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Date: Thursday 18th April
Venue: Watershed (W1)
Time: 18:00 - 19:30PM
Tickets: £5

This workshop will explore some of the ways in which archival material can be used to inspire and shape our writing. Using film clips and museum artefacts as prompts, we will consider how we might use objects, collections and archival spaces to stimulate our writing practices and guide our creative techniques. As ‘roving-poet-in-residence’ for Your Local Arena, Helen has been writing commissioned responses to the archive of the BBC’s flagship arts and culture programme Arena.

Presented in partnership with Speaking Volumes.

Helen Thomas:

Helen Thomas is a writer of Sierra Leonean and Irish heritage who was born in London. She moved to Cornwall over twenty years ago after receiving her DPhil in English Literature. In 2020, she distributed Black Agents Provocateurs: 250 Years of Black British Writing, History and Law, 1770-2020 as a free, 500-page e-book to celebrate Black History Month, and in 2022 she published 1562, a volume of poetry voicing the fictional lives of six black women from six ports in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Britain. Since then Helen has been experimenting with poetry and poetic plays, writing work that fuses literary genres and highlights the experience of black migrants in Britain as well as their contributions to British culture. In 2023, she was commissioned to co-create a play with young people in Plymouth as part of the With Flying Colours and Beyond Face Theatre Company partnership. She is currently working on two poetic plays and a new collection of poems.

Speaking Volumes is a live literature organisation specialising in getting underrepresented voices heard, reaching diverse audiences and finding exciting ways to present the work of writers.

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