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Posted: Fri Aug 10, 2007 7:05 pm| Quote: |
| From Times Online
July 30, 2004 NB J. C. <snip> The 2005 edition of the Writer's Handbook contains a twenty-page section on "Literary Societies". These run from Jane Austen to W. B. Yeats. Looking through the approximately 150 entries, however, we were struck by the number of societies dedicated to writers who are little read today. Warwick Deeping, for example, "produced seventy novels" and was once so highly thought of that a Navy trawler was named after him (it was sunk by German E boats in 1940), but we confess to being unable to name a single book. It is to counteract such ignorance that the Deeping Appreciation Society publishes a quarterly research bulletin. The writings of Leo Walmsley are much appreciated in East Yorkshire, where the Walmsley Society meets twice-annually, but the name sounds only the faintest of bells in our head. Much the same goes for Elsie J. Oxenham, whose Appreciation Society boasts "500-plus" members, keeping her name alive by the publication of a thrice-yearly news- letter, The Abbey Chronicle. The Jessie Kitley Trust exists "to promote the art of creative writing", and the "distribution of children's poems in shopping malls". Several writers have two societies to their name -Bernard Shaw, for example, and Elinor Brent-Dyer -but only one has three: the Arthur Conan Doyle Society of Ashcroft, British Columbia, must compete with the workings of the Sherlock Holmes Society of Bradford, while both are up against the Franco-Midland Hardware Company of Fareham, Hants, "the world's leading Sherlock Holmes correspondence study group". All publish journals. Annual subscriptions to literary societies range from Pounds 3.50 per year (Warwick Deeping, again) to Pounds 17 (Sherlock Holmes Society). The Writer's Handbook 2005, published by Macmillan, costs Pounds 13.99. The newly established Hamish Canham Poetry Prize, for a poem published in Poetry News, the quarterly newsletter of the Poetry Society, has been awarded to Denise Bennett, for her poem "Changing Shape". The prize has been established by the parents of Hamish Canham, a child psychotherapist and poetry enthusiast who died recently. Ms Bennett receives a prize of Pounds 300. J.C. |
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