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Beasts! Beasts all over the Library!

Orcas and Dinos and Bears, oh my!

A parliament of strange beasties crept and swooped and skittered across Covent Garden last night, as Sidekick ran wild with Birds, Tiger and Terrible Lizards: A Literary Bestiary!

We all scrambled down to the fancy Library members club for a night of mask-making, quizzing, poetry and partying:

A feathered raccoon, a many-eyed bear and a very stripey long-eared bat. Dr Moreau would be proud.

The event was a celebration of three of our snarliest titles:


JT Welsch came down from York for a fantastic set, which brought to life the prehistoric stars of Hell Creek Anthology (not to mention his splendid tribute to his dog, who couldn’t make it along).


The poets of Birdbook III: Farmland, Heathland, Mountain, Moorland treated us to their finest animal poetry.

Sarah Hesketh reads some merlin magic. 

Chris Jones describes the ring ouzel.

Alison Brackenbury speaks of the fieldfare and redwing

Christopher Reid on the carrion crow and corncrake.

Dzifa Benson talks little owl and wood pigeon.
Richard Osmond goes all golden eagle

Chris Beckett takes on the woodlark and red grouse.

And Jon and K sprinkled some movie magic in there too with a couple of extracts from Lives Beyond Us.
Photo courtesy of Ian McLachlan

Photo courtesy of Ian McLachlan

The rightful quiz victor was Peter Daniels, whose poem addressed the rook.



Thank you to Library for hosting us, Ana Sefer for inviting us, all of the readers, the poets and artists of Birdbook III and the masquerading, dino-drawing, quizzical, wonderful audience. You!

I’ll leave you with the winner of the mask-making. Transforming a bear into an orca, indeed.




Birds, Tigers and Terrible Lizards


Our first big event of 2016, booked for 30th March, is Birds, Tigers & Terrible Lizards, a late London launch for two of our recent titles: J.T Welsch and Dom & Ink’s Hell Creek Anthology and the many-poeted Birdbook: Farmland, Heathland, Mountain, Moorland. We’ll also be having a little ten-month celebration of Lives Beyond Us, to round out the theme of the evening. There will be animal/dinosaur mask-making activities and a quiz, and readers on the night so far confirmed include:

J.T. Welsch
Christopher Reid
Alison Brackenbury
Sarah Hesketh
Richard Osmond
Peter Daniels
Jeremy Keighley
Dzifa Benson

The venue is LIBRARY in Covent Garden, which looks like this:


The Facebook page for the event is here, but if you don’t use Facebook, please RSVP to us at events@sidekickbooks.com so that we know you’re coming, as there will be a guest list system in operation and we don’t want to leave anyone out in the cold.

The Sidekick Advent Calendar: Day 2

Day Two, and the next entry in the Sidekick Play Poem Archive comes from cinematic bestiary Lives Beyond Us, in the guise of Rebecca Wigmore‘s ‘The Lion Handler’s Advice to a Young Melanie Griffith’.

Melanie and Neil at home


This interactive poem includes a commentary from LBU‘s poetry editor Kirsten Irving.

Get prowlin’!

Lives Beyond Us: The Quiz

We wouldn’t want to leave out those of you who couldn’t make the launch for Lives Beyond Us, so here for your brain-tingling pleasure, we present Never Work With Animals or Children – the quiz!

Do you know your Lassie from your Lady? Bound right in and test your bow-wow know-how.*

*Failure may result in consumption by our resident quiz master.




Lives Beyond Us: Essays and Poems on the Film Reality of Animals (co-ed. Seb Manley and Kirsten Irving) is available to buy right here for £12 plus p&p.

This Happened: The Lives Beyond Us Launch

Cliff Hammett with chronophotographic image of a falling cat.
A huge thanks to everyone who came last Tuesday to help up launch Lives Beyond Us: Essays and Poems on the Film Reality of Animals!

For the uninitiated, Lives Beyond Us is a cross-genre anthology with gorgeous colour illustrations throughout. Covering topics as diverse as voyeurism, comic pratfalls and bear interventions, it’s a fresh look at a beloved topic, curated by Kirsten Irving (poems) and Seb Manley (essays).

The anthology is a super-thick bundle of Sidekick-style guile and intrigue, and costs £12 plus postage. Click here to see more and buy.

Cat watches humans watching bird.
We launched the book upstairs at the Genesis Cinema in Whitechapel. Since Sidekick started life in Whitechapel and was based there for five years – less than ten minutes’ walk from the Genesis, in fact – it seemed an oh-so appropriate place to unveil a book that dives face first into film history.

Here’s how the book in question fared under UV light as Jon was setting out the table:

Before the hoard descended.
We had readings and a slideshow, and there was an animal film quiz with a tricksy rebus round by long-time Sidekick ally Siân Moore. Alongside the editors, contributing writers Mike West, Rebecca Wigmore, Sophie Mayer, Simon Barraclough, Angela Cleland, Abigail Parry, Cliff Hammett and James Coghill were all present and correct.

