News and views

Write For Rights This Saturday With Amnesty

Posted By: Katy Carr, 08 December 2011

Molly Naylor reports on Strangers and Canaries

Posted By: Molly Naylor, 18 October 2011

Last week myself and James, a refugee from the Congo, visited a range of schools across Norfolk to talk to young people about issues surrounding refugees and asylum seekers. James told them his life story, sharing the details of his emotional and epic journey from Africa to Norfolk. We then explored the themes, ideas and issues that arose through discussion, writing exercises and poetry.

For me, the main impact of these workshops is their power to raise awareness and provoke thought. Norfolk can sometimes feel a million miles from anywhere. It’s easy for me to forget this as I’m up and down from London most weeks and have lived in many places before finding this lovely, dreamy, flat old county. But I met some kids last week who’d never been on a train, and had certainly never met anyone from the Congo.

Despite this, we found the young people hugely empathetic, sensitive and thoughtful as they listened to James’s story of how he came to be in Norwich. Prejudice is often born of ignorance, or a fear of the unknown; so introducing young people to these ideas early on in their lives must go a long way towards avoiding knee-jerk stereotypical responses to asylum issues. I’m pretty sure none of the young people we met will end up saying the sentence ‘they come over here, taking our jobs…’

Instead they are now armed with facts, as well as the personal details of James’s story. They know now for example that only 3% of the world’s refugees live in the UK, and they have a list of examples of cultural and economic contributions refugees have made to our country. The writing exercises helped with the empathy; getting them to imagine themselves in certain situations and consider their own responses and reactions. Exploring the question of what would be in their suitcase if they had to immediately leave town blew some of their minds a bit, and led to heated debate, big hypothetical decisions, and a blast of perspective.

And not just for them. Because although James and I planned and taught the workshops together, there were times when I felt I had more in common with the young people. We’d sit and listen to his story, exchanging glances that said: how lucky we are to have been born here. How fortunate we are to be able to moan about a broken Nintendo DS, a delayed train or a slow broadband connection. And how blessed we are to have James here in Nowich, inspiring us with his honesty, ambition and courage.

Strangers and Canaries

Posted By: Edward Cottrell, 04 October 2011

How would you feel if you had leave your home?

Our Strangers and Canaries workshops are running in schools across Norfolk all this week, part of our work as a City of Refuge. The workshops give students a chance to learn about exile, then imagine what it would feel like if they had to leave their home. The students really engage with issues of exile and identity through meeting exiles and working with writers imaginatively to understand what it involves - as well as learning about the local history of the Strangers and Canaries in the East of England. (Pictured right: Molly Naylor leading a workshop at Reepham High School).

 

Callum (12, Methwold High School) says, ‘It was fun and I learned a lot’, and Levi (12, Methwold High School) says ‘I liked Jack the refugee - I would like them to come back’.

These workshops have been running over the last five years and we have reached many thousands of students in schools across Norfolk through them. We’ve got some examples of their new writing below, showing their creative engagement with complex global issues:

 

Rwanda 

Missed out on Worlds? We’ve got your back…

Posted By: Richard White, 04 August 2011

Joseph O'Connor reading from Ghost Light: Chapter One by Writers' Centre Norwich


Joseph O'Connor reading from Ghost Light: Chapter Three by Writers' Centre Norwich


John Boyne and Joseph O'Connor, UNESCO City of Literature by Writers' Centre Norwich

More Than a Lit Fest: What's going on at Worlds 2011

Posted By: Katy Carr, 22 June 2011

Worlds, Writers and Words

Posted By: Richard White, 17 June 2011

NPO Status Granted to Writers' Centre Norwich

Posted By: Katy Carr, 30 March 2011

Writers’ Centre Norwich is delighted that Arts Council England has made us part of its National Portfolio of funded organisations for 2012-15.

