Norwich Writing Teachers, 19th July 2025.
It was different. Very different. Unsettling. Unusual, even. The sky a duvet of grey, shifted by a restless sky god, raining on the parade of the unsuspecting. A sausage roll with tomato and fennel rang a major change - although others went with the traditional cheese scone.
We spoke a lot. An hour of talking, sharing experiences of the classroom and of family history and the importance of trying to capture it before it is too late and fades to fragments with little context. From here we dragged ourselves back to the idea of writing something. After all, Sarah needs a lesson idea for the final days of term, and we wanted to know what we were likely to be buying from Amazon this month. This is all true, I promise you.
Words. The familiar starter. Whatever we wanted, no guide or prompt. A free write about the morning of a day of our choice, and then to the main course. Jenny asked us to choose a disk of card, the other side of which had a punctuation mark on it. We were tasked with writing using that punctuation mark as the main focus of our writing. Yes, think of Emily Dickinson with her dashes and other writers with their grammatical peccadilloes. Lin had the full stop, Sarah had speech marks, Jeni wrote in questions and I had the forward slash. We were possibly thankful we avoided the em-dash or the colon - semi or full fat. Naturally, we thought about about how the focus on one main punctuation mark alters the thought processes and the flow of writing.
Two final prompts were given to us; however, it was a day of talking and exploring rather than writing and we took away ideas around the picture book Come Away from the Water, Shirley by John Burningham, and the opening of Mrs Dalloway and it's glorious evocation of London. I was going to try and shorten the following long quotation but I couldn't see a way of doing it without diluting the glorious flow of it. Woolf wrote: 'Words, English words are full of echoes, memories and associations ... they have been out and about on peoples lips, in their houses, and streets, and the fields for so many centuries. And that is one of the chief difficulties of writing today. The are stored with other meanings, other memories, and they have contracted so many famous marriages in the past. The splendid word 'incarnadine' who can use that without remembering 'multitudinous seas?'
Some teachers and pupils think writing is difficult. Actually, writing is the easy part. Learning to edit and re-shape sentences and re-carve paragraphs with those familiar jots, tittles and squiggles of written language is the skill. Woolf understood that and the power and association of words. As we embrace the summer break, let's explore the multitudinous seas of language/s around us and revel in them.
-Mark Cotter