EVENT ARCHIVES

Writing for Performance

with Jackie Kay

This workshop took place on friday 27 - Sunday 29 February 2004 at the Nuffield Theatre, Lancaster

Please click here to see examples of participants' writing from the workshop

Jackie Kay was born and brought up in Scotland. She has published three collections of poetry for adults – The Adoption Papers (winner of a Forward Prize, a Saltire Award and a Scottish Arts Council Book Award), Other Lovers (which won the Somerset Maugham Award) and Off Colour (shortlisted for the 1999 TS Eliot Award). She gives readings of her work across the country. She has also written three collections of poetry for children. Her first novel, Trumpet (Picador, 1998) won the Guardian Fiction Prize, a Scottish Arts Council Book Award and The Author’s Club First Novel Award. It was also on the shortlist for the IMPAC award. She has written for the stage and television and her libretto Twice Through the Heart was performed at the Aldeburgh Festival and the Queen Elizabeth Hall with composer Mark Anthony Turnage. Her book about the blues singer, Bessie Smith, Bessie, is published by Absolute Press.

This was an enlivening experience that left me feeling poetically nurtured and challenged. Jackie Kay brought a warmth and ease to the group that is hard to describe on paper. Her soft accent and superb sense of humour enabled a disparate group of women to come together in a positive and companionable way and enjoy writing and sharing their work together.

I began and worked on one story and three poems throughout the weekend. Moreover, I came away with some new skills and techniques for writing. In truth these were not new, but rather met afresh and met with different eyes. These were key issues in language and literature; attention to voice, character and place. Discussions of the placing of emotions and the vehicles through which we can describe our human experience. The use and function of our imagination in writing poetry was discussed, as was form and structure.

RQ