Final Bilborough workshops with Nottingham Contemporary

As part of the Writing East Midlands Write Here residency at the Nottingham Contemporary, I have been lucky enough to act as a mentee on the project, learning from and assisting the Writer in Residence Wayne Burrows. As part of the residency Wayne has been facilitating workshops with a group of older people from a community centre in Bilborough, which have taken place both at the centre and at the Nottingham Contemporary gallery itself.

For the third workshop Wayne, Jo Dacombe, one of the resident artists at the Nottingham Contemporary, and I were at the Bilborough community centre once again, and welcomed three new participants to our ever growing group. We looked at the sound works created by the artist Jack Goldstein and currently exhibited at the Nottingham Contemporary. These sounds, pressed on coloured 7” records, made quite an impact on the group while we were visiting the gallery in the first week, and include recordings of burning forests, boats out at sea and cats fighting. They create a vivid image in the listener’s mind, bring back memories from the past to the foreground and can be incredibly evocative. I was struck by how every listener responds to recordings in their own personal way, much like how everyone has their own individual response and feelings to a particular piece of artwork, or piece of music or writing.

For the workshop Wayne had prepared a collection of old vinyl records by recovering the sleeves and the labels with blank paper, a virgin canvas waiting to be relabelled as something new. We then prompted the group to explore the memories that the sounds had created, or for them to create new pieces of artwork and writing based on what inspired them. We encouraged the group to follow their own individual creativity, and working one to one with the participants helped them create song lyrics and titles, snippets of speech captured from their recounting of the past or even, like Jack Goldstein’s sound works, more ambient sounds such as the forest and nature. Through their stories, discussions and individual creativity the group came up with some fascinating work, often poetic and poignant, spanning from the depths of space with a Dr. Who themed record, to the sandy deserts of the Sahara.

For the last workshop the group returned to the Nottingham Contemporary, to revisit the exhibitions and, in the cases of some new comers to the group, see them for the first time. There was an added dimension to the group with one of the members bringing her charming granddaughter along also. For this final session we set about collecting some of the thoughts and memories the work the group had created had evoked. We looked at the records and text totems created by the group over the past couple of weeks and asked the participants where their inspiration had come from.

We then walked round the exhibitions once more, this time prompting the group to find a piece of artwork that has some kind of relationship with the ones created by them, and this was recorded by Wayne, Jo and myself. What emerged from this exercise were many moving stories came to the surface. Stories of loss, of bereavement, of the struggle of coping with every day life and of self initiated growth and change at a very late stage in their lives. Stories of lost first loves, of running away during the Blitz and not wanting to accept the powerful force of change in an ever changing world, of hiding in forests, of enlisting to the air force and of family members estranged despite still living in the same village to this day. Though tinged with regret and sadness, the memories were often very positive, with perseverance and preservation a prominent theme among them, and I found the whole experience very powerful. By meeting up as a group at the community centre every week the individuals reach out to each other, giving comfort and understanding where it is most needed and able they continue to learn from each other, retaining the all important sense of self worth and friendship.

The workshops have been in my eyes a resounding success, engaging a group with forms of art and writing that they might otherwise have not have tried nor had access to. When asked if they would be interested in further workshops similar to the ones they had taken part in, the resounding answer was YES! Out of the group, only one member had been to the Nottingham Contemporary before, and it was wonderful to see them engaging and responding positively to the space. The work they created also acted as a vehicle for them to express their lives, their memories and experiences, and to me this was a blessing beyond riches.

Wayne will now collect some of the group’s thoughts on their work and weave them into a longer narrative, to be displayed later at Bilborough Library with the artwork created. As for me as a writer, it has given me ideas on larger bodies of work and stories and characters I’d like to explore, and these characters are currently tap dancing around my mind. As with any group workshops that come to a close, I feel sad to leave some of the lovely people I have had the pleasure of meeting through the projects, but also blessed to have taken part and to have met them.

Event Round Up

I’m embarking to London Town this weekend to soak up a bit of the capitals culture, but I just wanted to take a moment to let you know about some other fantastic cultural things happening over the next few days.

