Sue Divin

Sue Divin is a Derry based writer and community relations worker who has much to say about the impact of post conflict life on communities.

She has recently published her first novel Guard Your Heart; it focusses on the relationships of young people brought up post Good Friday Agreement & how segregation, labels & subconscious prejudices still take their toll.

Sue, whose writing often touches on themes of identity, diversity and reconciliation, is currently working on her second novel - Truth Be Told.

In this conversation she chats about why she is totally committed to peacemaking and sparking conversations that lead to altered perspectives.  She also opens up about challenges in her home life that have deepened her empathy, as well as her desire to write from the heart.

Transcript

Jude: You’re listening to Peace by Piece, I’m Jude Hill and this is a space for us all to get curious together about those who are pushing on against all the odds to build peace. What sparks them, what keeps them going, what have they personally lost along the way but what have they salvaged and discovered? What’s working and not working when it comes to reconciliation and are we ready yet to put words to some of our most difficult stories. In each episode, we get to hear from someone who is actively pursuing peace. We listen in as they share honestly about complex journeys and we’ll try to reflect peace by piece, story by story on how peace is really doing. 

So today, I’m chatting to Derry based author and peace worker Sue Divin. She’s recently published her first novel Guard Your Heart that’s focused on the relationships of young people brought up post conflict and the segregation, labels and subconscious prejudices that can still operate. One story I love about her is that as a student, Sue made a deal with herself to come back home here after university, but only if she could make a contribution to peace, and that’s really been the guiding star of her life through her time as a teacher, her work in community relations and as a writer. Her book Guard Your Heart is written for young people, but it’s caught resonance for all of us. It lays bare the current complexities of building peace and poses challenging questions around whether we’re taking it for granted. In this conversation, Sue opens up about challenges at home and in family life that have deepened her empathy and voice. She shares her insights into how segregation and poverty are still limiting the reconciliation we can achieve, and she’s passionate about the arts, leading the way when it comes to creating safe, listening spaces. So the chat lasts for around half an hour, and then as usual I’ll share a few reflections at the end. So chill, and listen in, to the brilliant Sue Divin. 

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Jude: It’s the weird lengths you go through now is just—computer set up on stools at times and all sorts of shenanigans going on!

Sue: There, that work?

Jude: That does work better actually, yes there we go. 

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Jude: Well listen Sue, thank you so much for joining me I know you’ve had a hectic few weeks, do you want to start by just telling us what the last few weeks have been like and what you’ve been up to?

Sue: Oh goodness, yeah well in the day job I work for Derry City and Strabane District Council, so I manage the Peace IV programme and we’re coming to the end of that, we’ve been running since 2017, believe it or not, so we had the major end event for that all online with about 70 projects covering about 6.7 million pounds, so that was a big deal! That finished last week. And then on with the writing hat on, I am in the middle of edits on book two which is called Truth Be Told, so I was away on a beautiful retreat, now that those have opened up, to do a bit of writing and that—just all the usual mummy stuff of adjusting a child back to school post COVID and all this madness.

Jude: A bit of everything thrown in there and I suppose it helps then to have retreats like that at that sort of end game of a project , to maybe get you across the line a bit more. 

Sue: Well I certainly find it very hard to be very focused at home, and something about COVID seemed to have robbed everybody’s concentration spans, I don’t know if you’re the same but definitely, I’ve the focus of a goldfish at the moment!

Jude: Sue just to lead us into the chat, I’ve been asking everybody just right at the start of the conversation where do you feel most at home, and can you maybe capture for us what that feeling is like for you?

Sue: For me, I’m not so sure that it’s a specific building or place, I mean obviously I have the home I live in, or places like Armagh where I grew up, and Derry where I now live are the kind of home places, but it’s—it’s probably anywhere where I feel I’m in the right place at the right time with a sense of purpose, I’m someone that loves getting into sort of big wide open spaces outdoors, wherever that is in the world, I mean at the minute it’s very often Ireland you know it could be Greenan Fort or walking along the beach or something. But really, I think if I feel that I am in the right place doing something that I’m meant to be doing at that point in time and you get a real sense of peace about that and purpose then that’s where home is.

Jude: Mmm, that’s beautiful. Peace and purpose, I love that. Where does your passion for peace come from Sue, because you seem to have been aware of it from a very young age, was it kind of woven into your childhood?

