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Garrie Fletcher

~ writing and all that

Garrie Fletcher

Category Archives: creativity

Writing Begets Writing

11 Friday Jul 2014

Posted by fletcherski in creativity, Mental Health, Short Stories, teaching, workshops, writing

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Birmingham, creative writing, creative writing workshop, creativity, Hearth, Mental Health, mental health practitioner, short stories, uk, workshops, writing

I’ve recently been involved with the wonderful Hearth organisation. Founded by Polly Wright, the artistic director, Hearth aims to use the arts to animate key issues in mental health, social care and the humanities, and to promote well-being. I’ve been enlisted, as part of the Writing Begets Writing initiative, to deliver a creative writing workshop in a mental health setting. I’ll be working alongside a mental health practitioner who will continue the work that I start, promoting creative writing as practice to promote well-being and who will encourage the service users to submit work to a short story anthology.

workshop

Fellow writers (left-right) Eugene Egan, Andy Cashmore and Vim Ayadurai

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’m really looking forward to working in this field as a writer. I have some experience of working with people who need mental health support but this will be the first time I’ve worked in this setting as a writer. The feedback from mental health service users regarding the benefits of creative writing were incredible.

You can find out more about this project and Hearth here.

Lost Districts: Text and Image.

27 Friday Jun 2014

Posted by fletcherski in Art, competitions, creativity, prize money, Short Stories

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Art, Birmingham, Birmingham City, Birmingham Literature Festival, Chaz Brenchley, Competition, Districts, Joel Lane, Lost Districts, Photography, Poetry, Prize Money, short stories, stunning images, Text and Image, uk

Hey, there’s a mighty cool project kicking off in Birmingham City called Lost Districts.

IMG_5349Lost Districts are looking to link the dark, moving, writing of the sadly departed Joel Lane with stunning images from photographers and artists.

At the moment they’re gathering extracts of text from Joel’s work, which was predominately set in the West Midlands, getting ready to draw up a list of ten sites that they want images for. The project will take place over the ten days of the Birmingham Literature Festival. Each day a winning image will be chosen and from those ten images an overall winner will receive £100.

So if you’re a budding artist, or a demon with a lens, get over to their site and read on for more details here.

If you’re unfamiliar with Joel’s work you should change that a.s.a.p. This quote from Chaz Brenchley, author of Shelter, Blood Waters, The Garden and other critically acclaimed works of crime fiction, should help:

“Joel Lane documents a life we don’t quite live, in a city we can’t quite find: half glimpsed and half imagined, we know it’s out there somewhere. Waiting, maybe. Mixing fear with desire, reputation with regret. Touching the blood-beat of our secret hunger with the rhythms of a music that never felt alien till now. Wasted lives, with never a wasted word. It’s an extraordinary achievement: vivid as neon, real as rain. Devastating.”

 

Tweeted Objects

20 Thursday Feb 2014

Posted by fletcherski in creativity, Short Stories, Think Tank, workshops, writing

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Birmingham Museums, MCC, Think Tank, tweeted fiction, uk, writing, young writers

A huge thanks to all the staff and kids who were at the Tweeted Objects workshop on Tuesday. I was made to feel really welcome and was allowed to wander through the stored items in the warehouse, which has to be seen to be believed. Extra thanks to Lynsey for organising it all and for introducing me to Story Cubes. Here are some pics of the day.

Kipper ties!

Kipper ties!

Happy scribbler.

Happy scribbler.

The cabbage hat.

The cabbage hat.

Inside the vaults.

Inside the vaults.

The kids produced some great tweeted fiction and managed to tell some marvellous stories in 140 characters or less. Tales of cabbage hats, of cats trapped in boxes and the bejewelled wonder of a jealous prince…

Check out the exhibition in May to see their work and to tweet your own. I’ll post full details nearer the time.

Tweeters of the Lost Ark

11 Tuesday Feb 2014

Posted by fletcherski in creativity, Event, teaching, workshops, writing

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13-16yr olds, 140 charcters, Birmingham, Birmingham Museum, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, Dollman Street Collection, kipper ties, make every word count, tweeted objects, tweeted stories, young writers

On Tuesday, the 18th of February, 2014, I shall be working with young writers at  Birmingham Museum’s Dollman Street Collection.

This is a warehouse full of items that the museum is unable to exhibit permanently; picture the huge warehouse at the end of Indiana Jones’ Raiders of the Lost Ark, now bring the scale down a tad and instead of sealed crates imagine engine parts, huge, ornate clock brackets, antique computers and old prototype cars that never saw production.

Giddy up

Giddy up

Dollman street triangleYou get a very rough idea from these pictures of the type of thing you can elect to discover there.

This workshop is open to children aged 13-16 and will allow the children to explore this great space and then to handle objects from the collection.

I’ve been sent some pictures of the objects and they’re rather marvellous: kipper ties, weird hats, strange cats and other stuff I can’t identify. I’ll be putting the kids through a series of warm up exercises and focused tasks that lead up to them writing about the objects in no more than 140 characters (that includes spaces, punctuation etc.) just like a tweet, hence the title.

I’m really looking forward to this. I think it’s a great idea and will help them to think about editing and getting to the heart of writing: make every word count.

Here’s a rough outline for the session:

12.00 Arrive at MCC
12.15-12.30- Tour of the stores
12.30- 1.00- Lunch
1.00- 1.30- Introduction to the objects by a curator
1.30- 3.30- Facilitated session to create the interpretive material 4.00- Collection by parents

Here’s the brief:

Outline

  • This project will utilise the interpretation device of creating ‘Twitter Labels’. This means producing a piece of creative writing about an object using a max- imum of 140 characters, i.e. the method of delivery on the microblogging, so- cial media site ‘Twitter’. This challenging method of interpretation is inspired by modern tends in twitter story writing where authors are using a single tweet or series of tweets to tell a story. We would like the participants to create a story or piece of creative writing using an object as inspiration, in the format of a tweet. We are not looking for historical information about the object, i.e. its date, name etc. that information will also be displayed alongside.

Participants will be working with objects from the ‘Patterns and Textures’ sec- tion of the exhibition including examples of textile, glass, carved wood and more.

dollman_street_racks2-300x225I’m not sure who you contact if you have a young one who’d be interested in this project but you could try Dollman Street, just click on this link for details Dollman Street.

Cheers

Back in the saddle

04 Saturday Jan 2014

Posted by fletcherski in creativity, writing

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Neil Gaiman, writing, writing tips

After a very excessive and tiring festive season it’s now time to get back to the serious business of writing. To help me, and any of you, that find yourselves in this situation, I thought I’d post Neil Gaiman’s, all important, writing tips. Read, digest and then write.

20140104-134331.jpg

Write

Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.

Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.

Put it aside. Read it pretending you’ve never read it before. Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is.

Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.

Fix it. Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.

Laugh at your own jokes.

The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it ­honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

Creativity and work.

15 Sunday Dec 2013

Posted by fletcherski in creativity, work

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creativity, management, productivity, uk, work

20131215-102208.jpg

A fine piece from Henry Potter in the Guardian on how we only use 15% of our brains whilst at work. Creativity is important in the work place, especially in non creative areas. Take a couple of minutes to read it and then go and make a Christmas Tree out of staff meeting minutes. Click on the link below.

Conformity is killing creativity.

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