Mines.”

Accurate translation is not just difficult, it is probably impossible. Not just from an ancient text, but also between modern languages. In modern Japan, Hungary or Mozambique the language has developed to express centuries of local geographic and cultural nuance. There is often no way of making all of that meaningful in English or Spanish or French. Now add 3000 years of history and try to express in English the inner mind and worldview of an Ancient Greek. It can’t be done.

I’ll not hold my breath for Musk’s detailed literary analysis of the text; I suspect if he ever does make an AI version of the film it’ll be mostly notable for Helen of Troy being depicted as the epitome of blue-eyed Aryan purity. I bet he loves Charlton Heston’s Moses almost as much as he loves Johnny Depp’s Tonto too.

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Member News

’s Radio Dacorum spoken word show is now onto episode 3. The broadcast editions go out on Wednesday evenings during our Caversham Writers events, but you can catch up on Mixcloud - this week Louisa spoke to author Lynda McCarthy, who left her publisher to go it alone and self-publish her first novel Twin Helix.

Member Sarah Swatridge wanted to let us know about a market for your short stories. She subscribes to a quarterly magazine called Scribble, which “publishes about 10-15 stories in each edition (up to 3000 words) and they run annual competitions. Readers are invited to send in their 1st, 2nd and 3rd and (helpful) comments. Once all the scores are added up, if overall yours comes 1st, 2nd or 3rd you earn £100, £75 or £25 respectively.”

Read more on writing for Scribble and their competitions on their website.

Caversham Writers Author Event

A reminder that next month we are hosting author Owen B Lewis in Fourbears Books:

Ask the Author! Meet Owen B Lewis

Wednesday, Aug 12 · 7:00 PM to 8:30 PM BST

We spoke to Owen B Lewis on a Zoom session a couple of years ago (listen back here). This time Owen will be joining us in person at Fourbears Books to talk about the latest in his YA fantasy series. The Wildfire Hurrier was published in June.

Sign up for Owen B Lewis event

Our Last Meeting

Write Night: Your Work in Progress

A warm welcome to new member Jacqui who joined us for the first time this week. Her work in progress is a story set in a small town in Pennsylvania: in this week’s writing session Jacqui worked on a scene involving miscommunication between characters meeting for the first time.

Stuart is nearing the end of a rewrite of a manuscript he first wrote a few years ago and made good progress this week to that end. Moira continued work on her romance novel, while Sarah started on a short story on the topic of ‘Dissent’ for a magazine competition.

Louisa set about writing a blog piece on the ever-controversial subject of AI in the writing and publishing world. Elaine is taking stock of the wealth of material she has accumulated and written on her prisoner of war project - assembling the material into a coherent plan. Abigail is using the time between submitting her novel to agents and waiting for a reply to research the self-publication route.

Next Week's Meeting

Bookshare Night - Your Summer Reading (online event)

Wednesday, July 29 · 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM BST

Need some inspiration for your summer reading list? Find out what your fellow Caversham Writers members are reading and recommending.

Join us for this online discussion and bring along a book (or two) you’d like to share with the group - it might be a current or recent read or an all-time favourite.

This event will be online via Zoom, register to attend on Meetup to get the link:

Sign up for Bookshare Night

Free To Join, Free To Attend

As you know Caversham Writers is free to join and free to attend and I want it to remain so. That doesn’t mean it is free to run, though. I organise the group meetings on Meetup.com who have seen fit to double the fees paid by group organisers over the last year.

This has led to many groups shutting down or moving platform. I like to think of Caversham Writers as a local group with a global reach and I want us to remain open to voices from all over the world. Meetup provides that global reach so I intend to stay there, but would welcome any contributions toward the costs of running the group.

So if you enjoy this free newsletter and our weekly free events, please consider helping out by buying me a coffee at the link below.

Buy Me A Coffee

I want to give you all a heads up on some author events we have coming up, both for Caversham Writers and for Fourbears Books here in Caversham. These are in person events, so apologies to those members too far away to attend Berkshire, UK events. Where possible, I seek author permission to record events held by Caversham Writers for inclusion in this newsletter, so look out for those.

Fourbears Books Events

Next week our local indie bookshop has two events for which tickets are still available.

In Conversation with MJ Arlidge

Tuesday 21 July 7.30PM

The new DI Helen Grace book, Out of the Ashes, is out now, and author M. J. Arlidge will be chatting with Alex about the series and what it was like to work on Monarch of the Glen.

M. J. Arlidge Tickets

Summer Sizzlers: An evening of unmissable summer reads

Thursday July 23 7.30PM

In April, literary agent Carolyn McGlone came to talk to Caversham Writers about finding an agent (you can listen back in this edition of the newsletter). Next week Carolyn joins Alex in Fourbears for a lively evening of book recommendations, conversation and plenty of literary inspiration. They’ll both be sharing their top picks for the season.

Summer Sizzlers Tickets

Caversham Writers Event

Our group has an event next month, also held at Fourbears Books in Caversham:

Ask the Author! Meet Owen B Lewis

Wednesday, Aug 12 · 7:00 PM to 8:30 PM BST

We spoke to Owen B Lewis on a Zoom session a couple of years ago (listen back here). This time Owen will be joining us in person at Fourbears Books to talk about the latest in his YA fantasy series. The Wildfire Hurrier was published in June.

Sign up for Owen B Lewis event

Dreading Slam

Our poetry friends are appearing at the Here Comes The Sun 2026 fundraiser for the Rising Sun Arts Centre in Reading:

We are back for another day of art, music and more as the Rising Sun Arts Centre opens its doors for the annual Here Comes The Sun festival. The centre will be transformed into a vibrant celebration of all the things the Centre and its volunteers hold dear. Bunting, fake grass, lots of colour and a glorious programme of arts all over the building! We have an incredible lineup of talented musicians and performers across 3 stages, captivating art installations and a host of family-friendly activities.

Saturday 8th August 2026, 2 pm to 11pm

Member News

has her own spoken word radio show on Radio Dacorum:

The prerecorded show goes out on Wednesday evenings at 8pm which, of course, clashes with our Caversham Writers meetings. But fear not! You can listen back on her Mixcloud page.

Our Last Meeting

Prompt-Write Night

We moved our regular Wednesday evening slot this week to Thursday so that members could enjoy watching England’s World Cup semi-final against Argentina.

Sigh.

I decided to set a football-related prompt to mark the occasion, but not one that would exclude those who aren’t interested in football.

The prompt I went with was: They think it’s all over…

Non-football fans and overseas members may not be familiar with this phrase, which was an iconic piece of TV commentary from England’s only World Cup Final win in 1966. With seconds remaining of the match, England are 3-2 up and the referee blew his whistle for an infringement. Some spectators, thinking the whistle was for the end of the match, started celebrating early and ran onto the pitch. Meanwhile, the match continued with England’s Geoff Hurst bearing down on goal. Commentator Kenneth Wolstenhome noticed the fans: “Some people are on the pitch, they think it’s all over… (Hurst smashes the ball into the net to make it 4-2) …it is now!”

Anyway, we had some splendid poetry in response to the prompt - Moira on the football, Amy had school on her mind with hers, and Richard went for Alfred the great battling the Vikings.

Gill started a dialogue between friends in a wine bar, Abigail wrote a futuristic game show, and Louise noted the statistics that show an increase in domestic violence whenever England lose a football match with a strong piece depicting that.

And me? I came up with the following vignette.

‘They think it’s all over the papers already,’ screeched Rupert, fumbling with his laptop as he ran into the living room.

‘Who thinks what is where?’ replied Fiona, affecting the bored indifference with which she treated all of Rupert’s panicky outbursts.

‘The chaps! The chaps! At my club. They think my, um, issue is about to become a Big Issue.’

‘Your issue? Is that what you’re calling her now? I’m sure she’s delighted.’

Rupert frowned, unsure of the extent to which Fiona was taking the piss. He’d never worked that out, one of many problems he now knew came with marrying above your station for political gain. Her superior intellect often skewered him without him even realising until it was too late. Up to now, it had been a price well worth paying - social standing and political cachet providing an invaluable buffer while his fledgling Repulse Party UK fomented division and strife across the land.

‘Well, er, the thing is, the chaps have got wind of that awful guttersnipe at the Telegraph sniffing around the story and it’s about to go up. Once they run it, they’ll all run it.’ Rupert scurried over to the bay windows while his laptop whirred into life. ‘I can’t see the wolf pack out in the street - should we pack a bag and pop over to the chateau, ride it all out over there?’

‘Whatever for?’ said Fiona, ‘why would they run the story, anyway? You’ve always had them in the palm of your hand, just like the other lot do. They only really go after the Remoaners and the Liberati, what do you have to worry about?’

‘Oh, they’ll run this one, you can be sure of that.’

‘But why? And even if they do, you know they’ll go easy on you, they always do. Look at what’s gone before. Our shambolic excuse of a Prime Minister broke his own laws repeatedly during Covid and our friendly media outlets all went after the Bleeder of the Opposition instead, a full week of front page news about an event in which he followed the rules. You’ll be fine.’

‘But that was bog standard political media bias, everyone knows that’s how those things work. This is different. It’ll be used against me?’

‘How? If that mop-headed tub of lard can get pissed at a party in Italy while Foreign Secretary and end up alone with a former KGB operative without any adverse coverage in the press at all, how can you possibly fall foul of them? They all want what you are pushing for, the fear you’re fostering in the nation is meat and drink to them, they love it, they don’t want it to stop.’

‘Yes, but this one is somewhat salacious and, um, might be subject to certain accusations that go against our ideals.’

‘Ideals? We have ideals? Well, I never. Every day is a school day. How could your latest infidelity possibly be any different to the others?’

‘Well, you see the issue is… um, the issue is that this time there has been, well… issue.’

‘Issue?’

‘Yes, issue. You know. Um. Progeny.’

‘Progeny, Rupert?’ You mean to tell me that you’ve finally knocked one up?’

‘Knocked up and knocked out. There has been… issue.’

‘Oh dear God, you great big walking appendage. How could you?’

‘It’s all her fault. I was careful, I know I was. She must have rummaged in the bin for the used, you know, thingy, and done it herself.’

‘Oh really, Rupert, spare me the sordid details. Anyway, even if this abhorrent offspring should come to light, what difference does that make? BJ was spaffing progeny all over London. Never did him any harm.’ Fiona made her way over to the laptop, while Rupert kept his vigil at the curtains.

‘Well, there’s a certain twist, shall we say, a wrinkle, about this particular liaison that might be subject to more scrutiny from, um, let’s just say… our kind of people. It could be the end of me. Career over.’

‘Over? You’re getting hysterical, don’t be ridiculous, whatever could… oh.’

Fiona stopped, staring at the laptop screen which had just refreshed its browser. The GB news site headline shouted at her:

RANDY RUPERT’S DIRTY LITTLE BLACK SHEEP

‘Well,’ said Rupert, ‘what is it? Is it all… over?’

Fiona closed the laptop lid. ‘It is now.’

Next Week's Meeting

Write Night: Your Work in Progress (Online event)

Wednesday, July 22 · 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM BST

This writing session is a chance for you to work on (or start) a project of your own. It’s your space and time to use as you wish.

