Writing Life

Our NEW Change the Word project for emerging poets from around the world…

Writing Life is a new offshoot of Change the Word, led by Yara Rodrigues Fowler and Connie Treves, using the idea of the archive as a way to chronicle and hold our lives and offering poets a chance to forge their own body of work ready to share it with the world.

They ask: how do we write our ‘selves’? How do we undertake the act of remembering? How do we choose what elements of our lives to weave into our writing? 

The workshops are a mixture of writing exercises and creative decision making, exploring content, form and structure. It’s open to poets from Change the Word and through an open call for new voices to join the Good Chance family.

We’re now working with individual poets in Writing Life to develop their work and identify the next steps they want to take on their journey to sharing their writing with the world.

Here’s to the poets of the future! Watch this space for writing that will blow your socks off.

About the Writers-in-Residence

Yara Rodrigues-Fowler

Yara’s critically acclaimed first novel Stubborn Archivist saw her shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 2019 and longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize. Yara was named one of The Observer’s ‘hottest-tipped’ debut novelists of 2019 and she was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize 2020.

Yara is currently writing her second novel, for which she received the John C Lawrence Award from the Society of Authors and was shortlisted for the Eccles Centre and Hay Festival Writer’s Award. Yara is a trustee of Latin American Women’s Aid. Her writing and essays have appeared in Vogue, LitHub, Electric Literature, The Guardian, BBC Brasil, Skin Deep, Litro, and other publications.

Connie Treves

Connie has been a Resident Artist with Good Chance since 2018, working on multiple Good Chance Dome projects in refugee centres in Paris to direct and devise community theatre work. She is currently the Artist-in-Residence for Change the Word, where she leads the poetry and performance programmes in Sheffield, Coventry and Barnsley. For Change the Word, she has co-edited three anthologies of poetry, including the most recent publication An Orchestra of Unexpected Sounds.

As a theatre director/writer, she has been the Resident Assistant Director at Sheffield Theatres, where she assisted on main-house and studio shows. She is currently working on a new play called 'Ache' exploring women's experiences of pain.