Secret City - The Edwardian Cloakroom, Bristol - 13th-19th October.

Me and my friend Ana are very excited as it is nearly time for our residency at The Edwardian Cloakroom in Bristol. Here is a blurb I wrote about it and the flyer. Also please contact me if you would be interested in bringing any school or community groups in for a free workshop. Please also note there will be a performance at 7pm on Saturday 18th October. Please drop by!

Secret City is a collaborative, evolving, drop-in writing installation that will be created over the week of the 13th of October in the Edwardian Cloakroom (Woodland Road/Park Row) by the writers Alice Maddicott and Ana Seferovic with help from members of the Bristol public. Alice and Ana will be resident in the cloakroom, spending the whole week creating work inspired by the setting, its atmosphere, history and the surrounding area, as well as old photos and objects, playing with the conventions of found notes, lists, graffiti and anonymous messages to create an immersive archive of writing that will transform the cloakroom as the week progresses. Members of the public, as well as any school or community groups who are interested, are invited to drop by and contribute to the installation, leaving their own stories, memories, creative interpretations to help build this evolving body of site-specific work. The residency will culminate in a performance on Saturday 18th (7pm - time to be confirmed) where people are invited to come back and read their work from the installation, as well as listen to Alice, Ana and local musicians. The installation will also be documented to form an archive of imagination and interpretation - of thought rather than fact - that will hopefully allow the project to continue to evolve after its physical completion.

The Broadsheet.

I should have posted this earlier as the launch was last week as part of the Exeter Poetry Festival, but I was thrilled that my poem "Suspension" was chosen to be in the launch of The Broadsheet, a new poetry magazine and the brainchild of Simon Williams - currently the Bard of Exeter! I sadly had to miss the launch as I was at a conference as part of the Bath Children's Lit Fest, but I would encourage you to investigate. If you want to buy a copy I would get in contact with Simon via his website http://simonwilliamspoet.moonfruit.com
I managed to find a photo of the launch I missed!

The Story Republic

As mentioned in the previous post I have recently been thrilled to be working with KEAP (Kernow Education Arts Partnership) on the Arts Council funded project The Story Republic. This has seen me work in nine schools across Cornwall, and has involved many more schools than this and lots of other writers and artists. This has led to a wonderful body of work being created by children and teenagers inspired by Cornwall and the poetry of Charles Causley. This work has recently been displayed in a travelling exhibition, which this week will come to The Exchange gallery in Penzance. It will open on the 24th, which is this Wednesday. There is a website for the project, which is now up and running, and there is a library where you can upload your work. Do visit it at www.thestoryrepublic.co.uk

It has been a wonderful project and it feels quite strange that my work in schools for this part of it is over! But here are some photos of the work I created with Constantine Primary School. They are banners showing maps of imaginary versions of Constantine, including pockets containing miniature books of the children's writing. I would also encourage you to watch the video of the work created by Mousehole school in my previous post. There was so much more as well! If you are in Penzance this week do pop along to The Exchange and check it out.

Neverending Chimes - Mousehole School

I was lucky recently to spend a day with Class 4 at Mousehole school near Penzance as part of The Story Republic project I have been working on with KEAP. We spent the morning exploring the village and gathering ideas for interesting poetic descriptions, then in the afternoon we wrote a group poem using them. The children were originally keen to write their own Mousehole version of "As I go down Zig Zag" by Charles Causley, but it ended up being much more dreamy and strange in a wonderful way. The children then worked with artist Jonathan Hayter to create an animation using the poem they created with me as the soundtrack. And now here it is!

Penair Lit Fest this weekend

I will be running a site-specific poetry creating workshop this Saturday at the Penair Literary and Arts Festival, St Clement, Truro - it starts at 11 and is aimed roughly at 9-14 year olds though other ages I'm sure are welcome. So yes do come along and join in if you fancy. I am also giving a reading of my work...

Belgrade Poetry Festival

I just got back from reading at the Belgrade poetry festival. It was really great and I met some lovely people - poets and translators. Me and Ana did a live performance of part three of The City and I also read some of my other poems more informally in a cafe. There was much beer and laughter. Here is a link to the programme where you can read a bit of me and Ana's work in Serbian and see the other poets... http://trgnisepoezija.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/alis-medikot-ana-seferovic.html

Calling all collectors!

Do you, or does someone you know, have a collection - it doesn't matter how big or small or esoteric? Do you have a space or selection of objects that is like your own miniature museum in a corner of your house? A windowsill? A cabinet of curiosities? Have you organised an exhibition in a non-traditional space? Do you have an interesting way of curating the world around you? If so I would love to hear from you for my other blog museeme, which can be found here. So please message me!

