Laura Sangha

This post was inspired by the conversations, presentations, exhibitions and performances at ‘Creative Histories’, Bristol Zoo, 19-21 July 2017. The conference was organised by Will Pooley, and you can read more of the posts that came out of the conference here.

 

Creative history is…?[1]

not a luxury[2]

an active part of the historical process at every stage of the process[3]

a way to uncover and reveal the research process[4]

a way to work out how others look and see[5]

a curiosity, a delight[6]

a means to create space in our writing[7]

a means to make an archive coherent[8]

a means to distort an archive and impose a narrative on it[9]

what ‘may have’ happened[10]

that thing where past time overlaps with present time[11]

in tension with rigour in somebody’s mind maybe[12]

a sense of fun[13]

a sense of senses[14]

a sense of the embodied sensory experience of moving through daily life[15]

serendipity, generosity, instability, proximity

woke.[16]

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[1] This post was inspired by the project and writing techniques discussed during the Panel: Panel: ‘Playing with Branscombe’, particularly Josie McLellan’s poem.

[2] Will Pooley (Creative Histories organiser), roundtable discussion.

[3] Conference consensus.

[4] Julia Laite, ‘Choose your own adventure: creating interactive social and cultural history, inspired by video games, board games, and serialised children books from the 1980s’.

[5] Beth Williamson, Panel: ‘Playing with Branscombe’.

[6] Erika Hanna, Panel: ‘Playing with Branscombe’.

[7] Matthew Kelly, Panel Q&A, ‘Playing with Branscombe’; Mark Hailwood, ‘As I Went Forth one summer’s day: putting the story in early modern history’.

[8] These themes emerged from the papers and discussion in Panel: Creative Writing III, Lucy Williams, ‘Fact or Fiction? Creating Convict Lives with the Digital Panopticon’; Nell Darby, ‘“History is just journalism”: how the history of journalism can help us write a more creative history’; Robert Bickers, ‘Better Looking than he Really is’. Also applies to ‘history’.

[9] These themes emerged from the papers and discussion in Panel: Creative Writing III, Lucy Williams, ‘Fact or Fiction? Creating Convict Lives with the Digital Panopticon’; Nell Darby, ‘“History is just journalism”: how the history of journalism can help us write a more creative history’; Robert Bickers, ‘Better Looking than he Really is’. Also applies to ‘history’.

[10] Julia Laite, ‘Choose your own adventure: creating interactive social and cultural history, inspired by video games, board games, and serialised children books from the 1980s’. Also applies to ‘history’.

[11] Julia Blackburn, ‘On not getting in the way’.

[12] Me. Now.

[13] Clare Hickman, ‘Experiencing Arcadia in a Digital World’.

[14] Clare Hickman, ‘Experiencing Arcadia in a Digital World; Alison Twells, roundtable discussion.

[15] Catherine Fletcher, ‘The Medici Vendetta, or, the Revenge of my Minor Characters: Historical Writing from Fact to Fiction’.

[16] Creative Histories.