Peace Photography and on Listening to Children

First, we have…


The Visualising Peace project is excited to be teaming up with PRISMA photography magazine to run a photography competition on the theme ‘Visualising Peace’. We are keen to see how people all around the world, in different contexts and communities, understand peace – from inner peace to geopolitical or even cosmic peace, past, present and future. The deadline for entries is 31st March, and a selection of photographs will be exhibited at a local showcase in St Andrews in April 2024 in the lead-up to PRISMA announcing the winner in their April issue. 

Please use this link to submit your peace-themed photo, with a corresponding caption that explains where the photo is taken and how it relates to peace/peacebuilding: 

You may submit several photos for the competition, but please do so via separate entries with one photo per submission. We hope you enjoy the chance to think about what peace means and looks like to you and get creative with your camera!

Dr Alice König

VisualisingWarAndPeace.

PODCAST!

University of St Andrews

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How and Why We Should Listen To Young People’s Voices on Conflict 

When I was last up, with Dr Konig, at St Andrew’s I agreed to write an opinion piece for Visualising War and Peace.

It’s here, if you’d like to see what I have to say about things. To paraphrase: We invest a lot of time instilling good values on our kids – their decisions when we’re not around are a marker we use to judge who they are and how we’ve done as parents and teachers (are they kind? Do they share?) and we punish or correct behaviours which aren’t what we tell them are good. So, we KNOW what correct, empathetic, kind decisions look like.

And then we grow up and forget them when they don’t serve us.

To quote myself…

It feels as though we’ve presented our (adult) selves with a conflict of our own. Despite all the coaching, we don’t really want to listen to young people. Sometimes it’s because it doesn’t fit our own agenda; and we’re certainly used to knowing best. In order to best represent young people and their experiences, and offer them the care and protection they need (geographically, and emotionally) would it not be best to talk to them directly?

And better still: listen to what they have to say?        

We need to stop assuming we know best. We also need to accept that, in doing that, we are hiding ourselves from the truth and removing the opportunity to empower young people and give them the skills of confident communication.

Ayr

Last week I was at Ayr Town Hall and it was a brilliant thing. I spent the day there with Never Such Innocence (who’ve written about the day here), working with 110 young people whose first language isn’t English. There were people from Chad, Turkey, Ukraine, Pakistan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Syria (apologies if I’ve missed any off!) and we wrote poetry about their experience of moving here. We celebrated home and looked at what they brought, what they missed, what they’ve discovered, what words they’d learned and what advice they’d give.

It was a genuinely brilliant day. What I loved the most – aside from the poems – was that everyone wrote and I think it goes to show that poetry, at its core, is nothing more complicated than what people think or feel or both, shared.

The two things that came up over and over again were food and friendship. I like that – I also liked, very much, the music that was played and the songs.

A huge thanks to all the organisations who made it happen – it’s a BIG job organising a day like that. They are: Thriving Communities Interpreters; South Ayrshire College ESOL and Photography; Barnado’s Scotland Welcome Service, and The Refugee Council, UK.

Half Term Writing

It was SO good to be back in a Sheffield library. It had been a while. Today was Firth Park and fifteen of us wrote poems and stories about belonging – here, where we are safe, where our parents came from. We looked at where people might not feel they belong (Hell, being the most notable example).

It was a really, really brilliant couple of hours.

If you know of anyone (over 7) who’d like to give it a go I’m at Central Library Feb 13th, Stocksbridge 14th, and then at Crystal Peaks on Friday 16th. 2pm-4pm and, of course, it’s free. Contact here if you need to... (booking is advisable).

Join award-winning author and screenwriter, Nik Perring, who’s going to show you how fun and easy writing can be. We’ll be writing about ‘belonging’ – in ANY way you like.

Nik will show you how easy it is to come up with brilliant ideas and how to make those into stories and poems you can be proud of. The workshop Is FREE. No experience needed and EVERYONE is welcome.

January

January’s been and gone. It’s been good. I’ve been busy, dividing my time between teaching and workshops and script work – lots of exciting things to come through in time.

I was at an event last week, following some workshops for interfaith week, Remembering Srebrenica, and Holocaust Memorial Day. It was an event for peace, it was anti-genocide, and I was thrilled to watch young people from Everton Free School and Christchurch Birkenhead read their work around peace and the fragility of freedom. There was so much wisdom, kindness, and empathetic thinking – we, as adults, need to be more like that. Here’s me reading a poem from an Appleton Academy’s Sophie…

I’d driven there from Barnsley College where I’d spent the day talking about being a writer as an actual job, and running workshops as part of their Industry Week. We were overflowing with brilliant ideas and there are some seriously talented/funny/thoughtful/terrifying young writers there. Loved it, as I always do. BIG THANKS to J and S for their wonderfulness.

