A promotional graphic for the Village Storytelling Festival. Large yellow and purple text at the top reads "3 - 6 June 2026 at The Boardwalk, Glasgow." There is a collage of various photos showing performers, storytellers, and community members in both indoor and outdoor settings. The blue Village Storytelling Festival logo is positioned on the right side. Colourful geometric borders frame the images.

Super excited that the programme for this summer's Village Storytelling Festival is out now!

Glasgow’s biennial Storytelling Festival brings together acclaimed international storytellers, award winning homegrown talent, and emerging voices in storytelling.

www.villagestorytelling.org.uk/festival/

As the crowdfunder for the first radical bookshop icon Newcastle for 40 years gets closer to the end I’m making the bold move of calling on all the academics I sort of vaguely know and also those I don’t to share the link for our crowdfunder: www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/booksfromb...

On Learning to Read Generously - Reactor What does it mean to be a generous reader, and is it a skill you can practice?

I've been referencing this essay by @mollytempleton.com a lot lately in conversations about reading fantasy and other literature. Templeton's piece includes a discussion of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's useful ideas about 'paranoid' and 'reparative' approaches to reading. reactormag.com/on-learning-...

Ethel Merman and Mitzi Gaynor - A Sailor's Not a Sailor ('Til a Sailor's Been Tattooed) YouTube video by Golden Hollywood Fan

I have the same list as dear Pauline has. We work together, in fact.

nb Although Ethel and Mitzi Gaynor performing that film's A Sailor's Not A Sailor 'Til A Sailor's Been Tattooed might suggest otherwise, Irving Berlin was, by all accounts, devotedly heterosexual. www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1Iv...

L: A young W B Yeats wearing pince nez and a large bow tie. R: A middle-aged Aleister Crowley wearing a large (possibly homburg) black hat and the ‘I’m mad, me’ expression that he always put on for photos

Ah! 19 April – 126th anniversary of the day William Butler Yeats kicked Aleister Crowley downstairs as they fought for control of the British branch of the not-at-all-ridiculous Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in the Battle of Blythe Road. According to legend, anyway... 🧵

A grid of nine illustrations of brutalist buildings

The National Theatre has joined my Brutalist Collection.
Have a look www.gailmyerscough.co.uk/brutalist-co...

To enter with heart and mind into the world of the imagination may be to head deliberately and directly toward, or back toward, engagement with the real world.

Two hooded figures with lamps approach a moonlit, isolated cottage. A woman answers the door. We have come for the child, says the hooded figure So soon? she asks It is time, says the hooded figure. The woman is distraught. We should never have got him a library card! What is done cannot be undone, says the hooded figure We couldn’t see the harm! We just wanted him to enjoy reading! For most, it ends there, says the hooded figure, turning away and walking into the wilderness Oh lord, What have I done! says the woman, the child walks past her and out into the darkness with them. Do not cry mother. I am a writer now.

my latest books cartoon for @theguardian.com

Progressively, we're unearthing memories and family stories, ancient histories and urban legends - as well as reimagining a few familiar, mythic figures among the shifting landscapes of the city.

'Auf Sand Gebaut' is led by Erzählkunst e.V., and funded by HKF, Berlin's Capital Culture Fund.

Black and white photo of the bronze statue 'Hercules and the Nemean Lion', by Max Klein (1878). A view of Hercules' muscular back, with the forepaws of the lion wrapped around his torso, and its mouth snarling above his shoulder.

But of course this guy found his way into today's rehearsal explorations of Berlin's old and new mythologies!

'Auf Sand Gebaut' ('Built on Sand') is a creative collaboration with a group of Berlin-based storytellers, born from a desire to excavate forgotten and untold stories of their city.

Excerpt - "As the astronauts deliver the SitReps - i.e. are not engaged actively in the gathering of scientific data - it is stark how rapidly they move away from technical description and fall back onto the language of poetics: colours, superlatives, adjectives, emotions. After all, in its purest terms, what they are doing is just describing a view - something landscape painters and romantic poets have been trying to do throughout history. And perhaps when it comes to describing a view, no matter how much you might try to be there in the name of science, you end up in the realms of art."

Excerpt "If to be a poet is to be a metaphor-maker, then certainly we can call them poets. Astronaut Christina Koch describes one of the moon's craters from a new angle as 'looking like a large healing wound', and new craters pockmarking the lunar surface as resembling 'a lampshade with tiny pinprick holes'. In this sense, the team's descriptions are a sort of exercise in free association, new extraterrestrial shapes seeking correlates in the more familiar - furniture, our own bodies, domestic detritus."

"Perhaps poetry is what happens when cognition encounters something outside of its existing framework; something beyond the edge, which cannot be made sense of."

