16–18 Aug 2019 — The Powys Society Conference
‘ADVENTURES WITH IDEAS’ Speakers (in order of appearance): Janice Gregory, Chris Campbell, Richard Graves, Goulven le Brech and David Goodway
Upcoming Society Events
1 December 2019: London Meeting
Discussion of John Cowper Powys's Dostoievsky
Led by Kate Kavanagh
2.00 – 5.00pm, Pushkin House, 5A Bloomsbury Square, London WC1A 2TA
“For the truth is that this astonishing writer does not content himself with revealing in his oracular and prophetic outbursts any one coherent vision of life, but several contradictory visions.” JCP
Refreshments of tea and biscuits will be provided.
All are welcome! Please email the Hon. Secretary if you plan to attend. Event is free -
voluntary contributions towards costs are invited.
Past Events
2019
13 August 2019 — Llewelyn Powys’s 135th Birthday and the 24th annual ‘Birthday Walk.’
This year’s Annual Dandelion Fellowship Gathering and Llewelyn Powys Birthday Walk was enjoyed by a select but happy group. We toasted absent friends at 12:30 over lunch in the Red Lion — holding Neil Atkin particularly in mind. We proceeded to The Sailor's Return (where the photo above was taken) and walked the track past Chydyock Farmhouse up to the coast and laid flowers on Llewelyn's Stone. Readings from Llewelyn's lyrical descriptions of the locale, and passages from Alyse Gregory's journal aching in his absence focused our minds and hearts. A cream tea kindly provided by Pam Gillingham was a suitably Powysian ending to the day.
The Dandelion Fellowship
A group also known as the Friends of Llewelyn Powys that anyone is welcome to join simply by turning up — meet annually at The Sailor's Return, Chaldon Herring, Dorset for a walk on Llewelyn's birthday. Llewelyn had expressed the wish that after his death a sum of money be invested to pay for free drinks on his birthday each year at a local pub ‘for anybody who enters the tavern after seven o’clock in the evening’. Free drinks cannot be guaranteed, but a warm welcome awaits. Descriptions of past Llewelyn birthday walks can be found in the Powys Society Newsletters and on this website's past events pages.
16 July 2019 — Reading Powyses Facebook Group
Online Discussion of JCP’s Autobiography
To view this stimulating discussion, please join the group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/271068293345294/.
All Society members who use Facebook are warmly invited to join; any non-members are warnly invited to become Society members and then join this group, which is currently proceeding through the novels of John Cowper Powys in sequence, enjoying the company of fellow enthusiasts. Autobiography being regarded as a novel for the purposes of this sequence. The next book to be discussed will be Maiden Castle. Details wil be posted once the date has been set.
30 Mar 2019 — Celebration: 50th Anniversary of The Powys Society
Even the weather smiled upon us for this celebration, held in a beautiful suite of rooms at Corpus Christi college, Cambridge. The speakers an unbroken chain running from the earliest Powysian Meetings taking place following ad-hoc advertisements in the Times Literary supplement to the notable conferences that have followed. Our president, Glen Cavaliero, went back further still, reading from his 1958 diary his first impressions when a young student of meeting John Cowper Powys at Blaenau Ffestiniog. See full programme
26 Mar 2019 — online discussion of Weymouth Sands by the Reading Powyses Facebook Group
This stimulating discussion can be viewed by joining the group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/271068293345294/.
All Society members who use Facebook are warmly invited to join; any non-members are warnly invited to become Society members and then join this group, which is currently proceeding through the novels of John Cowper Powys in sequence, enjoying the company of fellow enthusiasts. (Next stop after Weymouth Sands will be Autobiography. (OK... not really a novel, but a book so full of imaginative self-presentation that some have classed it as such)