It’s a writing session, but we also make time to discuss your work and any issues you might be facing with it.

This event will be online via Zoom, register to attend on Meetup to get the link:

Sign up for Write Night

Free To Join, Free To Attend

As you know Caversham Writers is free to join and free to attend and I want it to remain so. That doesn’t mean it is free to run, though. I organise the group meetings on Meetup.com who have seen fit to double the fees paid by group organisers over the last year.

This has led to many groups shutting down or moving platform. I like to think of Caversham Writers as a local group with a global reach and I want us to remain open to voices from all over the world. Meetup provides that global reach so I intend to stay there, but would welcome any contributions toward the costs of running the group.

So if you enjoy this free newsletter and our weekly free events, please consider helping out by buying me a coffee at the link below.

Buy Me A Coffee

Fourbears author events aren’t limited to Q&As and book launches in the shop. Ever since the shop opened, Alex has been a keen supporter of children’s literacy and community events, holding reading groups for different age ranges and also bringing authors into local schools.

My first day with Fourbears last week was a delightful one - escorting children’s author Christopher Edge to a couple of primary schools where he gave a terrific interactive presentation to Years 4, 5 and 6 on the subject of his latest book, How To Steal The Future. Here’s the blurb:

The maze is a dangerous place. The maze is ever-changing. The maze has never been solved.

Meet twelve-year-old Drew Blake, who faces the ultimate challenge. At the heart of a heavily guarded maze lies a secret – known only as the Avenir – which has the power to unlock the future. Many have tried to steal the Avenir, but no one has ever succeeded. Drew is the latest to try, just like his sister Evie did before him. But Drew has his own secret: he doesn’t care about the Avenir; he must find his sister.

Facing dead ends, traps and double-crosses Drew realizes that the maze holds secrets more dangerous than he ever imagined. Can he find the Avenir and save Evie before it’s too late?

In Christopher’s presentation, he spoke about how and why we have attempted to predict the future through the reading of runes, tea leaves or bones, via astrology, palmistry and oracles, and, a new one to me, the practice of oomancy (divination using eggs).

Children were invited throughout to go up and solve a series of challenges, riddles and puzzles of the sort faced by Drew in the book. It was great to see how involved and enthusiastic they were, and Christopher did a great job of engaging with two young audiences of over 200 at each school on a hot day.

I’ve had my first shifts in the shop itself this week. In fact, I’ll be behind the counter when this newsletter hits your inbox. If you’re in the area, pop in and say hi - and buy a book!

Leave a comment

Our Last Meeting

Writeshare Night - Read Your Work To The Group

This week’s event kicked off with Daniel reading from a personal essay on the subject of silence. The piece opened by discussing the difficulty of finding space for silence in the modern world, especially online where digital apps such as Instagram are designed to keep us engaged and to keep scrolling through the noise. The essay built towards an argument for how religious traditions and services offer a structure for people to bring stillness and silence into their lives. Although billed as a personal essay, Daniel intentionally tried to keep his own personal viewpoint to a minimum, preferring to cite examples from the cultural zeitgeist to make his points.

What do you think? Is a non-fiction essay more persuasive in its argument if it is taking a neutral, objective stance, or does it make its point more powerfully by using personal experience for the reader to relate to? Does it depend on the intended audience for the piece?

Paul joined us from the Netherlands to share an excerpt from the opening chapter of his book Denali: A Journey of Friendship and Perseverance. It’s an account of how Paul’s brother Mark sought redemption by climbing Denali in Alaska, the highest peak in North America. The question of why Mark is seeking redemption is where the book starts, in the excerpt that Paul read for us - Mark is still healing from a life changing accident that broke more than just his body: his sense of self and purpose were broken too. It was fascinating to note an intentional choice by Paul to write this account in the 3rd person, given that Paul himself is a part of the story, joining his brother on the attempt at Denali. Paul reasoned that this was a way of ensuring the narrative wasn’t about himself, told from his point of view, as it would have been if written in the 1st person. It was Mark’s story, so Paul wrote it as such.

Abigail then shared a chapter from near the end of her novel, Cancelled. It can be difficult to make constructive comments sometimes when we hear a piece for which we don’t have all the context of the preceding chapters - there will necessarily be things we don’t know about that have already been revealed earlier. In this case, however, Abigail had a specific brief for us - never mind the lack of context: did the narrative flow as you would want or expect for a chapter of a thriller building to an action-packed climax?

Pacing is key in such a chapter. You don’t want anything to put the brakes on as the action unfolds. Dialogue needs to be snappy, sentences need to be tight, all of it driving the action forward. There’s no time to smell the roses, or at least no time to dwell on it. Exposition gets in the way here - either deliver the information earlier or consciously apply the brakes because new information resets the action. It’s worth studying how masters of the craft, such as Lee Child, handle these scenes.

Stuart read another excerpt from the novel he’s been rewriting, based in Northern Ireland during the Troubles of the 70s. The second person narration is really strong in this piece, and with Stuart’s excellent reading, somehow made the story feel movie-like, in the style of the old film noir stories (as noted by Suni). I’ve been wondering what made it sound noir-like and I wonder if it’s because the tone of Stuart’s second person narration is somewhat cynical and world-weary? It’s certainly a dark, urban setting for the story, another prerequisite of noir.

We rounded off the evening with a poem from Elaine, who’s ongoing work in progress is based on her grandfather’s diary from his time as a POW in the Second World War. The poem was about the POWs beds and contained some powerful imagery. I particularly liked a line about a ‘town of beds’ suggesting a spirit of community among the prisoners, tempered by the phrase ‘separated into nations,’ reminding us that their living conditions were imposed upon them.

Another excellent and inspiring session, well done to all.

Next Week's Meeting

Prompt-Write Night (In Person Event!)

Wednesday, July 15 · 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM BST

Feeling stuck? Unblock yourself in this writing session where we set a prompt or theme for members to use as a jumping off point for an hour of writing. You can use it to write fiction or non-fiction, poetry or prose.

**Please Note! Should England progress past Norway tomorrow and reach the World Cup semi-final, that match will clash with this meeting. Many members who’ve already signed up for this event have said they’ll be watching the match instead, so in that event Prompt-Write Night will be put back to Thursday 16th - I’ll update Meetup and send out notifications accordingly.

This is an in-person event at our local indie bookshop, Fourbears Books, but you’ll still need to register via our Meetup page to attend:

Register for Prompt-Write Night

Free To Join, Free To Attend

As you know Caversham Writers is free to join and free to attend and I want it to remain so. That doesn’t mean it is free to run, though. I organise the group meetings on Meetup.com who have seen fit to double the fees paid by group organisers over the last year.

This has led to many groups shutting down or moving platform. I like to think of Caversham Writers as a local group with a global reach and I want us to remain open to voices from all over the world. Meetup provides that global reach so I intend to stay there, but would welcome any contributions toward the costs of running the group.

So if you enjoy this free newsletter and our weekly free events, please consider helping out by buying me a coffee at the link below.

Buy Me A Coffee

In April, Caversham Writers hosted literary agent Carolyn May McGlone in a special event at Fourbears Books. The audio recording of that Q & A with the group went out in that week’s newsletter:

One question that didn’t explicitly come up was whether literary agents are really looking for poets.

It came up this week in our Wednesday meeting, when I announced that Carolyn’s agency has now opened up for submissions. On her website submissions page, Carolyn says the following about what she’s looking for:

I’m keen to hear stories that encourage empathy and hope, which inspire and/or champion new perspectives, and which speak to your heart and soul.

But most of all, I am looking for texts that are uniquely YOU.
Show me something that no-one else could write.

She goes on to be more specific about the genres she wants submissions in:

• Adult & Children’s Fiction (Picture books, Middle Grade and YA)

• Adult & Children’s Non-Fiction which provokes discussion and broadens minds

• Under-represented voices with new perspectives

She is also explicit about what she doesn’t want: Sci-Fi, Horror, Cookery & Crime. (There goes my murder mystery set in the kitchen of a spaceship where the killer turns out to be Dracula. I even had recipes.)

What’s not mentioned at all is poetry.

Which raises the question of whether literary agents represent poets at all, or do poets even need literary agents?

In the group discussion on Zoom this week, Curtis mentioned that in his experience there are poets he knows who have agents, but that representation happened only when they were picked up to write memoirs or essay collections. The poets were already established in the world of poetry by winning prizes or getting published in major journals.

The poet and senior editor at Writer’s Digest, Robert Lee Brewer, addressed this question in a blog post in 2015. He wrote:

For the most part, poets and literary agents do not mix. When they do, here’s what is usually happening in 99.9% of situations:

Poet has already made it. Big time. Poet Laureate, books published by one of the big NYC publishers, and so on. Or...

Poet has a novel or memoir. Or something else of value that sells. Because poetry, for the most part, does not sell well enough to keep an agent in business.

Poet is being exploited by someone who calls themselves an agent. In this case, the “agent” is representing the poet for an upfront fee (and usually fees).

All of which backs up what Curtis said.

Brewer’s post was answering a question he gets asked frequently: “I am looking for an agent to assist me with marketing a book-length manuscript of poetry.” It was about feedback or critique from a professional as much as it was about representation.

Louisa recently sent me a link to just such a service - one that lets you hire a real, vetted literary agent to critique your query letter, an entire book, or anything in between - including individual chapters and synopses. You search for agents by price, years of experience, and genre, then submit your work and pay via that agent’s own form.

The service is from the agent-finding website QueryTracker and is called qtCritique.

Poetry? The home page says you can “submit any of your writing for critique, from novels to query letters to poetry.”

There’s no information about pricing for the service, but it’s free to sign up for and get comparison quotes.

Whether it’s a service that’s worthwhile at all, I can’t say. Depending on what stage you’re at with your work in progress, you might be better served hiring an editor instead, but if you feel you are ready to submit, then getting an agent critique might be appropriate.

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Member News

has her own spoken word radio show starting next Wednesday! It’s on Radio Dacorum, a local community-based station serving the Hemel Hempstead area in Hertfordshire.

The pre-recorded show will clash with our Caversham Writers meetings, but Louisa will let us know where they can be listened back to. Good luck, Louisa, have fun with it.

Open Air Theatre at Reading Abbey Ruins

It’s July already, which means our friends at Progress Theatre are gearing up for their run of Hamlet starting on July 15th.

To book, visit the Progress Theatre website, where you can also read about their history of putting on open air events in Reading going back to 1994.

Ask the Author! Meet Owen B. Lewis

In September 2024, author Owen B Lewis joined us via Zoom to talk about his writing and path to publication.

We spent some time talking about his YA fantasy novel The Waterfall Warrior. The second book in the Wilcroft Chronicles series is out now, and Owen will be joining us in Fourbears Books to talk about The Wildfire Hurrier on Wednesday, August 12 · 7:00 PM to 8:30 PM BST.

You can register for this free event on our Meetup event page:

Register for Owen Lewis event

Our Last Meeting

Write Night: Your Work in Progress

Lots of progress this week, from lots of members. Curtis has until October to get the first draft of the second volume his memoir to his publisher, so is busy editing the latter chapters. Louisa wrote a press release for her radio show. Richard completed tweaks to his Hiroshima poem. Stuart carried on reworking an old manuscript of a novel based in Northern Ireland.