First is the Nottingham Writer’s Studio live literature event ‘Word of Mouth’ on Friday 18^th Feb, which brings the comic actress Sophie Woolley to Nottingham alongside many other Nottingham writers as part of the Nottingham Light Night celebrations. Also featuring Alyson Stoneman, Paula Rawsthorne, Michelle Mother Hubbard, Robin Vaughan-Williams and Debris Stevenson to name but a few, the event is held at the Antenna café-restaurant on Beck Street in Nottingham at 7pm and is even free entry.

And if poetry and writing isn’t your thing, but pirates are then you’re in luck! At the Maze in Nottingham that very same night (Friday 18^th Feb, yes) the fantastic pirate band, Seas of Mirth, will bring their rum sodden shanties to get you heave-ho-ing on the dance floor. Get yourself there for 9pm and dance yourself silly. Taken from their facebook page:

Choose Mirth. Choose a weapon. Choose life on the high seas. Choose booty. Choose banging whores on an unexpected flexible rota. Choose pilfering the navy's rum. Choose ivory backgammon boards. Choose Matey Bubblebath and Pop-up Pirate. Choose tug of war with your Grandma. Choose battling with octopi in the Adriatic Sea. Twice. Choose a wench. Choose Judy Dench. Choose a tankard. One has a rat in it, watch out! Ye get the point...

Saturday at Nottingham Playhouse brings ‘Say Sum Thin’ the brilliant Mouthy Poets first show, featuring the poet Inua Ellams. The Mouthy Poets are a group of young people that don’t just ‘do poetry’ they write, perform, market, coordinate and facilitate their own community events, and are making waves through the city. The show starts at 8pm and promises to be unmissable, so unless you’re otherwise engaged, don’t miss it! For more information see here.

And later on in the week for those of you further ‘up North’ there is the poetry and spoken word night in Manchester, run by the new writing collective based in Manchester, Bad Language. Headlining the night is the fantastic poet, Jo Bell who is currently writing something everyday for the website ‘Something Every Day’ and is also the Writer in Resident at the Royal Derby Hospital as part of the Writing East Midlands Write Here programme. The night will undoubtedly be a great one, so get yourself down to the Castle Hotel on Oldham Street for 7.30pm. For more info see here.

So many brilliant events and so little time. I only with I could be in two places at once. Isn’t about time someone invented a transporter machine?

Write Here at Nottingham Contemporary

Write Here is the writer in residence programme organised by the writing development agency, Writing East Midlands. Write Here is fantastic as it creates residencies for writers in culturally and socially significant venues across the East Midlands, facilitates the creative development of writers and strengthens their links with local communities and audiences.

As part of the Write Here programme, the writer Wayne Burrows is the Writer in Resident at the Nottingham Contemporary. For a period of three months, Wayne is responding to the exhibitions, the museum’s atmosphere, services and working environment. As part of the residency Wayne is also running two series of workshops providing a supportive environment in which participants will be encouraged to creatively respond to all facets of Nottingham Contemporary; one series of the workshops is running in February and the other in March, the latter of which will be held in the Nottingham Contemporary’s ‘Study’ space and is open for participants, so if you’re interested contact Saima Kaur at saima@nottinghamcontemporary.org.

The February workshops are currently taking place with a group of older people from theBilborough Community Centre. These workshops particularly interest me, as I have previously worked in the care industry; I have an affinity with this demographic and I am lucky enough to work as a mentee on these sessions. I was interested in how the group would respond to the gallery and what their thoughts and feeling would be to the exhibitions on display there.Currently the exhibitions at the gallery focus on work by artists Jack Goldstein, reputably one of the most important ‘artist’s artists’ of the last 30 years, and Anne Collier, an exciting artist working with photography.

