Lockdown Town

We are very excited to share the final Lockdown Town poem with you on Thursday 15 April at 5pm!

Lockdown Town is written by Simon Mole with the help of the community at our workshops with the public, schools and community groups earlier this year. Participants came together at these relaxed creative writing workshops to stay creative and connected, whilst exploring their shared experiences of lockdown and the pandemic.

The final piece will be released as a short film featuring design and animation by Scott Tyrrell - and read by some of the workshop participant.

Watch along below when the video goes live on Thursday!

The Lockdown Town project follows on from the successful All Write Together series of online writing sessions during the first lockdown last spring. Click here to find out more and watch the final All Write Together film.

Here's Simon Mole to tell you a little about the form of the Lockdown Town poem and why he chose to write a univocalism - only using one vowel...

A message from poet Simon Mole about the project

"During the Lockdown Town project I ran over 10 writing workshops with Norden Farm to help keep the local community connected and creative during our winter lockdown. We explored the idea of place as a startpoint for poetry, and used a fictional place called ‘Lockdown Town’ as a way to share our ideas and feelings about the last year.

Quite often in a project like this, I will present the final poem and everyone will politely say how much they like it (hopefully that is for the most part true). We all rightly feel happy with what we’ve achieved and move on. In this project, something that made me feel even happier was how motivated participants were to get into the nitty gritty of those final editing decisions.

To be honest, I was pretty sure the poem was finished when I arrived at our last zoom, but by the time I logged off we had changed a few tiny but important things which definitely improved the version of the poem that we ended up sending to Scott to create the animation for.

The rough versions I’ve seen so far are looking amazing and I can't wait to share the finished video with you soon!"

This project is kindly supported by Arts Council England.