Jeni Smith
‘But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it feel this way to you?’
Kazua Ishiguro, Nobel Prize acceptance speech 2017.
On Saturday, we had the loveliest morning of writing together in Norwich. Alicia is going to write about it so I will leave that to her. I just want to say that I feel lucky to belong to the group and to sometimes visit other groups where we write together. One of the great pleasures of these meetings is to hear other people’s writing, to see through their eyes for a moment, to be delighted with a particular turn of phrase or choice of word, to know that you had not thought of things in that way before, or to feel for a moment, yes, that is how it is for me, too.
The meetings are the most joyous form of teacher development I can think of. And one of the things that I always take away is the knowledge that all these different writer teachers are working away in their own schools and classrooms and making a difference to the children they work with. It is more than that. There is something nourishing about meeting and writing together, sharing our ideas and experiences from the classroom, musing on the use of a semi-colon or wrestling with a current implausible recommendation from an anonymous somewhere in the field of education. There is also something that is personally enriching, a particular kind of friendship, solidarity, affirmation and hopefulness.
There are fewer teachers’ writing groups in existence now than there were before the pandemic. They have been another one of its casualties, I fear. I would very much like there to be more. Just because they bring something very particular to the lives of teachers who join them.
If you would like to be a member of a teachers writing group, please do get in touch with us. Between us, we will do our very best to see whether we can find you a nearby group or help you to start one. Only two or three need to be there to get things going. Your group may remain a small one, but it may well grow and become important in your lives.
