Louise The Poet, Fred's Duvet Daze
About the work
What’s the best way give families and kids some tips to help with sleeping, worrying and what seems to be a lot of Sundays recently?
I think it’s to write a poem about Fred, Fred hates bed, but Fred’s Mum gives him a lot of advice and help him to love sleep times.
The character of Fred stems from one exercise to help anxiety, where you use a finger and trace a pattern up and down every finger in the palm of your hand. My daughter had severe anxiety in primary school and I did a lot of research about all the things we could try to help her with sleep worries and panic attacks. She didn’t quite meet the local threshold for mental health services, so we had to do it ourselves. It turned out really well.
Children (and Mums) love rhyme, silliness and kindness so I built my piece around that. It was a challenge to create a film during lockdown. As an artist it gave me the opportunity to develop my D.I.Y film-making skills and ask children all over the country to help me with this by sending in little self-films.
About the artist
Poet- extraordinaire and theatre maker, Louise Fazackerley, is a font of family fun and word-smithery.
Her poetry shows for families include ‘The Sleepover: a re-imaging of the Princess and the Pea,’ ‘The Woman Who Turned Into An Eyeball’ and ‘Robot Aliens Stole My Ipig.’ She has also written for The Knotted Project’s touring show ‘Out of the Igloo’- the story of three penguins who refer screen time to going outside on the ice, and Helena Ascough’s ‘The Snow (ish) Queen: nice maiden or ice maiden.’
Louise is currently poet-in-residence at Lily Lane Primary School. As seen and heard on BBC 1, BBC Radio 3,4,5, The Guardian Northerner.
Artist links