We’re super pleased to announce that the filmed poems we were working on with our group in Walker Academy are now ready for release!

We’ve been hard at work behind the scenes over the last few months getting them all edited. We also wanted to make extra sure that the young people and their guardians were 100% happy for us to share this work.

Well, it is all go. And this is the first one we’d like to show you. Lilly wrote ‘3 Minutes’ pretty much off the bat during our first session, how cool is that? It’s a slam winning poem if ever I heard one.

We’ll be releasing more of the films on Facebook and Twitter. We’ll also be uploading them all, along with the written poems, on here in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!

Wow, we’re approaching the end of the summer. That went fast didn’t it? I’ve just got back from a holiday and I think it’s about time I told you what we at SlamFresh got up to before the end of the last school term.

So the week before the school closed, myself and Donald Jenkins were doing a bit of filming with our group in Walker Riverside Academy and finishing off our pilot project there. It’s been such a rewarding experience. I’ve been so impressed with the quality of the writing. And I’ve been especially impressed by how the young people have helped to guide the project in what has been some pretty challenging circumstances.

For those of you who missed our last post, the original plan was to help each young person write at least one slam poem. We would then organise a poetry slam in an out of school venue, which would be open to friends and family members.

But as we approached the final week of term, this started to feel a little problematic. Lots of venues were having to close due to a surge in Covid cases. Events were being cancelled and me and Donald had to make the difficult decision to move away from the out of school element.

It was tricky. We knew doing this final show would have helped the group take more ownership of the project and make it feel like something that was truly theirs. But we decided we just couldn’t risk the event being cancelled last minute.

So we threw the idea back to the group. One of them, Lilly, suggested we make some Youtube videos of the poems instead. It sounded like a great idea. We took a vote and the young people unanimously went for this option.

We then spent a few sessions editing our work and researching what a good Youtube poem looks like. We watched some Hollie McNish videos and talked about speaking with confidence, as well as using eye contact and clear body language. On the final session, Don led us all through some really fun warm up games, before we each took turns going down to the library to film our poems with a professional film maker.

I was really moved by the commitment of the group. One of them, George, had to go into isolation a few days before. He joined us virtually and recorded his poem over Google Meet instead. Another student, Favour, who has only been learning English for a matter of months, stood up and read her piece with such confidence and pride it brought a tear to my eye.

The films themselves are currently being edited and we’re hoping to be able to share these with you sometime around mid-September. We’ll also be putting written copies of them up as we go.

Until then, stay tuned!

Good things are happening! Our pilot project in Walker Riverside Academy is well underway and it is so exciting to be starting our work.

For those of you who missed it, SlamFresh are a community interest company made up of myself (Rowan McCabe), Michael MacDonald (pen name Donald Jenkins) and Jeff Price. Our aim is to help young people around the North East and beyond to write and perform their own spoken word poetry.

The first step of that mission is to run a pilot project in Walker Riverside Academy, to hone a model that we can then roll out to schools around the region. We’ve just started a 7-week project with a group of year 8 and year 9 students, and we’ll be meeting once a week to guide the young people through the process of writing, editing and rehearsing their own poems.

We got to Walker Riverside, signed in at the reception and went up to the room. Our 8 students started to filter in and sit themselves down. They’ve all put themselves forward for this, having just come out of a project ran by Seven Stories. We kicked off by playing an alliterated name game to get to know each other, before having a conversation about what poetry means to us.

One student talked about how he liked poetry, but the process of studying it for an exam could be exhausting. It made me remember what we’re doing this for. We explained that the purpose of these sessions was to express ourselves, to speak out about issues that were important to us, and to maybe not get so hung up on picking the structure of each poem apart.

Me and Donald then demonstrated what a poetry slam looks like by going head-to-head in front of the group, inviting 3 volunteers to be judges. After this we led the group through a series of writing exercises, inviting them to redefine commonly used words and make group poems from the results. We talked about zebras with yellow stripes, how bones are just meat sticks, and all of the many things you can do in 3 minutes.

While laying some ground rules near the start, I mentioned that perhaps we should avoid ‘isms’ in our writing e.g racism, sexism etc.
‘But some isms are good,’ suggested one student. ‘What about socialism?’

I can’t wait to meet up with this bunch next week. I’m really looking forward to hearing what they come up with next.

We are incredibly pleased to announce that SlamFresh CIC has been awarded a grant from Arts Council England. The grant will allow us to run a trial project in Walker Riverside Academy, as well as to set up a website and build a social media presence. It is the first step on our mission to deliver performance poetry and spoken word workshops in schools and community settings around the North East and beyond.

This has been a long time in the making! SlamFresh registered as a community interest company nearly 2 years ago and is directed by poets Michael MacDonald, Rowan McCabe and Jeff Price. However, in light of the global pandemic, our plans had to take a bit of a backseat.

So we are very excited to say that we are now able to begin running workshops and making plans to expand the business.

Our first series of sessions will be in Walker Riverside Academy, working with a group of 15 students from year’s 8 and 9. Over the course of 6 workshops we will be guiding the group through the process of writing, editing and performing their own spoken word poems. The project will culminate in a final performance for family and friends.

We believe this is the beginning of some very big things, and once this project is complete we will be looking to roll our model out to schools around the North East and, ultimately, the whole of the UK.