Guest post by Stella Backhouse, a writer based in Coventry. This post was originally published in issue #6 of Action Rayz zine, curated by Jazz Moreton & Alan Van Wijgerden. Details of Action Rayz’ regular film club screenings can be found here.
After the very public collapse of City of Culture Trust and the promised ‘legacy’ of Coventry’s year as UK City of Culture well and truly on the scrapheap, where does the city’s arts scene go from here?
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This post details a draft action plan entitled ‘Creating the Conditions for Creation’ which has its genesis in a F13 (network of independent and small scale arts organisations, freelance artists and creative practitioners) workshop. This workshop asked the question: “Where do we want to be in five years time?” – as a way of talking about, and moving collectively forwards from, the collapse of Coventry City of Culture Trust.
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Sarah Owen reflects on their second residency at the Nest
One of the last things I said before I finished my second residency at the Nest back in July 2022 was a tongue-in-cheek promise that it wouldn’t take me three months to write my blog about my experience, after I did exactly that last time. In my defence, I didn’t lie. However, taking eight months to write it instead was not exactly my intention. But! Better late than never, and I think I can (and I will) argue that it’s sort of appropriate for a person who spent their Nest residency working on a stage musical about time to also be consistently dogged by time as a concept.
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Rosa Francesca reflects on her Coventry Biennial Nest Residency
In 2021 I completed a Nest Residency on the subject of Black hair and the Natural Hair movement, particularly looking at how Black women’s relationship with their hair is often intruded upon, either physically by white people touching it without consent, or through unsolicited advice and comments on its styling. My project was a cybernetic wig, using a variety of sensors to create an interactive wig that both entices and reprimands users to interact with the wig.
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Navkiran Kaur Mann reflects on her Nestival Residency
I started my Nestival Residency with a sense of apprehension. Do I call myself an artist? As a person I am many things. I asked myself, does this label fit me? Do I belong in the arts? As a Brown woman I rarely see people who look like me in the arts.
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Filmmaker Adrian Dowling reflects on his Nestival Residency
It took me more than two months to apply to do the residency. I kept putting it off because I find those kind of things very difficult, but after attending one of the F13 meetings I felt quite comfortable in the space. Duncan Whitley [a former Talking Birds Resident] was pushing me, saying “Why don’t you do it? I think it would be good for you.” So I recorded a voice application with the help of my daughter, Kady, who’s doing all the technical stuff while I’m reading off some paper because I find it quite difficult to write things down.
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Mason Le Long Reflects on his Hatching Residency with Talking Birds
To be honest, I thought it sounded too good to be true. Talking Birds promising to pay artists to come and work in their studios for ten days, and not even asking for any finished material at the end of it? I thought there must be more to it than meets the eye.
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Anne Forgan reflects on her Hatching Residency
A place of permission.
I shouldn’t need it, but still I do.
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Matt Rheeston reflects on his Hatching Residency
For my Nest Residency I spent time exploring my creativity in a therapeutic way, through drawing, music, song writing and production.
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Nicola Richardson and Marianne Taviner reflect on their Hatching Residency
We are Nicola and Maz, the Directors of Vortex Creates. Vortex is a Coventry based organisation who for nearly 15 years have specialised in igniting the imagination of audiences through transforming spaces and creating showstopping costumes.
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Wes Finch reflects on his recent Nest Residency
I am taking two weeks, one either side of chocolate-gorging at Easter, to spend time immersed in fairy stories, folk tales, legends, and fables and work out how I might write something in response, along those lines that reach so far back into our collective past and persists into our messy and fragmented present. Maybe I can even jump into the future and look back at where we are now? Maybe that’s a little ambitious for a two-week period but it’s good to aim high, even if I just read some great stories and get a few ideas.
There are certain characters, ideas, formulas, and progressions of events that repeat themselves, in different contexts and wearing different clothes, in the stories that we share and enjoy that have been present from the beginning of storytelling and are still with us today. There are a whole set of ideas, circumstances and narratives that come to mind when someone says the name ‘Cinderella’, ‘Snow White’ or the phrases Let There Be Light! or The Chosen One. Stories are how we make sense of the world and inform how we navigate and interact with it. I’ve found thinkers and writers like Johnathan Pageua and Jordan Peterson fascinating in their unpacking of biblical stories in that regard – well what portion of it I can keep up with, anyway!
It’s a real privilege to have a room, a quiet space with wi-fi and books, with none of the distractions and obligations that come with trying to do this at home. I love being at home (which is a good thing, considering that last two years) but there are other people and animals that come in and out of rooms, people that knock the front door, guitars to be picked up, paint and pens, records, incomplete DIY jobs, things to tidy, laundry and washing up to distract and interrupt me. Here I have the luxury of time to dedicate thought and energy to something I hope I can form into a bigger project in the future.
At the moment I’m still trying to absorb stories and ideas, but I’ve written a little piece about a dragon that attacks Coventry and something about a metal detectorist finding a Golden Key…
The Nest is a fantastic place to be, amongst other creative people working in all kinds of disciplines. I’ve already bumped into a photographer and a dancer I know, passing between my room and the communal area downstairs. Now, I just need to find someone who might want to do some illustrations….
