Positive Poetry with The Chubby Northerner

This inspiring, hands-on workshop blends poetry, wellbeing, and public art into one uplifting experience. Led by poet, performer, and experienced arts facilitator Tom Stocks (The Chubby Northerner), participants are invited to explore their creativity while reflecting on kindness, mental health, and the power of words to spark change.

Tom is best known for his viral Pavement Poetry project, chalking powerful, positive poems across the streets of Greater Manchester to bring unexpected joy and connection to everyday spaces. Building on this ethos, the workshop encourages people to craft their own impactful words and share them in inventive, meaningful ways.

Over the course of the session, participants will:

• Write for Wellbeing: Use playful and supportive writing prompts to create short, powerful poems or affirmations that express their ideas, feelings, and hopes.
• Create Positive Poetry Scrolls: Transform their words into small handwritten scrolls tiny gifts of kindness designed to be hidden or left in surprising places to spread smiles and encouragement.
• Design Placards of Power: Bring their voices to life visually by turning poems into bold, colourful placards mini protest posters that celebrate creativity, self-expression, and the courage to stand up for what matters.
• Bring Words into the World: Take inspiration from Tom’s Pavement Poetry project, exploring how simple tools like chalk, paper, or card can transform public spaces into platforms for reflection, hope, and human connection.

This workshop is joyful & creative. It leaves participants not only with their own words of power and positivity but also with the sense that poetry can live beyond the page on pavements, placards, and scrolls, meeting people where they are with kindness, creativity, and change.

Tom will provide all the materials for the event. Try to arrive 10 minutes early so you can buy yourself a drink.

This event is open to age 14+ but any under 16s must be accompanied by an adult.

Buses stop on Wilmslow Road outside the Wild Alderman. There's a step into the space we will use so please contact us if you have any mobility issues and we'll do our best to help.

By supporting this event you will be helping the Didsbury Arts Festival continue its social impact arts projects with disadvantaged children and vulnerable people in Didsbury, Burnage, Withington and Old Moat, as well as produce the 9 day festival in summer 2026.