Making maps and telling tales
14th September 2013
The University of Gloucestershire writer in residence, Anna Lawrence Pietroni, has been busy continuing her psychogeographical explorations of place. Anna says she’s ‘exploring the idea that we’re all strangers to each other’s experience of place. While we might move through exactly the same physical space we have entirely different personal histories, motivations and needs that shape our experience of it. Give us the same coordinates, we each navigate with a completely different mental map.’
As part of her project, Anna’s shared a range of brilliant ideas and resources on her writer in residence blog. If you’re returning to uni and living in a new area, or moving to Cheltenham for the first time, you’ll probably have some exploring to do. You might be content to work out the quickest routes from home to uni, from uni to the pub, from the pub to the supermarket, and from the supermarket back to your home. But if you’re looking for a more imaginative way to explore your local community, all the resources you need are available here: pick an exercise, step off the prescribed path, and see what you find.
Anna Lawrence Pietroni is a novelist and creative writing tutor. Her first novel, Ruby’s Spoon, set in a fictional Black Country town in 1933, was published by Chatto & Windus in 2010 to critical acclaim in both the UK and the US.