Sissay talks family life at literature festival

Talking about family is nothing new to poet Lemn Sissay. Through his work, he has explored his own experience of growing up in foster care and reconnecting with his mother as a teenager.

In his latest project, he is asking his audience to share their own thoughts and feelings around family life, by adding their stories to an online archive to build a picture of what families look like all over the world.

He will talk about these stories - and his own take on family - at Bradford Literature Festival this weekend at an event called Tell Me Something About Family.

The poet and broadcaster said there are all kinds of complex stories of "fall-outs and fall-ins, of loss and love, and of memories".

Sissay, who was born in 1967 and grew up in foster care and children's homes in Wigan, said: "People have been so honest with me about family.

"It's people memorising their grandparents and their brothers and sisters.

"People saying how close they are to their siblings, and being able to say why they love them.

"And also it is people who say, 'I haven't spoken to my brother in 15 years and we were the best of friends'. Just simple vignettes, paragraphs about family."

Sissay has written about his own upbringing in his memoir, My Name Is Why.

He writes about how he and his Ethopian mother were taken to a home for unmarried mothers in Wigan.

He was placed into foster care against his mother's wishes, and renamed Norman - a name he only realised was not his own several years later.

Speaking about his life, and his interest in familial relationships, he said: "Through not having a family, I've got to see some of the magic of family.

"That's what the site's about. It's about seeing the power of family, in the negative and the positive."

The website he is talking about is a place where anyone can add their own memories, photographs or thoughts on family life.

"It's all just there for people," he said.

"One of the joys of the website is that people can go to it and they can see that family is so many things.

"We sometimes have a fixed idea of what family is and actually that is the biggest mistake, because it is so, so diverse, the experiences of family, and that's the joy of the site.

"At Bradford Literature Festival I'm going to be talking about this, showing people some of the very funny messages people have left there."

One of these stories was written by a mother who said she regularly gets in her car to follow the sunset with her children - driving from the valley where she lives up over the hills to see the sun set over and over again.

"These stories about family are worth their weight in gold, you know," said Sissay.

"Family at the base is a collection of stories between one group of people. It's wonderful, it really is."

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