Chris Gribble, our CEO says:

"Writers’ Centre Norwich (WCN) is a relatively young organisation, but over the course of the past seven years we have established ourselves as one of the UK’s leading literature development organisations. Working to explore the artistic and social impacts of creative writing and reading WCN is leading the bid for Norwich to become England’s first UNESCO City of Literature, we established Norwich as the first and only UK City of Refuge for exiled writers, we have helped some of the brightest new talents develop their work, engaged thousands of young people each year in a range of in and out of school activities and have welcomed a vast range of talented writers from around the world to Norwich to celebrate the best in world literature.

We are very excited about the coming years. In a challenging economic climate, Arts Council England support will be key to our continued development, and the funding we have been granted for 2012-15 will enable us to consolidate our local, national and international work with partners, audiences, writers and readers alike. We could not work as we do without the commitment of our other key stakeholders, University of East Anglia, Norwich City Council and Norfolk County Council, and we would like to take this opportunity to thank them for their support."

Letters to Europe – a visit to The Hewett School in Norwich

Posted By: Richard White, 10 November 2010

It’s been a long time coming, but finally I got the chance to visit a school to witness a Letters to Europe workshop as part of the Shahrazad project. It was an experience I won’t be forgetting for a while… in a good way, of course!

All week Writers’ Centre Norwich will be sending a writer and a refugee to work with young people in schools across Norfolk to help them understand the issues surrounding refugees and asylum seekers, the future of Europe, and the hopes and dreams they harbour for it.

Our workshop was led by writer, Sarah Bower - who had already completed a session with the same students during the Strangers and Canaries project – and supported by refugee, Asmerom.

Asmerom gave a fascinating insight into some of the difficulties faced by refugees when entering a new country. What was the most surprising for our young class? Realising that not everyone has a surname the same way Europeans do. Asmerom explained that in his country (Eritrea, North East of Africa), the importance is placed on the first name, and if there’s any need for further identification, they follow up with their father’s first name. Needless to say, not easy to clarify when filling out European forms of self-identification!


Students from The Hewett hard at work during their Strangers and Canaries workshop

Sarah then divided the students into groups depending on certain characteristics. Young people love an excuse to tear around a room, but they soon realised the consequences of being segregated. The responses were fascinating, particularly when close friends has been separated.

One moment that surprised me – but considering modern trends, perhaps shouldn’t have - was when Sarah showed the students some clips from our YouTube page. During the writing exercises it was a tricky task to keep the students focused, but show them a film and you’ve got their attention from the off! The films were created by students working on the same project but with the additional help of the BBC Voices team.

After a short exercise on how to personify a place, alongside the learning that had already taken place, Sarah and Asmerom had the students writing their letters. This is the business end of the workshop, and it was great to see a new level of concentration from our young writers. Some brave souls read their letters aloud. They were quite simply inspiring: a particular favourite line compared the mottled view of Europe from the air as freckles on a face.

Time flies, the bell rang and the students ran. But not before we got hold of their masterpieces. We’ll soon be posting some of the letters on our Freedom of Expression page, but for a taster, here’s one by Lucy from Reepham High:

What is home?
Home is where I live,
My house,
I don’t have a house.

What is home?
My nationality,
The country on my passport,
I don’t have a passport.

What is home?
The place where I feel safe,
A sanctuary,
I am not safe.

What is home?
My belongings,
The things I have grown up with,
I have no belongings.

What is home?
My family and friends,
The people who protect me,
I have no family, no friends.

Do I have a home?
 
By Lucy, student from Reepham High.

It’s a wonderful piece, and from what I saw at the Hewett, young people have plenty to say regarding our home, and without a doubt, they’ll have a big say in its future.

Norwich City of Refuge

Posted By: Anonymous, 19 October 2010

WCN Chief Exec, Chris Gribble, blogs about his recent visit to Brussels to attend the International Cities of Refuge Network and Board meeting.

