How to work as a freelance journalist

When I decided I was going to leave The Big Issue and go freelance I sought advice from colleagues. ‘What is working freelance like?’, ‘How long will it be until I starve?’ and that sort of thing. I also bought a few books. The advice I got from colleagues was great, the books were crap however.

So I had this idea that I would write a book, full of advice from real freelance journalists and editors about how you should go about tackling the world’s ’second oldest profession’. I bumped into some friendly people from How to Books at the London Book Fair and told them about my idea.

Six months later, the deadline is looming and I still don’t believe it is really happening. It must be really happening because there is a listing for it on Amazon.

Guardian Society – Prisoners thrive on retail therapy

Martin Elliott’s first day volunteering in a charity shop was “terrifying”, he says. “I was dropped off with just a map. The shop was a bus ride away from town through all these fields – I’m a city boy — and I was a bit paranoid, to say the least.”

Elliott, who is in his mid-50s, was serving a sentence of six and a half years for drugs offences when he began volunteering at the Sue Ryder Care shop in Hadleigh, near Ipswich. “I met the ladies, who were a bit older, let’s say, and I was like: ‘Hello, I’m your new inmate.’”

Elliott was only 15 when he began committing crime to feed his drug habit. His journey to rehabilitation started at HMP Blundeston, near Lowestoft, Suffolk, where he spent 20 weeks with the “therapeutic community”, which encourages prisoners to share their experiences. “You kind of run it yourself,” Elliott says. “It is facilitated by staff, to make sure nothing kicks off, but you challenge each other. I still keep in touch with many of them.” He adds proudly: “In fact, I’m going back soon to talk to the lads and tell them what I am doing now.”

The therapy gave him the confidence to apply to volunteer with Sue Ryder Care on day release from prison in order to learn retail skills, from customer care to stocktaking and handling cash. After six months, he became a part-time assistant manager while still on day release. Six months later, he was able to take up a full-time position, leave prison, and move into parole-approved accommodation.

Sue Ryder Care, which helps people who suffer from long-term and end-of-life conditions, has been running its prisoner volunteer programme since 2006. During that time, it has placed 300 prisoners as volunteers in 50 of its shops. Each year, offenders provide 36,000 volunteering hours, which is estimated to be worth the equivalent of £216,00 in staff-hour costs. The charity works in partnership with 30 individual prisons to ensure volunteer placements are mutually beneficial.

Declan Moore, governor of Hollesley Bay open prison and young offender institution in Suffolk, says: “Carefully risk-assessed prisoners are able to repay a debt to society by assisting with the charitable work undertaken by Sue Ryder Care. Not only does this assist the individual offender to find a renewed self-confidence and inner value, but it undoubtedly makes worthy reparation for their past mistakes. The experience gained by offenders adds to their chances of full-time employment on release, which is a major element in reducing the rates of reoffending”.

All prisoners in open category D prisons have resettlement programmes, through which they can take part in community service. Yet few charities have a national policy of working with prisoners. Research by prison volunteering organisation Clinks shows that 73% of prisoners would be willing to do voluntary work if it were available to them.

Community Service Volunteers provides opportunities for prisoners during the last month of a sentence to help build skills and reintegrate into society. Charity shops run by the British Red Cross also occasionally work with the probation service to offer volunteer positions to those on community service. Children’s charity Barnardo’s recently launched a scheme in which offenders aged 16-25 can work towards a youth achievement award.

Tracey Mealing, head of volunteering at Sue Ryder Care, suggests that changes in society, and an ageing population, will mean that all charities may need to look at new ways to attract types of volunteers who they may not have traditionally worked with.

She says: “The opportunity is for us to utilise prisoners’ time and energy to help us raise vital funds for Sue Ryder Care, as well as contributing to prisoners’ resettlement programmes and staged entry back into society.”

The charity plans to increase the number of prisoners in its shops to 600 by 2011. As part of the scheme’s expansion, it has produced a DVD that Mealing plans to show to shop managers and prison governors around the country who have yet to get on board.

One of the participants featured is Elliott, who believes the strength of the scheme is in developing transferable skills for when prisoners are released. He says: “One fella was a solicitor and he has gone back into the legal profession – at a lower level, obviously. Another young lad was a plumber, and now he’s a Sue Ryder Care supervisor.”

