Writing West Midlands

Saying goodbye to 2009 is an opportunity to take stock and look forward to the future. For the Birmingham Book Festival and related projects it was perhaps our most significant year. When the Birmingham Book Festival was founded in 1999 by me (Jonathan Davidson) and my colleagues Helen Thomas and Julie Tait we hardly dared look a year ahead let alone a decade. Well, in that decade not only has the Festival flourished but an education programme has been added (Write On!) and more recently a writer-networking programme (The Writers’ Toolkit). While Helen and Julie moved on to other projects, I have been lucky (sic) enough to stay with the Festival, and have been joined by Sara Beadle as Festival Programmer (now Director of the Birmingham Book Festival) and most recently Joanne Penn (as Administrative Assistant). And, perhaps most importantly, we have have establishment of very active and supportive Board of Directors, able to help carry our work through the next decade.

The Board of Directors has already been instrumental in helping the Festival take the next, logical step – becoming Writing West Midlands and setting out to provide the best possible environment for creative writing to flourish in the region. Our two writer networking conference (The Writers’ Toolkit in 2008 and 2009) gave a mandate for this ambitious development. Both conferences demonstrated not only a need for emerging and established writers to gather together but the effectiveness of broker relationships between these writers and the wider world. As a case in point, the wonderful work being done by Mandy Ross and Polly Wright for the Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health Foundation Trust using creative writing with service users was a result of these two writers meeting at The Writers’ Toolkit Conference in 2008.

So, the future. Well, we will be developing a set of aims and objectives over the two months and sharing these through our website. But more importantly we will be simply doing new work and testing demand and effectiveness. Our Writing Squads and Write On Online projects for young writers (8 – 16 years) are a case in point. These are not prompted by policy or strategy but by a gut feeling that the future of creative writing in the West Midlands depends on supporting writers at all stages of their careers, including at the very beginning. We have managed to secure a modest amount of funding to make this happen (our thanks to the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation and Birmingham City Council) and we have professional writers in the region trained and eager to do this work. Both projects launch on Saturday 30th January 2010.

There will be many more new activities, we hope. Some run directly by Writing West Midlands and some brokered by us. If you have ideas, get in touch. 

Finally, we wish you a wonderful creative writing 2010!

Jonathan Davidson (Chief Executive, Writing West Midlands) and the Staff and Board of Directors of Writing West Midlands

Filed under: Writing West Midlands