NAWE Writing in Education - Spring 2022

Interested in contributing?

We invite NAWE members to write on the subject of creative writing in education - in schools, adult education and community settings. We encourage you to think broadly on this topic and address any issue relating to the development of a space for creative writing in the education system. Please note, it is developmental work that we wish to highlight, not self-promotion. It may be useful to think about the kinds of articles most useful to your teaching and practice.

Submission deadlines: Summer 2022: 1 August (published September) Winter 2022: 21 November (published mid January) Spring 2023 (Conference Edition): 3 April (published mid May) For submission guidelines please refer to: www.nawe.co.uk/writing-in-education/nawe-magazine/submissions.html Writing in Education Team: Editor: Lisa Koning, publications@nawe.co.uk Reviews: Matthew Tett, reviews@nawe.co.uk Advertisement Enquiries: publications@nawe.co.uk

Photo on cover produced

by Virginia Barker and Julia Byrne, with permission provided by Jane Moss.

Photo on page 3 from Pixabay.

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Writing in Education is the members magazine for the National Association of Writers in Education (NAWE) All work is copyrighted to the author or artist.

All rights reserved. No part of this magazine may be used or reproduced without permission from the publisher.

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A word from the Editor

Welcome

We have such a collection of articles in this edition of Writing in Education. The conference is such a highlight in the NAWE calendar and I’m so pleased that our members’ magazine is able to support this valued event. I often come away from the sessions wanting to know more, to continue the dialogues that have only just begun, to explore in more detail the interesting ideas and concepts presented. And that was where the notion came from to have a special edition of Writing in Education with a focus on the conference and the sessions presented.

I must thank our many contributors to the conference and those who have accompanied their session with an article.

We have some excellent articles following on from our Renewal and Resilience Conference. There are just too many articles for me to mention them all here, but I’m sure you’ll find something to capture your interest. The wonderful image on our cover was provided by Jane Moss and accompanies her article on Embrace The Anarchy, co-written with Caleb Parkin and Liz Cashdan.

I’m keen to explore the idea of having special topics for some of the editions of Writing in Education. If you have any thoughts on what you’d like included, please do get in touch. For the next issue I’d like to explore the notion of the Writers’ Group. As writers, getting together with others to share our work, is a very logical and sensible idea. I know from my own personal experience, my writers group has become an important part of my writing life - not only do they provide me with honest and valuable advice on my work, but they are the people I turn to when I need support and encouragement to keep going. But I also know that not all writers groups are the same - they come in all different types, sizes and forms - and what works for one person won’t work for another. If you had experiences of being a part of a writers group - please consider sharing both the good and the bad. Writing in Education is our members magazine - so if you have something you’d like to contribute, whether a creative piece or article, please do submit via our submission page on the website. It doesn’t need to be related to our special topic; we are open to a range of submissions that support writers in education (in any educational setting).

Finally, if you’d like to respond on anything you’ve read in Writing in Education, then we do have our Letters to the Editor Section. And it’s always great to hear what is happening with other members, so please email me if you have news to share.

, Lisa

Best wishes

publications@nawe.co.uk Guidance on submitting to Writing in Education can be found on the NAWE website: https://www.nawe.co.uk/writing-in-education/nawe-magazine/submissions.html Writing in Education 3

Contents Editorial A word from the Editor

page 3

NAWE News Chair’s Report Director’s Report HE Committee Chair’s Column Writing in Practice - Principal Editor’s Column AAWP (Australasia) Update AWP (US) Report EACWP Update Lapidus Members’ News Letters to the Editor Conference 2022

page 5 page 6 page 8 page 9 page 11 page 13 page 14 page 15 page 16 page 16 page 18

Writing Through Photographs: Pauline Rowe’s reflects on MaxLiteracy during 2021 page 39 Our Fear of ‘Reading Wrong’: Elena Traina discusses challenges when teaching Creative Writing in English as a Second Language page 42 Digital Storytelling: Antonia Liguori and Alison Mott consider digital storytelling in formal and non-formal education page 47 Scan Rave: Sunni Brown Wilkinson considers the party that is poetric meter and scansion page 51 Rooms of Whose Own: Sonja Frenzel reflects on an eco-poetical perspective on renewal and resilience through writerly praxis page 53

Articles & Contributions Poetry In Motion: Anne Taylor discusses harnessing movement, awareness and expressive writing for creativity and resilience page 21 Embrace the Anarchy: Caleb Parkin, Jane Moss and Liz Cashdan share their experiences with inclusive practices when using Zoom page 23 Connecting Voices: Fiona Linday reflects on this Conference 2022 panel discussion on creative writing communities during lockdown page 25 Renga for Resilience: Mel Parks discusses her collaborative poetry approach and using Renga to unite page 29 Collaboration, Fragmentation and Involving the Absent Writer: Amina Alyal and Oz Hardwick explore visual and textual stimuli as prompts for collaborative writing which takes participants beyond their individual expectations. page 32

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Reviews

A selection of book reviews

page 57

Chair’s Report

NAWE NEWS

After two years of COVID and lockdown and now the problems we are about to face with the impact it has had on lives, we are aware the world continues to turn in ways which continue to challenge us. Only a couple of weeks ago, a couple of young Ukrainians who have come to stay for a wee while, presented me with a copy of this: It’s a book by Taras Hryhorovych Shevchenko also known as Kobzar, a nineteenth century Ukrainian poet, writer, artist, public and political figure. Extraordinary that they should bring a book of poetry as a celebration of their culture, and yet not so strange because poetry, writing, crosses borders in that common language we all of us at NAWE understand.

We live in an often troubled world and one of the things that holds us together is the work of writers, you, all of us, who remember the past, live and write in the present for the future. Long may all of you continue to do so; writers are the chroniclers of today for tomorrow.

Since taking over as Chair from Jonathan Davidson at the AGM in November 2021, I have come to realise NAWE’s role in supporting our members as writers in education. But at the same time, I have also become aware of the hard work being carried out on your behalf. We recently held the 2022 Conference, Renewal & Resilience and I was astonished at the sheer effort of everyone in the team, Serpahima Kennedy, Fiona Mason, Sophie Flood, Philippa Johnston and Lisa Koning. But a special mention must go to Seraphima because she is the without whom in the conference equation.

This was my first conference as Chair and seeing behind the scenes too was an eye opener.

The title itself, Renewal & Resilience was inspired because of the troubled couple of years we have all endured but continue to be resilient as we move into a new era. Having chaired the session on Know your Rights with Nicola Solomon (Society of Authors) and Lesley Gannon (Writers’ Guild of Great Britain), I realised that we had NAWE, the Society of Authors and the Writers’ Guild all in one room together. This took foresight, thought and persuasion by Seraphima to make happen. But then the UK Arts Councils Literature Panel brought Sarah Crown (ACE), Paul McVeigh (ACNI), Lleucu Siencyn (Literature Wales) and Alan Bett (Creative Scotland) to the same conference table for the second year running, and this was a real coup. It reveals the strength of NAWE in the national debates. That’s when I began to realise the great deal of care and attention that goes into the conference preparation. From the plenary panels like Poetics of Home with Sarah Howe, Nina Mingya Powles, Jenny Wong and Jinhao Xie; Making Literature Events Accessible with Hannah Hodgson and Kim Moore; Whose Playing Field? Creating an Inclusive Literary Culture that Works for all Writers with Sharmilla Beezmohun, Nathalie Teitler and Rishi Dastidar, and of course our special guests, Hannah Lowe and Thomas Glave; the conference sessions were inspired, thank you everyone. It really was an absolutely superb event. Being behind the scenes to witness how this evolved helped me to understand the role NAWE plays on behalf of its members. We are distinct and different in many ways, with our specific brief for ‘writers in education’, but we are very much an important and vital part of the writing community.

Many things are happening right now to ensure the success of NAWE; issues from funding to the next conference continue to occupy the team. And a question arose; did everyone like the conference being in the Spring? We would love to know so don’t be shy in saying. Also don’t be shy in letting me know of any innovations, ideas and thoughts you might have. NAWE is your organisation and we do our best to accommodate that idea.

Stay safe and stay well everyone. We are now into Spring and summer beckons.

Andrew Melrose, Chair NAWE

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NAWE NEWS Director’s Report

When social media timelines fill up quickly with screenshots of poems, you know that something momentous has taken place. And so it was in late February 2022, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Among the distressing scenes of people fleeing, there were screenshots of poems: Wisława Szymborska’s ’The End and the Beginning’, Czeslaw Milosz’s ‘A Song on the End of the World’, and a number of poems from Ilya Kaminsky’s ‘Deaf Republic’.

In April, Kaminsky himself shared an image of people planting purple and yellow pansies in what looked like a roadside flowerbed in Kharkiv. The image had originally been posted on Twitter by a Ukrainian media organisation, with the caption (in Ukrainian) roughly translated as: ‘Kharkiv is heroic, that’s for sure but also surreal, as always.’ Kaminsky’s post numbered the bombardments and the dead, ‘Today: bombardments in Kharkiv,’ he said. ‘4 people died.

And yet, these good folks are planting the flowers on the street corner.’