It was off to Brussels last week to catch up with our partner cities in the International Cities of Refuge Network (ICORN) and for an ICORN Board Meeting. I’ve been a member of the Board for the past year, representing both Norwich and the UK among the 32 Cities of Refuge in the network. Each city makes a commitment to offering a place of safety for a writer who’s liberty and livelihood has been threatened (whether he or she is a novelist, poet, journalist, translator or cartoonist – the definition is wide and inclusive) and undertakes a year round programme of activities to raise awareness of the importance of freedom of speech.

We spent an afternoon catching up with our partners in Spain, Belgium, Germany, Norway and Sweden – all of whom are taking part in the Digital Stories and Letters to Europe projects as part of the Shahrazad programme. Then there was the Board Meeting, which included a meeting at the European Parliament and another at the European Commission. It was fascinating to get a glimpse into the workings of the Parliament and the Commission (less fascinating was the 45 minutes it took to register, get a pass and gain entry to the buildings), and with rights under threat in so many places, absolutely crucial that Norwich was able to offer its own small degree of support in the world wide effort to promote universal human rights.


Elisabeth Dyvik (ICORN) and Sara Whyatt (PEN International). Helge Lunde (ICORN Executive Director) outside the European Commission in Brussels.

The economic and social climates are tough at the moment. Some say that charity begins at home and that finding money to support those in exile is a luxury we can’t afford. However, for hundreds of thousands of people across the world, home is something that has been torn away from them through no fault of their own. I’m immensely proud that Norwich is the first (and so far only) city in the UK to support the Cities of Refuge movement, and came back to the UK more determined than ever to expand the network across the UK.

Chris Gribble

Coetzee Rocks the House

Posted By: Katy Carr, 23 June 2010

Now suddenly it’s Wednesday and we are feeling pretty buzzy after last night’s event at Norwich Playhouse with Gabeba Baderoon, CJ Driver, Zoe Wicomb and of course JM Coetzee.

We started proceedings on a beautiful summer’s evening, with students and their families milling about for their art show down the road, and a sense of mounting excitement as the audience gathered and chatted outside as did we, waiting  in the sunlight for Coetzee.



Then he walked up to the venue, smiled for the cameras, walked around people with last minute glasses of wine and went backstage to say hello to his fellow readers before taking his seat for the first half.



What was great about last night was the variety and breadth of work. Gabeba Baderoon read first, a beautiful set of poems setting us on journeys of love and loss, allowing us to contemplate these big topics through sensuously crafted language which almost lulled the listener into the poetic landscape and which was received enthusiastically by the packed house.




Next came CJ ‘Jonty’ Driver, who, talking of a friend who asked why didn’t he give up and just accept that he is English (having lived half his life in England) he quoted the epitaph: old age has no country.

The atmosphere in the house was jolly and there were laughs as he read his poems, followed by quiet as some of the implications of his thoughtful poetry sank in.  His response to that question of his identity was very striking, and all of his poems arced in some way around belonging with some reaching back to the homeland; Jonty left South Africa having been detained for a period in solitary confinement in 1964 by the South African Security Service.


Then something completely different; Zoe Wicomb took to the stage with her striking, relaxed style, reading work from her novel which she ‘just grabbed from the shelf on the way out the door because I couldn’t find the one I wanted!’ This delightful style was echoed by her narrator –whose third person voice felt like first person and whose outlook was quirky, upbeat (widowhood means there’s more time to get things done – why be downhearted?) and involving from the off. The pace was fast, the writing and voice sharp and we clapped heartily at the end of what had been a great first half.


When we settled back in after the scrum at the bar, Coetzee took his place at the podium with a small smile. He read a short story, (not a new piece but virtually unpublished), that was vintage Coetzee. The story moved between humour, anger and pathos and he read with great expression, taking the whole audience on the journey of a young boy wondering what the stone circle on his farm means – could it be fairies? The young boy grows and eventually his father explains that the stones were used for threshing. The boy is incredulous; where was the wheat from; how was the land ever fertile enough to create it?  Trying to paraphrase Coetzee’s work is probably unwise, so I’d just advise that you try and catch this sometime – the story takes us thoughtfully round the issue of disconnection from the land, and the sense of civilisation almost going backwards.

