Posted on April 11, 2012 - by Kate

Our Lives, Our Stories

Storytelling Workshop in Gulu

I’m excited that my article, “Our Lives, Our Stories: Storytelling workshops in Uganda’s refugee camps”, has just come out in Issue 2 of Short Fiction in Theory & Practice, edited by Ailsa Cox, Alison Mcleod and Alan Wall.  The article is based on my experience of leading oral narrative workshops for displaced Acholi women in post-war Northern Uganda. Whilst I was there, I was involved in a fantastic project, ‘Our Lives, Our Stories’, which took place in two refugee camps in Gulu and Lira, in which I worked with participants in a storytelling competition. The women involved (very bravely) faced the challenge of transforming difficult personal experiences into fiction. In the article, I talk about the project as well as the role of storytelling as a form of advocacy and the ways in which creative non-fiction can make the stories of marginalized women heard.