N. Sayer Researching Writing Lives

I took part in the Writing Lives Module as I have a growing fondness for blogging and research. As I worked through the list of possible memoirs of working class authors and read his memoir I felt a connection with him due to his love of the Navy, travel and the ocean. I was excited to explore his life and research his home town and the life he would have lead.
The initial research was over whelming, for only a 58 page memoir the detail is rich and although Alexander can be blasé and skate over facts he perked my intrigue more than once and I had to restrict myself to relevant subjects to be able to produce succinct blogs.

The website I found was fairly easy to understand, having created a WordPress previously, and after a few sessions I found myself remembering the way it worked and found it easy to navigate, I even  managed to teach myself how to use various functions to improve the look and flow of the blog posts.

I managed, after some digging, to find Alexander’s ancestors through various websites and will send them the links to Writing Lives once all the blogs have been finished, edited and published as his story is one of a kind, he is one of the eldest writers in Burnett’s collection and to have survived for so long surely deserves some publication.

I have found out many useful things by using WordPress and have found Twitter to be a useful tool for sharing research with academics, students and general interest readers (and even gained a few more followers). It is a very different experience to anything I have previously done for university to immerse oneself in someone’s life and pick apart stories to research and put into context has been very enjoyable and something I would like to do again in the future.