Past Engagement Projects

We collaborated with SCORE Scotland for the first time in 2023. SCORE are a charity based in Westerhailes, one of Scotland’s most deprived areas. They support people facing discrimination and aim to address the causes and effects of racism and promote racial equality.

We worked with one of their youth groups, working with seven young people aged from 11 to 15. We offered weekly poetry and creative writing workshops, led by poet, artist and rapper Bee Asha, over 2 months. The young people explored a range of topics based on their own interests and were encouraged to try out different art forms including spoken word, music and visual art. They worked towards confidence in performance and by the festival, two of the young people read their own (very moving) work to an audience.

Evaluations shared with us by SCOREScotland showed that the young people found the sessions very enjoyable (scoring them an average of 4 on a scale of 1 to 5). More than half of the participants said that the sessions improved their mental wellbeing, and all but 1 agreed that they felt a sense of achievement after each session. In describing how they felt during and after the sessions, the young people chose words like “relaxed”, “motivated”, “happy” and “confident”.

“The Poetry/Creative Writing Workshops lit up with talent, with two participants wowing audiences at Push the Boat Out! Beyond the spotlight, these workshops are nurturing confidence and creativity in young writers. It’s proof of the power of these programs to inspire and empower our youth, showing them that their voices truly matter.” SCOREScotland

We are extending our partnership with SCOREScotland in the current year with a longer programme in collaboration with Tinderbox Collective

Open Book Reading runs weekly shared creative writing sessions all across Scotland for a diverse range of participants. We have been fortunate to collaborate with this vital organisation in each of our festival years. In 2021 and 2022, one of Open Book’s monthly prompts served as an inspiration for the group’s to create new work that through workshops was then scripted as a performance for each year’s festival.. In 2021, the prompt was “Morgan Month”, an occasion to celebrate the poetry of Edwin Morgan and create new work in response to his wonderful poem “At Eighty”. In 2022, the theme was “Voice”, based on a poem called ‘Sometimes I Lie’ by Hollie McNish.

Each year the event was free, family-friendly, and a sold-out success! Quotes from participants included:

“This is my first time on a stage – I am very proud of me now”
“Thank you! This was wonderful I feel so much less worried about speaking out now”
“This has shown me I can do new things even if I feel worried about them”
“I loved doing this! Let us push the boat out again together next year!”
“This is not how I thought poetry festivals would be: this is amazing!”

2023 brought a fresh aspect to the partnership as we additionally collaborated with the National Library of Scotland (NLS). We worked with them as they facilitated creative responses to the Liston Archive – an incredible collection held by NLS consisting of the letters, diaries and ephemera of Henrietta Liston, wife of the second British ambassador to the newly-formed United States of America.

Open book participants from across Scotland created new poems in response to the work, which were then read by Edinburgh-based group members at the festival. Accompanying this was a multi-media reel created by NLS and interspersed readings from Henrietta’s journals. NLS also brought a selection of reproduced materials from the archive so audiences had a more immersive experience.

WHALE Arts is a community-led arts charity and social enterprise in Wester Hailes, who we were fortunate to work with in 2021 and 2022.
In 2021, with funding from Creative Scotland, PTBO produced a special festival edition of ‘Sentinel’, Wester Hailes’ community newsletter, distributed by WHALE Arts to around 7,000 households, bringing PTBO festival content and feeling into people’s homes.

We also supported a poetry group at WHALE Arts which fostered beauty and togetherness despite pandemic conditions. “For a couple of hours, we are able to come away from our busy lives and focus on the vital importance of words and how they can communicate our experience of the world”.

The group’s poems were made into art during a riso printer workshop, supported by PTBO and run by artist Morvern Odling using the riso printer at WHALE Arts. The prints were then displayed at Summerhall during PTBO festival.

In 2022, we worked with Colin McGuire to support the WHALE Arts writers group with a series of poetry and mindfulness workshops. Again, with Colin the group created poetry based on their experiences. This was framed as concrete poetry and displayed at the 2022 festival.

Thanks to funding from Parabola / Edinburgh Park, we were also able to work with youth through a great partnership with Murrayburn Primary School. PTBO contracted poet Colin McGuire to run four poetry workshops with P5 children at the school – these resulted in “Here”, a beautiful group poem which was then made printed onto a banner for the school to keep and a banner for PTBO to display outside Summerhall during the festival.

 Colin then ran three more workshops after the summer holidays with the same kids, now P6, to make the poem into a brilliant poem-film, filmed by Gracie Beswick. This was shown to the children at a special screening at Summerhall: both classes arrived, 50 children in all, full of excitement at what was their first outing since early 2019. One of the children said, “I feel like a film star!”. Another said, “I am a VIP now”, and another asked a question we loved to answer: “Who knew poems could become fun?”. The kids also made their first fieldtrip in 20 months, visiting Push the Boat Out to watch their poem be screened at the festival and get up to some more poetry shenanigans with Colin.