A Place For Words: Why work with a writer?
Extensive thinking and advocacy has already been done around the role of the arts in regeneration and place-making. The aim of A Place For Words is to look specifically at how creative writing fits into that debate.
Creative writers – novelists, short fiction writers, poets, script writers – concern themselves with the complexities of relationships: between individuals, communities, places and politics. A writer strives to understand the connections between things, to listen to what is not said, and to find a form and a language to make these issues accessible and understandable to their readers. Writing is also about beauty, and fun, and entertainment. Excellent writing can speak across social and cultural divides; it can make us look again at our world and our position in it.
We can take these skills and approaches and apply them to the process of regeneration and successful place-making. Writers recognise and work with the fact that place is inextricably linked with the people who inhabit and use it, and so are well placed to deliver participatory projects that reconnect communities with place, tease out existing relationships with and aspirations for places, and work to improve and enhance places.
