Place writing – Ilkley Literature Festival

Ilkley Literature Festival 2022 has come to a close and, with it, the main responsibilities of my residency. I was delighted and honoured to be chosen as Apprentice Poet in Residence for the North’s longest-running literature festival, and being commissioned to create new work and share it with Ilkley audiences has been a real joy.

The opportunity has provided me with the chance to explore and rediscover places and spaces in and around Ilkley, spend an enormous amount of time pouring over maps and books on everything from Yorkshire dialect to Barbara Hepworth sculptures, and get lost wandering the streets while staying in the town and down umpteen rabbitholes while carrying out research on the internet. I’ve learnt loads of stuff including plenty about art, and I even cracked open the charcoals and had a go myself. In other words, I’ve had a lot of fun.

I’ve also, of course, done a lot of writing, exploring some new approaches (including mirroring one of my sketches in the shape of one of my poems) as well as styles (haiku, for one), and pulling together the poetry map I set out to create. My initial route turned out to be too ambitious less than a year after fracturing my spine, but an explore of the Moor in itself proved fruitful, producing a sequence of six poems for my festival performance, and a few extra for good measure. I invited the audience to join me on a round walk – from the comfort of their church hall chairs – loitering at different landmarks to take in the scene. At some point I will hopefully publish the series together (I think the pieces work for page as well as stage), perhaps even alongside the basic map I drew, so others can follow in my footsteps and read my poems in situ as they wander the trail. It ended up just shy of five miles with a detour to the Cow & Calf Hotel, and took about three hours – encompassing a not insignificant amount of evidence-gathering: taking photos, pressing flowers, keeping detailed field notes, stopping to listen to rustling beasts and beech leaves prospering in the breeze…

For the residency, I was also tasked with running a creative writing workshop, which I called Places and Spaces – in it we questioned our surroundings, observed the infra-ordinary, and looked for clues in the familiar and unfamiliar… Our texts took us from Yorkshire in ‘Bridge For The Living’ by Philip Larkin all around the UK, and we looked at pieces by Suzannah V Evans, Padraig Regan, Alice Oswald, Ella Frears and Liz Berry. The participants all contributed well and were happy to share work they made there and then, and I was told it was “a brilliant workshop – I go to many workshops, this was one great”, and I couldn’t ask for a better comment, really.

With fellow apprentice Rebecca Green, I also judged a creative writing competition and we hosted two Poet's Corner Reading Group sessions together, discussing pieces by writers who appeared at the festival – our first group helped us with a close read of previous ILF Apprentice Poet in Residence Andrew McMillan’s ‘visibility’ and a piece from Kim Moore’s Forward Prize-shortlisted collection All The Men I Never Married; our second readers (some returning) looked at ‘Foxglove County’ by Zaffar Kunial and ‘St Guy’s and St Thomas’s’ by Kayo Chingonyi, another ILF Poet in Residence. Did I mention I’ve also done a ton of reading? And I even managed to get my two new tomes into the Grove Bookshop…