Category Archives: Community projects

City Arts Commission: ‘Choice Gossip for Retail Later’

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Artwork by Paul Warren

Over summer I’ve been running writing workshops in the Meadows and Central library, Radford Care Group, and the Marcus Garvey Centre, gathering stories inspired by Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. The commission was for a City Arts project called ‘Words of Wisdom’ which aims to bring older and young people together through literature.

Anyone who has ever stumbled across this blog or my work (with Paul Fillingham) will know how important Alan Sillitoe is to me. I explored the enduring relevance of his debut novel in a commission for The Space called The Sillitoe Trail, brought him back from the dead in ‘For it was Saturday Night’, a comic in my literary graphic novel serial Dawn of the Unread, and presently I’m working on a new graphic novel called Whatever People Say I Am, which aims to dispel myths around identity and give voice to those deprived of the right to speak. He’s popped up elsewhere, but you get the point.

For the City Arts project I broke Saturday Night and Sunday Morning down into four areas: Work, Factory, Community, Relationships. Groups were provided with relevant quotes and extracts which we read and analysed together. These then served as inspiration to reflect on our own lives. The stories that came out were incredible. Here’s a few from our work themed sessions: Life as a pig farmer and the sadness of befriending one animal and discovering the next day it was off to slaughter; a young female locking herself in a toilet to avoid the advances of a lecherous boss; knocking on doors to inform people they had contracted a sexually transmitted disease and having water thrown over you; working at the Greyhound Stadium and hiding tips in your blouse; physiotherapist in a rehab unit working with miners with head injuries; hungover female bitumen workers grafting every hour of daylight; a textile worker who kicks his wife in his sleep because he still dreams he’s sat at his machine working the pedals.

Any analysis of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning rightly focuses on the wonderfully quotable antics of Arthur Seaton, the hard drinking, anti-hero at the heart of the novel. But for this project I wanted to give Mrs Bull a bit of a focus. She may not slug her guts out at the lathe, but she certainly puts in a shift at the yard where she is known as the “Loudspeaker” or “News of the World” for “her malicious gossip” which “travelled like electricity through a circuit, from one power point to another, and the surprising thing was that a fuse was so rarely blown”. Mrs Bull watches people head to the Raleigh factory in the morning and afternoon with one main purpose: “to glean choice gossip for retail later”.

Artwork by Paul Warren

Gossip is a contentious term. Did Mrs. Bull serve an important social purpose in keeping her community in check or was her gossip malicious, with the intent of feeling superior over others? This was perhaps one of the most interesting discussions to come out of our sessions, particularly in light of recent feminist debates about being heard and supporting each other, such as #Metoo

In Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women, Silvia Federici has traced the origins of gossip and found it originally meant godparent, “one who stands in spiritual relation to the child to be baptized”. Later it referred to companions in childbirth, then a term for female friends with strong emotional connotations. It is only recently that it has been used as a derogatory term.

We decided to call this project ‘Choice Gossip for Retail Later’ as a nod to women like Mrs. Bull who’ve been given a hard time over the years but also because this is what we were doing in our sessions: we were gleaning gossip from each other, sharing stories, listening and talking, evaluating and questioning our respective experiences to create a sense of togetherness through words. That choice gossip has taken the form of a series of illustrations with audio recordings which will be released bit by bit over the coming months. You can decide for yourself if this gossip is worthy of retail on 12 November.

Words of Wisdom: Choice Gossip for Retail Later, 12 November (6pm-8pm), City Arts, 11-13 Hockley, Nottingham. NG1 1FH   

Book tickets from Eventbrite here 

 

 

 

 

 

Writing workshops with ArtSpeak

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Photos by James Walker

I’ve just finished a commission for ArtSpeak which gave me the opportunity to nose into the lives of retired and elderly people across the city. My brief was to find out what arts activities people are interested in and where they would like to see these take place. The research would then help ArtSpeak develop a series of Creative Cafes. The research was conducted during two-hour writing workshops at Strelley, the Meadows, Clifton and Bulwell. From these sessions I created pen portraits of participants to demonstrate the different ways in which the arts fulfil needs, particularly in terms of health and mental wellbeing.

