A test

Hi all, this will be my first official blog on here or any where else. No image as yet but as the image i was going to use was a pic of me dressed up as the invisible man, i guess it doesn’t make much difference.

Anyway, i’m a writer and performer from Stockton on Tees. I should shortly be embarking on a Myplace project in the town of Thornaby, Teesside and Benwell, Newcasle, based around notions of journeys.

This first blog is really just a bit of a test and to introduce myself.

So, very briefly, about me:

I’m 28 and live in Stockton on Tees.

I perform regularly across the North East as a performance poet and deliver creative writing workshops in community settings.

I also perform as characters such as ‘Thomas Oswald Spennymoore’ a self righteous philosopher and troubadour and as ‘The Invisible Man.’

I am a member of Monkfish Wordtank a multi media spoken word collective.

I have never written a blog before.

Met up with the team I’ll be working with on the Myplace project in Newcastle the other day and we got in some workshop dates and discussed some ideas. We’re aiming to create some groups in the two libraries we’ll be working with and get them thinking about notions of place and how to ‘map’ it creativity. We’ll be rolling out some physical maps of the areas an hopefully getting people to share memories/experiences and then perhaps creating ‘mythical’ maps or maps based on formative expericnes. We don’t want it to dissolve into a rose tinted ‘weren’t things great back in my day’ sort of thing though, but it’ll be interesting to see what people come up with. We’ll then be looking at creating stories and poems and putting those poems to music for a performance. I’ll be looking to create some work of my own from that too as well as generally being on hand in the libraries. We also thought that, as we’re working in libraries, we might get a blank book that people can take out on loan for a week or so, writing the first line of a poem or story and handing it back in for some else to take out and take up the story, with me adding and editing in between. Reckon some really great things could come out of that!

Bye for now

Mike