READING
ALONG THE LINE
Three Poetry Readings for Writing on the Wall
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HEXHAM Cogito Bookshop, Hexham |
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Penny Grennan is an experienced writer and creative writing tutor, with a background in Archaeology, who writes both poetry and prose. She led a community based creative writing workshops in Hexham.
The writing group comprised 9 people all of whom were experienced writers. The aim of the workshops was to allow for freedom of ideas based on structured activities, which has resulted in historical writing, monologues, reports and contemporary poetry being produced.
Penny read from work in progress and her poems included those produced during creative writing workshops as well as commissioned pieces.
Her work reflects the spirit of place as well as the physical form of the remains, with one poem mimicking the layout of a roman fort. Her poems are accessible, thought provoking and often humorous.
Participants of the creative writing workshops also read their work which spanned a range of forms and centuries, including a long thin piece of writing of 81 lines that had been written by the group as if they were playing consequences.
NEWCASTLE The Cumberland Arms, |
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Ellen Phethean
was Writer in Residence for the Centre for Children's Books and
Writing On the Wall Project.
She organised workshops in Byker and ran a writing group
in the Cumberland Arms; all places close to the line of the Wall. Much
of her work has focused in some way on people and place, featuring the
themes and legacy of the Wall both Roman and modern. Arising from this
she read some new poems taken from a larger narrative, working title
‘Wall’, about a fictional family who live in Byker Wall;
which examines
how walls - real and metaphorical - can create barriers between people,
and how they are overcome.
Bill read from Over the Wall, a sequence of poems
which explored the landscape and language of the countryside of the
Wall - past and present, north and south. Subjects ranged from the commuter's
glimpses of wildlife on the A69 to the works of a fictitious Latin poet,
and included bursts of dialect, the song of a paranoid border patrol,
reflections on recovering a Roman fort, and radio reception inside the
Tyne Tunnel.
CARLISLE Tullie House Museum |
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Angela Locke read from existing work around the themes of breaching walls in the invisible world, the tangible and intangible landscapes that shape our sense of who we are. She also premiered the first of her poem cycle Walls at the World’s End - a Writing on the Wall commission.
Jacob Polley
read from The Brink, which
was written over the last five years. The book is about domesticity,
seas and snow and is inspired by a rural upbringing and the flat desolation
of the Solway Firth through which the route of Hadrian’s Wall
runs.
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