The workshops are collaborative, as they combine the expertise of both the writer in residence, Wayne, and one of the gallery’s four associate artists, Jo Dacombe to help the participants amalgamate the written with the visual and explore the exhibitions’ themes and ideas in a variety of ways. The first week acted as an introduction for the group to the gallery, with the group exploring the gallery and the exhibitions. A couple of the participants exclaimed that it was the first time they’d ever visited a place like the Nottingham Contemporary before and it was wonderful to see them engaging with the pieces, particularly the sound-scapes, Jack Goldstein’s recordings pressed onto vinyl of forests burning, cats fighting and a tornado to name but a few. After we had explored the exhibitions we all convened for another well deserved cup of tea and a discussion on what the pieces had said to us. There was an agreement from the group that everyone reads the pieces differently, and it was interesting to hear their thoughts and feelings on the experience, with one lady explaining that you can learn a lot about life just by looking at art.

The next workshop on the following Tuesday, Wayne, Jo and myself traveled to the community centre in Bilborough and met the group there. It was larger this time, with more participants who had not been able to attend the previous week but nonetheless keen to take part. For this workshop we reminded the group of some of the pieces that had engaged with at the gallery, and discussed Jack Goldstein’s ‘Text Totems’, explaining our mission for the session was to create some totems of our own.

The session commenced with the group cutting out words and poetic phrases from magazines and newspapers and arranging them on paper in a meaningful and significant way. Other participants played with the relationship between words and images, and wrote thoughts and phrases down, inspired by the Nottingham Contemporary’s exhibitions in an artistic way.

Wayne, Jo and myself worked one to one with the participants during this session, helping the groups with their pieces and encouraging them to approach them from a different angle. I particularly loved the charming, often poignant stories that emerged through this process, tales of first loves lost during the war, of a lady whose husband had gone to school with the man who was the inspiration for the character the Fat Controller on Thomas the Tank Engine, and a lady whose career in fashion had to be abandoned during the chaos of the war, but would never have met her husband had she not moved away from the city.

I think the group found the creative process to be incredibly therapeutic and enjoyable, with no two Totems the same and each offering a different perspective. There was a genuine sense of wellbeing after the sessions, with the participants pleased with their artwork and taking it home to show family and loved ones. I look forward to the creations we come up with tomorrow!

Lyric Lounge 2010

Last night saw the grand finale of Lyric Lounge 2010. A temporary spoken word venue which has toured through the East Midlands; transforming found spaces into accessible hives of lyrical activity with linked live events aimed at attracting young people and a range of culturally diverse participants and audiences. The aim for this engaging concept is to reach out and generate new interest in spoken word performance, and I feel incredibly lucky to have been able to attend three out of the four festivals this year, which were held in Derby, Leicester, Nottingham and Loughborough.

To me each lounge was unique, with its own ambience and personality, yet also similar, like children born from the same mother. They created a place where the power of the spoken word, poetry and lyrics was celebrated for its ability to connect, entertain and inspire. They have reached out, developed and showcased the talent of local writers and groups and have also been host to such eminent poets as John Hegley, Jean Binta Breeze and John Agard. People were actively encouraged to share their work, whether it be at one of the many open mic opportunities, workshops or 1-2-1’s with professional poets held in the festivals, or even invited to write poetry on the tables, which were ingeniously decorated with bight paper table cloths stamped with the words ‘write on me’. For me the Lyric Lounge acted as a conduit, allowing the audience to reach out into different cultures and groups in the counties, and I feel deeply moved by the experience. The quality of the work by people involved in each of the Lounges has been exceptional, with people honest enough to bear part of themselves and connect through the vehicle of verse and rhyme.

The last performance of these fantastic festivals was the critically acclaimed ‘Showcase Live’, featured by the BBC, Truetube and the British Film Institute. With a cast of culturally diverse poets drawing from personal experience and examining themes from mental health to getting lost and being found, the show was at once brutally honest, dark and profoundly optimistic. The multi media show used video, music and poetry performance to further draw you into the lives and psyche of the poets, creating an unforgettable, powerful show. For me the performance highlighted one of poetry greatest assets: its ability allow people to eloquently express how they feel and make us realise that we through we live disconnected, often fragmented lives, we are not very different from each other at all. To bring unity and understanding through the power of language.

These events are absolutely invaluable in their ability to connect people, to develop voices or even just to make people see that they have a voice which is worth being heard. The Lyric Lounge will now return its region tour next year, visiting Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire and Rutland.

