Dedicated to All the Others: Conversations about creative life stories

07391 868 726 YoungDementia@commlinks.co.uk

Introduction:

This episode was brought to you with support from a small grant from Leeds 2023, as part of a citywide cultural event. It was first exhibited as a sound work at the Horsforth Walk of Art alongside the knitted picture that accompanies this podcast.

You will hear an oral history recording made by me, Una, on behalf of my not for profit arts organisation Red Dress Collective, with one of my participants, Carol. Red Dress is an arts organisation that helps people to find a creative voice to tell their life stories.

Carol came forward to tell her story because she wanted to make a positive out of a negative and she hopes that audiences will find something meaningful and useful in her story of the perfect gentleman John, who had early onset dementia.

To create this work Carol and I met to talk in a cafe where we got to know one another and I asked her the set of questions that I have developed through my work with life story participants.

Through the questions we began to talk about the things that brought joy into Carol and John's life. John was a skilled craftsperson and so is Carol. John was a Carpenter and Carol has been knitting since she was six years old.

They shared a love of the rock group queen and John created a replica of Brian May's guitar a decade or so before he passed away. As part of Carol's creative work she is knitting a replica of John’s the replica of Brian May's guitar.

Carol crafted her story by knitting, thinking and making short notes in a tiny notebook. I think you will agree that her spoken word peice is an extraordinary testament to the enduring love of a relationship that lasted 37 years.

Thank you for listening.

Transcript coming soon

Find Shivanee’s work online at www.novelniche.net, shivaneeramlochan.com, @novelniche on Twitter, FB and Instagram

Find out more about:

Shivanee's Leeds-based publisher Peepal Tree Press

Shivanee's book reviews on Caribbean Beat Magazine. Here, a review of The Bread The Devil Knead (Myriad Editions). Shortlisted for the Women's Prize.

The NGC Bocas Lit Fest 

Shivanee's work in The Caribbean Review of Books

Sonia Farmer's artists book The Red Thread Cycle

The significance of Deya

The Forward Prizes for Poetry

Shivanee's Substack 

Thousands of of works by different poets on the Poetry Foundation website

Author & playwright Hilary McCollum, Fellow of the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queens University Belfast, is in conversation with Leeds born artist and writer Una, author of Becoming Unbecoming and creative director of Red Dress Collective. McCollum's 2008 autobiography Funny Peculiar relates her childhood in a loyalist household in Northern Ireland. 

Hilary and Una were born in the same year and met on Twitter. As children they shared a love of The Wombles, Mr Benn and David Soul. They also shared experience of childhood sexual abuse. As adults they share an interest in representations of VAWG, and both wrote politically contextualised memoirs about their childhoods. Hilary tells Una about her writing process and her work studying lesbian literature. They discuss writing process, historic and contemporary literature, "police procedural" TV drama, the suffragettes, women's sexual pleasure, and the importance of the clitoris

Links to mentions:

Unbelievable Netflix series (2019) with Toni Collette.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) Anne Brontë

Robert Browning's Murder Poems (Born 1812--Died 1889)

The Investigation, 2020 TV drama. About the 2017 murder of Kim Wall.

Joan Smith's Misogynies First published 1989. (2013 edition available from The Westbourne Press)

Andrea Dworkin feminist writer, 1956--2005

The History of Betsy Thoughtless by Eliza Haywood (1751)

Artemisia Gentileschi Italian Baroque Artist, 1593--1656

What Beyonce Taught Me About Race, TEDx talk, Brittany Barron (2016)

Lilian Lenton, Suffragette, 1891--1972

The Cat and Mouse Act (1913)

Operation Yewtree, police investigation, Gary Glitter, Jimmy Savile

Advocacy After Fatal Domestic Abuse

Hilary McCollum is an Irish writer and feminist activist with a long standing interest in creative responses to trauma. She has explored issues related to violence against women & girls through narrative non-fiction, fiction and drama. Her writing often focuses on women’s resistance to abuse and oppression. She is Publishing Fellow at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University Belfast, completing a PhD in Creative Writing at the Centre in December 2021. Her first novel, Golddigger, won the Golden Crown Literary Society prize for historical fiction in 2016.

The content of this podcast refers to gendered violence. Follow Masego on Instagram. 

"Be Still" was first developed as a performance work for the digital arts project Flock: Short stories from women on the move, supported by Counterpoint Arts, Arts Council England, The National Lottery Reaching Communities Fund, East Street Arts and Leeds Inspired. You can watch the film made for Flock here. The spoken word performances on this podcast were recorded specially for Dedicated to All the Others.

Una is the author of Becoming Unbecoming and creative director of Red Dress Collective. Una developed this project with support from Leeds Inspired and Arts Council England. Masego is also based in Leeds. The two artists met during Una's creative writing project, Dedicated to All the Others: Leeds, funded by Leeds Inspired.

Masego Lynia is a dynamic artist who has taken several creative roles with: Mafwa Theatre as an Associate Artist, Leeds Playhouse as an Assistant Director on 'Freedom Project', as Associate Director on ‘Aaliyah (after Antigone)’ and Cosmo Square Films as Associate director of WARM, a short film. She’s also an Arts and Well-being facilitator trained by Displace Yourself Theatre. She participated in content creation for Leeds Playhouse digital film 'This was a lockdown'. Masego is a versatile actor who has done film and theatre work.

Links to things Masego mentions:

Images from Becoming Unbecoming: Reputation, and Una carrying her speech burden.

Botswana Sign Language

British Sign Language

Una's partners in Brazil, Coletivo Rubra, will perform a short play adapted from Becoming Unbecoming and created using Boal's theatre methods. Coletivo Rubra can be found on Instagram and Facebook. 

Transcript of Be Still, by Masego Lynia

Thanks to Jon Sayles for playing Bach so beautifully on the guitar and for providing this service free under CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSE: Gavottes 1 and 2 From Cello Suite, Exzel Music Publishing (freemusicpublicdomain.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Tamsin Cook, co-director of MAFWA Theatre, a project based in Lincoln Green in Leeds, discusses MAFWA's projects Kuluhenna Drama and Flock and the Associate Artists programme, with Leeds born artist and writer Una, author of Becoming Unbecoming and creative director of Red Dress Collective, who also has a background in community arts. They discuss the need for community arts, community gardens and green fingers, creative process, responsive practice and the importance of ethics. Both Tamsin and Una play stringed instruments badly, and think the importance of public funding and sustainable community organisations is underestimated. 

Links to Tamsin's mentions:

• Curious Monkey Theatre,
• Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed,
• Migration Matters Sheffield,
• Howard Assembly Rooms,

MAFWA work with women who have been through the asylum process and with local communities. Tamsin's co-director at MAFWA is Keziah Berelson, they met while studying an MA in International Development and Theatre at the University of Leeds. 

As part of the Dedicated to All the Others project, Una's partners in Brazil, Coletivo Rubra, will perform a short play adapted from Becoming Unbecoming and created using Boal's theatre methods. Coletivo Rubra can be found on Instagram and Facebook. 

If you are interested in playing instruments badly, look no further than the Portsmouth Sinfonia.

Thanks to Jon Sayles for playing the Bach, rather well, and for providing this service free under CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSE: Gavottes 1 and 2 From Cello Suite, Exzel Music Publishing (freemusicpublicdomain.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/