Community Projects – appreciation

Community Projects

TSl publishes books for a variety of reasons, one of them being to support community projects and give aspiring writers an opportunity to share their creations.
The diversity of contribution around a particular theme is inspiring, and although you the reader won’t necessarily know the impact on the individual author being published, hearing of the journey travelled, and the sense of achievement is itself reward for publishing the anthology.

Imperfect Poets of the Third Age is an anthology of poetry by the St Albans U3A poetry writing group – the only one, as far as is known, in the UK. All the others study or discuss poetry, rather than work on the writing of it.
The group wanted to celebrate their 7 years of writing and felt a publication was the way to go. Two of the group were nominated as editors. Through various connections, they heard of TSL. We had a couple of meetings in St Albans to, first, discuss options and second, to discuss the format and layout of the publication. To both meetings, the editors came well-prepared with a list questions, they clearly wanted the best for their publication and fellow-writers, taking the different concerns of each into account.

Windswept’s collection of scripts, Between Bus Stop, is the product of an online drama group which xxx
Again, the collection was helped along by two dedicated editors, although only one liaised with TSL.

Finally, for something rather different, there’s Diversity House’s We Remember. This is a collection of essays by historians and others across the globe, together with art work by pupils of a Maidstone school reflecting on why we should remember the Great or First World War in Africa. It’s a special collection – from which I learnt a lot. It was also a privilege being the editor of the collection which was overseen by Christine Locke, Director of Diversity House and who ran all the workshops with the pupils to produce the artwork.

Monies earned from the sales of all these community project books go back into the community group.