Footnotes: Running Experiences

Come share your tales of poetry in motion at this spoken word Open Mic night in Colchester

Tues, 8th September at The Minories Art Gallery Colchester, 7.30. £4 on the door




This is a new event that aims to bring together runners of all abilities to share their stories, successes, failures, sprains, sprints and splints. Come and take part by reading a short essay, story, or poem. Have an opportunity to express your way of running, and how it impacts on you, your emotional and physical experiences.

Featured guests are:

Writer, Vybarr Cregan-Reid - will read from his forthcoming book, Footnotes: running, landscape & the way we live now. The book is a  psychogeography of running that darts between poetry, philosophy, neuroscience, history, paleoanthropology, and biomechanics. It is a running book for those that love the new nature writing. Vybarr has written for The Guardian, The Telegraph, and will be reading from his work on Radio 4's Open Book next week. He is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Kent.

• "When Vybarr Cregan-Reid set out to discover why running meant so much to so many, he began a journey which would take him out not only to tread London’s streets, but climbing to sites that have seen a millennium of hangings, or down the crumbling alleyways of Ruskin's Venice.  Footnotes will transport you to the cliff tops of Hardy's Dorset, the deserted shorelines of Seattle, the giant redwood forests of California, and to the world’s most advanced running laboratories and research centres, using debates in literature, philosophy and biology to explore that simple human desire to run."

Artist, Veronique Chance - she will be telling tales of her astounding M25 Great Orbital Run a solitary run and artwork that took place in March2012 over nine consecutive days around the inside boundary of the M25 London Orbital. Véronique will read extracts from her daily blog entries written during the time period of the run. A speeded up recorded version of the work will provide a projected backdrop. Veronique is based in London and has a studio at APT studios, Deptford. She has shown artworks nationally and internationally, including China, Canada, Korea, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Holland and France. She is a Senior Lecturer and Course Leader for the MA Fine and MA Printmaking courses at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge and completed her PhD at Goldsmith's College in 2012.

Exercise scientist, Dan Gallagher - has research interests in 'green exercise' and is particularly interested in 'adherence' to exercise programmes and how this may be tied up with our relationship with the environment. He is about to begin a new research role at the University of Essex which will assess the current fitness levels of primary school children, relating to the state of PE in Essex Schools. He will take part in a Q&A at this event where he will talk about the huge difference that our exercise environment has on the emotional and psychological impact of our seemingly everyday routines.

The evening will re-engage audiences with their environment and themselves, taking the audience from their demanding and structured lives on to new pathways and in to the wild. Reconnecting them to landscape and encouraging their minds to play, and to have a beer and a chat about running.