About Rainy City Stories
What’s Rainy City Stories?
This site gathers up a wide experience of living in, remembering and imagining the great city of Manchester. It uses a map of the city to organise stories linked to particular places. If you click on a place marked by the little cloud icon, you will be able to read a piece of writing associated with that spot. Anyone can submit writing to the site (though submissions are currently closed.)
Everyone’s secret map of Manchester is different, with each street bearing its own real or imagined history. This is a slightly mad attempt to plot and cross-reference these interior topographies. Our map contains within its depths an unwieldy and kaleidoscopic collection of documents that is constantly growing and changing, much like the city itself.
These stories come in different shapes and sizes. Some people give us a scrap of personal history, writing about something that actually happened. Other stories are completely made up. Others take the form of a poem that aims to capture the elusive quality of a place, or alight on a location as its starting point. PLEASE NOTE: We only accept new work that has not been published elsewhere.
Who’s responsible for this?
Project editor Kate Feld arrived in Manchester from New York eight years ago and now lives in Ramsbottom. She writes The Manchizzle, a blog about the city’s cultural life, and edits Creative Tourist, the web magazine of the Manchester Museums Consortium. She works as a freelance journalist, teaches people how to write and blog, and even occasionally finds time to do her own creative writing. You can find out more about her here at her professional site. If you have any questions about this project you can reach her at editor AT rainycitystories.com.
Site developer Chris Horkan is the creator of Mancubist, another blog about Manchester culture. He’s a journalist, specialising in music, technology and the arts, and runs a digital agency, OH Digital, which creates websites for the likes of Manchester Museums Consortium, Cornerhouse, The Big Issue in the North and the Royal Exchange. He also promotes Americana, folk and alternative gigs around the city in his other spare time. Contact him at designer AT rainycitystories.com.
Together, Kate and Chris run Openstories, a Manchester-based organisation that develops projects involving literature and technology. Like Rainy City Stories, our very first project. Some of our other projects include The Manchester Blog Awards and The Real Story, a celebration of creative nonfiction.
Design studio Young produced the site’s brand new appearance.
Rainy City Stories is part of the Manchester Literature Festival’s Freeplay programme, which straddles the intersection of literature and technology. Visit the festival website for information about events and ongoing projects.
It is supported by a grant from Arts Council England.
