[Written for the Bristol Old Vic blog. Original article here .] When I was little, I had a board game called Never Ending Stories (nothing to do with the furry-dragoned, slightly disturbing kids movie of the same name). A player would place a hexagonal tile down on a board and attempt to improvise and tell part of a story that corresponded with the picture on the tile, then the next player would do the same, steering inevitably towards either a Happy, Sad, Surprising or Scary ending. This game was a delight for the more verbose and attention-seeking members of my family (me), who would go for minutes on end stringing loosely connected fantastical events together, and a bit of a chore for the more reticent and shy (my grandma and great aunt), who would consistently try and close things off with a quick “and then it rained and they all had to go home”. I suppose it was one of those seminal gifts, like Beckham getting a football or Paxman getting a My First Interrogation Kit. In my first year of University, me and a cabal of other Creative Writing students got together on Thursday evenings for Board Game...

[Written for the Exeter Ignite blog. Oriinal article here .] Picture a different Exeter. I don’t mean some Avatar floaty island jetpack hologram horseshit. I mean something that could happen tomorrow and could’ve already happened by today. Picture a town where people sat down in the rubble of the Blitz and got out blue crayons instead of red pens. An unending playground of hanging gardens, spice markets and bandstands. A city where land is owned not by private contractors, churches or universities but by the people who live there, people who work out agreements amongst themselves to make public spaces fit for their own usage. A place where teenagers like the one I grew up here as don’t hover outside MacDonalds on cold spring nights doing ketamine and calling each other gay, and instead congregate to design video games or plan yarn bombing raids. A place that starts doing things right for a change. A city where every wall can be a mural, every street can be a carnival, and yes, anyone can tell a story. This might sound like a terrible vision to you. You might think I’m being needlessly disparaging about a city with many virtues. But...

[Written for the Apples and Snakes blog. Original article here .] I write this on the fourth day into a run of my show Rain at the Wardrobe Theatre in Bristol. My combined audience for the last three shows has been seven. I don’t ultimately blame anyone but myself: to drum up customers to a fringe theatre in a foreign town requires a level of effort that I did not put in, but it has made me think about the wider scale of the problems we as artists face. There is a chronic low self-esteem amongst spoken word artists that is borderline endemic, and dwarfs what is present in practitioners in other art forms. The poet and academic Bohdan Piaceski described it to me as Impostor Syndrome, a psychological phenomenon where a person believes that their achievements have come to them through sheer luck. For every success, there are plenty of failures: publishers downsizing, arts budgets cut, and audiences for live performance steadily declining in favour of digital media, but we write these off instead as reflective of our own laziness or incompetence, creating a paradoxical spiral where we cannot build pride in our achievements. This is coupled with...