Superpowered and other stories – an empathy inspired creative writing project

Superpowered and other stories – an empathy inspired creative writing project

We are thrilled to share a digital anthology of creative writing from Year 7 students at Cardinal Newman Catholic School.

In preparation for Empathy Day, we visited Cardinal Newman Catholic School in Rhydyfelin, Pontypridd. Over two writing workshops, the students developed empathy-rich characters and stories through a series of writing prompts and activities.

After the workshops, the Year 7 students worked on the openings of these stories and we are delighted to share these with you today.

We’d like to thank the class teacher, Kathryn Jenkins, and the school for their help and support during the project, and a huge well done to all the talented writers.

The Headteacher, Justin O’Sullivan, said: “A fantastic project and a great opportunity for children to showcase their creativity and writing skills. It is great to see our pupils involved and contributing such high quality pieces of work. Well done to everyone.”

Please click on the cover to download the anthology.

Firefly Press acknowledge the financial support of the Books Council of Wales and Creative Wales towards this New Audiences project.

Follow Honesty and Alice through Elizabethan London – Day 4: Southwark & London Bridge

Follow Honesty and Alice through Elizabethan London – Day 4: Southwark & London Bridge

This month author Eloise Williams takes us on a tour around the Elizabethan London featured in Honesty and Lies.

We’ll be visiting the key places where Honesty and Alice spend their time and Eloise will give you an inside sneak peek into the places as well as what it takes to bring this world to life!

Southwark and London Bridge

The story is set over Christmastide and Twelfth Night. It’s cold. Very cold. Not so many years before the Thames had frozen over and King Henry VIII had ridden his sleigh from London to Greenwich across its surface. I’m a big fan of creating wintry settings and London Bridge and Southwark were so much fun to write about.

The bridge would have been astonishing to a newcomer. All manner of people and animals would have been using it to cross the river and there would have been timbered houses and shops galore. There is nothing more pleasing to my writer’s eye than to imagine an apothecarist, filled with remedies and beaked masks. A mercer draping rippling silk over his arm as if it is trickling water juxtaposed with soldiers and sailors and rats the size of cats. And a candlemaker’s sign blowing in an icy wind sounds romantic for some reason. Or is that just me?

Once over it, having walked beneath a huge gate with the heads of traitors on spikes, you’d reach Southwark.

Southwark was the place of entertainment so when Honesty and Alice are sent on an errand it’s little wonder that they get caught up in the excitement of celebrations. A falconer with a trained bird, carollers, a merry group of boys with a bowl of spiced ale distract them from their duties. Then there are the men on stilts, the jugglers and flamethrowers, and people blowing crumhorn pipes and making a racket with… well… racketts. And, of course, the magic of the Globe theatre! Happy days.

Map artwork by Guy Williams

Of course, they do run into Alice’s father who, having fallen on hard times, is fond of frequenting the many taverns and inns in Southwark. And there is the Clink – a notorious prison, and the danger of having a chamber pot emptied over your head, but not everything can be perfect, can it?

Find out more about Eloise and Honesty and Lies:

Follow Honesty and Alice through Elizabethan London – Day 4: Southwark & London Bridge

Follow Honesty and Alice through Elizabethan London – Day 3: The Globe

This month author Eloise Williams takes us on a tour around the Elizabethan London featured in Honesty and Lies.

We’ll be visiting the key places where Honesty and Alice spend their time and Eloise will give you an inside sneak peek into the places as well as what it takes to bring this world to life!

The Globe

I love to write about the theatre and the Globe is surely one of the most evocative when it comes to historical stages. Don’t get me wrong, I love Victorian theatres with their decorative auditoriums, glittering chandeliers and plush velvet curtains. I’m also a sucker for other great outdoor venues, the Minack in Cornwall springs to mind as being exceptional, as does Regent’s Park. I also love a bit of street theatre, and the work of Brecht in breaking down barriers, or Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed which relies on audience participation. I feel as if I’m needlessly showing off my knowledge of theatres and practitioners now, but the point is, I adore it.

Before I became a writer, I was an actor and from the first professional performance I can remember, I was spellbound. Yul Brynner at the London Palladium is a pretty good place to start and though he meant nothing to me at the time – philistine that I was, I became completely enraptured by the costumes, lights, magic and story of the play. I’ve since been in lots of wonderful theatres, but the Globe is surely one of the most spectacular recreations of our time.

The audience in modern theatres – by which I mean British Victorian and onwards – tend to sit quietly until the end of an act and then applaud politely unless invited to take part in the action. Not so with an audience in Honesty and Alice’s day! There would have been shouting and heckling, ale being consumed in large quantities, cavorting and pickpocketing. The groundlings would have shoved and pushed for their view of the stage, and with their hard lives, poverty, and disease rife, the play had better be good to make it worth their while.

