Downing Street Launch For Local Women's Writing Project

Inky Lemons project is supported by leading poets

A writing project for young women in the borough started by the Hounslow Action for Youth (HAY) will be launched this week at 10 Downing Street.

In the year the UK celebrates 100 years of women’s suffrage, Hounslow Action for Youth (HAY) is launching its first anthology from its Young Women’s Writing Project.

Inky Lemons includes writing from 17 young women from HAY, supported by contributions from famous poets including Mona Arshi, Helen Calcutt, Fran Lock, Rose McGinty, Desiree Reynolds and Helen Young. The project started over two years ago and was the inspiration of Debbie Hughes, CEO of HAY and Jacqueline Crooks, Lead Workshop Facilitator.

Produced as a means of raising funds for HAY, Inky Lemons, available for £7.99, is a mash-up, giving young women the opportunity to experiment with different genres - poetry, fiction, flash fiction, life writing, song writing. The work explores topics of loneliness, loss, marriage, judgement, friendship and growing up. With the support of Vanguard Editions the project has been successful in involving the support of well known writers from around the country who have provided remote mentoring for the Young Women in Hounslow.

Jacqueline Crooks, Lead Workshop Facilitator added: “The Young Women’s Writing Project was set up by HAY after focus groups found that local young women wanted to write but didn’t believe they could. They talked about their lives and sense of voicelessness – a feeling that no one was listening to them. That's where the idea for the writing project arose. Even the title, Inky Lemons, was the idea of the young women and we all agreed that it would be an inspirational vehicle for raising funds for HAY, allowing us to give a voice to even more young women writers.”

Debbie Hughes, CEO HAY, has over 30 years’ experience in the public and charity sectors. She has worked for Hounslow Action for Youth for 13 years, and prior to joining HAY, she worked in the London Borough of Hounslow working in Community Development, Sports Development and Community Recreation. Since joining HAY, she has raised the funding necessary to keep the Hanworth Centre and HAY’s Activities running, lead the team to achieve the Silver Level London Youth Quality Mark and developed a wide variety of programmes and activities for the Children, Young People and their families.

Jacqueline Crooks, Lead Workshop Facilitator for HAY Young Women’s Writing Project, has been working in the charity sector for over 20 years. She has delivered many writing workshops for young people, children and families as a tool to engage them and give them voice. In the past two years she has raised funding from the Arts Council for writing workshops with Caribbean elders, Somali refugee children and families.

During this time, she has been working in partnership with Vanguard publishing as a way of getting high calibre writers and editors to support the writing workshops, helping participants feel valued and give them the opportunity of working with published writers and editors to polish their stories to the highest possible standards.
The Inky Lemons project has been successful in engaging well known poets from around the country who have provided remote mentoring. They have been carefully matched to the interests of the young women.

HAY Young Women Writers … In their own words

Maisie
I'm 15 years old. I'm interested in the Arts and have a passion for music. Growing up I loved to sing and learn about new and interesting things. I want to go to university and study psychology. I want to understand why people do bad things and how people's childhood affects their adult lives.

Writing for me was a bit of a struggle. It made me feel a bit self-conscious and vulnerable and it has exposed me in a way I didn't want the world to see. Now it's built my self-confidence and made me feel as if I'm good at writing and to not be afraid of feedback. I definitely write more when I am inspired and sit down to put my thoughts on paper. I didn't get much help with writing when I was growing up and this group has definitely helped me.

Kelina
I am 14 years old. My interests are; reading, dancing and gaining knowledge. In the future I would like to go to university, hopefully Oxbridge maybe. I will study something scientific, such as biomedical chemistry. I would like to invent something that would help the world, researching for a new medicine or maybe not ... I'm not sure. Whatever happens, I’d like to live a happy life.

Before attending this workshop I would occasionally write, due to encouragement from my parents and teachers. As I've got older I've found myself with less time to write in the free time I have left, so attending these workshops has given me a time to write. The workshop has been good because my writing has been reviewed by a professional writer.

Poppy
I am 15! Barely, but there regardless. My name's Poppy, and I love writing, despite the fact that I barely do it. In my head, always, I write, whether it belongs to my surroundings or something original completely; the written word is my soul mate, I sometimes feel. That brings us to my dream job - first a writer, then a publisher/editor. Politics, too, could count as an interest. If I hadn't been so enamoured with writing I would have ran on the path to activism.