Poetry Pasties

I was really thrilled to be working for a couple of days in Veryan School on the Roseland peninsula last week, for the local Under Our Feet creative project in schools. The first morning was spent cooking and we made fantastical pasty creatures with wings and horns and tails. We spent the afternoon then working on the characters of our creatures and creating stories. Day two was spent working on atmosphere and poetry (including changing how one feels in a room by finding a special place - including the bin it would seem!), culminating in a craft afternoon where we made what can only be described as Dada poetry pasties - cardboard pasty type objects filled with lines from the children's earlier poems and descriptive work like ingredients to be shaken up to make a new recipe for a poem each time. Tristan Tzara would be proud...!

Museeme - my new blog!

Today I have launched my new project - museeme, a celebration of stuff in a virtual world - a blog which seeks to explore the definition of what a museum and curation can be, all the strange personal and public museums, archives and collections of the world, and the hidden stories and meanings behind groups of objects, places and art works. Everybody is welcome to submit ideas for featured collections, reviews, articles etc, so do check it out at http://museeme.blogspot.co.uk, and please list it in your links if you like it.

The Car Boot Museum

Woo new project (that kind of fits with all my old projects)! Combining two of my favourite things, personal archives and car-boot sales, this project will also tie in with my new penpal writing and illustration collaborations. I love pop up museums - I remember being in Berlin about 8 years ago and finding what seemed like galleries open at 2am that the next day were somewhere else. Looking back it almost seems like I was imagining things, but I'm pretty sure it was real. Later that year I briefly lived in Paris and I remember this room under the post office on Rue Oberkampf where I saw handsome boys apparently randomly building miniature wooden rollercoasters - I now know that it was a gallery, but I have never forgot the delight at finding art in such an unexpected place (though I have to say in this case I kind of wished it hadn't been a gallery but more of an art guerilla affair - handsome boys building rollercoasters for random fun is like my perfect dream!).

The Car Boot Museum will stop and pop up wherever it seems is a good place, be it the side of the road (I'm hoping a couple of foreign road trips can be incorporated), a car park, an empty field (cows deserve art too) or outside a friend's house, and the inside of the car boot will contain text and images, created by me and friends collaboratively, or found things that fit as an almost memory atlas that is illustrated anew by each place it is viewed in. I was also thinking a lot about the Mnemosyne Atlas (see previous post on said marvel) and how we collate images and link things in our heads. The black voids in the display here are as important as the images in that the space represents the "ghost links" between things that can be filled in by people's imaginations. This completion by the reader/viewer has always been an important part of my work and I hope this project will explore and enable some of these ideas further. I also love the idea of drawing on that feeling at car boot sales when you peer inside a stranger's car not knowing what treasures you might find... It has a treasure hunt quality which also fits with my projects! And a travelling cabinet of curiosities one...

Soooo... Who wants to join in?

Supernova rocks (almost)!

Wooo the wonderful internationally collaborative Supernova poetry anthology I am in is off to the printers and the website with extra work will be live before too long! I am sooo excited that this wonderful project from the Auropolis folks in Belgrade is soon to see the light. I will post again when it is available. Here is my super posey autofictional poetess portrait for my biog - I was going for the intrepid turn of the century lady explorer returns and has to give a poetry reading at a Royal Geographical Society dinner look...? Taken by my sister.

Call out for silver ghosts (collaborators)...

Hello friends,

This is a call out for anyone who wants to participate in expanding my projects overseas. The miniature books project has taken place in Serbia and Georgia but if anyone would like me to send them some mini books to hide round their local city let me know. Also I am looking for illustrator creative "pen pals" for a new collaborative project whereby I send you a piece of writing, you send me a drawing based on it, I send back writing based on that etc etc... Finished illustrated letter books will be published here and possibly as an and the ghosts so silver publication if I finally launch that side of things properly! I am quite interested in people whose style is quite different to my writing - ie someone who creates crazy monster worlds that would be an interesting juxtaposition against my romantic dreamy strangeness, or someone who does quite clinical technical drawing for the same reason, but I am open to all possibilities. I was reminded yesterday of how amazing kids' art is too, when running Christmas decoration making workshops for The Eden Project (though for trees not the geodesic domes sadly), so if you have any kids or a younger sibling or nephew/niece etc who might like to draw some pictures that could be amazing and I would make sure the text was suitable for children. Also if you fancy doing a post-it trail or anything let me know! Details of all my projects can be seen on my website here.