Amy has got back into writing her novel, inspired by her attendance of the recent Book Finishers Summit, an annual free event with over 30 online talks covering everything from first drafts to marketing a book. Moira is also back on track with her novel, and David is nearly finished his - only about 6,000 more words to go.

Next Week's Meeting

Writeshare Night - Read Your Work To The Group (online event)

Wednesday, July 8 · 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM BST

In this event members have the opportunity to read out their work to the rest of the group and get some instant feedback. You do not have to read anything out if joining this event, just listen and comment if you wish.

What to expect: We shall take turns to introduce and read out our writing (10 minutes maximum) and then have a short discussion on the piece we’ve heard. Anyone that doesn’t get a turn this time we will prioritize for the next one.

The aim is to encourage our writing by having this space to share it and getting some spontaneous responses. We ask as always that this should be constructive and positive.

This event will be online via Zoom, register to attend on Meetup to get the link:

Register for Writeshare Night

Free To Join, Free To Attend

As you know Caversham Writers is free to join and free to attend and I want it to remain so. That doesn’t mean it is free to run, though. I organise the group meetings on Meetup.com who have seen fit to double the fees paid by group organisers over the last year.

This has led to many groups shutting down or moving platform. I like to think of Caversham Writers as a local group with a global reach and I want us to remain open to voices from all over the world. Meetup provides that global reach so I intend to stay there, but would welcome any contributions toward the costs of running the group.

So if you enjoy this free newsletter and our weekly free events, please consider helping out by buying me a coffee at the link below.

Buy Me A Coffee

The Great Gatsby might be the ultimate zeitgeist novel, encapsulating the jazz era roaring twenties and the hedonism that went with it. But did it capture the zeitgeist or predict it? The novel endures in part because Fitzgerald noticed not just where the careless pursuit of the American Dream was leading to (the Great Depression), but he also saw the rising tide of fascism in its early stages. Race theory, eugenics and the scientific “proof” of white supremacy was being openly discussed at upper class dinner parties in 1920s America.

F. Scott Fitzgerald saw what was going on around him and events unfolded to vindicate his inclusion of it in Gatsby.

It doesn’t always work that way. We don’t know how history will play out. How significant will a talking point from today be in a couple of years, or decades?

A novelist trying to capture the zeitgeist is trying to match symptoms to a cause, but a misdiagnosis can make you look silly. A better approach might be to simply write about what worries you in the world and make it personal for your characters. Give them a moral dilemma or put them in a compromising position. If you’re lucky, getting them out of it will define a larger struggle that we didn’t know we were facing at the time.

Capturing the zeitgeist might just be about luck, then, or perhaps it’s a question of timing.

’s latest novel, Bad Influence, was published last week on June 18th. It’s about two bored teenagers who get themselves into a spot of bother while phrogging - the act of secretly living in someone else’s home without the knowledge or permission of the owners. It’s about social media, and the world of social media influencers.

Three days before Bad Influence’s publication day, the UK Government announced that social media is to be banned for under-16s, bringing the subject right to the fore in the national conversation. Great timing.

Only time will tell if Will’s new novel captures the zeitgeist, but things are looking good for him right now. Will’s bio across his social media says “award-losing writer,’ which now needs updating as he just won the Fingerprint Awards Genre-Busting Book of the Year at the Capital Crime Festival last week for Kill Them With Kindness. Congrats, Will.

It was the launch party for Bad Influence at Fourbears Books on Tuesday, where we were treated to the spectacle of Will interviewing himself, asking questions that nobody ever asks him.

Among the questions that people always ask him, and top of his list of most-hated questions, is the perennial plotter or pantser question. Will once threated to burn down the shop if Alex asked him that a few years ago, which made it all the more thrilling for me to ask it in the subsequent Q&A.

The other most-hated question is the dreaded ‘where do you get your ideas from?’

In our Caversham Writers’ Ask The Author events, I’ve learnt to cunningly disguise this one, so see if you can spot it when we welcome YA fantasy author Owen B. Lewis to Fourbears Books on Wednesday, August 12th.

I’ll be chatting to Owen about his new book, the second in the Wilcroft Chronicles series, The Wildfire Hurrier.

Register for Owen Lewis event

East Reading Festival

I had the great pleasure of introducing Moira, Amy, Louisa, Louise and Richard in our line-up on the spoken word stage at the East Reading Festival last Sunday.

Moira kicked off proceedings with a poem all about our group, which she has given me permission to reproduce here:

We are the Caversham Writers

Cos Caversham is our place

We meet up on a Wednesday

Online or face to face

We sometimes do a writing prompt

Sometimes go for a meal

Sometimes we read our work aloud

Depends on how we feel

We all support each other

With feedback and advice

The groups full of encouragement

It’s really very nice

We all write different genres

We have poets and playwrights too

Whatever it is your working on

We have a place for you

So if you want to join us

And you’ve got some time to kill

Come speak to our great leader

Mr Adrian Raffill

Of course, I quickly got over my reservations about the penultimate line being a bit ‘North Korea’ - I promise my dictatorship of Caversham Writers is a benevolent one!

I thought ERF would be a good opportunity to showcase our Prompt-Write Night events, by having some of us read the various pieces we produced in response to the same prompt, one set by Louisa last year: Who are we?

I read my piece that went into this edition of the newsletter:

Amy then read her poem that came from that prompt, as did Richard later on. In between we had reading two poems included in her poetry zines, currently on sale on her website. Louise read her short story, titled ‘Love’, and we had more poetry from Amy and Moira.

A big well done to all who read - you did a fabulous job and represented Caversham Writers magnificently. Thank you.

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Poetry Events

A couple of live events this weekend that Gill and Richard from Dreading Slam will be involved with:

Saturday 27 June, 6:30pm to 11:00pm

Variety Night at The Rising Sun Arts Centre in Reading is a fundraiser for the venue featuring music, comedy, drag, dance and poetry and an auction of work by Denis Cotter.

Sunday 28 June, 1pm

There’s a community festival at Tutu’s Ethiopian Table in Palmer Park, Reading on Sunday afternoon featuring local musicians and poets.

The food at Tutu’s is spectacularly good, so treat yourself to a big bowl of spicy Doro Wot while listening to the music and poetry.

Our Last Meeting

Writes & Bites - an in person social event!

What blessed relief to discover that Alto Lounge in Caversham has air-conditioning. The crazy heat that’s currently breaking all records in the UK has been slowly turning me mad this week, a Colonel Kurtz-like figure sitting in a darkened room in a fever dream. I’ve been this close to shaving my head.

Strolling into Alto Lounge was more like the final scene from Ice Cold in Alex than Apocalypse Now, though, and the extreme weather hadn’t put off our intrepid writers, who turned out in force for our regular social event.

I can heartily recommend the Nasi Goreng.

Next Week's Meeting

Write Night: Your Work in Progress (Online event)

Wednesday, July 1 · 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM BST

This writing session is a chance for you to work on (or start) a project of your own. It’s your space and time to use as you wish.

It’s a writing session, but we also make time to discuss your work and any issues you might be facing with it.

This event will be online via Zoom, register to attend on Meetup to get the link:

Sign up for Write Night

Free To Join, Free To Attend

As you know Caversham Writers is free to join and free to attend and I want it to remain so. That doesn’t mean it is free to run, though. I organise the group meetings on Meetup.com who have seen fit to double the fees paid by group organisers over the last year.

This has led to many groups shutting down or moving platform. I like to think of Caversham Writers as a local group with a global reach and I want us to remain open to voices from all over the world. Meetup provides that global reach so I intend to stay there, but would welcome any contributions toward the costs of running the group.

So if you enjoy this free newsletter and our weekly free events, please consider helping out by buying me a coffee at the link below.

Buy Me A Coffee

It’s an easy step to overlook. Many of us think of “getting published” as the big leap - agents, publishers, national magazines - and skip straight past the opportunity sitting on our own doorstep. But writing for a local paper offers something immediate: a real audience, a real deadline, and a readership who will recognise the streets, the shops and cafes, and quite possibly you.

Here in Caversham, we have the Caversham Bridge newspaper, and most of what follows applies to submitting for them. But for those of you from outside our little catchment area, check out your own local paper and see what they are looking for.

A deadline is a great cure for a manuscript you’d otherwise never finish. The Caversham Bridge publishes monthly, with submission dates set well in advance, so you’re not writing into the void - you’re writing towards a date, for an editor who will actually read it. That discipline alone sharpens a writer. So does the word count. Local papers are ruthless about space, and learning to make a point or land an ending in 350 words is one of the best exercises going for tightening flabby prose. Every sentence has to earn its place.

There’s also the discipline of writing for real readers rather than imagined ones. A local audience is forgiving of subject matter but unforgiving of waffle - they want to feel something happened, that the piece was worth their two minutes. That’s good training for any writer, whatever you’re working on next.

It’s worth noting Caversham Bridge’s editorial character: this is a paper built on community spirit, warmth, and local pride. Fundraising successes, neighbourhood events, people doing good things for other people are all topics editor Phil Chatfield is on the lookout for. If you’re pitching a piece of nonfiction or a human-interest article, lean into that. A profile of a local character, an account of a community event, a piece on a Caversham tradition or institution - these fit the paper’s tone far better than anything downbeat or cynical. Good news, well told, is still good writing.

If non-fiction isn’t your thing, the Bridge runs a dedicated Creative Caversham section in every issue, featuring poetry and short fiction, along with other local arts and crafts activity. Recent contributors have had work featured there regularly, so the section is active and looking for material. Given the paper’s space constraints, a single poem or a piece of flash fiction in the 350-word range is ideal - which suits a lot of what we already produce on Prompt-Write Nights. If you’ve drafted something tight and complete in itself, this could be its first home. If it relates to Caversham in some way, all the better, but if not, don’t worry - make sure you mention you’re a Caversham Writers member and that’ll go in your byline.

Here’s some ideas to get you started:

• Adapt a Prompt-Write Night flash fiction piece - many will already be close to the right length, but if you’ve been particularly prolific, here’s a chance to work on your editing skills

• Write a short poem inspired by Caversham itself: the bridge, the river, Caversham Court Garden, shops, bars, cafes

• Profile a fellow group member or a local creative figure as a human-interest piece (not me - I’ve already been done!)

• Cover an author event at Fourbears Books (one of ours, or one of theirs - but check with Vicky in the shop in case she’s writing it up already for her regular column)

• Turn a piece of memoir or reflection into a “Talking Point” style article

How to submit

Submissions go to editors@cavershambridge.org, or via the form at cavershambridge.org/articles-for-publication. Keep to 350 words maximum, include a photo if you have one, and check the monthly submission deadline.

Seeing your name in print locally is a quiet, satisfying thing. Give it a try - and don’t forget to bring what you plan to submit to Writeshare Night first to get some group feedback.

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Member News

Some splendid news from Curtis Chin this week - his follow up volume of memoir to Everything I Learned, I Learned In A Chinese Restaurant has been picked up by publisher Little, Brown.

