Over the past two years, setting up my spoken word entertainment website www.listenupnorth.com has been a labour of love. It has also been a steep learning curve, some things have worked out, others not. Nevertheless no experience has been a wasted and I have brought together many strands including business and legal aspects, recording content, producing and directing, in addition to developing the website itself. Still under development, I am really pleased with how it is looking so far:
At last I have found a web designer that I really want to work with and for the past few months I have been shaping the site with Dean www.zimt.co.uk who has really taken time to find out what I want and need. We are nearly there, ironing out those glitches that are only apparent when you start using the site under test conditions; the list of things to work on is now down to two-thirds of a page instead of three and a half! At the moment I feel like a child on Christmas Eve, all excited, wondering whether Christmas Day will ever come and if I'll get that present I wrote to Santa Claus about.
Whilst I’ve been recording content to introduce to the site, I have been very privileged to meet some talented local writers. One of these is tutor Gordon Phillips who came along to Core Music Hexham to record a short story and a selection of his poetry. I have included his poem ‘Quarantine Song’ for you to listen to. This featured in the book ‘From Segedunum to Spanish City’ (02 March 2010). and is set on St Mary's Island, Whitley Bay.
Gordon is also running some fascinating courses this term:
Two Courses at Newcastle City Library
The Face in Literature is a course that will survey aspects of the human face – beauty, youth, ugliness, love, fear, blindness, disfigurement – in poems and texts by Walt Whitman, Edward Lear and Oscar Wilde, to name but a few. 10 weekly sessions begin on Friday 1 October from 10.15 am until 12.15 pm.
Songsville: Composers and Songwriters, their Lyrics and History will include folkies Robert Burns and Tommy Armstrong as well as the poetic songs of George Butterworth and the Englishness of Ray Davies, The Kinks frontman. It will end with songs from a Charles Dickens catalogue for a grand Victorian Christmas. 10 weekly sessions begin on Wednesday 29 September from 10.15 am until 12.15 pm.
A further WEA Literature Course at The Meadows, Waterville Road, North Shields
Nature Writing and the Environment is about how nature writers have approached the question of the environment and the way we have treated it from the early industrial landscape to the present day. 10 weekly sessions begin on Thursday 16 September from 2.00 until 4.00 pm. For more information on these courses contact the tutor, Gordon Phillips, on 0191 2747803 or e mail gordonfrankphillips@hotmail.com