Elliott, who now manages the distribution depot for Sue Ryder in Braintree, Essex, says it is building relationships and trust with other volunteers and staff that has the biggest impact. “Meeting the ladies who ran the shop was like a therapy in itself,” he says. “I saw a completely different side to humanity. Most of them had never had a parking ticket. They asked me questions, which made me ask questions of myself.”

The Big Issue: The future of work?

Adam Smiths stern profile adorns the back of the new £20 note celebrating his innovation in ‘the division of labour in Pin manufacturing’. Anyone with experience of factory work would probably rather forget this particular innovation but it does raise the consideration of where the next innovation in how we work could be coming from.

Social enterprise has been portrayed as a cure to all social ills but critics claim that social enterprise is doing what government should be doing. Social entrepreneurs argue they can reach the parts that governments can’t.

The Bank of England may have missed the irony in using Adam Smiths portrait just as the final death knolls of British manufacturing are heard. Pictures of despondent Welsh workers were recently seen in the news losing the fight to keep open the Burberry manufacturing plant in Treorchy, South Wales. This follows similar kinds of closures from Peugeot, HP, Clarks and Dunlop in recent years.

Service industries have mostly replaced the smoky factories with nice shiny office buildings. Now increasingly our jobs don’t even rely on us being at the office any more, a connection to the internet is often all that is needed. One entrepreneur saw an opportunity in this change.

Two years ago, the recently graduated Jonathan Robinson realised that many social entrepreneurs were ploughing a lonely furrow in home offices and back bedrooms and all that was preventing them coming together was access to the ideal space. So he set about creating one. In North London he rented a large property and contacted everyone he knew that may be interested in working there. It very quickly became full and a second Hub is now planned for London. Already there are sister branches in Bristol, San Paolo, Mumbai, Johannesburg and Edinburgh is in the pipeline.

Robinson had a ‘sense that there were a lot of people with brilliant ideas, particularly social business ideas, but they were stuck at best in the bedroom and unable to access the right funding and resources to get their idea off the ground.’ He was inspired to get his own idea off the ground after building the Soweto Mountain of Hope at the World Summit.

Robinson found a backer in Gordon Roddick, husband of The Body Shop founder Anita, who has been giving him advice, support and investment. Roddick was also an early backer of The Big Issue. The idea was to create a space that combined the best elements of working from home, a café and a serviced office. The rates are based on a mobile phone style ‘pay as you go’ tariff and the space offers hot desk space to freelancers, social enterprises and start-ups.

Robinson insists that The Hub is more than just a mini business park, ‘I believe social enterprise is a very powerful force. There is a wave of really good ideas for the world that also stack up financially, we have moved beyond the charitable model.’ So if not a charity, why a social enterprise? ‘There was a sense that big business wasn’t doing it for us, just maximising profit they are too often part of the problem and we wanted to prove that you can create viable social businesses.’

MySpace is a very successful version of an online social networking forum; so successful in fact it was swallowed up by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. Robinson doesn’t fear a similar corporate take over bid, ‘they have tried already and they will continue to try but our magic is hard to recreate. There have been copycats already but there has been missing something, the glue and magic between the members of The Hub is hard to copy.’

This seems to be backed up by people at working at The Hub, ‘We looked at lots of serviced office space and it was all completely soulless, The Hub is great as there are like minded people and organisations here, if anything we spend too much time networking’ says Katie Harrison. She is a director of Frank Water, a not-for-profit social enterprise based at the Bristol branch of The Hub. They produce bottled water which donates 100% of profits to water projects in the developing world.

The Hub seems to be picking up all the lost souls that are busy beavering away in cottage industries and giving them a home. Robinson disagrees, ‘I wouldn’t say lost souls. Hub members are often on a mission; the social element is what gives them the drive and determination. The most powerful ideas and innovations happen with people collaborating and sharing. To draw an analogy with relationships, we see messy one night stands but also long term marriages.’

Corporate Social Responsibility programmes and charity giving are often trumpeted as examples of sharing, caring corporates. Robinson however is convinced that we are seeing the death of the traditional corporate, ‘Twenty five years from now if you aren’t a social business your chances of success will be much less, if you just consider the bottom line I think your days are numbered.’

Robinson believes that the days of Japanese style devotion to big business is dwindling, fuelled by their lack of interest in their employees, ‘There is a sense that work isn’t working. People are stuck in businesses that don’t care, people are becoming increasingly frustrated from being stuck in jobs that offer no meaning. The Hub is offering a place to come and kick off their dream business idea.’

