Events

Typewronger Books runs a FREE events program, so you can turn up to any of these you like! Should you wish to set up an event with us please click here to find out how that might work!

*** CANCELLED ***

Happy Fuji News - Friday 8/3/24 @7pm


Happy Fuji News is a live-animated performed movie made out of 200+ woodblock prints, written by Brussels based production company The Woodcut Theater over the course of 2016-2022.

Prints are shown and thrown at the rhythm of an audio soundtrack with MIDI guitar music by Raphaël Desmarets, sound effects and characters voices by McCloud Zicmuse, Siet Phorae, Molly Rex, Ma Clément, Alice Perez & Joey Wright.

The story follows a touristic guide at the foothill of Japan's Mt. Fuji, escaping commercial hardship through the chance meeting of a Soundcloud ASMR artist.

With an equally comedic and dramatic approach, Happy Fuji News is a surrealistic dive into the world of tourism, apps, geology (and more..) done in a joyously performed proto-cinematic way.

Happy Fuji News now features a live-trailer for a period drama in production

In English (no subtitles)

duration: 33min

Trailer:

https://youtu.be/tidE1KX3_OI

More informations:

http://santeloisirs.com/erickinnyhfn

https://www.instagram.com/eric_kinny/

Letterboxd:

https://letterboxd.com/film/happy-fuji-news/

After a few secret shows in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, Happy Fuji News has played in Brussels, toured Switzerland, the Netherlands, Portugal, Italy, Germany and France, and is on the lookout for new audiences across Europe and beyond.

Muted Minds: Therapeutic Poetry Sessions

Sunday 10/3/24 @7pm

Sunday 17/3/24 @7pm

Sunday 24/3/24 @7pm

Wednesday 27/3/24 @7pm


FREE EVENTS BUT LIMITED SPACE - TICKETED THROUGH EVENTBRITE:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/.../objects-therapeutic...


The Muted Minds sessions are open to anyone, and everyone interested in co-creating poems driven by the documentation of personal and collective narratives of the present


Cal. Are not the object and the word the same?

– A Dialogue between Caliban and Ariel, John Fuller


In Fuller’s dialogue, Caliban engages in a discussion with Ariel, exploring themes such as the relationship between the word and the object. Notably, the dialogue between Caliban and Ariel leans more towards the significance of the 'word'; rather than the 'object'; as this fulfils the intended purpose of the work. The present series of sessions will focus on the exploration of ‘object-s’ through words, guided by the idea that “any rule may be broken”.


The Muted Minds therapeutic poetry series invite participants to delve into an exchange of words, punctuation marks, and experiences thereby co-creating a poem alongside others. “Docupoetry”, or else documentary poetry, is a form of socially engaged poetry that combines non-literary forms of writing with personal observations, and it is based upon the universal character of language.


Grounded in the universality of language and the use of the poetic, the sessions aim to provide a collective experience that captures the essence of Docupoetry; facilitating an exploration of the interplay between words and personal encounters that can offer a ‘healing’ outcome. The universality of language, shared inclusively amongst the participants, lays the groundwork for the therapeutic essence of the process.


Participants are not required to prepare or bring anything as all materials will be provided. There is also no requirement for familiarity with creative writing, as no prior experience is necessary. The sessions are guided and stand-alone, allowing everyone to drop in and out of the circle depending on their availability.

Just bring yourselves and an open mind!

All the Plants I Have Half Grown by Linden McMahon - Monday 11/3/24 @7pm


All The Plants I Have Half Grown - a poetry pamphlet by Linden McMahon, edited by Charlie Roy and published by Stewed Rhubarb Press.

· A vibrant voice in queer poetry, Linden McMahon returns to Scotland and to Stewed Rhubarb Press with a new pamphlet.

· McMahon takes the reader by the hand from disconnection – from each other and our ecosystems – to a deeper understanding of our ecologies and the fragile ties that link us.

· McMahon deftly expands the magic of queer kin-making across the borders of species.

This selection of ecopoetry begins with disconnection – from each other and our ecosystems – and reaches towards connection. Via goldfinches and skyscrapers, brambles and libations, compost and glitter, these poems feel along the sometimes strange and uncomfortable threads that link us to our ecologies – expanding the magic of queer kin-making across the borders of species.



LAUNCH: Gutter #29

Wednesday 13/3/24 @7pm


Scotland's leading literary magazine, Gutter, approaches its 15th year with the launch of a gender-bending pink and blue issue #29. Join the Gutter gang from 7pm at Typewronger Books to hear some of the country's brightest talent performing the work they've had published in this gorgeous spring issue. We'll have readings from Olivia Calderón, Colin McGuire, and Devki Panchmatia, with more to be announced.

Olivia Calderón is a Cuban-American poet whose work focuses on the intersection of culture, identity and senses of place.

Colin McGuire won the OutSpoken Prize for Poetry and Film in 2018 and was a 2020 Ignite Fellow.

Devki Panchmatia is an English poet. She was a runner up for the Orwell Youth Prize and the Lewis Edwards Memorial Prize.




