With all the carnage and mayhem going on in the world, it might seem pointless to try spreading joy this Christmas/Hanukkah/midwinter festival/just past Diwali. But we are with the people of Paris in wanting to promote business – and pleasure - as usual; in our case, spreading joy in poetry and all the arts. In any case, the UN climate deal is an astonishing achievement that is well worth celebrating, and I hope that even now someone is penning a poem about that to read somewhere soon. .

We believe that we must carry on doing what we do best: creating opportunities for more people to discover the joy of poetry; finding their voice through reading and writing poetry and related work. This helps people to make sense of the world around us, and we intend to carry on as long as we can in supporting all those who help them share their words with each other: event and course organisers, publishers, festivals and individual writers/performers.

Next month sees 10 years since we started the website, 12 since we launched Write Out Loud in the back room of a Bolton pub. We have done all of this almost entirely as a team of volunteers, because of the importance of what we were doing, and because we enjoyed it and could see the good it was doing.

After all that time being helped by a small but dedicated team, supported by our users’ occasional donations and constant enthusiasm, Write Out Loud has become a social enterprise, a community interest company or CIC. It is a halfway house between a charity and a profit-making business. We did this after taking advice, since we do not intend to rely on grants and handouts, but instead plan for a mixed economy of earning money for services, and of receiving grants for specific work.

Our technical wizard Paul Emberson has been busy all year making improvements to the general running of the site, such as boosting page appearance on phones including news, gig guide, galleries and discussions, providing logins via Twitter and Google as well as via Facebook, and updating profiles to allow the inclusion of Twitter feeds.

Organisers  and publishers regularly tell us how much good we do for them, as our gig guide, our reviews of events and books and our poetry journalism help build their audiences/clients.

We were reminded of how much we – and all those people who post events on our guide – help individual poets to find their voice, grow in confidence, and sometimes get published or bookings, earlier this month at our Wigan Write Out Loud night, run for many years by the unflappable (if you don’t believe me, try flapping him) arts impresario John Togher who, for a living, teaches people how to write poetry.  

The Write Out Loud Wigan Christmas special on that Thursday night was embarrassing because so many of the readers/performers made a point of relating what Write Out Loud had done for them, by providing both the Wigan (and all the other) poetry nights, as well as the now-international website. Many had started what has become a part-time career, after finding confidence and their voice by starting out in the old Tudor House hotel (RIP), our Wigan arm.  Hotfoot from her BBC work, en route to her Manchester children’s show, Louise Fazackerley was as mesmeric as ever, and she too started here.

So thank you to all of those who support us in supporting you; and that includes readers and organisers across the world, not least in the United States where poetry gigs are increasingly listed on www.writeoutloud.net.

We make a plea to you this Christmas as ever: if you run a regular event that is on our gig guide, that would fall on a daft day around Christmas – like 25 December -  please click to show it as cancelled. Email gig@writeoutloud.net for any help needed.

All the Write Out Loud team members and event organisers join me in wishing you a peaceful and enjoyable Christmas and a fulfilling and poetic 2016.