I wandered...

The Lake District. 50 mph winds; clouds scud in packs; sunlight chases across the fellsides and disappears over the ridges; daffodils more jitterbug than gavotte. The speed of the wind brings downpours and quickly takes them off down the valley. White horses crest the lake.

I discover that whilst William Wordsworth had his daffodils dancing in the breeze, Dorothy, on the same occasion, records a storm: the ‘furious wind’ seizing her and William’s breath. Maybe today we walked in weather closer to those dancing daffodils than I thought.

As we walked, I listened to the fearsome roar of the woods. I thought about the difficulty of capturing the many small moments of the hillside path; the lichen: silvered, ochre, the palest green; the fells like nineteenth century etchings, grey and lowering; cushions of moss and the downward rush of water between rocks and squelch; the patterns forming and reforming across the lake as the wind blew this way and that and a scatter of martins, small, quick arcs riding the air above the water.

And, as I walked, I also thought about writing: how difficult it can be sometimes and what an essential part it can play in our lives. I thought about the barriers that schooling can place between the child and their writing selves; and about the ways in which we can open up to them writing in its many forms. We can restrict ourselves, and those we teach, by limiting our picture of what writing can be, what it can do. And yet, if we open ourselves up to thinking about words and drawings on paper, the possibilities seem endless.

I am always struck by how much children welcome the opportunity to freewrite, and how often I stop the flow of their writing too soon. Freewriting allows a personal exploration of what pen and paper and mind can do. It is a place of experimentation and discovery both in terms of thought and of style. It is the kind of writing that helps me find direction, even as it seems to wander. Over the years, it has loosened up the way I use notebooks and has helped me to develop ideas and to find ways of expressing those ideas.

I have begun reading The Notebook A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen. Its contents span an unexpected variety of uses for writing. It reminds me of a wonderful exhibition at Kettle’s Yard Lines of Enquiry: Thinking Through Drawing which was an exhibition of the way thinkers in many fields use drawing as part of their work. The exhibition included drawings by archaeologists, astronomers, composers, geneticists, geologists, historians, physicists, surgeons, zoologists amongst many others.

Drawing and writing help us to think.

In describing Darwin’s use of notebooks, Allen explains how, on the voyage of the Beagle, his notebooks contained ‘whatever caught Darwin’s eye’, formal geological observations sitting alongside notes of expenditure, people met, routes taken. The historian, John van Whyle, describes them as ‘the worst’. ‘Not written at a desk, often in pencil, short lines, staccato notes, terrible handwriting, very faint, with arcane geological content.’ Over time, Darwin developed his use of notebooks. Once aboard ship, he wrote up his notes from trips ashore as coherent narrative. Later, he dedicated different notebooks to different intellectual functions, including those where he conducted a dialogue with himself, asking questions and pursuing his thoughts. On the page of his notebook where he drew his first evolutionary tree, Darwin wrote, ‘I think.’

Too often we think of writing as an end product, rather than as a part of a process of thought. I am wondering now about the ways in which we can encourage more fluid, speculative and adventurous kinds of writing in our classrooms.

What might that look like?

What's in a name?

We are entering the last of January, so I am getting in my new year’s wishes before the end of the month. Happy New Year! I have so much to write about and have just not been able to shape anything coherent; not so much writer’s block as writer’s bramble patch. Urgent ideas and pressing thoughts tangle and snatch so that sentences veer off into nonsense or are overwhelmed with further thought. Forgive me.  I feel  that we need writers and thinkers more than ever at the moment. We need to write ourselves and we need to give those we teach the chance to know for themselves what writing can bring to their lives.

I shall begin with Writing Club: a joyousness of little girls busy with pens and paper (and far too much washi tape.) I have been running this after-school club for seven years and it has always been popular, particularly amongst the youngest children. When Emily and I started the club, we expected that it would attract mostly Key Stage 2 children and the first groups were a brilliant mix of older and younger children, including children who not yet writing in the conventional sense. It made us rethink our ideas about writing and we became the richer for it. That’s maybe something to write about on another day. Last week, because older children were off on important business, there were only five and six year olds in the group. We began with our own names.

I had seen a post on Sophie Blackall’s Instagram account which inspired my idea for the session. (Those of you who know me will know that anyone may choose to write something that is more important to them  at that moment. I simply like to have an idea ready for them, should they want it.) Sophie Blackall is an artist and maker of books for children. She had been working with a school and had been taken by the way the children had written their names with such flair and individuality - ELIZA had perched hearts on the top of each letter; Arthur wrote swooping ‘R’s; Iris underlined her name with an emphatic zigzag. I loved the way that Sophie Blackall had noticed these differences and drawn attention to them and had a feeling that it would be something Writing Club would enjoy.

I made two different folded book forms for the girls to choose from – a simple zigzag and a vertical flap book. I made my own examples and soon knew what fun it could be. I wrote my name on each page or flap – Miss Jeni, Miss Jeni, Miss Jeni – and found a different style each time I wrote it. I followed each name with something about myself: ‘Miss Jeni lives in a house full of books.’ (‘That’s got to be your house’, observed Maud.) ‘Miss Jeni loves to read.’ And so on.  Illustrations would follow.

They all wanted to do this task, beginning with the writing of their own names. There was that miraculous silence that falls when people are absorbed and then an outburst of giggling and singing, standing up to dance to their song, sitting down to write their names over and over. Of course, they made the task their own. Soon they were writing about each other and making books for their friends. Writing for the self and from the self. Our names are important. Writing in a community and for that community. Other people are important.  It’s one of the things I have been thinking about a great deal: that when we are teaching writing in primary and secondary schools, we do well to remember those we are teaching. Each individual: the language, experience and thinking that each one brings with them. Writing learned from the inside out. We can set up the conditions for them to write what is important to them. We do so within a community and, through writing, extend our experience and our experience of language and how writing can work.

Alone and Together

It is National Writing day 2023. What a good thing. It is a day for celebrating; and a reminder of all the pleasures and benefits of writing. 

Perhaps you already write regularly or it’s part of a plan you haven’t quite got round to. I think that much writing is solitary, and necessarily so. It is possible to celebrate quietly and alone. But since it is a National Day for writing, it seems to me that it would be a great idea to write with someone else. It might be with just one friend or a whole class of students. There is something transforming about writing alongside others and then sharing something of what you have written. There is a warmth, an exhilaration, a very special connection, in the quietness of writing and then the sharing.

Maybe you would like a starting point, a way in. Of course we can start with words, a list of them or a poem or piece of prose. Think also, about an action that allows for dreaming, wandering before writing. Make a fold, cut, take a line for a walk. Make a simple folded book, cut out a character or a small crowd of them, draw -something that you can see or something that arrives from your mind. The act of making creates a space into which pre-writing thoughts flow.

The six pages of a small book can suggest a form. As we cut and draw, we dream, letting the ideas unfold before the words hit the paper. It can be a quiet, meditative time that moves us from the busyness of the world to the inside and out again. Patterns emerge, a phrase or sentence comes to mind. We find ourselves letting the writing fall onto the page. We surprise ourselves.