Lyric Lounge will also be returning for a day, Thursday the 7th October as part of the excellent Everybody’s Reading festival in Leicester, and I do hope you can make it over. For more information please see here.

Stories and Ideas

Just where do writers draw their ideas and inspiration? And how do these ideas translate themselves into memorable stories, poems and novels?

I think the answer is always, ultimately, a personal one, and so I will answer it personally. For me writing is an expression and exploration of the self. When I am writing anything that has happened to me is open to be used for inspiration, using a healthy dose of imagination to weave the ideas, experiences and thoughts together to form a story or longer narrative. I draw on my own experiences and I then reimagine them, recreate them and allow myself sufficient distance so I can write about them with fresh eyes to make the most out of the story I am trying to tell. This is not to say that I write autobiographical stories, my characters and events are fictional; however there will be an essence of my self, often manifested in my style of writing, that will ring true throughout all my work.

I’m a firm believer in the importance of stories. They help us understand and make sense of the world around us, and our place in that world. Throughout history it has been stories that have formed the basis of our learning and helped us grow intellectually and spiritually. Stories have the incredible power to take us away from our current stresses and strains and transport us to a place where we can escape the mundanity of life. And they also allow us to draw understanding from events that can often feel too random or colossal for us to comprehend when they happen in reality.

For me a good story will often help me put my own life into context, and it will stay with me, a true friend for life. I feel that a memorable story will have the strength to be honest and key into the thoughts and emotions that make us truly human, fallible and able to make and learn from our mistakes. I also feel that the process of writing is deathly honest. Writers need to be honest with themselves and their stories in order to explore and fully understand what their characters are feeling. In order to be true to ones story, one must first be true to oneself.
Stories sustain the spirit, and the very process of writing stories can be expressive, therapeutic and deeply enjoyable. Nevertheless, during the writing process it’s well documented that many people suffer from a conflict with their internal editor, that voice that questions the validity of your ideas and your ability to express them in the manner that you envisioned. It is important for writers to overcome their fear of failure in order to progress with the story they are trying to tell. As the saying goes: an idea that exists and is put into action is more important than an idea that exists only as an idea. And this I think is the challenge for all writers, to turn ideas into stories that stretch our world, to present us with new perspectives and different ways of seeing.

Round Up

Life has had the happy momentum of being incredibly busy of late, but I thought it was about time I collated some of my news into an easy to digest blog post. Like any concise news bulletin, here are some of the highlights of what has been going on:

Recently I performed at the weird and wonderful Macmillian fundraising event, Cogmachine, organized by some very special people in Derby. The event raised and impressive £422.11 and hosted such amazing artists, musicians and spoken word performers as Jo Lewis, The Super Normals, Mo Pickering, Simon Heywood and the utterly unique and mesmerizing Thomas Truax. For more information on the event please see Ms Mischeif’s blog, here.

I have had stories and poems published here, here and here.

I volunteered at Derby’s very own festival for alternative fiction, Alt. Fiction.
Focusing on Horror, Fantasy, Sci-Fi and Speculative Fiction, Alt. fiction was a fantastically organized event hosting many eminent writers, publishers and agents of the varied and popular genres. With an array of entertaining and informative panels, films, workshops and discussions for participants of all levels, the event was a true treasure trove of literary delights. Here I had the honor of seeing Robert Shearman perform on of his stories from his fabulous collection ‘Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical’. He was a fantastic reader, performing a lengthy and captivating story from memory, enchanting the audience and earning a place as one of my favorite writers.

I strongly recommend anyone who is interested in literature and wants to get more involved to either attend or volunteer at such events. There is so much information to be gleaned, contacts and new friends to be made and it is very interesting to experience the other side to how a literary event is run. Much like performing in a play, you form a bond with your fellow volunteers, and feel a certain sense of loss when the event is over. Volunteering is a great way to channel your passion and interest in literature and to become further involved in the industry, and you might even be privileged to participate in some of the event for free!

