大象传媒

The project is part of Made in England which looks at how the landscape, both urban and rural, enables people to create.

Over the next few weeks there will be workshops all round the region involving members of the public and 大象传媒 audiences to provide writers and poets with untold stories of the hidden south.

For example, what mysteries lie in the cloisters of Oxford, or the Lanes of Brighton? What stories have never really been told? What hidden gems do the locals possess that we could share with a wider public?

The aim is to try to create a view of the south that only the locals know. We then want to share those secret, locally known, stories amongst the whole region.

The poets and writers are working in Oxford, Salisbury, Brighton and Weymouth. Please email us if you'd like to take part, or share your story - oxford@bbc.co.uk.

These local stories will then be re-dramatised as flash narratives - micro-stories - by the four writers and exposed to an experimental literary technique of cutting up the beginning, middle and ends of each story and interchanging them with stories from all the other areas involved to create a new piece of work.

There will be a computer-generated element to this, but some of the final works will be projected onto the roof of one of England's most iconic buildings, Salisbury Cathedral, on the night of St George's Day on 23rd April.

The writers involved have national and international reputations for short form storytelling, and poetry, and this collaboration will be a unique event across the south. It's also the first time Salisbury Cathedral has hosted an event of this kind - of this scale and of this novelty.

There is something peculiarly English about the exchange of ideas and art. Made in England is all about celebrating the way the English landscape, and its population, enable creativity, in a rich exchange of ideas that migrate, visit or reside here. It's why the 大象传媒 and Arts Council England have joined together to try to capture a nation at creative full flow in the Made in England project.

Catherine Smith

CATHERINE SMITH

Catherine Smith from Brighton will be working in Oxford for the Made in England Consequences project.

Twenty of her short stories have been published in the UK, and two have been broadcast on 大象传媒 Radio 4's Afternoon Reading slot. Her poems are widely published in journals and newspapers. Her first short poetry collection, The New Bride, was short-listed for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2001, and her first full collection, The Butcher's Hands, was awarded a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

Catherine teaches creative writing for the University of Sussex and the Arvon Foundation, runs a creative writing enrichment group for young writers at Varndean 6th Form College in Brighton. She is a member of the National Association of Writers in Education and runs poetry/prose workshops in schools and colleges.