Bluebell Woods & Fairy Tales
new work & symposium
Last year I was involved in a wonderful creative project focussing on ‘Imagining Future Healthcare’. Funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Council award, in celebration of the 75th anniversary of the NHS, it was led by the brilliant Professor Bethan Evans (Liverpool University).
If you’ve been reading this substack for a while you will have seen a lot of references and images of bluebells and woodlands last year. I was walking through the woods near where I live at the time, seeking inspiration for my creative submission to the project. Recruiting a number of creative practitioners, the project invited responses to the title - Imagining Future Healthcare - with the prompt, if there were no barriers and no boundaries what could health and social care look like? Specifically for people with energy-limiting conditions, a group universally failed by healthcare.
My own contribution was to devise workshops for people to engage in, where we could begin to do this imagining. I wanted to draw on the idea of fairy tales as a fantastically rich source of possibility, as well as reflection of the societal constructs, the stereotypes and stigma, that produces them. Themes of woodlands are often used as a symbol and metaphor, of fear and danger, of the unknown and as sites of transformation. Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, Sleeping Beauty, and many childhood stories I grew up with like Enid Blyton’s Faraway Tree, you will likely have your own favourites.
Inspired by my own ideas, those that came from the creative writing workshops, and further reflections I made walking the woods, I developed a new story and a series of images to illustrate it. Can You Hear Me Sing? has been selected to feature in the forthcoming symposium Disability and Fairytales: Keeping the Magic, Confronting the Stigma. It has a wonderful programme, is online, and free to join. Take a look at the link and join me on 24th February.