Alice x

Tornadoes...

Clevedon Pier, North Somerset, December 2002.

Of pockets and post-its...

Here are the rest of and the ghosts so silver's current projects. I will add more as they occur and update on the existing ones as they develop, including start locations and dates for treasure hunt stories, and new miniature books that are returned. We always welcome feedback, as well as your ideas about memory, place and stories...

Pocket pieces.

For this project I write fragments of stories or stand-alone sentences on old torn bits of A4, or old receipts, so they look like the sort of thing anyone would find in an uncleared-out pocket. I then go and put them in the pockets of new clothes in shops, so that people can create a history from a seemingly new garment. I developed this idea and began to leave notes in people's pockets as they walked along - almost like a reverse of pick-pocketing. There have as yet been no contact details left on these pieces of paper as I think in this case anonymity is key to truly interacting personally with the reader - almost as if the note could have been somthing they left themselves and forgot about, and with the stories left in new clothes an identity could hinder the creation of an imaginary history of this garment. I believe that the imagination works most fruitfully when triggered and encouraged rather than directed or controlled.


Post-it notes series.

This is my longest running project started about four years ago when I was living in a small town in Dorset, and first became interested in new ways of illustrating my writing and interacting with the reader. I split up stories in fragments on post-it notes and flyered them around the town in both obvious and unusual places. I then went back to see what had happened to them. Sometimes they had simply washed away, but once one had been put up on a notice board and old ladies were discussing it! I love the idea that people can find part, or the whole, of a story, but it doesn't matter which; each fragment has the potential to interact personally with its finder in that moment. I use post-it notes as they are normally purely functional stationary that you would expect to find something such as a discarded boring list on. This again subverts our expectations of the things we discard or find on a daily basis - our expectations of when we are going to discover a story or read a work of fiction.

Treasure trails and following pieces.

The post-it note series made me think more about how the reader collaborates with the writer in how the work eventually fulfills its potential. By finding the work in its site-specific context the reader is an integral part of its completion. I moved to Berlin then Paris and decided to see if I could get someone to follow fragments of a story as I left them whilst walking around the city, exploring its stranger less known parts. Could the physical act of this site-specific storytelling and the location of a fragment help the story be communicated in a way that partly overcomes the language barrier? By making the reader part of the process of the story, and possibly leaving them to be the conclusion of the story, I was in a way letting them create a story from the remnants of my ideas - almost like echoes of what it might have been, but that any number of new interpretations were equally as valid.
The Treasure trail pieces are just a slight variation of these following works. Here clues are left dotted around the city for a person to find and create their own story illustrated by the places they have discovered. At the end of the trail I leave something significant to the story I wrote. And the ghosts so silver is planning a series of secret treasure hunts for next year where we will arrange a start location and leave details at the end so that we can have a record of all the stories created from different interpretations of the same story read/ objects found.


Ephemeral graffiti.

I get continually frustrated with the potential of graffiti as a way of presenting creative writing, but how it is so often about tagging, identity and permanence. My ephemeral graffiti uses materials such as glitter on snow, leaves, twigs and swirled dust and mud to write a phrase that could connect a person with that place in a specific moment. Its anonymity and ephemerality is important. It is not about marking, but interacting with a place and being part of its natural process of change.

The miniature books project.

As well as a forum for new writing and incidental strangeness this website will outline the projects which and the ghosts so silver has been working on over the past few months.

The idea with the miniature books series is to create a story that would only truly be complete if found; to illustrate it by the person's experience of its finding. Miniature books are made and a line from one of my existing stories is written in the front to become the first line of the story in the book. The "and the ghosts so silver" address and a stamp are then put in the back of the book with instructions to please complete and return if found.

So far books have been hidden at a story reading in Bristol, the Port Eliot literary festival in Cornwall, as well as in random places in towns and villages across the country. Next month they will be hidden in and around an art gallery in Belgrade as part of an event I will also be reading at - the books in this instance will contain lines from my reading. It is always a delight to open the envelopes as they are returned and see how people have taken a line that was originally meant one way, but for them it has become something completely different - the trigger for their own story. I hope that by finding these books people will think differently about their surroundings and expectations of random things they might find in the street; that they might realise that stories are threaded through even the most mundane parts of our lives.

I am planning to expand this project across Europe to create a library of lost and found books. I have also been particularly thrilled with the creativity of some of the books completed by children, and and the ghosts so silver will be looking into how to use this project, amongst others, for what could be seen as incidental/accidental site-specific writing workshops for our youngest collaborators.