“Paul is a tremendously sensitive professional, and a true and intelligent facilitator.”
‘I’ll always be glad I spent time working with Paul. It was a wonderfully positive experience. I had felt crippled by pre-performance nerves – Paul helped me to make the paradigm shift to knowing I could read and speak well in public and enjoy it, which for me was mostly about remembering to breathe and learning to redirect my nervous energy. His wisdom about choosing poems for a set, and finding the dramatic shape of that set, has also proved invaluable over the years.
Paul is a tremendously sensitive professional, and a true and intelligent facilitator. I can warmly recommend him to anyone who needs help embracing the joys of performance. Sometimes I still hear his voice in my head when I’m about to speak to a large audience, and I smile!’
Clare Best, author of Treasure Ground (2009), Excisions (2011) and Breastless (2011).
“Clare’s reading at the Needlemakers Café has to be one of the strongest and most moving I’ve ever been to. You could have heard a pin drop.” – Vanessa Gebbie
“She read with such direct simplicity that the tension in the room rose to fever pitch. I left feeling enlightened, uplifted and emotionally rejuvenated.” – James Wilby
“To listen to Clare speak about her preventive double mastectomy, with accompanying poems, was a revelation – such a rich and strange transformation in the presentation. We need to recognise innovative and ground-breaking work when we hear it, whether that is achieved in tone, content or form. Clare Best masters all three.” – Anthony Wilson
“It was the first reader, Clare Best, who stood out… She took the audience on a journey.” – Rachael Finucane, Cuisle International Poetry Festival 2011