Luck and pansies. Heavy artillery and street corners. Someone will have to clean up, and someone will have to plant the flowers. In Kharkiv, such care of public spaces appears to be a sign of hope, of resistance. In the UK, where we are living mostly in safety, the coming of spring has jarred against these images of people running for their lives and handing their babies over crowds of people in crowded train stations.

I can’t delete from my mind the images of women with children the same age as mine, handing them over the heads of passengers, writing addresses on their chests in black ink.

But I am aware that our collective international attention and empathy seems to be accessed more readily by pictures of people fleeing Kyiv than Kabul. For once the whataboutery on Twitter had a point: what about refugees from Afghanistan who came to the UK last summer and were still in hotels? What about those left behind? What about the children starving in Yemen? What about the talk of pushing back refugee boats from our own shores? Why do some lives seem to be more valuable than others?

The answers are both immediately obvious and deeply complex: there is great discomfort.

Within that discomfort, if you are a writer, is a call to action: a need to write in response, to organise, to arrange letters and statements of solidarity. And if you are a writer educator, there is a responsibility around how to handle the subject in classrooms and community centres and lecture halls, spaces in which creative writing can be a means of processing complex emotions.

How do we write about war? How do we help others give voice to what they’ve witnessed and felt? How can we write at all, in the face of such uncertainty and violence? What answers do we have for children and young people trying to make sense of what they’re seeing while still reeling from the pandemic? What is our role as writers and educators to help give voice to these things?

This last question is one of the reasons why the work done by the NAWE membership is so valuable, and why I look forward each month to reading members’ accounts of creative writing teaching practice in so many different settings. I know many members have been setting up literary and fundraising initiatives, as well as offering practical support to groups and to individuals fleeing violence and repression.

At NAWE, we’ve been thinking about our response both to the crisis in Ukraine, and to the wider refugee crisis. We would like our response to be long lasting, meaningful and practical.

With this in mind, I would be really interested in hearing directly from any members who are involved in supporting refugees, from Ukraine or elsewhere, to think through useful steps that might assist either refugee writers in the UK, or those of you with established communities of practice on this topic. Please do email me at s.kennedy@nawe.co.uk.

We’re also thinking deeply about the issues raised in several of our panels at the NAWE conference, especially those in the panel with Hannah Hodgson and Kim Moore in ‘Making 6 Writing in Education

NAWE NEWS Literature Accessible’, and ‘Whose Playing Field? Creating an Inclusive Literature Sector for All Writers’. We’re asking ourselves how we can take these ideas on board in planning future work, and we look forward to sharing our plans with you over the coming months.

A few other updates: • By the time you read this, our next Membership Survey will also be out in the ether: we hope to run these regularly throughout the year, so don’t worry if you miss it – there will be another opportunity!

• The next NAWE conference will take place in March 2023, so watch this space for more info.

• We recently participated in a British Academy meeting discussing the results of REF 2021, and the results data which will be released on 10 May. Together with the BA, we’re thinking about the most useful ways of analyzing and sharing this information. If you have any success stories you would like to share with us, please email me at s.kennedy@nawe.co.uk with ‘REF data’ in the title.

• We’ll be taking part in English Shared Futures, the big conference bringing together English Literature, Language and Creative Writing, on 8/9 July 2022 in Manchester! Check out the full programme and join us at: https:// englishsharedfutures.co.uk/ And finally, we’re delighted to introduce Bea Colley as our new Participation Producer! You can read an introduction from Bea herself on p.xxx. Bea will be working with members, and with our senior team, to shape our activities over the coming months. We’re really delighted to appoint Bea, and look forward to her getting stuck in.

Enjoy the magazine, and I look forward to reading all about your practice in the next edition of Writing in Education.

Seraphima Kennedy Director NAWE

Writing in Education 7

NAWE NEWS

HE Committee Chair’s Column Having conducted a survey on the different way institutions interpret their regulations on creative PhDs, I attended a panel at this year’s conference with Rachel Carney, Nikolai Duffy and Kim Moorein in an effort to try and get more information on the expectations of Post Graduate Study – and a picture is beginning to emerge. I am not proposing we prepare a Benchmark Statement on PhDs but a growing list of recommendations is beginning to have some consistency.

The conference allowed members of the HE Committee to engage with what is going on in the NAWE community.

The reports are that it was both successful and extremely informative. The Committee are mindful that NAWE has a wide remit and that Higher Education is only a small part of its engagement, so it’s good to be aware of what is going around in the country.

I was particularly taken by the Panel on Know your Rights with Nicola Solomon (Society of Authors) and Lesley Gannon (Writers’ Guild of Great Britain). The information was useful and informative (and the session well attended). All of us writers have come across ‘rights’ issues many times in our lives. It is astonishing how liberal people and institutions can be with our work. So it’s good to see the hard work that goes on to protect that work. Perhaps this could be something NAWE look at again in the near future – especially with the emergence of the ‘online’ content.

Finally, while we are easing into Spring and the Summer will soon be upon us, it continues to be the strangest of times.

A toe in the water still reveals the water is cold, but getting warmer. And things on the NAWE front are heating up as we move into the next, post-pandemic phase. What have we learned, did we learn anything or are we just moving on?

These are questions we will address in the coming months because I suspect it will be a long time before everything is back to what we knew to be normal. If anyone would like to write with comments, I would love to hear them.

Andrew Melrose HE Committee Chair, NAWE

HE Committee: References and Links Advice on lodging doctorates and embargos https://www.nawe.co.uk/writing-in-education/writing-at-university/research/lodging-theses.html Directory of Creative Writing External Examiners (requiring your NAWE membership password) https://www.nawe.co.uk/membership/members-area/external-examiners.html NAWE Creative Writing Research Benchmark 2018 https://www.nawe.co.uk/writing-in-education/writing-at-university/research.html

NAWE incoming HE Committee members list https://www.nawe.co.uk/writing-in-education/writing-at-university/he-network/he-committee.html NAWE guidance on short-term academic contracts https://www.nawe.co.uk/writing-in-education/writing-at-university/contracts.html

OU/NAWE events (audio recorded) on Creative Writing and the REF and Creative Writing PhDs http://www.open.ac.uk/arts/research/contemporary-cultures-of-writing/events/contemporary-cultures-writing-seminarsspring-2018 QAA Creative Writing Benchmark (teaching) 2016 https://www.qaa.ac.uk/docs/qaa/subject-benchmark-statements/sbs-creative-writing-16.pdf?sfvrsnd4e2f781_10 Writing in Practice - submissions https://www.nawe.co.uk/writing-in-education/writing-at-university/writing-in-practice/submissions.html

8 Writing in Education

NAWE NEWS

Welcome to NAWE’s new Participation Producer

Bea Colley is a freelance Literature Programmer and Producer. She has worked in the literature sector for over 15 years, supporting writers in their careers and programming and producing literature and poetry festivals. She worked at Southbank Centre in London for 10 years where she set up numerous projects alongside underrepresented writers and also worked at the Poetry Society and the Reader Organisation. She has strong connections with many of the UK’s literature development agencies and was Co-Chair of New Writing South until 2020. Bea is really looking forward to getting to know the members at NAWE and will be working on an exciting new programme of activities to support the professional development of creative writing facilitators.

Writing in Practice Principal Editors’ Column Principal Co-Editors’ Column Kate North writes: I have been working on compiling Writing in Practice 8 alongside the wonderful Issue Editors, Andy Melrose, Sue Dymoke and Michael Green. It is set to be an exciting issue with a guest article from the Costa Book Award winning poet Mary Jean Chan. Issue 8 will be out in early summer and submissions for issue 9 are now open until Monday 5th September. Please find a link to the submissions portal here: https://www.nawe.co.uk/writing-in-education/writing-at-university/writing-inpractice/submissions.html It is my pleasure to also announce that Francis Gilbert will be joining me as Principal Co-Editor from Issue 9 onwards. I am grateful for his willingness to take this on and the journal will benefit greatly from his experience. We have recently grown our college of Peer Reviewers also, which has been very helpful in terms of widening our pool of expertise. We are still open to accepting more Peer Reviewers, so please get in touch if you are interested in this.

Francis Gilbert writes: ‘I’ve been a long-standing member of NAWE, and have always loved its inclusive, rigorous, imaginative approach to the teaching of creative writing. I have published three novels, a number of memoirs about teaching, and many educational articles, both academic and more journalistic. I am honoured to co-edit the academic journal for NAWE along with Kate North, and hope to bring my experience as a creative writer, editor, teacher and fan of the journal to bear upon my joint editorship. I think Kate and I are very much on the same page about what we are looking for: sparky, original articles which challenge and provoke. We’re both avid creative writers, so we are keen to see some creative writing woven into the articles, or possibly pieces which use creative writing as a form of research (Cowan 2020), which is a burgeoning area. I have just changed the assessment rubric for my MA in Creative Writing and Education at Goldsmiths so that it embraces the idea of ‘creative writing as research’; using poetry, plays, stories and even multimodal forms such as podcasts/films to delve deeply into a topic, to answer research questions.

This said, we are going to be sticklers for things being suitably referenced and research-informed. I mention this because it indicates where my thinking is at with the journal, which aims to be cutting-edge and research-based. But do get in touch with us if you have any questions.’

