Songs My Enemy Taught Me – Joelle Taylor

Welcome to my blog site. On this blog you will be able to follow me on my journey to complete my new collection Songs My Enemy Taught Me. You will be able to follow the research and development process, read poetry and flash fiction

from some of the women I have worked with and keep track of where the masterclasses are taking place.

There is also a book tour in July, which you can reserve tickets for here.

Songs My Enemy Taught Me is a collection of back-alley poetry and flick-knife tales detailing Woman’s global struggle against sexual terrorism and colonisation. Songs of Silence. Songs of Survival. Songs of Uprising.

Comprised of poetry, text messages, landays, letters, news flashes and personal stories these are poems plucked from news stories concerning women across the globe and re-imagined by poet, playwright, and author Joelle Taylor. Some stories are her own. Others are yours.
The book will be published by Out Spoken Press on July 10 2017 and will be joint edited by Sabrina Mahfouz and Anthony Anaxagorou.

Masterclass Tour

As part of the ongoing research and development phase of the book I am leading a series of 18 masterclasses with women and girls across the UK.

While the workshops are a part of the research time, they are fundamentally aimed at empowering the women participants and giving the space and skills to tell their own stories. Where appropriate the women’s words will be published or filmed and uploaded to this blog.

None of the women workshop participants’ stories will appear directly in the collection. Full confidentiality will be respected.

I am also aiming to commission and publish in the collection a small selection of landays written by Afghan heritage women, via Paiwand.

The groups confirmed to participate in the workshops include 2 women’s prisons, centres on the rape crisis network, Afghan heritage women’s group, Gypsy, Roma and Traveller women’s group, inmates of women’s prisons in the UK, domestic violence survivors, working class women in Middlesbrough via Teesside University, women and girls affected by the care system  and a Bristol school with a high level of young girls affected by female genital mutilation. I will also be flying out to a refugee camp in Greece at some point with the Out-Spoken crew to work with the women and girls there.

The masterclass participants will be invited to read at/ attend a series of celebratory events in Canterbury, Bristol, Middlesbrough and London.