LITERATURE

Rising voices

As the city prepares to welcome the first ever Working Class Writers Festival this October, we get to know festival founder and artistic director, Natasha Carthew, who is looking forward to celebrating underrepresented writers of all styles and disciplines

This year, Bristol will see its first ever Working Class Writers Festival grace the city streets. The event, which is set to run from 21 – 24 October 2021 as part of the annual Festival of Ideas, aims to give exposure to working class writers and provide inspiration for young people from similar backgrounds. It will showcase authentic stories reflective of and relatable to the experiences of working class communities and be physically and financially available to audience members experiencing different financial pressures.

The festival will welcome poets, journalists and academics to the physical and digital stage, including Stella Duffy, Tracy King and Mahsuda Snaith. The special guests will also join panel discussions, speaker events and workshops.

To find out more, we spoke to festival founder and artistic director, Natasha Carthew, who initially suggested the idea in 2008, using social media to gauge interest in the event –the response was a resounding yes. Almost 13 years later, Natasha’s idea has finally come to fruition...

What’s a typical day for you?

Daily I write in a three-sided cabin I built out of scrap in my back garden in Cornwall, it overlooks a few farms and in the distance I can see Bodmin Moor. I head out for a hike every day in the neighbouring fields and woods and bring a small notebook and pencil with me for any lightning bolt moments. All my favourite places to write are outside and when I visit Bristol I make sure to take some time out to write beside the River Avon. Afternoons are generally spent working on the festival and doing interviews.

What are you currently working on?

I’m currently touring the UK with my new collection of prose-poetry, which celebrates the lives of working class women. It was published with Hypatia Publications in April.

With my artistic director hat on, I’m also planning the finer details of the Working Class Writers Festival. Class Festival is a dynamic new festival of national significance based in Bristol, with a far reaching ambition to enhance, encourage and increase representation from working class backgrounds across the country, whilst connecting authors, readers, agents and editors. Commissioning and showcasing writers of all styles and disciplines is at the heart of this festival, providing a platform for both established and debut writers to get involved with both live and online events. The Working Class Writers Festival will not only provide a platform for working class writers, but will set precedence among festivals that will make attendance more affordable and accessible to all.

What can we expect to see at the festival?

Natasha Carthew

What inspires you? Tell us about some of the things that drive you to write.

In my work I’m interested in socioeconomic issues, ranging from poverty to social isolation. It is these people’s stories that I am compelled to tell, the stories that may at first seem bleak, but are ultimately uplifting as the characters push for better. Social justice is at the heart of all my work, the simple fact that everyone deserves equal economic, political and social rights and opportunities.

Describe your ambitions for your work going forward.

I didn’t see working class identity in books when I was growing up and I still find it hard to find many working class writers that are published in the UK and I want to change that. I want to give readers a sense of belonging, so it’s always been my ambition to write stories that empower instead of isolate and this goes the same for Class Festival.

Who deserves a special shout-out in Bristol for their work this year?

For me it has to be the Festival of Ideas team. From the moment I met the director, Andrew Kelly, I knew I had met a like-minded soul and the support of the entire team has been priceless in the creation of Class Festival. Bristol Festival of Ideas aims to stimulate people’s minds and passions with an inspiring programme of discussion and debate throughout the year and is produced by Bristol Cultural Development Partnership.

What music are you into?

I’m a massive country music fan, but I’m really into an Australian band at the moment called Confidence Man. I first saw them in Bristol at the Dot to Dot Festival in 2017 at The Louisiana and they are incredible live (nothing to do with my nephew on drums!).

Wells Cathedral School’s production of Les Misérables was staged at Strode Theatre

Damian Todres

Teaching empathy

In a world that holds unprecedented uncertainty and change, how best do we equip our learners of today to adapt and thrive in an unknowable tomorrow? What is the priority for them, artificial or human intelligence? Damian Todres, director of drama at Wells Cathedral School, argues that drama may hold the key...

Consider the experience of being a child in the 21st century: tentatively exploring ‘who I am’ through the glaring lens of relentless social media feeds, with the emotional burdens of ‘always on’ connectivity, commentary and unprecedented self-comparison. Add to this the worries of climate change, perpetual political upheaval and the arrival of a game-changing pandemic. Such psychological pressures are compounded by the rapid pace of technological change, whereby more than half of children entering primary school today will ultimately end up working in completely new jobs that don’t yet exist. How can our young people be better prepared to cope in such a world?

An indication of this direction of travel can be seen in the World Economic Forum’s recent Future of Jobs report, where we see employers prioritising ‘creativity’ and ‘emotional intelligence’ as capabilities they wish to see in their recruits; these more ‘human’ skills balancing what the current digital trends of artificial intelligence and machine learning are unable to bear.

So as a result of the cultural and employment challenges facing our young learners today it seems that we may need to re-evaluate the kinds of knowledge and capacities that empower them to thrive in an unknowable future. And here we come to an old idea: Aristotle’s concept of ‘phronesis’, or ‘practical wisdom’, is an intelligence gathered from practical action and creativity that ultimately informs a person how to ‘be’ in the world. Concerned with not only the ‘head’ (what to know), but crucially, how to integrate this with the ‘hand’ (how to act) as well as the ‘heart’ (how to feel), Aristotle here emphasises the significance of not necessarily ‘what’ to know, but ‘how’ to know.

So how do we provide opportunities to facilitate practical wisdom and emotional intelligence in our schools? I believe that teaching and learning drama is a compelling answer. Through embodying characters from other times and places, drama utilises the universality of human experience to imaginatively uncover shared

The facility to empathise holds profound value in developing a citizen of the 21st century and arguably enables the skills of collaboration, people management and negotiation...

emotional and personal connections. It is able to further develop perspectives between ‘self’ and ‘other’ due to its inherently social and collaborative modes of working, thus encouraging empathic thinking and behaviour through a consideration of multiple perspectives. During this iterative process, creativity and imagination help to establish a transformative space of possibility that supports farreaching benefits such as kindness, healing and understanding –qualities that are transferable to the wider life of the child.

Not only do all of these traits explain how drama is able to foster practical wisdom, the discipline explicitly teaches what many consider to be one of the most urgent capacities in education: empathy. Originating from the German philosophical term einfühlung (‘feeling into’) and the Greek root ‘pathos’, which translates as emotion, suffering and pity, it is now understood to mean the ability to move beyond ourselves in order to meaningfully understand the feelings and experiences of others.

This facility to empathise holds profound value in developing a citizen of the 21st century and arguably enables the skills of collaboration, people management and negotiation necessary to be a success in modern life. Furthermore, the late and much-lamented educationalist Ken Robinson made an urgent call for empathy as the next educational disruptor, as he believed that many of the problems our children face are rooted in failures of empathy. In this way, the ability to ‘feel into’ is able to facilitate the development of a young person experiencing challenges into an agile, resourceful and resilient adult.

As a drama teacher, this concern with practical wisdom and empathy has led me to pursue my own research which focuses on dramaturgical strategies that enable pupils to develop and deepen their foundational human capacity to imagine the world of another; a competency that may help them to adapt and thrive together in the modern world of an unknowable future. ■

Damian Todres is director of drama and head of the creative arts faculty at Wells Cathedral School, winner of Independent School of the Year 2020 in the performing arts category. The above is drawn from his final MSc dissertation entitled ‘Imagining the Other’ at the University of Oxford, which investigated how educators can facilitate and explicitly teach empathy.

Wells Cathedral School's Brass musicians at The Two Moors Festival