Writing From the Archives with Elizabeth Lewis Williams (six-week course)

Week one – How do I approach an archive?

This first week will be an introduction, asking what constitutes an archive, and thinking about different kinds of archive. Do you know what you are looking for and how to find it? Does it matter if you don’t? We will address questions and practical considerations before you embark on archival research.

Week two – What is your story?

The focus this week is on building a narrative arc, whether within a single poem or across longer works of fiction and non-fiction. Do you have a sense of what story it is you want to tell? How do you construct a story out of disparate fragments? How do you position yourself in the telling? We will look at texts such as Ruth Padel’s ‘Darwin: A Life in Poems’, Dan Richards’ memoir ‘Mountain Days’, ‘There are Rivers in the Sky’ by Elif Shafak and ‘His Bloody Project’ by Graeme Macrae Burnet

Week three – How do you engage with archives and the resources within them?

Looking at two or three different online archives such as the British Library and the Wellcome Collection, you will take part in various exercises to help find material, take notes and organise ideas. You will also make short responses to writing prompts, and begin to plan your final assignment.

Week four – Archival voices

What are the voices we hear in the archives? As well as listening to short extracts from some oral histories, you will look at other kinds of voice found in the archives, and how they are expressed. Responding to material in film and sound archives, you will experiment with voice in your own writing.

Week five – Natural archives

There are also archives in the natural world: ice which holds a record of earth’s climate, rocks which tell the stories of wandering continents, trees which mark the passing of years. How do you write these archives? With reference to writers such as Elif Shafak and Nancy Campbell, you will consider how to answer this question.

Week six – How do you get all this material in order?

The focus of this week is the final assignment. This will draw together skills and ideas from previous weeks in the planning of your own piece of writing. This might be a short sequence of poems, a chapter from a book, or a self-contained piece. It will also be an opportunity to consider some of the ethical issues of using/quoting from archive material.