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Singer Camille O’Sullivan explains how she approaches interpreting song lyrics by writers as diverse as Jacques Brel and Nick Cave. She discusses how she comes to fully inhabit a song, and the importance of remembering that the ‘lyric is king’. Camille’s latest album is ‘Changeling’ (Little Cat) and she is performing at the Roundhouse on January 31st. More information is

Debbie Taylor is the founding editor of ‘Mslexia’ magazine and the author of the novel ‘Herring Girl’ (Oneworld), set in a small fishing community in North Shields in 1898 and 2007. When she was writing ‘Herring Girl’, Debbie came across the publishing industry’s unofficial rules for writing in dialect. Especially for The Verb, Debbie has taken inspiration from the Tyne and shares the rules the river taught her about writing.

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Poet Sean O’Brien celebrates the craft of the writer, performer and teacher Julia Darling, an inspirational figure on the North East writing scene who died in 2005. Sean explains how they collaborated on the Radio 3 play ‘The Black Path’, and shares a poem written in her memory. Sean’s latest collection, nominated for the T.S. Eliot prize, is ‘The Beautiful Librarians’ (Picador), and Julia Darling’s poetry collections are available from Arc.

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Chanje Kunda is one of our 2015 ‘Verb New Voices’ – a scheme to develop new writing and performing talent from across the North of England (in conjunction with Arts Council England. New Writing North, Arvon Foundation, Freedom Studios and The Writing Squad). ÌýChanje performs her piece ‘Gold-Plated Cathedrals of Thought’, which is inspired by her research into the world of Quantum Mechanics.

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Jo Bell is our 'Podcast Poet' this week. Contiuing the theme of writing from the river, Jo reads her poem 'Severn, from Purton' and explains how the canal informs her writing.

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