Elizabeth Cochrane

Well, there’s been a slight hiatus in my posting schedule, and for everyone following the project, I’m sorry about that… but loads has been happening, so I’ve got tons to catch up on in my posts.

One of the things that we have to do is find funding for the cookbook.  Making funding applications is time-consuming stuff! It’s not that the essential information about the project changes, but it has to be filtered and organised so that the aspects we present are relevant to the funders. 

The CoolTan Arts cookbook (working title Food for Mood) has a number of aspects that make it worthwhile.  There’s the healthy eating side: a healthy body means a healthy mind, whereas too much caffeine will bring on a mood crash – and some people claim that potatoes literally induce happiness!  There’s the creative side: CoolTan Arts believes that mental well-being is strongly enhanced by the power of creativity, and this applies to the production of a beautiful book as well as to cooking itself.  The Food for Mood book has a practical application as well: feedback from CoolTan Arts participants last year suggested that many were keen to share tips on how to cook healthily and well, using cheaply sourced food from the local area – so we want to provide a guide to places in Southwark where good, economical foodstuffs (both local and ethnic) can be found.  Finally, the book serves another one of CoolTan’s objectives, which is to overcome stigma and promote social inclusiveness.  Sharing our memories, experiences and food associations is a great way to recognise that there really is no gap between those who experience mental distress and those who have so far beenlucky enough to escape it.

Another time-consuming part of this process is finding the companies,  guilds and grant-awarding bodies who will consider our application at this point in the year.  Most organisations have particular dates on which they will accept applications – and some of those are only annual!  Fortunately we’ve located a couple of likely places, and managed to slide in under the wire just before their deadlines.  I won’t name the bodies here – not until they’ve promised some funding! – but one of them is a guild that vegetarians might not be fully at home with, and the other is a trust focussing on charitable activities in the inner city boroughs of south-east London.

Wish us luck with the bids – we find out in mid-June!

Great news from CoolTan Arts: a team of volunteers is gradually assembling, and people with specialist skills in desktop publishing, fund-raising and photography are already helping to shape the material for both the cook book and the poetry book that we are aiming to publish this summer.

We’ve got Jenny, a designer from Berlin (she travelled to London just before the volcano started spewing its fire, thanks goodness), who is putting the poems and their illustrations into InDesign. Jenny just arrived in the office yesterday and has jumped straight into a couple of projects – what a pro!  Ellen is Cooltan Arts’ new fundraiser (also an artist, incidentally), and I am feeling very confident about her ability to find the money to print 1,000 full-colour Southwark-based, food-for-mood recipe books…  And the lovely Miranda, a fantastic photographer/artist, who is lending her considerable networking weight and professional judgement to the question of cook book photography.

There’s still quite a way to go, but we’re getting there!

This is the blog where I keep track of the hectic path towards getting two books published for CoolTan Arts in Southwark, South London. CoolTan Arts is an amazing mental health charity, run by and for people who know about mental distress, that carries out really ambitious arts projects in all kinds of media.  Right now the CoolTan Gallery (on the Walworth Road) is showing paintings around the theme ‘Women that inspire you’.  CoolTan participants are also working towards a show at the London Alternative Fasion Week, which starts in just 8 days, and which coincides, it so happens, with the London Book Fair.

That’s of interest to me because my usual role is as rights manager at a London literary agency.  For at least the next two months, I’ll be bringing my love of books – and hopefully a little bit of publishing expertise – to the service of Cooltan Arts.  In fact, CoolTan Books is going to be the next big thing coming out of Elephant and Castle*!

We’re putting out a poetry book and a cookery book, and hopefully bringing the CoolTan Arts name and message to a wider group of people both within the nearby community and further afield.  Mental health is something that everyone has, just like physical health, and serious mental distress can strike anyone.  CoolTan Arts believes in the profound effect that creativity can have in enhancing mental well-being – and proves it every day through the workshops and arts projects.

The CoolTan poetry book, ‘Anthropology’, arises directly out of the long-running poetry workshop.  The recipe book, construed around the theme of ‘food for mood’, will celebrate all the nostalgic, personal, cultural and symbolic aspects of cooking and eating, as well as different foods’ nuritional qualities.  It’s going to be a shared effort, and with some noble volunteers (I hope) we’ll be collecting contributions from ordinary, diverse members of the local community as well as people who already know or use CoolTan: recipes, yes, but also foodie memories, reflections and neighbourhood recommendations.  The food for mood book should become a real Southwark gem, and put CoolTan Arts at the heart of local life.  That’s the dream, anyway.

I’ll try to keep this blog updated with progress reports and stories from the frontline: the spilled ink and the wild pentameters; exotic fruit, fund-raising hiccoughs and great stew debates. I’m looking forward to getting in contact with readers, too: please let me know if you have any questions about what you read here, or just leave your comments.  And your recipes, if you’re writing from Southwark!

*Non-Londoners may like to know that this is a place in the borough of Southwark, i.e. just south of the Thames, and that both Charlie Chaplin and Michael Caine were born and brought up here, as was Michael Faraday, who has his own Law.