LSBU MA Symposium was rich in diverse projects and people. Now the real graft starts. How to craft and scope the project, make the time for it, be creative, engage with different materials and people, bring clarity and focus - but that last aspect is a little premature - part of the excitement is the unknown, the exploration and the discoveries.
Today I have been doing some web based research and discovered two community websites relevant to the setting of what I want to write. Two emails sent to those sites in the hope I might meet some people who can tell me their stories and memories. It's about the ability to engage with the human part of research. Books, journals, yes, all vital but nothing like the engagement with the personal, to hear it rather than read it, to get the inflections of speech, accent, and the facial expressions as people tell their story.
My subject is war but not the hardware and military side, its a story of two women, similar in age, experiencing the mutual sense of loss, fear, separation of war and personal change, living out lives in two different cultures in the same city - one fully integrated into the life of the city, the other cut off by the realities of race and a bridge which defines a community and keeps it hidden.
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