I spoke to third year students on De Montfort University’s Creative Writing Degree Course today, invited by course leader Jonathan Taylor and lecturer Will Buckingham. It was my usual canter through my twenty five years of work in literature development, pausing to consider how writers are used by organisations and the wider world and finishing up with posing a few questions about the migration of writing onto new platforms. By platforms, of course, I meant digital about I was happy to add live real time performance and book based. When you consider text-creativity to have a number of different platforms, none of which is necessarily more important than another, suddenly things become clearer. Just as stories for many people migrated from the oral to the written book platform so they are now moving from the written book to the written e-reader file or the audio file or even back to the oral platform. Nothing is new. There is nothing to worry about, except how writers moneterise their creativity. You cannot pass the hat round the digital crowd.
Despite the inclement weather, we have managed to soldier on at Midland Creative Projects, only closing the office on one day when there was no need for any of us to be in. Our enthusiasm for getting to work has been partly prompted by a flurry of e-mails and calls about various projects, in particular activities linked to our Writing West Midlands’ Learning Programme.
We are now in discussion with schools in Walsall and Northfield about developing bespoke projects and busy preparing a large creative writing project for a cluster of schools in Nechells. And today we are meeting with the examinations board OCR to discuss a creative writing project linked to their English curriculum.
Planning for the the Birmingham Book Festival are well on the way, particularly for our Spring Thing on Saturday 29th May 2010. We are about to appoint a new PR company to help us with communications, which is very exciting. In the meantime we have a poetry writing workshop with Roz Goddard in early February to promote as well as launching our Writing Squads – our Saturday writing clubs for young people.
More news soon.
2010 promises to be another exciting year for Midland Creative Projects Limited. Jonathan Davidson will be spending a good portion of his time as Chief Executive of the newly formed Writing West Midlands (the Literature Development Agency for the West Midlands) while Sara Beadle will take full responsibility for the Birmingham Book Festival, one of our most important clients. We will be ably supported by Joanne Penn, who started as Administrative Assistant in August 2009 and is now a valued member of our team.
Other ongoing work includes finishing a piece of consultancy for Essex County Council on the future development of the Essex Book Festival, developing new ways forward for the innovative West Midlands Readers’ Network and a fundraising project for Swindon Festival of Literature. We will also continue to work with The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, particularly on developing the Stratford Poetry Festival and hopefully on a new Poetry Performer in Residence project (a funding bid has just been submitted in partnership with Warwickshire, Solihull and Coventry public library services). Our work for the Go Dutch! project will continue, with a new season of events and further distribution of the Go Dutch! sampler of new Dutch writing.
Both Jonathan and Sara will be criss-crossing the country in the first few months of 2010. As well as the weekly trips to London for various project meetings, Jonathan will be attending a first meeting of a new network of Directors of Regional Literature/Writer Development Agencies in Leeds in February and the third Lit-Up Conference in Bristol, also in February. Sara will be visiting New Writing North in January, in particular to talk about how they manage the Durham Book Festival, and has various trips to London planned to meet publishers in preparation for our first Festival in a Day on Saturday 29th May and our main Birmingham Book Festival in October.
So, we are very busy, but, of course, always interested in interesting pieces of new work…
Happy New Year!
Midland Creative Projects Limited is an independent company working in the creative arts sector and specialising in literature development activities. We have offices in Birmingham and works across the UK. We are involved in a range of work, including project management, fundraising, consultancy, training and writing. Click on the tabs above for more information about us and what we do.