Daughters Across Borders now available on Amazon

Authors with Daughters Across Borders books

Daughters Across Borders is now available on Amazon. Buy it  as a paper copy or as a Kindle book from Amazon.

Read about:

• How one Father survived a Japanese POW camp during WWII
• How another Father battered the Mother of his eight kids
• How a Father raised his Daughter on his own and then left for another continent
• How a Father had only six conversations with his Daughter in all his life
• How a Father considered his life a quiet despair
• How a Father dealt with his European daughter converting to Islam
• How a Father conceived his Daughter against all odds
• How a Father ordered chips from his Daughter without recognising her

Jude reads at Thackeray’s Book Store in Denton

Annie presents the book to the audience at Thackeray’s Book Store in Denton

Buy Daughters Across Borders book

Buy our book here

Reading in Todmorden Library: 24 May, Sat, 2 pm

Watch the trailer and order our book

Daughters Across Borders book is out in June 2014. Watch this trailer and order the book !

Review of Ilkley Fringe Festival readings – Tuesday 11th October 2011

Troupers! Readings done, audiences entertained, the final bow for 2011 taken

A text message sent to all of the readers from Julie, had served to pre-warn us that we needed to ‘up our game’ for tonight’s performance. Her text read, “OMG, it’s a real stage, in a real theatre.”

Julie and official Daddies’ Girls roadie, Ken, aka, Mr Ken Burgess, Julie’s delightful husband, had both gone ahead earlier in the afternoon to mount the van guard action of setting up the power point presentation to illustrate our stories and musical backing to help entertain the audience masses. Well, we could dream…

By the time Oxana, Jo and Annie arrived in the hired car having only got lost twice (!), the act before ours was in full flow – an Indian puppet show.

It had certainly drawn a large audience and as they poured out of the Ilkley Playhouse auditorium Julie and I mobbed them with DG marketing material to lure them into our show, expertly produced by our roadie Ken, outlining the content of the Daddies’ Girl event on the fringe programme. Oooh, the tension! The buzz! It was like being at the Edinburgh Fringe.

Annie popped up stairs to have a look at the stage, as just the word brought her out in hives of stage fright and she was seen downing a glass of Dutch Courage, white wine flavoured very quickly in the wings, only to ask if she could have another one or three.

“Oh my goodness! Lahore is all over the stage,“ exclaimed one of the Ilkley Fringe stewards rather dramatically, “I’m not sure if they will be able to remove it in time for your performance.” she explained to Annie, who was rather hoping that they wouldn’t…

But as the seasoned pros The Fetch Theatre Company clearly are, the stage was swept clear of their production of Basant Lahore!, featuring all manner of sub-continent clutter in record time, and in came the next expectant audience clearly wanting to hear tales of fathers and daughters.

In the wings Ken, now well into queueing up the slides and soundtrack with the attendant theatre AV techie, with Oxana, Jo, Julie and Annie, (doing deep breathing exercises and trying to decipher her handwritten intro), remarked on how many men were in the audience.

“Oh crikey, do you think they are expecting a burlesque troupe?” one of us replied. “What a disappointment for them if they are.”

We had been wondering for some time if the name, Daddies’ Girls, might be the cause of the so many hits on our website…

We had decided to mix the readings up a bit for this performance with Julie and Jo reading out their stories in full as theirs were the shortest, and Annie and Oxana reading sections of their stories, as they had a much longer total word count. And besides, parts of Annie’s make her cry, which rather brings the party down.

We consider the order with care, and try to counter balance the content of the stories e.g. an upbeat story following one that may be more sombre in content.

The readings as ever were well received by the audience, and if anything being on a stage added a theatrical angle to the readings. It felt rather ‘troupe like’ to make our bows and receive a round of applause, all together, when the four readings were done. And all in all the whole experience made for a really fitting end to our festival reading engagements for 2011.

in 2013, appearances at literary festivals will have more of an edge as our book will be published and we’ll be reading from them, and selling copies, with a bit of luck and a lot of marketing.

Later, we chat to members of the audience as people often like to share their stories and memories of their fathers with us. Tonight, a fond father tells his story of what he had to do when his daughter’s pet rabbit died while she was on holiday. He decided to deep freeze the body so the whole family could be at the burial on his daughter’s return.

Wise man, wise man indeed.

How Editorial Meetings Roll for Us

In case you are thinking of starting a group writing project like Women What Write, we thought we would share what has worked for us over the 12 months or so since we first banded together to write our first project: Daddies’ Girls.

1.) Decide on a clear theme for the stories, in this case it was to write a story based on our relationship whether it was good, bad or indifferent with the man who is half of the team that gave us life.

2.) Be clear about your goal – are you meeting for creative fun? Are you writing with a view to getting published? The spirit  in which you are meeting will ‘dictate’ how you organise your meetings. For example, once we felt confident we had attained a good standard and body of work our aim was to get published and so…

3.) Be very clear about draft deadlines, but be prepared to make allowances for the fact that we all lead busy lives – children get sick, holidays need to taken, there are other pulls on our time.  We started Women What Write in the spirit of supportive friendship and that’s how we want to continue – not by being petty about what word count each member has achieved in any given month.

