about the project
writer-in-residence
Writing is for everyone. People with dementia who are living in residential care homes, have thoughts, views and experiences to write in their own words. They have much to say to us about life, about living life, about who we all are as human beings. And dementia often enables a person to use words in ways that are fresh, powerfully simple and poetic.
I have developed my work from my experience with my mother when she had dementia. I watched her losing her memory, her capabilities, her independence. I watched her unceasing struggle to assert her own power. I remember the great sadness, the stress, the isolation that I felt through that time, and the fear that one day my mother would no longer recognise me.
But dementia, for my mother, was also something else. Something that in her words “stripped the top layer”. I am an only child. Since I was a little girl, it seemed to me that my mother and I were very different and our communicating was not easy. Yet there was a deep connection between us always. With dementia, my mother became her free-spirited self and we could finally see one another and communicate. In the midst of dementia, she found and lived a new and great inner power. I wrote down many of her words, and after her death in 1997 I made a book of some of our conversations, my writing and drawings. I called the book ‘inner-out’: the words my mother had used to name her dementia experience. She had taught me to listen in completely new ways and I am still learning.
The power of this experience led me one year after her death, to meeting other people who have dementia. With them I found again what I had experienced with my mother. Ways of being together and communicating with one another that are different, deep, honest and life-giving. My life in the years since has never been without people who have dementia, my friendships with them, and my passion to enable what they have to say to be heard - as authors in their own right.
Anthea McKinlay
Among the authors in this project, Alzheimer’s, vascular dementia and other forms of dementia are being experienced.
I am delivering this project in Glasgow City Council residential care homes across the city. The project is being supported by a partnership between Direct Services Older People (Social Work Services) and Arts Development (Cultural & Leisure Services) within Glasgow City Council.
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our experience of the project
Susan Baird, Principal Officer, Direct Services Older People
Kirsty White, Arts Development Officer