Trust Your Voice
Trust Your Voice is a new initiative for young people aged 18-25 at the Seamus Heaney Centre. We will be offering a programme of events, masterclasses and individual mentoring for two years. Trust Your Voice will help to foster creative confidence by connecting new writers with our extensive network of novelists, poets, playwrights, songwriters and storytellers of all kinds.
Applications for the first year of opportunities, which will from from October 2025 to June 2026, are open now. Read on to find out more about what will be available and use the link at the bottom of the page to apply.
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Events
As a participant in Trust Your Voice you will have a place reserved for you at monthly events in the Seamus Heaney Centre. As well as our regular programme of activities with poets and novelists, we will be hosting new events with writers of all kinds: screenwriters and animators, songwriters and historians, traditional storytellers and journalists.
Towards the end of the year there will be opportunities to gain experience in programming and delivering some of these events.
- Workshops and Masterclasses
Along with regular events, there will be workshops and masterclasses from established, professional writers. These will be opportunities to try out new forms of writing, or to think about your written or spoken voice in new ways.
- Individual Mentorship and Feedback
A key element of Trust Your Voice will be the opportunity for regular and sustained individual feedback from a working writer.
Our extensive network of writers will allow us to find a match for your interests:
Susannah Dickey (poet and novelist, author of Tennis Lessons and Common Decency), Matthew Rice (poet, author of plastic), Sacha White (poet and Seamus Heaney Centre PhD student) and Mark McCambridge (songwriter and musician as Arborist, winner of the NI Music Prize) are among the writers who have signed up to provide mentorship and feedback.
You can expect at six hours of one-to-one feedback sessions.
- Costs and Expectations
Participation in Trust Your Voice will be free, thanks to funding from Future Screens NI.
There will, however, be an expectation that participants will maintain attendance at as many programmed activities as possible from October 2025 through to June 2026.
A message from Glenn Patterson, Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre
My dad was one of the best storytellers I’ve ever known. Sit him down in a roomful of family and friends and there would be no stopping him. But put a piece of paper in front of him and he froze. It was as though he didn’t have the words – the right words, the proper words – as though, suddenly, the words he thought and spoke in weren’t good enough. Almost as though he didn’t trust his own voice.
I write novels, I write films, I write bits and pieces for newspapers and radio. Part of my ambition when I started out was to write stories the way my dad spoke them, which is the way I would have spoken them if I was half the storyteller he was when faced with that roomful of family and friends.
I love words. I love being serious with them and I love messing about with them. And I love learning new ones. I sometimes forget them. I sometimes make mistakes with them. But so does everyone.
It’s all a part of who we are.
Trust Your Voice is an opportunity for up to 50 young people, aged 18-25, who have left full-time education to work with writers from the Seamus Heaney Centre over a six-week period to find out how their own voices sound. You don’t have to write a story, you don’t have to write a poem, just something that is uniquely you. Something, just as importantly, you can carry away in your head to whatever you do next in life: how I think, how I speak is who I am. And there is nothing at all wrong with that.
There will be a certificate at the end of it. There will be a £100 voucher to spend on books or writing materials. There will be, for anyone who wants to take part, an opportunity to stand up and let others hear you speak or read. There will, I hope, be interesting stuff along the way.
If that sounds like something you would like to try then get in touch.
And, do, whether you join us or not, trust your voice.