Headingley LitFest: Love's Lingo

Tuesday, 3 January 2012

Love's Lingo

In honour of Valentine's Day, commissioned and published writer Becky Cherriman will take you on a poetic journey through the vast lexicon of love. This will take place in the HEART Café at 8pm on Friday 10 February as a preliminary event for the LitFest 'proper' in mid-March.

But don't expect it all to be hearts and flowers! Becky's work is known for its honest and often uncomfortable intensity. The evening will also feature live music from Maggie 8 (http://www.myspace.com/maggieslovelymusic) and a reading from poet, Clare Neruda.

Tickets on the door will be just six pounds - and that includes a drink.

Becky is a writer, creative writing facilitator and performer based in Leeds. She works regularly for the Workers Educational Association, The West Yorkshire Playhouse, Artlink West Yorkshire and Ilkley Literature Festival, develops writing-related resources for The Hepworth Wakefield and delivers public readings of her work.

Successes to date include being shortlisted for the 2009 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Award, the 2009-10 Fish Short Story Prize, and the 2011 Grist Poetry Competition, a commission to write and perform an interactive children’s story at The Rotunda Museum in Scarborough on the theme of geology, publication in an anthology ‘Along The Iron Veins’ and attaining second prize in the 2010 Ilkley Literature Festival Open Mic competition. Her poems ‘Behind His Eye’ and ‘Every Bone’ will be published in the 2012 ‘Grist Anthology’.

Here is a poem about the HEART Centre written by one of Becky's students:

The Heart Centre

New rooms wrapped round an old beating heart

Wall adorned with new, vibrant art.

Drums in the stairwell with Hettie the Cleaner

Pot plants abound to make it look neater

Guitar, pilates or trumpet lessons

Everything covered in weekly sessions

From young to old and those on the dole

With Heart in the Community, this place has a soul

Angela Lloyd Roberts

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LITERARY HEADINGLEY

Headingley is just the place for it! Don't expect a big circus with marquees, though: we're not at that stage yet. We're all volunteers as well.

Our venues include the HEART Centre on Bennett Road, the New Headingley Club on St Michael's Road, friendly cafés, historic local cinemas, Headingley Library, people's houses and the historic Leeds Library in Commercial Street, city centre.

Headingley's Literary Links

Headingley has strong connections with many writers:

Arthur Ransome was born in Headingley, J R R Tolkien lived at 5 Holly Bank and also at 2 Darnley Road, West Park when he was reader in English Language at the University of Leeds 1920 - 25, Alan Bennett lived over a butcher's shop opposite the Three Horseshoes, now Royale Dry Cleaners.

Lucy Newlyn has published poetry about her early life in Headingley, George Orwell stayed at 21 Estcourt Avenue with his sister Marjorie and her husband Humphrey 'Humpy' Dakin (with whom he visited the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth), T S Eliot used to visit his mother-in-law in Weetwood Lane, William Fryer Harvey was brought up in Spring Bank, Trevor Griffiths lived just off Victoria Road on Winstanley Terrace, Jon Silkin's first office of STAND magazine was his flat at 144 Otley Road, Sir Geoffrey Hill lived in Shire Oak Road, Peter Redgrove lived in Headingley between 1962 and 1965 when he was Gregory Fellow of Poetry at the University of Leeds, and playwright Kay Mellor still lives near The Hollies in Far Headingley.

Wilson Barrett, the charismatic first manager of the Grand Theatre, Leeds (a prolific playwright as well), lived in Beech Grove Terrace, Woodhouse in the 1870s. His house was a meeting place for many writers, artists and visitors to Leeds - such as W. S. Gilbert, George Grossmith and Atkinson Grimshaw.

Headingley LitFest 2020 was the thirteenth. The fourteenth will take place from March 2021 and will be adapted to the rules of the Covid pandemic. We are now a proud part of the annual Leeds Lit Fest.