Collecting COVID: Celebrating Resilience Through Story 

Anne Holloway is a poet and workshop facilitator with over a decade of experience in helping people ‘get their stories out’ in community and educational settings, witnessing how the act of telling our story can build resilience. In 2015 she set up an independent press, Big White Shed and has produced over 100 titles to date. Anne is clinical lead on Surviving by Storytelling at the Institute of Mental Health, Nottingham, exploring how writing poetry supports good mental health. She was Creative Director of Nottingham Poetry Festival in 2021/22 and continues to curate and host poetry-centred events. She believes we are all poets, but not everyone recognises it in ourselves.    

“At the start of the COVID outbreak in 2020 with events and workshops cancelled, any sense of connection to my creative community was broken. So, I grabbed an old pot of blackboard paint, painted the side of my garden shed and started writing poems up there for people to see as they walked past, during their permitted hour of exercise, then posted an image of each poem on Instagram. And so, #A Poet Lives Here was born.  

At that time, I was also resident poet at an alternative provision for vulnerable students. Throughout the course of the pandemic I worked with them to generate content for a book about their experience during those exceptional months. This practice enabled the students to process what was going on as it unfolded, and the book then provided them with a concrete record of those months, allowing them to pause and reflect in the future.”

View Anne Holloway’s short film, A Poet Lives Here (2020)

The Host and Project

‘Collecting Covid’ explores how Boots UK responded to the pandemic – from its role as a community pharmacy, how it supported the NHS, rolled out testing and vaccination centres, the impact this had on their workforce and the operational changes that followed. Through colleague interviews and documents gathered during the pandemic, the project aims to build a comprehensive record of how Boots UK navigated this extraordinary period and the lessons which will help strengthen future resilience. 

Founded by John Boot in 1849 as a small herbalist shop in Nottingham, Boots evolved into the UK’s leading health and beauty retailer. Under Jesse Boot, it pioneered affordable healthcare, expanded rapidly in the late 19th century, introduced iconic brands like No7 in 1935, and has been a key NHS partner since 1948.  

While Boots UK stores remained open on the frontline during the 2020 pandemic, the company quickly witnessed just how resilient and adaptable its workforce could be. As their systems continue to evolve and life settles into a new normal, many of these experiences risk fading from memory.  

Working closely with the archive team, I have been collecting the memories of colleagues who worked through the pandemic to ensure these stories are captured, honoured and recognised as part of the company’s history, and to contribute a significant body of new material to the Boots archive, resources that future researchers can draw on to understand both the pandemic and Boots’ role as a community pharmacy. The archive team is passionate about helping staff recognise that their individual stories are history and my aim is to encourage colleagues to share those stories now and in the future.  

Everyone who lives in Nottingham knows someone who works or has worked at Boots. As someone who has called Nottingham home for 30 years, I feel a responsibility to do this project justice: I want to balanceing the company’s desire to highlight its pandemic response, the archive team’s commitment to capturing history as comprehensively as possible, with my own mission as a poet to draw out and share the lived experiences of the people who carried the organisation through an unprecedented time, and allow them to experience how the act of telling their story can offer a moment of reflection, and the opportunity to share their experience with each other. 

Drawing on 40 recorded interviews, a thematic analysis will guide the Archive Team in sharing the experiences and recollections of Boots’ colleagues in exhibitions, commemorative events and through internal and public communications channels. My findings will also be used to highlight any pertinent areas of exploration for HR as they continue to support the wellbeing of their colleagues in the future and I am encouraging interviewees to comment on the impact of participating in the project. 

I am also working on a collection of creative responses to the stories and experiences shared with me, allowing all participants to have a glimpse of the interactions with their colleagues, and to show the impact that their stories have had on me. As it is logistically impossible to have all members of the Boots workforce in a space together, alongside these written accounts, I will include some ‘imaginary conversations’ using verbatim, anonymised sections of the transcripts from interviews to provide answers to questions which arose in some of the interviews – allowing an exchange and response which may never happen in person. 

The Journey So Far

The progress of the project has been relatively slow in comparison to my work in other settings, where I am immediately introduced to participants and build a relationship with them quickly. To engage this corporate community, I have been dependent on the relationship that the Company Archivist already has with the senior executives. With her guidance, and in consultation with the internal Comms team, we put together a compelling pitch to engage senior managers and invite them to be interviewed, before nominating members of their team. This approach has proved really successful, due in the main to the trust in the Company Archive team. The interviewees have responded enthusiastically, and I have been able to build a good rapport in the short time we have together. Colleagues have spoken frankly about their experiences and memories and as a result, I have been able to build up a comprehensive view of Boots’ response during the pandemic.  

Interviewing for an archive is quite different from interviewing as a writer gathering source material, so having the support and guidance of Boots Company Archivist Sophie Clapp and Dr Richard Hornsey, Associate Professor of Modern British History, has been invaluable. The interviews, so far, have been rich and reflective, helping to identify themes, shape the next phase of work and highlight who we still need to speak to. Many interviewees say they hadn’t fully processed their COVID-years experiences until now, and that the opportunity to reflect has been unexpectedly meaningful. 

I have been struck with the parallels between this project and working with the students, who were reluctant to write but happy to talk, and delighted to see their stories in an actual book. The colleagues at Boots simply don’t have time to spare from their schedule to write but have been able to set aside an hour to reflect with me. I look forward to hearing how they react to a book of their stories.  

Hopes and Plans for the Future

Understanding the way in which storytelling can help us navigate through life, aid our recovery and build resilience is central to my ongoing research project ‘Surviving by Storytelling’ which has concentrated in the main on poetry, and in supporting practitioners and facilitators in that field. This project has demonstrated how my methods could be developed to support colleagues in reflecting (before, during, after) on periods of change, or crisis points, and build their own mechanisms for adaptation and resilience. This act of voicing our own stories can help identify the root causes of our behaviours during difficult times and support development of strategy, and creation of robust systems and policies within a complex or corporate organisation. Give a poet a moment of time with your workforce and just see what happens! 

Story Skills In Action

My practice centres on creating spaces where people feel safe to speak and open to listening. I’m a keen observer, noticing small things, making connections, finding metaphors which help convey a message clearly. Sometimes recognising the story we need to tell is the hardest part, so I help people work that out. With topics such as COVID-19 still a sensitive issue for some, it has been important to guide colleagues towards conversations that acknowledge the difficult parts while also uncovering what helped them get through. The act of sharing stories builds resilience, strengthens connections, and improves communication, and the process of telling the story is often as valuable as recording it for the archive. 

Meet more Story Fellows:

• Read about Sula Douglas-Folkes use of archive in her project with Tomorrow’s Warriors.
• See how Story Fellow Marsha O’Mahony has been collecting oral histories in her project with Cardiff Council.