by Yemisi Blake

My seasons are all topsy-turvy. Having lived just north of the equator for a year, I’ve been back in the UK for some months and am coming out of hibernation just as the winter sets in. I’ve had a strange reverse culture shock since arriving back, but already some beautiful things have happened.

In terms of work, this new year (Autumn 2011 – Summer 2012) will be largely devoted to Shake the Dust, a national youth poetry slam project taking place across England in the run up to the Olympics. I’m part of the national production team, and am honoured to be working with some of the top poetry-in-education practitioners, arts professionals and organisations in the country. The project is the largest of its kind ever to take place in the UK. But as exciting as Shake the Dust will be, I hope it will go much further than one project, to create an ongoing national youth poetry slam. For more, keep your eyes on the blog.

This month I had the incredible opportunity to go to back to Chicago as part of the London Teenage Poetry SLAM Exchange. This time I worked with the wonderful Sifundo as co-poet coach for a team of emerging young poets. We kept a blog, which will continue to grow as the team digest and reflect on their experiences: http://slaminchicago.tumblr.com/.

One of my best memories since arriving back is going on a photographic walk in my (newly) local park with poet and photographer Yemisi Blake, where he took a picture of me for his Great British Youth exhibition. I felt a bit daunted by the idea, but Yemisi has a way of taking pictures that makes how you look less important than who you are and what you love. Thanks Yem.

Another beautiful highlight was being interviewed by the fantastic Naomi Woddis for her programme The Conversational on Reel Rebels Radio. You can listen here.

More news to follow. It’s good to be back!

Performing 'Condo', a performance piece I wrote with Jun Hanzer. It features a poem, a pedal looper and Jun's video projections, and is written in the voice of a condominium being constructed.

I had to learn how to use the pedal looper to perform (and write) the piece!

The City Limits explored Singapore (and its limits) from all kinds of strange and upside-down angles. This is an image from 'Seasons', a piece I collaborated on with Charlene Shepherdson, Joe Nair, Daniel Tan, Jun Hanzer, Bani Haykal and Ila, merging music, words and images. Singapore has no seasons in the temperate sense. What are its own seasons then?

I sang on stage for the first time in a long while. Working with so many talented artists in different art forms made it possible to try new things and surprise myself...

The City Limits crew: Joe Nair, Daniel Tan, Sharda Harrison, Charlene Shepherdson, Rae Lim, Shaun Koh, Ng Yi-Sheng, Chong Koh You, Sean McMenamin, Bani Haykal, Ila, Jun Hanzer, Kash Cheong, Marc Nair (who brought us all together) and me.

Word Forward supported the City Limits project, and the final performances took place at Goodman Arts Centre, Singapore on 22 and 23 July 2011. Photos by Shaun Koh and Wen Ai.

If you’re in Singapore, you can listen at 10.45am, 1.45pm or 8.15pm on 938LIVE. If you’re elsewhere, or radio-less, you can listen online by clicking HERE. Enjoy!

One of the best things about Writing the City is the panel of experienced writers from Singapore and the UK that supports it. These include Singapore Literature Prize-winner Suchen Christine Lim, UK novelist Jeremy Sheldon, poet/playwright Ng Yi-Sheng and Julia Bell, author of the Creative Writing Coursebook. Lim & Sheldon have created a series of six short films on ways to begin ‘writing the city’, with their own reflections on writing, excerpts from stories by themselves and others and creative challenges to the audience. A new film will be featured on the site each month from March. There are also articles, interviews, writing tips and educational materials to look forward to.

Writing the City launches today and anyone can sign up: civiclife.sg/writingthecity. For Valentine’s Day, we’re running a one day writing competition, City Loves, for the most creative four-line love poem or 140 character love story. To enter, click here. You can also visit the Civic Life blog, where I blog about goings on at Writing the City.

