Mapping the Imagination

I wonder if you read ‘James and the Giant Peach’ to your child or when you were a child yourself? Among the talking insects, the flying peach and the dim-witted adults, we’re offered a provocation; “Well, maybe it started that way. As a dream, but doesn’t everything? Those buildings. These lights. This whole city. Somebody had to dream about it first.”

Some might assume that planning buildings, a city, its lights, and indeed looking after those places could be something of a functional task, and the same could be said of any town, village or outdoor space on Ynys Môn, but we’ve been inviting children and young people to do just that, to dream about these places, to wonder about them, and simply see what happens with that curiosity as part of my Arts Based Research for the cultural layer of the Public Map Platform.

In this state of wondering and being curious together, the young people and I have become Contemporary Bards; thinking about and responding to wherever it is we are on the island and using our creativity and playfulness while telling its stories, just as the Bards of old would share the importance of place through poetry, songs and tales.

With over 100 Young Bards in schools, we’ve extended classrooms into beaches, woodland, clifftops and parkland. During summer 2024, at Lle Llais events, they came with their families, to an old copper mine, a heritage park, an Oriel, a forest. I gathered with different groups of talented Young Bards in library spaces also.

All the while, I’ve been watching to see how we might map what these places inspire in the imagination of our Young Bards, to understand what might be behind their creative outputs in terms of their needs, wishes or dreams. At every session, every child or young person has added to an analogue map, which I have been calling the ‘Every Child Map.’ This has been forming part of a research and development process for a new Myth for Anglesey, a co-creation between the Young Bards and myself.

Inspired by the place they were in at the time, or by photos they’ve taken of Ynys Môn, by their safe places, or by folklore they’ve heard, all of their imaginative contributions are included in the new myth. They’ve used poetry, stories, raps, drawings, shadow plays and more to invent places like ‘The Lovely Rock’ and ‘The Tallest Tree on the island’, or characters such as ‘The Mermaid’s Baby’, ‘The Goblin Lady’ or ‘Y Petha Drwg’ (the bad thing.)

These places and characters are being developed in the new myth, which will revolve around a grieving girl’s quest to know her island and to find her place in it. This character came about after I met a school pupil who responded to the analogue map by highlighting the places that remind her of her lost Naini (grandma).

The myth itself, ‘The Girl and the White Stones’, won’t be in a sharable format until March 2025, but importantly, and for the purposes of the wider research interests of the Public Map Platform, these moments of place-based inspiration already give us a rich insight into children and young people’s wellbeing, their belonging and their hopes for their island’s future.

With the permission of the Young Bards who have gathered with me, I’m sharing just some of their beautiful pieces in the hope of bringing some of their reflections to light for the wider project and its stakeholders.

At our Young Writers’ sessions in Neuadd Y Farchnad in Holyhead, I invited a group of 7- to 11-year-olds to simply choose a spot on the map and create a reflection in whatever form of writing they felt most comfortable with. With no prescription of task, one child shared her feelings in a poem about a local woodland space she pinned:

I Look Towards the Trees, by M, aged 11.

When I get out of my car, I start running far,

I feel relaxed and happy, and my hands go all flappy.

I roll in the grass, my time relaxing feels longer than an hour glass.

Penrhos has something amazing,

It wriggles inside me; it gets me dazing.

Into the air I swing, on the wild swing, so much fun it makes me ping!

When I get back in my car,

I feel relaxed and grateful.

This Young Bard places herself as hero in the centre of this ‘story’, her story, and we see the joy and power the woodland area brings her. For me, this insight is invaluable. We know the place she refers to is currently free for her to enter, that time there is unlimited (not ticketed), and that she can travel there easily by car, and park with her family. She so eloquently tells us that the place ‘wriggles inside her’, helping her to feel well, relaxed and ‘grateful’ – all essential responses in a society where Nature Deficit Disorder could be some part in the adverse mental health of some parts of our younger generations. ‘I look Towards the Trees’ just confirms for us that continued access to green and blue spaces are absolutely necessary for the wellness of our children, and caring for them is keenly felt by some of our children.

In the same venue, the following week, we invited a group of Young Writers between the ages of twelve and seventeen to sit with us and talk or write. Myself, Community Mapper, Aaliya McVey, Cambridge University Intern Marley Lalor, and our writer volunteer, Michelle Heskew, along with the Young Writers, simply scrolled through the photographs on our phones. We were looking for a photo from the island, a place they would put on their personal map. We would talk about it or write an ekphrastic response about the chosen photo.

While scrolling, we had many discussions, how the smell of marijuana was too overwhelming on some school buses or the lack of bookshops on the island, on the Welsh language and how they find it at school. One of the revealing moments came when we started to discuss where on the island felt safe for the group, and it seems the teenager’s bedroom is still ranking above most other places for safety for this cohort of teenagers, with a good proportion of the group choosing either views from their bedroom windows or concentrating on photos with friends in their rooms:

My Bedroom by L, age 15.

It's my safe place,

My comfort place,

The place I can go whatever mood I’m in.

My favourite place.

For policy makers, for young people’s services and the wider framework of those working towards the wellbeing of our young people, we start to think here about what a safe place looks like and whether the teenage bedroom is, for some, their Youth Club or Hub.

Some of the Young Bards in this group explained that their Youth Club is only available to them one evening a week, and only during term time, and that there was nothing else for them to access the rest of the time. The poem, and the discussions around the photograph which led to the poem, is revealing in itself in terms of the Young Bards’ needs in their immediate locale.

It hasn’t just been poetry that has brought about these moments of insight. In one Year 6 class at a school in the north of the island, the Every Child Map inspired a good proportion of the class to speak up about ‘something’, but it was something that they couldn’t find the language for. Instead, they just said it was ‘y petha drwg’, which, with some creative exploration, became a metaphor in the new Myth, as a character that makes the central child feel uneasy in her place.

As the time went on and the trust was developed in the school sessions, I learned the ‘Petha Drwg’, in real life, was sexually explicit graffiti with significant swear words in the park where some very young children play near the school. Their needs here are for the adults in their life to make sure their play spaces feel safe and child friendly.

There is much work to do now to put all these responses into ‘The Girl and the White Stones’, a home for further metaphors about the Young Bards’ opinions, feelings and imaginings in the telling of their story. Of course, it will be shared as a piece of Arts Based Research and data for the project itself, but I wholeheartedly look forward to sharing the story with the Young Bards, the co-creators of this work, giving them a story they are invested in and proud of, as an opportunity to offer them ‘reading for pleasure’ material.

The National Literacy Trust tells us, reading and creating stories has an “enormously positive impact on children and young people: boosting their confidence, helping them to relax and enjoy themselves and supporting them to develop life-long skills.” And so, the softer outcomes, for me as a socially engaged writer, is about a little boost in literacy, which leads to little boost in confidence, and finally forms a building block to healthy aspirations for the future.

There are many more examples of the children and young people’s reflections, among other place based creative responses which have been used as stimuli or references throughout the interactions. These can all be accessed on the Creative Places U Map here http://u.osmfr.org/m/1058014/