We’re thrilled to share Succession, an online e-zine made by Glasgow Women’s Library’s Autumn Winter Create and Connect Group, 2019/20. Read below to learn 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 or gender non-conforming 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, and the Spring/ Summer programme begins in Edinburgh in February 2020. Find out more and book your space.
About the Succession 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 we create new writing in response to old items held at in our archives. We did this in Summer 2019 with our The Distant Bodies e-zine by the Summer 2019 group, the first e-zine in what we hope will be many more, and are excited to return in 2020 with Succession, by the Autumn/Winter group.
Group members wrote found poetry and short stories/ flash fiction as part of an activity set by Women’s Library facilitator Nadine Aisha Jassat, in response to items held in the Glasgow Women’s Library archive: a ‘Christmas Decorations’ page in Girl Annual no.6 (approx. 1955) and a short story by Elizabeth Benson, illustrated by John Chamberlain, titled ‘3 Fateful Words’ in Girl Annual no.3 (approx. 1952). ‘On Snails’ by Lauren Ross is also from the Women’s Library annual archive, however the original prompt was lost. We suspect is was from The Girl’s Handbook 1966. You can see images of the prompts we used in the e-zine, if you’d like to create your own, or arrange for a visit to our Library and archive to delve into the archives and seek your own inspiration!
How did they do it?
For the found poems, participants used the words they found in the page, either by erasure/ 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. For the short stories and flash fiction pieces in response to ‘3 Fateful Words’, participants began by free writing on the title and seeing what ideas came to them to develop, with the challenge of writing a story in only a paragraph or two.
You can use the prompts in the e-zine as your own prompt to try at home, and share the results with us on Instagram and Twitter @womenslibrary using the hashtag #GWLSuccession.
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!
Read the Succession E-Zine
You can download a PDF version PDF version or a word document . A large print word document version is also available below.
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