About Helen (age 68)
Helen lives in Newburgh, Fife, and enjoys local history and storytelling. She has been writing and self-publishing for about 35 years – poems, prose, fiction and non-fiction, memoir, and some stage drama. In 2023-4 she had the opportunity to work with a filmmaker friend to produce a short film about the town’s WW2 experiences of evacuees; this included writing the screenplay. She found the collaborative nature of this project joyous, as it enabled her to draw on all kinds of past-experience, as well as develop more specialist writing skills. It was a steep learning curve. Now aged 68, she is engaged in the writing of a second screenplay (about Mary Shelley’s visit to Newburgh) and wants to underpin her experiential learning with some theoretical understanding.
Bursary Summary
I will use this bursary project to develop a short story I wrote many years ago Fairy Fay into a film. The story was set in Dunfermline and tells a fictional – but authentic – story of two older women in a homeless hostel, reaching for better things. The bursary will enable me to scope out practical considerations such as locations and casting and write a screenplay, which will tell the story in a more beautiful, rounded way
