Thank you for joining us for Story Seeds!
What is Story Seeds? Story Seeds is a joint project of Fighting Words, the creative writing organisation, and the Garda Community Engagement Unit based at Mountjoy Garda Station, with support from North East Inner City and the Irish Youth Foundation.
Beginning on 22 March, the project will bring together 24 schools in north Dublin to create six new stories of four chapters each about where we all live!
A team from Fighting Words will be visiting your classroom for a workshop via Zoom (or other online platform) to write a chapter of one of the stories.
The stories will be published in a printed collection and online in May 2021.
What is the project structure? Each of the six Story Seeds stories will be four chapters long. The chapters will be written during a 90-minute workshop with a team from Fighting Words. Once all chapters are written, the stories will be published in book form and online at the end of May.
During the project, we will work with one class at a time to write the stories over four weeks. During Week One, the first six schools will write Chapter One, the second six schools will write Chapter Two, and so on.
What is the workshop structure? The team from Fighting Words will consist of a facilitator, a typist and an illustrator. We will begin with an introduction to the project, i.e., that the class will be writing one of four chapters of an original story that will be published in a book.
The facilitator will ask a series of questions to prompt discussion and writing, encouraging participation from the entire class. The typist will type the story as it is being written and the illustrator will provide an illustration.
The story content will be completely open, except for the setting. We will ask each class to set the story (at least partially!) in and around their school, with the aim of encouraging them to describe what they like best about the communities where they live through creative writing.
At the end of the session, we will review the text as a group and invite any suggestions for editing. Finally, the Fighting Words team will ask the class to come up with questions for the next group to consider at the start of the next workshop. The classes participating in the final week of the project will finish the stories.
