Satellite of Love Poetry and Spoken Word run monthly events, workshops and writing retreats. Our monthly events at the John Sebastian Lightship offer a platform for local and touring poets, open mic and a community poem.

All languages welcome.

Open mic sign ups are currently open. Apply by emailing [email protected]

Doors & Bar open - 7pm
Night starts - 7:30pm
Night ends - 10pm

The John Sebastian Lightship, Cabot Cruising Club, Bathurst Basin, Redcliffe, Bristol BS1 6SG

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Featuring:-
Sarah-Jane Dobner wrote Banff-winning book A Feeling for Rock - a mix of poetry,
cartoons, vignettes and polemic. Her poems have been published in Alpinist, Climber and UKC, along with other prose pieces. In 2021 she won the Shextreme prize for adventure poetry. She is currently working on a crag destination guide in poetry-picture format. South-west born and bred, Sarah-Jane has been climbing for 25 years and has a mixed background including climbing instructor, musician, lawyer and construction labourer. She is particularly fond of sea cliffs and snooker.

Professor Terry Gifford was for 21 years Director of the annual International Festival of Mountaineering Literature, in its last years at Kendal Mountain Festival. A former Chair of the Mountain Heritage Trust, his collected climbing essays were published in 2004 as The Joy of Climbing and his eighth collection of poetry is A Feast of Fools (2018).

Libby Houston has tackled hawser-laid rope, nail-them-yourself boots. A manual typewriter, carbon paper. Beatnik poetry readings. Hitch-hiking tales. Then the National Poetry Secretariat, and London’s first climbing walls. Then the Avon Gorge. Over the decades Libby Houston has read her work across the world (recently Roundhouse Camden Town, Bluecoat Centre Liverpool), sung it on Dutch radio, led courses and workshops, and is now a professional rope access botanist, discoverer of new tree species here, with nature notes in Avon climbing guides. Selected poems Cover of Darkness (Slow Dancer Press 1998), working on new collection not before time.

Samantha Walton is a writer and academic based in Bristol and Bath. Her non-fiction
books Everybody Needs Beauty: In Search of the Nature Cure (2021) and The Living World: Nan Shepherd and Environmental Thought (2020) are published by Bloomsbury. She has also published a poetry collection, Self Heal (Boiler House Press, 2018) and a pamphlet, Bad Moon (Spam 2020). Samantha is Professor of Modern Literature and runs the Research Centre for Environmental Humanities at Bath Spa University.

Dave Wynne-Jones spent 20 years teaching English before leaving to gain an MA in
creative writing at MMU and publish “Kidstuff” a collection of poems to share with children. He then scratched a living writing articles for outdoor magazines and organising expeditions. He’s published two mountaineering non-fiction books, “4000m Climbing the Highest Mountains of the Alps,” and ”An Expedition Handbook,” which led to a poetry pamphlet, “The Way Taken,” based on his first expedition to China which explores different ways of writing about climbing.

There will also be a select open-mic where others will be welcome to read a single poem or short prose extract, either their own or one from a favourite writer, but please keep poems to 40 lines.

All welcome. No charge for Alpine Club and Eagle Ski Club members, please email
Dave to be added to the guest list or the open mic.

Dave Wynne-Jones - [email protected]

John Sebastian Lightship, Bathurst Basin, Bristol BS1 6SG

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