Exciting!  full details here

The inaugural Blackball Readers and Writers Festival, to be held at Labour Weekend, will bring established writers to the Coast to read from their work and to have conversations before the audience of Coasters and those from afar. The festival will be modelled on the underground coal mine and will therefore seek work ‘from the underground’ which can be interpreted in many different ways e.g. that which has been forgotten, or that which has become for a time, marginal, or that which has deep roots in the earth or the past.

The festival is organised by the Bathhouse Co-operative, a subsidiary of Te Puawai Co-operative Society, a co-op set up to incubate projects on the Coast (http://www.tepuawai.co.nz). The members of the co-op are: Catherine Woollett who runs the Shades of Jade shop in Greymouth; Jeffrey Paparoa Holman, London born but Blackball bred and one of NZ’s major poets; and Paul Maunder, a playwright, theatre director, filmmaker and author who lives in Blackball. Support comes from Creative Communities and the Department of Internal Affairs. The Festival could lead to the creation of a boutique publishing house on the Coast. As well, with the establishing of the Paparoa Great Walk, the festival could become part of a wider package.

The guests:

• Jean Devanny
• Carol Dawber
• Kathleen Gallagher
• Jeffrey Paparoa Holman
• Tusiata Avia
• Neil Silverwood
• Paddy Richardson