Earlier in the month I was down in Portsmouth with NSI. I’d not been to Portsmouth since I was a moody teenager so this trip was an improvement (I even found an hour to wander around the museums and ships, which was fun and strangely nostalgic).

Here I am with Hugo – Submariner and rower of the Atlantic twice as part of HMS Oardacious‘ crew, to raise money for mental health (this year’s team arrived on my last day of teaching – they’d been at sea for 35 days and won the race0). Again, SO much wisdom from the young writers.

I’ll leave it there. Plenty more to say and plenty more to come. Right now, I have writing to do.

Dances and Dirges

An extremely belated happy new year, one and all. Something a little different to start 2024 – my first love: music. I’m delighted to welcome the impossibly talented Cynthia Constantino here. I’ve known Cynthia for many years – she’s an editor who published me a long time ago, and I knew she was a great writer and poet. I did not know she’s also an incredible composer and classical pianist as well. And she has an album out – Dances and Dirges (available from all the usual places, which you can see here).

And here she is, to talk about her record. I love it – would recommend…

Welcome, Cynthia! It’s such a pleasure to have a musician here, again. Especially one who’s so good! First off, I LOVE your work. Where does it come from?

Thank you so much! It’s a pleasure and an honor to be here. My music is very much a part of who I am. It just feels as innate as breathing. A lot of the songs I write seem as though, even when they’re newly written, I’ve known them all my life. 

So…what is the album?

Dances & Dirges is my debut full-length album, and it released a few months ago. The dances signify the external, physical world, in which we transact our lived experiences, while the dirges are concerned with interior worlds, especially those of the heart and mind, which are universes unto themselves. In many ways, the album has been decades in the making, as some of the songs are based on, or begin with, musical ideas I had more than twenty years ago. Many more of the pieces are new, and all are newly developed.

There are eleven songs on the album, but here’s a bit about some of them: 

Tarantella: While this song doesn’t adhere to the tarantella in the traditional sense, it is derivative of that form, with melodic forays into contemporary neoclassicism. It ends up in such a different place than it begins, and has an inherent sense of movement.

Interlude No. 1: This may be some sort of tribute to modernism, but I didn’t write it with that intention in mind. Chopin dazzles me still with his use of polyrhythm and it was fun to be able to work that technique into this piece, which is also tremendous fun to play.

Hungarian Dance: This piece is based on the Hungarian scale, which can be heard in the opening. I’d long ago learned about the different scales and modes as a music student but had entirely forgotten about the Hungarian scale. Looking through one of my old notebooks, I found the scale and played it, and the song arrived in a single sitting. 

Majorca: A lot of my melodies tend to veer into Spanish influence and the song’s title is an homage to that tendency. I still haven’t traveled to Majorca!

Xanadu: My first single and release, this version is newly recorded for the album. It’s a contemplative work that conveys rich textures and interweaving melodies, and features deep, resounding bass occasionally overlaid with treble flourishes. The title hearkens to the metaphor for idealism and opulence, first conveyed by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and then later in the Orson Welles film Citizen Kane. Though there have been many cultural references to Xanadu, those two feel, for me, the most significant.

Lethe: Named after the mythical river Lethe in the underworld of Greek mythology, which has it that anyone who drank from the river would forget their earthly lives, this piece is more than a song about forgetting; it represents remembrance, and the importance of doing so.

Who would you say it was for?

I write for myself, and if I like it, I figure there will be others who like it, too. It’s so nice when others appreciate my music, but ultimately, I don’t write for other people. I write what needs to be written and in the process of doing so, honor the song that wants to be born into the world by shaping it in the way that serves it best.

Can you tell us about your process?

I do write by hand on staff paper, which I realize is considered an old-fashioned way to write music these days, but it’s what works for me. I’ve been an analog piano purist until about a year ago, when I purchased my first digital piano, and I only did so because of the recording process it facilitates. It’s nice to be able to hit record and just play around with musical ideas, which is how several of the songs on the album came about. When it’s a jam session like that, I transcribe the workable results by hand onto staff paper. Sometimes, I wake up with a song in my head; sometimes, it’s fully formed. Usually, I can just sit down at the piano and hit a few keys and I’m on my way to writing a new song. It feels a very natural and fluid process. 

Any tips or sage advice?

As cliché as it sounds, follow your heart, stay true to who you are, and never give up on your dreams. Diligence is not to be underestimated.

