Cranford Review 2016

First Story 2016
“There’s
There’s Always One is an anthology of new writing by the First
Story students at Cranford Community College who took
part in creative-writing workshops led by writer-in-residence
Always One”
Ross Raisin. First Story believes there is dignity and power
in every person’s story, and here you’ll find young people
expressing themselves in their own unique voices.
We hope you enjoy this collection.
First Story, now in its 10th year at
Cranford, Featuring continues writing to by: grow in
popularity Fatima Elmi • Harshaan with the Sahota students • Isheda Leeand
Kevin Clarke • Kulbir Maras • Lucy Tirahan
demonstrates
Raniya
the
Hersi
truly
• Sadie
amazing
Yasmin Blakecreative
minds of our young Saras authors. Dhiman Ross Raisin,
writer-in-residence returned again this year
to nurture their writing talents, working
alongside their teacher Sahrish Sheikh and he
remains inspired by the work they produced
to create a very personal anthology entitled,
“There’s Always One”. Here is just a sample
of their published work.
Changing lives through writing
'First Story is a very exciting idea –
writing can liberate and strengthen
young people’s sense of themselves
as almost nothing else can.'
There
FIRST STORY
was a moment, during our second
session, when a shift in the atmosphere
occurred. The group had finished writing their second
PHILIP PULLMAN
Author of His Dark Materials
poem of the session and were taking www.firststory.co.uk it in £10.00 turns to read
them Illustration out. Raniya, and cover design who by had not wanted to read out her first
Lucy Dove & Amit Rai
poem,
Typesetting
acquiesced
by Avon DataSet
to
Ltd
the gentle persuasion of the others,
and read out her new one. It was beautiful – and, with the
naturalness of response that comes when somebody reads
something affecting to you, the group’s enjoyment of it
was immediately obvious in the expressions and, when
she had finished, the words of approval, then applause,
of the others. ‘No, shut up. You’re just saying that, yeah?’
was Raniya’s reply, through a big smile. These are the
best moments for me. The instants when, for the students,
the whole thing – the group, First Story, the cajolement
of teachers to make you sign up for this mysterious
Wednesday thing, the point of writing at all– suddenly
makes sense. When a student begins, in that ‘you’re just
saying that, yeah?’ twinkling, to understand that she
is writing both for herself and to provoke something
in somebody else, and that this act is simultaneous,
intuitive, and human. And as these individual openingsout
ripple through the group, a community is created,
a miniature one that starts to look forward to sharing
pieces of writing, to reading, to talking about writing.
Importantly, too, it is a community to which their teacher
belongs and is part of, on an equal footing (and I will say
that Miss Sheikh’s gentleness and inclusiveness make this
happen very easily. She is also, by the by, excellent at
chasing young people who have missed their deadlines.
Which is a lot of chasing). The afternoon during which
the group found out that Miss Sheikh had once been a
pupil at Cranford herself was an eye-opener. And when
Jay came in from First Story to spend an afternoon with
us, and they found out that he went there too... and that he
even used to be in the same class as Miss Sheikh! Well…
There is something healthy in this realisation, outside of
the normal structures of the teenage relationship with the
Cranford Community College
There’s Always One
An Anthology by the First Story Group at
Cranford
Community College
Edited and Introduced by Ross Raisin
adult world, that the grown-ups around you are in fact not
so different from yourself, and that they like and respond to
some of the same things that you do. It is part of growing up,
glimpsing a future beyond school. There was disappointment
in some quarters that we did not vote in the title of: A
Compilation of Stuff and a Dozen Other Things, enough that
I promised I would mention it in my introduction. So there
it is. The majority-decided title, though, I think is a better
fit. In part because it plays nicely into the sense that there
would always be somebody with a surprise up their sleeve,
and in part because there would always be a different person
missing each week. One week, in fact, an entirely different
half of the group turned up to that of the previous week.
Which put something of a dampener on my session plan of
working on the pieces of the week before – but, as so often
can be the case, the spontaneity that came about that week
resulted in one of the most surprising and useful sessions
of the course. A few days before that meeting, the terrorist
attacks on Paris had taken place and the group fell into
discussion about the horror, the reasons, and the reporting
of it. Instinctively, they wanted to write about all this, and
so, without very much guiding, they did – and those pieces
are included in this anthology. It seemed fitting to put them
in, because this book, as much as it is an enjoyable read
(love, zombies, aspiration, atelophobia – still don’t really
know what that is – grief, diamonds, detectives, a great
deal of blood…), is an expression of what this small group
of young people make of the world round them – through
thought, language, humour – and of how they find their
place in it.
Ross Raisin (Writer-in-Residence)
10