Rochester Literature Festival

We’ve had a couple of months off to catch our breath and now we can reflect on our Medway Women’s History Month Festival.

Considering we had no funding or sponsorship, it was, overall, a successful start to celebrating women in Medway, both those from here and those further away. Women we know and women we don’t, women in history and women making their mark now.

Altogether, we collaborated with 37 different speakers / performers (56 if you include the choir individually!) and engaged over 900 audience members (which could grow as we share more on social media). Our best attended events were the author talks, so we’ll definitely do more of those next year, and maybe throughout the year too, only featuring different genres.

Massive thanks are due to our three partner venues: Rochester Adult Education Centre, the Salvation Army at Strood, and the Net Community Hub in Walderslade.

One thing we did realise was how much the audiences and speakers enjoyed the chance to chat, so we’ll build more social time into the events next year. 

The festival wasn’t without issues: a tech glitch with two of the panels means we’ve had to summarise the conversations in a blog, which will be posted separately. However, we live in hope that we will be able to retrieve the recordings somehow!

And we were targeted by local trans activists, who objected to Festival Director Jaye (i.e. me) talking about women’s rights, and that us women organising events for women to celebrate women in Women’s History Month wasn’t inclusive of men. 

They contacted some of our speakers and two pulled out. Thankfully, they were easily replaced, and the festival went ahead without any other issues.

Among panels which featured women in everything from careers, health, politics, sport, disability, creativity, music, tech, achievement, empowerment, cosy crime and poetry, only one featured any discussion on women’s rights; the trans activists came for us anyway. The lesson learned was that it matters not who we invite or what we discuss, they will complain. So next year, we will only invite women who won’t be so easily intimidated #womenwontwheesht.

On the whole, while rewarding, it was exhausting. So as much as we enjoyed spending every weekend in March with these amazing women, we’ll only have a day of events on the last weekends of February and March next year, with maybe two or three midweek events across the month. Subscribe to our Substack here and you won’t miss a thing!

We do hope you’ll join us 🙂