Changing the world may just be starting to look more appealing, people like Robinson and Anita Roddick are pushing the woolly jumpers aside and showing the kind of drive, determination and eye for profit of traditional business leaders. If social enterprise can truly change the world then perhaps many of the fledgling organisations that are flocking to Robinsons Hubs across the world will be leading the vanguard. In another 200 years time the £20 of the day could be carrying a picture of one of today’s social entrepreneurs.

Bristol Review of Books: Death and Elephants

Elen Caldecott had just finished her Master’s in Writing for Young People at Bath Spa University when Bloomsbury offered to publish her debut novel – How Kirsty Jenkins Stole The Elephant. Now the book – a feisty and often very funny tale of a little girl’s determination to honour her grandad’s dying wish – is shortlisted for the Waterstone’s Children’s Book Prize.

Born in Llangollen, Elen now lives in Bristol and divides her time between writing and working at the Watershed. However, it was in Edinburgh that the seeds of Kirsty were sown – in the corridors and rooms of the National Museum of Scotland where Elen was a security guard.

‘After working there a while I got “museum fatigue” and began to think about how I would steal the exhibits. Then I invented lots of “what if ” stories about the stuff on display.’ One of those ‘what if ’ stories was inspired by a stuffed elephant, a spacious, elephant-sized lift and lots of really good hiding places. Then Kirsty came along and with her, the tale of a little girl’s determination to keep the promise she made to her dying grandfather – to care for his beloved allotment.

To keep her word Kirsty has to battle with an adult world inhabited by the allotment caretaker, the officious Mr Thomas, create a new relationship with her hostile step-sister Beth and escapist step-brother Ben, and cope with her grieving father. These are dark themes for a book aimed at 9-12 year olds, but they are not exclusively adult and Elen has created a story that she says, ‘focuses on how a family gets through a crisis together’. ‘I wanted to show a high-functioning step-family coping with grief, and a father who was too busy with work to grieve.’ The work-as-a-substitute-for grieving characterisation was, however, not working and instead Elen made the story ‘deliberately darker’ by introducing a severe depression that leaves Kirsty, and her mum, to muddle along while Kirsty’s father lies in a darkened bedroom.

As well as creating a modern, post-Enid Blyton world of the imperfect step-family, Elen has also endowed the individual characters with unexpected but entirely believable attributes. The grandfather loves yoga and goes on demos; Kirsty’s dad loves the Sex Pistols.

Kirsty herself has been created with an endearing balance of naivety, cheekiness and fearlessness and arrived, says Elen, ‘pretty much fully-formed. All those exercises where I’d created lots of details about a character – I didn’t need to do that with Kirsty, she was ready to go.

The character of Ben was more difficult to develop, but Beth was fun. I enjoyed getting into the mind of a stroppy teen’. The talk of exercises brings us back to Bath Spa University and how the course helped Elen develop as a writer. Having written since she was a child, including a spell of ‘teenage goth poetry’, the transformation from keen amateur to published professional was a leap that would have taken a lot longer to make without the guidance and support from Bath. ‘They gave me the strength to overcome rejections and carry on.’

It’s a supportive environment but not an easy one, where students’ work is exposed to hard, critical analysis. ‘It’s called critical feedback and it’s brilliant’ says Elen. ‘45 minutes when you can listen to comment but you can’t interrupt. It makes you reflect on your work but most importantly it helps you grow a thick skin.’

People say writers cannot be taught to write but for Elen (and for Bath graduate Sally Nicholls, who won the 2008 Waterstone’s Children’s Book Prize for Ways to Live Forever) it seems that their skills can at least be refined and polished. Says Elen: ‘We wouldn’t think it’s weird for fine artists to study, but writing is an art that can be developed like any other. It’s a myth that only geniuses can write.’

Bristol Review of Books: Q+A with Edson Burton author of ‘Seasoned’

‘Seasoned’ takes on the whole span of African Diaspora experience which is quite an undertaking. When did you have the idea?

I did not sit down with the intention to write a transatlantic diasporic collection. The poems were written over several years but many were completed over the last 18months. When I first began to assemble the collection I recognized recurring themes, issues, concerns in the poems. These quite naturally offered a narrative structure to the collection.

How do you approach writing a poem? Do you have an idea first or a phrase?

