Two of my Flash Fiction pieces titled, FOOTSTEPS and A
CONVERSATION have been commissioned by the University of Leicester. They will
appear on their website www2.le.ac.uk in July, and later published in an
e-book.
The worthwhile project details are below.
The Sole2Soul project is creating new digital assets for the
Falkner Boot and Shoe exhibit at Harborough Museum (Market Harborough). These
include new creative writing (flash fiction, twitter fiction and poetry), photography
and podcasts. The project is designed to increase Harborough Museum’s visitor
numbers and to attract more online traffic to the Museum website.
The project concept
is best expressed as follows: wise souls talk to teen souls about shoe soles.
Silver champions will join forces with writers and curators to stimulate teenage
engagement with Boot and Shoe artefacts. In response, teenage pupils from local
schools will produce a web-gallery of “Future Curators” pages about the
exhibit. In December 2014, all participants will be invited to an event where
the new digital assets will be launched.
Sole2Soul will provide new digital assets for the Falkner
Boot and Shoe exhibit:
A mobile phone app for museum visitors (a downloadable
application for smartphones)
“Future Curators” webpages by teenagers, accompanied by
podcasts about their experience.
A radio programme about the project.
30 experienced writers will visit the Boot and Shoe exhibit
and produce 30 pieces of creative writing in the following forms, which are
best suited to digital transmission: story tweets, flash fiction (200 words)
and poems. These writers will present these creative pieces on social media
platforms such as Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter.
A smartphone app is created and tested. The app will
encourage museum visitors to access the project’s digital assets. Visitors’
physical location in the museum will prompt particular pieces of information or
creative writing to appear on their phone screens.
Teenagers from local schools attend three workshops at
Harborough Museum. Curators guide pupils around the Boot and Shoe exhibit.
Pupils will be presented with all the creative writing produced about the Boot
and Shoe exhibit produced during phase one (commission) and phase two
(narrate).
The Sole2Soul creative writing commissions will be showcased
at the Literary Leicester Fringe festival in November 2014.
Harborough Museum’s new digital assets will be unveiled at a
launch event in December 2014, to which curators, journalists, project
participants and writers will be invited.
The writers will be able to
list the commission on their CV (‘awarded an Arts Council-funded Sole2Soul commission,
2014’).
They will be invited to showcase their Sole2Soul piece at the
Literary Leicester Fringe 2014, for which writers will be paid a fee.
All
commissions will be published in an e-book, which will become part of the
museum’s new digital assets.