Letterbox in Melaka, Malaysia

For the past year, poet Karen McCarthy Woolf and I have shared a ‘creative correspondence’, writing letters to each other which inspire and feed into our writing processes. Our letters have flown between different locations, crossing London, Europe and now Asia. Later this year they’ll be flying to Egypt, where Karen has a residency coming up. During the year, we also blogged about our letters on Karen’s experimental website Open Notebooks, sharing images, poems and insights into how letter writing influences our creative writing. The blogging took a rest for a while, but our letters continued. Now, we’re back to the online side of an equally offline project. Read the most recent post at www.opennotebooks.co.uk

Performing at Singapore’s Esplanade during Y-Fest, a festival of youth arts. I was invited by Word Forward as a guest performer and judge for their youth poetry SLAM. Word Forward is a poetry & creative writing organisation run by Chris Mooney Singh, specialising in SLAM. They’ve given me a warm welcome to the Singapore poetry scene and I’m very lucky to work with them.

Recently, I performed at subTEXT at The Arts House, a literary evening presented by the wonderful poet Yong Shu Hoong, and at Blu Jaz (Singapore’s jazz cafe and one of the best venues I’ve discovered) at a Word Forward SLAM that threatened to blow the roof off. I also co-hosted an evening of spontaneous performance at Singapore Shophouse Salon, a jazz-poetry-dance party thrown by Laura Freedman at her beautiful shophouse. Laura is an MBA admissions consultant who happens to know a whole load of artists and truly knows how to throw a party. Just one of the many inspiring people I’ve met here.

Leading Workshops at the United World College South East Asia. United World Colleges are an international group of schools where students from all over the world come together to learn, volunteer and live together, most of them on scholarships. I went to UWC Atlantic College in Wales before university, so it was interesting to re-visit a similar place as a workshop leader. I was working with International Baccalaureate students as well as grade 8s – performing my poems, answering some searching and brilliant questions about poetry (do I mind how people interpret my poems?), taking them through writing exercises and looking at how to approach critical commentary writing in a creative way. I hope the students learnt as much as I did. I also led a special workshop on ‘Landscape Poetry’ – exploring different ways to write about place, for a group of students who were about to visit the UK on a literature trip.

Recently I led a series of poetry SLAM workshops in a local school with Word Forward. Class sizes here are bigger than in the UK – 40 students to a regular class. The students were hard to keep in their seats, but once their energy was channelled into poetry, they produced some impressive results. One group wrote and performed a beautiful poem on love – ‘love tastes sweet like palm sugar,  bitter like antibiotics’. Mmmm. By our final workshop, even the shyest students got up and performed in front of the class, which was a real achievement. The students judged each other in a class slam and selected one group to represent them in an inter-class slam. By this time they were taking the whole thing much more seriously, asking questions like ‘what do you do when you’re nervous before going on stage?’ It was wonderful to experience a change like that in just four days.

Kite-flying at East Coast Park

I’ve also been Writing. I’m currently working on my pamphlet, which is due out next year with flipped eye, and also on new poems. As long as you remember to bring a cardigan (outside may be tropical, but inside can have glacial air-con), there are plenty of good places to write. My favourite is 15 minutes at Lasalle College of the Arts.

I’ve found a strong writing community here and there’s a sense that it’s growing and that things are happening. In September I attended the launch of Ceriph – a magazine of creative writing by new Singaporean writers, in its second issue. Books Actually, an independent bookshop to die for, publishes Ceriph through Maths Paper Press. They’re also collecting submissions for Coast - an anthology featuring new writing of that title by writers resident in Singapore.

Project-wise, I’m plotting a number of things for next year with some exciting people and organisations. These past few months have been a time to explore and find my bearings. I’m looking forward to seeing what comes next. Expect to hear more…

This week I’m at Ubud Writers & Readers Festival in Bali, where I’m a festival blogger and events volunteer. Surrounded by palms, rice padis and the sound of motorbikes, I’m taking in the delights of the festival, listening to and meeting writers from across Indonesia, Asia and the globe. Take a read here: http://ubudwritersfestival.com/blog