Poetry for me begins as a feeling, idea, or sentiment. I find I am moved to write by some sense of incompleteness, of a perspective that has not been expressed. This sentiment builds into a nexus of words sometimes with a rhythmic pattern, then a poem. I try not to force the poem but will edit, and refine over weeks, months, years.

Can you tell me about the various forms of patois or dialects employed in the poems? Did you develop them yourself or is there an agreed way of writing?

I wanted to express the diversity of voices contemporary and historical which I have encountered. My first loyalty is to my ear and my attempt to render the diverse voices that I hear. In trying to replicate these voices, in trying also to be fair to the reader, I have been guided by writers such as Louise Bennett, Sam Selvon, Linton Kwesi Johnson Benjamin Zephaniah, and Jean Breeze.

Since the 1950s these writers have developed some kind of standardization of the patois in verbal form. However such standardization should not be seen as some kind of accepted lexicon. Patois is never static and differs between generations and between Black Britain and the Caribbean particularly as American influences increase. I give myself leave to depart if I think authenticity demands it.

‘What Stella didn’t see when she got her groove back’ and ‘IC3′ feel quite lyrical. Have music lyrics influenced your writing? Is there anyone in particular?

I listen to and quarrel with a breadth of contemporary Diaspora musical style. I wanted at times to reflect the energy and posturing and themes of hip-hop and Jamaican dance hall without adopting the aesthetic. No one person in particular but I am, unsurprisingly, generally inspired by artists such as Prince, Me ‘shell n’ dege o’cello, Jill Scott, who use musical forms to express different zeitgeists.

Some of the poems are reflective of the larger African diaspora experience and some seem very personal to you. Is one easier to write than the other?

The personal and political which is one way to put it I guess, present different and similar challenges. I find the personal poems are often easier to come into being but harder to craft as I struggle to distance myself from the inspiration in order to refine the poem. But for both I constantly ask myself what am I trying to express? What is the essence of the poem? What is just verbiage?

You have also written plays for radio and theatre, how does writing poetry differ?

Playwriting and poetry intersect in the creation of characters and seeking plausible voices for those characters. However the unique challenge of poetry lies in its economy. I rarely struggle to write a play the hard work comes with refining the play. Hmmm but poetry nearly always leaves me feeling absolutely knackered.

Positive News: Ann Pettifor calls for ‘Green New Deal’ at the Schumacher Lectures

Ann Pettifor is a political economist and author of ‘The Coming First World Debt Crisis’ (Palgrave, 2006). Pettifors book, based on an article from 2003, not only predicted the current credit crunch, but also highlighted Iceland as being particularly at risk.

Pettifor’s seminar was incredibly timely and the audience was overflowing to hear how the current financial mess was created. Herbert Girardet, himself a chair of The Schumacher Society and a patron The Soil Association chaired this event and wrestled with the audience encouraging them focus on the future rather than on the present.

Pettifors belief is that it is time for a ‘Green New Deal’. The public has been let down by the banks and by a succession of US governments. Since 1971 banks have been creating credit based on their own guarantee rather than actual gold reserves which had always been the traditional approach. Around the same time Nixon in the US started to create an international version of the same idea by issuing a ‘Treasury Bill’. This moved the US away from being a manufacturer to effectively becoming the world’s banker and explains their phenomenal trade debt. Readers may have seen the US debt counter which recently ran out of digits (at the time of writing the debt was in the region of $10 trillion).

Pettifor is best known as the co-founder of ‘Jubilee 2000’, the worldwide campaign that succeeded in the cancellation of $100 billion worth of debts of the world’s poorest countries. This seminar was delivered with a courage and a conviction that led me in no doubt as to how Pettifor was able to get such pledges of support from world leaders. Her argument was radical and thought provoking, much of the audience wanted to know more about how we had ended up here. ‘What is money?’ asked one member of the audience, ‘It is not a commodity, it is man made’ Pettifor replied before the chairman intervened again to encourage the audience, and Pettifor to re-focus again on solutions for the future.

Pettifor argues for a return to regulation based on a Keynsian model of economics involving a much greater accountability of banking directors, and less reliance on credit. Personally I found Pettifor’s understanding and courage very inspiring, and the reason she has been arguing against a system based on credit is that she believes in creating a sustainable economic base. A common sense approach, and one wonders why it takes a crisis before the majority of us start to listen?

On the day, the audience were struggling to come to terms with the present and wanted to know more about how we ended up here. The chairman wanted us to think about the future and this tension led to some audible grumbles from the audience. Despite this, I am sure much of the audience left that room inspired to find out more about how our economy works and for that Pettifor must be applauded.

