Client: Wageningen University, the Netherlands
The Susplace Project, funded from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, aimed to explore the what, why and how of Sustainable place-shaping.
We were tasked with the question: Can an academic research project be turned into a children’s story?
Jacqui Lofthouse and Nikki Sheehan from The Writing Coach worked with six SUSPLACE fellows on this project – helping the academics translate their ideas into powerful stories that would appeal to a young audience. The result was Once upon the Future: Everyday Adventures that Change the World – an anthology of six stories, each sprinkled with humour and magical realism, and oriented around the theme of hope and action towards a more sustainable future. The book has now been translated into Spanish.
You can read more about the project here
Making the book took work. But we were all in it together, which made the work energising and rewarding. We’ve also had a wonderful editor, Jacqui Lofthouse from The Writing Coach, who together with Nikki Sheehan, guided us through (re-)writing the stories and finishing the book. They supported our project with a touching mix of professionalism, care and belief. Above all, we had each other, which made the creative process so much more joyful and the frustrations so much easier to handle, even the inevitable frustrations amongst each other.
Anastasia Papangelou
