Girls' diary project seminar

As one of two co-authors of The Girls’ Diary Project: Writing ourselves into being I will be presenting our recently published book on our research project that used as source material adolescent girls diaries, voluntarily shared and studied by the writers of those diaries. As we write in the introduction to that book:

“We did not set out to study diary writing, but during the first meeting, one of us said that she had been an obsessive diary writer in her youth. She still had some of her diaries, and was curious about what they might say about her adolescent spirituality. A kind of electricity went around the room as we discovered that each of us had also been an adolescent writer, and might be willing to share our writing.

"Over the next 3 years we met regularly discussing passages, hearing stories about context and engaging in reflections on the diaries, their significance and worked to make sense of them.  We developed a close knit working group and were surprised to begin to given other diaries – and that continues to happen, the most recent one coming 2 weeks ago unsolicited via an email.

"The diaries offer a remarkable window of insight into adolescent experience with its complexities, issues and intense emotions: relationships, identity, mortality, sexual discovery, friendship, intimacy, connecting, family troubles and sense making.  We discovered diaries from Russia, China, Malaysia, USA, and Europe with the bulk of our material being from Canadian women. There is a consistency of concerns across the diaries regardless of the era or the location. We think there are vital insights into girls' lives as they come of age that the diaries speak to.

To quote again from our introduction:

“The Girls Diary Project: Writing Ourselves Into Being invites you to learn about the inner lives of girls, to begin to honour and understand the intense and complex passage into adulthood as it is expressed by girls themselves. One of the great skills of spiritual life is learning to be present in the moment and to pay attention. A young women writing in a diary is practicing a form of paying attention to herself and to life around her. She needs peers, adults and friends who will join her in being attentive and support her in that process.”

Daniel Scott - http://www.cyc.uvic.ca/facultydirectory/scott.php

Interested? March 7, 13:00 – 15:00 hrs (1-3 PM) book your free place here (spaces limited): http://www.crfr.ac.uk/eventsandtraining/training/crfr-informal-seminars/