She moved to Leeds in 1990, teaching creative writing for the Universities of Leeds and Bradford and the WEA. From 2003- 2006 she was an online mentor for writers in Africa, for Crossing Borders
(www.crossing-borders) From 2004- 2006 she worked with a group of Finnish writers, resulting in a publication Interland (www.intland.net). She has collaborated with artists on projects on head lice, and teeth, and has swum round the swimming pools of Leeds on an Arts Council funded project, writing poetry and prose.
She has gained awards in short story and poetry competitions, including Fish (Ireland), Ilkley, Arc, and the Poetry Business. She has had a number of Arts Council awards, the most recent in Feb 2007 to work for a year in putting together a book of short stories. At the moment she divides her time between short stories and poetry. Her work has been broadcast on Radio 4 and published in a wide variety of magazines and anthologies, including The North, Rialto, Horisont, Smiths Knoll, Arc, Moving Worlds, The Text, Metropolitan, The Guardian, Mslexia. She has published one novel, and one poetry collection.
She has performed her own work at many venues in this country, and abroad in Finland and Malawi. She has run workshops for refugees and asylum seekers, for users of the mental health system, and for other NHS users, and in primary and secondary schools. For several years she organised poetry readings in Leeds.
A recent story of hers- ‘Window Dressing' - can be found in ‘A couple of Stops' (Light Transports), published by Illuminate/Route (www.light-transports.net). A recent poem, ICE, can be seen in Smiths Knoll, the poetry magazine (info on the net).
In April she will read at the Beehive café in Bradford, and in May is performing at the Writing on the Wall festival in Liverpool.
Try Kath's writing exercise...
a) Building a character
You find a bag on a train. Go through what's in it and make notes on the character who owns the bag. Start with a list of the objects, and then see what they suggest about their owner. Go beyond the obvious. Write down a fact that seems to you significant about this character -e.g. their name? or age? or prison record? or medical record? or a ticket somewhere?
Is it a large bag, or small?. Expensive or not?- Make a few notes, and use this as a way of building up a character. Let the character seep in, add more notes as they occur to you. Eventually you will use this character in a story.
b) One of the objects is broken.Write down a detailed description of it first. Then answer the questions -Why is it broken? Has it been repaired, or allowed to fall apart? Now write a piece from the point of view of the broken object -eg. I am a phone with a crack in it, or with no battery power. Look at the world from the point of view of this object -note what you see, smell, touch, taste and hear.
(This exercise can lend itself more to poetry-just write without going to the end of the line. Give yourself a number of lines to write -say, twelve.)
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