We are delighted to launch our third podcast on the theme of IKEA. You can stream it now via Soundcloud.
You can also subscribe to the podcast via iTunes. Android users should click here instead.
Here is a rundown of our contributors:
Thomas Stewart is a Columnist for Litro NY and has had his fiction, poetry and essays published at The Cadaverine, The Stockholm Review, Rockland, Storgy, Anomaly, Agenda Broadsheet, among others. His debut poetry pamphlet, Creation is forthcoming from Red Squirrel Press. He has an MA in Writing from the University of Warwick and a BA in English from the University of South Wales. He enjoys folk music, horror films, suburban fiction, watches, cooking, patterned jumpers and beat poetry. He is afraid of the dark.
Max Scratchmann came into being as a flat pack form IKEA and was discontinued very soon after the original units were sold in the 1950s, so there are very few versions of him still around today. However, he has been spotted on the poetry scene from time to time, and another incarnation of him appears to like to illustrate, while a third assembled unit seems to enjoy writing books and has produced lots of them. Mostly as flat packs.
Dan Stathers has incredibly hairy knees. He enjoys talking nonsense in pubs and spends a great deal of his time at the bottom of a garden.
Michael McGill is an Edinburgh-based performer who has appeared at Inky Fingers, Blind Poetics, The Accelerator and Last Monday at Rio. He has also appeared as part of Big Word Performance Poetry and on The Verb on BBC Radio 3. Recently, he has had work published in RAUM, New Walk, The Haiku Quarterly and on The Open Mouse and Hot Tub Astronaut websites.
Stephen Barnaby was raised by stoats and taught to communicate entirely through fifty snuffly, grunty noises, which he has successfully and randomly rearranged into two pamphlets, Self Loathing Ostrich Tragedy and It was Happy Hour at the Nutty Nun. He has worked hard at expanding his repertoire, culminating in last year’s naked appearances in the videos for ‘Wrecking Ball’ and ‘Blurred Lines.’ He insists, though, that he is emphatically not the plaything of an industry hell-bent on sexually objectifying bespectacled grey-haired men in their mid-forties. He can be contacted by leaving breadcrumbs in woodland clearings and hiding behind a tree.
Nick Brooks is a novelist and poet who lives and works in Glasgow. He has twice won a Scottish Arts Council (now Creative Scotland) Writer’s Award, and most recently was awarded a stipend by the Royal Literary Fund. He has published three novels to date; My Name Is Denise Forrester (2005), and The Good Death (2007), both Weidenfeld & Nicolson, and Indecent Acts with Freight (2014). Forthcoming works include a collection of erotic haiku, called Sexy Haiku, due in 2015 through Freight, and a first collection of poetry, The Dog in the Disco, through Dive Buki in Slovakia, also due this year sometime. When not more gainfully employed, Nick is a full-time stalker with a pronounced limp.
Kevin P. Gilday is an award winning writer and spoken word artist based in Glasgow, Scotland. Kevin has been performing for five years, during which time he has solidified himself as one the foremost spoken word artists to emerge from the fertile Scottish poetry scene. Kevin has written four solo shows, completed two national tours, published two pamphlets and appeared at a whole host of festivals including Wickerman, Doune the Rabbithole, Lingo Festival (Dublin), the Edinburgh Fringe (three times), the Toronto Fringe and the Glastonbury Festival. Kevin also enjoys competing in slams for fun, miraculously winning a few (the StAnza Digital Slam, the Creative Stirling Slam, the Four Cities Slam) and has competed at the national finals on three occasions (coming 3rd twice). Kevin is also the host of Rhyming Optional, Glasgow’s dedicated spoken word radio show, and co-host of Sonnet Youth, a new alternative spoken word night for Scotland’s burgeoning scene.
Born but not bred in a market town in Fife, Stella Birrell‘s mum claims her line can be traced back to Genghis Khan via Russian Aristocracy, while her father’s grandparents were big in the Art Nouveau in Hungary at the beginning of the 20th Century. Despite the richness of this gene pool, Stella herself only appears to have inherited weak wrists, and a penchant for sitting down to write stories. Her debut novel, How Many Wrongs make a Mr Right? will be published by Crooked Cat Books in 2016.
Ian McKenzie has contributed poems to anthologies about Luddites, death and dog poo. His work has also featured in Raum Magazine. Whilst his house is full of IKEA furniture, he hates it almost as much as he hates the Royal Family, who probably think they are too good for IKEA. Bring on the flat-pack guillotine!’
Ian Richardson has been reading books and comics for years. Eventually, inevitably, he started writing. The first piece he ever wrote won a competition but he’s not been able to maintain that 100% success rate. He did have two pieces of poetry published in RAUM poetry magazine in 2015 and was overall winner in the Scottish Borders Waverley Lines contest. Ian enjoys writing bios in the third person, drinks a lot of coffee, doesn’t sleep much and is currently supposed to be working on the sequel to his e-book on Jukepop.
Alexandra Voutsina is an artist with an academic background in psychology, interior architecture and graphic design. She is trying to convey messages concerning the problematic issues of the contemporary world, through different media. This media includes photography, graphic design, printing and creative writing. To discover more about her work one can visit www.alexandravoutsina.com
POETRY AS FUCK 