It’s that, which makes it so remarkable that a story could spellbind an audience. Of course, there was swordplay and gunpowder, beating drums and merry jigs, but ‘the play’s the thing’ and beyond these tricks of the trade and smells of the audience, the story soared capturing the hearts of the people and lifting them above the hardship for a while. At least, I like to imagine it did.

As Honesty says, ‘This is everything I ever knew that stories could be. The words curl and romp, frolic and gambol, trip from the actor’s tongues and enchant us all.’
If Honesty says it, it must be true, right?

Find out more about Eloise and Honesty and Lies:

Follow Honesty and Alice through Elizabethan London – Day 4: Southwark & London Bridge

Follow Honesty and Alice through Elizabethan London – Day 2: Greenwich Palace

This month author Eloise Williams takes us on a tour around the Elizabethan London featured in Honesty and Lies.

We’ll be visiting the key places where Honesty and Alice spend their time and Eloise will give you an inside sneak peek into the places as well as what it takes to bring this world to life!

Greenwich Palace

I visit London as often as I can and have favourite haunts. Highgate Cemetery – excuse the haunts pun – the Southbank, Postman’s Park and the West End are all well frequented by us and our tourist’s fascination with pretty much everything. But we wanted to discover somewhere new. ‘What about Greenwich?’ I asked my husband as I peered at a Google map. There’s an observatory in a big park and we can get the boat back. Feet weary of concrete and longing for grass agreed. And so, we set off.

I’d never heard of Greenwich Palace. I don’t know why. I’m not claiming to be a font of all knowledge by any stretch of the imagination but to know nothing of a palace of such stature and magnificence seemed a little bizarre. Oh, it’s not there anymore. That explains it then. But what a gift for a writer to recreate something which has disappeared! Yes! I wanted to do just that.

I had little idea of how people lived in Elizabethan times, save for the series of Blackadder in which Miranda Richardson played QEI which I couldn’t rely on to be wholly accurate, so I thought I’d better educate myself. Nothing helped me more than my visits to Hampton Court Palace, the Globe theatre and the Tudor Merchant’s House in Dinbych-y-Pysgod. The staff at all were so knowledgeable – thanks to them for answering a very annoying number of questions – and to be walking through these historic buildings was just wonderful.

I learned many things which helped me to visualise Alice and Honesty’s lives and how they might have lived at Greenwich. Or course, I am no historian, but I created a palace of my own which, whilst heavily influenced by Hampton Court, has its own identity too.

Seeing it through the eyes of the girls meant that I only had to recreate the places which were relevant to them. It’s a look at the palace through the eyes of the workers. They appreciate the beauty of the dresses and feasts, fine artwork and beautiful fountains, but they also have to work hard in the laundry room, cold underground tunnels where they fear the Thames will break through and drown them, and the stinking washhouse. The contrasts are extreme and the theme of appearance versus reality echoed my theme of honesty and lies so well it was almost as if it was planned that way.

Find out more about Eloise and Honesty and Lies:

Follow Honesty and Alice through Elizabethan London – Day 4: Southwark & London Bridge

Follow Honesty and Alice through Elizabethan London – Day 1: The Thames

This month author Eloise Williams takes us on a tour around the Elizabethan London featured in Honesty and Lies.

We’ll be visiting the key places where Honesty and Alice spend their time and Eloise will give you an inside sneak peek into the places as well as what it takes to bring this world to life!

The Thames

I love to write about water. It snakes its way through most of my stories and is, I suppose, the common theme which would draw them together if anyone should care to search for a link in my work. I often find myself absorbed by it. Looking at it, jumping into it, admiring or fearing it. The fluidity of the stuff, everchanging, glittering and gobbling, listening, drinking everything in. There’s such a magical quality to a body of water quite beyond the lifegiving, life-taking one. Think of the stories the Thames carries. The things it has seen and swept away. The voices which have sunk into it and the curious objects it leaves on its banks as clues for mudlarks and historians. It’s the heart of London.

A couple of years ago I took a boat from Greenwich to Southwark and pondered on the perspective it gives the traveller. How grand it would have been during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I to have seen Greenwich Palace – long gone now – on its banks. How frightening to slide past The Bloody Tower. How exhilarating to fight for your place on the water, jostled by other passengers and boats. To dock perhaps at Southwark, place of entertainment and home of the Globe. If you lived at Greenwich Palace, you might make use of a tide clock to make travel swifter. If you were a traitor, you might find your head on a stick for all to see from the barges which passed beneath London Bridge.

