By Kathy Hoyle
On March 1st, 2025, I was invited to chair a discussion at Sunderland Museum with Dr Louise Powell about her work with oral histories and poetry. Louise had used recordings of local people from now-decimated mining communities to create an exhibition of poetry alongside stunning tintype images by local photographer Andy Martin.
When Louise first told me about the project I was instantly intrigued since my own PhD thesis focuses on authentic North-East dialect and narrative voice in working-class fiction. I also use oral history recordings as a springboard for my creative work, so I was keen to see a similar methodology in practice. Moreover, I’m the daughter of a miner. My dad worked in Horden pit, and I was born and raised just down the road from Sunderland, in Hartlepool, so, if ever there was a project that appealed to me both professionally and personally, this was it!
After visiting the exhibition with my Dad, it was clear that ‘Coal Face’ carried a deep reverence for the local mining communities and was a wonderful way of preserving Northeast heritage and history. By marrying images with poetry and using excerpts of the recordings as voiceovers to accompany both, Powell and Martin had created an exhibition that brought respect and understanding of Northeast heritage to a much wider audience – particularly those who might otherwise have had little understanding of the bravery, camaraderie and resilience of mining communities.
During our discussion, Powell explained that she worked closely with recordings for many months, searching through over 80,000 words of transcript to find emerging themes, phonetic patterns and dialect terms that could be used to create her poetry. In structuring the pieces, she cleverly used different poetic forms to mirror physical and emotional moments in the miners' lives, the constraints of the haiku representing the compact, claustrophobic space within the mine, sonnets reflecting the contradicting emotional lives of the workers, and prose poetry that emulated speech patterns and regional dialect, all perfectly woven through the exhibition alongside the powerful images created by Andy Martin.
Powell went on to discuss the importance of using dialect in her work. By using dialect, she explained, she was not only preserving heritage and memory but also preserving language. She wanted to stay as true as possible to the recordings and added that to whitewash the local dialect would have made no sense to her at all - how can you authentically represent a regional community without using the language within it?
She went on to describe her joy at using dialect within her work, the rich beauty of the language and the emotional resonance she felt with the mining community in doing so.
Several members of the audience were nodding enthusiastically throughout the discussion and one gentleman went on to tell us a wonderfully light-hearted story about how he had worked in a mine in Yorkshire and caused much confusion with his colloquial language.
It was clear the exhibition was of real importance to the local community, and it has been incredibly well-received. You could see grown men visibly moved while they were walking around the exhibition space.
My own father’s response was quite visceral, and I was surprised at how emotional he became – holding his hands up to compare his arthritic fingers to the photographs of other miners' hands, his memory sparked by the poetry and recordings and afterward he was quite still for a moment. Then he simply said, ‘I can’t really tell you if these are good memories or bad, but either way, it’s wonderful!’
It seems that Louise Powell and Andy Martin have created something deeply meaningful for both the local community and beyond. It was a real pleasure to be involved and wonderful to see oral history being used so effectively as a spark for creative practice.
Coal Face exhibition is open until March 15th at Sunderland Museum and Winter Gardens- you can find more information here.
Accompanying podcasts by Dr Louise Powell can be found here.
You can read an interview with Dr Louise Powell on Everybody's Reviewing here.
Kathy Hoyle’s work is published in literary magazines such as The Forge, Lunate, Emerge literary journal, New Flash Fiction Review, South Florida Poetry Journal and Fictive Dream. She has won a variety of competitions including The Bath Flash Fiction Award, The Hammond House Origins Competition and The Retreat West Flash Fiction Competition. She was recently longlisted for The Wigleaf Top 50 and her work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions, Best Microfictions and The Pushcart Prize. She is currently a PhD Creative Writing student at the University of Leicester.
