Big Venture Challenge 2013
We’re delighted to announce that The Reader Organisation has been unveiled as one of the winners of the Big Venture Challenge 2013.
The Big Venture Challenge is run by UnLtd, the leading provider of support to social entrepreneurs in the UK, and supports entrepreneurs by giving them access to business support, powerful connections and match funding to help them raise investment and deliver social impact at scale. Following a pilot in 2011, the programme is funded by the Big Lottery Fund to support a total of 100 new social entrepreneurs over the next three years.
The 2013 Big Venture Challenge saw social entrepreneurs from around the country apply to scale their ventures with an expert team. Just 30 were chosen and have been announced at the Big Venture Challenge launch today – and we’re very proud that The Reader Organisation is amongst them. Our Director Jane Davis and Managing Director Chris Catterall are down at the launch in London representing us, and will be looking forward to meeting the other winners at what promises to be an exciting day.
The future is already looking bright for The Reader Organisation, with our plans to develop The International Centre for Reading and Wellbeing at Calderstones, and being part of the Big Venture Challenge will build more opportunities for us to reach the widest range of Readers.
You can follow the launch of Big Venture Challenge throughout the day on Twitter @BigVentureChall or use the hashtag #BVC2013.
May’s Masterclass: A Novel Approach
A Novel Approach: What a novel brings to your shared reading group
Saturday 18th May, 10am-4pm
Cullompton Library, Exeter
Looking to start reading a novel with your shared reading group, but not sure how to go about it? Perhaps you’re already reading novels and are looking to refine your practice? Are you interested in the special quality that novels have when read aloud together?
This special Saturday Masterclass, led by The Reader Organisation’s Literary Learning Manager and The Reader magazine regular Casi Dylan, will cover all aspects of working with novels, from selection through to conclusion, and will make the case for working through longer works of fiction as a group.
“The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.” – E.M.Forster
Masterclasses are especially for Shared Reading Practitioners who have attended Read to Lead as part of The Reader Organisation’s Ongoing Learning provision, designed to improve shared reading practice and deepen understanding as a reader.
The last few places on this special weekend Masterclass in Exeter are available – places are free if you are within your first year of Ongoing Learning, and £55 otherwise. This cost includes lunch.
For more information on this Masterclass and to book your place, please contact Literary Learning Coordinator Roisin Hyland on roisinhyland@thereader.org.uk or call 0151 207 7207, with the details of the Read to Lead course you attended.
Featured Poem: Childhood Home by Lemn Sissay
Last week’s Featured Poem previewed our latest RISE event with John Burnside and Rita Ann Higgins in Liverpool in association with Writing on the Wall and In Other Words, and this week we’re reflecting back on another brilliant RISE event which took place last month with Leigh and Wigan Words Together Festival with award winning poet, writer, broadcaster and patron of The Reader Organisation Lemn Sissay.
Lemn was In Conversation with Jane at an inspiring and moving public event in Wigan, and also visited HMP Hindley to read three of his poems to the young people there. Beforehand, the lads who got to see Lemn as part of RISE shared reading his poems with Get Into Reading Wigan Project Manager Val Hannan. She describes how, at first reluctant, they were well and truly taken on a journey to Planet Lemn while reading the poems and some great discussion was sparked.
You can read the whole of Val’s reflection on the young people at HMP Hindley and Lemn’s visit by heading to our RISE blog, but for our Featured Poem we’re focusing on one of the pieces Lemn read at both of his RISE events, Childhood Home, and the reaction it got from the young men reading it for the first time.
The sense of sadness and isolation in the poem resonates further with their own situation.
‘The children nearby came to our secret garden/gazed at our mansion in disbelief
Either said they wished they lived here/Or that this was the den of the thief’
I ask them what they imagine the home to look like. One boy says ‘It’s like Harry Potter or something’ adding to this idea another boy chips in with ‘Yeah, it looks exciting, like you could have a laugh there’. ‘But it was our Narnia of food fights at midnight…’ adds weight to the initial image of this place as some Enid Blyton style boarding school or, in today’s context, J.K. Rowling’s ‘Hogwarts’ is the point of reference.
Keys begin to play a more ominous role in the poem and the boys pick up on this immediately:
‘But the rattle of rules and keys/Broke the magic – we all knew it couldn’t last…
The keys in cupboards, slamming security doors/Each child slowly retracts inside their self
Whispering ‘What am I being punished for?’
‘It’s like being in here’, someone says: ‘that’s all you can hear, the slamming of doors’. As we move further into the poem the sense of being unloved and unwanted causes the boys to reflect on their own situation. ‘Self-mutilation, screams and suicide/Of young people returned, return to sender…’ ‘At least we know we’ve got people who care about us when we get out of here, we’ve got somewhere to go,’ they all murmur in agreement.
Back on planet Lemn the boys see these poems come to life before their very eyes, they become even more powerful, even more explosive. I see them turn around to me or whisper ‘we did this one’ as they recognise the words of the poetry and hear them invested with new meaning. At first they are unsure how to react to Lemn, he is almost too crazy, they are not laughing with him but at him: ‘Are you on drugs?’ they ask; ‘Are you for real?’ ‘He’s off his head’ but as Lemn works his magic they warm to him and settle down for the ride. They laugh with genuine enjoyment and pleasure, they are keen to know more, hear more.
