Chippenham Our History – Teen Writing Group

The Writing Group with Elaine Davis and Lesley Taylor.

Chippenham Museum’s Teen Creative Writing Group, the first activity to take place this year in the ‘Chippenham Our History’ programme, was celebrated on Thursday 30th April with a presentation, which included a reading of the final pieces produced to a gathering of the writers and their families.

The five-week creative writing course, organised by Elaine Davis, the Museum’s Engagement Officer, was inspired by photographs from the Museum’s collection and the writings of polymath John Aubrey, who was born 400 years ago this year.

Throughout his life Aubrey collected ‘old wives’ tales’, folk stories, local legends, anecdotes and gossip about important figures of the age and contemporaries of his time. These were drawn together as a collection of ‘Brief Lives’.

Inspired by Aubrey’s work and unnamed Victorian portraits taken by local photographers in Chippenham, the young writers were prompted to write their own ‘brief life’. The group were led and encouraged in the 5 weekly workshops by English tutor and creative writing facilitator Lesley Taylor, who was employed with funding from the Friends of Chippenham Museum.

The group experimented with different writing genres, such as, flash fiction, poetry, monologues and short stories to write about the imagined lives of the portrait subjects. They then selected what they considered to be their best work to be included in a booklet entitled New Voices and read out at the celebratory event.

The pieces were read out by local writer and theatre practitioner Marnie Forbes Eldridge and all those listening agreed that all the writers showed a talent for writing and had produced imaginative and, at times, emotional descriptions of their fictional characters.

New Voices: An Anthology of Creative Writing is not available for sale, but can be viewed on request at Chippenham Museum.

Gil Alder