Fondest Regards is the second collection resulting from the ongoing collaboration between the Memory Harbour, Clonskeagh Hospital and Dún Laoghaire- Rathdown County Council, where the principles of brain health and creativity are explored at the intersection between the health, arts and community sectors.

This year, our writers were facilitated to explore playwriting by playwright and theatre maker Michelle Read, funded by dlr Arts and Health Programme. Everyone was welcomed at the door of the dlr Lexicon by volunteers from the Dún Laoghaire Rathdown Volunteer Centre, who supported way-finding, social connections, writing and the all-important refreshments. This enabled speech and language therapist Ciara McWeeney and myself to provide therapeutic support to the writers with their language, memory and to work with Michelle to adapt activities as required.

Michelle introduced the concept of letter writing as a familiar tool to many of our writers. It provided us with an interesting way to explore the characters’ point of view, to jump forward in time, to elicit replies from other characters, and, in each instance, reveal a little of the writers’ own point of view and life.

All the fictional characters here on these pages and performed at our launch night originated in the long-term memory of our writers, who remembered Aunts and Grannies and Sisters and Mothers who all had an impact on them in their early life. Through the playwriting process, we explored these real characters and then took them further, re-imagining them, stretching them whilst keeping the essence of the specific memory and the person alive.

In doing so, we celebrated our writers’ long-term memory, stoked their imagination, encouraged creativity and exaggeration, which almost always ended in laughter. We looked forward every week to hear the writers’ point of view as they embellished their characters. We wrote some characters together as a group, which only served to spur on the outrageousness and the playfulness as we bounced off each other and collectively got up to mischief.

Catherine Keogh-Daly - Senior Occupational Therapist, the Memory Harbour, Clonskeagh Hospital.