I got this commission after giving a talk at the Nottingham Contemporary about my contribution to The Bigger Picture, a multi-collaborative research project exploring the impact of intergenerational arts programming on minority communities in Nottingham. Sharon Scaniglia and Hannah Stoddard of the Radford Care Group were in the audience and approached me afterwards about their ArtsSpeak project. I mention this because as lovely as the internet is, nothing compares with getting off your arse and meeting people in real physical space. This is how I get most of my work. It was also nice to work with Sharon again. We had previously worked on the board of directors for Festival of Words.

I began each ArtSpeak session with some literary or historical link to the area. This was partly to see how much people knew about their home turf and as a reminder that artists are ordinary folk from ordinary places. This led on to a series of writing exercises from a pre-set list of questions. You can’t predict how these sessions will go or how participants will react, so the questions were a loose guide that could be adapted as and when. Similarly, what works in one place doesn’t necessarily work in another.

Folk from Bulwell were absolutely on it. They were self-motivated, well-organised, and had a good infrastructure in place to keep themselves busy. Their complaint, and one I heard repeatedly, was not having enough time to do the things they wanted to do. Therefore, anything that took them out of their busy schedule had better be worth it. I have featured one person from this session (Joy Rice) on my Whatever People Say I Am Instagram account as she confessed to knocking out the first brick of the now defunct Broadmarsh carpark. How dearly I would love to meet the person who one day gets to knock out the first brick of the Broadmarsh shopping centre …

When I began creating Dawn of the Unread in 2014 I was highly skeptical of one stop libraries. I was deluded by the aura of books, believing the presence of any other service within this space would trivialise the experience of reading. I was wrong, and Strelley library typifies this. Opened on 14 November, 2018, after £1 million of investment, Strelley library acts as a cultural hub for the wider community. It’s also a very inviting space, with light pouring in through the glass fronted windows. Above the library are 37 one-bedroom independent living flats, run by Nottingham City Homes.

Participant pictures and observations.

The participants for this workshop came from the flats, one of whom was really grateful that Hannah Stoddard had knocked on his door twice to encourage him to join in. He said he wanted to answer the door but didn’t have the confidence, so appreciated her perseverance. He was introverted, anxious, and uneager to get involved at first. He said he’d not undone his curtains in two weeks and was very ill. But once we’d won over his trust he became really animated, sharing an incredible life story that had taken him around the world and in a variety of public facing service jobs. He temporarily forgot about his illness and our session overran by an hour. This validated the objectives of ArtSpeak. It was a pleasure to meet him and I felt genuinely sad to say goodbye. I felt as if I’d known him all my life rather than for three hours on a Thursday afternoon.

The Clifton session took place in a less inspiring library, but this didn’t bother participants. Cost and access were the factors that seemed to matter most, rather than aesthetics. Clifton library is on the bus and tram route. I met a man who took The Beatles’ ‘All you Need is Love’ as his personal mantra, travelling to India in a clapped-out van. On his way he stopped off in Afghanistan and fondly recalled that they were the kindest most hospitable people he’d ever met and how much it saddened him to see what we had done to the country in the aftermath of 9-11. I would love to tell his story as part of the graphic novel element to Whatever People Say I Am and may do so if I can find additional funding.

Participants at the Meadows were exactly as I expected – vocal, proud and heavily involved in their local community. Again, I encountered incredible stories of ordinary lives – from a woman whose best friend is a parrot to a man who copes with bereavement by growing food in his allotment and sharing it out with his neighbours. This group all wanted to learn how to write ‘properly’ so that they could write their memoirs to pass on to their grandchildren. I recommended The Accidental Memoir by Eve Makis and Anthony Cropper as a good starting place for getting their ideas down.

ArtSpeak is an arts strand of The Radford Centre. Read their blog about the project here. Website: www.artspeak.org.uk