Burning Bright

There’s much ahead this year including a new project – Liverpool Elegies (LE) – starting at the end of January.  This is a North End Writers project, funded by Liverpool NHS Clinical Commissioning Group for which I’ll be Project Lead.  It is a creative writing and arts project particularly for people who have had significant experiences of loss.  It may seem a gloomy approach to creativity but it is in fact an honest and open starting point.  Loss is at the heart of so much sadness and distress, whether it is associated with life changing events like retirement or losing a job or relationship or grief following bereavement or illness, that it seems a strong starting point for building a creative project.

We all know what it is like to lose something or someone and for some of us these experiences mark stages of self knowledge and growth; but for many they also mark times of anxiety, struggle and bewilderment.  Liverpool Elegies will provide a safe place to explore such difficult experiences through shared reading, creative writing, making new things, discussion, walks, films, conversation, new friendships.  The open day event will be on 27th January when I will present some of my own work to our LE participants , alongside our Visiting Writer, Aileen La Tourette and Project Assistant, Maria Isakova Bennett who is an artist and poet.  I am excited to be working with these excellent women – and look forward to meeting our extraordinary project members.

I’ll be on Radio Merseyside in the morning with Tricia Hagan (Chair of Trustees for North End Writers), on the Helen Jones programme, to promote the project.  I will need to take something to read.  Perhaps this wonderful poem?

After great pain, a formal feeling comes –
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –
The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’
And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?

The Feet, mechanical, go round –
A Wooden way
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought –
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone –

This is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –

Emily Dickinson      (Poem 372)