Well, we’ve been holding out for a long time. The Word Machine CIC managed to absorb pretty much every ounce of this summer’s glorious Westcountry sunshine, but now it’s back to work. Lots of exciting things are happening to keep our spirits up. Our collaborative work with tribe magazine is going from strength to strength. This week’s 21st edition of tribe magazine has had about 100,000 reads in four days – an extraordinary figure, and a testament to founding editor Mark Doyle’s vision and the support of his superb team. This autumn, we plan to work with the tribe team on new digital publications, including Frank Carney’s wonderful Birmingham-set novel, Crimes of the Powerless. We also plan to begin a regular series of tribe publications, including a Saki anthology and a new writing anthology.
We are meeting with a new year of second-year history students at Plymouth University later this week to start the second year of our HLF-sponsored oral history of Plymouth during the war, and the ten years of social housing which followed it. The excellent fellows at Fotonow have begun to produce some lovely photographic records of our interviewees, and we’ll be presenting an interim exhibition on the project at the Plymouth International Book Festival on Sunday 3rd November.
There are plans afoot for an involvement in Plymouth’s commemoration of WWI alongside Plymouth historian Chris Robinson, local publishing expert Helen Greathead and the good people at the Real Ideas Organisation.
Onwards and upwards.