Congratulations to Curtis, very well deserved.

Our Last Meeting

Writeshare Night - Read Your Work To The Group

We usually hold our Writeshare Night events online via Zoom, as our many members from the rest of the UK and overseas particularly enjoy reading examples of their work to the group and it’s a great way for us to hear stories and voices that we might not otherwise come across.

This time, though, we met in person at our local indie bookshop, Fourbears Books. This was mainly to give those members reading on the spoken word stage at East Reading Festival this weekend a chance to practice and get some feedback on their intended pieces.

We were also able to work out a running order for our lineup, so it was a productive meeting all round.

East Reading Festival is at Palmer Park, Reading on Sunday 21st June. Acts on the spoken word stage begin at 12 noon, and Caversham Writers are scheduled to begin at 14:15. Our friends at Dreading Slam are also appearing at 15:00 and Progress Theatre have a slot at 16:00 where they will be previewing their forthcoming open-air production of Hamlet at the Reading Abbey Ruins.

Come along for a fun afternoon out in the sun - don’t forget to splash on the sunblock, it’s forecast to be a scorcher!

Next Week's Meeting

Writes & Bites - an in person social event!

Wednesday, June 24 · 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM BST

We are currently well overbooked for next week’s social at Alto Lounge in Caversham, with 9 members currently on the waitlist.

This is the only event that I typically set an attendee limit. I need to confirm numbers with the restaurant we’ve booked, and too many people presents further difficulties with payments etc. I’ve found that 10 people is the usually the upper limit to allow for a good round table discussion.

All of which means that Writes & Bites events are the only ones where no-shows on the day are a problem, as they may be denying another member a spot at the event. So please be aware that no-shows on the day of these events may result in expulsion from the group. Please let me know in advance if you cannot make it.

Free To Join, Free To Attend

As you know Caversham Writers is free to join and free to attend and I want it to remain so. That doesn’t mean it is free to run, though. I organise the group meetings on Meetup.com who have seen fit to double the fees paid by group organisers over the last year.

This has led to many groups shutting down or moving platform. I like to think of Caversham Writers as a local group with a global reach and I want us to remain open to voices from all over the world. Meetup provides that global reach so I intend to stay there, but would welcome any contributions toward the costs of running the group.

So if you enjoy this free newsletter and our weekly free events, please consider helping out by buying me a coffee at the link below.

Buy Me A Coffee

Without the focus of preparing for and hosting these weekly events, I would have lost all sense of time. Every day seemed much like the last, all blurring into one. We were living in bubbles mandated to isolate us physically, but there were knock on effects mentally. The sense of being out of time with nothing to differentiate the days was one of those effects and it was a disturbing one.

With our lives narrowing down to our own homes and the bubbles we were allowed to form with our nearest and dearest, it was a real lifeline to have one area of my life actually expand.

When Caversham Writers was a local Meetup holding in-person events only, our membership was limited to those in our local catchment area of Berkshire. Nothing wrong with that, it’s what the Meetup website was designed to facilitate.

But as soon as we went online during the lockdown, the group’s profile was made visible to people beyond our postcode. And they started joining us - from the rest of the UK, from across Europe, and from all over the world.

It was fun to have the group founder with us again, having returned home to Toronto. It was great to hear from members in faraway places such as Myanmar and Bangladesh. And Nigeria.

In September 2020 we held a feedback event in which new member Ayotola Tehingbola presented a short story to the group called Rape of Paradise, which told the story of a young woman’s shocking and brutal upbringing in Delta State, and her aspirations for her education as a way into a different life.

It was a vivid and unflinching portrait of a life most of us in the group could never imagine and it touched us all deeply.

The following year Ayotola submitted another story to the group for feedback; this one was called Heavy Edgy Memories Of Phony Henchmen Organizing Bad Intentional Acts or; Rust.

If anything, this story was even more shocking, showing us a child’s traumatic loss of innocence - from her helplessness while witnessing her parents’ arguing, through to a violent roadside robbery. The young protagonist collects words she doesn’t yet understand, phonetically recording them in a notebook given to her by her father for her seventh birthday: “For all the words you can taste.”

I’m delighted to report that both of those stories appear in Ayotola’s first book, published here in the UK on June 4th by Jacaranda Books. It is an anthology of her short stories called Lagos Will Be Hard For You.

The collection includes stories previously published in The Common, Washington Square Review, Witness Magazine, and several that were nominated for the prestigious Pushcart Prize.

I urge you to buy a copy - it’s available at all the usual outlets in the UK, including Bookshop.org, Waterstones, Blackwell’s, Amazon, Jacaranda Books, or you can do what I did and order from our local independent bookshop in Caversham, Fourbears Books.

Congratulations to Ayotola and also a big thank you to her for mentioning Caversham Writers in the acknowledgements: “for reading that first story during COVID and urging me on.”

The pleasure is all ours, Ayotola, and I cannot remember urging on anyone more deserving. It has become one of the great pleasures of running Caversham Writers over the years to hear from voices that I might not otherwise have heard, telling stories that have taught me so much and added to my understanding of the world. And it started with you.

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Independent Bookshop Week 2026 - Starts Tomorrow!

Saturday 13th – Saturday 20th June

From the Books Are My Bag website:

Independent Bookshop Week is a celebration of independent bookshops across the UK and Ireland. It aims to highlight the vital role independent bookshops play in their communities, and to encourage consumers to shop for their summer reads with their local independent. The campaign was launched in 2006.

We are very lucky in Caversham to have the wonderful Fourbears Books. Alex and the team are so very supportive of the community in general and us at Caversham Writers in particular.

I thought we as a group should show some support in return, so I’ve organised a group Meetup for tomorrow - Saturday 13th June at 10.30AM.

Here’s the plan:

• We’ll gather at Costa Coffee in St Martin’s Precinct in Caversham for coffee and a chat.

• Then we troop round to Fourbears and buy a book!

• Share your book purchases on social media tagging @booksaremybag and #IndieBookshopWeek (and @fourbearsbooks)

I’ve scheduled a Meetup event for you to register your attendance, details here:

Indie Bookshop Week Coffee Morning

Our Last Meeting

Prompt-Write Night - Cancelled

Apologies to all who signed up for this event that I had to cancel at relatively short notice.

Next Week's Meeting

Writeshare Night - Read Your Work To The Group (in person!)

Wednesday, June 17 · 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM BST

At this in-person event at Fourbears Books in Caversham, members have the opportunity to read out their work to the rest of the group and get some instant feedback.

**If you’re reading at the East Reading Festival on Sunday June 21st, this is a chance to practice and get a little feedback before the day**

Sign up for Writeshare Night

Free To Join, Free To Attend

As you know Caversham Writers is free to join and free to attend and I want it to remain so. That doesn’t mean it is free to run, though. I organise the group meetings on Meetup.com who have seen fit to double the fees paid by group organisers over the last year.

This has led to many groups shutting down or moving platform. I like to think of Caversham Writers as a local group with a global reach and I want us to remain open to voices from all over the world. Meetup provides that global reach so I intend to stay there, but would welcome any contributions toward the costs of running the group.

So if you enjoy this free newsletter and our weekly free events, please consider helping out by buying me a coffee at the link below.

Buy Me A Coffee

Some news from my day job this week as I came across an article posted on LinkedIn discussing a report called The Great Flattening.

The subject was our old friend AI and the argument posited by marketing website The State of Brand is that AI is making every company sound the same. Initially, they based this assertion on anecdotal evidence and observed patterns in content, noting for instance that “the phrase “not just X, it’s Y” appeared in 73 corporate documents in a single quarter after barely registering across the previous two decades.”

Since that original piece published in April, State of Brand has now reported on peer reviewed studies into the topic and discovered that “the findings are worse than what we originally described.”

In The Great Flattening, Part 2, State of Brand reports as follows:

The team tested over 70 large language models using a dataset of 26,000 real-world, open-ended queries, the kind of things people actually type into ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and other tools every day.

When they asked 25 different models to write a metaphor about time, each generating 50 responses, the outputs didn’t spread across the conceptual space the way human answers would. They collapsed into two clusters. One group wrote variations of “time is a river.” The other wrote variations of “time is a weaver.” Different architectures, different companies, different continents, two ideas.

The last sentence is the telling one. This isn’t a case of similar responses generated from the same AI. Different AIs built by different companies with different objectives in different countries produced content that was 81% the same when asked to write a product description for iPhone cases.

Identical phrases were generated by both DeepSeek-V3 (built in China) and OpenAI's GPT-4o (built in San Francisco): “Elevate your iPhone with our,” “sleek, without compromising,” and “with bold, eye-catching.”

The evidence is compelling - AI “homogenizes human expression, thought patterns, and group creativity.”

In other words, it all sounds the same. It doesn’t matter what AI you use, it all sounds the same. It doesn’t matter how clever you get with your prompts, it all sounds the same.

I’m feeling rather smug about this. I was asked a couple of years ago about AI taking my job as a copywriter. My answer was to ask another question in turn: suppose that did happen, everywhere - what if every company in the world produced all their marketing material with AI? What would it look like?

Two years ago I assumed it would all look the and sound the same. I had no basis for this supposition, but I put forward the argument that the only way a company could then differentiate itself or its products from the competition would be to hire a human again.

That’s because a human would be able to write about that product from a human perspective and appeal to the same human experience of using it. There is no substitute for real human experience and the real human emotion of that experience, recounted by a real human who knows how to express themselves in a way that resonates with another human being. It’s what we do best - communicate.

We may have reached a tipping point with AI. A realisation of something that should have been obvious all along - the only way to stand out is by being you. Find your voice and use it.

All of the above is about commercial writing, not creative writing. But of course, it applies to every form of writing that is intended to communicate a message from one human to another.

To me, it has never been a question of whether you should use AI in creative writing. The ethical questions are secondary as far as I’m concerned. The fundamental question is surely why? Why would you use an AI to write something that is supposed to be an expression of your own innermost thoughts? Every piece of creative writing is an expression of how the author sees the world, an attempt to say, “this is what it is like to be inside my mind.”

Why would you hand that over to a piece of code that doesn’t see the world and cannot know you?

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Independent Bookshop Week 2026

Saturday 13th – Saturday 20th June

From the Books Are My Bag website:

Independent Bookshop Week is a celebration of independent bookshops across the UK and Ireland. It aims to highlight the vital role independent bookshops play in their communities, and to encourage consumers to shop for their summer reads with their local independent. The campaign was launched in 2006.

We are very lucky in Caversham to have the wonderful Fourbears Books. Alex and the team are so very supportive of the community in general and us at Caversham Writers in particular.

I thought we as a group should show some support in return, so I’ve organised a group Meetup for Saturday 13th June at 10.30AM.

Here’s the plan:

• We’ll gather at Costa Coffee in St Martin’s Precinct in Caversham for coffee and a chat.

• Then we troop round to Fourbears and buy a book!

• Share your book purchases on social media tagging @booksaremybag and #IndieBookshopWeek (and @fourbearsbooks)

I’ve scheduled a Meetup event for you to register your attendance, details here:

Indie Bookshop Week Coffee Morning

Our Last Meeting

Write Night: Your Work in Progress

Last week I shared the Zoom AI summary of the meeting, which was reasonably accurate. This week it tells me that “Abigail was editing her novel Gorilla Cancelled…” Gorilla?

