What You Need To Keep Warm

I have been thinking about the place that writing can have in people’s lives.

I have said before that writing is a human activity. In fact, people are at the core of any writing, whether as writer or reader or subject. That seems to be overlooked by most recent directives about teaching writing. The emphasis on technical accuracy and grammatical knowledge, on textual features and such, has overshadowed what it means to write.

In our writing groups we experience directly the ways that writing transforms us, both individually and as a community.

We reflect on our own lives and those of others. We shape and re-shape thoughts and feelings. We travel into our hearts. We travel across the globe.

During our last Norwich Writing Teachers meeting we wrote in response to a poem written by Neil Gaiman for the UN Refugee Agency UK: What you need to keep warm. The Agency invited people across the world to send in drawings and paintings in response to the words and then created this video.

When we wrote, we thought of both physical and abstract things that warm us. Emily Rowe shared the video with her Year 5/ 6 class who are isolated at the moment and learning at a distance. One wrote about how hearing ‘Well done, that’s great,’ makes you feel warm. And here are more:

The warmth of a smile
Hugs and fire
A snuggle with grandad
Hot chocolate
Cups of tea
My hot water bottle
Friendship and family

Sometimes, even the warmth of a smile is hidden behind a face mask. That is why I would add the unexpected gift of words to my list of things that warm us.

There is a saying that firewood warms twice -once when you saw the logs, and again as it burns in the hearth. Perhaps words can warm three times, once as you write, twice as you give them, a third time as they are read.

A Creative Space

“It’s a feeling of happiness that knocks me clean out of adjectives. I think sometimes that the best reason for writing novels is to experience those four and a half hours after you write the final words.” Zadie Smith

One of the great pleasures of being part of a teachers’ writing group is hearing other people’s writing. Another, is experiencing the diversity of any group and all the many ideas and perceptions that arise from it: this reception teacher likes nothing better than to write alongside her class;  that one has been walking and drawing maps and writing with her son; another is, over time, finding a way to write  about a crucial relationship; this one loves a good list. I love the fact that we come to writing for different reasons and that when we share our writing and our approaches to writing, our teaching is the richer for it. This summer, Mikela Bond from one of our groups finished a novel.  Amazing! She has written a blog about the process which we have permission to share with you. I think that much that she has to say will chime with you, even if writing a novel is the last thing on your mind.

What seemed most important to her was the finding of a ‘creative space in which none of the other day to day demands mattered.’ In the first instance, she writes, this was something to do with well-being in the life of a busy teacher and parent. And then the novel took over. I like the way that it came to her as fragments. First a glimpse of a woman washing up, sunlight on soapsuds. Mikela had to find the space, often writing on her knee while one child or another was busy with Beavers or swimming lessons. She joined a workshop run by the Unthank School of Writing where much of the hard work of reading and revising took place, but I will let her tell you the story.

Read Mikela’s blogpost here.

What strikes me is how much of what she says echoes through our writing groups: well-being, notebooks filled with fragments, reading aloud and hearing the work of others; researching through books and place, carving out a space. Now, on Zoom, we gather together and children hover around us. One of our Norwich group joins us from a swimming pool car park, her damp son creeping into the back seat towards the end of the session. What thrills me is that this is good for each one of us, and good for our teaching.

A Gift of Words

At our Norwich Teachers’ Writing group this week we wrote about gifts. And we wrote gifts of words. For me, meeting with this group - and with other writing groups – is a gift.

Each time I sit down with teachers to write, I am overwhelmed with the pleasure of it. How good it has been, over the last year of isolations and zooming and lockdowns and remote learning, to sit by a screen and write alongside others on the screen, writing, by their screens.

Of course it is not the same as being side by side - and this year we’ve missed handing round the stollen - but there has been a calm; and an affirmation of our lives, alone and together.

It so happened that our group met this week on the first day of Hanukkah. The Chief Rabbi spoke on Thought for the Day that morning. (You can find it on the Today programme, BBC Radio 4, December 10th 2020, at 7.50am) He spoke about the seven words for ‘gift’ that exist in Hebrew. Each provides us with a different way of thinking about the nature of gifts and giving. A gift can be a blessing, a good wish; it can be an act of appreciative joy, given in the moment, in the present; another word denotes the gift for special occasions, a thoughtful gift; and the fourth word denotes a gift given to a good cause; the fifth is a similar gift, but unsolicited, another example of giving in the moment. Finally, Rabbi Mirvis spoke of a gift that takes time, effort and talent in the making. It draws people together. It is for a greater good. One such gift, this year, he said, has been the development of vaccines designed to prevent the spread of Covid 19.

