Change the Word with Emily Webb
Marketing & Administration Assistant Elizabeth Carpenter learns all about Change the Word with Director of Poetry Emily Webb:
As a new member of the team, I am eager to learn about all of the different aspects of Good Chance’s work. As well as large scale productions such as this summer’s ambitious project The Walk, much of Good Chance’s work takes place in intimate community settings, providing a platform for participants to voice their stories. In light of our Head of Poetry Emily Webb’s recent first prize at the International Cheltenham Poetry Festival it seemed the perfect time to learn more from her about Change the Word. In addition to writing herself, Emily leads this unique Good Chance collective, which brings people together through poetry and storytelling.
Tell me about Change the Word! What do you do, who is involved, and how did it all begin?
Change the Word is a poetry collective like no other. It is a space for the collision of ideas and language and friendships, where the differences between us all are celebrated as much as the things that unite us. We revel in that difference - we hold it up and turn it in the light, we share the specificity of who we are through poetry, and in doing so we understand each other, ourselves and the world in new ways.
The members of Change the Word are from all over the world - over 25 countries - and now live here in the UK. New people get involved through Change the Word projects, where we run poetry and performance workshops each week that build towards the publication of a poetry anthology and a poetry show in an unusual space in a city (or on Zoom most recently!) Then the Change the Word collective meet up every week, from all over the country, to write together and share their poetry with the world through books, shows, films and more.
Was there a particular moment that inspired you to establish a creative writing group which would be a welcoming space for everyone, especially those newly arrived to the UK?
There was a moment in the Good Chance Dome in Paris in 2018, when Mohammed Mustafa performed for the first time - now a member of our brilliant theatre company La Troupe. It was a long prose-poem, fully in Arabic, that lasted for about 10 minutes. Most of the audience in the Dome didn’t speak Arabic. But everyone was spellbound - there was an immense power to his words, to his impassioned performance of them, to his expression with his hands, his face, his eyes, that communicated something fundamental about who we are as human beings. We understood what he was saying, even when we didn’t understand what he was saying. And we were moved and changed by it.
This is the power of poetry. And the essence of the Dome is to bring people together to share in that power, to revel in it, to make change with it. With Change the Word, we want to show what a changed world can really look like, and what it can mean when we come together to imagine things anew.
Fitwi from Change the Word says all of this better than I could:
“In Change the Word, we see that we are all human beings, we are one species, but we see one thing from different perspectives. It enriches and tells you how the world is beautiful. And observing that one thing can be expressed and viewed by different people in different aspects - that is amazing, that is inspiration.”
Change the Word has been quite far reaching! Where did it begin, what cities have you worked in, and how many people do you think have been involved over the years?
Our first Change the Word began in the Shop Front Theatre in a shopping arcade in Coventry two years ago. When we went out into the arcade to read our poems one day, our voices rebounded off the walls into this huge chorus of words that I’ll never forget.
The next Change the Word took place in Sheffield, in the big glass box on top of the Crucible Theatre. There we had over 100 people crammed into one room for a Welcome Meal - a taster of delicious food and a taster of delicious poetry - that evolved over months into a performance in Sheffield’s beautiful Winter Garden to well over 200 people with the powerful words winning out over the powerful storms of a cold February day!
And most recently, our Change the Word in Barnsley was, in fact, online, and welcomed people together from Barnsley, Bradford, Coventry, Huddersfield, Sheffield, London, Wakefield… The magic of Zoom! There have been nearly 100 people writing with Change the Word, not to mention the thousands of people who have been part of the workshops and interactive shows along the way…
What do you think Change the Word means to those who have been part of it?
Especially through lockdown, I speak for myself when I say Change the Word has become a real lifeline - to meet every week and see people in your poetry family, to create together, to share the very strange experiences of the last year - that has been unique.
And I think the words of the brilliant Almigdad in Barnsley sum it up beautifully:
“Now we are in COVID-19, no-one is meeting anyone, we are all living alone. So this group is very important, because every time we listen to a poem and see people in the group, you are feeling what they feel, and this changes your mood, and makes you feel very good… When I go to my bed I am thinking about next Monday we have Change the Word again and it makes me very happy and changes my mood and it makes me smile.”
Congratulations on your recent first prize win at the International Cheltenham Poetry Festival! Can you tell me a bit about the winning poem?
Thank you so much - the best thing about winning has been the chance to tell the poetry community more about Change the Word! The poem is about my father growing up in India in the 1950s - his stories of the country of his childhood have seeped into our family lore, and I wanted to explore what it means to have another language, another culture, another history as part of your own. What it means to leave that behind, but also to bring it with you, and to pass it on to the next generation.
Turning Words
When I was the height of the table leg,
eye to eye with Indian elephants,
jasmine flowers climbing the sheesham wood
of my dad’s childhood, I tried to turn my tongue
around his Tamil, thumbi little brother,
thungachi my sister, but didn’t know
the kneedeep kneedeep calls of purple frogs
that sent him to sleep each night or the thwack
of stick on bush as his pudgy legs roamed
all the way to the cud where rivers fell
off the side of the earth into thick clouds
of shola forest and spirits below.
Now I ache for those sounds, to hear his fine
English vowels transform to the palate-flick,
the glottal rasp of his past; to hear consonants
flitting round his mouth as if they’re water striders
dancing, their spindly legs notching
the surface like time, just for a moment.
Without giving too much away, what exciting plans are brewing and where do you hope Change the Word might go in the future?
So many plans! Our current poetry anthology, An Orchestra of Unexpected Sounds, is out now for everyone to enjoy… We have a collaboration with Coventry City of Culture to showcase poets’ work on screens across the city during Coventry Welcomes festival Refugee Week (14-21 June)… We are cooking up an R&D for a new boundary-pushing poetry theatre show… We’re concocting plans for a big poetry welcome for Little Amal when the epic festival of art and hope The Walk reaches the UK… And we’re writing poems every week, which will have lives of their own so you’ll have to wait and see where they fly off to!
It was a pleasure to chat to Emily and find out more about Change the Word. I’m inspired by everything that this unique collective achieves by creating a space where people can share their voices with each other and the world. I can’t wait to see these exciting projects come together. Until then I am going to make my way through the poems of An Orchestra of Unexpected Sounds and perhaps muster up the courage to write some of my own!