It’s simply titled Cancelled, and Abigail announced yesterday that she’s made her first agent submission with it. best of luck, Abigail.

Speaking of submissions, Gordon told us he’s submitted his novel to the Bath Novel Award, an annual event “open to unagented writers, who are unpublished, self-published or independently published.” Good luck with that, Gordon.

Elaine told us more about her ongoing WIP, based on her grandfather’s POW diary from WWII. The research Elaine has done for this project has been extensive and she has plans to create a short film about visiting Slaughterhouse-Five in Dresden, connecting her grandfather’s WWII POW experience with Kurt Vonnegut’s work. Writing for a documentary comes with its own skillset but there are crossover skills from other forms of writing, in particular the need for a narrative arc.

Elaine’s grandfather’s link to Kurt Vonnegut gives me a good excuse to share thn on the shape of stories:

We had a good turnout for this week’s event, with 24 members joining the Zoom session. This included several newbies, so a warm welcome to the group to Geron, Sher, Lata, Lilou and Liliane.

The latter has her own Substack that you might be interested in reading. ’s bio reads ‘Fashion-obsessed fast-food addict, the biggest Edgar Allan Poe and Agatha Christie fan, and EY Rising Star’ and she is writing series about people in history who have inspired her. Here’s the one on Agatha Christie:

Lili's Substack

Agatha Christie: The Misfit Who Was the Duchess of Murder, Suspense, and Mystery

Read more

5 months ago · 2 likes · Lili Kiefer

Next Week's Meeting

Prompt-Write Night (Online event)

Wednesday, June 10 · 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM BST

Feeling stuck? Unblock yourself in this writing session where I set a prompt or theme for members to use as a jumping off point for an hour of writing. You can use it to write fiction or non-fiction, poetry or prose.

This event will be online via Zoom, register to attend on Meetup to get the link:

Sign up for Prompt-Write Night

Free To Join, Free To Attend

As you know Caversham Writers is free to join and free to attend and I want it to remain so. That doesn’t mean it is free to run, though. I organise the group meetings on Meetup.com who have seen fit to double the fees paid by group organisers over the last year.

This has led to many groups shutting down or moving platform. I like to think of Caversham Writers as a local group with a global reach and I want us to remain open to voices from all over the world. Meetup provides that global reach so I intend to stay there, but would welcome any contributions toward the costs of running the group.

So if you enjoy this free newsletter and our weekly free events, please consider helping out by buying me a coffee at the link below.

Buy Me A Coffee

I spent last weekend in North Norfolk in the birthplace of Horatio Nelson, celebrating my birthday and sweltering in temperatures that broke records set in 1922.

It was a bad weekend to discover my car’s aircon needed recharging.

It was a great weekend for everything else as I caught up with some old friends and enjoyed cool drinks with a sea breeze and ate far too much seafood. Top tip: if you ever walk the North Norfolk coast path, stop at the Crab Hut in Brancaster Staithe. You can thank me later.

I’ve travelled a lot in my life, for both business and pleasure, and with varying degrees of planning involved. Some trips need to be planned to the nth degree; others you can let unfold as you go and see where you end up.

I was once in Saudi Arabia on business for a week where it felt as though every minute of my time followed an itinerary and timetable that had been set out in advance. It made sense for the situation - I was in a country I’d never visited before, one with strict rules I was unused to and probably unaware of (while I was there an expat worker was stopped by the religious police, the Mutawa, while out jogging because his singlet and shorts were insufficiently modest. This was on a private workers’ compound). I also had a strict remit for the work I was there to do and a deadline by which it had to be done. I was on an oil refinery with serious security measures in place - soldiers in armoured vehicles, passport checks on entry points, permits required for every activity. There was an expectation for behaviour that could not be deviated from.

I was thinking about this on my drive up to Norfolk at the weekend. I didn’t need to use my Sat Nav until the last few miles driving there, and not at all coming back. The weekend itself was unplanned, apart from my Airbnb which I booked a month earlier.

There’s a comparison here to the age-old writers’ question of plotting versus pantsing.

Should you plan and outline everything or just fly by the seat of your pants and see where the story takes you?

The truth is, very few writers do one or the other. At least, not exclusively. It is not a binary choice, but a spectrum of options you can pick from depending on circumstance.

If, as with my Saudi Arabia business trip, you are setting out to write something entirely new to you, something you’ve never done before or something that you know comes with its own ‘rules’ or expectations, then maybe more outlining and planning would be wise.

If, on the other hand, you’re experienced and know what you you’re doing (or if you are simply comfortable with the idea of getting a little ‘lost’), you may not feel the need to plan much, or indeed at all.

You don’t need to do the same amount of planning for every single trip you take, so why do the same amount for everything you write?

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East Reading Festival

Caversham Writers has a slot on the spoken word stage at the East Reading Festival and Richard Stephenson is looking for volunteers to help out on the day.

This isn’t just for those performing - if you just want to come along and help out, Richard is looking for:

• Someone able to get to Palmer Park 10:00 to help set up gazebo. (no experience needed, just the ability to be there)

• Camera or video operator

• Sound desk

• Help to take down the gazebo at 18:00

Please let me know and I’ll put you in touch with Richard.

Our Last Meeting

Writeshare Night - Read Your Work To The Group

Firstly, my apologies to anyone who joined us via Zoom this week only to be presented with images they’d rather not have seen, thanks to an idiot who joined the group for the sole purpose of trolling and offending others. I hope I removed the pathetic idiot quickly enough that most attendees missed it. He’s been removed from the group and reported.

I suppose we have been lucky in the 6 years we’ve been holding Zoom events that this was the first time something like this has happened. I shall try to be as vigilant as the platform allows, but the odd one can always slip through the net.

Anyway, the Zoom AI Companion told me the following about this week’s meeting:

The evening featured readings from several participants: Tanjina shared a poem about writing poetry despite facing warnings from others, Curtis read an excerpt from his memoir about coming out to his brother in New York during the 1990s while pursuing a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, Stuart presented a vivid scene from his spy thriller “Quartz City” featuring flashbacks to a murdered agent named Sally and a former interpreter named Farah, and Vinoth shared an opening section from his fantasy novel “The Curse of Promise” set in a fictional world blending Tamil and Japanese cultures, though the group provided feedback that the extensive world-building prologue could be better integrated into the story itself. The discussion focused on writing techniques, with particular attention to world-building approaches in fantasy literature and how to balance exposition with action in the opening chapters.

Pretty accurate, I would say, although the excerpt Curtis read to us took place in DC, not New York (the memoir itself is set mostly in New York, so a reasonable misunderstanding?)

Vinoth was joining us for the first time, so a warm welcome to Caversham Writers to him, and well done on volunteering to read at your first event! The world-building in your work was excellent and the discussion it provoked around whether to present it in prologue form or weave the information into the narrative was an interesting one. As ever, there’s no right or wrong way, only what works for the author and perhaps what is expected of the genre. Readers will always have their own preferences too.

Next Week's Meeting

Write Night: Your Work in Progress (Online event)

Wednesday, June 3rd · 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM BST

This writing session is a chance for you to work on (or start) a project of your own. It’s your space and time to use as you wish.

It’s a writing session, but we also make time to discuss your work and any issues you might be facing with it.

This event will be online via Zoom, register to attend on Meetup to get the link:

Sign up for Write Night

Free To Join, Free To Attend

As you know Caversham Writers is free to join and free to attend and I want it to remain so. That doesn’t mean it is free to run, though. I organise the group meetings on Meetup.com who have seen fit to double the fees paid by group organisers over the last year.

This has led to many groups shutting down or moving platform. I like to think of Caversham Writers as a local group with a global reach and I want us to remain open to voices from all over the world. Meetup provides that global reach so I intend to stay there, but would welcome any contributions toward the costs of running the group.

So if you enjoy this free newsletter and our weekly free events, please consider helping out by buying me a coffee at the link below.

Buy Me A Coffee

It’s a different question to ‘what is your favourite book?’ Mine is actually an ever-changing list of at least 5 novels plus a couple of nonfiction books thrown in. I’ve never found myself wishing I’d written any of them myself.

I’ve been thinking about why that might be and I suspect it’s because the very best books, the ones that move me the most, are so definitively and authentically the product of that author’s mind that I cannot imagine it as springing from my own.

The Guardian recently published The 100 Best Novels of All Time - and it provoked a frenzy of argument, as these things always do. Whatever your views on who made the list and who didn’t (No Steinbeck or Salinger? No Philip Roth?) it’s impossible to imagine anyone else writing any of the hundred, especially not me.

I think this is also true of any book, not just the best ones. Anything that hasn’t just plagiarised another’s work is the author’s expression of how the world looks to them. Even the most formulaic whodunnit, making no attempt at a wider commentary of the human condition, is still that particular author’s own take on what a whodunnit looks like. By definition, nobody else could have written it, so why should anyone wish they had?

A couple of years ago I wrote a blog post for Alex’s Fourbears Books website. It was called The Death of Creative Writing and probably should have had a question mark at the end as it was mostly my view of the potential impact on writing of the relatively new iteration of AI that was ChatGPT. In it, I wrote the following.

The creative human mind gives us an ability to communicate ideas through storytelling that sets us apart as a species. But for all that, none of us can really know what it is to be inside the mind of another human being, to see the world as they see it. Our attempts at conveying that, at communicating what it is to be ‘me’, is a pretty good working definition of art.

I stand by that. For me, it is the tragedy of the human condition that our greatest asset falls short of fixing a fatal flaw. We communicate better than any other species, but I cannot tell you what it is like to be in my head, experiencing the world as I see it. Our empathy has limits. We cannot truly see the world through someone else’s eyes (more on that phrase later, in the write up of this week’s Caversham Writers meeting below.)

Which brings me to Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby. Written in 1992, Fever Pitch tells the story of Hornby’s obsession with football, and with Arsenal FC in particular.

For something so niche, exclusive and divisive as supporting a football team, the book became a surprise bestseller (over a million sold) and was adapted into a film starring Colin Firth.

A clue to its popularity came when several friends (not football fans, and certainly not Arsenal fans) read it and made similar comments. First, that they recognised in it their own obsessions with, variously, music, film and DIY and how their own lives and relationships even had been affected by them. Second, they also said they felt like they understood me a little better for reading it.

That second point is because I, too, am an Arsenal fan. It’s a part of my identity. I was born and raised near the ground; my whole family are Arsenal fans going back several generations. When I first started going to games as a kid, we stood on the same part of the Clock End terrace that my great uncle Stan stood on to watch the all-conquering team of the 1930s.

In Fever Pitch, Hornby writes about how that sense of identity becomes larger than the personal. He writes about how he takes comfort from knowing that whenever Arsenal is in the news, he knows that friends who don’t even like football will think of him when they pick up the newspaper or catch that TV report.

Fever Pitch ends with Arsenal winning the league title in 1989 after a wait of 18 years since the previous one. This week Arsenal became champions again after a wait of 22 years. Friends of mine who don’t like football have been sending messages because they saw it on the news and thought of me.

