I haven’t been able to sit down and write properly over the past week as all my focus has been taken up with a mini exhibition and performance for a 3 week literary and language festival called Words Over Waltham Forest #WOW.
Earlier in the year I put forward a proposal to perform Our Community, Our Word, Our Voice in the festival and it was accepted! I was absolutely thrilled as that meant that the voluntary organisation I run was not only going to have the chance to perform, but we were also featured in a programme with really high profile, Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, best selling authors such as Martina Cole and Dorothy Koomson, as well as some pretty fantastic, established organisations.
My voluntary organisation has only been up and running since January, and for the past few weeks I have been beating myself up over whether it was the right thing to get myself involved with quite a big event so soon!
Over the past 2 months, mothers who attend the sessions we run have been participating in workshops run by 2 of my closest friends, on the role of women and other related topics. Much of the work and discussion has looked at words. Words that explain how we feel as women, how we are perceived, what we like and more. This all contributed to the display that my sister in law on the left helped me put together.
My thought process behind this was that words and the definitions that we read in the dictionary can seem baron, almost clinical. But, as women (and humans!) we bring those words to life. As we give words a voice, we give them colour, we create the meaning, we give words emotions. We are the words.
This evening the children attending the workshops performed poems, speeches about how wonderful and diverse the borough we live in is and music. The night was magical!
To top it off, a good friend of mine danced with his group Goldrush. He taught the other members of the group to dance around 8 or 9 years ago and they just keep on getting better! One of the guys is Godson who was in the final of Got to Dance so it was a pretty amazing surprise for the audience and to the end of a great night!
Provocative Prose 