Add your stories to Lemn Sissay’s storytelling website
Our Guest Director, Lemn Sissay MBE, has just launched Tell Me Something About Family, a new storytelling website created with Brighton Festival 2021.
The new site has been created with Brighton Festival 2021 and will inspire Lemn to create a new piece of work from the public’s recollections that will “light up the world with stories and phrases about family.”
From his own personal experience of growing up in social care, Sissay is asking the public to tell him something about their own family via a written submission on the website.
Each story will be added as a shining orb on a map with visitors encouraged to share the project with friends and relatives to connect with each other across the world.
Sissay has invited friends and colleagues as ambassadors, including the writer and comedian Henry Normal, author and TV presenter Baroness Floella Benjamin, Professor of Social Work, Dr Adele Jones and performance poet/author Laura Dockrill who have shared their own moving and personal stories.
Lemn wants to hear from you too:
“It could be a memory from childhood. It could be a phrase that your father used to say that you thought everybody said, but then you discover they don’t! It could be the smell of your mother’s cooking. Include something that represents family to you, whether good or bad. There is something beautiful about hearing people speak honestly about the things that really matter, and we have learned in this pandemic that family really matters.”
Commissioned by Brighton Festival as part of Sissay’s role as guest director and the theme of ‘care’, you can submit stories up until 31 May 2021.
Designed by Brighton based creative agency Baxter & Bailey, the storytelling mechanism starts with the idea of map pins to help identify where stories are coming from and to visually represent each story as a light.
