Cheltenham Shut Up & Write: Artists and Authors Unite

By Shut Up & Write! Cheltenham

First set up in 2023 by a university librarian, our Shut Up & Write! group has been very lucky to make the Wilson Art Gallery and Museum in Cheltenham, UK our permanent home. It was a happy matter of serendipity (our usual cafe space being shut one Sunday) that led us to finding the new space. As a non-profit, the Wilson have been very keen to welcome us as one of their community groups and get us more involved in their events and exhibits (more on that later!).

The format of our group is perhaps more casual than other Shut Up & Write! events, largely because the area we use is quite spacious. People arrive between 10–10:30 am to start their writing or have a quick catch-up with others. From 10:30 am, we have two hours of silent writing time, accompanied by plenty of hot drinks, toasties and sweet treats from the cafe. At the end of the session, we chat for an hour or so to connect and meet new people. No one has to discuss what they’re working on if they don’t want to, though our projects and the writing process often come up as a topic of conversation.

While we don’t have any formal breaks as part of our event, our members will sometimes take a rest from their writing to wander the gallery floors, looking for new sources of inspiration. The upstairs floors host exhibitions from national galleries, while the lower floors are home to outstanding fine arts, local history, archaeology, and crafts collections. The rooms we use are usually completely silent, but we do sometimes hear children excited to inspect a lovely penguin sculpture on the floor above us, which is always a delightful distraction.

Since finding the new space, our numbers and popularity have grown hugely. During Spring we even had a waitlist of 10–12 people for each event! As with most Shut Up & Write! groups, we get a whole assortment of different types of writers: poets, aspiring novelists, children’s authors, playwrights, researchers, copywriters, graphic novelists, stand-up comics, and more. It’s that diversity of interests that’s one of my favourite things about Shut Up & Write! It’s always fascinating to hear about people’s passions, interests and sources of inspiration. It’s also lovely to hear how much they appreciate finding a space like Shut Up & Write! if they have difficulty connecting with their creative side in their day-to-day lives.

A community guide: Paula Rego’s “Visions of English Literature”

Most recently, we were able to draw on this diversity of interests by helping to create a community guide for the Wilson’s Paula Rego exhibition, “Visions of English Literature.” This type of guide is a great way to bring under-represented and marginalised voices into an exhibition, with the Wilson previously having invited a local refugee group to respond to past exhibits.

Paula Rego was a Portuguese, London-based artist known as a prominent feminist painter and printmaker. She incorporated folklore, fairytales and literature into her work, along with fever dream depictions of her life growing up under António de Oliveira Salazar’s dictatorship. The women in Rego’s works are harsh and provoking, often with distorted, demonic expressions. They are horribly real, but also inhabit a haunted, liminal space of the imagination. As a result, Paula Rego has a great gift for revealing stark truths that we don’t like to confront, particularly in familiar stories we cling to.

In the UK, Paula Rego is particularly well-known for her series of prints on Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. These were created as an artistic response to Jean Rhys’ postcolonial novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, which focuses on Bertha Mason. In her prints, Rego uses the same model for both Jane Eyre and Bertha, reflecting how they are two halves of the same whole and revealing painful truths about this beloved narrative. In these images, Mr. Rochester is domineering, unkind and controlling, whereas Bertha, the “madwoman,” is depicted as child-like and vulnerable.

To gather responses to the exhibition, we invited some of our regular attendees to participate in a workshop led by Melissa, one of our organisers. Another organiser, Anna, collated and edited the responses. These were very well received and some of our participants were so enthusiastic about the project that they submitted further essays and poems.

Read the community guide: “Confronting” — Community Guide to the Paula Rego Exhibition (Wilson Art Gallery & Museum).

What’s next

Beyond our involvement with the gallery, our next project will be a creative writing anthology, at the suggestion of one of our members. Our plan is to release it in September, which will be the three year anniversary of our group being set up!

We’re excited to continue to see where this group, as well as our creativity and connections, will lead us. We’re proud to have created such a thriving community of writers in Cheltenham and the wider Gloucestershire area, and feel lucky to have such a supportive space to create together.