We thought about John May’s ‘Six Things for Christmas’:

I wish to be given beautiful things this Christmas,
Beautiful but impossible.

It’s a poem that Jill Pirrie mentions in On Common Ground (1987) London: Hodder & Stoughton. She asks us to think of memories so dear to us that they occupy a special place. These can be given, as gifts to those who might share those memories. This year, when we will be sharing festivities with far fewer people, and when some people we know may well be alone, it may be that the words you send them could be the loveliest gift.

Writing Inside Out

I am sorry that I have not published anything here for so long. I have known I should. In April I experienced a life-changing event and have just not been able to find public words. I have written. Writing has remained my lifeline, but, until the last few days, I have not found the energy to write beyond myself. I think that kind of ebb and flow of writing and what we choose to write -or not - may be familiar to most of us. I hope that you have been able to find time to write for yourself. Perhaps you have used and enjoyed the regular writing prompts posted on the site . Have you had time to read Katie Kibbler’s wonderful account of her encounters and commitment to NWP teacher writing groups? If you haven’t already, read what she has to say.  Feel inspired by her!

More than ever, our groups of teacher writers, and those who are not yet part of a group, need the time and space to write, and we need each other. Writing together brings a kind of affirmation, inspiration and comfort that infuses our lives and our teaching. It would be good to hear news of what you have been writing, how you have been meeting. Most of our established groups are writing together by Zoom. Unexpectedly, the Zoom meeting for writers is remarkably different from the many other on-line meetings that you may have to deal with. Essentially, the on-line meeting for writing teachers has become, what one teacher described as ‘a sacred space’. It works so powerfully for our well-being and is, at the same time, ‘the best kind of CPD’. 

During the spring and summer, when teachers were teaching remotely to blank screens, dipping in and out of school, caring for the children of key workers, trying to home school our own children, we, in Norwich, found that our meetings were a space that was ours. I was able, home alone, to run a meeting every week, rather than monthly. And that has proved to be wonderful. People come and go according to commitments and timetables, but we are always there on a Thursday. Sometimes children join us -and that is a pleasure and a privilege. And I have found that we are learning even more about ourselves as writers and teachers of writing.

My usual approach to running a writing group is to combine adult focused activities alongside approaches and ideas that can be transferred to the classroom. I have always included in our meetings some focus on pedagogy or process. But during lockdown, I began choosing ideas and prompts that were designed with the group and our situation in mind. I felt that we just needed the space to write -and to hear other people’s writing, about our days, about what we have lost, and what we have found, pleasures and sadnesses. And there is always laughter. At some point I worried about the teaching part of this venture. Had we lost that element of our meetings? And that is when someone said that this was the best kind of CPD. The weekly commitment has allowed people to stay in the writing moment, and not feel they have to pick it up again after a month or more. A weekly commitment is not necessary, though people reported how they had more frequently gone back to their writing, revised it, developed it. Most importantly, they said that what they were learning for themselves, through writing themselves, was richer and more deeply embedded in their teaching than in other forms of professional development. It is what I have always known at some level. It is hard to capture. It encourages me to encourage you to write with others!

We learn to write from the inside out…

In Our Hands

With Toni Morrison’s words on the home page of the website, it was good to be reminded of our responsibility ‘to do language’; and to be reminded of so much that Toni Morrison wrote that faced up to self-pity and fear.  Since her death last year, I have had cause to read and re-read her Nobel Prize lecture, delivered in 1993 in which she speaks, again, about our responsibilities towards language. The speech is rich and complex. Each time I read it, I take something slightly different from it. The speech is framed by a parable, a frequently told story that Morrison shapes to her own ends. It tells of an old woman, blind, wise, and in this version, the daughter of slaves. A group of children visit the woman and one of them says, “Old woman, I hold in my hand a bird. Tell me whether it is living or dead.” The old woman does not answer immediately. She cannot see them, or whether or not there is a bird in the child’s hand. Have they come to mock her? What is their intention? Eventually, she answers,  “I don’t know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands.”

