News & Events

Events 2008  |  Events 2007  

Brimstone Events 2008

There will be a Brimstone Press Tent at the Dare 2 Festival, Tollard Royal (a village some six miles from Shaftesbury) during the weekend of 12th - 13th July — for details about the festival please go to www.dare2festival.co.uk. Brimstone books will be on display and our Directors will be present during the weekend to answer any queries. Brimstone author and Company Secretary, Sebastian Hayes, will be giving a storytelling performance of his story “The Island of Gulls” at 2 p.m. on Saturday 12th July and Sunday 13th July in the Brimstone Tent.

Brimstone Press will be participating in this year’s Dorset Art Weeks, which run from Saturday 24 May to Sunday 8 June, as part of a range of artistic offerings at Higher Green Farm Arts, Twyford www.highergreenfarmarts.co.uk. There will be opportunities to meet our Directors, to buy our publications, and to learn more about getting your book published.

Following our presence at the recent NorDOP event at Sturminster Newton, Brimstone Press has been invited to take part in a similar event later this year, to be hosted by Dorset PoPP.

Other promotional events are in preparation, and will be shown on the website when plans are finalised.

Brimstone Events 2007

We are pleased to welcome several new members to Brimstone Press, Pam Kelly, Mary Wood, Christopher Irven, the Breach Common Group and Sylvia Oldroyd.

Pam Kelly and Mary Wood received rave reviews in the Blackmore Vale Magazine for their books of poetry, On the Edge and Day Return respectively, for which we compliment them.

Chris Sledge joined our Board of Directors during this year. Chris, the author of the Brimstone title, Internal Memorandum, a novel about life in the corporate world, brings to us, apart from his literary skills, a lifetime’s experience in business and we are very lucky to have him amongst us. One of Chris’s first moves was to get us registered as a Limited Company — you can’t be too careful these days. The Blackmore Vale Magazine printed, in May, a piece about Chris Sledge and his book, Internal Memorandum.

We now span a large and growing field which includes Poetry (Keith Walton, Pam Kelly, Mary Wood, Sylvia Oldroyd), Novel (Keith Walton, Chris Sledge), Drama (Arnold Hinchliffe, Sebastian Hayes), Travel (David Grierson), Philosophy and Religion (Chris Irven, Sebastian Hayes) and Art (Breach Common Group).

Brimstone Directors and Authors have also been hosting and organising a number of local events.

In collaboration with the Slade Gallery in Gillingham, Brimstone co-organised and hosted a joint exhibition with eleven local artists chosen by us (25 May — 10 June). Brimstone Press's work was well publicised and the full range of our titles was available for sale throughout the duration of the exhibition. The event included a private view and a readings evening. We are aiming to set up a similar joint art/literature exhibition as part of Dorset Art Weeks 2008.

Sebastian Hayes, Brimstone Company Secretary, (under his real name Robert Mules) organised a musical evening on 20 June entitled “Gateway to Summer” in the picturesque grounds of Shaftesbury Abbey and in so doing managed to raise some money for the Shaftesbury Westminster Hospital. Many thanks to all the local persons who helped to make this a memorable evening including Keith Davies of the Abbey Trust who was invaluable in helping us with the organisation, the Shaftesbury Silver Band, the U3A Circle Dance Group led by Pam Kelly, the Westminster Nurses who prepared sandwiches and the Bell Street Café which put some of their delicious puddings up for sale. Only the weather left something to be desired but this, sadly, is a typical hazard of outdoor events in this country !

On 13 August Mary Wood launched her first collection of poems Day Return with a Public Reading at one of the regular literary evenings organised by David Caddy (editor of Tears in the Fence magazine) at Huckleberry’s Bookshop, Blandford. Sebastian Hayes and Keith Walton also read from their work.

Brimstone Press participated in the initial launch events of Creative Dorset. This is a Government funded initiative designed to promote economic activity in the creative industries in the county. As a result, we were invited to speak at a seminar entitled "Write to Survive" which was held at Poundbury on 26 September. We shall continue to stay involved with this initiative.

On 30 Sept there was a Private View of Breach: The Art of Commons at Shaftesbury Arts Centre. The exhibition is the response of four artists — a poet, a painter, a photographer and a prose writer — to a Dorset Common over a six month period from the shortest day of the year to the longest. Catherine Simmonds, Rachel Sargent, Justin Orwin and Keith Walton were all there to host a well-attended evening. The exhibition continued to 14 September. It then transferred to Salisbury College (7—21 November) and Gillingham School (21 Nov — 21 Dec), the first outside exhibition to be hung in the new theatre's gallery.

Pam Kelly was asked to judge the Mere Literary Festival’s 2007 Poetry Competition (Local Prize) on Sunday, 14 October, and, apart from her appreciations of the poems she selected, she delivered a stirring speech about the importance of poetry in our lives which was very well received. Her own books of poetry, as well as other Brimstone Press publications, were on show at the Festival and Brimstone Press representatives were available to answer questions about self-publishing and online marketing of books.