TypeCast! - Frankenstein by Nick Dear, based on the novel by Mary Shelly - Friday 15/3/24 @7pm


We are delighted to announce the next TypeCast!, our play reading group at Typewronger.

All you need is a copy of the play, which you may source yourself or purchase from the shop. We mainly read plays written by living authors to help support their continuing work.

Please email info@typewronger.com ahead of time to secure a spot and order a copy of the play if you are interested in attending, as these events tend to be popular, and we sometimes run out of playscripts.

Take a seat on the welcoming stage of this little bookshop as we read aloud Frankenstein, adapted for the stage by Nick Dear. We'll randomly assign parts on the night, and then get reading!

'Slowly I learnt the ways of humans: how to ruin, how to hate, how to debase, how to humiliate. And at the feet of my master I learnt the highest of human skills, the skill no other creature owns: I finally learnt how to lie. Childlike in his innocence but grotesque in form, Frankenstein's bewildered creature is cast out into a hostile universe by his horror-struck maker.

Meeting with cruelty wherever he goes, the friendless Creature, increasingly desperate and vengeful, determines to track down his creator and strike a terrifying deal. Urgent concerns of scientific responsibility, parental neglect, cognitive development and the nature of good and evil are embedded within this thrilling and deeply disturbing classic gothic tale. Frankenstein, based on the novel by Mary Shelley, premiered at the National Theatre, London, in February 2011.'

James Matthewson - Working in Politics - Monday 18/3/24 @7pm


‘An evening with James Matthewson, the former Labour spokesman and TV commentator, who will give a short talk about working in Television, Media and UK Politics, followed by a Q&A. With excerpts from his lecture ‘Serial Spinners’, James will shine a spotlight on the reality of working in Politics and detail his own journey from Working for the House of Commons, to being a regular on Sky News and other outlets. There will also be a chance to pick up sign copies of James’ book ‘wonderboy’ about his experience growing up on the Autistic Spectrum.’



Reading list:



The Secret Life of Special Advisers – by Peter Cardwell

Team of Rivals – Dorris Goodwin

Left out – Maguire & Pogrund

Julius Ceaser – William Shakespeare





McNaughtan's Non-Fiction Book Club: Papyrus by Irene Vallejo - Wednesday 20/3/24 @6:30pm


Join us for a discussion of Papyrus by Irene Vallejo.

An enthralling 2,000-year journey through the history of books and reading.

Long before books were mass-produced, scrolls hand copied on reeds pulled from the Nile were the treasures of the ancient world. Emperors and Pharaohs were so determined to possess them that they dispatched emissaries to the edges of the earth to bring them back.

In Papyrus, celebrated classicist Irene Vallejo traces the dramatic history of the book and the fight for its survival. This is the story of the book's journey from oral tradition to scrolls to codices, and how that transition laid the very foundation of Western culture.

And it is a story full of heroic adventures, bloodshed and megalomania - from the battlefields of Alexander the Great and the palaces of Cleopatra to the libraries of war-torn Sarajevo and Oxford. An international bestseller, Papyrus brings the ancient world to life and celebrates the enduring power of the written word.

Jake Kendall, Eris Young & Lyndsey Croal - Monday 25/3/24 @7pm


Come along to a talk with Jake Kendall, author of The Vanitas & Other Tales of Art and Obsession. Spanning 300 years of art history and weaving art styles including Cubism, Surrealism, and the Baroque into his prose, Jake Kendall’s collection tells the stories of those with an obsession for creation – artists who sacrifice friendships, careers, romance, and even their own happiness in pursuit of a vision. 


Eris is a writer of speculative fiction. Their short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in publications including Escape Pod, GigaNotoSaurus, Small Wonders, Pseudopod, and the Immigrant Sci Fi Short Stories anthology from Flame Tree Press. They are the fiction editor at Shoreline of Infinity, Scotland's science fiction magazine. 


Lyndsey is an Edinburgh-based author of strange and speculative fiction, with work published in over eighty magazines and anthologies, including Apex Magazine, Shoreline of Infinity, Analog, and Weird Tales. She’s a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Awardee, British Fantasy Award Finalist, and former Hawthornden Fellow. Her novelette Have You Decided on Your Question (2023) and debut short story collection Limelight (2024) are published with Shortwave Publishing. Her second collection of Scottish folklore-inspired tales will be published in 2025, with details to be announced soon. She's currently working on a number of longer works in the sci fi horror space. Find out more about her and her work via www.lyndseycroal.co.uk








OPEN MIC REBOOT XI - Sunday 31/3/24 @7pm


Edinburgh's anarchic open mic night where there's no limit on what can be performed, only how much time performers get! We run for 90 minutes, and divide that time by the number of performers who sign up to get our set times. There's a bell 30 seconds before the end of each set, and a gong at the end which performers CANNOT go past! Sign up is 7-7.30 - comedy, music, poetry, short stories, film scripts, magic acts - we've had all sorts over the years, so just rock on down ! 