Reference Cowan, A. (2020). ‘No additional information required’: Creative writing as research writing. TEXT: Journal of writing and writing courses, 24(1): 1-20. https://doi.org/10.52086/001c.17723 Writing in Education 9

Writing in Practice - Volume 7 published January 2022 Principal Editor: Derek Neale, Volume 7 co-editors: Derek Neale and Josie Barnard Issue editors: Josie Barnard, Yvonne Battle-Felton, Oz Hardwick, Amy Spencer ISSN 2058-5535 www.nawe.co.uk/writing-in-practice The journal publishes scholarly articles about practice and process that contextualize, reflect on and respond to existing knowledge and understanding. Volume 7 is a Special Issue on Multimodal Writing with guest co-editor Josie Barnard.

This issue’s guest article is by Maggie Butt.

Volume 8 - submissions are now closed with publication due in late 2022 This volume will contain articles on the writing process, practice led research in creative writing and interdisciplinary research. It includes a guest article from Costa Award winning poet Mary Jean Chan.

Volume 9 - A call will go out in late Spring, to be published in Winter 2023 We are looking for academically rigorous research into creative writing, appropriately referenced and engagingly written. We are happy to receive articles that reflect on practice and process, explore writing research in interdisciplinary contexts, engage in critical analysis of writing pedagogy, explore cultural and global challenges such as diversity and inclusion and ecological sustainability through creative writing.

Creative Writing itself is welcomed when integral to an article. Submissions should be 4-10,000 words long and include an abstract of up to 200 words. All submissions will be anonymously peer reviewed. See the contributor guidelines to submit your work via the submissions link: www.nawe.co.uk/writing-in-education/writing-at-university/writing-in-practice.html If you are interested in acting as peer reviewer for the journal, please send details of your expertise to the editorial board, c/o: admin@nawe.co.uk Writing in Practice is an open access, online journal that complements Writing in Education, the NAWE magazine distributed to its members. As the UK Subject Association for Creative Writing, NAWE aims to further knowledge, understanding and support research, teaching and learning in the subject at all levels.

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NAWE NEWS

AAWP Report (Australasia) Dear NAWE readers.

My name is Julia Prendergast. I am the current Chair of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP). I oversee the Prizes and Partnerships portfolio. I am inordinately passionate about this portfolio, not only because of the opportunities we provide for writers and translators, but also for the partnerships we have forged with publishers and writing communities in Australia, and beyond. I am supported in managing the activities of this portfolio by the AAWP executive body, broadly, but in particular by the prizes team: Dr Katrina Finlayson and Dr Daniel Juckes.

As we have just launched our 2022 suite of prizes, I thought I’d take this opportunity to share some of our Prizes and Partnerships initiatives. This portfolio abounds in positive energy generated by outreach and engagement. We provide publication pathways and networking avenues for writers and translators, with a particular focus on facilitating opportunities for emerging writers and under-represented voices.

AAWP / WESTERLY Life Writing Prize

Chapter One Prize

This prize has just been launched and will run for the first time in 2022. The prize is offered in partnership with Westerly Magazine. We welcome submissions of autobiography, biography, memoir, and essays. We celebrate Life Writing as a rumination upon memory and experience and encourage creative and hybrid approaches. The prize is open to writers at all stages of their journey; emerging and established writers are welcome to enter. The prize recognises excellence in nonfiction, creative nonfiction and hybrid modes of storytelling. Hybrid storytelling is broadly conceived as storytelling that crosses traditional boundaries of nonfiction and creative nonfiction and/or is experimental in form. The winner will receive a $500 cash prize, a oneyear subscription to Westerly,

This was the very first prize we established. This opportunity is offered in partnership with the University of Western Australia Publishing (UWAP), a highly respected Australian Go8 publisher. The prize is aimed at emerging writers. It is open to authors who have written a poetry collection, a literary novel, a short story collection, or a hybrid work, crossing genre boundaries.

The winner receives a $500 cash prize, as well as fullysubsidised fees to attend the AAWP’s annual conference (held in November, each year). The AAWP judge’s report is sent to UWAP, together with the winner’s manuscript, and UWAP agree to assess the manuscript as a matter of priority. Entries should not exceed 50 lines (poetry) or 5000 words (prose).

Writing in Education 11

NAWE NEWS AAWP/UWRF Translators’ Prize This is our newest prize, offered in partnership with Ubud Writers and Readers Festival (UWRF). The prize is open to translators at any stage of their career. The winner receives a ticket to UWRF, accommodation for the duration of the festival, and up to $1000 towards economy airfares. In addition, the winner receives a one-year membership to the AAWP, as well as fullysubsidised conference fees to attend our annual conference. The winning entry will be considered for publication in Meniscus Literary Journal. Entries must be no more than 30 lines (poetry) or 3000 words (prose).

Entrants can translate their own work or the work of others, into English. Entries must be accompanied by a ‘Translator’s Statement of Intention’ (up to 400 words). The aim of this prize is to promote the work of under-represented writers to a broader “English-using” audience—to celebrate the art of translation by building both local and global writing communities from within our broad geographical region.

AAWP / UWRF Emerging Writers’ Prize This prize is offered in partnership with Ubud Writers and Readers Festival (UWRF). The prize is open to emerging writers of fiction or poetry. The prize includes a ticket to UWRF, accommodation for the duration of the festival, and $500 towards economy airfares. The winner receives a one-year membership to the AAWP, as well as fully-subsidised conference fees to attend our annual conference. The winning entry will be considered for publication in Meniscus Literary Journal. Entries should not exceed 30 lines (poetry) or 3000 words (prose).

AAWP/ASSF Emerging Writers’ Short Story Prize This prize is offered in partnership with the Australian Short Story Festival (ASSF). The prize is aimed at emerging writers. The winner receives a ticket to the Australian Short Story Festival (held annually in October), as well as economy airfares, to and from

12 Writing in Education

the festival, and accommodation, for the duration of the festival. The winner also receives fully-subsidised conference fees to attend the AAWP’s annual conference.

The winning entry will be considered for publication in Meniscus Literary Journal. Entries can be in any style or genre but should not exceed 3000 words.

Full details of all of our prizes are available at: https:// www.aawp.org.au/news/opportunities/ The AAWP community wishes our NAWE friends good health and positive energy. We warmly welcome submissions to our suite of prizes from the NAWE community.

Julia Prendergast Julia Prendergast is a writer of short and long-form fiction.

She lives and works in Melbourne, Australia, on unceded Wurundjeri land. Julia’s novel, The Earth Does Not Get Fat, was published in 2018 and longlisted for the Indie Book Awards for debut fiction. Her short stories have been recognised and published: Lightship Anthology International Short Story Competition (UK), Ink Tears International Short Story Competition (UK), Glimmer Train International Short Story Competition (US), Séan Ó Faoláin International Short Story Competition (IE), TEXT, Elizabeth Jolley Prize, Josephine Ulrick Prize (AU). Julia’s short story collection is forthcoming (October 2022).

Julia is Chair of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP), the peak academic body representing the discipline of Creative Writing in Australasia. She is Senior Lecturer and Discipline Coordinator at Swinburne University.

Julia is a practice-led researcher—an enthusiastic supporter of transdisciplinary, open and collaborative research practices, with a particular interest in neuropsychoanalytic approaches to writing and creativity. Her research has appeared in various publications including New Writing (UK), TEXT (AU), Testimony Witness Authority: The Politics and Poetics of Experience (UK).

NAWE NEWS

AWP Report (US)

The Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) is excited to announce the promotion of Miranda González to director of membership. Miranda holds an MFA from the University of Texas at El Paso and has taught English in various capacities throughout the course of her career. She joined AWP in 2020. In transition into the director of membership role, Miranda shares: “I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to serve AWP’s members and the creative writing community as a whole.

I look forward to building on AWP’s long legacy of helping writers and to finding new ways to improve the resources and services we offer.”

In other news, this past March, the 2022 AWP Conference & Bookfair was hosted in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and online. AWP welcomed 6,000 attendees for the return of an in-person event, as well as hosting an additional 1,000 attendees online.

Wednesday evening, AWP kicked off the start of the three-day conference and bookfair with the World of Wonders reception, which included an up-close and personal evening with Aimee Nezhukumatathil and special guest and AWP Vice Chair, January Gill O’Neil. Donations collected at the event will fund AWP conference scholarships in 2023. The scholarship program was created to increase access and representation in the writing community.

Celebrated poet Toi Derricotte provided the 2022 keynote address on Thursday, March 24, 2022 at 8:30 p.m. ET, starting the evening with a dance party prior to the event.

Derricotte’s speech, which was livestreamed for virtual attendees, brought an exciting and vibrant energy to the space with a much-celebrated moment: a standing ovation for the cofounder of Cave Canem in celebration of their twenty-fifth anniversary.

A statement from AWP’s executive director about the 2022 AWP Conference & Bookfair: “New vendors—such as CrowdPass, to verify vaccination cards and Covid-19 test results and SwapCard, for registration—made the registration experience smoother than in previous years. The sentiment received has been there is an overall overwhelming majority of attendees happy to be together, creating an overarching feeling of positivity at this conference. The easiest part was our shared vision of making this a positive and joyous conference with many reunions and serendipitous moments.” –Cynthia Sherman, AWP Executive Director Those who weren’t able to attend the conference, can check out the AWP YouTube channel, where AWP will release select #AWP22 events throughout the upcoming year. Year-round free programming from Virtual AWP can also be viewed on the AWP YouTube channel, including previous #AWP21 featured events, Writer to Writer discussions, pedagogical conversations, and the Conversations with Writers series.