Writing before this workshop would be a lie: I didn't write. Unless you could count some sappy, emo poetry as it, which I for one hadn't. Aside from English lessons - which had writing lessons once a blue moon, anyway - I just didn't write. I'm not sure that it was a plain inability to put pen to paper in the sense of lack of ideas, but just motivation. In the millions did I have ideas, but my perfectionist disposition wrought my hands into procrastination, then inaction. Having the writing club was great as a result. It was a big, strict, yet really kind and polite finger pointing at me, demanding me to write something, for once. And I did!

Krissa
I am 15 years old and love to do many things. I play many instruments such as ukulele, piano harmonica etc. I love to draw but also I love learning new things such as history and maths. In the future I really want to be a chartered accountant to explore the world of finance and the growth of our new generation of business. But also I want to go to university and experience university life and learn more. However the most important thing is to help my parents and make them happy and enjoy life.

For me writing was difficult, expressing my ideas with words was not easy and very slow. Thus causing me to not write at all. However now coming to these sessions I have learnt how to write properly and have grown more confident in my ideas. My writing also has a rhythmic flow to it which I did not know how to do before.

Contributing Authors

Mona Arshi
Mona is a British poet, human rights lawyer, and lives in Hounslow. She won the Forward Prize, Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection in 2015 for her work Small Hands. She began writing poetry in 2008 and then went on to study creative writing at the University of East Anglia. Whilst she was studying for her masters she won first prize in the inaugural Magma poetry competition for her poem 'Hummingbird'. She then went on to become prize winner in the Troubadour International Competition in 2013 for her poem 'Bad Day in the Office'. In 2014 she was joint winner in the Manchester creative writing competition with a portfolio of five poems. In 2015 she published her first collection of poems 'Small Hands' with Pavilion Poetry a new poetry press from the Liverpool University Press under the editorship of Deryn Rees Jones.

Rose McGinty
Rose is the author of Electric Souk, published in 2017. She lives in Kent and works for the NHS in East London, and has worked overseas, including the Middle East. She is an alumni of the Trinity College, Dublin and the Faber Academy. Rose has won a number of writing competitions, had short stories published, spoken at festivals and is co-editing an anthology celebrating a hundred years of women’s suffrage with Retreat West. She is completing her second novel.

Kate Wakeling
Kate’s debut poetry pamphlet, The Rainbow Faults, is published by The Rialto. Her poetry has appeared in magazines and anthologies, including Magma, Oxford Poetry, 3:AM Magazine, The Guardian, The Forward Book of Poetry 2016 (Faber & Faber) and The Best British Poetry 2014 (Salt). Kate’s collection of children’s poetry, Moon Juice (The Emma Press), won the 2017 CLiPPA and was nominated for the 2018 Carnegie Medal.

Tyrone Wright
Tyrone is a musician, producer, and writer known for his distinctive and experimental place within soul, R&B and hip hop. He has been involved in putting music to the lyrics of the Inky Lemons writers so many of these pieces of prose or poems have music to match.

Tyrone grew up in Southall, close to Hounslow. He studied in Hounslow and has family in the area. He sees music as a way of transmogrifying difficult life circumstances into powerful art and likes working across artistic disciplines, so likes the idea of giving voice to young people through literature and art. He raps a lot and thinks rap and literature are cousins so it was an opportunity for him to deliver work with rap, poetry, literature, lyrics and music. His sound is a sprawling exploration of tightly-wound drum sequences combined with ambient key work, warping synths, and evocative vocals.

Publisher
Richard Skinner set up the social action arm of Vanguard Publishing to publish anthologies from minority social groups and channel expert writers to these projects. He has been recruiting lots of award-winning and best-selling authors to support these projects and he has been editing the stories and publishing them via his publishing press Vanguard Editions. Richard Skinner is a writer working across fiction, life writing, essays, non-fiction and poetry. He has published three novels with Faber & Faber, three books of non-fiction and three books of poetry. His work has been nominated for prizes and is published in eight languages.

April 22, 2018