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Ian McMillan takes to the stage in front of an audience at MAC in Birmingham to introduce the first of the Verb New Voices performances. Two emerging spoken word artists, Fatima Al Matar and Bohdan Piasecki premiere the pieces they've developed over the Summer. Novelist, biographer and playwright David Lodge first started exploring ideas around consciousness in his novel 'Thinks' ten years ago. Now, he's adapted the book for the stage and called it Secret Thoughts. For The Verb he reflects on what working in different genres has taught him about how his characters think. The memorist Sathnam Sanghera wrote about secrets, lies and family love in his memoir of his Wolverhampton childhood 'The Boy With The Topknot'. For The Verb he reads a commissioned piece about eating beef for the first time, by mistake. And, the writer Catherine O'Flynn champions Birmingham in fiction.