Offa's Press Winter Workshop

On 31^st January, two of our members, Cherry and Kuli, attended a workshop run by local publisher Offa’s Press. We headed off to Pant, a village near Oswestry in Shropshire, in time to start the workshop at 10:30. Luckily, although we’d had some snow and ice in the few days beforehand, the morning shaped up to be mild and sunny.

We started the day with a workshop in Pant village hall, where we discussed poetry on the theme of winter by Western poets. The favourite of the day was Snow Joke by Simon Armitage, which is a ‘gossip’-style poem about a man who ignores police warnings and drives across the Yorkshire moors in the snow, only to become trapped in his car in a snow drift.

They all certainly gave us something to think about when examining how to represent the season in words.  For a completely different flavour, we moved on to the next part of the workshop where we looked at tanka, a traditional Japanese form.

Tanka are 5 lines long, have a juxtaposition of images (usually one from the poet’s surroundings and one about the poet themselves), and use a ‘pivot line’ between the first two and last two lines, which means the poem could be reversed and still make sense.  

We practiced writing tanka about winter to get us accustomed to the form. We had to draw on our experiences of winter, either recently or winters past we could remember.

We broke briefly for lunch to get our strength up for the walk. We went a similar route to last time we were there – through the limestone quarry over Llanymymech Rocks – all the while taking in the winter surroundings. There was plenty to be inspired by, from the gorgeous view at the top, to the snowdrops just coming through.

Although we had to leave at 2pm, the day continued with a further workshop in the afternoon, to work on poems inspired by the walk.

Once again, Offa’s Press delivered a first class personal learning experience, and both our members are keen to go back for the next poetry day, to be arranged for later in the year. You can see our girls’ work on the Offa’s Press website here, alongside other poems from the day.
 

Our girls on the walk around Llanymynech Rocks



Wild Bytes Café and the Black Country Writers Project

Recently, we learned that local community group Our Own Future have launched a project to promote local writers and give them a platform to share their work with a wider audience. Black Country Writers Project is accepting submissions of poetry and prose to display in Wild Bytes Café in Darlington St, Wolverhampton, for customers to enjoy while relaxing at the café.  

Three of our members - Roma, Kuli and Cherry – submitted some work which was accepted to be displayed at the café. Subsequently, they were invited to perform their work at the launch event for the project, which was held on the same day as the official launch of Wild Bytes Café.

On 14^th Feb, after the Blakenhall Writers session, they went along to share work on the theme of ‘love’ – very appropriate for the date! They read their work alongside two esteemed local poets - Jane Seabourne and Emma Purshouse - who had also submitted work to the project. Some of the audience had brought their work along too and joined in with the reading, while our member Amarjit came along to support. 

The café was busy and bustling, and the audience were enthusiastic about the work which was shared. It was a lovely environment and all three of our members enjoyed sharing their work and seeing their work on display.  

The project is ongoing, so if you have some work you want to share to help take your writing to the next level, why not check out their requirements and submit to ourownfuture@gmail.com?

You can read more about the launch event on Our Own Future's blog, where you can see our members performing.

February 14th Session - getting ready for our anthology!

Nobody can escape it – the year of the Blakenhall Writers Anthology is here! We want to take every opportunity to give our members the chance to create some really compelling content ready to submit to the anthology, so we are tailoring our sessions to the theme of our identity, and our local community.

For February’s session, we decided to respond to the group’s request for further work on character development and dialogue. We gave it a local twist by using some old photos of residents of Wolverhampton from the past. There were schoolchildren, factory workers, and even the head of the workhouse, who were just waiting for us to give them a Blakenhall makeover.

First, we did a bit of work to turn these pictures into characters.  We tried to answer some questions about the characters, including ‘what do they like to do on a Saturday?’ ‘Describe the most important person in their life’ and ‘What is it like where they live?’

This exercise meant we could really get inside the character’s head, as well as giving us some good ammunition for writing a short story. But now we had some ideas brewing, we had to give our characters a voice.

We learned that dialogue has a purpose in a story; to show the relationship between characters, to move the story on, or to build tension. It’s important that this is effective, or your work will not be believable.

We explored some dialogue techniques, including the importance of the word ‘said.’ Did you know, that if you try to use lots of different words to describe how your character is feeling, you lose the impact of the words? Using ‘said’ is a sure-fire way to maintain a neutral playing field and let the words themselves do the talking (so to speak!)

Then we tied it all together by writing a scene for a story in which the character we built in the first exercise was speaking to another character, to practice the techniques we’d just discussed. You can find some good tips here.

I hope this has given everyone a starting point for a story they might like to submit for our anthology! Try to work on your piece for next month’s meeting and bring it along for some feedback.

Don’t forget, you need to submit some work for our feedback session to the Blakenhall Writers email address by the date of our next meeting (March 14^th). Please send up to 3 poems or up to 400 words of prose that you would like some constructive comments on. We will distribute them to the whole group to review, and bring our comments in to the April session.