When we come up for air and look around to see and hear what our companions have cut from card, what they have used to animate their writing and how their writing has unfolded, we are delighted. We learn, always, from hearing words read aloud; ours and theirs. I hope that you have time this week to sit down with one other, or with many, to write. And to hear each other’s writing.

One of the good things about having a special day to celebrate writing is the way it generates such a rich variety of ideas for writing. Start with First Story, the organisation which came up with the idea of this day, and play the roll the dice game. Choose one of the links on their website. Try Arvon or CLPE, the British Library or the Literacy Trust. There are more. Use the ideas now and save some up for later.

Because I wrote some things

NWP Director Jeni Smith reflects on the ownership of writing:

January has ended and I have not yet wished you a happy new year. So here we are: Happy New Year! I hope that the year ahead is good to you and that you have left behind all those early January resolutions and are forging ahead into an interesting February. The sun is shining through my study window, calling me to be out walking, reminding me that the windows need washing, making me think about all that I have not written in the last few months. And all that I have written, for my own eyes only.

In my last post, all the way back in October, I wrote about Writing Club, attended by some of the youngest children in the school. We are still meeting every week and our numbers have grown a little. It is a relief to have some older children in the group who can help with spellings and be, quite unselfconsciously, good examples of what a writer might look like. We can become very tangled up in thinking ourselves not proper writers because we have not published or appeared on anyone’s bestseller list. It seems presumptuous to call ourselves writers. But we do write. And it is a pleasure and a solace. Writing alongside each other, whether adults or children, reminds us of the many ways we can be a writer and we learn from each other. Writing Club is a highlight for those children who attend. I imagine that might be something to do with washi tape and stickers and watercolour pencils, but it also is bound up with making, composing for ourselves. Making a mark.

Everyone has the capacity to write and to use writing for their own purposes. Not everyone feels that. I fear that the seeds of self-doubt are often sown in school. Writing can all too often be connected with failures: to spell, to punctuate, to form letters beautifully or to choose words that the teacher considers sufficiently wowish. Writing is rarely easy and all those secretarial skills can present real challenges for the young writer. When young children are asked what is hardest about writing, they are more than likely to say that it is getting the words right, ‘trying to think about the words that match’. However, writing is also a feeling. I think we all need to feel we have the power to use our writing in any way we choose, and to shape it accordingly. As a Year 3 child told me recently: ‘Just be yourself and don’t worry if anyone else judges your writing bad; you are never wrong, it is your writing.’ There’s an echo of Peter Elbow in there. The reader and the writer are always right and always wrong. They are right about their own responses and intentions, wrong about the experiences and intentions other writers and readers bring to the work.

When we feel we own the writing, we can feel more open to changing it, to shaping it more carefully. We may also feel more nimble, more able to adapt a task and to take risks. We can choose when to keep our writing for ourselves and when it is for sharing. It can be a joyful thing.

What, for you, is the best thing about writing?

Here is a four year’s answer:

Because I wrote some things. I wrote “I love you mummy.”

All this is writing

I have been circling around this piece of writing for a while now. My recent reading has set me thinking – Simon Armitage’s Oxford lectures, Annie Dillard’s essays in The Abundance, Richard Mabey on nature writing, reflections on Hilary Mantel – but I continue to circle, unable to reach a satisfactory resolution. Sometimes writing goes like that: more time, more thinking, needed.

Then, in the last three days, I have had two glorious, joyous, hopeful face to face encounters. On Thursday, our school Writing Club met after school for the first time in several years (we have been squeezing into lunch times) and on Saturday, five of us from the Norwich Writing Teachers group met in person for the first time since January 2020. I have loved our on-line workshops. During the height of the pandemic, they seemed like a sacred space where teachers and, often, their children, met on screen against the background of home. The on-line workshops have allowed us to write with people from across the country. When time differences have allowed, we have even written alongside a teacher from Dominica. It has been, and continues to be special. But, oh, the pleasure in sitting around a small cafe table with our pastries and our cooling cups of coffee. We didn’t write. We talked. There was so much to say and conversation flowed in between and over itself in ways that a Zoom meeting does not make easy.

Our talk was of the classroom, of our reading and our writing, our hopes and ambitions and the obstacles that stand in our way. As always, I worry if we are not writing. Our notebooks and pens lay untouched. Rightly so. We orientated ourselves. We discovered how things had changed for us all, and how they remain the same; the importance of placing children at the centre of our thinking; the nonsense that pervades schools and stands in the way of growth, despite the rhetoric; the courageous head teachers who place children’s happiness at the forefront of their thinking; the ways that each person around the table finds ways to open up possibilities for those they teach; the ways we make reading and writing a special part of children’s lives.

On Thursday, I met with the three children who had signed up for Writing Club. It has always been a popular activity in the school and I am sure it will be so again. There were two Year 1 children and one from Year 3. As always we began with words. It never ceases to please me! Off we went, one word each: heffalump pizza amungus sketti bolognaisi.  That was so enjoyable and so quick that we did another round. Let’s do foods, I said, taking their lead: raspberry oranges curry apples. And then we did four more rounds: scrabble chess jigsaw bingo; swimming walking bobbling climbing; turquoise bobbly blue  (lots of giggles) pink gold; red shoes, my pyjamas, flower dress, woolly jumper. There is something exhilarating about compiling lists of words together. There is laughter and there are pauses for explanations (the pyjamas are hard to get on but she likes to wear them as soon as she gets home from school). We discover it is both funny and OK to say bobbly blue -and how good that is to say. Try it! There are stories within the single words. We see the fun of hearing our own words amongst the words of others.

The words became a great preface to the little books we were about to write. I had brought each child a small folded book and some bird stickers to decorate the cover. No matter how old you are, part of a writer’s pleasure is the stationery (read Hilary Mantel on stationery). And so we wrote our names and began to draw and write. I drew my son and daughter, because they are always goading me to say which child is my favourite. But food had taken hold amongst the  rest of the group: tomato pasta, pizza, egg -but not the slimy centre bit. They drew and wrote, providing a running commentary as they did so. Their talk unfolds the thoughts and experiences that underpin what they choose to represent on the page. It is true for us all, I think, that the words on the page rise up from the great underground caverns of our lives.

Writing Club comes at the end of a long school day. Before the time was up, we broke out the washi tape. Of course we did. And we continued to talk and shape our ideas and experiences. Reading, drawing, talking, laughing, choosing stationery, breaking out the washi tape.

As far as I’m concerned, all these things and many more are an important part of writing: indeed are writing.

A short history

Thank you letters – the post-Christmas commitment on small sheets of notepaper.

Not understanding what other girls did to have their writing praised.

Writing and rejection – short stories that were just too weird.

