Valerie Gillies

And they went on.

to express themselves and what they had felt like.

Well, quite often if I'm working with a photographer, with my colleague Rebecca Marr,

She will have cameras which Artlink have lent us or she's produced from out of the blue.

And people will take their own photographs to go with their writing.

Especially if we're working in a setting where we can go outside.

So that's always very helpful.

to work in more than one art form.

structures these workshops yes i think we're always hoping that people feel their work is going to emerge as of a professional standard that they are practicing artists or poets in the group and that pushes the boundaries and lets them try things that they might not usually try mm-hmm

Yes.

Just from my own noticing what's happening, I've seen it so many times, as Sukhema will have as well.

You know, people completely altered, relieved, just...

urged forward by themselves and what they've found to be part of their own integrity is coming out in what they're writing.

well uh a long list all over the place i realized this morning before you arrived i looked it up and the first time i did any workshops like this was in 1992 i was writer in residence in east lothian and there's a hospital there which

where there were some outpatients who asked for help to produce a magazine.

They'd been given money to make a magazine, and they were already doing some of their own writing, but they wanted a bit of editorial input.

And at the end of those, I think we had about three workshops.

It had a spectacular ending, actually, which I shouldn't tell, because it just showed how green I was in them thar days.

I just said to people, well, that's the last workshop because I won't be here next week.

And one woman stepped forward and she took all the papers and everything we'd been sorting into what would go in the book and she tossed them all in the air.