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Health & Fitness

Writing Your Life

The Hagaman Memorial Library received a Public Humanities Challenge Grant from the Connecticut Humanities Council to provide a Memoir Writing and Publishing Workshop to the East Haven Community.

The Hagaman Memorial Library received a Public Humanities Challenge Grant from the Connecticut Humanities Council to provide a Memoir Writing and Publishing Workshop to members of the East Haven Community and residents of East Haven's Village at Mariner's Point Senior Living Community. To accomplish its goals for the grant project, the library partnered with the East Haven High School and the Village at Mariner's Point Senior Living Community.  The workshop consisted of ten senior participants and thirteen East Haven High School Student volunteers.

The Connecticut Humanities Council awards Public Humanities Challenge Grants to help partnering agencies develop and pilot programming ideas that reach new audiences, sustain cultural literacy, strengthen community ties, and explore common threads among the state’s diverse peoples. This year, the Council awarded a total of $16,945.00 to nine organizations that impact a statewide audience.

The first two Writing Your Life workshop sessions took place in April and were taught by freelance writer and teacher Marcelle Soviero.  Ms. Soviero taught workshop members how to begin crafting their memoirs during session one. Participants then read from their work during session two and Ms. Soviero gave each member feedback on how to expand and continue their work.

The second half of the workshop series took place in May and was taught by East Haven High School English teacher Doug Gardner.  Mr. Gardner taught workshop members two different online publishing tools. The first tool, www.blurb.com, allows its users to create their own book and publish it using software templates downloaded directly from the site. Blurb is an excellent publishing source for combining a lot of photos with text. Blurb offers two options for book creation.  The second tool is called Create Space. Create Space is owned by amazon.com and is a great tool for text focused books and memoirs.

Thirteen East Haven High School student volunteers worked directly with the seniors to set up accounts with either Blurb or Create Space, and helped them download the necessary templates and software for the option they chose. Several students scanned photographs and saved them onto a USB flash drive for the workshop members so that these photos could later be inserted into the final books. The student volunteers were part of the honors program and were credited with Community Service hours for participating in the workshop. The students and the seniors were both enriched and enlightened by the intergenerational partnership.

The final reception for the Writing Your Life memoir writing and publishing series was held on Tuesday, June 19 at the Village at Mariner’s Point Senior Living Community.  The senior participants read from their published memoirs. The workshop series was a great success. All of the workshop members were excited about continuing their writing and publishing again in the future! The Hagaman Library hopes to offer a year-long memoir writing and publishing workshop this fall.

If you would like to see photographs, and read quotes from the finished memoirs, please visit the Writing Your Life blog.

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