In many writing workshops over the last twenty years or so, we have asked participants to think of some highlights from their lives as writers. You may have been at one of those workshops. We hand out sticky notes and ask people to write a different memory of writing on each one. We usually ask writers to add their age at the time of the memory, though that isn’t compulsory. We are going to share what we write with others. We suggest areas that you might think about: learning  to write; teachers’ influences; the most important pieces of writing you have written; writing at home and away; the travel blog and the letter to an unborn child; the highs and lows; letters and e-mails; writing as the start of something and sometimes its ending; writing for the family, the personal, the academic; the all-important notebook and the momentous graduation to a handwriting pen.

When we share our writing we find that there are always things we have in common and reminders of things we had not thought of.  Always there are memories which are the unique and intriguing. In the individual and the collective we find the beginnings of our selves as writers and the experiences which shape us as writing teachers.

The power and pleasure that came from the one thousand word limit.

Writing reports – scrumpling and rewriting and blotting and rewriting.

Writing daily about teaching and the  classroom. The revelation of it.

At this point in the summer, as you settle into yourself, as you may already be looking towards the new autumn term, perhaps you could take a moment to reflect on our own history as a writer.

Note down some memories; five to eight would be a good start, more if you want. Perhaps you could draw a timeline. Live with it. More memories will come. When we are writing in a group, we often choose one incident to write about in more detail -you could do that. Or you could add to your headline memories: a potted history of your writing life gathered in brief moments. As we push for more elusive memories, we build a fuller picture. It has a bearing on how we write and how we teach.

                        Writing into friendship and romance  across an ocean.

                        Reading a poem aloud and listening as others talk about it.

                        Shaping the SED – writing that hits the buttons and uses the language.

                        Observing and writing about a classroom  – shaping the words to make it live again.

It is good to write your history alone – you have time and space. It is good to write your history amongst others. The talk that weaves between the writing brings different perspectives. It helps us see ourselves and to see the possibilities for our classrooms. More than ever these days, we need the strength of shared understandings. We need to know that we are not the only ones who are listening to those we teach and placing them at the centre. We need to know that we have deep understandings of writing and the confidence to share those understandings.

With that in mind, thank you, to all group leaders, who have kept on writing with others throughout the last few hard years, and a special hurrah, for the Whodunnit Group, who will be meeting, face to face, in London, next Tuesday. Do get in touch if you would like to join them.

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Daily

I have been considering the ways in which daily writing – and drawing - work on mind and body to shape us as writers: the value of morning pages, the discipline of a daily 1000 word target,  the practice of writing freely for a set amount of time, or for a defined number of pages, the poem a day challenge, the commitment to recording one moment from each day. Peter Stillman suggests we think of a journal as ‘a net for catching the shining particles of the day’, dust motes in sunshine, maybe. I have ditched the shining bit, and just kept the particles. I can often surprise myself with what I choose to write. And I have enjoyed drawing alongside the writing.

I just like the idea of noticing something every day and noting it down. I like the way it makes me look more carefully and how that carries into the next day, making me look out for things, changing my perspective.

Writing daily somehow, changes the way we write and think; the repetition, the regular commitment  both consolidates and surprises, it can shove you into having to find a different way round things, and it can allow you to fail and go back and keep on going back until you have found something that works for you. I find that when I commit to morning pages, my writing is strengthened. I feel it comes more fluently,  that I am more willing to experiment, that I am more agile. Freewriting has a similar effect. Writing for its own sake, writing without any audience but oneself in mind, makes way for playfulness, honesty, experimentation. Writing every day allows us to see what it is that we can do when we write. As we write without pressure, we may open up new possibilities for ourselves. We can try out stuff. We can lay down new writing tracks. We can strengthen hand and mind and imagination.

There is much to be said for the steadiness of a daily routine. August is a month when, for teachers, a different daily rhythm may emerge. Even if each day is filled with adventures, duties, catching up, letting go, there can also be time to create a small space for regular activity. Musicians and athletes know the necessary pains and consequent pleasures of regular exercise. A daily practice is fundamental for artists and thinkers of all kinds. It is an undertaking that shapes and strengthens.

It can set us free.

Summer Journal

First of all, apologies for my long silences.  No good reason, to be honest, but I am delighted to find, two days after a cataract operation, that the text on the screen is really quite dark and clear cut and not, as I thought, unnecessarily blurry. Perhaps it was that peering at a misty screen that was holding me back, even though I hotly denied it. So here I am.

Although I have been silent here, on this website, I have continued to write, alone and with teachers. I continue to see how writing for oneself informs the teaching of writing in powerful ways. I continue to find new pleasure in writing myself. Writing continues to help me think. Writing and drawing and saving ephemera helps me remember. I regret not writing more regularly about ordinary days. So I was inspired by the Foxes, a Year 5 and 6 class, as they created their own travel journals or holiday journals and I have created one of my own this summer.

We have made such journals before. Each one reflects the personality and potential activity of the maker. Many children fill them with their adventures; memories of a moment in time captured for the future. We choose our papers and the size and design of the journal. Some people, choose compact square shapes, to be tucked in a rucksack on a Lakeland walk. Others are more expansive, creating A5 and A4 notebooks with maps and pockets and different kinds of paper. Some focus on a particular holiday destination - slim volumes with maps of the place included, and others ambitiously gather enough pages and pockets to encompass the entire summer. Most of us choose to have two or three signatures in the notebook and we prefer thicker paper that will take watercolours, coloured inks or pastels. We plan to draw and write; to stick in photographs and entry tickets. Some of us may never start. Others will end up with a bulging collection of days out and projects at home.

You can find plenty of videos on line that will show you how to make a three or five hole bound book or you can simply choose a readymade notebook. I recommend Gwen Diehn’s The Illustrated Journal which has clear instructions for straightforward book binding and is full of suggestions and examples of ways to fill it. This kind of journal is very different from my own writer’s notebook, which is full of scrawl and quite a lot of nonsense, crossings outs, lists and the occasional cutting or bus ticket. I have always hesitated to take on an illustrated journal because it seems to me more public and, therefore, more self-conscious. However, this summer I have made a journal and have reached day seven.  I am finding it a peaceful, meditative thing to do. It is nice to draw and use colour and to stick in sweet wrappers and a pressed flower from a bunch my daughter sent me. It calls for a different kind of writing and being.

Many summers ago, a teacher writer created a beautiful summer journal from a Collins Pocket Guide to the Seashore. The book itself was a lucky find in a second hand bookshop in the seaside town where she was staying. She transformed the book into a record of her holiday there. It was full of paintings and poems, maps and stories. It even contained a small compartment cut from the pages where shells could nestle. It was a beautiful object and a unique reminder of that time with her family.

May I suggest that you treat yourself to some quiet journal making? It can be whatever you wish it to be. More than anything it can be time for yourself. And, as you know, any kind of writing and making can find itself back into the life of your classroom. The website holds plenty of ideas to start you writing and drawing, so have a look. I decided to offer a small list of prompts for the month of August, just because I was playing with the idea of alphabets, and it is always fun to have a new list.

Gather a little stash of pencils and papers, colour and tape, scissors and glue. Set a little time aside. Have a lovely summer.