During the weekend of Alt. Fiction, a very different, but no less important literature event, the Lyric Lounge was also taking place in Derby. I attended the Sunday event at Deda and was delighted to see the venue transformed into a very well attended friendly and accessible participation space for spoken word, poetry and music. The day also featured Polarbear’s new innovative spoken word film/show ‘Return’, performers such as Sureshot and Mellow Baku, and the specially commissioned and very moving new showcase ‘Between the Laughter and the Tears’ by Joe Coghlan and Jo ‘Spice’ Blackwood, directed by Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze. An amazing event, and perfect end to what was a weekend filled with wonderful words.

And last but not least I was recently interviewed on the first of a new radio show for all literature lovers, The Reading Room. The show was aired on Sunday morning, for which I was privileged to be featured as a special guest, and I was able to promote the wonderful spoken word, music and writing collective, Hello Hubmarine, which I am involved in and very passionate about. I read a short spoken word piece which I performed with Hello Hub last year as part of our set at the Phrased and Confused tent at Summer Sundae and also discuss the upcoming Hello Hubmarine website. I’ll post the podcast of the show up here as soon as it is available.

Exciting times indeed, just watch this space!

On Writing

For a long time I prescribed to the notion that you’re not a writer unless you write every day. You need to find the time and space to write, even if that means getting up an hour earlier than you would normally, just so you can sit at your desk and let the ethereal words ‘flow through you’. And I tried. I really did try. But after a while I realised that many of the words I’d forced myself to write were tosh. They were not up to the standard and calibre that I knew I was capable of achieving. I was writing for the sake of it, to keep the demons at bay, rather than to represent my particular way of seeing. It was arts for arts sake, and inevitably it was unsustainable.

When I look back to the things I have written recently, the pieces that have weight, meaning and worth, they have all been stories that have come naturally to me. Pieces which I have had the smallest inkling of an idea for, and have invariably ‘written themselves’. I used to hate it when a writer would talk about how pieces write themselves, as if the act of writing is effortless and we are just the conduit for a higher power. However, I can now see there is some element of truth in that mantra. The good stories I write have all developed from the tiniest seed of an idea, which has grown into something much larger as I write it. For me, writing is a very natural and intuitive process, and I find forced creativity doesn’t produce the work that I am proud of. Work that rings with an element of self and truth. Therefore I’m trying to learn to keep my demons at bay, and be comfortable with myself as a writer, by understanding which ideas are the sparks that will grow into something bigger. I don’t want to simply write for the sake of writing, I want to produce worthwhile work. However I also recognise that I need to be better at not feeling bad when I have no such project or story on the go, for one will inevitably present itself. Well, that’s the hope at least.

At the moment, as I have no driving project propelling me forward, I have taken to editing snippets of free writing pieces I have done in the past, in the hope of creating a collection of complete pieces. In this way I hope to clear my head of the old, half finished ideas and spiritually make way for the new. Some of them may not be great, but I’d rather get them up to a certain level and then leave them, than have a mind full of muddled, segmented stories. That’s the theory anyway.

Reviewing the Reviews

In 2008 for my Creative Writing dissertation, I conducted a 6-month case study on the female author’s place in the book review pages. Now, spurred on by a recent article in this issue of Mslexia magazine, I have decided to revisit my findings, baring in mind their recent research.

In the past, many female writers have been forced to adopt male pseudonyms in order to have their work taken seriously by the literary establishment and receive a ‘fair’ book review. With the rise of first, second and third-wave feminism, women writers have now come a long way from the constraints forced upon the 19th century female novelists such as George Eliot. But, can it now be said that women writers have finally managed to penetrate the glass ceiling and reach a state of equality within today’s literary world? And if not, what does this reveal about both the current attitudes towards female authors and publishing and reading trends in today’s market?

With the current market flooded with new and established writers, book reviews are one of the few methods available that identifies a book of significance to readers. And of all the different types of reviews, the newspaper book pages are regarded as the most influential in terms of sales as they reach the widest audience. It is therefore crucial that writers are treated without prejudice within these pages and receive a fair book review. Admittedly a review does not necessarily have to be a favourable one to be recognised fair, though ideally, it should be honest, constructive and free from discrimination.