It’s now the end of the second week in my little office. I’ve met some more interesting folks working here and shared some of my writing with some, and as my time here comes to an end, I know I’m going to miss what such an environment has given me.
I’ve read more but nowhere near everything I’d want to (so many books, so little time!) and I’ve written a few more pieces. I worried I might not be able to get back into the rhythm of it after a break, but ideas have obviously been percolating and then insisting on being put on the page just as I’m trying to read another story.
The stories of Kurt Schwitter are bizarre, funny and brilliant, Katherine M Briggs’ British Folk Tales and Legends – A Sampler has been really useful, as have Lisa Schneidau’s Botanical Folk Tales along with Chainey & Winsham’s Treasury of Folklore.
It doesn’t help that Talking Birds’ small library downstairs is full of incredibly interesting and distracting titles too (I borrowed Octavia Butler’s Bloodchild and Other Stories over Easter and didn’t regret it, although I’m not sure it tied into my practice here other than highlighting some useful stuff about the practice of writing with a short contextual essay after each piece.)
There’s been some positive responses to whatever I’ve shared which has been encouraging. I wrote a retelling of an old French tale where a young lord marries a water sprite and I’ve started a retelling of the early life of Lady Godiva, when she was just called Evie.
I’ve struggled to get a foothold on something truly from the future perspective. After finding a map of the predicted flooding and redrawn coastline of the UK in 100 years’ time I really wanted to respond to that, setting a story on the Isle of Rasen where the market town of Middle Rasen now lies in Lincolnshire but that’ll have to wait to solidify a bit more.
I’ve been drawn to Fairies, or as I now know to call them The Gentry or The Good People and have a couple of pieces concerning encountering them in a more modern context.
As an over-arching theme I’ve been mulling over the idea of the ‘other’ or the ‘magical’ that features in so many stories and drawn to considering it all in a revised way; I think there is a lot to be gained from understanding and appreciating the symbolic reality of things and what they represent and manifest for us in the stories we tell and enjoy. We live in an age so dominated by scientific practice that to even deal with things like spirits and spells is at once dismissed as childish. Fantasy as a genre isn’t considered as worthy or important as say historical fiction because it involves things that have no basis in physical, manifest reality. If something can’t be observed, recorded, and quantified does it even exist?! Well, what does that say about your very own consciousness, eh…?
I think it’s probably important to remember the following, and it’s something that has been known eons before and is being slowly remembered and reconfirmed in physics labs today; what you observe to be real is very dependent on what and who is observing. Therefore, what is true might well depend a lot on you. So, just bear that in mind next time you turn the corner into your street and come face to face with a fox in the moonlight.
Leanne Moden reflects on her recent Nest Residency
At the end of April 2022, I spent a beautiful, sunny week in Coventry with Talking Birds, as part of their Hatching Residency.
I was really excited to work on a completely new idea – a one-person show based on my recent experiences of chronic illness – and the residency gave me the headspace to finally start the process of thinking about the project, rather than just thinking about thinking about it.
In 2021, I had a sudden and frightening period of ill-health, and the experience really showed me how invisible and chronic illnesses are often treated in the UK. I wanted to explore the highs and lows that come from navigating the world with a chronic condition, with a view to turning this into a piece of autobiographical theatre.
One of the things that struck me most about getting sick was how worried I became about ‘not being useful”. When I was incapacitated by my condition, all I thought about was how much time I was taking off work, and how inconvenient I was being to those around me. That made me think about the current societal narratives around productivity, usefulness, and community, in relation to illness and disability.
During my first couple of days on the residency, I did a lot of thinking, note-taking, and reading, and I wrote pages and pages of stream of consciousness narrative. At the end of each day, I worried that I hadn’t written enough, or used my time as wisely as I could. This was pretty ironic, given I was meant to be writing about productivity and rest! So, by Wednesday, I vowed to just go with the flow, and not get too het up about “being productive”.
As a result, I spent the final few days writing around the themes of the show, as well as plotting the story arc, thinking about how “Deal Or No Deal” might be the perfect metaphor for the Just World Hypothesis, and generally getting super excited about what I was writing.
I also found time to write a draft for a commissioned piece for an unrelated project, and I spent a day working through my current archive of poetry – finding stuff that I’d started but failed to finish, and earmarking it for editing in the summer.
It was almost as if the fear of not being productive was causing me not to be productive. It all felt a bit meta, truth be told! But actually, it was all grist for the mill, and I wouldn’t have found time to consider my own relationship with “feeling useful” if I hadn’t had the time/space afforded by the residency.
It was also really lovely to meet and chat with other creative people during the lunches, and these serendipitous conversations were super inspiring too. I’d like to extend a huge thanks to everyone at Talking Birds for such a lovely, welcoming, and creative experience. I hope it won’t be too long until my next residency!
Words from the Birds 