No ideas but in things

‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ is the first  poem that Miss Stretchberry introduces to her sceptical class in Sharon Creech’s novel, Love That Dog.

So much depends ….

JACK

       Room 105 – Miss Stretchberry

            September 13

I don’t want to
because  boys
don’t write poetry.

Girls do.

…

September 27

I don’t understand
the poem about
the red wheelbarrow
and the white chickens
and why so much
depends upon
them.

If that is a poem
about the red wheelbarrow
and the white chickens
then any words
an be a poem.
You’ve just got to
make
short
lines.

Sharon Creech (2001) Love That Dog. London: Bloomsbury.

The ending of Creech’s book gets me every time. And now I am thinking about it, the last time I read it was the very week that the first lockdown was announced. I was reading with a group of Year 5 children and they had suggested we read all the poems (they are gathered at the end of the book) before we started on the story itself. It was an inspired idea for that group. We spent a giddily joyous hour reading and re-reading the poems and talking about them. Trying out different ways of saying them and noticing how they worked.

Who knows whether they finished reading the novel? I didn’t see them again, face to face, for more than a year. But we did continue writing and, as is routine with that class, we always begin with a list of words. And every time we do, we are reminded of their pleasures. In particular, we enjoy the naming of things. Specialist vocabulary: bit, bridle, breeching, tail comb, crupper. Proper nouns, familiar places, brand names: The Pightle, Lidl, Eye, Colman’s, Mitsubishi, Finbow’s Yard. Words that come directly from our daily lives:  mug, bicycle, travel card, flat white, Whatsapp, drains.

And just recently I came across this really delicious four minutes forty-seven seconds of video: No ideas but in things.

You can watch it over and over again to hear a fistful of poets talking about Williams’ poems, teaching us about poems: the breath of them, the line breaks, their mindfulness; Alan Ginsberg on the look and placing of them on the page, Kenneth Koch, enjoying ‘this cluttery, clanking sound’. I don’t do it justice. It is just very good to hear them speak.  ‘Why don’t you write about something nice, Dr Williams?’ and the good doctor himself: “I am a radical. I write modern poetry, baby. I’m an awful person.’

No ideas but in things, William Carlos Williams said. He noticed everyday things and put them in poems: the wheelbarrow, broken glass between buildings, chicken wire, barrel-staves. No one, he says, at the end of Pastoral, will believe this/ of vast import to the nation.  But it is. It wakes us up, makes us alert. Makes us pause. It values our everyday experience, the things that take up most of our time. It moves beyond the individual to shared understandings. It loves language. Miss Creech/ Stretchberry knows a thing or two. You could do worse than introduce her selection of poems to a class starting out with poetry.

A teaching journal

When I was a young teacher, I worked in two unusual and challenging schools. We were often working without a map and it was both terrifying and brilliant. Early on, Michael Armstrong, who was a colleague then, encouraged me to keep a journal. Every day, at four o’clock, I sat down with a cup of tea and recorded stories from my day. I wrote down things that bothered me, or puzzled me, or that I considered a success. Very often, I just wrote down things that had happened without really knowing more than that. Only later did patterns appear. I have been writing journals about school life ever since.

It is what I like to write and it is where writing, for me, is a record, a research tool, a means of thinking and a means of discovery. I find writing in this way utterly absorbing and it is this kind of writing that makes me feel most like a writer.

When I look back at the early journals, I am dismayed by their prim schoolmarmy flavour despite the wildness of the context Very often I was simply catching the moments, hoping enlightenment would come later. I was coy about my part in the procedure. My notes were often cryptic, missing out the detail which I have learned bring things alive and help me to make sense of what I am seeing. Slowly, I loosened up. Threads emerged. I felt able to speculate. And I was lucky to have colleagues who wanted to talk, endlessly, about what we were doing; what students were teaching us. The talk remains essential. The writing catches the moment and allows thinking to unfold.

So I encourage you to keep a teaching journal. So very often it is assumed that writing means ‘being creative’; and ‘being creative’ means writing novels and poetry. For a teacher, writing about the life of the classroom is creative, is intellectually satisfying and is emotionally worthwhile. It is a way of making sense of what we and those whom we teach are doing. In making sense we create meanings and consolidate and develop our practice.

If that sounds too worthy, then shake yourself free of that idea. Just capture a story or two each day and see what happens.

This is the thing. Make a cup of tea and sit down. Open your notebook. Write the date and time and let the day come back to you. Write down what immediately comes to you. Sometimes, there will be one overwhelming event. Sometimes, a brief moment will have stayed with you -the way a child smiled, the hush as you read the last chapter of a novel, the surprising solution a child found to a maths problem, the emotions that surged when, yet again, Galahad the Restless could not settle to the task. .

Start by recording the story. Write down what happened. What words were spoken. Maybe what you felt and thought at the time. Then let the pen go. You may find yourself exploring one idea. You may find yourself writing down a list of small incidents. Be patient. Start with the aim of simply getting some details down. Let the events of the classroom and the writing itself lead the way.

One year my journal began in despair. Daily I reported a sense of failure, of making no headway, of students’ unfinished work and abandoned projects. I constantly questioned myself. Six months later, when re- reading the entries, I saw that much more had been happening than I thought. Although I felt at sea, the students were making headway. In every single abandoned attempt lay the seeds of what became major pieces of work during the next twelve months. I learned how some things come slowly and how important trust can be.

Start today. Use a school exercise book. See what happens.

Michael was an inspirational teacher and thinker. A collection of his papers and essays is available in this free e-book, Another Way of Looking.

Exciting Writing

A teacher asked her colleague, Emily, what she did about children who don’t want to, don’t like to, write.

After a pause Emily replied that she could think of no child in her class who didn’t like writing.

It’s true. I know the children in her class, and even children for whom the mechanics remain difficult want to, indeed, like to, write. It led me to think about why that was. Soon after that another teacher told me of how the teacher taking over her class in September had come to her in amazement, asking what she had done to make that class so enthusiastic about writing.

‘They love it,’ she told my friend. ‘And what is this freewriting they talk about?’

My friend had introduced a daily freewriting session. For ten minutes she and the children wrote freely, non-stop, about anything they pleased. There was time for sharing, too. Children (and adults) who wanted to could read aloud what they had written. And they wanted to. And they wanted to hear each other’s writing.

Which made me think of a Year 2 boy who mystified his teacher, and me, by telling her that what he liked about writing was that it was exciting. We didn’t doubt that writing could be exciting, but this boy wrote the most mundane and pedestrian things, usually no more than one sentence in a single session; nothing intrinsically exciting, we thought.

Then his teacher observed him more carefully when he was writing. He wrote with others around a table. They leaned in and out from the page, often pausing to exchange information about what they were doing;  reading their words aloud and sharing their drawings. They were a little community of writers; and being part of that community, surely, was exciting. What were they doing? They were coming up with ideas, thoughts, memories that started in their heads and which they were able to translate into words and images on the page. Not only that, once on the page it was there to share. And they got to hear other people’s words, also. It was exciting!