Afterwards, Coetzee signed books as did the others, and the great atmosphere continued, perhaps as the audience contemplated the width, depth and variation in these voices.

A great evening and thanks to all the writers for taking part; I don’t think anyone who was there will really ever forget it.

Onwards now to the rest of this fantastic week at the Worlds Literature Festival...

Imagining “the Public Good”

Posted By: Adrian Slatcher, 22 June 2010

Fiction writer and experienced blogger, Adrian Slatcher provides an insight into the first session of the Worlds Literature Festival Salon. Adrian will be blogging about the Salons thoughout the week, so stay tuned!

When UEA was designed in the nineteen sixties, the architect deliberately created a sense of flow between disciplines and faculties which can perhaps only now be discerned as some kind of architectural memory, hidden in the blueprints of a contemporary campus university. This was one of the interesting points that came up late in the first morning of this year’s Worlds’ Literary Salon.

 

    This year’s theme is “the education of the imagination” and there’s already a palpable sense of it’s appropriateness just through the gathering of around 40 writers in the UEA’s council chambers. Though many of the writers there are based at universities, the relationship between institution and creative practitioner is one of the themes that comes out of our first morning’s discussion.

    Though we had started to get to know each other the previous evening, and some, such as myself, had a chance to catch up with those we had met in earlier years, like any good party, the salon requires a little bit of judicious oiling from the genial host to get things going.
    Our two provocations this morning came from Rukmini Nair and Graeme Harper. Firstly though, Jon Cook sketched out the thought process that had led to this year’s theme. A recent piece in the Spectator by Martha Nussbaum has argued in favour of literature’s capacity to educate the imaginations of its readers is a public good. For a room full of writers and academics, surely this should be an uncontentious statement? Yet Jon wanted us to consider whether this was always the case, for though Schiller and Coleridge may have based there views of the value of the imagination as part of what makes a civilised state, there are other times in history where this is not necessarily the case. Think of Nuremberg, Cook suggests, and I was also moved to think of the Kapoor Olympic sculpture, and the alliance of big business and political ambition that will make it happen. Going back to literature and it’s relationship to the state, will it always be tinged with irony?

Rukmini’s presentation took us on a tour of the imagination, her provocations stopping off at various unconventional places – not all of which we had time this morning to fully explore. If previous year’s salons have been anything to go by, we will come back to them, both in the formal space, and in informal discussion.
She began by considering the basis of what we mean by “imagination.” After all, in a world without written language or written literature, the imagination still exists. On visiting remote villages in India she finds “storyboards” and “story boxes” – which you open up, like a children’s plaything, to find multiple meanings. At the back of the story box is an imagination tree that is “mounted on the back of a cow – the giver of all good.” She finds puppets in these villages; archetypes of joker, death and monkey God. They’re immediate familiars in all cultures – I’m instantly reminded of Punch and Judy, and the dark stories told in the Punch and Judy booth, clearly not just for children. Our stories exist, she surmises, beyond the writing of them down, as does our imagination. In meeting Mr. Hu, a Chinese architect, Rukmini – who is a technologist as well as a writer - and him have a shared understanding of the distances between the “analogue” of the village, and the “digital” of the city – and how we need to look at the spaces between. Interesting for an architect, but also for a writer.
    Yet this is only one of her provocations. In the Mahabaharata, the figure of a Guru is ambiguous, not always doing what is morally right, a sometimes repressive representative of the state (of things.) In a university is the creative writing tutor also a guru with a statist agenda? Are, as a result, the University creative writing courses, by nature of the institutions within which they exist, creating “bonsai” writers? Cultivated, but out of nature.
And, if literature is a “state” or a “country” – how does it speak to its neighbours? Does it have a dialogue with them? A treaty? Or is it perpetually at war?
It seemed that our first discussions concentrated on some, but not all of these points. Rukmini had raised a number of “oppositional” forces: the city v. the village, the state v. the individual writer. In this world, literature is something negotiated, perhaps, even misunderstood (or re-interpreted) between the different oppositional points.