Make Good Trouble: A Practical Guide to the Energetics of Disruption by Briana Pegado - Monday 8/4/24 @7:30pm


This is a practical guide for anyone who wants to harness the energetics of disruption to catalyse change in their own lives and in society as a whole. Using various energy workings, including Theta Healing, tarot, astrology, goddess energy and so much more, this book will show the reader how to find their values, stand in their integrity, be a leader, and channel disruption for powerful change. Learn how disruption of the status quo releases energy, what that energy can do, and how you can begin to create it. Discover many practical ways of bringing about change, from the smallest steps of improving personal relationships, to whistleblowing and challenging big systems of power. Delve into the energy of goddesses and warrior queens as a tool to embody power and become a leader of change.

Navigate by the archetypes of the Tarot and astrology to better understand your own journey as an individual standing in your integrity. Explore the Values Compass tool to unearth your true values and priorities. Use the disruption toolkit to understand when to speak up, when to be silent and when to act. Equip yourself with the self-care tools to protect your own energy, including setting boundaries, building a network and rest as resistance.

In the aftermath of disruption, understand how to restructure and rebuild for a better future. This book is for anyone who feels compelled to make the world a better place, anyone who is looking to bring compassion and equality to all aspects of their lives, including at work, at home, in friendships, in relationships, and most importantly in our relationship to ourselves.

Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea: Stories by C.D. Rose / Photo, Phyto, Proto, Nitro by Melissa McCarthy - Monday 22/4/24 @7pm


Welcome to the fictional universe of C. D. Rose, whose stories seem to be set in some unidentifiable but vaguely Mitteleuropean nation, and likewise have an uncanny sense of timelessness—the time could be some cobblestoned Victorian past era, or the present, or even the future.

In these 15 dreamlike tales, you’ll meet a forgotten composer who enters a nostalgic dream-world while marking time in a decaying Romanian seaport; two Russian brothers, one blind and one deaf, building an intricate model town during an interminable train ride across the steppe; a journalist whose interview with an artist turns into a dizzying roundelay of memory and image.

Ghosts of the past mingle with the quiddities of modernity in a bewitching stew where lost masterpieces surface with translations in an invisible language; where image and photograph become mystically entwined, and where the very nature of reality takes on a shimmering sense of possibility and illusion.

“Every madness is logical to its owner,” one of Rose’s characters says. And it is that line — between logic and madness — that Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea walks with such assuredness and imagination.

Photo, Phyto, Proto, Nitro by Melissa McCarthy

Photo: to do with light. Phyto: plants and flowers. Proto: the first, the original. Nitro: it blows up.

From Troy to Hiroshima, Crimea to the nuclear Nevada desert, we make our tracks over the war-scratched globe, and when we reach a ruin or a destination we read the markings, record them using various forms of photography. Later—or much, much later—someone else in turn will try to understand our silvery traces. These are the threads that Melissa McCarthy follows, unpicks, weaves again into a nexus of light and time: the mirrored silver cells of a shark’s eyeball, sunlight glinting off the foam and sea wrack of the Aegean on flower with corpses, the silver salts of photographic paper, silver grave-treasures at Ur.

Like an archaeologist in her own strange literary landscape, McCarthy cuts through layers of history and technology to realign the dead and their images. She examines both what can be photographed and what remains always just beyond the frame, and photography itself. It’s a practice involving chemicals and the action of light. But it’s also an organising principle for literature and beyond: there are marks made—by us, on us—that we can’t yet fully see or understand, though they push on through to the surface, always re-blooming.

Mícheál McCann, Thomas Stewart & Caleb Nichols - Monday 17/6/24 @7pm


Mícheál McCann is from Derry City. His poems have appeared in Banshee, The Stinging Fly, The Poetry Review and Poetry Ireland Review, anthologised in Queering the Green (Lifeboat Press, 2021) and Romance Options (Dedalus Press, 2023) and have been broadcast on RTÉ and BBC. He is the co-editor of Hold Open the Door (UCD Press, 2020) and has published three poetry pamphlets, most recently Keeper (Fourteen Publishing, 2022). Devotion, his first collection of poems, is forthcoming from The Gallery Press in May 2024.

Thomas Stewart is a Welsh writer and English teacher based in Edinburgh. He is a New Writers Awardee and the author of two poetry pamphlets: Based on a True Story (fourteen poems, 2022) and empire of dirt (Red Squirrel Press, 2019). His debut book of poems, Real Boys, will be published by Polygon in August. His work has been published in Poetry Wales, Butcher’s Dog, The Amsterdam Quarterly, And Other Poems, among others.

Caleb Nichols is a queer poet and musician from a working class family in California. His poetry and prose has been published or is forthcoming in places like the New England Review, 14 Poems, Poetry Wales, Redivider, 45th Parallel, Talkhouse, and Truthout. His Kelp Book chapbook “Teems/Recedes” was called “a gorgeous abundance” by Chen Chen and his Bottlecap Press chapbook “Chan “Says & Other Songs” was called “marvelously queer” by Eduardo Corral. Caleb’s critically acclaimed rock opera “Ramon” was released on iconic indie label Kill Rock Stars in 2022. A best of the net nominee, and a recipient of an Academy of American Poets University prize, Caleb is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at Bangor University in North Wales.