Bertie Cairns, of NWP Islington, writes about stairs as stimuli for writing.
Stairs. They’re everywhere. But it was not until we watched Simon Wrigley’s video on making origami stairs that we thought about them in stories, films and dreams and used them for the Islington NWP meeting in November 2021.
So: stairs as stimuli for all sorts of writing.
Stairs as metaphors: journeys to different places, from enlightenment to social climbing. Journeys to the underworld, slow emotional descents. Sitting on stairs in moments of indecision or slowly walking like Prufrock. They are bridges between places, offering goals, dilemmas, surprises. They hint at change and status and struggle. Hope and despair.
Film, of course loves stairs: https://nofilmschool.com/2016/07/learn-how-stairs-can-be-used-visual-metaphors-films
Simon suggested non-fiction uses for stairs: lists of animals with their adverbs or adjectives, stairs as steps to create essays, stairs to show how characters have changed. We thought back to back stairs, so, as Pip climbs, in Great Expectations, we see how he feels before meeting Miss Haversham and then how, going down, he feels afterwards.
And then we wondered what a staircase would say. What voice would it adopt? Does it like your steps, does it mind that we pay it no attention, does it trip up the unwary, the nasty, the arrogant? Our free-flow writing produced some staircases you wouldn’t want to climb!
We then used these initial thoughts to make poems on the stairs and used the space on the stairs as limitations: small step = few words, large step lots of words. We liked the way the poems could be written going up or down or have different poems on different faces depending on how you hold the folded paper. We loved the fact that they fold and will pop up out of our books but also when they are flat, they look like more conventional poems.
Concrete poetry with a licence to roam.