LeftLion 39 hit the streets of Nottingham on Friday and I’m delighted to report it’s put on a stone or two courtesy of literature. MulletProofPoet, who started posting on our forum a couple of years ago, wrote about the 5th Duke of Portland, the sartorially-challenged eccentric of Welbeck Abbey. His piece was finished off with a poem, a clever way to contextualise his work. MPP will be performing at Apples and Snakes All Stars at the Lakeside on Feb 1.

Cat Arnold, a local councillor and author of a trilogy of history books examining death, madness and sex in the capital was meant to be my featured interview but she requested that we hold back due to the forthcoming elections. This was frustrating as her topicality was the whole reason for doing the interview, but at least now it’s on reserve for a future issue. The downside was I had 12 hours to find a replacement or I’d lose the page. So make sure you always have a back-up plan.

Fortuitously, Deborah Stevenson had emailed a couple of days earlier about promoting Mouthy Poets, a performance poetry group for 18-25 year-olds. Further conversations revealed she’d been published in a book which retails at £15,000, stared in the Year Dot C4 documentary and helped organise a literature festival for over 2,000 people. Not bad for a twenty-year-old. Mike Atkinson had a chat with Dan McCalman about his autobiographical account of life as a bouncer which signified a hat trick of literature related features which I think is a record for a 32 page issue. This is made more impressive by our regular WriteLion page which featured four new poets, a book review debut from Pete Lamb and the return of Katie Half-Price. By all accounts a good start to the year.

I’m hoping that the new LeftLion homepage will go live in the next couple of months so that we have more space to showcase local literature, and the WriteLion podcast should start up again soon with an additional presenter. The first Shindig of the year will be on March 20th at the Jam Cafe and Scribal will follow a month later on April 2nd, when Kate Tempest headlines. But it is the Vox Pops from the Thompson Brothers in their ‘voice of reason’ column that I hope will materialise for issue 40, after well over a year of pushing, puling and screaming for it. It’ll be worth the wait though people may never go back in their shop again…