FAMILY HISTORY AND creativity
The sun is shining brightly on this October day, and I am just about to conduct a creative-writing class over Zoom, but one with a difference. The members of the workshop are not your standard group of budding writers, but instead a set of family historians from Tameside in Greater Manchester. Our exercises will focus on the lives of the relations that they have discovered, and the locations that they have investigated. We do some work on character, on place, on voice and on memory. Each exercise is designed to get the participants reflecting upon the way that they might present the stories of the people in their past. The results range from pen portraits to verse, from brief prose descriptions of place to more detailed outlines of relationships. The participants are intrigued and enthusiastic, tentative at times