What is most exciting, is their sense of agency. They were able to choose what to write and how to write it.

Pause for a moment and think about how thoughts shift around in your head, how they begin to shape themselves into something more coherent and then the hand takes over and those thoughts and arrangements of words appear on page or screen. Exciting!

Which brings me back to Emily, and a Reception/ Year 1 class just before Christmas. We were making garlands from card circles to be hung from a string. We suggested that they think about writing names of special people on the cards, and special Christmas wishes. They could write their own names if they wished (everyone would be able to do that) and then the names of others. Emily and I had their families in mind, I think, but these children set to work writing the names of their friends in school. And they moved on to making cards. They sat side by side, writing and decorating cards for each other. They saw no need for envelopes, secrets or surprises. Harry and Will, crouched together on the floor, explained that Harry was making a card for Will and Will was making a card for Harry. Children gathered round the table where there were gold and silver pens. They offered running commentaries to the future recipient of the card on its progress. ‘We will go to the beach,’ wrote Candice. They were in charge. When I returned to the class in the next week, they were eager to continue this compelling activity.

What is exciting? It is the knowledge that we can write what we want in ways that we choose. Teachers who attend my writing workshops know that they can write what and how they wish. It is something of a joke that they never do as they are told [although they often do] but that freedom, that sense of agency is, it seems to me, crucial as we learn how to write and understand what writing can do and be for us. What is exciting about writing for you? What stops the excitement? Is there something you can do about it?

Children in Emily’s class have agency. They have known since they were in reception that they are in charge of and have responsibility for their writing. They have regular opportunities to write freely. They must also follow given briefs. They do so in the knowledge that their teacher welcomes their personal interpretations and that they can solve any problems the task poses for them in ways that suit them and which strengthen their writing practice.

That is exciting.

Pause, and then write

Happy New Year!

The sun is shining as I write this and I am about to go for a walk with a neighbour. Although the paths are muddy and the breeze chilly it will be the loveliest thing. Sometimes walking feels a bit like writing. Yesterday, despite the sunshine, it took me an age to get out on the road. I suddenly found a number of small jobs that had to be done before I could go out. I prevaricated about gloves and hats. I sat by my muddy boots for quite some time, simply staring into space. And then I was out in the lanes, startled by the yellow of a dandelion, happy to see the blush of mauve in the sky, sitting for a while on one of the benches John has made in the woodland, glad to gaze at the circle of hazels. And, today, how much pleasure there is to be had in walking with a friend.

And so it is with many things. We put off the moment, whether it is the plunge into a pool, the first strides of a run, the rolling out of a yoga mat. Afterwards when we have walked or run or made friends with downward dog, we feel good. Writing can make us feel well. It is good for the mind and spirit and the imaginative life. If you are reading this, you probably know that already. You may have been given, or gifted yourself, a new notebook for the new year. Hurrah! But let’s be realistic, and kind to ourselves. At this time of year we are bombarded with exhortations and advice towards the new  person we are going to be in 2022.The stakes are too high! I have a number of notebooks that I began with a flourish on the first day of several Januaries and they remain  unfilled. Once I had missed a day, or two, somehow I couldn’t go back to it. It is even worse if you have a diary where blank, dated pages serve as reminders of your failure to write on Tuesday and Saturday. It’s already past the first few days of the new year, so let’s start with the kind of cheap notebook that Natalie Goldberg recommends. It is spiral bound, may have a cartoon character on the front and is not so fat it can’t, realistically, be filled in a month.

Filling a notebook a month, getting the words on the page is what Natalie Goldberg recommends. It is our daily jog, our morning flow. Some people write morning pages: twenty minutes of non-stop writing with no expectation, even, that you will read back what you have written. Some people make a date to write with a friend. This is low stakes writing. There is no need to worry about the Great British novel just now. Tjis is just about words on the page.

In last Sunday’s Observer Magazine (2.1.2022) Michael Rosen wrote about the importance of play in his life, of playing with words and, as he learned when his son died, how writing things down helps him to confront the sadness:

… penning a poem about sadness or a sense of loss can leave you feeling better as well. It helps, laying things down on paper. I call it “unfolding”.

Everyone can do this, it doesn’t take expertise. Think of it as doodling with words.

There’s a tyranny to education: learning to write frees you, but we’re restricted by being taught that formal sentences are all that’s worthwhile. Instead, scribble down fragments – think up half-lines mixed with song lyrics, lines from films, things people say. Don’t overthink it - it’s like talking with your pen. This process is a liberation for the mind.

I am thinking that you know all this. And you know how, not only the commitment to the formal sentence, but the requirement to write at particular times and in ways that are defined by others often dominates how children write in schools. For many, it is the only way they experience writing. The young people we teach experience sadness, too. They have complicated lives. They worry about things. Are you able to squeeze five or ten minutes of free writing, playful writing, into their school day?  In schools that I know where there are regular opportunities for free writing, young people like writing, often love writing. And they learn, also, the ways in which writing can be their own, that writing can make you feel better.

So I send you the very best of wishes for the year ahead. Write often. Write for your own reasons.  Be playful and tender. Allow the writing to bring you back to yourself. I hope, also,  that you are able to find the space where children may write for their own purposes and that they learn what a good thing that is.

How about a five minute free write every day? Start with this month’s thirty writing prompts to break into the page, along with an idea from David Morley.

Festive Fripperies

There’s a tradition that at the December meeting of Norwich Writing Teachers  there will be stollen and glitter, paper-folding and gold pens, terrible jokes and, probably, Father Christmas: the Truth. Stollen is tricky at an on-line meeting and some people haven neither glitter nor a gold pen, but we can still get into paper folding. I am amazed and impressed by teachers’ capacity to look at me waving bits of paper around on screen and translate it into their own books and wordy decorations. We do try and create some writing-based fripperies each year and these can often fill a corner in the last week of the Autumn Term.

Last week we made garlands from wintery, Christmassy words which I had road tested with four and five years olds -a great success. This week we made simple shaped single pamphlets with rather fancy pop-up inserts and a folded box that can house a tableau and has flaps for accompanying writing. I stuck with the nativity and then got carried away with the idea of a series of boxes charting Father Christmas’s journey across the world on various forms of transport. The idea was inspired by John Burningham’s picture book, Harvey Slumfenburger’s Christmas Present and, of course Raymond Briggs’ Father Christmas.

Finally, we folded origami envelopes that can be hung on a tree and contain good wishes of all kinds. We learned how to make the envelope from The Travelling Bookbinder https://www.thetravellingbookbinder.com/2021/12/folded-pocket-decoration/  [worth signing up for her newsletters]. Of course, we missed the festive snacks, the chaos and bustle of the last writing group of the year, but it remains a pleasure to welcome people from across the country to our on-line meeting. (Contact us if you would like to join) Last night I was reminded of the companionship of writing together, the great pleasure to be found in frippery, and how much we learn from each other.

