Creative Writing in the Gallery @ Phoenix Brighton

Paper Trail by Deb Bowness -

© Wendy Ann Greenhalgh

Those nice people at Phoenix, have invited me to run regular creative writing workshops in their gallery. Phoenix is the largest artist-led arts organisation in the South East, and as well as curating a rich, diverse programme of contemporary art exhibitions - it's also a creative-hub with 100 studios above the gallery space. And now they have a cafe too and Story Scavenger is taking it over! Well occasionally.

Saturday June 2nd 11am-1pm sees the launch of our fun, art-inspired creative writing sessions, and we'll be back for a session each exhibition after that. Details of this will be in the monthly Story Scavenger E-News. You can sign up for it here.

Free Creative Writing at Brighton Waterstones - June

Story Scavenger is back in June for another FREE creative writing workshops at Brighton Waterstones, this time on the theme of Surprise! Join us on June 7th 5.30 - 7pm for a session that confounds expectations and gets you inventing characters and imagining situations that surprise even you.

Waterstones Writers Publish on PEN Website

A huge thank you - to everyone who took part in the PEN - Writers at Risk Workshop - at Waterstones this month. It was a very special evening, with many people commenting on the peaceful atmosphere and what an unusual and powerful writing experience it was. During the workshop, participants read poems by five writers of concern to PEN, before writing their own responses, interpretations and reinventions of these pieces. Their responses are being sent directly to the writers whose work inspired them, and PEN will be featuring a selection of them on their website.

WANTED: Experts on Longing

What are you longing for? Who are you longing for? When - or even – where are you longing for? These are the questions I’ve been asking on Twitter over the last few months, since I began my #longing for project in February, inviting you to share your longings using the #longing hash tag. A fascinating picture is beginning to emerge of the depth, variety, frivolity and hopelessness of this human thing called longing. And slowly my plans for #longing for are developing too. So now seemed a good time to tell you what’s been happening, and invite you to take part again. Because I need experts!

Creative Writing - Summer School 2012!

Creative Writing Summer School
4 Tuesdays 12th June - 3rd July 2012 7.30-9.30pm
 
Back by popular demand - Story Scavenger's unique - art inspired sessions - designed to get you feeling creative for the summer season.
 
June is the time of year - when I REALLY start to get the creative itch - the nights are long and light - and I want to get out and do stuff, preferably with other people too. So come and celebrate the sunny evenings in creative company, have fun and gather some inspiration for new writing.
 
These inspiring and experimental creative writing sessions, will encourage you to play with language and explore new ways of writing. Each week we’ll focus on the techniques developed by famous writing or art movements to generate lots of ideas for poems and stories.

FREE Creative Writing at Waterstones - with English PEN

In the festival month of May, Story Scavenger is joining together with English PEN for an extra special session of the Waterstones Writing Workshops. PEN uphold the freedom to write and the freedom to read, campaigning internationally on behalf of persecuted writers, editors and publishers. In the UK they campaign to reform laws that curb free expression, and for greater access to literature. I've become involved in their Books to Prisoners programme - and Cat Lucas at PEN, asked if I'd like to run a workshop for them and give Brighton writers a chance to get their work published too. Well, of course I would - I said!

Writing The Spring Within

So how's the spring time treating you? Are you feeling it? Where are you feeling it? And what memories does it evoke? Those were the questions I posed to the writers at last week's Waterstones writing workshop.

Spring's a fantastic theme for writers - it's a sensual, sensory explosion of a season - and it's the perfect ground for exploring and developing writing that savours all the senses. We used two exercises during the session: first - writing autobiographically to draw out our early memories and responses to spring time; then moving on to a more imaginative, magic-realist response, in which spring took over a human body. Here they are if you'd like to try them...

Flash!

The new addition of Flash - The International Short Short - Magazine is finally out. And I'm happy to say that my story, Breadcrumbs, is in it - along with great stories by talented writers from all over the world. 

For those of you interested in flash fiction, the magazine comes out twice yearly in simple, but beautifully produced book-form and you can subscribe online or buy a single copy here for £5.

I'll also be running a workshop on writing flash fiction during Brighton Festival. It costs just a tenner - and includes tea and cakes! If you'd like to learn more about this particular literary form - then why not come along?

I Am Andy Warhol

In the summer of 2011, the De La Warr Pavilion commissioned two pieces from me - to celebrate their Andy Warhol season. And now you can download one of them for FREE! Titled - I Am Andy Warhol - it uses transcripts from interviews with Warhol in the 60s, to chart a surreal, present day social-media conversation. Click here for your PDF copy of the magazine and a free Andy Warhol poster too. Oh don't say I'm not good to you ...

We Saw We Heard We Were Here

The inspiring - Broken Ground Symposium, at Phoenix Brighton this Saturday - got everyone thinking, talking and sharing ideas about what it means to live, work, create and move in the city. We dwell at the intersection between space and experience, building and body, public and private, we take this for granted; so much so, that often we don't even notice the ground we're walking on. The purpose of the participatory project I led on Saturday, was to bring this relationship into consciousness and to allow the Broken Ground participants to mediate their own experience of the city - of Phoenix - through creative activity.