Childhood Home
The children nearby came to our secret garden
Gazed at our mansion in disbelief
Either said they wished they lived there
Or that this was the den of the thief
But it was our Narnia of food fights at midnight
Wet flannel battles in the halls
Fire extinguishers that lose their heads
We had nothing to lose – nothing at all
But the rattle of rules and keys,
Broke the magic – we all knew it couldn’t last
The alarm bells rang and rang and rang
In Emergency Break The Glass
And it’s no fun any more in here
The keys in cupboards, slamming security doors
Each child slowly retracts inside their self
Whispering ‘What am I being punished for?’
We’d been given booby-trapped time-bombs
Trigger wires hidden, strapped on the inside
It became a place of controlled explosions
Self-mutilation, screams and suicide
Of young people returned, return to sender
Midlit dorms of midnight’s moans
We might well have all been children
But this was never a children’s home
Lemn Sissay
New Brian Nellist Summer Course!
We are pleased to announce Brian Nellist’s newest Summer Course ‘Down to Earth’, beginning on Monday 13th May at 10:30 in The Lauries Centre, Birkenhead. This summer, join Brian to read tales from James Joyce, Chekhov and many more fabulous writers.
Brian’s courses are perfect for anyone who loves shared reading and getting a grip on great literature. Come and spend time with some brilliant readers, thinkers and teachers, where you can also meet new people and learn something new.
Prices are £60 or £30 for concessions (GIR group members/students/pensioners/ unemployed), or you can pay £10/£5 to drop in to a weekly session. All funds go towards supporting The Reader Organisation’s work.
To sign up, please contact Roisin Hyland on roisinhyland@thereader.org.uk or call 0151 207 7207
The Wild Writers’ Imaginarium
The Wild Writers’ Imaginarium
12-6.30pm, Saturday 11th May
Drop the Dumbells, Slater Street, Liverpool
Calling all budding writers – here’s your chance to step into a world of imagination, invention and inspiration, all decorated by thirteen very wild writers…
The Wild Writers’ Imaginarium is popping up for one day only as part of Writing on the Wall and In Other Words festivals in at the artist driven gallery ‘Drop the Dumbells’ on Slater Street, Liverpool, this Saturday. The Imaginarium – an exhibition set in a single room – will play host to some of the city’s emerging and upcoming talent, all hoping to inspire local people of all ages to get writing.
Throughout the day, the Wild Writers – coming from a wide range of literary backgrounds – will be on hand to talk about creative writing and guide visitors through the Imaginarium. There’ll be music, art, talks, live readings and short plays, a poetry vending machine, story tent and camp fire and an after party – tons to get your creative juices flowing and inspired to join the bursting Liverpool literary scene.
For more information, visit The Wild Writers’ Imaginarium blog or join in with the tweets from the Wild Writers at Wilde Towers at @WildWriters .
What are the books that have built you?
There’s just a week to go until we head to the British Library Conference Centre for The Reader Organisation’s fourth annual National Conference, Shared Reading for Healthy Communities. It promises to be an enriching, enlightening day providing lots of inspirational answers to many burning questions about shared reading and public and mental health, libraries, education, addiction recovery, and dementia care.
As well as exploring the present and looking to the future to discover how a working, creative community can be built on reading, we’ll also be finding out how reading can profoundly affect the life of an individual. Shadow Health Secretary Andy Burnham MP will be joining us in London, rounding off our ‘Healthy People’ morning session by discussing the difference reading English has made to his life and revealing the books that have built him.
In anticipation, we would love to know: which books have built you? Is there something that you read when you were young that taught you a valuable life lesson outside of the classroom? Perhaps a book that marked a coming-of-age watershed? Do you have a novel that defines your life up to now and is always one to revisit?
We’ve already had some great selections on Twitter, including To Kill A Mockingbird, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Noughts and Crosses, Little Women and Great Expectations, provoking a range of responses: bravery, self-confidence, empowerment, as well as the tough lesson that life doesn’t always work out the way you think it will but equally, the importance of keeping going.
Share yours with us here on The Reader Online, over on Twitter @thereaderorg (use the hashtag #TROConf so we can see your choices) or on our Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/thereaderorg
RISE presents John Burnside and Rita Ann Higgins
RISE: John Burnside and Rita Ann Higgins
7.30pm, Thursday 9th May
LEAF, Bold Street, Liverpool, L1 4EZ
If you’re in Liverpool tomorrow evening and fancy a night in the company of two award-winning poets then you’re in luck, as our latest public RISE event is bringing John Burnside and Rita Ann Higgins to the city.
In partnership with Writing on the Wall and as part of the In Other Words festival, John and Rita will be reading from and discussing their work at LEAF, following earlier readings in HMP Liverpool and in-patient units in Merseycare NHS Trust and 5 Boroughs Partnership NHS Foundation Trust respectively as part of our Reading in Secure Environments (RISE) project.
John Burnside is one of only two poets to win both the Forward Poetry Prize and the TS Eliot prize for the same book, Black Cat Bone and has been called “a Master of Language” by Hilary Mantel. Rita Ann Higgins has been described as both provocative and heart-warming, with Ruth Padel writing that her poems have “a brilliantly spiky, surreal blend of humour and social issues.”
Tickets cost £6/£4 concessions but there is a special two for the price of one offer if you enter the code WoW at the booking page or at the Philharmonic Hall Box Office, Hope Street, Liverpool, L1 9BH.
