INKY FINGERS OPEN MIC
featuring CATHERINE BROGAN and MORAG EDWARD
Tuesday 24th May, 8 – 11pm : FREE

The Inky Fingers Open Mic takes place in the main room of the Forest Café every fourth Tuesday of the month, from 8-11pm. It’s free to come and free for anyone to perform, regardless of style, experience, or identity. It is big and celebratory and welcoming and fun. We want to hear from everybody. We want your poems, your rants, your ballads, your short stories, your diaries, your experimental texts, your heart, your mind, your body. We want the essay on your summer holidays you wrote when you were four, your adolescent haiku, and extracts from your eventually-to-be-completed epic fantasy quadrilogy. We want to hear your best new work as well. And we want people to care about the way words are performed.

Our feature performers this month are Irish performance poet Catherine Brogan, whose searing political verses have wowed audiences across Europe, and Edinburgh storyteller Morag Edward, who has been seen at performances from the Victoria & Albert Museum to the Edinburgh International Book Festival. We’re especially excited to be part of Catherine Brogan’s Poetry Hitchhike: she’ll be hitchhiking and performing across the UK all month, accompanied by a film crew who’ll be pod- and video-casting her exploits online, along with interviews with and performances from the writers she meets along the way.

Open Mic slots are five minutes long; e-mail inkyfingersedinburgh@gmail.com to sign up and be sure of a slot!

Find Inky Fingers online at http://inkyfingersedinburgh.wordpress.com, on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=101994993200164, and on Twitter @InkyFingersEdin.

Inky Fingers Edinburgh August Minifest
Callout for Performers

Calling writers, performers, poets, storytellers, spoken word artistes, linguistic experimenters, and everyone who cares about putting beautiful words in a beautiful order!

Inky Fingers, Edinburgh’s live-lit organising collective, are programming a spectacular wordly mini-fest at the Forest Café, 8th – 13th August 2011, and are looking for proposed events and readings from writers around the country.

Do you have an idea for a weird and wonderful word-related event? Do you have an awesome spoken word show you want to try out in Edinburgh? Do you have a show in Edinburgh already and would like a chance to promote it to wider audiences? Or are you just an awesome reader looking for a slot to perform at? We want to hear from you!

OUR REASONS FOR DOING THIS

• We want to have a space for spoken word &c in the August festivals that is free and liberated;
• We want to programme a balance of local writers/performers and folk from further afield, so that local writers can reach a Festivals audience and incoming writers/performers can connect to the local scene;
• At Forest we’ve got access to some great audiences, and we want people with funky ideas for spoken word &c to be able to reach them;

HOW THE ECONOMICS WORK

• Forest is a free venue. Audiences don’t pay to get in, and performers don’t pay to hire it.
• We provide the venue, the equipment, tech support, online and (some) print publicity; you provide yourself, a good idea, and energy to make the mini-fest a success.
• You can ask for donations during your performance to help cover your costs; we cover our costs through booze and food sales

HOW TO SUBMIT A PROPOSAL

• We have quite a few “lunchtime readings” slots on offer, which will be divided equally between local and incoming performers. To apply for a half hour slot, just tell us who you are, what you do, and what your experience is.
• We have a few slots for afternoon and evening shows. On no more than one A4 page, tell us who you are, what your idea is, what your time and tech requirements are, whether your show has been performed elsewhere before (or during the festival), what your experience is, and anything else you think we ought to know.
• We also have the energy and space to support really wild ideas. Got one of these? Pitch it to us in whatever way you think best.
• Any and all of the above should be emailed to inkyfingersedinburgh@gmail.com by 10th June at the latest. Programming decisions will be finalised by mid-to-late June.

A WORD OF WARNING

• We’re expecting a lot of proposals, but we only have six days to programme for this initial minifest experiment. We won’t be able to programme everybody. We won’t even be able to programme every great idea we receive or awesome person who contacts us. Our decisions will be based on gut instinct and various chance factors. We’ll try and do right by you, but we’re doing this for free and in our spare time, so be nice to us. And hey, even if we can’t programme you, we’ll be running quite a few open mics and we’d love to see you there.

ABOUT THE ORGANISERS

• Inky Fingers (http://inkyfingersedinburgh.wordpress.com) is an unfunded grassroots organising collective. We run monthly open mics and workshops in Edinburgh, as wellas various special events. We care about supporting new writers, and providing a space for people to speak out, to work on their writing and performing, and to enjoy a community of writers and performers.
• The Forest Café (http://www.theforest.org.uk) is an independent arts-events-food-social-chaos-space in Edinburgh. We provide free and open events spaces for literally anyone to come and perform in, and we also have loads of amazing projects — like an art gallery, a publishing house, an award-winning experimental performance festival. We run on volunteer power, and we like a good party.

That’s all! Any questions, e-mail inkyfingersedinburgh@gmail.com. Please feel free to forward this callout to anyone you think would be interested.

The Melting Pot
‘Organic Musical Stew’

Raising funds for a children’s music camp in Bosnia:

Klezmer           Cajun               Folk

        Balkan Brass         Sebda

Acoustic         New orleans trad. jazz

Tuesday 17th May 7pm - 11pm
upstairs at The Forest Cafe
suggested dontion £4 entry


With FRESH ingredients imported from all over the world

Black Cat
Sink
The Cajun Enjuns
Caro Bridges and the River
Kate and her Kettle
Rob (aka Cappo)

plus very special guests…