Human Writes, Hackney style

Write to Ignite festival producer, Christopher Preston

The biannual Write To Ignite festival, all about words and wordcraft, is taking over fourteen venues in Hackney throughout this September.

I gather the theme of the festival this time is Human Writes.

That’s right. We have an exhibition of Kurdish writing, for example. One of the problems that the Kurds have is that their language is under threat so they need to preserve that. We’ve got an exhibition of Kurdish books at Stoke Newington Library; we’re also having a Kurdish Book fair.

Then we’ve got events around prisons. Then there’s a play written by Dean Stalham, who’s an ex-prisoner. He learned to write in prison so a good example of writing helping somebody to pull out of whatever they’re in.

And of course there are some quite big names on the bill, too.

Yes, ex-Children’s Laureate Michael Rosen appeared on Friday at the Stoke Newington Gallery. He’s a Hackney man. He’s going to be doing some of his poems for adults.

As with, say, Roald Dahl, some people might not realise that he does adult stuff.

Two years ago he wrote a piece called ‘Hackney Streets’, celebrating the literature and literary history of Hackney. He has a great poem ‘On The Bus’: it’s a bus journey through Hackney and it’s absolutely fantastic.

That’s interesting, so almost a poetic equivalent of Ian Sinclair?

Yes, they do work very much in the same area and Michael knows everything that there is to know about East London. He’s a great observer. He’s got a poem about going to a Turkish barber which is hysterically funny. Speaking of humour, John Hegley did a show on the 12th at the Mildmay Club on Newington Green. He brought his new ‘The Adventures of Monsieur Robinet’.

I know you’re very keen to promote Shane Solanki, who’s a big up-and-coming performer.

Yes, a great performance artist. He’s a poet, musician, artist – he works in mixed media. He’s bringing a great show called The Girl Who Learned To Beatbox Out Of Her Arse. He’s working with his team: Sapro Jade, who’s a fabulous Jazz singer and Arthur Lee. Bellatrix is the beatboxer. She’s fabulous.

There are some hands-on elements too, right?

Yes, people can come along and actually get writing. We’ve got poets, we’ve got Baden Prince who is a great poet and he’s doing workshops, so is Neil Zetter. Baden’s re-launching his Speak Easy (his monthly poetry event at the Hackney Empire). There’s also a family workshop with Ngoma Bishop and Oma-Ra for families to come along and share stories, listen to other people’s stories, and explore how parents and children can swap stories – something we often don’t get round to doing if we’re stuck in front of screens all the time.

Often when you think about the parent/child relationship you think of the parent telling the child stories, but it’s a crucial skill for children too.

Absolutely. I mean your kids come home from school and they tell you what happened. That’s story-telling.

I hear ‘guerrilla poets’ are going to be operating in the area.

They are. They’re led by Baden Prince and will be zapping various places around Hackney, and I think we’re going to invade Tower Hamlets briefly too. On Sunday 13th if you’re walking through Abney Park Cemetery you may very well come across a poet.

How did you find yourself in the position of organising this wonderful thing?

Well by accident really! I run a theatre company; when the Hackney Council’s creative development organisation set up all these creative clusters around Hackney we found ourselves in the literature group. There was some money available from Europe at the time (2005). They said ‘what would you like to do?’, and we told them we wanted to do a festival. Then the regeneration money stopped, but we carried on thanks to The Arts Council.

Is there a particular message that you’d like people to come away from the festival with?

Well I think one of the things that we do want to encourage is for people to read more, join the libraries and write more. Just to get enjoyment from expressing yourself either verbally or on the page.

Write to Ignite runs right through the month until 2 October.

For information and to book tickets go to Write to Ignite or call 07923 474 196 – and don’t forget to keep your eyes peeled for guerrilla poets!