TREE
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. In 2020 I created Firewash, about a mediaeval ancestor who mined for manganese in Cornwall in the eleventh century. I visited the site and stayed there in a shepherd's hut during a storm, and the poetry film came out of that experience. You can find out more about other details on these films, such as festival screenings in the news or poetry films sections of this website.