Exhumation : how creative writers use and develop material from an archive

Abstract

This thesis is composed of five original creative pieces of previously published, commissioned, performed or broadcast drama for stage and radio and a critical component investigating the creative writer in the archive. All of the previously published creative pieces have been developed with archival research but I have never before used an archive as a starting point for the creation of a drama. The critical component looks specifically at my experiences researching and developing a radio drama from the archive of the Stannington Children’s Sanatorium, Morpeth, the first children’s tuberculosis hospital in the UK, 1907-1953, as my starting point. In this critical section of the thesis I investigate and interrogate archival theory in relation to creative writing and explore the writer’s occasionally uncomfortable, ultimately valuable, involvement with documents (actual and electronic), archivists, and libraries. This critical inquiry goes on to investigate the writer as collector; the specific items the writer may collect from the archive and how working in the archive presents the writer with a conflict, tension, and paradox which can be valuable in the development of creative work. As an addendum I include two plans, or working synopses, for future dramas based on excavations in the Stannington archive.