The House with the round window

Description 
 
In 'The House With The Round Window' Andrew Cheffings explores how subgroups can form within society which become coercive and create intense power structures, difficult to escape from.

John is a young middle-aged man working at a Community Music Centre in the small town of St Herefriths on the edge of the Lincolnshire Marsh. In many ways his work at the music centre is his ideal job as he loves being creative and helping others to find their own unique brands of creativity. However, when a new Centre Director, would be rock superstar, Dave Grimsby, takes over, John's working life becomes progressively less creative and progressively more restricted in its scope. And it is starting to effect his mental health...

But new people are moving into Marsh Cockerington House, down the road from where John lives with his partner, Gordon, at the house with the round window. And the rock and community music worlds of St Herefriths are about to be turned upside down...
 
 
 
About the Author 
 
Andrew Cheffings was born on a small working farm on the Lincolnshire Marsh. But the local small farming culture he was born into was gradually coming to an end after a long decline following the Enclosures, almost two centuries before. His Grandfather still spoke N. Lincolnshire dialect and had a store of stories, aurally transmitted through the generations. Evenings with him were often spent enjoying these stories and those of his Grandmother, who had written a few down decades earlier and sent them to the ‘Farmers’ Weekly’ who published them in their magazine during the second world war. 

Life on the farm had its difficulties. And Andrew’s father remembered a time when every winter was spent digging long trenches by hand, right across the wide, heavy clay fields of the farm, back and forth, right through the day, in order to drain the water-logged earth. 

Andrew's stories reflect his experiences of growing up in a challenging local culture which was in terminal decline, but which was still rich in stories and traditions. And into these stories, he weaves threads of the new life which was being imposed (supposedly by economic realities) and was gradually taking its place. His stories are healings, processing and resolving the wounds where local tradition and colonial modernism meet.

Join Andrew for: local places/local culture through a Queer lens; Queer Romance; a spirituality grounded in Queer Ecology.