Thank you to all #AWP22 attendees. We look forward to the 2023 AWP Conference & Bookfair in Seattle, Washington.

Writing in Education 13

NAWE NEWS

European Association of Creative Writing Programmes (EACWP) Teachers Training Program: V Virtual Premium Edition European Association of Creative Writing Programmes (EACWP) Due to the pandemic worldwide circumstances, in July, 2020, the EACWP launched the first Premium Virtual Edition of its European Course for Teachers of Creative Writing. This initiative was conceived as an on-line format committed to the need of giving continuity to a European pedagogical dialogue over pandemic times.

Thanks to the remarkable success of our four previous editions, gathering more than 30 worldwide colleagues, representing more than 15 countries, the EACWP launches this time the fifth edition of its Virtual Teachers Training Course to be celebrated in June, 14th, 15th and 16th (2022). In this occasion, we’ll count on the participation of John Vigna (University of British Columbia / Canada), Claire Collison (NAWE / UK) and Mercedes Cebrián (Spain). All the sessions will be celebrated through Zoom from 17.00 to 19.00 (CET).

• • •

Tuesday, 14th: Revising our work while revising ourselves / John Vigna (University of British Columbia / Canada) Wednesday 15h: Brief Encounters: Once Met, Never Forgotten/ Claire Collison (NAWE / UK) Thursday 16th: Food Writing: Much More than Writing about Food / Mercedes Cebrián (Spain)

As in the regular format of our training program, the three teachers invited will share their different methodologies, approaches and experiences within the creative writing domain by offering a so called “auteur workshop” by performing and explaining their own ars pedagogica and didactics from both a theoretical and practical approach. All the working sessions are focused on pedagogical training and guidelines to empower the participants to develop their own teaching interests and new possibilities.

Course Fee • •

200€ (EACWP members) 250€ (other participants)

14 Writing in Education

Scholarships Additionally, five (5) scholarhips scholarships of 80% will be offered this year for participants not funded by an institution. The selected candidates will be charged with 50€.

Candidates interested must send their CV plus a motivation letter to info@eacwp.org before June, 8th. The subject of the message must be “Course scholarship / Premium Virtual Edition 2022”. Results will be announced on June, 10th.

The scholarships will be only granted if the course gathers the minimum required number of students.

Criteria for participants This training is for: •

•

•

•

Beginner teachers keen to learn about the pedagogy of teaching creative writing and the different international approaches Intermediate teachers wanting to broaden their grasp of pedagogical concepts in an international and culturally diverse environment More expert teachers interested in sharing their experiences and approaches and enriching their own perspectives from international discussions and comparisons Students of creative writing willing to deepen into their knowledge and skills within the contents of the different working proposals in an international context

For more information, please, visit www.eacwp.org or contact Lorena Briedis: info@eacwp.org

Lapidus

NAWE NEWS

Pause and reflect…. Stare into space even.

As I write this, though it is cold, the sun is shining, dazzling a little, a soft breeze is lifting the new leaves on the trees ahead, one section of the grubby green parasol covering our picnic table is reflecting the tree canopies, nodding and flapping in agreement that this is a beautiful day.

So often lately, it has felt hard to remember beauty in the face of the unrest and turbulence we are witness to, are living with, contending, coping with. No matter how much we might tell ourselves that everything changes, it is not all awful and things are always moving, it can be hard to believe, or hold on to this truth in the face of some of our losses. It can be harder still to recall any or all of our gains. Those of us moved to do so, write or try to capture our thoughts, memories and observations, in words and pictures, in movement and sound. We write, we read, we talk, we resonate with the words and experiences of others and in doing so can feel affirmed, understood and less alone, connected.

Staring into space and then back at a keyboard seems to have become ‘a thing’ for so many of us, a regular occupation in this age of separation, atomisation and ‘digital only’ connection wrought in part by Covid.

Connecting and gathering together through the written and spoken word becomes more potent especially when we become zoned out by our own reflections on screen, or through online conversations.

We know that the act of writing, in all its forms, is a kind of disciplined and deliberate pause, where writers take time to reflect and report on their reflections. Unlike the consistent and apparently unrelenting presence of the shining sun, even if its actual appearance to the eye is different. Does the sun have time to do this I wonder?

Right now the sun’s rays seem to be pushing their way through the trees as I squint at my desk dodging their brightness and cat’s eye stare, trying to stay in the now.

The age-old ways of writing to symbolise, heal, understand ourselves and explain is increasingly becoming acceptable and available ...whether it be through lyric writing, poetry, ballads or storytelling. As a part of the writing for wellbeing community Lapidus International strives to join with others highlighting and creatively documenting everyday events and significant human experiences helping to normalise human reactions and responses as well as offering a multitude of perspectives that can delight and challenge us wherever we are in the world.

At Lapidus we are keen when and where we can to explore the international part of our remit: to hear, learn from and work with all writers who are part of the community. The pandemic has led to increased use of digital and social media communication. It’s a great way to hear from local, national and global wellbeing writing communities and activities that promote this. We would be delighted to hear from you of wellbeing writing and reading community activities and writing groups that we have not yet connected with or somehow missed so please let us know of them and maybe introduce us to them if it seems right. You can do this by contacting: info@lapidus.org.uk.

Below is a list of other events and activities currently being pursued through the Lapidus community •

• •

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Our Community Director, Dr Poonam Madar, will be running an event on the theme of Solitude on Thursday 12th May, during Mental Health Week. We thought it was appropriate to explore solitude, and how it differs from the Mental Health Week theme, which is Loneliness. Poonam has also just launched the Ealing Writing Trail, supported by Lapidus, which celebrates creativity and wellbeing around Ealing.

Our Story Director, Kiz Manley, is currently running trauma-informed hip hop workshop facilitator training through her company, Hip Hop Heals.

We shall we running a summer festival on July 9th, which will provide a space for attendees to get involved with three short writing for wellbeing taster workshops online.

If you are thinking about publishing a research article in our LIRIC journal, why not join us on Saturday 11th June for our event: Write On! How to Transform Your Written Work into a LIRIC journal paper.

Tickets available on the Lapidus website soon. Our website: www.lapidus.org.uk You can also find out about our new Lapidus magazine, which showcases writer’s work within the writing for wellbeing community on our website: https://lapidus.org.uk/lap-mag-preview

Val Watson – Chair of Lapidus and Richard Axtell – Membership, Communication and Events Co-ordinator.

Writing in Education 15

NAWE NEWS

Members’ News

Poet Dr Joan McGavin has worked with filmmaker Anna Cady before and has completed a poem to accompany a film made by Anna during her Not Just a Garden project commissioned by Furzey Gardens (Minstead Trust), with Arts & Heritage. As part of her co-creative work with the people with learning disabilities whom the trust supports, Anna has put together a multi-media installation in a sixteenth-century cottage at the gardens, in the New Forest. The cottage is being reopened as an exhibition space in early May and the poem and film will be available to view there from May through to December.

Letters to the Editor NAWE review of Critical-Creative Writing: Two Sides of the Same Coin Michelene Wandor I am grateful to Paul McDonald for his review of my book, and for complimenting me on my expertise. If I may, though, I would remind him that the first principle of reviewing is to read a book with care. There is little editorial matter here – an Introduction and a Postlogue, and in these, his ‘objections’ are clearly dispelled.

First, the title is not Critical and Creative Writing, but Critical-Creative Writing; the hyphen suggesting a symbiotic relationship. McDonald says I ‘do little to explain why “critical and creative writing” are considered “two sides of the same coin”’. The quotation at the end of the Introduction, from Iowa’s Norman Foerster in the 1930s, and the aims of the first MA in Creative Writing (CW) at UEA in 1970, show how CW’s ‘discipline’ was seen as an intellectual union between critical and creative writing.

The fact that this is rarely achieved in the academy is one of the reasons for my Reader – the only one of its kind. It bridges the gap between the massive number of ‘how-to’ handbooks for CW, and the many excellent anthologies of Cultural Theory. The Reader shows how selected writers and thinkers across the centuries have endeavoured to ‘think’ and write about imaginative (creative) writing.

Of course, it’s not exhaustive; what anthology is? The extracts lead to the history of literary criticism, and thence to the borders of Theory.

He says the two ‘limitations’ of the book are: a) that it is ‘limited to copyright-expired material’, and b) that there are no extracts from such as Barthes and Foucault. He comments: ‘What the book needed was a commercial publisher to commit to the project and pay for copyright permissions.’ Too right. However, he should know that 16 Writing in Education

academic (not commercial) publishers will not shell out to publish extensive out-of-copyright material. My ‘solution’ is the Postlogue, summarising (under headings/categories relevant to CW) some relevant twentieth-century in-copyright writers.

