A merry, peaceful, poetic Christmas to our thousands of users, from the Write Out Loud team. It has been a bumper year in terms of participation, quality of work uploaded, events on the gig guide, poet profiles; all in support of the great open-mic poetry movement that we expect to continue to grow into 2012. In an era of interesting political movements – Arab Spring, the ‘occupy’ protests, stirrings in Russia – it is not pretentious to consider the open-mic poetry movement a part of that, providing as it does a platform for thousands of people to share their own words with like-minded others in hundreds of venues across the country, and elsewhere in the world, and online.

Keep writing, keep sharing. Tonight, when this pub closes, the revolution starts, as Alex Glasgow wrote and sang.

Please do take care to check with organisers for gigs listed around Christmas as we do not always get the correct information and cannot accept responsibility for your wasted journey.

Enjoy!

Julian