"Perhaps poetry is what happens when cognition encounters something outside of its existing framework"

Yesterday I visited the First Cemetery of Athens and paid my respects to the grave of children’s literature and fantasy author T.H. White. More photos and full report in this new piece: dimitrafimi.substack.com/p/finding-th...
@uofgfantasy.bsky.social @uofgartshums.bsky.social

this pagolin, like dr. maturin's debauched sloth, was innocent

It's beautiful! And I hope you're doing a bit better now 💛

Black and white photo of Stephe, sitting on a stage in front of a large window. Her jacket, covered in sequins, glows bronze and pink.

Great to be back in bronze yesterday evening, telling Queens of Albion at the beautiful, atmospheric Rise in York.

What a privilege to share tales of our island's mythic mothers with such a fiercely imagining roomful of folk.

I can't wait to be back!

I highly recommend that everyone follow artists. If you do, your feed is filled with art every day. Real, original art. It's bonkers that you can even have this. Amazing. Undeniably cool.

And then support those artists, when you can, because that helps the delight continue.

Photo of Stephe, leaning against a bank of Welsh slate, mottled with pale lichens, with ivy climbing from crevasses. Behind her shoulder is a patch of moss, and a tumble of dried leaves.

And breathe ...

Been spending some time with the rocks and trees, lichens and waters - and the odd wild goat - in utterly beautiful, blessedly remote Welsh woodland.

Once of those spots where you can feel yourself quietly, gently, going sane.

Anyway: something positive in a negative world - trans friends (and friends of trans people) - can you help us spread the word? Next Monday, Liverpool, free, good times, a good cause, and better than doomscrolling and feeling helpful. We'd love to see you there.

There'll be more news from our storytelling sandbox as the project goes on. But for now, it's a great privilege to be part of this groundbreaking, place-based exploration.

'Auf Sand Gebaut' is led by Erzählkunst e.V., and funded by HKF, Berlin's Capital Culture Fund.

Through the dying days of winter, we've been unearthing memories and family stories, ancient histories and urban myths. And now, as the light floods back, we're turning our minds to shaping these fragments into tales for the telling ...

Black and white photo. A handful of sand has been tossed into the air, and is arcing gracefully, like a breaking wave, as it flies and falls. Photo by Alex Dos Santos.

Taking the day to pause, I'm reflecting on a storytelling project that's been growing over the past few months.

'Auf Sand Gebaut' ('Built on Sand') is a creative collaboration with a group of Berlin-based storytellers, born from a desire to excavate forgotten and untold stories of their city.

An illustration of a boat filled with monks on the back of a giant fish biting its tail, from Heidelberg. Universitätsbibliothek, Cod. Pal. germ. 60, fol. 179v.

A reader has drawn a doodle of a fish with crude trees and a cooking pot on its back, from Bodleian Library MS. Laud Misc. 44, fol. 41v.

Today, according to The Voyage of Saint Brendan, the saint and his brothers would have landed on the back of Jasconius the giant fish en route to finding the promised land of the saints.

Some manuscripts of this work incorporated planned illustrations, others had enthusiastic readers...

Goodnight from Coreham Ampitheatre, where police have declared this year’s Harrowing of Hell play a major public order incident. Goodnight from the stevedores of St. Mary’s Wharf, demanding double pay to unload the allegedly ghosted ship AKD Longstone. Goodnight from Hookland.

A Doublet Disposed: Time Travel Paradoxes and the Death of Euphorbus At the end of book 16, Patroklos dies and prophesies the death of Hektor. Book 17 opens with Menelaos ‘noticing’ Patroklos fall and then turning to attack one of his killers, the Trojan Euphorbus. …

"When Euphorbus is compared to a shoot of an olive tree...the Iliad is really marking him as an abortive narrative tradition, snuffed out by the force of a storyworld that has no space its growth and expansion."

sententiaeantiquae.com/2026/04/03/a...

A promotional graphic for the Village Storytelling Festival. Large yellow and purple text at the top reads "3 - 6 June 2026." The background is a collage of various photos showing performers, storytellers, and community members in both indoor and outdoor settings. The blue Village Storytelling Festival logo is positioned on the right side. Colourful geometric borders frame the top and bottom of the image.

Really thrilled that the excellent Village Storytelling Festival is back, with a brand new Glasgow-city base, and a new look schedule, this June.

No spoilers ... but it's entirely possible that I might be perusing the times of trains northward ...

www.villagestorytelling.org.uk/save-the-dat...

I always wonder - usually in vain - just how big auction houses determine provenance information. Thanks to the Epstein Files, we can see exactly how a seemingly rock-solid provenance was built on shifting sands for this Hercules. 🧵

Congratulations! That's brilliant! 💛

Likewise! 💛

I'll give you a shout, once the thought is a little more developed - if that's OK?