Owen Sutcliffe is an award-winning writer, musician, and community worker. Since late 2024 he has been our Writer in Residence at The Alternative School at Spartans Community Football Academy. Here he reflect on his time so far in post.

Work from Spartans Zine 2021

My position as writer in residence at Spartans Alternative School requires me to travel from Glasgow to Edinburgh twice weekly by bike and train. Each of those mornings, on the way in, I write a story. They’re short, daft things, instinctive and unedited, an exercise I set myself when I took up my post. This Wednesday I wrote story number 32.  

It’s strange to know I’ve been teaching at Spartans for 32 days, which somehow feels too brief for my experience of it. In that time I’ve been welcomed by the staff, the warmest bunch of bananas possible, and got to know the young people as well as one can in six months. With my background in youth work I’m fully aware of the patience and perseverance required to build relationships with young people, but observable signs and verbal feedback have been great and I find myself exactly where I had hoped to be by this point when I took the job. 

I occupy a curious space between English teacher and youth worker at Spartans; I’m somehow both and neither. Establishing myself as such has been an interesting challenge, but I’ve come to be glad of the ambiguity. It works to my benefit, allowing me, I think, to offer a way into writing or creative expression without reference to curriculum, but to be flexible too. Ultimately, I’m here to model and encourage writing stuff down, the benefits of which I hold as huge. I’m here to champion the young people’s creative impulses and validate them, showing them the value in work they might consider unimportant. My catchphrase has become see that? That thing you’ve just written? That’s a poem! 

Work from Spartans Zine 2021

This term I have offered a number of wee projects and exercises related to writing. We have drawn characters and designed their personalities; complex personalities, real-feeling. This has prompted conversations around the meeting point between fact and fiction in creative writing; that details from our own lives might seed a story or populate a world, get us going, allowing us then to depart into fiction and fantasy somewhere along the way. We’ve storyboarded narratives and discussed arc; recorded fond memories from primary school; written acrostic poetry and notes to ourselves and each other at the outset of 2025. We’ve played lots of games, too, and got to know each other on the football pitch. 

Many of the Spartans young people have a difficult relationship with writing, as a result of negative experiences of mainstream schooling. Handwriting, in particular, can cause real anxiety. Laptops, then, are a key tool in my sessions but I still encourage writing by hand and, for the most part, am successful. I don’t care about grammar or spelling, I care about the act of writing something down, a profound and potentially healing thing. I’m working towards something exciting in late summer which will celebrate the talents of Spartans young people and the Alternative School more broadly. 

As the end of my first academic year in post looms, I’m reflecting on how fortunate I feel to have been offered this opportunity. Working for the Book Festival in this role gathers the various strands of my professional experience together, allowing me the chance to do what I’m best at for two excellent organisations.  

Hopefully there are many, many more morning stories to come.