‘It is in your hands’.

It is their responsibility. Toni Morrison goes on to say that she reads the bird as language and the woman as a practiced writer. She thinks of language as a living thing, over which we can have control, and ‘mostly as agency – as an act with consequences.’ Language, she says,  is susceptible to death and in  the hands of those who would control and suppress, it is already dead but not without effect. ‘it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential. Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, fill baffling silences.’

Morrison imagines the woman thinking about language. She recognises that language can never live up to life once and for all. She sees its force in its reach for the ineffable. 

Word-work is sublime, she thinks, because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference – the way in which we are like no other life.

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

And then she gives the story another twist. She proposes that the children did not come to the woman in mockery but in genuine search for wisdom. They speak up:

 “You trivialize us and trivialize the bird that is not in our hands. Is there no context for our lives? No song, no literature, no poem full of vitamins, no history connected to experience that you can pass along to help us start strong? You are an adult. The old one, the wise one. Stop thinking about saving your face. Think of our lives and tell us your particularized world. Make up a story. Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created. We will not blame you if your reach exceeds your grasp; if love so ignites your words they go down in flames and nothing is left but their scald. Or if, with the reticence of a surgeon’s hands, your words suture only the places where blood might flow. We know you can never do it properly – once and for all. Passion is never enough; neither is skill. But try. For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don’t tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear’s caul. You, old woman, blessed with blindness, can speak the language that tells us what only language can: how to see without pictures. Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.”

We are not Toni Morrison. We are teachers. We write. Children are asking us about the world and about their future. We do have stories to tell. And we can make it possible for children to tell their stories. Together we can keep language alive;  do the word work.

It is in our hands.

Keep On Writing

I am learning, all over again, about the generosity and power of writing, alone and with others. I have been learning about writing all my life. I know it well and I am grateful. Writing has become an old friend, one who continues to surprise me; one who reminds me, gently, of what we have learned together. Writing was there when I fell in love and stood by me in dark times. Writing has helped me keep a record of my days, required me to focus, shown me how I can be a teacher, shown me what I think and helped me to discover more. Writing keeps me in touch. Writing allows me to create new possibilities. Writing steadies me. And when I write alongside others, I am enriched by their writing, by hearing our words on the air, learning new ways, new perspectives, acknowledging our shared humanity and our unique selves.  

Most of us, just now, have more time than usual to write. The need for writing, always there even at the best of times, is accentuated, suddenly acute. I have been moved to see how many of those I know have turned to writing as one way of engaging with this personal and worldwide crisis. 

A month or so ago I began to post ten-minute writing prompts on my Facebook page. I was encouraged to do so by a friend who is not a teacher and would not, I think, describe herself as a writer. She was finding it useful, she said, to write. I have continued to post these prompts. They are on this website also. And sometimes I wonder what on earth I think I am doing. Who am I kidding? More junk.

But I notice quiet responses. A like. A simple comment. A note of thanks: ‘I am loving this 10 minutes a day of writing. It's 10 minutes’ sanity.’ Another friend sends me a beautiful piece of writing about necklaces. I love it. I think there is a poem within it. She sends me the poem, the first draft and the second. We are connected as we are usually connected when we write together. Perhaps even closer. 

And then something else happens. People are beginning to write beneath the prompts. It began with a prompt to write about a recipe –and a photograph of some of my cookery books on the shelf. Crank’s Recipe Book, amongst the line-up, provoked a memory of vegetable crumble, cheese jacks (baked that very day), homity pie. On Easter Sunday, an invitation to write about eggs brought photographs of lovely Sussex Light Chickens and a small tousled headed boy with his stash of chocolate. On Bank Holiday, memories came of other Easter Mondays. And one, glorious, exuberant, personal account of the writer’s  annual family celebration: painted eggs, the woods, children showered in pink blossom, the wild throwing and batting of eggs ‘to smithereens’, then ‘All children must then have their turn with the bats until our party breaks up- the smallest children and their mothers or fathers return home while the rest of us walk on to catch up with important less frivolous news of each other. Next year it will be very special indeed ...’ The writer said she felt better for having let it all out. And we, the readers, were enriched and amused and strengthened by her words. 

