Perhaps you’re a Care Worker, or caring for a loved one at home.  You’re looking to make a Book that celebrates their varied life. And wondering how to start.

Just how do you get the ball rolling, draw the stories out and get them down on the page, whilst maintaining your sensitive respect for a life well lived and well loved?

You want to do the stories, and the individual proud.

I understand how that feels. I was there too.

In the late 1990s I was privileged to work with The Pabulum Project in Norfolk UK. It was a unique Home Based Dementia Care project, where Volunteers were trained in Reminiscence and Dementia Awareness.

The aim of the project was to prompt and gather life experience stories from Dementia Clients whilst they were still able to recall these important life events. The books that came from this were then used by the families to trigger further memories.

Over the life of the project we saw some amazing transformations – clients renewing their personal self-worth, improved sleep patterns, and less reliance on medication.

Unsurprisingly, it also helped the families re-connect to their loved ones, as they came to re-evaluate the person they had come to see ‘just with Dementia’.

I was the Creative Activities Tutor with the project, sharing a range of ideas on how to get the stories down on the page. It changed lives, and it’s still changing mine, years on as I’ve come to draw on these approaches in my own family.

I knew we’d all been part of something special. A number of the volunteers we worked with were keen to spread the benefits of Life Story Work in their own settings. And so, when the project came to an end, I wanted our experiences to help others.

This book, Working with Memories is the accumulation of the techniques we shared with our volunteers. I know it works.

Our Volunteers, the Dementia Practitioners associated with the Project, Age UK, The Dementia Society, Mike Wilson, the Reminiscence Tutor, - we all saw that what we were doing helped people find a new sense of wellbeing, and in the process, helped their stories live.

This was especially important as we knew the average life span of Dementia was 7 years. Drawing out the personal stories and making them sing on the page, meant there was a permanent, tangible account of their lives, that could speak for them, when they could no longer share them themselves.