Perhaps most irrelevant and frustrating is McDonald’s claim that the book needed ‘a few imaginative workshop questions or writing prompts…’ Courses, teachers and student needs vary enormously, and, even if I had done what he suggests, someone would complain that I hadn’t catered for them. This is not a how-to book. ‘Keywords’, relevant to CW, enable teachers and students to draw on the Reader to make connections for their own purposes, rather than be spuriously spoon-fed. These will be useful, to discuss, contest and build an understanding of the history of the ideas which inform some of the rubrics of CW, underpin literary criticism, and still haunt Literary Theory.

McDonald notes, at least, that ‘The texts included are germane to the subject…’, an acknowledgement of the Reader’s relevance to CW. While the printed book does, indeed, cost £16.99 (expensive for students), it is also available as an ebook, and anyone (including lecturers, students) can buy the book directly from me for £10.00, postfree. Please email me. mwandor@googlemail.com Michelene Wandor .

Creative writing at Bloomsbury Academic

9781501376207 | Aug 2022 | £17.99

9781350119406 | Jan 2022 | £19.99

9781350160705 | Jan 2022 | £19.99

9781350076549 | Oct 2021 | £27.99

9781350067806 | Aug 2021 | £22.99

9781350127159 | April 2021 | £85.00

9781350152687 | March 2021 | £85.00

9781350190849 | Feb 2021 | £15.99

9781350092815 | Jan 2021 | £25.99

Explore more creative writing books at https://bit.ly/33TIR0TO @BloomsburyLit

bloomsbury.com

Writing in Education 17

NAWE Conference 2022 NAWE CONFERENCE: RENEWAL, RESILIENCE & SAFE HARBOUR ‘From the other side of ruin,’ read Sarah Howe in our opening event, ‘we found safe passage.’ In setting ‘Renewal & Resilience’ as NAWE’s 2022 conference theme, we hoped to create an event that could speak to the present moment.

We wanted to create an opportunity for participants to gather and reflect on how their practice has changed in the past two years, and in doing so to create a supportive community of practice – a harbour in which to land.

‘If survival is not the ultimate rebellion,’ asked Jinhao Xie, ‘what is?’ Our opening event, Poetics of Home, featured bravura poetry readings from three incredible poets: Sarah Howe, Jinhao Xie and Nina Mingya Powles, as well as a conversation between Jennifer Wong and Anne Caldwell. Created during the pandemic as a festival of diasporic poetry, Poetics of Home brought writers from all over the world together for an online festival that would not have been feasible pre-2020. An egalitarian approach programmed emerging poets alongside established writers, sharing knowledge and creating opportunities for peer support. It was about ‘creating a home for many of us,’ said Nina Mingya Powles.

This was the second time NAWE has curated a separate strand of events designed to interrogate some of the wider issues facing writers. We were delighted to welcome back representatives of arts councils from across the UK: Lleucu Siencyn (Literature Wales), Alan Bett (Creative Scotland), Paul McVeigh (Arts Council of Northern Ireland) and Sarah Crown (Arts Council England). It was heartening to hear of the huge number of interventions to support writers, readers and the wider literary ecology across each of the four nations.

In Making Literature Events Accessible, Hannah Hodgson and Kim Moore described the routine exclusion of disabled writers from in-person events because of a lack of understanding around barriers to attendance. Hearing live literature is a luxury – and even bursary schemes can exclude writers by failing to factor in the cost of carers or asking applicants to ‘perform’ their disability through convoluted application forms. This was an ‘informative and galvanising’ call to keep online options open for disabled poets, as well as a challenge to festival organisers and programmers to consider accessibility – in all its forms – right from the start.

In Whose Playing Field? Rishi Dastidar, Sharmilla Beezmohun and Ken Wilson-Max discussed access to writing and publishing opportunities for writers of colour. Initiatives come and go, but every 5-7 years there’s a need to stop and start again. It takes sustained willpower from many different areas to create long lasting change, as well as an awareness of the business possibilities that open up when new voices are brought into the talent pipeline. Diversity has already happened, said our panellists. It is time for industry to catch up.

This being the NAWE conference, most of our time was spent in sessions run by members. It was impossible for us to go to everything, so we turn here to delegate feedback! Anne Taylor’s workshop on awareness through movement was a calming start. Mel Parks’ Renga for Resilience created a ‘community environment that produced real understanding of the content.’ Kim Moore’s talk on creative and critical hybridity was useful for PhD students, and Oz Hardwick and Amina Alyal gave a popular session on collaborative poetry. Victoria Field’s presentation on ‘Pilgrimage’ was mentioned, as was Weidong Liu’s discussion on the rise of creative writing studies in China. There was so much more, and I’ve enjoyed being able to watch back recorded sessions after the event.

Our final curated events saw two more sessions focused on creating change: Jane Commane and Romalyn Ante discussed ‘opening the doors of poetry for everybody’. Kate Simpson was in conversation with poets James Thornton and Jacqueline Saphra on the role of poetry and activism in combating climate change. They imagined an ecological civilization, designed on behalf of all citizens and all living things. Writing a poem was ‘a radical act of imagination’, an act of despair but also of its corollary: hope.

Our headliners treated us to frank and funny conversations about writing, teaching, truth and memoir. Thomas Glave and Jonathan Davidson explored Thomas’ journey as a writer, as well as the differences between writing and class in the US and UK. On Saturday, Hannah Lowe delivered a barnstorming reading from her book The Kids, before discussing teaching and ethics with Lucy Sweetman.

We were amazed by the high quality of all the presentations. We’re currently reflecting on feedback and looking forward to next year. As one delegate wrote, it was ‘an excellent team effort by all involved, and the quality was 18 Writing in Education

consistently high. Much thought and effort had obviously been dedicated to bring the event to fruition - thank you all!’ Our thanks to the NAWE team and board, to all the staff at Mosaic Events, and to our unflappable tech support, Keith McJannett. Our thanks also to ACE for their support of our work, which enabled us to provide a number of bursary places for the event.

Feedback has suggested that a shorter hybrid conference would suit most delegates, so we’ll offer this in 2023. We’ll also think about improving online and in-person access and networking opportunities. Do you have an idea for our programme? Would you like us to come to your region? Get in touch and tell us why at s.kennedy@nawe.co.uk.

Thanks to all our delegates, contributors, and to our wonderfully engaged audience. We’ll see you next year!

Seraphima Kennedy Director NAWE

Blind Drawings Philippa Johnston

Our Information Manager Philippa Johnston combines her work with NAWE with her own art practice.

This year’s conference gave her the chance to practise some ‘blind’ drawing where you only look at what you’re drawing, not at the page. It’s a very liberating technique and the results are always unexpected. (Any resemblance to anyone living is highly unlikely!)

Writing in Education 19

Conference Contributions

20 Writing in Education

Poetry in Motion Anne Taylor HARNESSING MOVEMENT, AWARENESS AND EXPRESSIVE WRITING FOR CREATIVITY AND RESILIENCE Not so long ago, I was given advice about my writing by a poet of some repute. ‘Write until it hits you in the gut,’ they said, ‘and then keep writing.’

psychiatrists by the Royal College of Psychiatrists and ArtsHub in 2020, designed to take doctors out of their heads and to bring attention to their whole selves.

Some writers feel their work is an entirely cerebral activity, and that their bodies are a nuisance, while others complain that their overthinking brain somehow gets in the way of the process. Where does our writing come from — does it emerge from the head or the heart, or the gut, or somewhere else? How can we encourage it to flow effortlessly onto the page?

I introduced participants to some gentle movement, before inviting them to write a letter to a part of themselves that holds a story — or which drew their attention following some awareness and movement.

Then, they were asked to write a response from their whole self. The NAWE workshop involved two short movement sequences, followed by some expressive writing and the same letter-writing prompt.

These questions have been pre-occupying me for some time — as both a writing group facilitator, and as a teacher of the Feldenkrais method. The latter is a somatic learning method that combines movement and awareness, and is based on the premise that our cognition is embodied and that there is no split between body and mind.

Since discovering the Feldenkrais method six years ago, I have not only felt better physically and emotionally, but have found that my writing and creativity have improved. I somehow feel more connected to myself, and more liberated in my work. It therefore has felt natural to introduce the method, and the awareness through movement sequences it involves, to the writing groups I facilitate that deal with self-exploration and personal development.

These take on many forms. For instance, I lead short five-minute series of gentle chair-based exercises at the beginning of a workshop for people with mental health challenges. I also run longer workshops that combine movement and writing, involving some more extended time lying and moving around on the floor — designed to generate inspiration and creativity.

The writing workshop that I ran at the NAWE conference in March 2022, entitled Poetry in Motion: Harnessing movement, awareness and expressive writing for creativity and resilience, was designed as an experiential introduction to this work .

The session was a version of a lunch-time workshop that I was commissioned to design and run for a group of

Participants at my workshops have reported feeling much calmer and more grounded before starting to write, and much more in touch with themselves physically and emotionally. Often they find that this is a novel feeling for them, and have been surprised by what has flowed out onto the page.

I have found that inviting participants to freewrite (sometimes called flow-writing) or write expressively — without attention to grammar or punctuation — for a few minutes following a movement sequence has also allowed for an enhanced sense of freedom and play. In my experience, the value of freewriting is multi-layered.

