September 2011 was a busy month out on the road for the National Lifelong Learning project – especially in Wigtown.
For the past few months, the volunteers from the women’s history walk group have been working hard on putting the finishing touches to their podcast of the Wigtown women’s history walk and getting it ready for launching at the fringe festival; and staff at GWL have been preparing “Hysterical Women and Graphic Grrrlz”, our lovely new collection of graphic novels and zines by women for exhibiting in Wigtown library as part of the book festival.
Lots of people have been involved in this – Jenny, part-time worker and volunteer at the library, wrote some blurbs highlighting her favourites from the collection, Wendy, Nisha, Helen and I have been preparing posters, bookmarks, publicity and I’ve been doing a bit more driving than usual getting everything down to Wigtown in time for the festival.
This year, as well as providing workshops at the fringe festival and exhibiting the zine collection, we had also arranged for Heather Middleton, who works and volunteers at the library (and also happens to be a writer and illustrator!) to do a talk about women and zines.
Our National admin assistant Nisha, who has now left the project to study in London, had one last 16 hour day when she and I travelled down on the Monday for a scrapbooking workshop, launch of the new podcast and a volunteer-led guided women’s history walk. Some lovely pages about Wigtown women were created and volunteer Kriss led a busy walk of over 40 people in the afternoon.
On Friday the same week I was back in Wigtown, this time with Heather for her talk. I was a wee bit worried about this as Heather warned me beforehand that she suffered from travel sickness – not a good thing to have on the winding roads to Wigtown! In the end it was beautiful sunny day and Heather not only survived my driving skills, but gave a fascinating and authoritative talk with some really fabulous images. Thanks to Heather and all the other staff and volunteers who helped out and thanks to Wigtown Book Festival and to the staff at Wigtown library for their help.
It was great seeing Wigtown buzzing with the energy of the festival – roll on next year!
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