Following on from Rukmini, Graeme Harper wanted us to think about a more specific “role” for creative writing (and by implication “the imagination”) within our institutions. He took us back to the ancient universities, and reminded us that creativity was there at the very beginning, as places not just to study the world, but to create our understanding of it. The role of a scholar was cross-disciplinary – with a fluidity between critical and creative thought which only now may we be looking to go back to. Universities are partially established to protect their own “liberties” – of learning, of imagination, of action, outside of church and state, though linked to them, so surely putting writers into universities only to then separate them from the critical discourse therein, is in itself artificial?
    
Sitting on a train, Harper sees people on their mobile phones, browsing their Facebook page, sharing their experience via Twitter, and wonders whether this is the new model – already happening – that allows the creative and critical to sit side by side and mutually enhance each other. I’m reminded of China Mieville’s “The City and City” where two mutually exclusive cities are in the same physical space and exist side by side through a process of “unseeing.” Mieville has created a powerful metaphor. Learning, rather than being in a physical space, can happen between people, across disciplines. In the placing of creative writers – “imagination workers”, if you like – in the academy, we are not displacing their imaginations but finding some kind of utilitarian yoke for it. It is why some writers are reduced to describing their “day job” as some form of “alibi” – “I do this to earn money” etc. etc. – rather than revelling in the daily truth; which is creative people coming together, choosing to connect with others who share certain beliefs and aspirations, rather than remaining in isolation.
    In a room full of writers it takes a bravery to mention that writers, often self-involved, are not always the most empathetic of people in real life, and we should not pretend that they are. In some ways, it’s not even part of the job description. The empathy, if it exists, comes from the work. On coming to England a writer from another part of the world can have a recognition of place through seeing something – in this case a “copper beech” – that she has only read about, never seen, creating for her a kind of “luminous shock.”
    For us “imagination workers”, there’s almost a contradiction here. We sometimes despair at the short attention spans of web-surfing students who want to write long novels, but to read short Wikipedia entries. Yet, as children we all revel in the imagination.
Perhaps, I start to wonder, trying to pick apart the morning’s session, the “public good” of studying the humanities is literally that, state-sanctioned at certain times in society, and at other times dropped because it does not fit the pressures of the age. In a less than benign financial environment, there is no doubt that we are all under a certain “threat,” for the arts and the universities are developments of our civilised society as much as necessities for developing it.
Yet, for children, imagination, like play, is of immense value to their  development – later in life, society has, at various times, less of an obvious need for it. Yet the storyteller, the “imagination worker”, did not just appear with the renaissance, or flourishes in times of prosperity, but appears wherever humans gather together to reflect on their world.
Remember, the internet offers us endless opportunities to be “creative”,  in fact, it is the raison d’etre of the business models of such sites as YouTube, Blogger and Flickr; yet at the same time, those of us who have to “justify” the imagination to funders or institutions, have to use words and structures that are utterly utilitarian.
    The day’s final thoughts broadened out from the value of “imagination” to that of “knowledge.” What is that we need to know? We need to know that a bottle of water is clean, and safe, not that the plastic it is made out of is derived from oil. It is impossible to be like the young Gertrude Stein, frightened that she would one day run out of books to read, yet even if we can’t know anything we make choices on what we need to know to flourish in the contemporary world, in the same way that an isolated village would learn to know the medicinal properties of those plants that grew surrounding them.
    With the images of Rukmini’s archetypes – joker, death, monkey God – flickering in our thoughts, we finished for the day. We were, I felt,  a little less certain about the arguments that we began with. Over the rest of this week I think we will  want to define a little better what it is we mean by “educating the imagination.” As we slipped out of the meeting, the campus around us seemed keenly utilitarian, as buildings from that era always do, but a building, however well-designed, does not entirely describe what goes on inside of it, no more than you can access a person’s imagination from looking directly into their face.