National Poetry Day 2021: Choice

Poetry is …any utterance that sings in a short space: to sing we need all the resources of language -sound, rhythm, beauty and toughness.

Kim Stafford

And we need playfulness, community, a belief in each other and enabling spaces.

 It is a day for celebrating poetry on October 8th. I hope that poetry is in your life most days and that today you have a chance to set aside some special time for it. I think we really need poetry at the moment and that we need to find the nooks and crannies that might hold it during the day. That might mean writing with others, or alone; it might mean pausing to read from a loved anthology or exploring something new; you might choose to write down a poem or a part of a poem and send it at as a gift or you might look to Youtube to find a poet reading their own work.

 Years ago, I was sent off to train to be an Ofsted inspector. We were locked in a basement room whilst we watched videos and listened to the recited script of the trainer. Sometimes we had to write judgements. At the end of one day, I went up to my hotel room and switched on the television. It was National Poetry Day. There on the screen, poets were reading. One after another, they  spoke their poems directly to me. And I found that tears were coursing down my cheeks. What they brought to me was all that had been absent in that basement room: imagination, truth, warmth and surprise, the music of words and human connection and responsibility. Children, especially, discover that they can love poetry and that they are poets. It has a vital part to play in the living and healing that we are engaged in just now.

 In the late 1970s, Kenneth Koch discovered the pleasures of writing poetry with children in New York schools. He came to understand the fundamental value of treating children like poets, realising that it ‘was not a case of humorous but effective diplomacy, as [he] had first thought, it was the right way to treat them because it corresponded to the truth.’ Writing can play a crucial part in our well-being and good health. I have always believed that writing is a form of play equal in seriousness and pleasure to forms of play we see amongst young children. It came as no surprise to learn that, when engaged in creative activities, an adult’s brain is fully engaged in the exactly same way as the brain of a child is engaged when they are busy playing. A poet friend of mine recommended this short TED talk by Lynda Barry and I pass on the recommendation. In it, she speaks about play and about her notion of ‘the image world’ in contributing to our mental health.

 Lynda Berry is an engaging and thought-provoking storyteller -watch it, if only for the story of the boy’s conversation with the piece of bacon he is about to eat. And think about how, in our classrooms and with other teachers we can read and write poetry together for the joy and goodness of it. Kenneth Koch discovered to his surprise that the children he worked with much preferred writing poetry at school than at home. He writes:

“There was also the fact of their all being there in the room, writing together. No time for self-consciousness or self-doubts: there was too much writing and talking and jumping around.”

 Go and read some poems. Listen to some poems.

Get together with others and write and talk and jump around.

Whoop, whoop for poetry day!

National Writing Day 2021: Connections Praise Song

The Women I’ve Worked With

In a final thought, for the time being, about National Writing Day’s theme of connection, and in addition to the power of ‘and’ , connection maps and ‘hair’, here is mention of a poem by Liz Venn which we enjoyed very much last week.

It is called The Women I’ve Worked With and is a praise song. We found great pleasure in writing in response to it. I think some people wrote very personally, and I think some of the writing will find its way to the people it celebrates. More connections!

Here is the first verse:

This is a song for the women I’ve worked with,

for the plasters I’ve borrowed, the aspirin,

for the Friday prosecco, the trainers they wear

to commute and the heels they work in.

And here is the last verse which  sends up a prayer for the usually unsung people who help us through our days:

May every Friday be Cake Friday.

May grey never touch them.

May their passwords be strong.

Your song might be for fellow football players or neighbours. One of the group wrote about parents -the ones discovering how to be parents alongside you – and I thought about all the non-teaching staff I have worked with over the years, the caretakers with mop, bucket and sawdust, the secretaries and bursars who have helped me out of all kinds of pickles.

Here’s Alicia’s song (thank you for sharing, Alicia):

To the teachers I taught with...

To my Hilts, my rock and single support through my NQT year.

For Crazy Em, Fleabag and wordy extraordinaire - you inspire me daily.

To the unnamed for showing me how NOT to be a teacher.

For Mrs K, the OG, the one who taught me everything.

To Cole, of unlimited patience, always hovering at the time out chair when it has all gotten too much.

For other Hannah, my saviour when KS1 science goes too deep.

To Bottom, smiling and tea-ing us all through thick and thin.

For the lady shredding my predecessor to shreds at the inaugural conference - I want to be just like you when I grow up.

And here’s a final verse from another teacher:

You can find Liz Venn’s poems in Cast: the Poetry Business book of new contemporary poets. Her website is https://lizvenn.wordpress.com/poetry-prompts-blog/. She posts poems there and some great prompts to start you writing.

If you would like to read more about her, try Kim Moore’s blog https://kimmoorepoet.wordpress.com/2012/10/21/sunday-poem-elizabeth-venn/

 or the Great Fogginzo’s Cobweb:

https://johnfogginpoetry.com/2014/08/

These are both sites worth knowing about if you don’t already.

Happy National Writing Day 2021!

National Writing Day: Connections

During our last few NWP workshops we have been gearing up for National Writing Day on the 23rd June, and exploring the theme of ‘connections’.

When we were thinking about connections, that useful little word, ‘and’, cropped up. Young children used to write stories that were punctuated by ‘and’, a beautiful daisy chain of action joined on a rope of ‘ands’. I think that they don’t often get the chance to try that out any more because the fullstopcapitalletter police are onto them. In our teachers’ group we had enjoyed some of those ‘and’ connections: hook and eye, egg and spoon, fish and chips and I thought that our very youngest writers would enjoy that collection and connection.

It was serendipity, then, that when I was riffling through the children’s books in a charity shop, a board book by Janet and Allan Ahlberg caught my eye: Doll and Teddy. It is one of four little offshoots from The Baby’s Catalogue and contains all the Ahlberg’s genius for the subject matter and cadences that attract young children.

Open the page and It continues: Duck and bottle; Kittens and Cat;

Bricks and ball, and so on through a flurry of “Butterfly and flowers and bird and worm and ants!’ and:

Making a list of things that go together, joined by ‘and’ is fun, we found, and not to be reserved for the youngest writers only. 

The sound and rhythms of these  pairings are tremendously satisfying and we began to see that there could be themes and jokes. I found myself wanting to rhyme, and maybe adding a few rogue phrases in [whatdyoumacallit, how’s yer father, over the hill…]  There are pairings we commonly use: cup and saucer, salt and pepper, biscuits and cheese; the idiomatic: an arm and a leg, down and out, over and out; and some people began to think of characters from fiction and others searched valiantly for pairings that are unexpected: fish and bicycle, clock and whistle [that sounds like a pub name, there’s another idea]. Is there a connection? 

