This Is Just To Say: spoken word open mic

This month’s theme is VOICE! We want your whispers and screams, your inside voice, your outside voice, hoarse and husky, mellifluous and melodic, your murmurs and mutters… It’s poetry night and we’re going to be doing all the voices.

Every month we feature a performer with a slightly extended set and this month’s featured performer to grace our stage will be Laura Varnam. Laura Varnam is the Lecturer in Old and Middle English Literature at University College, Oxford. She was one of the winners of the Nine Arches Press Primers competition in 2023 and her poetry sequence ‘Grendel’s Mother bites back’ (inspired by the Old English epic Beowulf) was published in Primers Volume Seven in August 2024. Her poems have been published in journals including Bad Lilies, Banshee Lit, Berlin Lit, Dust Poetry, The London Magazine, Under the Radar, and Wet Grain; in the anthologies Gods & Monsters (ed. Ana Sampson and illustr. Chris Riddell) and All Shall Be Well: Poems for Julian of Norwich (ed. Sarah Law); and with creative-critical essays in Annie Journal and the academic journal postmedieval. She has a poem and interview forthcoming with Poetry Wales in their ‘How I write a poem’ series.