Vera

Vera has seizures, she’s a nerd and she thinks she might be gay. She might be able to deal with all this except for the fact she lives in Orgreave, one of the poorest areas of South Yorkshire. When her parents decide to separate and tell her she has a week to choose who to live with, she realises nobody ever taught her to imagine what the future might look like. She goes in search of Margaret Twatcher, a local drag queen. One night at the top of an old pit, as Vera grapples with her choice and has a seizure, history breaks apart and Vera and Margaret wander through the history of the town. We move through three civil wars, from the miners strikes, to the Rotherham exploitation scandal to a recent general election and begin to see how Vera sits at the centre of a fractured town. Vera begins to understand her parents roles in all these events and sees they are not the perfect people she once thought they were, but how much should this influence her choice? Vera is an epic coming-of-age story about a generation of young people entirely detached from the history that has always defined them, and how they might now learn to tell their own story.

This is a work-in-progress sharing which kicks of Tom’s time working on strategies for ADHD writers with a “Developing Your Creative Practice” grant from Arts Council England. It will be followed by a Q&A about what the project is going to look like.