There has been a lot of interesting research on women’s place in the book review pages over the years. In 1985 the group Women In Publishing completed an extensive study into this subject and found that the broadsheets, including the Times, the Guardian and the Mail on Sunday, were not only the most discriminative against women regarding the length of reviews, but they also showed a clear preference towards the male author. WIP also discovered that although women write and read more fiction than men, female authors actually received far fewer book reviews than male authors. For example, in 1985 the book pages of the Guardian, a newspaper that has always claimed to promote true journalistic standards of objectivity, reviewed on average only 19.54 per cent of women’s writing, compared to 75.86 per cent of fiction written by men.

However, WIP’s research was conducted over twenty years ago. So, what can now be said of more recent findings on women writers in our modern literary world? In 1999 writer Debbie Taylor founded a woman’s writing magazine called ‘Mslexia’, which focuses on practical and creative issues connected to women and writing. In an article written for the first issue entitled ‘Three Cures for Mslexia’ Taylor documents extensive research, which identified the modern female writer’s position in the literary market. Taylor discovered that in Autumn 1998 women writers received 32 per cent of the book reviews printed, whereas male writers received a much higher proportion of 68 per cent.

My own research, focusing solely on The Guardian’s book pages, revealed that in the Spring and Summer of 2007 male authors received approximately 64.3 per cent of the reviews printed, with women just receiving 35.7 per cent. Compared with Mslexia’s findings in the last ten years, the female author’s place in the review pages has only improved by approximately 3 per cent. Could this preference towards male authors in the newspaper review sections merely reflect a world in which women publish fewer books, or does it point to a pervasive, unconscious sexism in how these books are chosen for review or even how they are marketed and classified into genres?

Ironically, research suggests that women still write, read and indeed borrow significantly more fiction than men: the current statistic widely quoted by booksellers is that 60 per cent of all novels published are written by women. The discrepancy between how much work is published by women, and how much is actually reviewed may stem from the subjects that women typically write about. Men and women have different reading and writing preferences and women’s writing is often typecast under the headings of ‘chick–lit’, ‘mum–lit’ or the ‘domestic’ novel. Perhaps it’s because men’s genre writing is broken down into crime/adventure/S.A.S – it’s not called ‘men’s writing’ yet, and genre writing for women is called: ‘women’s writing’. But by categorizing different novels under the same headings, women’s writing does not receive as much (if any) coverage in the press as male orientated genres such as crime fiction. The domestic experiences are often perceived as pertaining only to women, whereas the experiences of men are supposedly universal. While, admittedly, many women do write ‘chick–lit’ and popular fiction, there is a sense that many novels written by women who challenge set stereotypes are often misunderstood or misclassified.

But by not reviewing women’s writing as much as men’s, the literary establishment could be construed as signifying that the experiences of women are not as valid or important as men’s experiences. For if women’s writing is defined as inferior, then women’s experiences are automatically denigrated as well. A discrimination against women’s writing in the literary industry may not even be a conscious one, however it is still as damaging if women’s experiences are simply not seen, and particularly when women’s work is not represented adequately in the book review pages. Literary editors may claim that their book pages reflect the tastes and demands of society, but by producing book pages that are biased against women, whether consciously or unconsciously, the literary establishment is simply perpetuating existing prejudices and subtly shaping people’s perceptions of reality. The problem may fundamentally lie in the way that women’s work is marketed, however, literary editors are in a unique position of responsibility to deal with the world of ideas, and are best placed to influence changes in attitudes.

What can we, as readers, do to combat this problem? Interestingly, in our technology rich age, there are many other mediums readily available for us to review books that we have recently read. As Jane Mackenzie points out in Myslexia, the literary pages are not the only door into the realm of books and ideas. There are thousands of book groups, review sites and discussion groups taking place now, and the more women try their hand at reviewing, the more chance we have of resetting the balance in the book reviewing world. There remains a great need for the promotion of women’s writing, an awareness and awakening of consciousness for us all to set the numbers straight.