We’re thrilled to share The Distant Bodies, an online e-zine made by Glasgow Women’s Library’s Summer Create and Connect Group, 2019. Read more below all about Create and Connect, the e-zine, and how you can continue the conversation with your own digital creative responses!
About Create and Connect
Create and Connect is a quarterly writing group for women and non-binary folks to meet together to connect to our writing and to a community of writers, and to create new work and networks. The groups run per quarter, following the women’s library seasonal programmes, and quarter on quarter we are seeing full groups of writers developing on their journeys to expanding and energising their work. Booking opens at the launch of each new Women’s Library programme, so watch this space for the forthcoming editions starting in January and May 2020!
About The Distant Bodies E-Zine
We’re huge fans of new writing at the Women’s Library, and women’s history, too, and so in our Create and Connect groups it’s always exciting when the old and the new combine, and we create new writing in response to items held at in our archives.
For Summer 2019, we did just this, and the result is our The Distant Bodies e-zine, which has poems from several of the Create and Connect group members written in response to an item held in the Women’s Library Archive. This Summer, group members wrote found poetry as part of an activity set by Women’s Library facilitator Nadine Aisha Jassat, in response to the page ‘The Universe and Solar System’, from the 1966 edition of the Girl’s Handbook (available for viewing in the Women’s Library archive, and see below for a copy of the page we used!). It is these poems you find in the e-zine!
How did they do it?
Participants used the words they found in the page, either by process of omission (i.e. crossing out the lines inbetween until only select words remain on the page to form a poem) or by pulling out key words and lines and putting them together into a poem on a separate piece of paper. Why not download the PDF page we used as your own prompt to try at home, and share the results with us on Instagram and Twitter @womenslibrary using the hashtag #GWLUniverse.
The zine was designed by group member Jinling Wu, and features the writing of Anita Jeyam, Louise Terry, Amy Fairbairn, Laura Lodahl, Abi Hayes, Jinling Wu, Barbara Munro, and Victoria McIntyre. The work is created by the participants and is therefore not the property of GWL. Thank you everyone for your writing responses, and may we all keep creating and connecting across the Universe!
Read the The Distant Bodies E-Zine
You can download a PDF version or a word document. A large print word document version is also available below.
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