Bridport Literary Festival is supporting Bridport-based charity The Bank of Dreams and Nightmares with a special event during this year’s BridLit.
The Bank runs free, child-led creative writing workshops for young people from all backgrounds, encouraging them to use their creativity in a safe space.
As part of this year’s BridLit, it’s running a series of workshops with TS Eliot Prize winning poet Joelle Taylor.
Twelve young people, aged between 13 and 18, will be attending two workshop weekends to explore what they want to say and how they want to tell their stories – whether it be in poetry, spoken word, storytelling, monologue, rap, song or even comedy – and on the third weekend they will perform their piece to a live audience.
This event will take place at Bridport Arts Centre on Sunday 5 November at 7pm. Tickets are available from Bridport Tourist Information Centre on 01308 424901.
The festival event is free to attend for under-19s (who still need a ticket to get in) and £5 for 19s and over.
Festival director Tanya Bruce-Lockhart said the festival was pleased to give financial support to The Bank of Dreams and Nightmares for the project.
She added: ‘We hugely admire the work and creative endeavour that Bank of Dreams and Nightmares brings to schools and young people in the town and beyond, and with their emphasis on storytelling and valuing the written and spoken word, it is a natural fit for the BridLit.
‘We look forward to seeing the results of this exciting project.’
As part of their ongoing work in the community, each child creates a story that gets released into the real world, as a published book, anthology of poems, podcast or even a play.
Nick Goldsmith, director of The Bank of Dreams and Nightmares, said: ‘We want children to see that their writing will be taken seriously, show them the possibilities of what can be achieved, and make those achievements a reality.
‘In the last year, children have become published authors, newspaper journalists, podcast creators, written campaign videos to inspire local change and even been part of creating a play for a national puppet touring company.’
Joelle Taylor is an award-winning poet and author who, prior to the pandemic, completed a world tour with her collection, Songs My Enemy Taught Me.
She founded SLAMbassadors, the UK national youth poetry slam championships, as well as the international spoken-word project, Borderlines. She is widely anthologised, the author of four collections of poetry and is currently completing her debut collection of interconnecting short stories, The Night Alphabet.
Her new poetry collection, C+NTO & Othered Poems. was published in June 2021 and is the subject of the Radio 4 arts documentary Butch. C+nto was winner of the T.S Eliot Prize 2021. Joelle has received a Changemaker Award from the Southbank Centre, a Fellowship of the RSA, and her poem, Valentine, was highly commended in the Forward Prize.
She is a co-curator and host of Out- Spoken Live, the UK’s premier poetry and music club currently resident at the Southbank Centre. She is the commissioning editor at Out-Spoken Press 2020-2022. · For more information about The Bank of Dreams and Nightmares, visit thebankofdreamsandnightmares.org
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