Sue: You know it’s one of those things that I don’t honestly know where it originated from, maybe there is like a minor rebel in there that just right from the start didn’t want to be put into a box or didn’t want to just toe the line of this is the way Northern Ireland is so therefore this is what you do, you know, and whether that was learning tin whistle and pipes when I was from a Presbyterian background in my teens or probably the fact that my parents were brilliant at crossing community lines, you know they—they always brought me up just to see people as people, and my dad grew up in an era before a lot of that really had significance. It was just more a working class ethos of people are valuable no matter what their identity and we should be listening and working with everyone and valuing the humanity in them I think, so I know from early on I did—I mean I used to write horrendous poetry when I was a teenager and a lot of that focused on peace and reconciliation—I’m still useless as a poet—but maybe you know that’s developed into I want to work in something that makes a difference and learning to teach history and politics and citizenship when I was a teacher for about seven years you know it was just always something I was interested in, I think. 

Jude: And you did go away to study at university in England and France, what brought you back here, what was the decision making process around that?  

Sue: Well yeah, you know there’s that conversation about the brain drain and how people go somewhere else to university, and they just don’t come back, which is why we need the university here in Magee and all that sort of stuff. I went to Hull University because I liked the look of the course which was a mixture of languages and history and politics, it was European studies, and at the end of that I really did have a choice about whether I would just stay in England or whether I would come back and I applied for a couple of things, one was to do the PGCE, the secondary school teaching year in Queens for history and politics and I got offered a place on that, and I also got offered a chance to do an M.A. in Peace and Conflict Studies at Magee, and I think I really came back to Northern Ireland and said ‘look, I’ll give this another year or two, I’ll do these but if it’s not working I’m out of here’ you know, but I came and I stayed and the second of those was in Derry and that’s where I’ve stayed ever since so.

Jude: And again that drive for passion and peace was really part of that because did you make a bit of a promise to yourself around coming back?

Sue: When I was a teenager, I do specifically remember when I was about eighteen or nineteen saying that if I was going to live in Northern Ireland that I actually wanted to make a difference to peace because it just, it didn’t seem to be sustainable to live here if I wasn’t going to try and do something about that, I mean I’d no idea what I would end up in or the root that I would take to get there but that was something I have a definite memory of that commitment and that interest to do. 

Jude: And you mentioned teaching there a wee while ago like how did that tie in or how did the peace making play out when you were doing the job?

Sue: I loved teaching, I loved working with teenagers actually and the sort of in the classroom interaction. I loved the fact that when you were teaching history or citizenship you could really get young people talking about the issues and that was all part of it, those conversations I think were the things that I enjoyed the most, and getting young people to have a better understanding and to develop their own thinking around it, you know you’re not spoon feeding somebody to think a certain way, you are giving them the information and the knowledge and asking them questions so that they work out what they actually think, rather than just having being handed down snippets of information that were taken in stuffed by osmosis through communities, you know. 

Jude: Sue part of what I’m trying to do in this podcast is just to have conversations where people are putting words to some of their more difficult stories. Can you bring us into a story of pain and challenge within your own life that has really shaped you as a person and also some of the work that you do as well? 

Sue: It’s not something that I talk about an awful lot, but for example, in the book, in Guard Your Heart, something that very few people have commented on is that there is some domestic violence and you know one of the characters, Aiden, has a pretty tough home background that he has grown up in and there’s elements of that that play out in to who he is and how he reacts to things, and that was something that I experienced not growing up as a child, but actually in a marriage that ended in a divorce because my ex was an alcoholic. So, you know, without the details of that, it was a very tough time and you do really find yourself in a very different place, but also trying to be a single parent and keep working through that, how little systems are set up to support working single parents sometimes both in the workplace or in the education systems, can be really difficult to get your head round, and also my son has ASD, he’s on the autistic spectrum, at the higher functioning end, and at times, particularly coming out of COVID, the pandemic and the situations, you know it’s not particularly easy to help people adjust and that, so I think everybody has some extent where they have stuff in their background, and where I tend to use that is I think that helps my empathy with other people that are in difficult situations as well at times, and you know I’m blessed that I have had many things that have gone really well in my life and very often I think we are talking about first-world problems when we are talking about a lot of this, you know because I’ve enjoyed travelling to different parts of the world and when you see abject poverty compared to relative poverty sometimes, and you start to appreciate the fact that you can turn on the tap and there’s water and things like that. I think you learn to put things into perspective and certainly I have learned that you take one day at a time, because if you’re having a really tough day, well, you just want to get through that and then—then you can start thinking about a week at a time and then a month at a time and you just, you do have to look after yourself a bit and your own mental wellbeing within that too and to learn when to ask for help, as well, from various quarters, which is quite humbling at times but very important. 

