Herstories from Portsmouth (UK)

This project supports the documenting of women’s wonderful contributions to Portsmouth by offering a series of Life Writing classes. The first workshops were supported by the University of Portsmouth and the second and third workshop series were supported by Portsmouth City Council’s ‘Portsmouth Creates: In Our Words’ festival 2025, celebrating literature, literacy and storytelling. These workshops are led by Dr Amanda Garrie, a Portsmouth writer known especially for her contribution to spoken word in the city, and for her poetry and prose.

Each class gently demonstrates how you might start to reflect upon aspects of a woman’s story, perhaps your own or someone else’s.  This covers influences and barriers, as well as ways in which changes and developments have been received and absorbed within the community. Every story of women’s agency and activism is unique and needs to be told in a way that suits the individual writer. Life Writing may take the form of fictionalised stories or factual accounts, prose or poetry, biography, autobiography or autoethnography, and any combination of these modes of expression.

Laurel Forster