A Life’s Journey in 99 steps.

I am very fortunate to have been sent an advance copy of Geoff Nicholson‘s new book, Walking on Thin Air: A life’s journey in 99 steps.

Some of you may remember that Geoff was a Café guest, back in December 2021 when he was trying to find a publisher, and had chosen to launch an Unbound account, a crowdfunding site in which people can self-publish their books.

So it’s really good news that The Westbourne Press, which is part of Saqi Books have taken on the book. I’m really looking forward to reading it.

It’s quite clearly a memoir, written at a time when Geoff has been diagnosed with a very rare, incurable cancer, wrily, he remarks as not rare enough in his case.

If you haven’t read Geoff's work you are in for a treat and we would really recommend that you try The Lost Art of Walking, or one of his many novels, each written with a wry sense of humour.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Geoff in 2010, when The Lost Art of Walking was to be published in the UK. In that interview, he talked about the liberation he felt in 'walking away', which of course is the theme of this year’s writing competition, the deadline for which was last Monday.

We had more than 60 entries of poems and stories submitted on the theme of Walking a/way, and our volunteer judges, two for prose and two for poetry, have been reviewing and scoring the submissions. Within the next 2 to 3 weeks will be putting together an anthology of 12 shortlisted pieces and on Soundwalk Stories Sunday at the end of September, will be hearing from those shortlisted authors reading their work. At the event, they will learn which of them will be the winners and take on the mantle of online writer-in-residence for 2023/4.

Tony Horitz, last year's poetry winner, and our current poet-in-residence wrote poem about the discovery of a relation's grave in a Jewish cemetery in Prague - you can read and listen to it here. We are seeking permissions from the cemetery authorities, to place the audio recording as a geo-located Viewpoint on the Placecloud platform.

We would love it if other people would contribute to the Placecloud platform, and since taking it over in the Spring, we have been working hard to create a more user-friendly and functional site, and to populate it with more stories (and poems) about buildings and places. I have been focussing on Clerkenwell on the fringe of the City of London, as in October we are hoping to run an on-the-ground event in The Gallery, on Clerkenwell's Cowcross Street - just a short walk from Farringdon, now London's most connected railway station.

Sound Walk September is fast approaching and we are really encouraging our community to upload soundwalks that they have made this year before the deadline for the Awards at the end of September.

Our next event coming a week on Monday, will be our Walking Detective meet-up and community member and super sleuth Molly Wagner, based in Sydney, Australia has been hunting walking artists and walking writers there to invite them to join a walk · listen · create hub. So should you be based in Australia, or have colleagues, friends or family, or know of someone there who makes work on foot, do please get them to get in touch with us, and we will e-introduce them to Molly.

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