Jude: And in terms of you navigating some of those difficult at home dynamics, was writing or putting words to some of that even in Guard Your Heart like part of you trying to kind of work through that or was that something that you had already worked through, and this was just a natural output?

Sue: I don’t think any of it was me working through it, I think it was a case of me milking every human experience I was aware of to make the book authentic, because it’s those details that are true, that people read and know that the book has something authentic and that, and then they can go with the story, if the framework isn’t sounding authentic the story collapses you know. I suppose in a sense weirdly I would say I don’t think I would’ve written the book if I wasn’t a single parent, and that’s nothing to do with the experience I went through at all, that’s more due to the fact that I was stuck in the house every evening after work. You know in my thirties, I was lucky to get out as in out for a meal with friends or something, three or four times a year, because that was the extent of the babysitting that was available to me, so being stuck in the house, I exhausted having watched everything on television and having gone through all the grieving and healing processes within a few years and after that it was just boredom. So, it was a case of what can I do that might be a better use of my time and one evening I just got an idea for a story and thought you know what, I’m going to try and write this and that’s where Guard Your Heart and being an author actually came out of. 

Jude: And we’ve mentioned Guard Your Heart quite a few times now, so give us a wee synopsis of what it’s all about—and I have read it and obviously love it but it’s better hearing it from your own words, Sue.

Sue: Well, it’s a Romeo and Juliet novel for young adults and crossover to adults as well, and it’s set in Derry in Summer 2016. And basically Aiden and Iona are from two very different identities, not just the fact that they’re Catholic and Protestant but their life experiences, you know what they relate to, and how they’ve grown up as well, and really it’s an across attracts romance, looking at what are the legacy issues that young people here today face because both these characters are eighteen and they’re both born on the day of the Good Friday Agreement so the critical thing is that they haven’t lived a single day during the Troubles and yet the shadow of the Troubles very much impacts them so that’s kind of the jist of it. It’s quite a fast paced, gritty, Northern Irish contemporary kind of story. 

Jude: Why did you decide to really locate it around that post Good Friday Agreement generation? 

Sue: It was the sense that there was a gap there, so you know if you google young adult writing Northern Ireland, you’ll get stuff from the troubles, you’ll obviously get the Joan Lingard Across the Barricades series, it’s still one of the school textbooks, you know, and it’s the fact that that—you know people have compared Guard Your Heart to Joan Lingard’s series which is a real honour, and they sort of say, ‘oh is this the story a generation on?’ and I have to say ‘well actually it’s two generations on’. That was written nearly fifty years ago, I think it’s set in 1972, and I wasn’t born then, never mind my son, so it was about time that somebody wrote that, and there are some brilliant Young Adult writers in Northern Ireland like Shirley McMillian or Kelly Mcochran or Sheena Wilkinson, but nobody’s really writing the post conflict, you know, legacy of conflict, political religious stuff. There felt like there was a gap and it felt like I knew something and could give that a go. And also, was the sense of the—in my day job we were doing a lot about the Decade of Centenaries, which was you know, a hundred years on from the momentous events that formed and shook Northern Ireland and the partition of Ireland that kind of thing, 1916, and y’know, when I started writing the novel it was deliberately set in 2016 to be a hundred years on from the Somme and the Easter Rising and it’s kind of interesting that it’s now published a hundred years on from partition and the centenary and the creation of Northern Ireland as well, you know. So maybe it has something to say about where we are at now a hundred years on.

Jude: Mmm, and the two main characters in the book as you mentioned, it really focuses in on the complexities of how they navigate a relationship and the absolute difficulties of that, do you think that that is true to life in terms of what young people are experiencing now, because I suppose the assumption of many might be that there’s so much more freedom and room for manoeuvre for young people now?

