An opportunity for short story writers…

Hi gang,

I’ve been asked to share the following, so get our your biro or flex your fingers:

From Annabel Hervey-Bathurst:

New website: Stories for lipreading

We are hoping to help deaf people to practise vital lipreading skills through watching short stories being read aloud online, on a free-of-charge website which we are setting up. I have hearing loss and attend lipreading classes, and have seen what a huge motivation it is for students to be following a gripping story – and what a massive difference lipreading skills can make to deaf people’s lives.  There’s very little online provision of lipreading practice at the moment, and almost nothing good that’s free of charge in UK English, so we’d love to do something to fill the gap.

We are contacting a few Hampshire writing groups and tutors to see if their members might like to submit unpublished short stories which we can use. As the project is entirely run by volunteers and the website will be free of charge to all users, we sadly aren’t able to offer the writers any financial incentives. However, we hope that the unusual nature of the project and the requirements which it imposes on the writing style might be sufficiently challenging to interest writers. The project is still in its initial stages, but we hope to select stories and film the lipreading videos over the summer.

I attach a document outlining the project and giving writing guidelines.  If you have any questions, or would to discuss the project, I would be absolutely delighted to hear from you.

 Please get in touch with:

Annabel Hervey-Bathurst – info@storiesforlipreading.org.uk

Download: Short Stories for Lipreading – invitation to submit work March 2016 to get more information about what sort of stories are suitable.

Best,

Sue