every place
has stories worth knowing
before we leave began with a question: what would it mean to truly know a place before we left it? Not just its history and landmarks, but the rhythms of daily life. The local knowledge people carry. The small, easily overlooked details that make somewhere feel like home.
The name before we leave holds two meanings. It speaks to the leaving we all eventually do, whether we move away or simply grow older. And it asks what we might leave behind: records, memories, connections that outlast us.
I'm Debbie — but please call me Bee Lilyjones — a non-fiction writer and founder of this small creative practice. I work with individuals, families, community groups and parish councils to gather and shape fragments of history and lived experience into something meaningful. That might mean uncovering and writing the story of your house, helping you preserve memories of a particular time or place, or supporting a community group in building an archive. At other times the work takes the form of an exhibition, or an anthology of place-based writing.
What emerges is never a finished report to be filed away. It's something beautiful to look at, and something that continues. I build living digital archives: something you can return to, add to, and carry with you wherever you are. What matters to me is not only gathering the material, but shaping it — creating narratives that feel readable, grounded, and true to the place they come from.
At its heart, this work is about care. About paying attention to where we are, and to each other. About noticing what might otherwise slip away, and creating something that remains not just as a record, but as a living connection.
If you're thinking about documenting a place, a story, or a piece of your own history, I'd be glad to hear from you. No pressure, and no need to have everything figured out.
Just a conversation, to begin with.
In Place: Literary Cartography
In Place: Literary Cartography is a literary travelogue published here, growing issue by issue. It brings together writing about landscape, memory, and the experience of being somewhere — by me, and by writers I've invited to contribute.
Before We Leave with Bee Lilyjones and Friends on Substack
The ongoing writing also lives on Substack, where you'll find serialised chapters of my book in progress, also called Before We Leave — a nature memoir about making an archive, leaving Cumbria, and the pull of a place you never quite left.along with work from the Lay It On The Line writing collective. If you'd like new pieces delivered when they appear, you can subscribe there. And if the work means something to you, there's an option to support it too.