A Plymouth arts collective is to continue publishing literary magazines and is working on creating a major literature festival for the city after receiving further support from Arts Council England.
Wonderzoo has been a leading name in the Ocean City’s cultural sphere since 2015, running successful literary and visual arts events, involving hundreds of writers and artists.
It moved onto a more business footing in 2020 after being granted £13,000 from Arts Council England (ACE), the public body of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.
Now Wonderzoo has received further backing with a £15,000 ACE grant for 2021 and £5,000 from Pop Plus (Plymouth Octopus Project) to develop research into staging a festival based around words.
Wonderzoo is working with on this with partners Imperfect Cinema and Soapbox Culture and has employed Plymouth poet and artist Caitlin Brawn as a researcher for the project.
The idea has been to follow the success of the prominent Port Eliot Festival, in St Germans, near Plymouth. That festival attracted famous novelists, musicians, fashion designers, chefs, artists and other creatives since 2003, but decided not to carry on after 2019 because it was no longer financially viable.
Meanwhile, Wonderzoo will continue to publish arts and literary magazines in 2021 after issuing four well-received anthologies in 2020. These digital publications featured work from dozens of artists and writers from Plymouth and beyond.
Wonderzoo is also continuing with live events, now streamed, a Radical Reading Group, exploring “dystopian” literature and film, and story-telling workshops.
There is even the hope that Covid restrictions may allow for a street party in the Stonehouse part of Plymouth, and performance and arts events in the Union Street area.
Gabi Marcellus-Temple, who runs Wonderzoo alongside Slain McGough Davey, said: “We will be running a couple of pilot events, maybe online, at the end of March, and a live event in the summer. We are looking at whether we can set up a literary festival for Plymouth.”
She said the idea is to build on the success of the Plymouth Art Weekender, which Wonderzoo has been part of, and said: “That has become pretty successful.”
Wonderzoo has also been awarded cash from the Community Spark organisation to stage Covid-safe events in North Stonehouse every Saturday for eight weeks, using video and QR codes.
“The Wonderzoo crew is a bubble,” Ms Marcellus-Temple said, “So we can be performers and there will be videos on Youtube.”
She said Wonderzoo can video performances in North Stonehouse which can then be viewed online. Ms Marcellus-Temple said: “Since the start of Covid we have had to be pretty inventive about how we did things, but we are growing, which is brilliant.”
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Wonderzoo is also planning to work on the 2021 Plymouth Respect Festival, although it may have to be scaled down due to the Covid situation.
“We have been researching historical minority figures,” said Ms Marcellus-Temple.
Wonderzoo’s next event is its online showcase The Lost Generation on Thursday, February 25, featuring poets and artists from around the UK and even the USA, such as Rosie Barrett, Jo Heckett, Clare Peartree, Edith Blackbird, Lesley Constable, Juiia Teasin, Jazz Ann Thorn and Rik Christiansen.