Here’s Vikki’s list for starters:

Harry and Voldemort

Knife and fork

Bells and whistles

Bread and butter

Coat and shoes 

Brother and sister

Kettle and pot

Jeeves and Wooster

Moon and stars

Salt and vinegar

Hope and glory

War and peace

King and queen

Cat and hat

Lion, Witch and Wardrobe

Alicia is going to invite her Reception/ Year 1 / 2 class to add their and phrases to a paper chain. I hope we may have some pictures after the event. And someone suggested to me once, that ‘and’ was a better word than ‘but’, particularly when giving feedback. Think about it. I often do …

Amongst the other connections that we thought of when we  talked about the theme for this year’s National Writing Day, came the idea of trains and maps, and, in particular, the London Underground map. A group or class tube map could indicate the connections we have made over the last year. You could start by talking about what kinds of connections we have experienced and how they have been made -Zoom might feature as a large station on the line with many connections, but there may be some connections that are unique to one or two people, a connection with a neighbour you had not met before, perhaps, or a particular connection with a local footpath through woods.

The idea is that you make a map, with large and smaller stations that indicate different kinds of connections. Then Lisa suggested that you could have different coloured lines that indicate the kinds of connection being made. You could define these categories and they might give some structure to initial discussions. I have included family connections, friends, school, shopping … But your categories could be different -on-line, by text and hone, face to face close, face to face distanced … You and your group will have your own ideas.

It is a bit tricky drawing the map -it would take time to have it beautifully presented – but I do like it as a visual reminder of the connections we have made – and missed. Then each writer can make their own journey in writing. We only have to fill the box, so you could choose one connection, or write a short piece for each relevant station. We have found that he more opportunities we have had to talk and write about the experiences of the last year, the better we have been able to make sense of them. I think I might give out small squares of paper to write on which could then be attached to your lockdown tube map. 

National Writing Day 2021

This is just a quick note to remind you that it will be National Writing Day on the 23rd June 2021 and this year’s theme is ‘Connection’. We are invited to write a poem, story or letter, within the box, or in the 280 characters of a Tweet. At our teachers’ writing group yesterday we talked about how we might approach it in our different settings. We were keen to make the day visible within our schools and so we have begun to think about how best to share and display the writing for that day. It may be that you would like to Tweet students’ writing. You can do so using #fillthebox #nationalwritingday @FirstStory. But you may like to exchange poems, stories and letters within the school or to display them so that many people can read them -and connect.

There are loads of resources on the National Writing Day website:

https://firststory.org.uk/writeday/

At our recent meeting we tried out an idea suggested by Kate Clanchy from the Arvon website, using Rachel long’s poem, ‘Omen’ which is a great little anecdote about family hair. We discovered that we all have lots of stories about hair, and that they are often closely tied up with identity, culture and connections of all kinds. One teacher told us of her fascination with barber’s shops -what goes on in there?- another of how she discovered that her much disliked tangly hair linked her to Irish ancestors going back hundreds of years and so now she loves it. There was a hymn of praise and love to a daughter’s distinctive hair and a list of relatives and their hair related to food -inspired by a photograph of a mother with ‘mushroom hair’.

We had a quick look at Neil Gaiman’s picture book Crazy Hair and we were recommended Hannah Lee’s picture book My Hair for younger children. You can find out more about Hannah Lee and how she wrote this book on the Booktrust website https://www.booktrust.org.uk and you can watch a great video of her reading it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNet1W_TMqM

I have been able to start writing club meetings in person again this week. We sit outside on the field in the lunchtime sunshine and write together in a companionable way. Writing together is such an important way of connecting. Maybe that is the main thing to think about for National Writing Day. How can we quietly connect through writing together?

This was going to be a quick note – but there is so much to share! We thought a lot about ‘connection’ and there are some good ideas brewing. We plan to share more ideas between now and the 23rd June. Watch this space!

International Metaphoraging

In the last week of January 2021, I had the pleasure and privilege to run one of three workshops that formed the most recent virtual teacher training conference run by European Association of Creative Writing Programmes.

We met on three consecutive evenings: 23 participants from 17 countries, world-wide. The remarkable (and very persistent) Lorena Briedis had been asking Simon Wrigley and I to contribute ever since she attended the Metaphoraging  workshop that we ran together at the NAWE conference in 2018. Simon wrote up the workshop for the website and you can find that in the archive.  I remember it as a little bit crazy as we crammed two hours of workshop into one. It was, as ever, hands on, full of paper and glue and scissors, cut up card and folded books and boxes of knickknacks and treasures. How would this translate to the loneliness of the long-distance Zoomer?

This question of engagement and energy, presence and connection, was something all three presenters tackled and I wish that I had been free to listen in to the other two workshops: Mariana Docampo from Argentina on ‘creating a workshop from the text analysis method’ and Renée Combal-Weiss  from France, who explored ‘creative tools to enable connections between home and the virtual classroom’ and, as I learned, had everyone writing stories together. In our workshop we collected words -and, as we heard them round the group, it was wonderful to hear many words not in English [fifteen countries represented, world-wide] and to hear how people who are already fluent in two or three languages were learning still more. I, as always, when in the company of others working in a second or third language, was overwhelmed by the generosity and energy of those who worked with me in English. What exactly is metaphoraging? one participant asked me. Well, it’s a word that Simon coined when we created our workshop, and it is a term I have come to love. I’ll write about it more in another post. For the time being, enjoy that combination of metaphor and foraging.

I had sent out a list of things to bring to the workshop; not simply paper and pen, but scissors, a stapler if you have one, a handbook or reference book of some kind and a small box of treasures to replace the treasures that Simon and I usually take to the workshop. People responded with such imagination and willingness. We made little flip books and invented characters and colours and put these together with various items of clothing to create a whole variety of possibilities: Marigold’s sky-blue skirt, Amy Spoon’s breezy white pyjamas, Chewsy Fingers’ sunburst yellow waistcoat. We worked within several linguistic structures and, a favourite activity, we foraged for noun phrases in the books we had brought with us. The phrases became metaphors as we completed the phrase “the moon is …’ The moon was transformed into delicate stitches through the language of a book on embroidery, the stars and planets each became a bird with distinctive plumage. 

Using the rooms where we sat, our collections of treasures, and even other rooms of our homes, we went on a scavenger hunt. If you have used a scavenger hunt, you will know that the search is, essentially, metaphorical and the language reflects that. Of course, and I should have considered this, some of the language sent participants to Google translate. It also drove us to new perspectives. We reflected on the swoop of a warm woolen shawl. We heard the story of the ‘footstep of a hero’ which was a clump of wool collected from the landscape of the `Faroes Islands, where such a collection is regarded as lucky. There was not time to put our treasures to full use, but it was wonderful to see what was in the collections and to see their potential for story making and as metaphors for writing. One person brought a great selection of cooking utensils that I longed to hold.  Amongst another collection there was ‘something hidden’, a Roman amphora, beautiful aged glass that is usually hidden away so that it is protected, and another footstep of a hero, shrapnel from the Dardanelles, so different from the soft sheep’s wool  from the Faroes.

