I have created this for the purpose of my application to co-ordinate a workshop at Tribal Gathering 2017.

In 2016, I went through a long, slow break-up from a 10.5 year relationship with my high-school sweetheart and my only love. It was one of the most difficult experiences of my life, but I found poetry, and I really feel like it saved me. Just months after breaking up, whilst on holiday together with 15 of our other friends, she got together with one of my best friends. What was already a very hard event to deal with suddenly became infinitely more painful - but through poetry I have been able to move through the whole experience very quickly. I am pleased to say we are all still good friends and I really feel like I have poetry to thank for that.

So, I wish to be able to share my story and the gift of poetry with others, and to let them know they are not alone. Through trying to articulate how they are feeling about any given event, and get the chaos out of their head and out into the ether, I want them to experience the healing power behind the simple task of putting pen to paper.

It will be a space for people to share, connect, open up, release and express their feelings and emotions. It will be healing for all those involved, which I believe fits in well with the whole ethos and theme of what looks to be such a beautiful festival.

I did my first workshop at Boomtown festival last year in the UK. My friends and I run a venue there called ALAN - Awareness and Love All Nighters - and Jon, the venue manager, gave me a space to run my first workshop. Since then I was also able to do the same workshop at Leefest, another UK festival through my friend Daniel Wedge, as well as at a night they run in London called Wonderland. Lastly, I did a workshop at a day time event in London called Gathering of Minds, run by Jess Lewis, whereby I co-ordinated the same workshop.

This would be a very rough breakdown of the running order -

5 mins - Intro and my story

10 mins - Sharing circle (Introductions of participants and what brought them to the workshop

15 mins - Exercise 1 - Writing a Limerick.

15 mins - Exercise 2 - Writing a piece about a super power and how it could help deal with Trauma.

15 mins - Exercise 3 - Writing a piece about a particular person using their Name and Alliteration techniques.

I would be more than happy to run the workshop on multiple days to give more people the opportunity to participate.

Any extra time we have and if the audience are willing I will then share some of my performances after the workshop is over. I have 12 pieces memorized ranging from 3 - 5 minutes of topics ranging from Blood Donation, Drug Abuse, God, Bravery, Comparing yourself to Others, Jealousy, Faith, Anger, Facebook addiction and lots more. Because I only just got into poetry last year after my breakup, there’s not a great deal of videos of me, as most poetry nights do not film the audience. However, I have 2 performances online, as well as my first 2 professionally shot videos.

Blood - My first professional video about giving blood - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NelA45tJ014&t=1s

Better Than You - My latest professional video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2l2AJfCrmE

F - Return - My piece about Facebook addiction https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGlC2gkoeTQ&feature=youtu.be