To mark International Women’s Day 2024, we put together a programme of activities themed around the strange and the uncanny.
These included two writing workshops, a sound art workshop and Unheim-Lit, a spoken word event where headliners Abi Hynes and Gaynor Jones appeared alongside an all-women line-up of some of Manchester’s finest writers performing their strange tales and poems.
Tickets for all activities were free, and participants were invited to make a donation to Levenshulme Old Library in order to help us continue delivering projects like this in Levenshulme.
We commissioned Alice Godliman, a Pushcart-nominated poet, to run Poetry as Spellwriting; Gaynor Jones, an award-winning short story writer to run Successfully Bringing the Strange into Your Stories, a fiction writing workshop; and Ria Wilson to run Glitch and Bitch, a woman-only noise art workshop.
All of these workshops sold out, as did Unheim-Lit, a spoken word event where local emerging writers read their work alongside their more established peers. All facilitators and creatives involved in Weird Women were paid for their work.
This project resulted in:
- 3 free workshops
- 1 free literature event
- 43 workshop participants
- 70 event attendees
- 3 paid workshop opportunities
- 10 paid performers