Reading in Hammocks

Saturday 1st August 2026

“Summertime…

and the living is easy.”

Well, that’s rather a grand claim on it’s own, but yeah…things have been slowing down.

There’s always a fair bit to juggle in this job role, in ten hours a week, but the start of this year has required the addition of some extra circus skills - think riding a unicycle whilst juggling with an unexpected amount of tightrope thrown in. There may even have been fire involved at some point…Yes, readers! Buying your first house in your mid-fifties, when you are a self-employed writer, brings a whole new set of hair-raising experiences - but I made it to the other side in one piece.

So, here we are…

It’s the start of August and we are definitely taking the pace a little slower at NWS HQ. July was an intense month of clearing the decks for our largest project of the year - the 2026 Anthology. With a broad title of Life and Other Stories we have invited submissions of poetry and prose and added creative non-fiction to genres accepted this year. We hope this has encouraged more of our members to put fingers to keyboard and send us something.

Fingers typing furiously to meet the deadline

So we can be sure we do these submissions justice, the board and I decided that this should be our main focus for the whole of August, so there will be less on the schedule to juggle. It would be fair to say, the poetry game remains strong though this month, with a workshop planned by our resident Diamonds Hannah Norris and Esme Rose Marsh, who might still just be coming down from the heady celebrations of the second Anniversary of our popular monthly workshop, ‘Diamonds and Rust Poetry’ as I type this.

‘Lunar Guts’ is their first workshop together, and although it was created with beginners in mind, more seasoned poets will enjoy picking apart the process too. This pair of poets bring a fair bit to the table in terms of writing, performing and publishing their work, so expect the delivery to be as dazzling as it will be informative - find out more via the link.

Hannah and Esme go large!

We all agree that our move to Broadway was a smart decision, and see our relationship with Laura and the team there as one that will develop beyond basic room hire. We look forward to working with them more this year to expand our members’ experience. As demand for rooms at the the library increase, it made sense to look for alternatives for when they don’t have space.

As membership continues to grow, we know we need to be flexible in our approach to how we support you all. With this in mind, having one person as the main point of contact for pretty much all of the operational ‘stuff’ at NWS (me) means it is tricky for that one person to step away from the laptop for too long - those balls start to fall!

So, the most exciting news I have to to share with you in this blog post, is that I now have back up! This valuable cover will be provided by the fabulous Novelette Williams. An active NWS member since 2017, Novelette has always been someone who shares her thoughts and ideas and has no idea how valuable that has been to me, especially when I was new in the role. It became clear we had a lot of common ground, personally and professionally, so I was delighted when she agreed to step-in and support me for a few hours a month.

Novelette’s website is well worth a visit

It was so reassuring knowing she’d got some important things covered when I disappeared off in July for a much needed break. The simple life, camping at the edge of the forest on the North Welsh coast, always helps give me a reset. Now I have mastered the art of writing in a hammock, as well as reading and napping, I enjoy whiling away the hours, gently swinging to the sounds of the waves - try it, it’s bliss! *sigh*

I am happy to be back. Now the catching up week is far behind me, I feel privileged to be spending time with the many submissions that have been arriving in the inbox since the call-out at the end of June. I have saved them all to read through at once, so I can start thinking about how to pull together such a diverse body of work into one anthology. It will be a challenge, but I will enjoy it.

So, let’s catch up again next month!

Come and join our creative community!

Deb