A Plymouth arts collective is set to become a publishing house and aims to establish a major literature festival after receiving 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 more than 300 writers and artists, but will now look to move onto a more business footing after being granted £13,000 from the public body of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.
It now plans to publish at least four books or magazines in 2020 and other plans include starting a book club and workshops to encourage people to engage in literature and the spoken work and to train them as performers.
It is also looking at creating a literary festival based on the success of the prominent Port Eliot Festival, in St Germans, near Plymouth.
That festival has 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.
Wonderzoo founder Peter Davey said there is now an opportunity to run something similar in Plymouth, where the small scale PlymLit annual events have kept the literary fires burning since the demise of the Plymouth International Book Festival in 2015.
“We want to create a literary festival modelled on the one in St Germans but in the city,” said Mr Davey. “It would also have elements of music and art, that’s a long-term goal.
“But first we will be developing the organisation as a business with more structured management, so we can take Wonderzoo to the next level, part of our grant is to develop a business strategy, so we can create a successful festival.”
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There are also plans to work with the Racial Equality Council, Peninsula Arts, the Arts Institute, Literature Works, Pride in Plymouth, and with refugees and in prisons. And it will pay artists and writers who run workshops or perform at spoken word events.
Mr Davey, who runs Wonderzoo with Gabi Marcellus-Temple, said the organisation would publish about four magazines, described as being “like small books”, containing such material as stories and drawings.
One will be called Damaged Miracle and Mr Davey said: “It will be a collection from different writers from Plymouth and the South West who will be asked to submit work, and there will be illustrations from local artists. It will have about 100 pages and will support writing and the arts.”
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This will be followed by three further anthologies of “spoken word”, poetry and art, including one called Heart of Darkness and another tracing the history of Wonderzoo.
“Each will be on a slightly different theme,” said Mr Davey.
Cash raised from sales of the books will be reinvested, with plans for an arts exhibition featuring work by disabled artists being worked on, and Mr Davey said: “If we can raise money we will have a week-long exhibition of artists who are disabled, and pot on a spoken word event as part of that.
“There will also be book-reading workshops, every two months on a Monday night, where people receive a free copy of a book to study and we then debate how it is relevant today. We’d like to build the book group and make it a permanent fixture.
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“We hope to study texts that are relevant today in the political and social environment.”
Mr Davey said events would begin in January 2020, with a spoken word and poetry evening for 10 young people, aged between 11 and 18, in the inner city Stonehouse area of Plymouth.
He added: “We put on a small event in October 2019 themed around mental health. We’d like to do more events like that next year.
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“Our passion is to create a platform for artists in this city, that could be through workshops, reading groups, events or publishing. And we aim to work across the social barriers.
“In four years we have reached 3,000 people, and more than 300 artists have come through our platforms, that’s quite a lot.
“We are not afraid to experiment – and have fun,” he said. “That is very important in this political climate.”