I’m curious about your approach to writing music—is there one or is it different for each in terms of the story of the music? There are so many times where it feels the music tells many stories, like songs within songs. How does one achieve that?

I love the idea of the story of the music, and songs within songs. If others find stories in my music, then that’s beautiful; those could be associations with the musical ideas in my songs. I do think music conveys a certain sensibility or feeling; after all, music is like emotion distilled. My approach is simply to stay true to what I hear during the writing process and to take the music where it wants to go. 

You’ve mentioned Chopin already. Who else would you say influences you? 

Rachmaninov, Joep Beving (a contemporary composer), and to a lesser extent, Erik Satie (Gnossienne No.1) and Aram Khachaturian (Toccata).  

It feels as though there are so many styles to your composing and playing—there’s the simple beauty of a lullaby and Rachmaninov in the same piece; ‘Interlude No. 1’ put me in mind of Val Halen’s ‘Eruption’—contemporary and classical. Do you consider the album to be fusion or is it more that we, as artists, are everything we’ve ever consumed and seen and felt, turning into something we think sounds/looks/feels good?

Ha ha—how fun to receive comparisons to both Rachmaninov and Van Halen in the same breath. This is an interesting question and it isn’t something I consciously set out to do. The most important thing for me is to feel the music. I see myself as more of a conduit and what comes through, comes through. It’s more important that I honor what I hear. 

I do think that, as artists and humans, we can’t help but synthesize what we’re exposed to. What comes through may be a distillation of our preferences. 

And, as an extension to that, what do you need from a piece of music for it to hit the right buttons?

First and foremost, it should move me. I should be a little bit (or ideally, very much) in love with it. There are certain musical ideas in my pieces that make me swoon every time I hear them—that’s when I know I’m on the right track. That said, I do trust my own process, but I also leave room for refinement: where could something sound better, where could it flow more, where could it do more?

I’d love to know what you were listening to while writing these pieces? Are you able to listen to others’ work while writing?

Well, honestly, a lot of postpunk and darkwave—Fontaines D.C., Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance, Joy Division, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bauhaus. I don’t listen to a lot of classical music on the whole, and certainly not when I’m writing music, which I am most of the time.

Any plans for any live shows?

I plan to start performing sometime this year. Stay tuned! 

What’s next for you?

I’m always working on new music, and I already have enough for several more albums. I plan to release another album this year, and it’s one I’m very excited about. I’m honored that one of my songs from Dances & Dirges, Tarantella, placed in the Semi-Finals in the 2023 UK Songwriting Contest. 

It’s also been nice hearing the feedback from my listeners, especially as I’ve just released my music to the world for the first time. Coloratura is, so far, my most-Shazamed song, with Shazams from places like Paris, London, Toronto, Slovakia, Japan, Chile, Ecuador… It’s really quite something that my music, which has always felt so private, is gaining this reach. My biggest dream? For my songs to be included in the soundtrack for a major film. Someday, I’d love to write a film score. I also wouldn’t mind getting signed with Deutsche Grammophon… 

You can find Cynthia Constantino wherever you stream music and on Instagram

@expateditor 

Visualising War and Peace and Poetry

It’s been far too long since I was last here – I worried I’d misplaced my keys. But, here I am. And I come with poetry. (I’m typing this in a hotel room near Bradford – I have workshops at Appleton Academy tomorrow, which will be marvellous, as ever). Lots of things going on under the hood and behind the scenes and I will share news soon (there’s a lot). But. For now…

I wanted to draw your attention to some poetry that came out of me working with The University of St Andrews, some local schools, and Never Such Innocence a little while ago around Diana Forster’s art. I mentioned it here in greater depth (it’s fascinating and brilliant, and important). The incredible Dr Konig emailed to let me know some of the work’s been published – and I HAD to share it because it’s brilliant. You can read all the work here. Here’s one from a student at Bell Baxter.

I Have Witnessed The World…

I have witnessed the world
In all its twisted forms.
I find that now,
After a lifetime,
The cold makes me sweat.
 
Icy, unlit trains slap
My face when I touch
Cold metal. 
And sweat drips heavy on my nose – 
Once small.
 
I often wonder why
I was forced to crawl,
Back spiked by foreign fences
To nibble like a rabbit on tasteless leaves.
 
And, in honesty,
I wonder why I now always feel 
Like I’m crawling, with
Fresh wounds on my back
Which cannot heal.

One of Mine

While I was in St Andrews, at The Wardlaw Museum, I was commissioned to write a couple of things myself. There’s an essay/opinion piece to follow but, until then, here’s one of two poems:

When We Were Slugs 

To the slug
the difference between the touch
of bullet cases
and soil
may be nothing but temperature.