On Thursday evening, after the final workshop, we met for drinks and chat. I was thrilled by the warmth and energy of those writer teachers and thrilled to be in touch with so many people, world-wide, who love writing and want to share its pleasures and possibilities with others. Lorena Breidis has worked tirelessly to arrange the conference and hosted everything with such generosity and affirmation. She was ably supported by her cockatiel, Juanita, who flew about the room, landing on Lorena’s head or shoulder as we all talked. Renee Combal-Weiss, who had been listening in to Metaphoraging, shared some lines from her response to Roger McGough’s poem, Me: If she were gin she would sip herself slowly, if champagne, she would allow bubbles to fly her into the air, if she were whisky, she would down herself in one. I raised my glass of single malt to her, as I raise it now, to all those writers and teachers, for their enthusiasm and imagination and attention to language, for the knowledge that we are part of a community that dissolves boundaries, that values both our difference and all that we have in common.

Answering Back

What a wonderful bird the Zoom are
When we there we here almost;
When we mute we speak almost.
We ain’t got no sense hardly;
We ain’t got no near hardly either.
When we write, we write what we ain’t got almost.

The last weekend in January 2021 has seen the most wonderful flurry of writing events. It is so cheering to hear news of so many of you out there meeting remotely, writing together, sharing closely. Thank you so much, to all of you who take time to organise such meetings.

They mean a great deal.

This weekend I joined the London group led by David Marshall. There were seventeen of us on screen, sharing as a whole group and moving in and out of smaller groups to write and talk together. As always, the session was beautifully prepared and generously shared. David brought such a variety of ideas and resources, so there was great pleasure in writing for ourselves, and much to be taken on into our various classrooms, both face to face and remotely.

Many of us were very taken with an idea from a Poetry Society worksheet developed with the Orwell Society. All the ideas, centred round poetry and political language, are of interest. David introduced us to Malika Booker’s poem, That Force-ripe Morning and to a form new to me, invented by Karen McCarthy Woolf, in which the poet takes another text – in the case of Malika Booker, a political speech - and answers back to it.

That Force-ripe Morning takes the words of a speech by Nigel Farage after the referendum vote. She creates couplets/ couplings using words from the speech in the first line, and her own words answering back in the second:

Dare to dream that the dawn is breaking,
like cracked eggs in we sky, this force-ripe morning

on an independent United Kingdom
where crapo croak he song each morning

this, if the predictons are right, this will be a victory
grabbed like flies snatched with fork tongue flickering.

We found the whole business of answering back to poetry and prose, to poems we want to take issue with, to advice we want to question, full of energy and promise.

Here, also, is the opportunity to use our own voices, our own language, in response to those who speak differently, think differently. Here is Karen McCarthy Woolf, quoted by The Poetry Society.

I wanted to integrate the two voices, but also to subvert or extend what the original writer was
saying. The cadences of the original determined to some degree the tone of the new text. [...] The
response line is intended to act as an asymmetric mirror of the original. You might have rhyme, assonance, repetition, or a variation. [...] The ‘coupling’ is a response to both prose poems and found poems – and to my own experience as a Jamaican-English hybrid Londoner. I think the impulse to unify seemingly disparate parts is part of a larger poetic.

The Poetry Society worksheet can be found here.

David also introduced the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition of community based photographs of the Lockdown 2020. I urge you to have a look at it if you have not already seen it.

The last time that this group met face to face, this time last year, was at the National Portrait Gallery. We long for the time when we will be face to face again, manoeuvring our pots of Earl Grey tea and deliberating between chocolate brownie and lemon drizzle. In the meantime, these groups on Zoom have been lifelines. And we have been inventive and compassionate. Jan told me how she has been writing weekly with a friend, the space both a motivation to write and a time for friendship through writing. It has kept her going, she told me. “It’s a comfortable place, It’s a world of words. It’s your own place where you can go to.”

We need those places. Theresa Gooda and her Sussex writers explored a sense of place. She writes “It turns out of course that place resonates more strongly than ever when we are ‘locked down’.”

Alison Jermak has circulated around her group, a wonderful on-line booklet of ideas for diary writing, remembering Anne Frank at this time.

Marjory Caine and her group wrote about winter weather on Saturday. As always, Marjory brought a treasure trove of resources to the group. I was only sorry not to be able to join them for sharing.

Marjory did, however, mention Gigantic Cinema A Weather Anthology edited by Alice Oswald and Paul Keegan. Since it was the second time I had heard the title recommended in as many days, I pass the recommendation on to you. Here’s a link to the Scottish Poetry Library’s review.

And I could not resist including Marjory’s prompt for a short-write:

‘A thunder-storm came on while we were at the inn, and Coleridge was running bare-headed to enjoy the commotion of the elements’

Write for 10 minutes on an experience, real or imagined or both, of winter weather. Place a character or two in the landscape/cityscape, ‘bare-headed’ and let them loose!

Thank you, Marjory! And thank you and good wishes to all of you who are still meeting and writing together. We are so lucky!

Love Writing

There’s no shortage of advice for writers from writers.

In interviews, blogs and newspaper articles we are able to learn from the published and the prize-winning. Sit down, stand up, write propped up in bed, we hear.

• Craft sentence by sentence (Andrew Cowan).

• Get the words down fast and then revise (Stephen King)

• Write what you know (Geraldine Brooks amongst many).

• Forget the boring old dictum "write about what you know". Instead, seek out an unknown yet knowable area of experience that's going to enhance your understanding of the world and write about that. (Rose Tremain).

We will take the advice that suits us. But what might we take and apply to our teaching?

I have begun thinking about this more deeply. Most writers are addressing an adult audience, most of whom want to be published. However, each one of us is a writer. Each person we teach should learn how writing works for them. I have been sifting through all this counsel to find the ideas that will inform our practice. We probably don’t need to take up Hilary Mantel’s  suggestion that we find ourselves an accountant. Anne Enright’s recommendation of whiskey alongside all her other advice might be an interesting addition to the Year 10 classroom but …

• Be kind to yourself, say Roddy Doyle and Kate DiCamillo, as do many other writers in their different ways.

• Love what you do, says Jeannette Winterson.

• Have fun, says Anne Enright.

Initially, I discounted this advice as irrelevant to the task of teaching writing. The current National Curriculum is unlikely to have much truck with such sentiments as being kind or loving what you do. As for having fun - please be serious. There are criteria to be met. I thought again.

Seriously.

Seriously, having fun, being kind to ourselves, loving what we do, sit at the centre of the writing workshop. We have become dominated by a curriculum overloaded with content and anxious about skills. On-line answers to remote learning emphasise rules and routines. A friend of mine lamented the impossibility of keeping her son focused on the deathly slow progress of a PowerPoint presentation for writing. Yet when she abandoned the prescribed course and went for a walk, weaving writing into the activity, the roles were reversed, her son calling her to wait, while he completed his task. 

Let us begin with our writers, whether adult or child. Place them at the centre of our teaching. Writing springs from safe spaces, mutual encouragement, universal celebrations.

When we find the ways in which we love writing, our writing grows. Let us be kind to ourselves and to each other. 

Happy new year!