REVIEW: JAY BERNARD’S ‘SURGE’
By Stella Backhouse | The question posed by Jay Bernard’s humbling 2019 collection Surge is encapsulated in microcosm right here in its searingly angry opening lines: if the process of recording is itself a forgetting, how can we ever remember?
Online Events: July 2021
July has arrived! Life has taken a few steps closer to resembling normality, but we’ve not yet reached a stage where everyone can participate in their usual cultural activities. So the HCE team have created another list of online literary open mics, events and workshops to help you plan for the weeks ahead. You can stay virus-free AND enjoy your favourite gigs. […]
European Mythology: Gods & Monsters
By Eve Volungeviciute | In the spirit of our ‘Gods & Monsters’ theme, Eve has written an article giving a brief look into some different mythologies, by region. Myths and folklore are tales that can give us an insight to the past – what people believed in, worshipped, even detested. Just as every country has its own unique history, they also have different mythical creatures that […]
Writing Advice: The All-Knowing Narration
By Emma Evans | Writers and readers, allow Emma to guide you through some narrative devices. In particular, a branch of third-person narration called ‘third-person omniscient’. Step into an all-knowing, godlike perspective…
‘From Heaven to Hell’: a Gods & Monsters Book List
By Eve Volungeviciute | As HCE recently announced its new theme of ‘gods and monsters’, Eve has compiled a list of books on the subject. There’s a little something for everyone – from Greek mythology to witchcraft, from zombies to vampires. Some are classics you most likely have heard of and some are less well-known […]
INTERVIEW: FIRE & DUST MEETS ANN ATKINS
Ann Atkins is a Some-Antics Online Slam winner, was Scriptstuff New Year Slam Champion in early 2020, and has been featured as part of Positive Images Festival for three years in a row. Recently, she has been interviewed on radio programmes Coventry Creates (BBC Coventry & Warwickshire) and Brum Radio Poets. On 6th May 2021, Ann headlined at Fire & Dust . HCE caught up with her after the event, to ask a few questions…
June 2021: Online Literary Events
Welcome to June! Plenty of people are still being cautious about venturing out, especially those who’ve not yet been vaccinated. The HCE magazine team have created another list of literary open mics, events and workshops, to help you plan for the weeks ahead. You can stay virus-free AND enjoy your favourite gigs…
REVIEW: LOUISE FAZACKERLEY’S ‘THE LOLITAS’
Reviewed by Stella Backhouse | The Lolitas, Louise Fazackerley’s intensely challenging collection from 2020, is a complex, multi-dimensional work. Poems about giggly teenage rites-of-passage such as biology lessons and rating boys slide into judgemental adult attitudes to contraception and the ease with which men abuse positions of trust […]
REVIEW: LUCÍA ORELLANA DAMACELA’S ‘INHERENT’
Reviewed by Stella Backhouse | And yet here it was: so real I could almost feel its metallic, exhaust-fume breath blowing in my face. It made me wonder what other lost things live on inside my head, if only I could access them. ‘Inherent’, the 2020 collection from Ecuadorian-American poet Lucía Orellana Damacela is informed by a landscape rather more arresting […]
REVIEW: ANDREA MBARUSHIMANA’S ‘FATBERGS’
By Stella Backhouse | […] it’s hugely to Andrea Mbarushimana’s credit that she has not only confronted an urban phenomenon so unpalatable that most of us would prefer to not even think about it; but has turned it into a metaphor for modern life. Fatbergs is a mixed collection, embracing snapshots of 2020’s lockdowns along with poems about sex, childhood experiences and nature […]