Category: Uncategorized
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Heartfelt
heartfelt bright blue, red, yellow I can’t stop looking but then we have to cover it with white wool water and soap turn and rub, press and mould she says you will feel when it is felt the famous writer tells us my kind only have feelings for ourselves I can’t see how the colours…
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Notes from the Hip Yak Poetry School
Notes from a facilitator at the Hip Yak Poetry School (Run by the Hip Yak Poetry Shack for poets in the South West, May 23-6, 2019) DIY culture. I was born to it. Methodists, cloggers. But often it’s not just DIY, it’s ask someone else and before you know it you’re all Giddens’ mobile, flexible…
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Autism and the Arts Festival (University of Kent): 10 Things I Learned
A blue line was painted on the floor to link all the buildings used as venues at the Autism and the Arts Festival. The organiser, the heroic academic Shaun May had hoped for something more like this: Not Actual Blue Line but it ended up more like this (though with more waves, diversions, paint splashes…
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Touring a Show: The Good Stuff and the Challenges
I’m sitting in an M and S cafe failing to start writing my next show and the pilot episode of a sitcom. Instead, I’ll record some of the learning from touring my show “Where There’s Muck There’s Bras” and hopefully be useful to another stand up/poet/spoken word theatre person if not myself. It has been…
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Lifting the Lid (Tins Tins Tins poem for Barnsley Museums)
I was commissioned to write a poem for the launch of the “Tins Tins Tins” exhibition, celebrating the Barnsley Canister Company and the beautiful tins they produced. Loved hearing more from women who worked there in the seventies about factory and office life. (Especially as I’m a product of seventies office life- born of an…
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Northern Women Will Laugh in the Face of Future Hard Times- as Usual #IWD
Saying that my current touring show “Where There’s Muck There’s Bras” is about forgotten Northern women, makes it sound as if the amnesia is just historical- but, as one of my characters, Mother Shipton (who was really Ursula Sontheil, resilient daughter of a fifteen year old single mother) says “In order to be able to…
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A Small DVLA-inspired Poem: Stuck in the Mud
We have clearly muddied the waters that is, they are no longer clear because of the mud it’s not that we’ve muddied them which then somehow caused them to run clear that is, drivers, look, our use of language is so excellent that although we used to say you should notify us of an Autism…
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Pros and Cons of An Adult Autism Diagnosis
I don’t find “Why did you get a diagnosis?” a simple question to answer. In a way perhaps “The cost-benefit analysis finally worked out in favour of trying to get one at the same time as I thought I actually would get diagnosed” is the truest. Just as I had conversations about whether I should…
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Do You Know These Authors Who “Divide their Time”?
(Commission from The Verb on Radio 3 about writers who “divide their time” usually between cultural capitals). https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0002sbs Craig McUrgent is a Booker prize winning novelist who divides his time between London and a peasant village in the Auvergne where he dines simply on good bread, wine and stories about his time guest lecturing at…
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How to Work With/For An Autistic Person (from arts organisations to doctors and more)
I am writing this from a position of still-learning about others*, increasing self-knowledge and a growing recognition that the preconceptions (including, until recently, my own) many people have about autistic people are either sketchy or plain wrong. Here’s some stuff I wish people knew. At the same time, I could include about a thousand caveats.…
Kate Fox. Writer, Broadcaster and Performer: Where There's Muck, There's Bras. 