In May, alongside my Wind&Bones collaborator Dr Will Buckingham, I was delighted to attend National Tainan Chia Chi Senior High School 國立臺南家齊高級中等學校 to deliver a lecture and workshop to a brilliant class of 72 students.

Josh Tseng, who teaches English at the school, got in touch via the organisation I co-direct Wind&Bones. Through Wind&Bones I run a range of projects that use writing and storytelling as catalysts for positive social change.

Josh invited me to talk to the students who are studying on the school’s experimental bilingual (English / Chinese) pathway. So together, we cooked up a plan!

During the lecture I talked about our work at Wind&Bones in the UK, Myanmar, Bulgaria and Taiwan, and then led a writing workshop on the theme of Telling Tales About Tainan, asking them to share their own experiences as young people in Tainan.

While at the school, I also visited truly impressive school library, and I was so moved finding out about the amazing work the school is doing around gender, inclusivity, and building a more tolerant, kinder society.

After the talk, one student, Abby, presented us with a fabulous portrait (complete with pictures of Will and I’s books, and some very happy looking cats!).

The visit also allowed us to work on further developing the work we started on our residency at the Nanning Literary House in December 2023. When we ran the residency, we set up a website to post some of the stories that we gathered. Since then, our 滋養台南 | Nourishing Tainan project has gathered a lot of interest, we took the opportunity of this workshop with the brilliant students at Chia Chi to relaunch the website with a new look, so we can go on publishing stories about the things that nourish us: body, soul and mind!

You can visit the new website at this link.