Sue: I think it’s true to life to some young people today but probably not all, and it’s probably important to say that as a work of fiction what you do is you have to try and pick those that would have the biggest story to tell, otherwise you don’t have an interesting story, so I mean Aiden has grown up, the fictional character has grown up in Creggan, a fairly single identity community, from tough circumstances—he’s Catholic but he’s only nominally Catholic, really, it’s his politics that drive him and his passion for what he’s interested in and history and that, whereas Iona is not really interested in politics at all, but she has grown up in a slightly more mixed environment in the Waterside in Londonderry, but her family have involvement in the police so there’s a legacy of the impact of the troubles there and she does actually have quite a strong evangelical faith, I suppose, so they as individuals are probably from quite different backgrounds and Aiden’s own family has a background in the IRA as well, so you know he’s hanging about with people who are around the edges of dissonant Republicanism, the new IRA, so they are from quite different communities, from segregated areas, whereas some young people today would still be like that because we have a lot of segregation in our housing, and we have a high degree of segregation in our education, so many young people don’t really meet with the other or with that much diversity until they’re actually leaving school, but there are also many young people who do cross those lines, don’t identify particularly with one identity and you know, are a mixture of a whole pile of things so. 

Jude: What are some of the conversations then you’re hoping to spark with this book?

Sue: I hope that because it’s fiction, that it’s a safe space for people to start talking about some of the issues that are in there, so I think we have probably moved on from the point that it’s just a religious thing, you know, it’s the complexity of peace and peace building that we’re looking at it’s the fact of how does segregation overlap with poverty, to overlap with divided education, you know and young people feeling trapped in a certain identity or young people not having the hopes and aspirations that they can do the things that they want to do in life, how does that all play into the legacy of Troubles and how much can people actually interact and start to empathize with the humanity that’s in people. I suppose what I’m actually seeing as opposed to hoping for—what I’m seeing in people’s reviews and hearing in people contacting me in all sorts of ways is that it’s allowing them the freedom to talk about either experiences that they had when they were younger, if they’re adult readers, or it’s allowing them to understand better and communicate and start conversations about what they’re experiencing now, and what they would like to change now if they’re the younger readers.

Jude: And that theme of starting conversations, or even in the book, you know the courage of people to challenge their own status quo, like just going back to your own backstory, Sue, is that something that comes naturally to you or was that a learn journey in terms of speaking out or challenging or breaking silences?

Sue: I think it’s probably a learn journey in the sense that I’m quite introvert, so as a teenager I was very very shy, I definitely did cross boundaries, I remember being in a lot of cross community situations through youth drama, through music, both classical and traditional, you know and being somebody that was quite happy to cross those lines, but at the same time I think what I learned was how to be quiet as opposed to speaking out at that point and in some ways I’m kind of reflecting now that maybe having learned that as a teenager, I then went into an environment where both as a teacher and then as a Council worker to build peace, it’s never about your own voice, it’s always about trying to help other people find their voice, and particularly working in managing a peace programme, and doing Community Relations, it’s very much about facilitating communities to move forward and not about this is what I think and this is what I, you know, believe about something, so I didn’t have a voice in because of the peace building work I was doing really, because of the environment I was doing that in, so in a sense being able to write both the novel and the one that’s to come and but also the short stories, the flash fiction that I tend to write, is very much although it’s not me the character, it’s not based on me it’s pure fiction, it is still my voice that’s trying to say here are things that you should look at and think about and see can it provoke your empathy to understand that Northern Ireland is more diverse and that we need to listen. 

Jude: From your vantage point and from the work you’ve done, where do you think we are at, Sue, at the moment when it comes to peace and reconciliation as a society?

Sue: That’s actually quite difficult to say at the minute. Usually I’m a glass half full kind of person because I think it almost helps to be to keep going in this kind of work and I think I do see lots of really positive stuff, in our communities, I mean we have come so far in the last twenty years but I would caveat that these days that I think since Brexit, we’ve taken steps backwards or at least we’ve stayed still but probably we’ve gone into reverse, and the—no matter what people’s opinion for or against that is, no matter what their opinion for or against the protocol or the current issues that we’re seeing, it is quite a serious time for Northern Ireland and I would be worried. I would be worried that you know having worked for 20 years in peace building, what may come in the next 20 years might be an unravelling of that, but at the same time, if people can learn that actually peace and human beings are more important than whatever your political ideal certainly when it comes to the potential for violence reigniting here, then I think that would be really important to consider now, because you know, the next 20 years will be an interesting time shall we say, but you can put a lot of different words in where interesting is and peace building is very much still needed and everybody needs to be on board with it. There’s a lot of people opt out of peace building, whether it’s that you know their own personal circumstances don’t require them to be involved or that they think it’s irrelevant to them, or that their privilege shields them from what happens if things go wrong with peace building, so I think it’s really important that we all reflect on how do we keep building peace here if you don’t want it to go backwards in a cycle. 