Mind Magazine: Matt Harvey – Hole in the sum of my parts

Poets through the ages have battled mental demons and mild mannered Matt Harvey is no exception. Often described as a ‘Stand-Up poet’ Harvey pokes gentle fun at being a modern liberal enlightened man, whilst also being one himself.

Harvey is a regular on Radio 4’s Saturday Live programme and performs at cabarets, festivals and colleges. He is often invited to mental health conferences to ‘provide some light relief’ as he describes it.

‘The hole in the sum of my parts’ (published by The Poetry Trust) is Harvey’s collected poems. The poems reveal his awareness of common mental health issues from anxiety and phobias to the confusing internal dialogues of self-help.

His journey to becoming a poet came via The Self Heal Association; a Devon based community he attended in his early 20s. The psychotherapeutic residential community was a charity people were referred to via local GPs, self-referrals or the local Buddhist centre.

‘I had been a troubled teenager, with acute unhappiness really’ is how he reflects on his experience. ‘Various inexplicable things happened and I went into psychotherapy to hold myself together. The whole process was very compelling and fascinating and I jumped in at the deep end’ he adds.

After his own therapy was complete the director asked him to stay on and become a helper. As part of this role he would put on a cabaret to engage the charity with the local community. He would compare the event and this kick started his love of live performance.

Having experienced both sides of the therapeutic process was one of the reasons Matt was later invited to talk at mental health conferences. ‘The first conference I was invited to speak at was entitled Isolation and Connection and I thought ‘What am I going to talk about’, and then I looked at my work and thought ‘well it is all about isolation and connection’ he exclaims.

One character of Harvey’s that is always very well received is Empath Man. ‘Empath Man wasn’t always Empath Man. 
He took part in a drugs trial that went horribly wrong. It was for an anti-pessimism drug, called Optiagra, for middle-aged men who find it difficult to get their hopes up…’.

Dealing with mental health experiences through writing is a common form of therapy but not one that Harvey has benefitted from himself. However he recognises that creative people need an outlet.

‘If they are not creative they aren’t going to feel ‘right’. They may not be thinking ‘this is my therapy’ but by going into other peoples points of view and the conflicts that are in drama, then we are exploring our own inner conflicts. You can understand your own points of view better through that process’.

A by-product of chairing conferences is that Harvey has become increasingly interested in the relationship between service users and staff. ‘We are all struggling with the human condition in someway, nobody gets out of here alive’ he jokes. ‘I feel we all have an experiences of anxiety and depression, whether minor or not and whatever our roles.’

Harvey also holds some strong views on psychotherapists, ‘Some of it is very outdated, that isn’t true of all psychotherapists but it is of many. I was very surprised that they aren’t required to do any work on themselves. They see every aboration as a chemical imbalance and people’s stories aren’t taken into consideration’.

But with characteristic empathy Matt concedes, ‘They have enormous responsibilities and probably need more support than criticism so I won’t lay in to them too much’.

Bristol Review of Books: Brothels, Bordellos and Bristol Pluck

As titles go ‘A True Account of the Villainous Bartholomew Rakehell, Ne’er do well’ doesn’t sound like your average 21st century book. But then first-time author Nick Law hasn’t written your average book.

The bawdy tale, set in the late 18th century, is written in verse using the lexicon of the era and reveals a wicked sense of humour. The larger than life characters include Bristol lass, Jenny Go-Sprightly who decides to try her luck in London. Innocent Jenny appears to be ripe for exploitation but thankfully her ‘Bristol pluck’ sees her through.

The tale itself, by the authors own admission is ‘light, bawdy and frivolous’. It is the language employed by Law which sets this book apart. ‘I had to make sure all the words were of the period’ he says. ‘That has been incredibly important to me. It had to be authentic.’ The period details that form the backdrop to the story have also been meticulously researched.

An unusual career path lent itself perfectly to developing an understanding of 18th century language. After graduating from drama school and working for a period of time as an actor, Law worked for a ‘Live Costumed Interpretation and Historical Special Events Company’ called Past Pleasures where he was immersed in history for 13 years.

As if one unusual job wasn’t enough, Law more recently had a stint at being a stand-up comic. This is apparent throughout, take for example this description of Mrs Come-Quickly’s brothel,

‘Her wenches were comely, her rooms clean and tidy

Her virgins were all guaranteed Bona Fide

She’d ripe juicy slatterns like Lombardy grapes Some buxom, some lithesome – all sizes and shapes’.

