Free (Creative Commons License) creative writing activities that use Scottish Heritage as a muse.
License
Who is this for?
- Individuals – if you are interested in creative writing and/or heritage, then these can be used as self-guided learning activities;
- Heritage workers – they can be used as non-traditional activities to engage people with heritage;
- Creative writers groups – a great prompt to explore new topics for writing.
Feel free to adapt and change them to your needs.
Who made these?
These resources were created by Michael Deerwater as part of a Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities artist-in-residence.
The resources
Weird World-Building
We’re living in an age in which human activity dominates our landscape. The term for this is the anthropocene. The belief that humans have the right to this domination, control and use of the plants, animals and earth around them is known as anthropocentrism, or human exceptionalism. It stems from the idea that we are somehow categorically different from and better than other beings on this planet.
This Weird World-Building activity is part of a series that helps us explore and imagine our humanity as something other than a unique separateness that allows us to dominate and dictate to the world around us. Using storytelling tools from genres of the fantastic (like fantasy, sci-fi and horror), the activity is designed to help you disconnect you from anthropocentric assumptions, and see through fresh eyes the shifting, changing cluster of connections and interactions – things like societies, ecosystems and networks – that are also part of what we are.
‘Weird World-Building’ is a creative response to the Hamiltonhill Claypits and includes images from the site, so that you can participate at home. The activity can also be used to explore the claypits, or any mixed-use environment, in person. It works best on sites where human activity meets the natural world, in areas that sit on top of, or integrate, historic buildings or groundworks, for example, urban parks, rural farms, ‘wasteland’, and brownfield sites.
Historic Footage, New Stories (National Library of Scotland):
The National Library of Scotland Moving Image Archive contains thousands of films, video and audio recordings covering over 100 years of Scotland’s history. Exploring an archive of this size can be overwhelming. We often seek guidance from curators to teach us facts and tell us the official story of the things we see. It’s part of our natural urge to learn and understand, but it’s not the only way to experience these vast, exciting resources.
However, this kind of academic learning isn’t the only way we can benefit from archives. We also have permission to dive into these spaces, find inspiration, and discover unexpected connections that only we, with our unique perspective in this moment, may see. This activity uses storytelling techniques to help you connect with the archive without judgement, and to turn your creative responses into the start of a new story.
This can also be adapted for use with any archival space, either using online resources or when visiting them in person, and is suitable for use in group workshops.
Museum Store-ies (Glasgow Life Museums Store):
Over 100,000 objects are stored at the Glasgow Museums Store at Kelvin Hall. As well as being used in museum exhibitions, these items are occasionally picked up for special displays, or for use by community groups to create their own exhibitions.
Like us, they may spend time boxed into various spaces, meticulously catalogued to ensure that they are well-preserved, and easy to find when they’re needed for exhibitions or for further study. However, objective, academic study isn’t the only way to interact with and understand these objects.
In this workshop we’ll be creating new stories and understandings through creative exploration, which meets the objects in an open, curious, and playful way. By thinking about the thoughts and feelings these stored items elicit from us, we are also awakening their agency and exploring their place in the world.
This is a creative response to the Glasgow Museums Store at Kelvin Hall, but can be downloaded and used to explore any storage facility in person, including as part of group activities.
Sci-Fire (Museum of Scottish Fire Heritage):
This activity was developed by Michael Deerwater, as part of an artist residency at Open Past, to mark 200 years since the world’s first public, local authority funded fire service was established in Edinburgh. Using storytelling prompts and techniques from science fiction, it encourages participants to explore the collection at the Museum of Scottish Fire Heritage in search of inspiration for the future of fire fighting.
Each stage of the activity sheet involves seeing and using the objects we encounter to imagine alternative futures. By the end of the activity, you’ll have the bones of your own story and an idea of how to go about writing it for yourself. You will also, hopefully, gain a deeper understanding of how the stories of our past can inspire and inform new ways of living in the future.
Although the activity is focussed on the collection at the Museum of Scottish Fire Heritage, the principles can be adapted for use on many different museum sites, or used to explore virtual museum collections.
Energy Communities (Whitelee Wind Farm):
Sci-fi stories estrange us from our current world by presenting a new development (novum) that changes the world. Because these changes are often presented in the distant future, we can forget that they also arrive in the here and now. When they do, we have an opportunity to rethink what our world means to us, and how we choose to live in it, together.
Drawing on Donna Haraway’s idea of sympoeisis (living with other beings), and broader spiritual conceptions of no-self and the more-than-human, this writing activity encourages an encounter with the more-than-human beings and assemblages that interpenetrate our lives. In this case, that’s the energy technology of a wind farm, the ecosystem that powers them, the creatures that share the space, and the communities that humanity creates either with, despite, or in conflict with them.
This is a creative response to Whitelee Windfarm and includes images from the site, so that you can participate at home. The activity can also be used to explore the site, or any other renewable energy site, in person.
Living Artefacts (Tudi Gong at The Burrell Collection):
Humans love to imagine other worlds. It’s what we do when we visit museums sites. We use the historic objects on display to imagine how the world was. But just because museums give us information about these objects, that doesn’t mean we’re imagining things exactly as they were. In fact, alongside the data we’re given, our minds are projecting all of our experiences, values and judgements onto the world we imagine around these object.
In this activity, we will try to imagine that world a little differently. Instead of building the world from our own point of view, we’ll do it from the perspective of an object in the museum’s collection. Through this kind of anthropomorphism, a common tool in fantasy and science fiction writing, we will push ourselves to consider other aspects of an object’s life: and all the strange things that influence it.
One of the things this exercise explores is our living empathy with objects. Because although we can only imagine how it may think or feel, we can use our experience of a shared space to engage with the things it could encounter. This point of contact also reminds us that, in a museum, the past and the present remain firmly connected.
This is a creative response to the artefacts at The Burrell Collection and includes images from the site, as well as links to online resources about the exhibits there, so that you can participate at home. The activity can also be used to explore the museum for yourself. You can even use apply it to objects at other museums if you want.