Hornby found something in Fever Pitch that any writer of memoir wants to capture - to find the universal in the specific. I don’t wish I had written Fever Pitch, but I do wish I could write something like it.

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Member News

Well done to Gill Passman for a superbly organised and hosted event for the Dreading Slam poets at the RAG Parade in Forbury Gardens in Reading last week. Richard Stephenson made it back from Spain the same morning to take part, and Louisa Guise was also one of the readers on the day.

The event itself followed the same format as the Reading Poetry Writing Meetup’s regular Dreading Slam event. Poets perform their work and are judged by the audience, with the winners getting the chance to compete in the Grand Slam in January 2027. This is followed by a themed quick-fire round of short poems (up to 5 lines). The theme on Sunday was century, to mark Reading University’s centenary celebrations that the RAG Parade was part of.

The next Dreading Slam event is on Sunday, June 7th at 7:30PM at the Rising Sun Arts Centre.

Our Last Meeting

Prompt-Write Night

It was Moira’s turn to set the prompt for us this time, as we gathered in Fourbears Books for Prompt-Write Night. She chose a phrase that had been stuck in her head of late: through someone else’s eyes.

You can see what my thinking was drawn to in the piece above. On the night, I thought more about the AI aspect of the blog post I linked to above and tried to construct a story to illustrate it, with my two main characters discussing the key moment in history when a group of early human hunter gatherers tell the first ever campfire story. Is one of them an AI?

Moira herself wrote an excellent poem that might get another airing at the East Reading Festival in June. Abigail went where I considered going but shied away from - body horror, as did Amy in her story.

We welcomed Michaela to the group for the first time and her story ended with a delightful twist that we were all trying to predict but couldn’t. Richard started on a poem in which he imagines seeing the world through a newborn baby’s developing eyes. Louisa, David and Emily also found inspiration from the prompt, with the latter finding a way to use it to further her work in progress.

If you’re making slow progress in your own WIP, Moira’s prompt might be a good way to kickstart it again. Thinking about how the story would look through someone else’s eyes, such as another character, is a good way of breathing new life into a story and might give you another angle from which to tell it.

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Next Week's Meeting

Writeshare Night - Read Your Work To The Group (online event)

Wednesday, May 27 · 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM BST

In this event members have the opportunity to read out their work to the rest of the group and get some instant feedback. You do not have to read anything out if joining this event, just listen and comment if you wish.

This event will be online via Zoom, register to attend on Meetup to get the link:

Sign up for Writeshare Night

Free To Join, Free To Attend

As you know Caversham Writers is free to join and free to attend and I want it to remain so. That doesn’t mean it is free to run, though. I organise the group meetings on Meetup.com who have seen fit to double the fees paid by group organisers over the last year.

This has led to many groups shutting down or moving platform. I like to think of Caversham Writers as a local group with a global reach and I want us to remain open to voices from all over the world. Meetup provides that global reach so I intend to stay there, but would welcome any contributions toward the costs of running the group.

So if you enjoy this free newsletter and our weekly free events, please consider helping out by buying me a coffee at the link below.

Buy Me A Coffee

In my day job I’m a copywriter.

Before that, I spent over 20 years as a Cisco-certified IT Consultant, installing networks and communications systems all over the world.

When I left that world and retrained to write marketing copy, my background meant IT networking and communications companies were an obvious target market for my services. Not only do I already understand the technology (which means I need very little briefing to get up to speed on my clients’ products or services), I also understand my clients’ customers - because I used to be one. I understand their challenges, because I used to face the same ones.

In deciding what type of copy I would write for this market, I looked at the Buyer’s Journey. This is the process any consumer goes through leading up to a purchase, from being aware of a need for something, to considering their options, through to choosing a product.

In my experience as an IT Consultant, a major factor in choosing a solution to our problems was a deep distrust of salespeople. Engineers and technology experts are especially notorious for this, preferring to listen to what their peers in the industry say.

Which means a case study is one of the most important sales documents for an IT vendor. A case study is sometimes called a success story or customer story, because it tells the story of how a customer solved a problem in their business by using a particular product or service.

When a potential, but sales-wary, technology customer reads a case study of someone similar to them, the result is an increase in trust in that product, service, or vendor.

I chose to specialise in writing case studies as they, more than any other type of marketing material, leverage my experience the most, and so offer the greatest benefit to my clients.

What I didn’t realise at first was that the writing of case studies would prove to have so much in common with what we do in Caversham Writers.

You see, there’s a structure to writing a case study. It follows a narrative in much the same way a story works in novels and films.

Joseph Campbell wrote The Hero with a Thousand Faces in 1949. It famously influenced George Lucas, who used the mythology-based Hero’s Journey laid out in Campbell’s work as a map for Luke Skywalker’s story in Star Wars.

The Hero’s Journey is also the journey a customer goes through in a case study. The stages of the journey map remarkably.

Sprinkled through my story above of a career change from working in IT to writing for IT are several words that form the basis of a case study story. Here’s how they map to the Hero’s Journey.

Background

A case study starts with this, telling us who the customer is and what their business is all about. In the Hero’s Journey our hero begins in a situation of normality. Luke Skywalker’s background is on Tatooine. He’s a farm boy living an ordinary life.

Challenge

The case study customer finds they have a problem to solve. Something gets broken, or an issue arises that cannot be fixed internally. In the Hero’s Journey there’s an inciting incident that changes ordinary life. In Star Wars, R2D2 arrives with a message and Luke’s aunt and uncle are killed. He has a challenge to face.

Journey

Our case study customer looks for many ways to solve the challenge, involving research, testing, evaluations, and consultations. They gather information and resources to help. In the Hero’s Journey, the call to action is answered and our hero starts to undergo change, gathering knowledge and allies. Luke Skywalker trains with Obi Wan Kenobi, meets Han and Leia, and finds out about the Death Star.

Solution

Our case study customer finds our clients’ product or service and implements it. The Hero’s Journey reaches a climax with a final battle where all is won. Luke Skywalker destroys the Death Star.

Results and Benefits

Problem solved, the case study will report on how things have improved for the customer, using metrics and numbers to specify the result, and describing how those numbers are of benefit to the customer. The Hero’s Journey ends with a return to what is now a new normal - a life changed by events. The knowledge gained is shared to the benefit of all. Luke Skywalker joins the rebels and is rewarded in the final ceremony.

One lesson I learnt early as a case study writer was in remembering who to cast in what role. My client is the one who pays me so it’s tempting to cast them as the hero of the story. But they’re not. Their customer is the hero - that’s one reason they are persuaded to take part in the case study in the first place.

My client is the mentor, the wise counsel, the wizard. They are Merlin, Gandalf, Dumbledore, Mufasa. They are Morpheus from The Matrix or Mr Miyagi from The Karate Kid. They are Obi Wan Kenobi.

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Member News

Some absolutely splendid news from Emily Goode, who was invited to attend a Royal Garden Party at Buckingham Palace. From her LinkedIn post:

“A wonderful, and slightly surreal, honour to represent Progress Theatre and all the work we do in our community, surrounded by people who also work tirelessly to support charities and communities throughout the UK.

What a memorable day. An experience that will stay with me my whole life.”

RAG Parade - Sunday 17 May | 12:00 to 17:00

More news on Dreading Slam’s involvement in the Reading Students’ Union’s RAG Parade this weekend. As part of the university’s centenary celebrations, the parade starts at 12:00 outside Broad Street Mall, moves down Broad Street, across Market Place and into Forbury Gardens.

From the university website: “In Forbury Gardens, the celebrations continue with an afternoon of live entertainment, interactive stalls and delicious food. We have invited incredible local talent to perform at the Festival across three live stages, featuring vibrant music, dance and spoken word.”

Gill Passman has sent me this.

I will be the compère for our act which will celebrate the amazing talent of the Dreading Slam poets as well as promoting our monthly Slam on the first Sunday of the month at The Rising Sun Arts Centre.

I had just over two weeks to put the whole thing together but, as always, our amazing Slammers have stepped up to the mark and volunteered their time to take part in this event.

The act will include a “mock” taster Slam, our ever popular quickfire round which will be up to 5 lines on the theme of Century or whatever twist our poets decide to put on it….and believe me when I say that they are very creative and oft hilarious…we are also very excited to have our 3 times champion, Sarah Smith (Wordsmith) joining us after too long a break…

So, if anyone is in town on Sunday, please come and see us on the Meadow Stage at 3pm in Forbury Gardens and enjoy listening to some of the best performance poets in town…

Fourbears Books Events

Alex from Fourbears has told me about a couple of great looking events coming up at the shop.

Women’s Prize for Fiction Party

Thursday 11th June 19:30 – 20:30

6 shortlisted books, 6 wonderful ladies presenting each book on the shortlist. Join us for an evening celebrating the Women’s Prize for Fiction which is the greatest celebration of female creativity in the world.

One of the advocates championing a book on the night will be Carolyn McGlone, the agent we met recently at a Caversham Writers event (the audio of our Q & A is in a recent post: What Literary Agents Are Really Looking For.

Get tickets

LAUNCH PARTY - Bad Influence by Will Carver

Tuesday 23rd June 19:00 – 20:00

Will Carver is back, and celebrating his brand new book, Bad Influence. Come and celebrate with Will and the Fourbears team.

I’ve already signed up - see you there!

RSVP

Our Last Meeting

Write Night: Your Work in Progress

I never record our Zoom meetings, unless it is an author event and our guest has agreed to the recording, which I publish in this newsletter for those unable to attend on the night.

I do usually have the Zoom AI Companion enabled, though, which sometimes gets remarked on by attendees. It’s a valid concern, given the widespread misuse of AI and the resulting lack of trust in it.

For us writers, the main issue involves copyright infringement - the unauthorised use of an author’s work to train the LLM (large language model) to mimic human writers’ styles. The means by which Anthropic et al do this involves an automated mass extraction of works, mostly from websites hosting pirated copies of books. They also engage in scraping and crawling of existing online content across the entire web.

In my opinion, the Zoom AI Companion is an unlikely scraper of material as described above. Our conversations would be an inefficient input source for anything other than improving speech-to-text transcription capability.

Rather than providing input, the AI component in this case is giving me an output - a summary of the meeting. I use it as an aide memoire - something to jog my memory of what came up in our event, in case I want to write about it in more detail here.

If you’re curious, here’s the output from this week’s event:

This was a writing group session where members shared updates on their progress during a dedicated writing hour. Lisa reported making significant progress on her memoir about becoming a landlord after her husband’s death, which has evolved into a book guide for first-time landlords. Amy discussed regaining her writing flow and nearing the end of her play, while Richard shared that he wrote two Japan-inspired poems about Hiroshima and Zen Gardens. Moira worked on showing rather than telling in her Shakespearean adaptation, and Daniel, a first-time participant, shared his early progress on a project about traditional philosophy while discussing his approach to making it more accessible rather than academic. The group also discussed challenges around world-building in science fiction and the importance of considering what readers know versus what writers know.

