Taking a break from DJing, radio shows for BBC 6Music and running Buzzin’ Fly, Ben Watt is presenting two special day-long workshops at an upcoming UK literary festival focussing on an area of his work that has been overshadowed in recent years – lyric and songwriting.
The Small Wonder Short Story Festival takes place at Charleston in East Sussex (originally the summer house for Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group) from 22-25 September and Ben’s workshops take place on Sat 24 Sept and Sun Sept 25.
“I was approached out of the blue by the organisers,” says Ben. “They had been planning a workshop that showed links between short story writing and lyric writing for some time, and they thought with my background in songwriting with Everything But The Girl, recent spoken-word writing on Buzzin’ Fly with Estelle and Baby Blak, and the autobiographical non-fiction I wrote in the nineties, I might be an interesting host. It came at a point in my life when I have been returning to an interest in words and writing as opposed to the instrumental music that has dominated much of my life recently so I said ‘yes’.”
The workshops start each day at 10am and run until 5pm with breaks for lunch. The workshops will look at different writing styles and techniques and the aim is to help each participant come up with a good lyric by the end of each day.