Cold does not deter them:
tiny mouths mark
soldier-grown cabbage leaves;
unaware of the guns.

At night
we transform ourselves 
into slugs:
gastropod compact;
mollusk stealth.
Better to be a slug
than a human, hungry
or dead.

We shrink our stomachs small,
morph our mouths
to form radula.
Suck the edges of leaves 
as quiet as night
but remain blade-edged alert.

We know the difference
between bullets
and what they bury 
in earth.Nik Perring

Visualising War and Peace

I spent a couple of days in St Andrew’s, working with Never Such Innocence, Dr Alice König, and The University of St Andrew’s Wardlaw Museum. Their exhibition of Diana Forster’s work – Somewhere To Stay – is incredibly moving. It charts her grandmother’s journey from Eastern Poland (now Ukraine) during the Second World War, where – at sixteen – she and her family were displaced by Stalin’s Russia and sent to a labour camp in Siberia. They were there for eighteen months, in -40, on a starvation diet.

At night, the children would crawl into the cabbage patch the soldiers had been growing to nibble on cabbage leaves. They made sure their bites were so small they would be mistaken for rabbits or slugs. Here’s the sculpture. Cabbages on a bed of rifle bullet cases.

When Stalin switched sides, it was decided that the Polish men would be useful. So they were now the army and, as part of deal with the allies, the Polish nationals were freed. Diana’s family moved from Siberia, through Uzbekistan and on to Persia (modern day Iran) where they were, finally, welcome. Ishfahan was known as ‘the city of Polish Children.’ And then, onto East Africa – Tanzania before, finally, settling in the UK.

We wrote poetry responses to the whole exhibition – there are aluminium sculptures outside, which cast shadows of war over the museum’s walls, based on Wycinanki (traditional Polish paper-cutting) – wooden sculptures inside, and even some parodied tourism posters. I loved the work there – so much that I ended up writing an essay and some poems which will follow the exhibition around – I’ll share what I can, when I can.

My biggest takeaway was how engaged the young people were and how wise they were in their thoughtful responses. There was a an awful lot of empathy in the room (there always is when we see how things are) but also solutions and good ideas to move us all forward. I’ll share those soon too.

Botanical Poetry!

I loved the day I spent at Sheffield’s Botanical Gardens earlier in the year – loads of people, lots of laughter, and tons of really brilliant poetry (and the odd story!). A heads-up… we’re doing it again – for children and for adults. Not too many tickets left so I’d book soon to avoid disappointment. No experience needed. Love to see you there.

And you can find out all you need…

for adults, here.

And for younger writers, here.

Cathedral, Teen Wildlife, Launches

This is in no order at all but…

Last week Hive were in the house at The Civic in Barnsley launching the Teen Wildlife publication. I say this a lot (and I mean it) I’m blown away with how good and smart these young writers are and how affecting their work is. And a huge thanks to Jason and Vicky who work, literally, tirelessly.

There were other launches – at Appleton Academy in Bradford for their First Story anthologies. Again – so good and so affecting (I saw tears…). I’ve been working with both Primary and Secondary and seeing their hard work (writing, editing, choosing titles, cover design – thanks Lydia and Sam) come together and be held in an audience’s hands was really special. Again. And, again, none of that would have been anywhere near as good were it not for Mrs Parr and Saima who are both as smart as they are wonderful (and, of course, the First Story Team).

I actually drove from Bradford to Rutland that night so I could be at Kendrew Barracks to work with military families the following morning. Organised by Matt (thank you!) of Little Troopers and NSI we had a few breakneck half-hour long poetry workshops. And a bbq. And drama. And an assault course. We know there’s a need to look after young people who move around a lot and this felt like the perfect opportunity to give them something fun (that they’d asked for).

I was at Manchester Cathedral, and Liverpool Parish Church for Remembering Srebrenica after that. Civic services to honour and remember those who were affected by the massacre (over 8000 Muslim men and boys on one day – and the wider systematic genocide over a much longer period of time).

Here’s me reading

I’d worked: Christchurch CofE Primary, Birkenhead and Birkenhead High School Academy; KDGB and Manchester Islamic Grammar School for Girls; Appleton Academy, and Oasis Academy Watermead and I couldn’t have been more impressed with how the subject matter was dealt with. Empathy. Wisdom. Sense. Kindness.

It was cool to deliver with the ever-astounding Chris Mould up at Appleton. We took phrases from our poems and made, then illustrated, our own origami books. Art, and story, have many forms…

And I think I’ll leave it there for now. There are other things and I’ll pop them up here soon once I’ve had a bit of a rest.