Jay will be doing a talk at the Purcell Room on Monday 5th November 2012, at the event entitled 'Season's Mist: The Arts of Autumn' http://ticketing.southbankcentre.co.uk/find/literature-spoken-word/tickets/seasons-mist-the-arts-of-autumn-69095

Following the just-completed course at the Aigas Field Centre in Beauly, near Inverness, she will be teaching a writing course again at Aigas in 2014.  Apart from the course, co-tutored with John Lister-Kaye, participants have the opportunity to look for otters, badgers, pine martens, golden eagles, dolphins and red squirrels.

Talks

Jay Griffiths will be speaking at the British Library on June 1st 2012 as part of a discussion to accompany their exhibition 'Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands'

She will be talking about her short novel A Love Letter from a Stray Moon, at the Port Eliot festival, July 18-22 2012.  This was published in Australia by Text publishing and is now being published by Penguin as an e-book.

She will be speaking at the Wilderness Festival on August 11th 2012

August 17-19 she will be speaking at the Dark Mountain festival, reading from Anarchipelago, her short novel about the road protests. 2012

A Love Letter from a Stray Moon

                A LOVE LETTER FROM A STRAY MOON

                                                Jay Griffiths

                      To be published by Penguin as an e-book in June 2012

A Love Letter from a Stray Moon is a fictionalised portrait of the intense and prolific life of Frida Kahlo. It explores the artist’s childhood polio, her devastating accident and her turbulent relationship with Diego Rivera, a story of passion, grief and transcendence.  Partly a poetic depiction of a woman in flight from the hollowness of childlessness, the burning of betrayal and the constraints of physical pain, A Love Letter from a Stray Moon is also a love letter to the earth and a celebration of the rebellion which protects it – from Frida’s own politics to the present-day Zapatistas.  It is a hymn to the revolutionary fire at the heart of art.

                                                     *****

‘A rich and extraordinary vision. Jay Griffiths is a fearless adventurer with words and images. I salute her courage and the splendour of this vision’  Philip Pullman

‘Frida Kahlo’s life and work were indivisible, and with a power worthy of her subject Jay Griffiths has found a way of writing Kahlo’s broken, prolific life. Through Griffiths we hear the voice of Frida Kahlo herself, as if she were speaking directly to us. I devoured this wonderfully perceptive and sensitive book’  Marie Darrieussecq

‘Rich, honed and intense, a fierce, compelling homage’ The Age, Australia

‘An extraordinarily beautiful and sustained prose poem, a call for engagement with the world, and a powerful and astonishing feat of literary and retroactive telepathy. It is a book about possession, in many forms, each of which is sparked by a
particular urgency; to comprehend, to celebrate, and to endure’  Niall Griffiths

‘A stunning allegory about love, art, and revolution. She makes every word, every scene, in this passionate narrative count. It’s brilliant work’  Barry Lopez

‘The raw and erotic power of Kahlo’s voice takes centre stage.  Jay Griffiths has created an extraordinary feat of imagination’ Weekend Press, New Zealand

 ‘A wonderful book. It’s like a dress that Kahlo invented for herself and wore’ 
John Berger

‘Kahlo’s inner voice soars on Griffiths’s metaphorical flourishes, applied carefully like the brushstrokes of Kahlo’s brightly pigmented self-portraits . . .  a multilayered work which creates a vivid sense of Kahlo’s elliptical life’ Sun-Herald, Australia

‘A rapturous, crazy and gorgeous poem to art and to the human spirit.  Griffiths’s novel reminds us what it is to be a human being, born native to the earth, on fire with the joy of the universe and full of grief for our broken world.  It is a love song to life, to art and to the human spirit’ West Australian, Australia

‘Vivid as a bloom in the jungle, visionary as a flight over a desert, a love song to life on earth’  Joan London

‘A raw and confronting piece of poetic prose . . . a fearless adventurer of words, Griffiths is in great form’ Sunday Herald Sun, Australia

‘A love letter to human originality’  Melanie Challenger

‘A musical reverie, a tapestry of lyrical metaphor, a prose poem driven by heat and fury.’  Sunday Star Times

‘The book is both narrative and prose poem to revolution, uncensored minds and life lived as art.  Griffiths’s fearless, untamed writing style is equal in measure to Kahlo’s brushstrokes.  Griffiths’s writing is utterly original.’  Northern Rivers Echo

‘An act of poetic ventriloquy… Griffiths’s language is flowing, hyper-poetic’  The Sydney Morning Herald

‘I found in Griffiths’s writing a crafted freedom that feels made from the mist of dreams and a very real emerging dawn. Imagine being held in the open hand of moonlight and carried through a dream into day.  This is what it is like to read A Love Letter from a Stray Moon. It is a book for men to read on women and for women to read on men.  I am transported and transformed; I feel lucky to have read it and it leaves me in awe’  Lemn Sissay

                                                       *****

talks coming up

http://www.isbourne.org/index.php?option=com_jcalpro&Itemid=60&extmode=view&extid=3515

Friday 10th February at the Isbourne Centre in Cheltenham, Jay Griffiths will be giving a talk on West Papua

February 16th, at the Watershed Media Centre, Jay Griffiths will be hosting an evening In Conversation with David Rothenberg, American philosopher and musician

Saturday February 18th, Jay Griffiths will be giving a talk at the Aldeburgh Festival on The Sea

Wednesday February 22nd, JG will be giving a talk at Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts, in a conference on literature and the environment

Wednesday February 29th, JG will be giving a talk on Time in Shoreditch, based on Pip Pip: A Sideways Look at Time

Sunday March 25th, JG will be talking at the Oxford Literary Festival, about her novel A Love Letter From A Stray Moon