I wouldn’t rely on it for detail - I’m not sure that represents Moira’s contribution accurately, although the rest is pretty much as I remember it. If you attended this week - what do you think?

Leave a comment

Next Week's Meeting

Prompt-Write Night (In Person Event!)

Wednesday, May 20th · 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM BST

Feeling stuck? Unblock yourself in this writing session where we set a prompt or theme for members to use as a jumping off point for an hour of writing. You can use it to write fiction or non-fiction, poetry or prose.

Sign up for Prompt-Write Night

Free To Join, Free To Attend

As you know Caversham Writers is free to join and free to attend and I want it to remain so. That doesn’t mean it is free to run, though. I organise the group meetings on Meetup.com who have seen fit to double the fees paid by group organisers over the last year.

This has led to many groups shutting down or moving platform. I like to think of Caversham Writers as a local group with a global reach and I want us to remain open to voices from all over the world. Meetup provides that global reach so I intend to stay there, but would welcome any contributions toward the costs of running the group.

So if you enjoy this free newsletter and our weekly free events, please consider helping out by buying me a coffee at the link below.

Buy Me A Coffee

The emphasis is on the ‘share’ in Writeshare Night, one of our regular event formats, the latest of which we held this week. Our members get the chance to read some of their work to the group - up to 10 minutes of reading time, followed by a short discussion on what we heard.

We usually hold this event on Zoom (our in-person events tend to be writing sessions) and I always encourage readers to share the screen if they can. It’s always instructive for us to see where readers self-edit what’s on the page in real time. A good reminder that reading your work out loud, even to yourself, is one of the most effective editing methods you can use.

But it’s the sharing of our writing, not our screens, that’s the most important part of this event. We do so in order to get some feedback on our work.

We also hold the occasional dedicated feedback event in which two members can submit a piece in advance of the meeting and ask for some more considered responses, often directed by questions from the author. I’ll be running another Feedback Night soon, keep an eye on our group Events Page.

The Feedback Night events are a deeper dive, it’s more of a workshop than what Writeshare Night offers.

So what does it offer? What is the benefit of an unconsidered response, given in the moment? I would argue it’s the most honest data a writer can get and therefore the most valuable.

The immediacy of the response to a piece just heard is a gut reaction, one not tempered by analysis. If a line is funny, it’ll get the laugh. If the piece is dull, you’ll see it in their eyes. It’s the closest you’ll get to seeing a genuine reader experience - after all, if your work does get out into the world, most of your readers won’t be poring over it with a pencil.

And you’ll know it without having to be told. Reading your own work out loud forces you into being both a performer and an observer (of your audience). As a performer, you can tell when you’re struggling to get the words out because the sentence is too long, or you increase your pace to make up for the lack of it in your writing. As an observer, you can gauge reactions before they’re made explicit.

Of course, reading your own work out loud is an exercise in vulnerability. It is exposing to put yourself in that position. But here’s the good news. The group recognises that; they’re watching you bravely face up to a daunting task. They’re on your side in a way that is very different from when you’re receiving more considered, distant feedback. That makes it feel safer.

Which brings us to the question of what to share. We have members who write across all the genres and categories - poetry and prose, short stories and non-fiction. A poem or short story fits the 10 minute limit nicely and can make an ideal candidate for Writeshare Night.

For many, the obvious answer is to read an excerpt of their current work in progress - a chapter from a novel, or an excerpt of memoir. Regular attendees get the chance to hear a longer work read to them in serialised form.

If choosing a piece from a longer work, such as a novel or memoir, what excerpt should you pick? The opening chapter is the obvious choice, but it might not be representative of the book’s voice once it hits its stride (if that does strike you as a risk, maybe you’ve just got your first bit of feedback on something that needs fixing!) The problem with choosing a later chapter is context - the feedback you get might be focused too much on clarifying stuff answered in earlier chapters. Try to pick something that works without too much setup.

There’s a long tradition of oral storytelling, stretching back to the prehistoric campfire. It is a communal act.

Writing is usually a solitary pursuit, but the stories we write are meant to be read or heard. The point at which your writing is shared is when it becomes a social act, a communal one. That’s what Writeshare Night is all about. It’s what Caversham Writers is all about.

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Member News

Richard Stephenson has sent me details of this:

From the University of Reading website:

For over 50 years, the RAG parade was the highlight of the Raising and Giving (RAG) calendar, bringing students and the community together to raise money for countless charities. You can expect a burst of colour, creativity, music and energy as our students take to the streets, reviving the magic of a cherished tradition.

The Parade

Starting at 12:00 outside Broad Street Mall, the Parade will move down Broad Street, across Market Place and into Forbury Gardens. Join us along the route to watch this exciting spectacle. There might even be an opportunity to join the Parade itself!

Forbury Gardens celebrations

In Forbury Gardens, the celebrations continue with an afternoon of live entertainment, interactive stalls and delicious food. We have invited incredible local talent to perform at the Festival across three live stages, featuring vibrant music, dance and spoken word.

Among the “incredible local talent” performing in Forbury Gardens is Richard himself and his Dreading Slam poets. They are on stage at 3pm, Richard is flying home from Spain that morning. Nothing can possibly go wrong.

(If something goes wrong, Gill Passman will be wrangling the poets, so still show up and enjoy!)

Wargrave Literary Festival

Monday 22 June – Doors open 6:30pm for 7:00pm start

Marquee on Mill Green, Station Road, Wargrave RG10 8EU

Hat tip to member Andrew who reminded me of this event, which is held every couple of years.

“Come down to the marquee and enjoy a glass of wine and snacks, while listening to an interview between Suzanne O’Sullivan and Tom Whipple. We are also delighted to be hearing from Ellie Levenson, interviewed by Scott Pack. For those interested in writing there will be the opportunity to arrange consultations with a literary agent. In between the talks, have a browse of the various stalls, including Fourbears Books, the ‘book club corner’, ‘secret novel swap’, and other stalls selling crafts, literary goodies, and stationery.”

Tickets are £10 from the Wargrave Literary Festival website.

Our Last Meeting

Writeshare Night - Read Your Work To The Group

We had 4 readers this week.

Lisa read us the opening chapter of her memoir, which starts with the birth of her son. That’s a life-changing moment for anyone but some moments are more life-changing than others and Lisa’s very raw and visceral account made that point very forcefully. Her style in this opening chapter tells us the author isn’t going to shirk from difficult topics, which sets an expectation for the rest of the book.

Setting an expectation was one of the discussion points with the group. Does subject matter like this, written about with such detail and honesty, need a trigger warning? One would expect, should the memoir get published, to have this covered in the book’s blurb. But maybe in other settings, such as a reading like this, the audience might need a heads up for what is to come?

Next was Stuart, who read another chapter from his novel set in 1970s Northern Ireland during the Troubles. There was much praise for the authenticity of the dialogue, research, and period details though some noted challenges with the head-hopping perspective that Stuart deploys. That might be down to listening only (Stuart had technical issues sharing his screen so we couldn’t read along.) I wonder if it is easier to head-hop in a narrative when we have the visual cues on the page in front of us?

Anastasia was joining us for the first time and bravely put her hand up to read. Her excerpt came from a piece she described herself as “experimental prose” and she also apologised for her accent and writing in English as a second language. I’ve written about this before, and Anastasia had nothing to worry about. All agreed her language competence was exceptional and was another example of something I’ve noticed before - that the lyrical style of someone writing in English as a second language is often enhanced by that fact. Zoe touched on Anastasia’s description of her piece, saying that rather than experimental, “I saw it as prose meditation on aesthetics, identity, emotional construction, and intellectual experience, and I felt it had touches of surrealism and metafiction.” Summed it up well.

Finally, Amy read a couple of shorter pieces. First, a 500 word short story titled ‘Craft’ in which the protagonist’s occupation was very skilfully held back for an impactful reveal. If we’re good at something, we all enjoy executing our craft and this was no exception! Entirely coincidentally and bringing our event to a nice circular close after Lisa’s opening chapter, Amy’s second piece was a poem also on the subject of motherhood. A different take, for sure, but no less emotional. Also: skills points for sticking to a challenging meter in this sonnet form, well done!

Next Week's Meeting

Write Night: Your Work in Progress (Online event)

Wednesday, May 13th · 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM BST

This writing session is a chance for you to work on (or start) a project of your own. It’s your space and time to use as you wish.

It’s a writing session, but we also make time to discuss your work and any issues you might be facing with it.

This event will be online via Zoom, register to attend on Meetup to get the link:

Register for Write Night

Free To Join, Free To Attend

As you know Caversham Writers is free to join and free to attend and I want it to remain so. That doesn’t mean it is free to run, though. I organise the group meetings on Meetup.com who have seen fit to double the fees paid by group organisers over the last year.

This has led to many groups shutting down or moving platform. I like to think of Caversham Writers as a local group with a global reach and I want us to remain open to voices from all over the world. Meetup provides that global reach so I intend to stay there, but would welcome any contributions toward the costs of running the group.

So if you enjoy this free newsletter and our weekly free events, please consider helping out by buying me a coffee at the link below.

Buy Me A Coffee

She set us all a challenge - for those of us who are not writers of fantasy like Abigail, she asked us to give it a try for this writing session, using the prompt Dark Magic. For those members who do already write fantasy, Abigail suggested using the same prompt but in another genre, - what would it look like to write about Dark Magic in a romance, for example, or historical fiction?

I’ve been sharing my output from recent prompted writing sessions here in the newsletter and so, despite reservations, here’s what I came up with in response to Abigail’s challenge.

Dark Magic

“It’s all fake, you know it is,” said the woman in the bright red dress at the bar, “they plant people in the audience and call them up. They’re playing a part. They did a good job, though - realistic, wasn’t it?”

The glass shook violently in my hand as I tried to down a double scotch. Wiping my mouth, I stole a glance at the woman holding court with her friends a few feet away. They didn’t look entirely convinced. Neither did she, despite her cynicism.

“How do you think it works, then?” said one of her friends, eyes wide in a permanently startled glare. I couldn’t tell if that was her normal expression, or one she’d just acquired tonight. “I mean, pretending to be a chicken is one thing, but that last bit was scary.”

I ordered a second double and left the bar by the patio doors. I didn’t want to hear how they rationalised what we had all just seen, I didn’t trust myself not to jump in and put them straight. Truth is, if it had been any other night, one where I was just another audience member, I’d have been right there with them, agreeing it was all put on.

But it wasn’t any other night. This night, I was part of the act, but not in the way they thought. I stood in the freezing rain, barely noticing it. From the hotel bar’s beer garden, I could just make out the silhouettes of two men in the car park, arguing with each other. Tappy Wood and his dad. Were they arguing about what had just happened, or about my part in it? About the part they had made me play.

Tappy was an old school mate. He showed up out of the blue a couple weeks ago. I hadn’t seen him in years, nobody had. Rumours abounded. Some said he was a druggie, living in squalor in a Bristol bedsit, others said he’d fled the country. Or he was in prison, or dead. Once I heard he’d joined a troupe of performing street artists, and was traveling around the country, playing county fairs and festivals.

That last one made the most sense, oddly, given what his dad has spent his life doing. Tappy never confirmed or denied anything though, always managing to duck the question, change the subject, or just plain ignore it.

