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.

Blakenhall Writers Autumn News

We have plenty of things going on in autumn so make sure you’re up to date by checking through this post!

September 6^th – Kuli and Cherry appeared at the Stafford Arts Festival, reading their poetry in St Chad’s Church Stafford. The event was organised by the Staffordshire Poet Laureate, and Kuli was invited to do further readings as a result of the great reception her poems received.

October 11^th – We will NOT be having a session in October. This is due to Roma, Kuli and Cherry being at the Offa’s Press Writing Day. We discussed our options at the September meeting and decided this was what we wanted to do. We’ll see you in November! If you want to head along to the Offa’s Press Writing Day with us, check out the details here.

October 14^th – Roma will be reading at Wolverhampton City Voices in the Lych Gate Tavern, 7:30pm, £2.50 on the door. Let’s turn up and support her!

November 8^th – We will be back on schedule with a session on Poetry & Prose techniques. Come along to Blakenhall Healthy Living Centre at 11:00 – 13:00.

Other news!

We will be starting conversations soon about putting together a Blakenhall Writers anthology in the early part of 2015. We will need some funding to put towards this, so any ideas you have, please let us know! Start having a think about what you might want included in the anthology, and we will start discussion in the next few months.

We also want to hear from you about your writing plans. We’ll be tailoring next year’s schedule to what people want to develop, so start thinking about why you write and what your goals are, ready for when we have those conversations.

Take care everyone, and see you in November!

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