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 lives out on the edge of Greater Manchester, in Ramsbottom, where she works as a writer and editor. She is a contributing editor at cultural webzine Creative Tourist, and the digital engagement coordinator at Manchester Literature Festival. You can find out more about her at her professional site. You can reach her at kate AT openstories.org.
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 annual Blog North Awards and creative nonfiction site The Real Story.
Design studio Young produced the site’s design work.
In its original incarnation, Rainy City Stories was supported by a grant from Arts Council England. It continues to be supported by Manchester Literature Festival.
