Hi, my name is Kirsty and I’ve just started the Community Reporters course hoping it will help me on my journey towards becoming a more accomplished writer.
I’ve wanted to be a writer for as long as I can remember, starting way back in the mists of time as a school girl where I would write dodgy poetic odes to the pop stars and footballers of the time (Hoddle & Waddle – what was I thinking??!!??) along with with a rather odd novel about an alien from the planet Zog! I wish those articles still existed, it would be funny to go back and read them again.
Life passed as it does and took me in a different direction before picking up again where I left off in 2012. There were a number of factors for this, far too detailed for this short introduction but suddenly the words long stuck in my head were determined to come out no matter what. So I started a journal. I’m very old school, I can’t travel anywhere without a minimum of one notebook and a journal and half of WH Smith’s stationary section. However I soon took the plunge and took my musings online with a blog.
Originally the blog was about overcoming mental health issues and finding the positivity in life no matter how small, but has evolved to include random musings on books, my quest for self employment (a dream that’s moving forward at a snails pace) and travel reviews whenever I potter around the country.
Joining the Community Reporters course is a way of honing the writing skills I hope and anything that helps me become a better writer cannot be a bad thing. However I recently started tracing my family tree. If you watch certain TV shows most people find their families have come from far flung places across the globe and had many exotic adventures. I’ve gone back to the late 1600’s so far and none of them have left South Leeds!! The last 300 years have been spent in Hunslet and before that Rothwell. It’s only with my mother’s generation that anyone has left and gone elsewhere. I left once but something drew me back and I”m not sure now if I ever would again.
It’s given me a sense of belonging to a community and I want to do something in return. I looked at Beeston in Bloom but I hate flowers. What I do like is writing so something that enables me to support my community, get more involved and yet aids my own personal growth. Whether I end up doing the odd article for South Leeds Life or adding to my own blog remains to be seen but let the adventure begin…
This article was written by Kirsty White using our Community Reporters website
I was on the last reporters course Kirsty.
You will learn a lot from Jeremy, I did .
Oh Kirsty your a fab writer x