Jude: And I’m going to lift your book at this stage which I have, a quote that really stayed with me afterwards was ‘What’s the point in peace if you still think like we’re at war’, and another quote as well, maybe it’s along a similar theme ‘is peace harder than war’, is there that sense that we’re still at war in terms of mindsets here? 

Sue: I think fear is something that needs to be acknowledged actually. That rather than things being hatred, very often defensive positions or confrontational positions are taken out of fear, and one of the ways to diffuse fear is to make sure that people are listened to properly, and that they feel understood, and that they feel respected but it’s more than just feeling that we have to find ways where we’re actually showing respect. Also if you take in comparison with the Black Lives Matter movement and how that has worked to highlight that racism is institutionalised in systems and mindsets that sometimes we are blind to ourselves you know that I think in Northern Ireland we sometimes think that we know what the conflict is about and yet so many of us still have so much to learn about what was the experience of other people through that conflict and maybe it’s time to take the time to actually listen to that and look at structurally because I do think issues—you know you combat fear with hope you give people something that’s hope and a future for them to look forward to and if they can see that then you have a chance to connect as people, and you know reset the game a little bit even though the politics and the opinions that people have and the cultures and all that do matter. 

Jude: Structurally, Sue, how might that look to actually really engage in a listening process with those who feel disenfranchised?

Sue: Structurally’s a big word I think it starts with us. It starts with each individual person saying ‘actually, I want this place to be peaceful for my kids, for my grandkids, for my social circle’ and realising that you know, we all can play a role in that, in terms of the social circle we’re in—if you hear prejudice challenge it if you don’t know the other side of a perspective on something why not go and find out about it. There are so many programmes there are so many things that we can access and not just listen to what’s reflected back on our own Facebook or Twitter feed or whatever we use because that will be people that we’ve liked and they like us, so you only hear yourself reflected back. We need to go beyond that and actually engage. So that’s at an individual level and I think it does start there. Structurally, I think many of those people still working in peace building would point to segregated education and segregated housing and poverty, as key things that are you know too big for individual community projects in or between or across different community, we can’t solve that. That needs structural decision making.

Jude: Do you think that fiction can play a role in peace making and sparking conversations and encouraging listening stances?

Sue: I know that it can. I have seen it, for example, locally there’s a writer Dave Dougan who would write a lot of sorts of political legacy type fiction, he’s done plays, so has the playwright Jonathan Burgess and I’ve seen many of those plays tour community venues, we’ve seen it done with Greater Shantallow Community Arts as well did a play as one of our programmes called ‘Don’t Shoot My Wean Shoot Me’ and it was about punishment attacks and they toured it round very different community areas as an immersive experience for the audience to actually experience that debate and then vote at the end whether the person who was obviously an actor should be shot or not, and those communities voting having heard all the different perspectives know this needs to stop, so fiction whether it is through a play, whether it is through a TV Drama, whether it is through what I have written in a novel to spark conversations, it definitely it’s a safe place for people to look at it and if they want to say ‘I don’t like what Aiden says because of X, Y and Z’ it doesn’t offend me because it’s not me it is a character it is fiction, you know, or equally if something from Iona’s experience go ‘Well I think that’s a load of rubbish there’ you know but this is Iona’s voice, but it’s a safe place to have a conversation and it also means that you know if it’s Aiden and Iona sharing their story, they can’t get hurt by people mulling or arguing over their experiences whereas if you share real life stories, which we do in peace building, and use that as a tool but it means you have to be very protective of the actual people, so that you’re not re-harming anyone. So I think fiction is a really good way to try and maybe reach a different audience that wouldn’t normally engage in those types of conversations.

Jude: And when it comes to legacy and wrestling with our past and our present how do you think the arts could be more effectively used?

Sue: I think they could be more effectively used if they were funded, might be the answer to that, I think we have fantastic arts work, I mean I know what I see in this city for a start, if you take the Playhouse or if you take the Nerve Centre or Greater Shantallow Community Arts, there’s a plather—or Verbal Arts Centre, I know the quality of arts work to challenge people’s empathy, and their thinking, and to move them on into making friendships or being able to articulate their own perspectives more clearly and constructively, I mean the overwhelming amount of work that people have done in that, but it’s reaching the wider audience, and reaching those that wouldn’t ordinarily engage with that that is the difficult thing and some of that does come down to funding, and I do know that that’s replicated in other places across Northern Ireland where you have fantastic artworks in various sectors and towns and cities and they are—they are making people think but it’s just that we can’t reach everybody. 