It can help writers to clear their heads of the messy thoughts of the day, developing a ‘writing muscle’ that they might not be used to using, and allows for a direct connection to the unconscious feelings and emotions to take them towards. This is what Creme and Hunt identify as a ‘freer and more spontaneous experience of creativity’ (Creme & Hunt, 2002).

Freewriting is a form of expressive writing, which has been shown in a number of experiments by James Pennebaker, when linked to writing about a traumatic experience, to ease emotional pain and improve physical and mental health (Pennebaker & Smyth, 2016).

These movement and writing workshops are not just about bringing attention to our oft-forgotten bodies, but through the enhancement of an integrated sense of ourselves. As Feldenkrais teachers, we are discouraged from using the word body, which signifies a difference Writing in Education 21

between the mental and physical. Rather, our use language is focused on integrating the whole self.

Moshe Feldenkrais, the architect of the Feldenkrais Method, was an eminent physicist and engineer who identified the concept that our neuropathways can be rewired; we can relearn or change through the medium of gentle movement.

We communicate with the brain by paying attention to our sensory and muscular (or kinaesthetic) experience.

The method can be taught one-to-one with a teacher (Functional integration), or in a group setting — with participants being led though a series of movements by a teacher (Awareness Through Movement).

Rather than work towards a prescribed posture or action, people are encouraged to explore movement and difference as a way of learning in the same way a baby or infant might. My experience, and that of others, is that the process encourages a sense of play and exploration, which can translate into creativity and a more embodied kind of writing.

The benefits are at this stage anecdotal, and this is an area that is ripe for further research. My proposition is that awareness through movement helps calm the central nervous system, and cultivates a grounded and centred state of being before we start to write. I also think that the sensing that is encouraged helps locate what Eugene Gendlin described as the ‘felt-sense’—an inner knowing or ‘special kind of internal bodily awareness … a bodysense of meaning’ (Gendlin, 1981).

It also reminds us that we have different options available and encourages exploration and experimentation. As the adage goes, failure is the best teacher of them all.

© The Feldenkrais Guild UK 2005

photo: Jonathan Thrift

I am also fascinated by the idea that our cognition is embodied within us in the form of metaphors. Lakoff and Johnson (1999) propose that metaphors are rooted in our psychology from birth — for instance, the association of warmth with affection, weight with importance, sadness with down and happiness with up. We all allegedly embody these universal metaphors, but we also develop a complex network of personal metaphors reflecting our unique life experience. I wonder whether awareness through movement combined with creative and therapeutic writing might unlock opportunities for accessing and exploring these metaphors creatively, but also perhaps for healing and making sense of our lives.

You can find out more about the Feldenkrais Method at Feldenkrais Guild UK: www.feldenkrais.co.uk or Anne’s work at www.poetryinmotion.studio, or email annetaylor.writer@gmail.com for information about future workshops.

I feel as if my ideas connecting movement and writing is a continuing story of exploration, and am encouraged by the positive feedback I have received. I appreciate the participation of those who have,and will hopefully continue, to join me on this journey.

Pennebaker, J. Smyth, J. (2016) Opening Up by Writing it Down, How expressive writing improves health and eases emotional pain

References: Creme, P and Hunt, C. (2002) Creative writing in the essay writing process, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 1, 145-66.

Gendlin, E. (1981) Focusing, Bantam.

Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (1999) Philosophy in the Flesh : The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought

Anne Taylor is a writer, teacher and Feldenkrais practitioner who runs therapeutic, reflective and creative writing groups for the mental health charity MIND and with medical students, doctors and others working in the healthcare sector. She is co-director of the Professional Writing Academy courses – Introduction to Therapeutic Writing and Running Writing Groups.

22 Writing in Education

Embrace the Anarchy Caleb Parkin, Jane Moss & Liz Cashdan INCLUSIVE PRACTICE ON ZOOM In 2021 the novelty of attending NAWE’s conference online was a talking point among excited delegates as we peered and beamed at each other from our Zoom windows. By 2022’s conference the Zoom room had become the ‘new normal’, although a normal we are still navigating and refining as practitioners and participants.

For those of us who facilitate writing in community venues and schools, Zoom presents a new kind of community space with its own tools and conventions.

Three members of the NAWE Communities SubCommittee reflected in their joint session on how the Zoom platform has made it possible for them to engage with participants, and how the experience of writing together online can be made as playful, inclusive and accessible as possible. For some, that means more accessible than physical meetings.

Jane Moss, a community writing facilitator in Cornwall,

illustrated how a group of amateur writers working on their community novel during lockdown found ways to make the Zoom experience fun and innovative. In one example, they used live role play to improvise a chapter in which an under-prepared young man gives a PowerPoint presentation in a public meeting which turns rowdy.

In preparation for the improv, members of the group brainstormed what would happen and chose the roles they would play. As facilitator, Jane was allocated the role of the young man, Luke, and his PowerPoint slides were written based on the group’s ideas about what he would say. The notes view provided a subtext showing the lack of planning and preparation. ‘Luke’ was in fact winging it. The improvisation was recorded in Zoom, lasting for 40 minutes. Afterwards, the group discussed how to write up this part of the novel. Rather than simply transcribe and edit the improvisation, they had Writing in Education 23

the idea of producing a fictional local news report and a set of minutes, giving a short and longer narrative account of what had happened at the meeting, and enabling readers to read between the lines. Members of the group (who live in a coastal community) used a cut up sail to make banners with artwork depicting the scene as demonstrators heckled during the meeting. The result is a chapter in the novel that can be read through several different media, in print and online, with access to a pdf of the PowerPoint.

poems were produced, and poems inventing new names and occupations, including the Dirty Decorators who became a spin-off project.

Trapped in Zoom during lockdown, this was an exercise in how to make the group’s online ‘room’ into a playful space. In this example, they found they could experiment and innovate in terms of working methods and the resulting form of part of their novel. As the group worked together during the summer of 2020 and again during the further lockdown in early 2021, they developed their own Zoom etiquette that made use of muting and unmuting, screen-sharing and emojis, and a structured work programme. Videos stayed on because everyone agreed it was important to see each other in this online community.

Finally, Liz Cashdan made the point that Zoom has saved writing groups over the last two years. She argues that it needs to keep going not only for those still isolating but also for those older people who can’t get to places for in-person meetings. As the Community Sub-Committee we arguably have a responsibility now to encourage organisations to provide outlets for workshops, readings and performances online, as well as in their physical form.

Post-lockdown, the Zoom room remains a meeting place, interspersed with meetings in community venues and people’s houses; an established part of the community’s cultural and leisure activities. The novel can be read as a work in progress at: www.mylorcommunitypublications. co.uk, part of a flip book serialisation.

Caleb Parkin picked up the theme of playfulness and ‘getting our hands dirty’ with the new medium of online participation and ways to blend the digital with the physical. He described activities with QClub, a project of four sessions with neurodiverse young people reflecting a range of support needs including those on the autistic spectrum, some with disabilities, some who are socially excluded, looked after or bereaved, and young carers.

QClub is based at Derby Quad Arts Centre and the sessions were run after school.

The mix of methods drew on the digital, the tactile, experimental, and surreal. A pack of craft materials was provided for each young person, including fabric, coloured pens and publications. Cut up poems and group

Caleb found that Zoom can be a formal space, or a playful, anarchic one as participants experiment with backgrounds, emojis and filters. Challenges such as how to engage everyone on screen did not materialise; the only barriers to involvement were to do with lack of digital resources or reliable wifi.

Liz, for example, has started a new online Poetry Stanza following contact with the Poetry Society during lockdown. It has members across the UK, in Israel, Norway, France and Switzerland. The membership is wider than before, thanks to this enhanced digital reach.

Liz made the point that growing old has limited her movement and travel, quite apart from the pandemic.

Being able to take part and run workshops online has, she says “saved me as a writer, teacher and tutor”. To help us think about our future practice, and what it means to work with a blend of on and off-line groups, Liz recommended Robert Seatter’s poem, I Come From (Seren Books 2006) as a prompt. This poem will be familiar to many but instead of writing your own version of ‘Where I come from’, try ‘Where I’m Going’, and use it to explore the Conference theme of resilience and renewal.

In our not-yet post-pandemic world, practice is evolving along with our definitions of community. If ‘normal’ is now a blend of traditional methods and community spaces, that is an open invitation to make our working methods and those spaces as inclusive and accessible as we can. That means being playful with them, embracing the anarchy, being innovative, and leaving no one behind.

Caleb Parkin is Bristol City Poet, published widely in magazines, journals, and commissions. He tutors for Poetry Society, Poetry School and First Story and holds an MSc in Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes.

Debut pamphlet: Wasted Rainbow, (tall-lighthouse, Feb 2021), debut collection: This Fruiting Body (Nine Arches, Oct 2021).

Jane Moss co-hosts www.thewritingretreat.co.uk in Cornwall running online courses and residential retreats.

She is published in magazines, journals and by Jessica Kingsley Publishers, and facilitates writing groups and workshops for hospices, charities and local communities. Her PhD asks ‘How can the novel be a vehicle for community participation?’

