Welcome back to Surrey Writes, the Surrey New Writers Festival Podcast!
IT'S FESTIVAL WEEK! To celebrate, we thought we would end this season with the first podcast we ever recorded, back in February 2023. Stay tuned until the end of a surprise reading!
Our last guest is the wonderful Sharron Green, who will talk to us about her university experience, her publishing journey, and performing her poems to an audience. She will then give us a surprise reading of some of her poems!
Sharron describes herself as a 'poet of a certain age' whose writing blends nostalgia, comments on modern life and odes to nature. She enjoys experimenting with rhymes and poetic forms. She's been writing rhyming poetry since she was a child, with a lot of encouragement, especially from her Granny, and also family and friends. Pam Ayres with her witty verses and delivery has been a role model to her, along with Carol Ann Duffy, Wendy Cope and more recently Brian Bilston and Luke Wright.
She studied modern languages and enjoyed a fulfilling and exciting career as an international qualitative market researcher for many years. She moved to Guildford when her son was three in 2003.
After becoming an Empty Nester in 2018 the time seemed right to pursue her hobby, and she was buoyed by creative writing classes with Ruth Brandt and the infectious enthusiasm of fellow students. Since June 2019 she has posted poems on Instagram
and Facebook as @rhymes_n_roses and she's very grateful for the support of the vibrant poetry community and inspired by the wonderful poems and many challenges there. In August 2019 she was involved in a motorway car crash which she was lucky to survive. It spurred her on to self-publish a booklet of her favourite poems ‘Introducing Rhymes_n_Roses’ and she was proud to give Pam Ayres a copy at the Cheltenham Literary Festival.
In 2020 her Covid-19 and lockdown inspired poems were accepted for international anthologies. That September she embarked on an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Surrey and in December ‘Viral Odes’ a chapbook of pandemic poetry was published with the help of Ink Gladiators Press.
Having completed the MA, in January 2022 she started an Advanced Poetry Course at City Lit London with Ella Frears
and in September she joined an online Poetry Masterclass run by poet and author Helen Cox. She has submitted pieces written on the courses to poetry competitions. She enjoys performing at local open mics – especially in person – and have been to Write out Loud at the Woking Lightbox; Poetry Performance (a Richmond based group); and 1000 Monkeys which is now held online. Last August she started hosting a monthly open mic ‘Poetry
and Pizza’ at the Solar Sisters café in Guildford which has attracted great poets – some reading their work for the first time.
She and two local poet friends, Heather Moulson and Trisha Broomfield, are also keen to run Poetry Party workshops to introduce poetry forms and talk poetry at the Solar Sisters café
& Twitter: @rhymes_n_roses
Website: https://rhymesnroses.com
The Surrey New Writers Festival will take place at the University of Surrey on the 27th May 2023. TICKETS ARE NOW ON SALE!
TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE
Website: https://surreynewwritersfest.com/
Instragram: https://www.instagram.com/officialsurreynwfest/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/officialSNWFest
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/officialsurreynewwritersfestival
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/company/surrey-new-writers-festival
We hope you enjoy this episode!
