Shoreham Wordfest (25th August 2020)
Wordfest August Newsletter
Poems for Our Time
Shoreham Wordfest will launch Lines from the Lockdown in September, a book of children’s poetry inspired by their hopes, fears, observations and feelings during school closures this year. We are thrilled with the response to the home-schooling materials developed by Kay Walton of Rap’n’Rhyme which are still available at here
We received 114 poems from 18 local schools in Adur and other West Sussex schools who asked to join the project. Our Schools and Community Lead, Chrissie Ient, and Kay are now putting a beautiful book together with illustrations. We hope we can have a celebratory event at the beginning of October for the young poets, their families and their schools – all dependent on whether we can do so in a safe way, meeting government guidelines.
The project was funded by Adur District Council, and we think it will be an important record of how children responded to this uniquely challenging time of Covid 19.
Poetry and Short Story Competitions
We were thrilled to receive 171 entries to the 10-line poetry competition, which closed on 1 August, and 271 10-word stories. Launched to mark our 10th annual Wordfest, the competition has been a great success. The entries are now with the judges, John McCulloch and Catherine Smith. An announcement of the prize winners will be made in September, and the team will produce an anthology of the top entries.
Please keep the date of the 11th October, when we are still planning to have a small, socially distanced, Poetry, Story & Music Evening at Ropetackle. Judges John McCulloch and Catherine Smith will read their own work, as well as present to and comment on the winners. We’ll also have local performance poet Katrina Quinn and local musicians Ben & Alfie. As the audience numbers will be limited we are aiming to record the event so people can also watch on-line.
Wordfest Local and Ropetackle Together
Now that live indoor events can go ahead, with the required social distancing and hygiene arrangements in place, we are delighted to be working with Ropetackle Arts Centre to organise events during the autumn, featuring some of the considerable talent we have locally. This will include a new theatre piece by Janet Behan.
Ropetackle has been successfully showing films since the beginning of August so we hope people will also be keen to return to see some live performances. We are in discussion with various authors, playwrights and musicians and will be able to announce the programme in the next few weeks. As the number of seats is restricted for the time being, we are aiming to record and live-stream some of the events so people can also enjoy them on-line.