Liz Cashdan was a founder member of NAWE in the 1980s and Chair from 2012-2015. A secondary school English teacher then, Liz now teaches for the Open College of the Arts and Bristol Folk House. Her most recent publication is Things of Substance: New and Selected Poems (Five Leaves 2013)

24 Writing in Education

Connecting Voices Fiona Linday As a writer and editor, choosing a favourite piece of writing to share from a collection is difficult. It is tricky to give a flavour of a book to an audience, without having access to the whole script. When I proposed a panel discussion with other members of the NAWE Action Learning Set, the small group responded enthusiastically.

At the panel discussion we aimed to represent how we had engaged our communities in creative writing over lockdown. The job of showcasing our wider activities was challenging, restricted to doing justice to the four texts and their producers, in a fifty-minute online Conference session. So, this article explains our attempts to summarize the activity of sparking, collating and editing submissions to collections of creative writing from four varied writing communities. These projects happened over many workshops and over an extended pandemic time. Five of us rose to the challenge of fairly providing a taste of our output to represent these ambitious voices.

What was sad was we couldn’t read much of that impressive work. Three of our books are available to purchase via the editors, though.

The structure of the panel discussion was outlined by Fiona Mason who chaired. She gave an informative introduction giving context about organising NAWE’s Action Learning, peer coaching Professional Development course, which began in 2020. This online training brought about NAWE’s Action Rebel’s set of seven writers. She told of how most of us still meet each month to present on writing and facilitation practice and share workshop activities to promote our creative writing responses. She explained how our group was formed during COVID, and we were there to share our experiences of developing anthologies with different writing groups. The themes include context, spaces for writing, writing identities and group dynamics.

To meet the panel Fiona Mason read our short biographies, as follows: Susanna Roland created a free online writer’s space, Turbulence is a Must during lockdown with participants from the UK, Argentina, USA, Nigeria, and Afghanistan.

Shelley Tracey describes the process of creating an anthology about caring with family carers. This Carers Collective Creations, Voices of Carers book focuses on selfcare, resilience and creativity.

Judi Sissons and Amina Alyal co-edited Words from a Distance (Stairwell Books 2021), therapeutic writing distilled into art.

Fiona Linday facilitates another ACE supported anthology project- Making Our World Better, Dahlia Books, March 2022 across campus at Leicester University.

After welcoming the Conference delegates and thanking NAWE for having us, I explained how our group has much rich, shared practice producing a variety of valuable outcomes. We sparked creative writing primarily via Zoom during lockdown and supported one another. Also, we read portions of each others’ work produced in response to workshop activity or callouts.

I reflected that many clever pieces of new writing were developed under our creative direction. Each panel member spoke about their activity. All the outputs were complete, except for my project, which had a book premiere taking place at the Literary Leicester Festival later in March.

The set members then spoke enthusiastically about their individual projects.

Turbulence is a Must, Susanna Roland The first to unwrap her parcel was Susanna Roland who introduced her international online writing activity called Turbulence is a Must. Explaining her online collection Susanna commented, ‘In April 2020, a young writer phoned me having a major wobble - isolation, anxiety, creative block, yadda, yadda – yes well what’s new? Join the rest of the world, I hear you say - and glimpse inside the fragile mind of a writer! But beyond pandemic paranoia, what was really upsetting her was her loss of voice during this turbulence and her inability to tap into her creative self to navigate the stormy landscape and document the journey. We talked about journaling, as did every morning TV and radio show during that time. I suggested looking for an online group to join for support and motivation.

A week later, I mentioned our chat to a Uni friend - I had graduated from an MA in Creative Writing at Brunel the autumn before. ‘Hashtag me too’, she retorted, and within a week, I had gathered a disparate group Writing in Education 25

Complied by Susanna Roland with contributing writers from: AFGHANISTAN, ARGENTINA, IRELAND, NIGERIA, UK and the USA

of writers across the globe and a couple of artists who fancied expressing themselves through words. After a quick consultation about what people wanted and needed, our lockdown lit group was up and running.

Although the group was open to new participants, nobody wanted to use Facebook - they didn’t want a public forum but a safe space to write, experiment, share and feedback. As I had a website already, I decided to host the group, creating an online area for writers, a kind of gallery space. Everyone had a sign in and could share the page with friends if they wished I tried to set up a zoom, but the geography and time challenges with members in Argentina, Nigeria, Afghanistan, and the USA - made it tricky, and we decided to keep it as a simple WhatsApp group for communication, prompts etc. and our web space for posting and commenting on work. Each week, I would choose a subject and some writing for reference and set a prompt. I would also ask the group to offer a prompt, so there was always an option of two, and if someone was unable to write, they could still contribute by providing stimuli and reading others’ creative responses. The prompts ranged from exercises to words and pictures, including photos and paintings provided by the artists.

We then had a window to create and post our writing, and people would go online, read, review and comment on each other’s pieces. This casual approach worked for the group as people could contribute in their own time. We could also see one another’s comments which stimulated online group conversations. A few pieces directly referenced the pandemic, but most were unrelated. Although much of the work was political it on many levels, it was also clear that people just wanted a creative date, and some escapism. When it came to offering feedback, I kept it light as this wasn’t why people had signed up to the group. Participants were understandably fragile as writers and humans, and we 26 Writing in Education

weren’t aiming for an anthology - just a safe space to write. Therefore, the collection hasn’t had a full edit. Just the odd typo revised and although we had an agreed word count up to 1000 words, I included a piece that was 3000 as I felt it was a story that needed to be shared.

The writers are all emerging; none had been published, and the work is raw, reflecting the moment, and I believe that, like many communities writing projects, this was more about the process than the product. There were poems, short stories, flash fiction and life writing. Delve in and enjoy some examples of the work!’

Next, Susanna read two poems from her online collection.

Finally, I conclude there were many writers who benefited across the globe from generous inclusion in her effective writing group.

Carers Collective Creations, Voices of Carers, Shelley Tracey Next, Fiona Mason invited Shelley Tracey to give details of her commissioned handbook and how she prompted the work. At the back of the book there is this note from Shelley“It was a privilege for me as journaling and creative writing tutor to work with the seven carers whose words you see in this book. I was moved by their commitment to the project, to the people they care for, and to other carers. They shared their stories and their insights with generosity and openness. In the process of collating and editing this book, I have had to make some omissions and minor changes, but have tried to ensure that the voices of the writers ring out. I hope this book speaks to other carers, and reveals the complex challenges of the caring role. I also hope that it reflects the grace, skills and love of the carers who wrote it. I congratulate them all

on their achievements, and also the Northern Trust for recognising the need for this book.”

We were shown the Northern Trust area covered by the Carers Book on a slide. Shelley explained all about her project and that the book was a runner up in the Northern Trust Awards. Also, Shelley provided an extract from a video allowing us to hear a couple of the contributors read their compelling work. Shelley also read a contributor’s poem distilling the project and concluded how her book had a wide reach and had been of much encouragement and a useful resource to other carers.

I reflect that Shelley’s sensitively produced handbook has a useful wellbeing impact that helpfully signposts support for carers. It shows a real sense of connection between contributors and service providers, which can be dipped into easily. Also, likening the collective force of carers to that efficiency of a patchwork quilt summed up their strength. The spiritual connections were a great insight, too. Many useful illustrations add to this colourful collection of short prose and poetry.

Words from a Distance, Judi Sissons & Amina Alyal Next Fiona Mason invited Judi Sissons with Amina Alyal to share about their anthology project. The delegates were shown a slideshow from Words from a Distance. This was taken from the introduction to the book from Judi Sissons: “Words from a Distance was conceived one chilly morning in March 2020 a few days before the national lockdown was announced. I have my friend Rebecca to thank for supporting the idea in its first incarnation. As we stood shivering in our communal gardens, trying to maintain social distance – was it one metre or two – we discussed our options now all our freelance work had been cancelled and panic-buying of loo rolls had set in.

With my own sense of isolation and fear about the virus growing, I figured there would be others feeling at least as anxious as myself, I needed to connect and do something useful. So a writing for wellbeing workshop in our back garden to support the local community seemed like a grand idea. I posted flyers on the noticeboards of our block of flats and had a few enquiries over the next week or so, but it soon became clear that the restrictions and the miserable weather would make this unworkable. Having recently discovered the wonders of Zoom, I decided to move the project online and quickly realised that I could reach out far beyond the local neighbourhood.

As cases of coronavirus rose dramatically and the WHO declared a pandemic, the collision between human rights and public health brought issues of basic human dignity to the fore. We were all at a distance, be it two metres, thousands of miles or the width of a pane of glass between ourselves and our loved ones, and yet we could connect and share our words with others from all over the world. There were reports of nature recovering

due to reduced pollution and images of deserted urban landscapes filmed by drones. On my daily walks through the traffic-free city I stopped to listen to previously unheard birdsong in the trees along empty streets, and Bette Midler’s song, ‘From a Distance’ came to mind. The Words from a Distance workshops would focus on writing for wellbeing, offering people a chance to gather online, to record their experiences, process thoughts and feelings, or simply to escape them for a while in the company of others, sharing writing and supportive discussion with no critique of the writing. My initial assumption that the group would want to write about the pandemic and the minutiae of life under lockdown soon gave way to the realisation that they wanted to write about a wide range of topics. I drew on my own interests and covered everything from myth, psychology, masks and self identities, clothes, personal symbols and significant objects, rituals, psycho-geography, landscape and the natural world, as well as significant world events.”

