Discovering Identity Through the Poetics of Ancestral Place
I have been researching my family history (and finding and visiting ancestral places) for more than twenty-five years. Tree is a journey into self-identity (as an online geopoetic and mythopoetic life writing project with poetry films), and includes archive research, and onsite documentary prose and poetic response, as a form of haibun. It originated as a creative means to understanding where I ‘come from’, in order to develop a sense of belonging. The first episode, about an incident at my great-grandfather's paper mill in Devon during the First World War (poetry film below), premiered at The Scottish Centre for Geopoetics, June 2019.