This is why we meet to write together. This is why we learn to teach children about writing. Go well and go safely, dear fellow writing teachers. Keep writing. Ten minutes a day. Write with a friend. Tell yourself. Tell each other.

Writing Groups...Remotely

“Thanks for joining this morning. [It] was really nice to see everyone who made it, and so lovely to do some writing and laugh and share ideas.”

“Thank you so much for joining in with today’s writing session in your various ways. It was wonderful to write in your company.”

Group leaders, David Marshal and Alison Jermak, sign off at the end of their respective writing group meetings. At a distance. It is lovely to write and laugh and share ideas. It is wonderful to write in the company of others.

I feel sure that many of you will have sought out a time during the day when you are able to write. We are discovering, in new ways, the power that writing can have in our lives; the way that writing works within us and takes us beyond ourselves. We are also discovering the great need we have to be in touch. In touch. We may not be near, or even touch, especially if we live alone. But we may be in touch. And the great pleasure of written and voiced communication is brought into sharp focus when closeness is denied. Alison and David are among a growing number of NWP group leaders who are finding ways to create writing workshops, writing meetings that allow us to hear our words, and the words of others, on the air.

These two leaders have been able to use Zoom to create their groups. Simon Wrigley, I know, ran his group last Saturday through e-mail. Alison accommodated both.  I envy those who are able to hear poems and prose read aloud and to share the thoughtfulness and the laughter. I have loved the group contact that is generated and the conversations that have arisen. Several weeks ago, a long-standing writing group to which I belong was cancelled for non-pandemic reasons. On the verge of lockdown, I think we felt the loss keenly. Rather tentatively, I began a virtual writing weekend, imagining the arrivals, the crunch of wheels on gravel, Radio 3 in the lit kitchen, our host asking whether we would like tea, or are we ready for a beer? I set writing prompts at appropriate times. During the weekend we quietly exchanged e-mailed conversations. We exchanged writing. Friends who would not have been able to be there in person were able to join us. Those of you who belong to writing groups know just how nourishing and inspiring they are. They are deeply human.

What next?

You could initiate a group, a trio, a pair of you, who would write together. Start with some shared prompts and see where this takes you. Alison and David kept to the pattern of regular groups: words, a short writing activity, a longer more considered piece of writing. If you are starting a new group, you may like to begin with just one short starter and then time for a longer piece of writing. You can decide. There are daily short prompts on this website. There are many more ideas in the Exercises section and in the archived, original website which you can access on the home page. Alison and David drew upon some of the brilliant resources that are available to us on line. David used a session from the Arvon 5 day short story challenge.

Alison chose a poem from Anthony Wilson’s wonderful website. If you are not already signed up for that, I recommend it.

Blue sky between clouds

I have been thinking of all my writing friends – those that I already know and those I am yet to meet. I am hoping that you are well and that you have managed to allow writing to be present somewhere in the new rhythms of your life. I find that, even if I simply write down the bare bones of my day, it helps to anchor me when all else seems adrift.

Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary: “I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down.” Writing the everyday and the ordinary, captures for me the extraordinary.

And this morning a writing teacher sent me the link to Kate Clanchy’s poetry prompt of the day on Twitter. Frank O’Hara’s poem Today just hit the spot: that celebration of the things that populate our world:

Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas!
You really are beautiful! Pearls,
harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins! all
the stuff they've always talked about

still makes a poem a surprise!
These things are with us every day
even on beachheads and biers. They
do have meaning. They're strong as rocks.

There is a sudden proliferation of such prompts and you will find those that work for you. I am reminded that it is nearly April and that it is the poetry equivalent of National Novel Writing Month. It is worth a go at http://www.napowrimo.net.  

There is so much to talk about!

What I really want to think about this week is the blue sky. The opportunity that stands before us at the moment. Last week, as I thought of teachers stepping forward to prepare work for children at home and to care for others at school I began to wonder what I would have done with my own children, if they had been directed to stay at home. I am not sure they would have taken kindly to daily maths and English.

What would be important? What would I be wanting them to learn? The general coverage of what is beginning to be called ‘home schooling’ reveals a conceptualisation of education, of what school means, that fills me with dismay. That sense that it is ‘done unto’ children rather than children being willing partners in the venture.

