My role in the project was to assist magnificent poetry coach Michael James Parker and together we worked with a team of eight young people from a school in Farnborough.
Shake the Dust is a national project and is part of the Cultural Olympics in London. This Monday it was time for the regional poetry slam final in Southampton where our team was competing against four other schools in the South East of England.
Watching the youngsters on stage was much more nervwracking than being on stage myself ... And when the winners were announed I was in tears. I couldn't believe it ... our team aka The Awkward Squad won! I couldn't believe it, not because they weren't good, but because ALL the teams were good. So much power, so many feelings. Next week we're going up to the national final in London to represent the whole of the South East.
I'm also the Digital Champion for my region which means I represent the South East by blogging. You can read about the final and some more of my blog posts here.
Funnily enough my title during the Shake the Dust project has been "shadow poetry coach" which suits me as I'm a shadow in other people's everyday life through my Swenglish project. The idea of Swenglish was to give up my room, my job and my usual activities in order to take part in someone else's life, but Shake the Dust has been good for me, to go away about once a week to do poetry workshops has been a chance to "be myself" for a day.
You can read what I'm up to with Swenglish here.
