Spoken Word Saturday (14+)

People Speak Up, Park Street, Llanelli.

8 March 2-5pm with Chandrika Joshi

14 June, 2-5pm with Daniel Morden

13 September, 2-5pm with Christina Thatcher

13 December, 2-5pm - Danny Sioned

Free

Ages 14+

Join hosts Ceri John Phillips & David Pitt for an afternoon of sharing stories, poetry, creative writing – all through the Spoken Word!

Spoken Word Saturday is held at People Speak Up, Arts Health and Wellbeing Hub, Park Street, Llanelli.

Entry is free, and refreshments are provided (donations for these are warmly welcomed!).

Special guests and a safe space for our community to share in our ‘Speak Up Spots’ for you to read or perform your own work. If you’d like to reserve one of these please let us know. We ask you to please keep your pieces to a maximum of 5 minutes, or preferably shorter so that we can have as many people sharing as possible.

www.peoplespeakup.co.uk
info@peoplespeakup.co.uk
01554 292393

8 March with Chandrika Joshi

Our guest storyteller and writer next month is Chandrika Joshi.

Chandrika Joshi is a Hindu Priestess, storyteller and a writer. She comes from a family of professional Kathakars , who tell stories from the Itihas and Purana. She grew up listenning to stories from both her parents. Her father was a priest and a Kathakar. It is her mother’s stories that she loved the best. Stories that her grandmother had passed on to her mother. Stories of strong and amazing women as protagonists. Chandrika has performed at festivals and other events and she helps run Cardiff storytelling circle.

14 June, 2-5pm with Daniel Morden

Well-known Storyteller Daniel Morden will be joining us at People Speak Up’s Spoken Word Saturday, but with a difference. He will be moving away from his traditional storytelling approach and sharing something much more personal.

In his talk, The Story Cure, Daniel Morden reflect on his recent health. In 2015, Daniel was diagnosed with a rare cancer in his jaw. During his treatment he found traditional tales that featured predicaments analogous to his own, which led him to realise storytelling is a fundamental human activity.

All his work since has been informed by his experiences undergoing illness and debility. He will discuss how these experiences shaped his recent work and our relationship with story more widely. He will be telling stories and talking about the value of them.

13 September, 2-5pm with Christina Thatcher

We are pleased to have poet and author Christina Thatcher at Spoken Word Saturday.

Christina grew up between a farm and a ranch house in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. She won a Marshall Scholarship to undertake two MAs in the UK, after which she completed a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at Cardiff University, where she is now a lecturer. Her poetry and short stories have been widely published in literary magazines, including Ambit, Butcher’s Dog, Magma, Poetry Wales, The North, The

Poetry Review and more. She has two previous poetry collections with Parthian Books: More than you were (2017) and How to Carry Fire (2020). Christina has toured internationally, reading her work in the UK, USA, Canada, Costa Rica, Switzerland, and Romania. christinathatcher.com / @writetoempower.

Christina will be sharing words and poems and reflecting on her recent work Breaking a Mare which is an investigation of silence, goodness and girlhood. It invites readers into the barn, the sawdust mill, the rodeo arena. These poems expose the hard work women do on farms, the loss of rural landscapes and the role death can play in these spaces. They ask what it means to be good in the face of physical, emotional and ecological threat. Ultimately, these poems want to know what breaks us and what makes us stronger.

13 December, 2-5pm - Danny Sioned

This December, singer and songwriter Danny Sioned will be joining us for Wintery Spoken Word Saturday. She is originally from the Preseli Mountains and expect to hear a mix of original and traditional folk songs in Welsh and English.