Author: Julia
Over four Saturday mornings between February and May, a group of LGBTQ+ young people met in the light and airy Creative Space at the newly transformed Poole Museum, with its inspiring view of the quay. I listened to the Museum’s brief for this pilot scheme, threw all the requested elements – lived experience, identity, creativity, imagination, objects, local history – into my creative cauldron and devised four different sessions exploring a variety of genres to engage and encourage the young writers.
Drawing on the many descriptions in the Museum of Poole’s rich and fascinating maritime history, we discovered how interpretations of public history can serve as prompts for narrating our personal stories. From thinking about what precious things we would keep – physical or metaphorical – in our own sailor’s ‘ditty box’ to rearranging words of history to reflect our own lives and feelings, we explored lived experience and identity through creating joint and individual poems – resulting in some beautiful and powerful work.
Indulging my own love of folklore and fantasy, we used exhibits on display at Poole Museum to spark our imaginations and inspire fantastical settings, characters, and stories, exploring and reinventing maritime myths through a queer lens. After reflecting on what the sea means to them, the writers took part in fun exercises to help them create characters and used maps and images to devise fictional worlds inspired by maritime legends. With luck, the beginnings of several new queer and watery fantasy novels are now in existence!
The past is full of half-told stories; we delved into aspects of local history, looking at how real events, people and places can inspire fictional narratives in which we ‘fill in the gaps’ to reflect our own stories or create stories we feel need to be told.
In the final session, the writers, whom I really enjoyed getting to know, helped me to put together a visual exhibition of their writing from all four sessions, which I hope will soon be on display in Poole Museum to showcase these young people’s amazing talent and encourage others to engage with their own identities and the places they live through creative writing.
If you are a cultural organisation wishing to engage with your community in a creative way and would like us to design and deliver a bespoke creative writing workshop for you, please do get in touch at info@thestoryworks.org.