4.) Decide where best to meet. Our meetings take place largely in my house in west Yorkshire. Three other members of WWW also live nearby, the others live in Greater Manchester.

5.) We make our editorial meetings as sociable as possible and try to meet up every six weeks or so. We all contribute something for the dining table to eat or drink which adds to the ‘breaking bread together’ social aspect.

6.) After a good gossip and catch up with everyone’s news over our shared buffet – it’s down to business.

7.)  We always work to an agenda which is sent out via email some time ahead of the meetings. We found right from the first meeting that this is the way we like to do things. The agenda ensures we make use of our time efficiently, this is an important consideration as some of the WWW have travelled over thirty miles to get to the editorial meeting. The agenda is also there so  that each member of the group has a voice, as they can ask for anything they want as an agenda item for discussion.  It also provides a framework and helps move the meeting forward so that we all know what we have to do during the next batch of time before we meet again.

8.) Share the load. If actions arise out of the agenda,we find that the one best suited to the task in hand comes forward to offer to take that particular action on – e.g. editing, proof reading, liaison with literary festival organisers, getting publicity materials printed etc…

9.) Fiscal arrangements – make sure no one is out-of-pocket. Check if anyone needs a contribution. So far, WWW members have generously gifted items especially for publicity purposes, refusing to even talk about reimbursement – naughty! But nice.

10.) Enjoy! We do – most of all each other’s company in the spirit of endeavour.

Hope this post has helped if you are thinking of setting up a writing group and do get in contact if you want to know more. We’re not experts – but we were fortunate to find a great mentor and experienced writer – and it’s only fair to share the goodies out.

Daddies’ Girls at Ilkley Literature Festival Fringe 2011

Daddies’ Girls performed our short stories, with visual and sound backtrack, at this year’s Ilkley Literature Festival Fringe.

Date       Tuesday 11th October 2011

Time       9.15 pm

Venue    Ilkley Playhouse Wharfeside Theatre

(Weston Road
Ilkley
West Yorkshire
LS29 8DW)

Review of readings at the Friends of Todmorden Library

I was slightly dreading the invitation to share our work at this event and for more than a couple of reasons.

a.) I knew the audience would be wanting and expecting a good quality of ‘reads.’ Calderdale is well served for author visits  for festivals, book launches and such like, would Women What Write cut the literary mustard? = pressure.

b.) As we would only number five out of a potential of nine readers, we decided to read our stories out in full. That was fine, except, I can’t get through my story, Age Shall Not Wither Him without blubbling = pressure not to blubb.

c.) At the last-minute due to circumstances beyond her control, Monica, writer of  The Orange Hillman Hunter, had to cancel her reading as her daughter was very poorly with adult measles. Having had mumps as an adult, and a pregnant adult at that, I could only sympathise = with one down we had even more pressure to be entertaining.

d) All in all= pressure – with depleted numbers and, carrying one whose reading  may turn into a poor impersonation of Gwyneth Paltrow‘s Oscar acceptance speech (me), we meet up for this, our third, public reading.

The Friends of Todmorden Library (FOTL) had organised a weekend of events to suit the community the library serves – and serves so well, at least three of us use the library regularly.   

In fact, All the Women What Write group are massive fans of the library service and we use which ever library we live nearest to on a regular basis. Libraries are under threat of Government/council  cut backs and closures – they need protecting by pressure groups such as FOTL – providing us with yet another reason for getting on this event’s programme and show our association.

Writing now post performance, all that fretting about the pressures was largely unfounded – the audience were very attentive, our introduction by Ms Stephanie Booth was more than encouraging, and we were delighted to see ‘our mentor’ poet and play writer, truly generous professional and generally lovely lady, Char March in the audience to support us.

With just a bit of blubbing from me during the course of my reading – the gig went well and we were jubilant that it was another in the bag.

Of the literary festivals we had lined up, we have just Ilkley Fringe to go next week.

But this Sunday, many of the Women What Write team are meeting to discuss our next project and to do a review of our efforts thus far…not to mention a jolly good catch up on everyone’s news as this will be our first meeting since the long summer break.

The Tale of Getting Published

We know that there are many people out there who love writing, we know that there are many people out there with a story to tell.

We know this because just like them, we felt we had stories to tell and first of all we told them to our own little group of nine writers.

Once we had got the stories to a level where we were happy with them we started to tell our stories at Arts festivals in the north-west of England. To our delight they were so warmly received that – we then wanted to tell our stories to a wider audience by getting them published.

Follow the Daddies‘ Girls blog come with us on our journey to the bookstore via the publishers.

We’d love to have you along…

Best wishes,

Women What Write

Project 1: Daddies’ Girls

 

 

 

Daddies’ Girls at Friends of Todmorden Library Literary Festival

We read our stories at the inaugural Friends of Todmorden Library Literary Festival (30 September – 2 October).

Date       Saturday 1st October 2011

Time       5 pm

Venue    Todmorden Library