Words on Tap

Open Mic Event

Contact: wordsontap@email.com

This month's Words on Tap promises to return to its roots, showcasing literature from various genres by celebrated writers and performers from across the north of England. There will be poetry from Steve Anderson and Wendy Pratt, teenage fiction from John Irving Clarke and performance works from Carrieanne Vivianette and Alex Herod. There will also be an open-mic section - more poems about MHS's homebrew are welcome - and fine ales from Leeds's finest boozer, the Chemic Tavern. See you Friday May 30th, 7.30pm. Admission FREE.

More info about the line-up below and at wordsontapblog.wordpress.com


Born in Newcastle, Steve Anderson is a performance poet, craftsman, musician, and cook. He writes with wit, humour, and irritation of relationship, nature, and politics, performing in many guises since 1982.

Having retired from the time-consuming activity of running his catering business ‘I spice’ over the last five years, Steve is enjoying a revival of his performances, currently offering poetry and music, sometimes solo, sometimes in a duo with musician Andy Wood.

During the catering years, ‘I spice’ had a very successful stall at the World Curry Festival in Bradford, at which he appeared supporting Hardeep Singh Kohli’s stand-up comedy routine in the festival theatre.

He was diagnosed in 2012 with an advanced cancer two days after that Curry Festival show.

Steve’s first poetry collection ‘The Loneliness of the Un-requited Lover’ is now in print, with all profits going to Macmillan Cancer Support.

“Foremost a craftsman, I enjoy the contact with material that quality work allows. The immediacy of making artefacts I find closely related to the satisfaction derived from expressing thought/emotion successfully on paper. Dynamic acts both. As I become less physically able this is joyful realisation .”


Since resigning his teaching post, John Irving Clarke has been facing up to the "terrible freedom to write." He has done so by having a selection of poems and their Italian translations published and accepting an invitation to read them in Mondovi, Italy. He has also published his first novel, Who the Hell is Ricky Bell? which draws heavily on that former life as a teacher. He is tutor to an adult creative writing class and alongside his friend, Jimmy Andrex, he is a co-organiser of the Red Shed Readings in Wakefield.


Wendy Pratt was born in Scarborough, North Yorkshire in 1978. She now lives just outside Filey. She studied Biomedical Science at Hull University and worked as a Microbiologist at the local NHS hospital for some years. She is also about to complete a BA in English Literature with the Open University and is hoping to study towards her MA in creative writing next year.

She started trying to fashion a career out of her writing in 2008 and has since enjoyed publication of her poetry in many journals and magazines including: Interpreter’s House, Pennine Platform, Prole, Envoi, Other Poetry, Acumen, The Frogmore Papers and The English Chicago Review.

Wendy’s first poetry pamphlet, Nan Hardwicke Turns into a Hare was published by Prolebooks in 2011 and was well received, being reviewed favourably in the TLS. The collection centred on the loss of Wendy and her husband’s baby daughter, who died during an emergency C-section in April 2010.

Her first full size collection, Museum Pieces is also published by Prolebooks. It went to print in December 2013 and was officially launched, in Leeds in January 2014. The concept of the collection is that of a museum where memories, events, objects, thoughts are touchstones for something deeper; the poems artefacts to be observed.

Wendy is the poetry correspondent for Northern Soul, where she writes a regular column called ‘Northern Accents’. Wendy was recently invited to read at Bridlington Poetry festival in 2014.


In 2008, Carrieanne Vivianette and Alex Herod met on a near-empty corridor at Leeds Met Uni and bonded over several bottles of red wine and a love of Samuel Beckett.

Since then they have worked together on text, readings and performance works including at Leeds Festival 2009; Books & Blues; NEWK at LAB, Leeds; Rage Actions at Theatre in the Mill, Bradford, developed with Nick Kilby as part of TiM’s Open Space programme for emerging artists.

Carrieanne became devoted to exploring the construction and delivery of autobiographical text following her BA in Contemporary Performance Practices at Leeds Met in 2010. United with an already physical approach to performance, her work focused on text in relation to the body, in performance improvisation and scripted work, which was explored further through her MA at Manchester University, 2014. Her collaborations, as well as solo work, prioritize how play can present texts differently, furthering her interest in performance which is abstract and about ideas as oppose to a specific narrative.

After graduating from the MA Performance programme at Leeds Met in 2010, Alex spent 3 years as Deputy Editor of For Books’ Sake, a feminist organisation celebrating women writers. She is fascinated by text in and as performance; she enjoys putting on events (e.g., Words V Music); she loves all things cut & paste and DIY; she once performed a durational piece for 24 hours (at inXclusion, Leeds) and then took it to Berlin for 48 hours (MPA Open); she tweets as @collaboratehere; she overuses the semi-colon.

Entry: FREE

Time: 7:30pm