We launched a film poetry competition to support the work of commissioned artist Gijs van Bon to create KRYT, a light writer that writes poems on a wall while the audience listens to them being read. The text of the poems created by young people of Southampton will be written word by word on a projection screen with a clear blue laser before fading away, leaving space for new words.

We are keen to show that poetry can be presented in many creative ways and not just in a book or through spoken word. We are pleased to announce the winning film of our film poetry competition:

- "A Dream of Ships" by Diana Taylor | in the Video section below
- runner up "The Sea" by Pat Boran | https://youtu.be/gKKXzEZ7Lgo

The light writer, KRYT created by artist Gijs van Bon, will be writing poems created by school children from Southampton, onto a projection wall. With the passage of time, the written text fades away, giving space for continuous poetic text accompanied by sound. Audiences are taken into a story, as very slowly light, sound and text merge allowing you to enter the writers head. KRYT mixes technology, the beauty of poetry and sound into an exciting performance.

To support KRYT, Audacious, working with ArtfulScribe, have commissioned poet Susmita Bhattacharya to create a digital resource package to be made available to schools to support KS2 teachers delivering poetry sessions, teaching students how to write poetry exploring themes of:
- Self-identity.
- Identity of Southampton.
- Relationships with the sea.
- Journeys & migrations.
- To celebrate people of the world.
- Southampton as a gateway to the world.

Selected poems will be presented in Southampton by KRYT, an art installation using laser technology, by Gijs van Bon - planned for February 2021.

To find out more and get involved, please visit the website https://mayflower400southampton.co.uk/events-and-workshops/kryt/

Activity image by artist Gijs van Bon

In 1620, a letter from John Robinson, the Puritan Separatists Pastor who had remained behind in Leiden; this was read on board the Mayflower before she sailed away. The letter discusses how to live onboard, and in the planned new settlement, in a way that is understanding and accepting of difference. He discusses the nature of good governance, telling the Puritans that they should work for the common good, elect a good leader who can do that, and that they should pick a man for his honourable actions and not because he looks flashy or talks a good talk.

If you were writing a letter to the Mayflower passengers today, what would you want to say about their voyage? About living well as a community? About understanding and living with people who might be different from us? About the nature of good leadership? Or about being good neighbours?

Why not write your own 'letter to the Mayflower' and send it to us as a short film and/or a written piece at: mayflower400@southampton.gov.uk

We will post a range of the most interesting letters on our social media channels.

More details available at https://mayflower400southampton.co.uk/events-and-workshops/letters-to-the-mayflower/

Pens and quills at the ready, we are about to begin!

Find out about how the eighteenth-century writing masters showed ladies and gentlemen how to write in the round hand style and have a go yourself. And watch our on how to fold up your letters to send in the style of the period before envelopes were used.

" 'Tea By the Sea' is a powder keg of a novel, where secrets and lies explode into truth and consequences, all told with spellbinding, shattering power. Hemans doesn't just fulfill the promise of her debut-she soars past it." -- Marlon James, Man Booker Prize Winning author of Black Leopard

Last October, Donna Hemans, an award-winning writer from Jamaica and Washington, D.C., read from her new novel, 'Tea by the Sea' then talked to Carole Burns, the university's head of creative writing and herself a writer. As Hemans and Burns discussed the importance of telling diverse stories, the role of culture and history in literature, and the creative process, viewers were able to ask questions.

From Brooklyn to the island of Jamaica, 'Tea by the Sea' traces a mother's circuitous route to finding the daughter taken from her at birth. A seventeen-year-old taken from her mother at birth, an Episcopal priest with a daughter whose face he cannot bear to see, a mother weary of searching for her lost child: 'Tea by the Sea' is their story-that of a family uniting and unraveling.

Jamaican-born Donna Hemans is also the author of the novel 'River Woman,' winner of the 2003-4 Towson University Prize for Literature. 'Tea by the Sea,' her second novel, won her the Lignum Vitae Una Marson Award for Adult Literature, and was listed in Ms. Magazine's "June 2020 Reads for the Rest of Us."

Donna Hemans official website: https://www.donnahemans.com/

This event was broadcasted live on YouTube and Facebook and is now available for you to enjoy in the Live section below.

In response to the 400-year anniversary of the Mayflower sailing from the UK, ArtfulScribe, in partnership with Winchester Poetry Festival, offers a weekend of poetry workshops led by poets who've made their homes in England from countries including Hungary, Nigeria, The Philippines, and Poland.

George Szirtes, Theresa Lola, Romalyn Ante and Bohdan Piasecki will explore themes such as journeys, new beginnings, identity and belonging, in a series of ninety-minute Zoom sessions on the 14 and 15 November.

A crowd-sourced poetry reading on the theme of 'Giving Thanks' is also featured on this weekend of poetry activities.

All events are free to attend and priority access will be given to people from Southampton and SO post-codes. Find out more on the official website at: https://mayflower400southampton.co.uk/events-and-workshops/4612-2/

This collaborative workshop invites you to explore what it means to be human by contributing to the creation and critical discussion of a mashup-style computer generated novel.

Computer generated literature connects back to experimental literary practices in Dada and Oulipo, as well as to early AI language research. This has shaped the current landscape of creative text generation, or, computer generated text which does not serve a practical purpose. It is text which has been made for expression, enjoyment, playful experimentation, to convey points, and to represent concepts.

