A thought-provoking workshop with poet Katie O'Pray, exploring writing on chronic illness and disability, featuring readings from their debut collection APRICOT, and an opportunity to share your work at the Salon open mic.
About Katie O’Pray
Katie O’Pray is a poet and facilitator from Bedford. They have been the winner of The Ruth Weiss Foundation’s Emerging Poet’s Prize and the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition. Their work has recently been associated with the National Poetry Competition and the Manchester Writing Competition, among others. Their ‘devastating’ debut collection APRICOT was published by Out-Spoken Press in 2022.
About the Writers’ Salons:
CRIPtic x Spread the Word is a year-long programme of writers’ salons, led by industry-leading creatives including a workshop, reading and open mic. The Writers’ Salons are run in a partnership between CRIPtic Arts and Spread the Word. The Salons are supported by Scope and Arts Council England.
Come and join Connect through Creativity’s CRIPtic x Spread the Word Salon with Katie O’Pray and sign up for the Salon open mic if you’d like to share your work.
Katie O’Pray invites discussion and connection, as they share poems and approaches that have informed their own writing on chronic illness and disability.
Together, we will look at poems that explore experiences of mental and physical ill health and disability. We’ll be sharing our responses to them and considering how they may guide or inspire us in our own writing practice.
Katie will also be reading from their debut collection APRICOT, which examines their overlapping and interwoven experiences with complex trauma, chronic illness, eating disorders and psychiatric hospitalisation.
Read your work at the open mic
There are five open mic slots available at the Salon and if you’d like to share your work please complete the following form by 11am, Friday 27 September: https://forms.gle/2zietduM8xjzHur59
You’ll be asked to provide your contact details and a short bio and the reading you will be doing which should be no longer than 5 minutes. This is so we can send the work to our BSL interpreters in advance of the session. You can submit these in written English, video or audio file format.
Accessibility:
The Salon takes place on Zoom.
The Salon will be BSL Interpreted by Michelle Wood and Lynne Bateman.
It will also be auto-captioned.
The Salon is a relaxed space. People will be given regular breaks and are able to take additional breaks as needed.
Open Mic participants and guest readers will be asked to self-describe when introducing themselves.
Any images used at the Salon will be described, and Open Mic participants will be asked to describe any slides or images used in their own work.
We cannot guarantee a trigger-free space, and we will request that people participating in the Open Mic slots flag content likely to trigger.
Please email us about any other access needs: [email protected]
FAQs:
What do you mean by deaf and disabled?
When we say deaf and disabled, we include within that neurodivergence, chronic and long-term health conditions and mental health conditions.
How do I sign up to take part in the open mic?
There will be five x 5 minute open mic slots available at each Salon.
In your confirmation email for the ticket you’ll receive a link to complete an open mic application form, which we need you to complete in order to read at the Salon. We ask you in this form to share your writing bio and five minutes of reading material with us – this can be in English written form, or as a video or audio file. We’ll let you know if you have an open mic slot by the Wednesday before the Salon takes place. We ask for this info as it enables us to send work through to our BSL interpreters in advance of the Salon.
If the open mic slots to be oversubscribed and will prioritise writers reading from a range of genres and those who have not read at the Salon before.