Intro

Welcome to a bumper issue of things we have made in workshops, projects and collaborations over the last few months.

Enjoy some old books cut, glued, pasted and inked into new objects from a workshop led by Core Team member Stevie Ronnie at the Lit and Phil in Newcastle. The library gave us the old books, Stevie brought his usual haul of maker’s materials and the results were exhibited in the Lit and Phil for several weeks after the workshop.

Listen to a spooky tape made by Andrew Cook of pupils from Wakefield Cathedral Academy reflecting on their trip down a mine and writing with us as part of We Are Ive’s Ignite project at the National Coal Mining Museum.

There’s a couple of short films to watch, The Waiting Room and 5 New Messages, made from scratch over 12 hours of a Sheffield weekend.

And from another Squad Day workshop – led by Andrew McMillan and Lizzie Coombes – enjoy street writing and photography by Elizabeth Gibson, Lydia Allison, Thea Ayres & Emily Pritchard and Vivienne Burgess.

We also share two collaborations with libraries.

A celebration of The Word, the astonishingly beautiful and calming National Centre for the Written Word in South Shields in poems from Beth Davies, Fahad Al-Amoudi, Prerana Kumar, and a photo essay by Sara Heraoua.

And finally three simple, honest and moving pieces about their reading lives by Annie Dobson, Elizabeth Gibson and Jack Mann, commissioned by Read Manchester for their Take 10 campaign and last year’s Manchester Literature Festival.

Enjoy the brilliant work of Writing Squad writers.

 

Steve Dearden

 

Director

June 2019