Yesterday Was Lit
I spent a day cycling, youth working and meeting my community across south London. My journey and conversations reminded me why I do this
I recently got my electric blue Giant Defy road bike serviced, ready for the summer. I started cycling consistently in London when I first bought it back in 2019, from a bike recycling initiative overseen by trainee mechanics and wheelie enthusiasts at Carney’s Community Centre, a youth club next to Battersea Park. It’s taken me a few years to move on it with confidence, quickly and safely. Now, I mostly use it to get between amenities in my south west London locale: gym, barber, Tooting Broadway for food and produce, park benches to read or write in my diary. If I’ve planned ahead and the weather’s right, I’ll peddle it across the city, for work and to see friends.
Yesterday morning I put my helmet on and stepped out of the small courtyard beside my flat, whose perimeter is guarded by a tall brick wall draped with ivy. I was heading towards a girls’ secondary school in Bermondsey to deliver a social action writing workshop with a group of year 9s for the National Literacy Trust. When I left home, the session was starting in 55 minutes and Google Maps said the cycle would take 46 minutes. I bombed it, eventually arriving with plenty of time to spare. But being outside on my bike again with the sun beating down and temperature up, going at pace to uphold timetable security, weaving through traffic, was a handful.
The programme I was travelling to deliver is called The Power of Voice. It is designed to enable authors to go into schools and work with students to develop pieces of writing about responding to a social issue they care about. I’m doing it at two other schools in south east London, too: one in New Cross, one in Plumstead. Over the last two weeks, navigating my way via train, tube, bus, bike and car across the southern half of the city map, from my home in the western quadrant to locations dotted around the east, has become a core thread interwoven into my day.
This kind of work is the best because it allows me to stitch my youth worker hat together with my author hat and wear them simultaneously. I can leverage my experience working with young people over the last decade to build rapport and hold attention with tried-and-tested icebreakers. Then I can refer to a copy of Cut Short, ask them what they think about its cover, read extracts from it, answer questions they have, and draw out its themes.
For yesterday’s workshop, I read out an introductory passage about one of the main characters, Jhemar Jonas, which allowed me to introduce the book as a piece of social action writing that tries to analyse and respond to the problem of serious youth violence. The girls in my session were prompted to come up with their own social issue they cared about as a collective — they chose anti-social behaviour — and outline a manifesto for how they might solve it. Forthcoming sessions will help them to each shape this sort of exercise into their own individual piece of persuasive writing that, if they want it to be, has the chance of being published in a printed magazine at the end of the academic year.
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