Real ones, ones we invented, and some in between

The Writing Squad & Project H’s Chaz Josephs writes…

This month, we arrived at the library expecting a different kind of workshop; it was going to be led by Writing Squad grad Katherine Horrex. That was not the only change in store. We were turfed out of the usual dreary reading room, and found ourselves a floor up, in a modern meeting room.

Katherine gave us a poem that had been formatted as prose, and asked us to indicate where we thought the line breaks would be. Seemingly simple, the task turned out to be challenging, and no one got all the breaks in the right place. From this, Katherine went on to talk us through free verse poetry, before giving us a chance to write our own.

We then compiled a Hull Dictionary, words and phrases used in Hull, real ones, one we invented, and some in between. We also made up our own words and used these in our next writing exercise, resulting in some lively dialogue pieces. We look forward to seeing how we can put our Hull Dictionary into our final project.