Welcome to the Advent Calendar, day 18. I’m a big believer in our voices being heard by our community, friends, or just ourselves. So any opportunity to speak for ourselves and to speak for others to hear, I would love to highlight.
In the Winter Welcome post, I highlighted some of the speakers we had come to read from work they’d done at Writing Our Harehills.
Writing Our Harehills
Let’s start with Writing Our Harehills – this was a series of Creative Writing Workshops in late Summer and autumn. The fantastic and powerful Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan hosted and supported. The sessions, sign-up, and promotion was organised by Natalie Tharraleos and Martha Adebambo.
There were multiple sessions for varying demographics across multiple sites over several weeks. I was gutted. I couldn’t align my holidays at work to coincide, as I wanted to visit and get involved. Like many involved, I’ve a passion for writing too.
The sessions were open to everyone, with no experience necessary, though if you had some experience, you were just as welcome. It was a place to write your story for you.
We live in a world where much is sanitised, even across social media – just being able to express yourself in your own words is one of our greatest gifts and rights. There are many perspectives, experiences and histories in Harehills, points of view that many of us can’t imagine, so the free and open telling of our stories is compelling. So I think these workshops sound fantastic and hope to be able to go along to whatever follows because I hope there’s something like this in 2023.
What we heard at the Winter Welcome showed the power there.
Harehills ❤️ Love 
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