Worlds Literature Festival is up and running!

Posted By: Richard White, 21 June 2010

Yes, the moment has finally arrived. It’s that time of year when we welcome writers from all corners of the globe to partake in our yearly Worlds Literature Festival, a unique mix of public and private programmes, exploring the best of world literature.

Writers arrived over the weekend and are participating in the first of three Salons exploring questions around 'The Writer' in relation to the 'Education of the Imagination' – stirring stuff!

Although the Salon is closed to the public, we’re delighted to offer you a sneaky peek inside the chamber doors through the talents of fiction writer and experienced blogger, Adrian Slatcher. Adrian will blog all the juicy gossip directly to our WCN ‘Latest News’ blogroll. He’s a great blogger; check out Art of Fiction for clear-cut evidence.

As I write this, we’ve already enjoyed the talents of Neel Mukherjee, Henrietta Rose-Innes and Kate Kilalea (pictured above) at the Worlds International Readings event at the UEA Drama Studio, and there’s so much more to look forward to – see the event listings at the bottom of this post.

We’ll be posting photos, podcasts and literary musings prior to, during and after each event on our blog, twitter, flickr and facebook accounts, so keep an eye peeled and primed – something tells me this week is going to fly by!

Worlds Literature Festival event listings:

Your Summer Reads, Monday 21 June, 6.30-7.30, Norfolk & Norwich Millennium Library, £2 on the door.
Readings by Naomi Alderman, Nii Parkes and Mick Jackson - all part of our Summer Reads campaign.

JM Coetzee: An Evening with Four South African Writers, Tuesday 22 June, 7.30pm, Norwich Playhouse, £14/£12/£10.
JM Coetzee heads a bill showcasing writing from his home country, South Africa. The three other writers are poets CJ Driver and Gabeba Baderoon and the impressive short story writer Zoe Wicomb.

Granta Readings: Going Back, Wednesday 23 June, 7-8.30pm, Thomas Paine Centre, UEA, £5.
Helping to celebrate the new volume of Granta Magazine, Andrew O’Hagan will read alongside Jon McGregor, Evie Wyld and Colin Grant.  

Australian Voices, Thursday 24 June, 7-8.30pm, UEA Drama Studio, £5.
Listen to three outstanding voices from down under read from their work: Chloe Hooper, Michelle de Kretser and Steven Amsterdam.

Worlds Film Screening: Disgrace, Sunday 27 June, 5.30pm, Cinema City, £8, member £6.
Come along and enjoy a special screening of the film adaptation of JM Coetzee’s Booker Prize winning novel Disgrace.

Up-to-date news from the Worlds Literature Festival

Posted By: Katy Carr, 21 June 2010

There's still time to book the last tickets for Coetzee's event tomorrow - but please hurry; at the time of writing there's only six left!

Coetzee will follow hot on the heels of our Summer Reads event this evening, featuring Naomi Alderman, Nii Parkes and  Mick Jackson, who’s driving in from Brighton as we speak. You can catch Nii and Mick on Radio Norfolk later on this week; we’ll be doing a pre-recorded interview later on today.

Simmone Howell, the delightful Australian novelist will be delivering her teen book group session later on today, a book which was apparently a gift to write as the female larger than life narrator sprang into life in six months. ‘They’re not usually that easy to write,’ she told me earlier. If you read the book however, you’ll feel that joyful ease – the book is fully formed and charged with the narrator’s easy wit.