The Totterdown based author explains how his characters came to life, ‘Some characters came just as names, like Timothy Tosspot’ he says. ‘Whilst others are based on real people or archetypes.’ Then revealing his obsession with the origin of words Nick explains with a straight face that ‘Tosspot meant drunkard originally, and Tosser is just an abbreviation of that’.

The anti-hero of Bartholomew Rakehell is influenced by the fast life and colourful times of Richard Barry, the 7th Earl of Barrymore. Law describes him as ‘A notorious rake, a well known womaniser, gambler and drinker. He formed the Four-in-hand club for a group of men that enjoyed racing four horse carriages at breakneck speed. The Earls speciality was to drive through alleyways and break the windows on either side using his whip’ he says with a chuckle. ‘Despite this, he was also strangely charming’.

It obvious that Law is fascinated with the period, and choosing to write in rhyming couplets reflects this, ‘I describe the book right at the beginning as being in the authors best doggerel. Doggerel is often demeaned as meaning inferior but originally it meant light, rhyming verse in couplets’.

Choosing such a style is a brave undertaking for a first time writer ‘sometimes I could write 20 lines in an hour, sometimes it would take 20 hours just to do one line. It was difficult and enjoyable at the same time because having those limits makes you work harder’ he reveals. This process may also account for the book taking ten years, on and off, to write.

‘Rakehell’ recalls a past era of bordello’s, brothels and bare-knuckle boxers. This contrasts nicely with today’s modern world. The plot is fun, and the language is simultaneously colourful whilst retaining an academic accuracy. The balance is finely tuned and a heavier plot with this kind of language may have been too alienating for a lot of readers. The ghost of the Earl of Barrymore rides again.

Society Guardian: Here for some time

The voices of foreign nationals held in UK immigration detainee centres are rarely heard. The centres themselves, often in the news, are rarely seen beyond the exterior.

Border Country is a new book of photographs and audio recordings that attempts to redress the balance, documenting the literal and metaphorical no man’s land inhabited by Immigration Detainees in the UK.

Photographer Melanie Friend was granted exclusive access to eight of the ten UK Immigration Removal Centres including Dover and the female and families only facility at Yarl’s Wood, Bedfordshire.

During the project, which ran from 2003 to 2008, some 25,000 immigrants passed through the centres.

For some detainees this was a brief stop before being granted leave to remain. The stays of others, uncertain of their futures, were longer. Many of the detainees, whose voices accompanying these images, have been forcibly returned to their countries of origin.

The detainees’ stories take the listener on a journey through their experiences of civil war, torture, the debilitating experience of detention and to thoughts of suicide.

“At the end of the day they are telling us that they are trying to help us, but then they send people back to Congo. Congo! (laughing). This system is crazy,” said one detainee.

There is a strong sense of survival against the odds and many of the recordings are witty and insightful. These include reflections on how English speakers overuse the word “Sorry” to the point of meaningless, or how immigrants are portrayed in the media.

Sometimes the detainees break into tears or laughter. Ever present is the background noise of the centres. Children laugh, telephones ring and doors slam.

“They ask you for evidence that you are in danger, where are you going to get this? Back in Nigeria? You can only do this when you are dead. This is the only evidence,” said another, exasperated by his experience.

Friend admits the border between professional and personal became blurred during the course of the project.

“I got very personally involved, you can’t avoid it. I visited one person 14 times and was very upset when he was removed,” she said.

The photographer has kept in touch with some of the removed detainees who have subsequently sent her emails detailing the danger that they have returned to.

Friend said: “I feel angry and saddened about how detainees are treated in the UK, I am horrified by the length of time some have been held. I heard some horrific tales of detainees being forcibly removed. As if they haven’t been through enough trauma before they reach our shores.”

Despite this, she was fascinated with the centres. “It is a locked away world. They look like ordinary places, but are also places of surveillance and demarcation, with lists of rules on the walls.”

Most of her photos are of communal areas, including the visitor areas where detainees’ and visitors’ seats are often colour-coded.

“They are like any communal, institutional place we have such as a doctor’s waiting room. But there is this ambiguity. The voices in the recordings pierce through those institutional landscapes.”

Friend’s previous work includes “Homes and Gardens: Documenting the Invisible”, which used the same method of images and audio to comment on the police state in Kosovo in the 1990s.