We piece this account together now from whirling fragments, as we spent much of the evening rushing between the projection room (well, the cupboard with the technical things in it), the book stall and various old friends – a little chaotically, since this was our first book launch in over a year and we’d forgotten just how much needs doing to keep things running semi-smoothly.

Lessons learned: always give five-minute warnings in a quiz show host voice; PCs can project to a second screen in one of four different ways; electric fans give poets a neat ‘windswept’ appearance when placed correctly.

Finally, evidence that a selection of readers, hosts, editors and audience members felt the animal magic and posed it out onstage. What a grrrrrand night.

Post-launch cast and crew superhero pose

Animals, Amazons and ACE news!

Hallo one and all!

Hope your year is going mighty well. We’ve had our heads buried trying to make sense of what has already been a packed year of Stuff.

Brace yourself. We have a lot of exciting things to pack in here.

Firstly, those of a certain age might remember back, way back in the mists of time, talk of a lost edition of the fabled Fuselit magazine. Thought by many to be a myth, Amazon has now been unearthed! Featuring exquisite poetry, artwork and prose, this hand-sewn magazine comes with its own talismanic owl amulet and a set of six postcards detailing exchanges between the director Werner Herzog, fond of his Amazon-based films, and his best friend, the erratic, arrogant actor, Klaus Kinski.

Here is Werner Herzog drinking cough syrup out of his own slipper.



Fuselit: Amazon costs £10 and comes in its own card-and-plastic display case. Also, there is a gold monkey hiding inside for you to make friends with. She is called Rolo.



The best bit? This lovingly crafted relic is not available through Amazon! Muhaha!

OK, so onto the ACE news. That’s both ACE, as in 90s-excellent and ACE, as in Arts Council England. For many years, Jon and I resisted applying for funding, preferring to fund Sidekick ourselves from our day job. That was all well and good until we realised that me going freelance and Jon going part-time, while splendid for productivity, chafed the funds somewhat. So we took a deep breath and a jot of advice from very kind indie publishers and applied to part-fund our next five books.

And, um, they said YES.

This is the moment a rep from ACE came to Sidekick HQ to tell us the news:



We’re thrilled, mainly because it means we can pay contributors to these five books, many of whom have been collaborating with Sidekick for some time now. The five books we’re producing with the funding are:

Lives Beyond Us, an anthology co-curated by film scholar Seb Manley and yours truly, featuring essays and poems on animals in cinema.



Birdbook III & IV. So exciting to know we can complete this beautiful series without compromising on production. The final two titles will feature the birds of the mountains, moorlands & heaths and saltwater species. III is so very near to completion I might just pop.



Surveyors’ Riddles, our latest Team-Up, this time between poets Giles Goodland and Alistair Noon. In Alistair’s own words, the pamphlet is “A sequence in classical enigmenga form, consisting of exactly 87 triquatrainal poems of varying types, the 39th poem being by a member of the Kim family, the 59th poem by a Russian symbolist, and the final poem being not allowed to reference the moon, the formal requirements followed faithfully and perfectly.”

You hear that? NO MOON! The perfect collection for selenophobes everywhere. 



And on the Team-Up train, we’re extremely excited about the forthcoming We Go Wandering at Night and Are Consumed by Fire, a collaboration between illustrator Hetti McArthur and poet Rowyda Amin. We’re promised dark fairytales and plenty of getting lost in the woods of the imagination. More on that one later in the year.

Buuuut we got a little drunk on power. 



On top of our ACE books, we are also very excited to be publishing the following titles:

Laboratorio, edited by Simon Barraclough. Following on from his residency at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory, and to complement his collection Sunspots, to be released through Penned in the Margins, Simon Barraclough presents an anthology of work written by scientists and poets on the trials and technology of space exploration, from satellites to silverfish. Contains dark matter.



Finders Keepers, a Team-Up exploring vanishing species, devised and created by artist Sophie “Moomintastic” Gainsley and poet Harry “Big in Macedonia” Man. You can see their work so far at this frankly BEAUTIFUL site.

Over the Line, a comics-poetry anthology co-edited by comics editor and comics-poetry aficionado Chrissy Williams and comics artist Tom Humberstone, for which WE WANT YOUR SUBMISSIONS! [Note to self: do not shorten ‘comics poetry’ to an acronym.]



And we have a whoooole bundle more plans lined up for 2016.

(Is that fox still jumping up and down? Righto.)

Thanks, as ever, for your love and support. We are always grateful for it, and keen to hear what you think. Can’t wait to show you the new books!

CONTACT:

contact [a] sidekickbooks.com

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