Jude: What’s your next book about?

Sue: Good question because that’s the one I’ve been immersed in at the minute! It’s called Truth Be Told and I suppose where Guard Your Heart is really about peace and reconciliation, Truth Be Told is really digging into truth and forgiveness, and I also having reflected on Guard Your Heart, one thing that I found really difficult to write in Guard Your Heart was I felt I was useless at female characters, it took so much more work to get Iona as a strong character than it did to get Aiden, Aiden just jumped off the page you know, so you know what do you do as a writer when you’re struggling with something, you immerse yourself in something even worse so in Truth Be Told, it’s two young girls who are both 16, and they’re from very different identities, one of them is from Derry one’s from Armagh, again I’m milking what I know, yes one is from a Catholic, very nominal background, one is from a Protestant rural family where that’s important the religion side of that’s important but really what I’m doing is I’m updating the context, so it’s set in 2019, and that was the era where Northern Ireland had no government for three years, we’ve kind of forgotten that we’ve just got our government together before the COVID pandemic hit, but we’d no government for three years and then hot topics then were about equality, about women’s rights and about LGBT rights and also about pensions for victims and survivors, and that’s the backdrop really of many of the issues around truth and forgiveness that these two girls explore, because the critical thing is these two girls have nothing in common, but after an incident in a community, they meet together with their youth groups on a cross community residential, and when they meet for the first time they discover they look virtually identical, so clearly there is a shared history of some sort there and I guess they set out on a quest to discover what—what that might be and might they have a shared father and what they find is really an unravelling of the stories that wouldn’t be as common in Northern Ireland, over about 3 generations and particularly the stories of woman.

Jude: And how is your own journey then of developing those female lead characters been going amid all that?

Sue: Yeah, I think—I think I can now say that I can write girls so I’m glad! 

Jude: I would agree! I would definitely agree. Sue, just to try and land our chat we obviously spoke at the start about home, and you tied it very much in with home is a place of peace and purpose, if you’re in the right place at the right time, in all the work that you’re doing and what you’re trying to work towards what’s your vision for us as a home and as a society?

Sue: I suppose that we would take the bigger picture. And by that I actually mean, not just whether Northern Ireland 25 years from now you know is in a process merging into a United Ireland or whether we’re still British, or what the path is but actually when you look at the environmental question, it might be more the case of should we not be thinking now that being alive on a functioning island or place where—where we have you know a hope and a future for our families or our kids actually might be the more important question to be thinking about here so I hope that whatever the political future for Northern Ireland is that we will we welcome everyone regardless of their identity and learn to appreciate the humanity in people first and all the labels can be subsidiary to that.

Jude: Sue Divin, thank you so much for joining us and just for your passion, your drive, and the—the challenge that you bring in your work as well so thank you so much for chatting to me and being so open.

Sue: Thank you.

~music~

Jude: Thanks again to Sue there, just so many challenges and conversation starters for us in there, do start those chats with the people around you and feel free to use these podcasts as springboards to discussions you’ve maybe not had before. As usual, I’ve wrapped my reflections on Sue’s story, into a poem, so here we go. 

You write because you can’t be quiet again, 

You create characters in pursuit of the peace you don’t yet fully see.

You form stories to spark suppressed conversations,

Because peace has been on your heart for a long time now. 

For a new generation, 

For those who didn’t grow up in the strife,

But now know it’s shadow.

And so you write to make the ghosts of war flee, 

To challenge stubborn and subtle sectarian mindsets, 

To ask the haunting question

‘What if peace is more difficult than war?

What if it needs urgent attention or it dissipates? 

What if the wars of the mind aren’t yet 

in cease fire mode?’

You write to create new space for

realizations and reconciliations

For altered perspectives,

For us to face the questions 

we’re scared of. 

What if each of us need

To make our own peace here?

~music~

Jude: This podcast has been made possible through funding by the Social Change Initiative, and our gorgeous soundtrack was composed and performed by the brilliant local artist Ferna. Last word to you just to say thanks for listening to Peace by Piece, hopefully it sparked some new conversations. I’ll chat to you soon!