This workshop will focus on the generated novel as an emerging form of creative text generation which has the potential to complicate the role of the author and machine. Participants will get a taste of this complication by selecting and preparing found texts which they feel resonate with the theme 'being human'. Everyone's selected text will be combined and computationally processed together to produce, tweak, and curate a 50,000 word generated novel which will be used to stimulate discussion during the workshop. The generated novels will be submitted to the annual National Novel Generation Month (NaNoGenMo) challenge, with all the participants listed as collaborating authors.

No prior programming knowledge required.

About the Hosts

Lesia Tkacz is a PhD candidate at the University of Southampton, researching auto-generated novels.

Dr Noriko Suzuki-Bosco is an artist and researcher based at Winchester Schol of Art. She is responsible for the Library of Re-Claimed Books project.

"A gripping, upsetting and tenderly told dramatic memoir of one man's ordeal during the Windrush scandal" - The Independent

When Stephen Thompson's brother was imprisoned during what later became known as the Windrush scandal, as a writer, he wanted to write about it, but he thought maybe the moment had passed. Instead, that story became the lightly fictionalized film "Sitting in Limbo," was purchased by the BBC, and then aired in summer 2020 just as protests about George Floyd's killing in America prompted protests here and in the UK.

Thompson, a Southampton resident who has also published three novels, will talk to Carole Burns, the university's head of creative writing, about how he shaped this true-life story into a film; whether writing is (or should be) a kind of activism; and how his fictional writing feeds and impedes his screenwriting.

"There is a clarity and intimacy in the retelling which feels remarkably true to life" - Radio Times
"This Windrush story should - and will - make you angry" - The Telegraph

This event broadcasted live on YouTube and Facebook.

You can watch Sitting in Limbo on BBC iPlayer at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/p08g29ff/sitting-in-limbo

Sitting in Limbo trailer: https://youtu.be/1brHDPtSgZo

You can read Thompson's opinion piece from last June on The Guardian at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/22/sitting-in-limbo-windrush-victims-stephen-thompson

My home is headlights winking at me, reflecting off my glasses / My home is police sirens, singing to me like opera / My home is autumn leaves, crunching beneath my feet (Year 6, Bevois Town Primary School)

What is home to you? Where is it?

Home could be the place you live. Home could be a memory, the place you left behind. Home could be drinking a cup of cocoa with your family.

Now, more than ever, as we live in a world come alive from the pages of a dystopian novel, home allows us to anchor ourselves in the familiar.

If your heart swells with emotions when you think about home, poetry is the way to express it.

This hour-long workshop will give you the chance to explore what home means to you through a series of guided activities.

All you need is some paper, a pen and your thoughts.

Join Aiysha Jahan, English at the University of Southampton, for the opening event of Hands-on Humanities Day Goes Digital 2020!

The workshop is free, open to children and their families, and will run in Blackboard Collaborate. Please book your ticket to Hands-on Humanities Day to receive the joining instruction with the reminder emails.

Tracy Chevalier, author of the international bestselling novel Girl with a Pearl Earring, will talk about her most recent book, A Single Thread, set in Southampton and Winchester shortly before the start of World War II. In a reading and discussion led by Carole Burns, the university's head of creative writing, Chevalier will explore ideas around the intersection of writing and history and how she crafted her new book.

"A Single Thread" weaves a tale about Violet Speedwell, a woman who moves to Winchester in 1930s Britain after her fiance dies in World War I, then falls in love with a married man whom she meets while volunteering to embroider cushions for Winchester Cathedral. As in many of Chevalier's novels, the hero is not a well-known historical figure, but an everyday person. In Girl with a Pearl Earring, she focused on the young servant who posed for Vermeer, not the great artist himself. Here, Chevalier explores this "surplus" woman - one of the many left single after World War I - and teases out the largeness of this one individual woman's story.

"This was a unique generation of women... but their stories feel familiar nearly a century on." -- The Guardian

Tracy Chevalier official website: https://www.tchevalier.com/

This event will broadcast live on YouTube - please do not forget to book your ticket for Hands-on Humanities Day Goes Digital

Have you thought about the journey of your toothbrush - where does it spend the rest of its thousand years after you've binned it?

Have you wondered about the plastic particles that end up in the ocean as a result of using the washing machine every day?

What has poetry got to do with environmental issues?

Eco-poetry is a way of combining both these ideas to create thoughtful reflections about the world around us and the effects of pollution in its various forms. Writing about these issues can create awareness and an understanding of how to express one's concern for the planet through the power of words.

Join ArtfulScribe for a free 90-minute writing workshop as part of the Human Worlds Festival. Open to young people, this workshop will focus on both poetry and prose, discussing contemporary themes that are important and relevant in these present times and writing in a fun and collaborative way.

'It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.'
What is the purpose of dystopian fiction? What role can a writer of fiction play in shaping the social or political landscape?

Looking at classic and contemporary examples of 'alternative worlds' in fiction, workshop leader Joanna Barnard will supply prompts to help with your own world building, for example how to create an immersive setting using the five senses; how to use the realities of current or recent society to draw up the 'rules' of your invented world, and how to plant characters in that world and watch them grow.

Writing about alternative worlds can be entertaining and cathartic, and can open our eyes to the possibilities in our own world if things were subtly - or perhaps spectacularly - different.

Join ArtfulScribe for a free 90-minute writing workshop as part of the Human Worlds Festival.