Welcome

Welcome to Mel Witherden’s Web Site. I’m a writer and retired community development consultant and social enterprise specialist who has lived and worked in Wales for nearly 50 years. This site is a belated effort to bring together in one place some of the things I’ve worked on over the years and make them available to anyone who might be interested – particularly as the writing I’m doing nowadays is some of the best I’ve ever produced. Please read on.

NEW, February 2025: the publication of three long poems!

This site has now been updated, after a couple of years of neglect, to include no fewer than three new substantial pieces of work. There are two scathing political rants, Where Power Lies (about Britain and war) and The Commodity News (about the greed and exploitation which has caused the climate crisis). The third poem, The REinvention of Time Travel, is a major reworking, unsurprisingly, of The Invention of Time Travel which was published in 2022 and has now been abandoned.

There are also a number of previously unpublished poems on the Three D page of the Selected Shorter Poems section.

Accompanying the Poems are two new blogs, 40 per cent more Poems NOW!, which explains what the three poems are about, and What happens when poetry becomes obsolete, a revised account of the bizarre way in which most of the Poems on this site were, quite literally, assembled.

Latest blog post

40 per cent more Poems NOW

I’ve just added 40 per cent to my lifetime output of long Poem, and this blog is an excited celebration. These three new Poems include my strongest political writing to date - Where Power Lies, an unpatriotic swipe at Britain’s warfaring record, and The Commodity News, which pours venom on government and business greed at the heart of the global environment calamity.

Continue reading on blog page ...

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Poetry

My output of mainly unpublished poetry is not immense. But it’s concentrated on exploring the possibilities of meaty narrative works which are composed of many shorter self-contained poems and connecting verse. This leaves the reader to dip in and out of the collections or follow broader themes in the full poems.

The poems themselves vary widely in tone – from the frivolous to the serious, from the accessible to the complex, from nature poetry to acerbic social commentary, and from exuberant juvenilia to the unrestrained grumpy insights of maturity. There’s plenty to think about and hopefully enjoy.

Poetry page »

Community development resources

We wound up the community development charity Community Projects Centre, where I worked for many years, in 2013 and in 2016 I effectively retired from the private Community Development Consultancy. But that leaves a great deal of accumulated knowledge and guidance material without an outlet.

So I’ve brought some of this together on this site so that it continues to be accessible to charities and community groups and those who support them if anyone wants it. Why reinvent the wheel when the experience has been had, the thinking has been done and written guidance derived from 40 years work in the voluntary sector is already available? I hope you can find some of it useful.

Community development page »