The Somnambulist. That was his dad. It was all a bit of a joke at school, Tappy’s dad being a stage hypnotist. It didn’t seem funny now, not from where I was standing, in the freezing rain, glass empty again, still sweating like a spooked horse.

And that’s as a far as I got on the night.

It’s always an interesting exercise, for me, the prompted sessions. I’m usually a plotter and if I were writing a story like this in that mode, I’d start off knowing what happened on stage that has so unsettled the narrator and would be working towards that reveal. In this instance, I started off with the premise that ‘something’ had happened, but I’ve still no idea what. Instead, I find myself writing the scene and letting it go wherever it wants. I might carry on writing it, just to find out what The Somnambulist did!

When I think about fantasy stories, my mind immediately goes to Lord of the Rings, or Game of Thrones. There’s a rich history of these types of stories that lean heavily on European medieval history. Look at any of the Arthurian legends involving Merlin, Camelot, and the Grail quests and you can see the direct links to Gandalf and GoT’s Targaryen dragons.

Fantasy’s roots go back even further though; heroic quest tales appear in Greek and Norse mythology and even further back in the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh.

One thing all these eras have in common is the presence of magic in the stories. In some, magic is awesome and to be feared or respected; in others, magic is an everyday occurrence, not something '“fantastic” at all. When we write like that now, with magic an unremarked upon part of a recognisable reality, we call it magical realism, not fantasy.

With my story above taking place in a modern setting, it isn’t going to be epic fantasy. The characters seem disturbed by whatever has happened, so I doubt it’ll become magical realism. How might it qualify as fantasy, then? Urban fantasy?

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Members had some fun with this one on the night.

I enjoyed hearing newbie Tracey’s story set in a casino with dice imbued with power. Mathilde wrote about a generational family curse; David went cross-genre with techno-thriller in which a computer virus provides the dark magic element; and Amy’s very funny story about a demon support group discussing problematic human summoning practices was fantastic in more than one sense!

Good work everyone and thank you to Abigail for setting the prompt.

Apropos of Nothing…

The opening line of the novel Neuromancer by William Gibson is

The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.

Great line, and a great image.

Except it’s an image that has changed since Gibson wrote that line in 1984. I found this clever post on Bluesky by FuzzWolf:

Remember folks - that really clever simile you came up with might not stand the test of time and be utterly meaningless in years to come.

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Member News

is going to be hosting a new spoken word show on Radio Dacorum, a radio station based in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire. And the show needs a name! Go to the Radio Dacorum Facebook page and vote for a name.

Richard Stephenson got in touch to tell me about a regular local spoken word event here in Reading.

“Some Caversham Writers may be interested in joining the Castle Tap Storytellers. They meet on the first Thursday of each month in the back room of the Castle Tap Pub.

The meeting is based around short storytelling not writing, so the prefect chance to read the product of a prompt night.

Like Caversham Writers some of the Caste Tap Story tellers will be at East Reading Festival in Palmer Park Reading on June 21st.”

Don’t forget Richard’s Dreading Slam open mic poetry events, the next one is this Sunday at the Rising Sun Arts Centre.

Email Richard at dreadingslam@gmail.com to receive his newsletter.

And thanks for the reminder about the East Reading Festival too, Richard:

East Reading Festival

Sunday, June 21st · 12:00 PM to 18:00 PM BST - Palmer Park, Reading

Another reminder about this year’s East Reading Festival.

The annual festival in Palmer Park is a free community-focused event, with live music, community performances, a funfair, a small food court with a variety of different cuisines and a wide range of community, charity and commercial stalls.

There is also a spoken word stage, organised this year by our very own Richard Stephenson, and Caversham Writers has a slot for our members to read some of their work.

We’ve taken part in this event in 3 out of the last 4 years and it’s a relaxed, fun, and supportive environment. Throughout the afternoon, members from writing and poetry groups around the region take to the stage to read their work. It can be poetry, a short story, a scene from a play - anything, as long as it’s suitable for a family audience.

We’ve found in the past that keeping it to about 3 or 4 minutes maximum per reading works best, so dig into your portfolio of poems and stories, or write something just for the festival!

If you’re interested in taking part, let me know. Contact me directly, leave a comment, or email by reply to this newsletter.

Next Week's Meeting

Writeshare Night - Read Your Work To The Group

Wednesday, May 6 · 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM BST

In this event members have the opportunity to read out their work to the rest of the group and get some instant feedback. You do not have to read anything out if joining this event, just listen and comment if you wish.

This event will be online via Zoom, register to attend on Meetup to get the link:

Sign up for Writeshare Night

Free To Join, Free To Attend

As you know Caversham Writers is free to join and free to attend and I want it to remain so. That doesn’t mean it is free to run, though. I organise the group meetings on Meetup.com who have seen fit to double the fees paid by group organisers over the last year.

This has led to many groups shutting down or moving platform. I like to think of Caversham Writers as a local group with a global reach and I want us to remain open to voices from all over the world. Meetup provides that global reach so I intend to stay there, but would welcome any contributions toward the costs of running the group.

So if you enjoy this free newsletter and our weekly free events, please consider helping out by buying me a coffee at the link below.

Buy Me A Coffee

Carolyn came to agenting via a career in book publicity, working for Puffin, Usborne and David Fickling Books before setting up May Literary Agency around eighteen months ago. She represents adult and children’s fiction and non-fiction, with a particular passion for under-represented voices. (She does not, for the record, represent crime. “I don’t want to know who did it, why they did it, or how they did it. I’m just too much of a wimp.”)

We had a fabulous chat; Carolyn was so generous with her time and willingness to share her experience and knowledge. We covered a lot - from the role of a literary agent and why you need one to finding the right agent for you.

Carolyn told us what she’s really looking for in a submission:

"I really want to know your personality and what it is about you that makes you different from all the other submissions in my inbox."

Why rejections aren’t personal:

“If an agent says no to you, it doesn’t mean your book’s rubbish. It just means it’s not right for them.”

And on how many clients she takes on each year:

“I didn't have a set number in my mind. They’re just the ones you can’t say no to.”

You can listen back to the whole event and get the lowdown on the entire submission process, what agents are looking for, publishing timelines, the agent-author relationship, and much more at the link below (or download it to listen offline).

Put the kettle on and enjoy:

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Last year I interviewed author and driving force behind The Breakthrough Book Collective Stephanie Bretherton.

is now on Substack, and you can read her first post below. Why not subscribe, too? She’s good value.

Stephanie’s Substack

On being an “unpopular” author

I love writing. I really do. And I have loved the process of getting it all shaped up for publication, of being published. But I would keep doing it even if not a single book found its way into the hands of an appreciative reader…

Read more

4 months ago · 4 likes · 4 comments · Stephanie Bretherton

Member News

In the very first issue of this newsletter, I wrote about member Nicolette Carter adapting her children’s picture book The Pink Peacock into a musical stage play.

Nicolette wrote to me last week to tell me that the Princess and the Peacock had two really successful shows at Greenwich Theatre - with the artistic director saying it was a “great show with a great cast...that would fit very well into the festival circuit.” Great news, well done.

Nicolette also told me about a Summer Writing Challenge that may be of interest to members, run by The Wyrd Folk:

Enter our Summer Writing Challenge for the chance to be one of two writers picked by us to read their work out on a special episode of the show, including a spotlight post on our Instagram account.

Challenge: write a story of Summer Folklore which explores some aspect of British folklore or folk culture. It could be anything from properly terrifying Children of the Corn folk horror or something much more magical and whimsical.

Rules: entry is free. Stories are to be no more than 2500 words (we’re giving you a bigger word count than we usually get). British folklore theme (the stranger the better).

Deadline: Tuesday 30th June

Format: Word document 12 pt type/ Times New Roman/ double space (all the usual formatting jazz so our eyes don’t go funny).

Submissions here.

Author Events at Fourbears Books

Our friends at Fourbears have a few author events coming up, as follows.

Professor Tom Oliver presents The Nature Delusion

Tuesday 12 May 2026, 19:30 – 20:30

Does the future of humankind lie in colonising a new planet or downloading our minds into a digital metaverse? Listening to certain billionaires and technophiles, you might think these are our best bets for escaping our increasingly hostile world.

This book dispels the illusion that only technological or economic fixes hold the solutions to a better future. The Nature Delusion uncovers the root causes of our environmental crisis – from our disconnection from nature to our focus on short-term, self-centred priorities – and offers a hopeful vision for the future.

Although it’s easy to feel powerless or overwhelmed, The Nature Delusion invites you to see humanity’s place in the world in a radically new way and demonstrates how transforming our mindset can create a healthier, more resilient world.

In Conversation with Simon Mason

Thursday 14 May 2026, 19:30 – 20:30

Simon Mason visits Fourbears to discuss his latest book in the DI Wilkins series. Join DIs Ryan and Ray Wilkins (no relation), Thames Valley's detective pantomime horse, one Oxford-educated, the other Oxford-trailer park, as they tackle their latest case.

Weather Words - British Weather in Words, Prose and Song

Thursday 28 May 2026, 19:30 – 21:00

“Such an uplifting evening...”

“Everyone in the audience around me was saying how enjoyable it was to listen to readings. Such a wide-ranging selection of poetry, prose and song, delivered with panache.”

“A wonderful selection of pieces, and excellently read by all.”

In Conversation with Robert Thorogood

Monday 15 Jun 2026, 19:30 – 20:30

Robert Thorogood is the creator of the hit BBC One TV series Death in Paradise and author of the Marlow Murder Club series. We are delighted to have Robert back to celebrate the paperback release of The Mysterious Affair of Judith Potts

Hamlet at Progress Theatre

Our friends at Progress Theatre have just announced a run of Hamlet in the Reading Abbey Ruins from 15th to 25th July. Tickets here.

Progress is excited to announce we'll be back performing in Reading Abbey Ruins in 2026. Even better, we are bringing you Hamlet, William Shakespeare's most celebrated – and most quoted – play.

Progress Theatre have been presenting an open-air event in Reading since 1994. I went to their production of The Importance of Being Earnest a couple of years ago. It was fabulous, as I’m sure this will be. See you there.

Next Week's Meeting

Prompt-Write Night (Online event)

Wednesday, April 29th · 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM BST

Feeling stuck? Unblock yourself in this writing session where I set a prompt or theme for members to use as a jumping off point for an hour of writing. You can use it to write fiction or non-fiction, poetry or prose.

This event will be online via Zoom, register to attend on Meetup to get the link:

Sign up to Prompt-Write Night

Free To Join, Free To Attend

As you know Caversham Writers is free to join and free to attend and I want it to remain so. That doesn’t mean it is free to run, though. I organise the group meetings on Meetup.com who have seen fit to double the fees paid by group organisers over the last year.

This has led to many groups shutting down or moving platform. I like to think of Caversham Writers as a local group with a global reach and I want us to remain open to voices from all over the world. Meetup provides that global reach so I intend to stay there, but would welcome any contributions toward the costs of running the group.

So if you enjoy this free newsletter and our weekly free events, please consider helping out by buying me a coffee at the link below.

Buy Me A Coffee