As I write we’re also hosting the first of the Worlds Literature Festival workshops, we’ll keep you posted as to how they’re going, and Adrian Slatcher is preparing his report from the first writers’ round table, coming up soon.



The first public event last night took the form of three readings up at the UEA Drama Studio. Poet Kate Kilalea (below left) opened the evening, striding into the spotlight to read from her Carcanet collection One Eye'd Leigh. Kate described how important it can be to prepare the listener, leading them into the frame of mind in the way an architect would with a winding driveway; putting the listener in an appropriate frame of mind. This she did and frequently, so her alternative love poems full of dirty little creatures really hit the spot, as did her new six part piece, which she read without once looking down and which left the listener wanting more.



Henrietta Rose-Innes (above middle) continued the theme, reading from her novel and a short story (featuring her own burrowing creatures!), whilst Neel Mukherjee (above right) closed the evening with a scene from his novel, A Life Apart featuring his character Ritwik undergoing a frustrating evening with his 80 something charge who drunkenly asks him to read to her and then releases tantalising tit-bits from her life, before going under again, leaving him eager to hear more.

Which is a bit like how I feel now – eager for more of this week’s opportunities – and to discover more about the tantalising glimpses we’ve had into our writers’ intellectual and fictional worlds.

View images from last night's event on our Flickr page

Norwich UK City of Culture bid: full steam ahead!

Posted By: Richard White, 24 February 2010

Fantastic news!

Norwich is one of four cities shortlisted to become the first ever UK City of Culture in 2013.

With the winner announced in the summer, Writers’ Centre Norwich looks forward to continuing to support the bid led by Norwich City Council and the City of Norwich Partnership.

Our director, Chris Gribble, said:

“We are delighted at Norwich’s shortlisting for UK City of Culture. As the UK’s first International City of Refuge and with a bid to become England’s first UNESCO City of Literature well underway, the UK City of Culture accreditation would be well-deserved recognition for a vibrant, thriving and creative city.”

Culture Minister Margaret Hodge made the announcement earlier today, confirming Birmingham, Derry/Londonderry and Sheffield as the three other contenders.

Margaret Hodge said:

“Huge congratulations to the four cities in the final running for the 2013 UK City of Culture.  It’s a testament to their hard work – and dedication to culture – that they’ve come so far in what has proven to be a very tough competition.  I’m really pleased that we attracted such a strong and varied field.  It just goes to show the richness of culture across the UK.”

Find out more:

Eastern Daily Press article
News from the City of Norwich
Official press release

Life Changing Moments: Free Films at Fusion, The Forum, Norwich

Posted By: Katy Carr, 18 January 2010

140 Characters Films Showing at the Forum, Norwich, Jan 11-22nd

I realised that for years I had been having salt in my coffee and then I discovered sugar.

Come and see some thought-provoking 12-second films about coming-out on the giant Fusion screen at the Forum (Norwich and Norfolk Millennium Library) in Norwich from January 11th-22nd, 10am-5pm.

The films were inspired by 140 very, very short stories produced by members of the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender) community, their friends and families. All the stories were 140 characters or less – the length of a Tweet on Twitter.

For a taster of some of the films please go to www.12seconds.tv/channel/OUT140.

I wasn't out 2 my family. Nan saw me on TV on a Pride march with my girlfriend. She rang me & sed "Did you know your friend was a lesbian?"

The 140 character stories themselves are also very absorbing – go to www.twitter.com/OUT140 to read some funny, sad and poetic work. All stories and films are part of the 140 Characters project that Writers’ Centre Norwich has been working on with Norwich Pride and various other partners.

Read writer Ross Sutherland’s guide to writing very short stories.

For further enquiries please contact Michelle Savage 07985 409873 www.shellytelly.co.uk/OUT140 or Vince Laws 01263 587728 vincelaws@gmail.com 140 Characters is supported by the Forum Trust, City College, Writers’ Centre Norwich, and Norwich Pride, and is a What Next? project.