a novel set in Manchester's curry district. I teach creative writing as well as academic writing.
It's not every day that I get invited to speak to social entrepreneurs, but it happened, it really did and it was yesterday.
You see, as well as gallivanting as a writery sorta person, I have been living a secret double life - hey, just kidding! Seriously, this is the work that I do on a day-to-day basis and have been doing since 2001. I am the creative director (lowercase please) of a fledgling social enterprise entitled Script Social Media. My role is to develop "story strategies" (ahem!) for clients, stories which get told across social media platforms...
Anyway, the peeps from Unltd invited me to pop along and share my experience of living the social enterprise life.
As these things usually go, I hadn't planned anything, I really hadn't. So, when Nick Buckley from The Mancunian Way stood up to speak I was filled with the sudden desire to...share a poem. Nick's charismatic and his presentation pinned people to their seats and he enjoyed a wild round of applause at its end. And then I got to share my poem. It's called The Mancunian Way too. I'm not going to share it in this post, but I promise, I will do so in the future.
And after I'd shared the poem, which I read off my phone - it's unforgivable because I once knew if off by heart (*Sigh* Old age) - I told the audience how I'd stumbled (that's the word I stole from Nickala Torkington) into the heady world of social media. A series of fortunate accidents led me to orchestrate the social media for a charity dinner in the summer of 2014 and that event achieved a tweet reach of 12 million. I know that impresses some people and other people collapse like jelly when they hear the word tweet. I didn't do it on my own though. There were 9 of us. So, hats off to all of them. This experience ultimately propelled me to set up Script Social Media with two other like-minded people in October of 2014.
Now, despite my work at Script Social Media, I'm really just doing what I've been doing for years. Telling stories. I guess I've found a new array of media to share stories on...
Anyway, you might be wondering what the image of a doorway has to do with anything. Perhaps it's a weak metaphor to where this is all leading, but I really don't know where that doorway leads into. I think it's filled with the imagination, or I'd like to think that, but you know, imagination is more important than knowledge and wild-haired Einstein said that (don't know in which language), so it simply has to be true.
