For the past few months, I have been volunteering with
Scottish Book Trust. It’s rather difficult to summarise all the marvellous
things SBT do, so perhaps I should leave it to them, as they describe
themselves as ‘the leading agency for the promotion of literature, reading and
writing in Scotland.’
Since moving to Edinburgh, I have found surfing SBT’s site
for competitions, advice and general literature chatter incredibly useful, and
when I realised there was a possible volunteer role up for grabs, I jumped at
the chance to get involved.
‘Family Legends’ was a project that SBT ran across Scotland,
whereby people were encouraged to pen a short story about a particularly
‘legendary’ family member. This resulted in thousands of entries, a brilliant
book, and more than a few new writers.
My job in all of this was as one of the project’s Community
Ambassadors. Although originally I was intended to be the Edinburgh
spokesperson, my then job with the Science Festival was taking me up and down
Scotland dressed as a Space Cadet (but that’s another story…) so I ended up as
more of a ‘Roaming’ Ambassador.
It was a wonderful experience, encouraging people to tell
their stories, and for me the most interesting part of the whole project was
attending the North Edinburgh Writing Workshop, I wrote about the experience
for the website here but I’m not sure I quite managed to convey exactly what
went down. I suppose, with my MSc and lately my writers' group, I have become
used to scribblers with a fair bit of experience and, more importantly,
self-belief. Whereas many of the attendees of this workshop had barely done any
creative writing before and had, for whatever reason, barely any confidence in
their writing abilities. Which is crazy, because of course everyone has the ability
to write - everyone. I truly believe that, and evidently so did the workshop
leaders, who calmly guided the group through a couple of exercises, despite
protestations. It might have been a struggle, but it was more than worth it for
the end result: hearing people proudly read their work aloud.
Since then, I have been thinking quite seriously about – I
don’t even know what you would call it - community creative writing work?
Perhaps not yet, but one day, if I can ever get my own act together, it’s definitely
something I would want to do more of. Watch this space, I guess.