The Thames is a very different serpent now to the one it would have been in Elizabethan times. I’ve dipped my toes into its waters without fear of catching the plague and have viewed the Tower of London with a tourist’s eye and no fear of being rowed through Traitor’s Gate. But what fun it is to see London from the water and imagine it as Honesty and Alice would have seen it. The wares transported from foreign climes. Busy with galleons, and wherries and ships crammed with people. The stink of fish guts and scum and human excrement. Oh, what stinky joy for a writer! I hope you enjoy your journey!

Find out more about Eloise and Honesty and Lies:

Nicola Davies on nature, fossil fuels, and The Song that Sings Us

Nicola Davies on nature, fossil fuels, and The Song that Sings Us

Nicola Davies, author of The Song that Sings Us

As world leaders meet to tackle climate change at COP 27, writer, zoologist and presenter Nicola Davies talks here about the inspiration behind her double Carnegie nominated The Song that Sings Us – the story of a world like ours, but where the rules of nature have never been completely forgotten, and the peril of exploiting fossil fuels was recognised from the start…


My favourite object in the British Museum is an anorak. It’s beautifully constructed, light as a leaf and completely transparent. It isn’t a high-tech modern garment but a traditional Inuit parka, made for summer hunting, from a kayak. The material it’s made from is the epithelial lining of a seal’s gut, sewn together with sinew, that swells when wet, to make the seams watertight. I love it not just because of the ingenuity in use of materials and the excellence of its design, but because it symbolises a deep knowledge of, and connection with, the natural world.

All over the planet, indigenous cultures embody both the inventiveness of the human mind and the lessons learned from Nature, the most uncompromising teacher. For people living, like Inuit, in direct contact with their environments, respect for natural resources was the rule and the consequences of breaking it were starvation, disease and death. The rewards were not only survival but a sense of belonging, purpose and deep meaning. Concepts that we see as new in the modern age – recycling, reusing, repairing, sustainability – were hard wired into belief systems and cultural practices.

What has allowed us to break the rules for so long was the discovery of fossil fuels. We could step out of the day-to-day current account of the carbon cycle and plunder 60 million years of stored photosynthesis in the form of coal, oil and gas.

And that, of course, is what’s got us into the potentially civilisation-ending crisis that we’re in.

But just supposing we had never completely forgotten those lessons from nature. That we had either never found fossil fuels, or found them and realised what the dire consequences of exploiting them would be? That is the world that I imagined in creating The Song That Sings Us, a global human civilisation fuelled by renewable energy and still abiding by the rules that nature originally taught us.

Another strand to my fantasy world is one of the forces that has kept humankind within the bounds set by nature’s parameters, and that is the voice of other living things. In the world of my novel there are humans able to tune into animal thoughts. I didn’t want to create a Disney-esque situation where animals are just little avatars of humans. So, the voices of animals in the story are sometimes hard to interpret and true communication requires commitment on both sides.

If this sounds to you like a rather dull utopia, don’t worry, there are baddies! They are called the Automators. Their motivation is personal gain, money and power and they can see that by converting the world to dependence on fossil fuels, whose supply they control, they’ll get just what they want. The way they sell this to the general population is by promising to end the ‘tyranny of nature’ and when that doesn’t work, they resort to the time-honoured methods of violence and oppression.

At the heart of the story are three children, the offspring of a rebel leader who has opposed the Automators’ rise. There are animal characters too who give readers a perspective on the world that they may not have had before. From the first moment the protagonists are thrown into a maelstrom. There are chases and disasters, separations and surprising alliances, love stories and fights. I wanted to give my readers a really exciting ride with lots of emotional engagement and thrills, but I also wanted to make them feel, that in our world, all is not lost. The Automator forces in the real world are very powerful and they would like us to despair, to assume that the fight is lost before it’s begun. Despair suits them very well. It will allow them to hold onto the reins of power even as they drive us all over the precipice of environmental disaster. They portray the changes that are needed as impossible, they focus on all we will lose in a greener, sustainable world. They never speak about what we will gain, a better life for more of earth’s inhabitants: a future that we can look forward to instead of dread; hope and renewal instead of an apocalypse that even the very rich will struggle to survive.

I wanted my readers to feel that change is possible, and that change can happen very fast if everyone works together. And the first change that is required is simple, but huge: to know what the Inuit knew which is that we are all one kin, all life, interdependent, one great family. From that profound realisation all other things flow.

– Nicola Davies


The Song that Sings Us has been nominated for the Yoto Carnegie Medal for Writing (Nicola Davies) and the Yoto Carnegie Medal for Illustration (Jackie Morris).
Get your copy here.
Learn more about the Yoto Carnegies here.

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