“When I started this I wasn’t expecting to go down the same route,” explained Friend. She started with taking portraits, but soon realised her subjects were more comfortable talking anonymously. In a parallel with her Kosovo work, Friend concludes: “There was always this extraordinary disjunction between what I was seeing and what I was hearing”.

• Border Country is a book of images and an accompanying audio CD, published by Belfast Exposed Photography and The Winchester Gallery.

Available at www.amazon.co.uk and www.melaniefriend.com, the project has been funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Arts Councils of Northern Ireland and England.

Society Guardian: A not so green and pleasant land

The countryside is often depicted as a place to live “the good life” and to escape the stresses and strains of modern life.

The Rural Media Company, based in Hereford, set about debunking this myth with its film Show & Tell. The documentary lifts the lid on rural people living in poverty.

Show & Tell brings unfamiliar voices to the screen and exposes the hardship and stigma of surviving on a low income in the countryside.

“People don’t understand the hidden costs of living in a rural area. We are marginalised,” says Emma, a lone parent and one of the contributors.

“The dentist is in Hereford,” she adds. “We can get a bus there, but it takes an hour and costs £3 each way. That’s £10 just to get there and back for me and my child.” This is almost a fifth of her weekly income.

In the film people speak of having nowhere to live, abandoning A-levels for lack of money, of being unable to work because they cannot afford a car, of living without a phone, a TV, even hot water.

Jane Jackson, project director for Show & Tell, explains how the sensitive nature of the project almost prevented it from happening.

“You can’t blend in here like you can in a city,” Jackson says. “Nobody wants to talk about being poor. It is almost harder to talk about than anything else; it took months to find people to volunteer their stories.”

“People feel that it is their fault, even if that isn’t true. Poverty makes people feel powerless,” adds Jackson.

Feelings of powerlessness and isolation were common among the participants who emphasised the importance of having strong social networks. Others spoke of the vital role service provision has in maintaining social networks and remaining active in society.

Nevertheless, for many participants the physical isolation of rural life plus their social isolation contributed to feelings of exclusion. Lone parent Tracey explains: “I have got no money to socialise … it is very hard being able to go out if you haven’t got the money. So I save up the money, what I can, to go out. But when I do go out, I feel very guilty about it, because I think that the money I spent to go out, I could have spent on water rates or something else.”

Many participants identified significant barriers and obstacles in claiming the services and benefits to which they are entitled. These included a lack of information, complex forms, and the inflexibility of the benefits system to understand their circumstances.

Others referred to feelings of worthlessness and lack of recognition arising from the way they were made to feel by service providers. For example, being “treated differently”, viewed with suspicion, looked down on, or “processed” without real recognition of their situation and views.

Another contributor, Lyanne, says: “There is constantly a feeling that you’re either trying to wangle something else, or are trying to cheat the system … As a single parent, I had to go to interviews to confirm why I was on income support. It did very much feel like I was being accused of just sitting on my bum, not doing anything, accepting this money and doing it on purpose almost, which certainly wasn’t the case.”

During the project, the word “poverty” itself was identified as part of the problem. Contributors considered it inherently damaging and isolating, because it signifies personal inadequacy and failure.

Yet the participants found the filming process itself was empowering. In follow-up interviews, contributors’ self confidence was boosted by seeing themselves on screen, describing their experiences, and this has helped to break the debilitating cycle.

“It was great to be asked my opinion on a subject that obviously related very much to my situation,” says Craig, a young local unemployed man. “I’m glad I did it because these are matters that need to be talked about.”

Nic Millington, founder and chief executive of the Rural Media Company, explains the need for its work: “Rural life and coverage of rural communities is often through the prism of a metropolitan point of view,” he says. “Locating ourselves in a rural area and allowing local people to have an input gives a platform for alternative points of view.”

The company produces films which include participation from ordinary local people, a method favoured by directors such as Shane Meadows and Ken Loach. The organisation also produces Travellers’ Times, the only publication aimed directly at traveller, Gypsy and Romany groups.

Millington believes that creative and media industries are finding a natural home in the country. “Rural areas are undergoing a huge demographic change and many people from the digital and media industries are relocating to the countryside,” he explains.

These new industries relocate for the quality of life, and new technology allows it. “Media is a high-value industry,” Millington explains, which “provides a tremendous opportunity for regeneration”.