Songs and Stories with Anne McDonald

Course Summary

The aim of the course is to work with themes to mine our precious memories of what songs and stories influenced us as children/young people, with a view to creating new writing based on what we discover.

Participants will focus on two topics for each session, one musical and one story based. These will include topics such as Theme tunes, Pop music, Seasonal music, Radio, favourite bands/singers. We will explore where our stories came from, whether it was books, letters, elders, community or school.

Course Outline

Songs & Stories, uses memoir with specific themes, each week looking at a different aspect of what we heard growing up.

We will begin with earliest memories and build each week a list of sources that we will use to write poems, stories or reflections.

We will work through the teenage years, to early adulthood and up to the present day.

A typical session could incorporate Top of the Pops, Theme tunes to Dallas, Bosco, Match Of The Day or favourite bands rock or pop stars.

Tales local to your area or the books you read as a child will be used to remember what attracted us to these stories, and what we can now understand as adults about why we loved reading/hearing them.

We will explore how we accessed music, Pirate Radio, television, records and what stories were popular and how we interpreted them as children.

Course Outcomes

We will write to prompts each week and will take away a range of topics to explore and help them create poems/essays/stories using their own individual lived experience.

Each session will also include an element of craft using tips/tools to help articulate memories and shape them into whatever form participants choose.

Participants will be encouraged to work towards at least one finished piece of writing that they are happy with and will have a clear plan for where they want to go with their writing when the course ends.

Anne McDonald is a highly experienced creative writing facilitator, and an award winning poet and prose writer. Her poetry collection Crow’s Books was published in 2020. Her writing has been reviewed and broadcast on RTE radio, and is featured in several anthologies such as Unsinkable, Poems Inspired by the Titanic, Strokestown Poetry Anthology 4, Blue Mondays 2021 & The Storms Issue IV, Dublin Days. A qualified, professional coach she worked on the BBC program The Last Resort. She has a Masters in Creative Writing.

Booked out? To be added to the waiting list for this course, please email bookings@irishwriterscentre.ie.