In many homes children’s experiences will be rich and challenging. They will have the chance to take hold of their own education and to interact with adults in important ways. Many more will have a different experience. And gaps will widen.

There will be no exams and no testing. Things will not fall apart. We can get to the nub of things. What do we mean by education? What will benefit us all, adults and children, wherever we are in the coming months, and then, maybe, beyond?

Let us seize the chance. Let’s think about what our vision is for the education of children. We have the opportunity to consider it anew; to think carefully about how children might best spend their time. We can think about the children and young people we teach, whom we know well. What are the things that will enrich their lives; help them develop; be fundamental into their becoming the persons they have the capacity to be?

Despite the circumstances, this seems exciting to me. If I am to understand this correctly, no one (except teachers) seems to be expecting any teaching or learning to be going on. So here we are. 

What is it about your own discipline that you love and wish to share with those you teach? What would you like to include, freely, in your teaching without having to squeeze it between the cracks? Perhaps we can begin with writing. 

Now is the time to re-imagine education. 

A Good Time To Be Writing

Welcome to the website and to this, newly formed, Director’s Page. As you may know, we have had to create a new website to support the activities of NWP members and all teachers who have an interest in writing.  Theresa and Stephen, our trusty editor and website manager, are migrating the old site to the new and in the meantime you can still access all the resources on the original ten-year-old site.

At this moment, with the world turned upside down, writing is more important than ever. Writing has always been a source of solace and reflection. It allows us to remember and to record the moment. We find solutions to problems when we write and we discover ourselves. It is a distraction and it brings sharp focus. It is a way of making sense of things when that seems well-nigh impossible. It helps us find a way through. Writing puts us in touch. It puts us in touch with ourselves and in touch with others. When hugging is out of bounds and we are placing ourselves at several broomsticks away from each other, writing has the capacity to bring us closer.

Writing also may have a meditative quality. With that in mind, we are going to post a prompt a day, just to help you establish a daily, nurturing writing habit. There are so many ways in which writing can work wonders for us as individuals and as members of a community. I thought we might begin with thinking about a journal of the times we are living through.

Recently, a writing weekend with beloved friends was cancelled and we conducted a virtual weekend. During the weekend, one of our group, who was able to join us from France, responded to some Natalie Goldberg prompts and it struck me how useful it was for her individually, but perhaps even more so for those who read her work. It seemed to me that we can begin to make sense of what is happening through writing.  And that some kind of record of what are being repeatedly called ‘unprecedented’ [that word is driving me to distraction] times would be worth having.

Here is Monica Melinsky on the contents of her freezer:

We can't live without 

The well-stocked freezer: celeriac and pea soup, chicken curry with the spices carefully ground, two always popular orange and almond cakes, gluten free, garden tomato soup ( it was a glut crop in...2017..oh dear... ), figs pureed and more figs roasted, haricot beans, more figs, chestnut purée, more soup, useful items in boxes with sadly no longer any labels, must chuck now. Frozen egg yolks saved from the meringue last summer? I think I can live without them. Enough to fill our ark- for how long? Let's just hope it doesn't come to that.

And a more personal response to the same [Natalie Goldberg] prompt:

What I can't live without

I couldn't live without a cup of china and Darjeeling tea. Apparently as soon as my daughter heard my key in the door my first words were, 'Put the kettle on,...'

But I can't live without Whatsapp. We are now all confined: in three countries with European borders closing today and all flights cancelled. Never before in our life-times. Outside my window the village is silent, no traffic passing, no planes, neighbours indoors, no social contact permitted. The world is drawing in. Life is changing forever. We are still a family. But I can live without them if I can still speak to them.

It made me think of the Mass Observation project which collected information about the lives of men and women from 1937 to the early 1950s and then again from the 1980s. 

http://www.massobs.org.uk

It seemed to me that we could write to record these times that we are living through and capture the varied, unexpected ways in which we do so. 

And we are teachers. Here is an opportunity for us to allow ourselves to write, just for our own purposes. No guilt. We are teachers. Through writing for ourselves we will continue to learn about teaching writing; about writing alongside our students; about how we can best work with them as they write and how what we say and how we respond can help student writers  grow.

However you choose to write, I wish you well. It seems to me that writing, and drawing, are essential human practices which will enrich and expand our lives. And perhaps steady them.

Jeni Smith