Cyfarchion ffrindiau annwyl! Greetings dear friends!
Feeling wired & a little twitchy, following an all-nighter [due to travel arrangements] the incredible Mel & Write4Word’s terrible intern [that’s me!] touched ground in Sweden. This is Mel’s eighth year in attendance, she tells me Tranås & at the Fringe are very close to her heart, although she needn’’t have done so as that was very clear from the way her whole demeanor changed when she spoke of them. I’m intrigued. The airport left Mel’s suitcase behind [again!] but she didn’’t care as we were nearly there. There amongst friends. There in Tranås.
After checking in to the hotel and being shown around Tranås & the Kultivera residency. we headed over to the newly developed festival welcome centre. It has an area for the media team to collaborate & is like a bee hive [if you replace the bees with creative people] with a sense of rising excitement & incredible energy bouncing off the walls!
Our first mission was to touch base & re-group with Dominic & Write4Word’s Coracle Europe International Residency writers, and team Kultivera. We felt slightly heart-fractured at stories of magical happenings that had already taken place, but massively fired up at the exciting & diverse range of voices & events that were still in store for the week ahead.
[Sorry to interrupt but as I was typing this, Dominic turned up at the welcome centre & introduced us to the current National Poet of Wales- Ifor Ap Glyn. How exciting. He seems nice!]
No time for a nap, we had hit the ground running, for Tranås. Tranås, at the Fringe. That afternoon we got straight into the festival programme with a poetry performance workshop run by Sandra Skaven & Julian Guerra Ortega at Cafe Towerland, a reading from award winning poet & writer Janice D. Soderling at Theatre JARMO, followed by a live ‘visual spa’ by artist Fuji Hoffmann. More on those later on, but for now please excuse me, there is ‘full-immersion in the arts’ to be taken care of!
Hwyl fawr a nos da! Goodbye and goodnight!
Also published at Literatur Wales.
Dana Perry