Raising Voices is looking to collect and curate a selection of poems, short stories and short pieces of creative non-fiction that have all been written in response to or with reference to a specific place in Milton Keynes.

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These might be written from personal experience – whether they are expressed in poetry or prose, these will be ‘true stories’ in their individual ways – while others will be works of imagination. We’re not looking simply for personal stories or histories, although those are of course welcome: the project happily embraces the idea of fiction – one plain spoken definition of which might be ‘making stuff up’. Even purely invented stories have a truth of their own: a capturing of the emotional states or social interactions that illuminate or shape the human experience.

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Nor do your submissions have to be ‘songs of praise’ to the city: we are a Literary Festival, not a tourist board or an advertising agency. Literature acknowledges and reflects any and every aspect of human life: the happy and sad, beneficent and furious, the joyous and the jaded are all valid. The pieces that we’ll select for the StoryMap, SoundWalks and all the other offshoots from the project will be chosen because they are the strongest pieces of writing that speak to the richness of people’s lives in the city.