HIP LOCAL LIT NEWS: ATownExploresABook22
Choose2bKind Project
A Creative Writing Competition
By Gail Borrow
Kindness is the theme of #ATownExploresABook22’s creative writing competition running 1-31 March 2022. Young writers aged 7-14 years are invited to submit 100-150 words about an act of kindness in a competition judged by a panel led by Young Adult authors Catherine Johnson and Patrice Lawrence.
Advice from writer Hannah Collisson who is selecting the competition short list is to focus on the feelings experienced in an act of kindness. Collage artist Lou Lou Cousin’s top tip is to visit Hastings Museum and Art Gallery to find a picture or object showing an act of kindness and to record words that come to mind in that moment on a phone. Then, on returning home, to write the words out, cut them up and collage them on to a page in an order, with additional words, that feels creative.
The creative writing competition is being supported by Hannah, Lou Lou, visual artist Yasmin Aishah and festival artistic director Gail Borrow in an innovative schools project at Hastings Museum and Arts Gallery called Choose2bKind. It responds to the central theme of friendship in Rumer Godden’s Whitbread Prize winning children’s book The Diddakoi, marking fifty years since its publication.
Funded by East Sussex Community Foundation, festival crowd funder donations, The Arts Society Rother Valley and Hastings Museum and Art Gallery, year 5 pupils from St Leonard’s schools Christ Church C of E Primary Academy, St Paul’s C of E Primary Academy, West St Leonards Primary Academy and Icklesham CE Primary will be exploring the museum’s collection with the artists and learning how to navigate bullying scenarios in forum theatre workshops.
A legacy of the project is to support the embedding of training in dealing with micro aggression into the literacy curriculum. The Diddakoi is significant for exploring the bullying of a marginalised female character by a group of girls. It was written eighteen years after William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, often cited as the defining twentieth century text on childhood bullying.
Festival director Gail Borrow says, “Actually bullying is a theme found in many children’s books so building a fun and accessible drama exploration into literacy learning, aiding children to recognise aggression in its many forms and equipping them to address it healthily, offers an essential life skill. You aren’t safe in water unless you learn to swim. Practising how to navigate complex social situations protects children from getting caught up in destructive and negative power imbalances that can impact every aspect of life. It’s potentially a life changer.”
• To find out more, visit www.atownexploresabook.com Competition flyers are available from the museum and in schools with entries accepted from 1-31 March, 2022.
• For museum opening times: www.hmag.org.uk
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