Then with Amina, the co-editors shared how the editorial process worked for submitters. Amina commented that editing was an advisory function. Several of her poems were included alongside Judi’s and the workshop attendees in the anthology. There were interesting paintings incorporated between pieces to break the writing up, which worked well. After our panel discussion, Judi went into the hangout lounge to answer any further queries about their worthwhile project. ‘One thing that came out was the way groups are better than the sum of their parts,’ Amina commented afterwards.

Making Our World Better, Fiona Linday Lastly, Fiona Mason introduced my Making Our World Better project. I read from my introduction: “The Making Our World Better Project was launched in April 2021. I led this Arts Council England supported writing activity across the University of Leicester campus. This collection presents the expressive writing of learners from the Attenborough Arts Centre. They were joined by many service users of Leicester Arts in Mental Health, Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust, and several Creative Writing students at Leicester’s Centre for New Writing.

For a year, workshops prompted these three groups to respond to the title of Making Our World Better. I helped develop these pieces of work encouraging wide engagement and collaboration. The contributors were inspired to write poetry and flash fiction reflecting on their wellbeing during lockdown while considering their future within our environment. I aimed to stir in readers thoughts of successfully adapting to life after the pandemic and improving our new normal, natural environment.

Making Our World Better features Mark Gwynne Jonesthe commissioned poet from the partner Renaissance One and guest author Matthew Tett. I model my writing alongside sharing that of others, joining in this active learner challenge by contributing new poetry and stories. However, while some pieces reflect lockdown, the bulk of the new hopeful pieces of flash fiction and Writing in Education 27

poetry anticipate our positive future, interwoven from all three groups. Topics included identity, appreciating loved ones and family dynamics, finding wellbeing in nature reflecting from lockdown the times of less pollution and valuing community. We anticipated future sustainable futures through making changes and being good neighbours while dreaming of get-togethers and holidays gave resilience to these strengthened voices. Our grassroots group has developed a neighbourhood-based voice showcased at the Literary Leicester festival.”

I shared the fabulous foreword by Richard Attenborough CBE “Amidst the widespread chaos and distressing scale of deaths, the current pandemic has coincidentally thrown up a number of valuable indicators for our collective future.

The concern for people’s mental health; the thrilling revelation of a cleaner environment; the scale and sense of loss at the absence of the creative arts; the importance of an enriching education; a greater appreciation of the natural world. Climate change has brought us to the brink of self destruction. We now need, as a matter of urgency, a creative response from humanity. Focused, articulate and passionate. Creativity lies at the epicentre of that humanity. It nurtures the invisible part of our health; our emotional, psychological and spiritual health.

Our ability and freedom to express ourselves is a basic human right, one which feeds humanity’s understanding of itself and its relationship with the rest of the world.

Cultural communication has the capacity to enlighten, challenge, excite and inspire. It expresses our individual and collective identities, needs and aspirations. A civilised society is one that is in constant dialogue with itself, one of evolutionary discovery and growth.

This exciting new anthology is one vital part of this creative movement. Here is a taste of the writing- “ Then, I read A Blade of Grass poetry By Mark Gwynne Jones. Also, extracts from Making Our World Better Collective Poetry collaboration by two of the groups were shared. I felt my anthology reinvigorated the Attenborough groups and connected them to the University of Leicester’s Centre for New Writing students.

Finally, Fiona Mason concludes the unwrapping of some of the inspirational gifts from the Action Rebels.

Panel members put contact details in the chat for any questions from the delegates. I reflect that these four projects succeed in raising the editors’ profiles to show a satisfying distillation of creativity in words from all the contributors. Most importantly, our projects connect voices within our groups and to countless audiences.

Judi Sissons’ book is available from: https://www. stairwellbooks.co.uk/product/words-from-a-distance/ Fiona Linday’s book is available from http://dahliabooks.kong365.com/en-gb/collections/our-books/ products/making-our-world-better-anthology

First came the young adult Get Over It, Adventures, Onwards and Upwards. Then followed a prizewinning short story, ‘Off the Beaten Track’ and the Unique Writing Publications Story Award for ‘Love’ prose non-fiction. In my YA eBook anthology of short stories, The Heavenly Road Trip with Help For Writers. More recently, I enjoy facilitating with Attenborough Arts, Leicester University learners editing Family Matters- an anthology of new writing, 2019 and Making Our World Better, Dahlia Publishing, 2022. My inspirational collection is Count Our Blessings, Onwards & Upwards, 2021. Presently, I’m pitching a resilience-building, wildlife picture book series seeking a publisher. www.fionalinday.co.uk

28 Writing in Education

Renga for Resilience Mel Parks In 2021, I was invited to be a researcher on a project looking at stories of the immobilities of gender-based violence during the Covid-19 pandemic. The research team was interdisciplinary and included criminologists, sociologists and creative writers. We researched online stories and created workshops for people who had experienced gender-based violence to write, draw or stitch their stories.

As part of this process, we wrote our own stories as we didn’t want to ask participants to do anything we weren’t willing to do ourselves. These stories, based on memory, emerged as fragments, and when I read them, I had the idea to create a collaborative poem and a renga came to mind. Collaborative creative work was important to connect us as researchers during the pandemic when we were all working online and the renga provided a form to unite our voices and contain difficult emotions. Not only that, collaborative writing (Chang et al, 2014) ensures that no one voice is privileged over another and can include many voices. It’s also helpful in groups which include less confident writers as their words can be integrated and not singled out.

Poetic inquiry in research has mostly focussed on free verse, but Rich Furman encouraged researchers to use form and structure when he used a French-Malaysian pantoum and Japanese tanka to create research poems from a patient’s perspective of being treated in an emergency room (Furman, 2006). He found that working with poetic form forced him to ‘make specific choices and explore the essence of the experience’ (Furman, 2006 p.

565) when compared to the more expansive, narrative free verse which is often written for self-expression.

There is a growing tradition of using Japanese poetic forms as research. For example, haiku has been used in an arts-based therapeutic project with veterans in Australia (Bullock & Williams, 2021) as field notes in feminist research on running (Faulkner, 2018) and as ekphrasis for audience in performance (Prendergast, 2004). Tanka has been used to research domestic abuse (Breckenridge, 2016) as well as adolescent identity (Furman et al, 2016), and with our research, we build on that to use the collaborative form of renga to research gender-based violence. Renga has already been used in some research contexts - to anonymously discuss scientific ethical dilemmas that were usually avoided (Djerassi, 1998); as part of a reflexive process around the topic of doctoral students’ graduate school experiences (Lahman et al,

2018); to explore social reality in organisational studies (Gabriel & Connell, 2010); multiculturalism in South African academics (Pithouse-Morgan et al, 2017); as well as a signed renga, which was created to look at the intersections of Black African, Deaf and Queer identities (Mesch & Kaneko, 2017). It also has a more recent history in tackling politically and emotionally charged subjects, such as the Gaza conflict (Hacker & Shehabi, 2014) and lockdown separation during the Covid-19 pandemic (Hacker & Naïr, 2021).

Renga is an ancient Japanese form of linked poetic verses, which began in the 17th century when Basho would travel Japan as a special guest at renga parties, held to write and share communal poetry (Reichhold, 2013).

So traditionally, it was a part of an in-person event, but the research team were all working from home, and we also needed a creative method that could easily fit into the busy days of academics (Tusting et al, 2019 p. 34), so I devised a way of writing renga by email. We took it in turns to write a tanka (or five-line poem with a set syllable pattern) and email it to the next researcher on the list. Each tanka responded to a word, image or theme from the previous tanka stanzas. We read through the growing number of stanzas before writing the next one and allowed the poem to unfold. I then invited the researchers to write a reflection (Bolton, 2014) on the process and to include any new insights they had about gender-based violence during the pandemic.

For the NAWE conference workshop, I took this a step further and devised a method to write a renga on Zoom. We took the conference theme of renewal and resilience and then wrote tankas, pasted the words into the chat function in Zoom. This was a continual and unfolding process as people read the poems in the chat box and then responded to the words, themes or images with another poem and posted that. While this was happening, I compiled the stanzas into a document to create one long renga poem, then read it out loud at the end. I have added punctuation to some of the stanzas for consistency but made no other amendments.

Thank you to all of the poets that contributed to this poem. It is a fantastic reflection of not only the NAWE conference but also of that moment in time, with reflections on lockdown, the pandemic and the war between Russia and Ukraine.

Writing in Education 29

Renewal is return of light. A walk to yoga at dusk. The first white crocus.

Hope that it’s done, a moment of relief and rest but no, something

Wrens nesting every year.

This squabble of hope.

breaks again again broken stuff to recount.

Before, Ravensbourne Park was unknown walking space I’d seen from the car.

Almost dead, bought for fifty pence, now thriving spider plants ballerina in the March sunshine whilst I sharpen kitchen knives.

Lockdown prised me from my seat to a green leafed treasury.

In the old quarry a tree felled by gale force winds tears a hole in the earth and the stream eroding the path is swallowed underground.

Life inside and out: squirming, kicking, never still.

Always on the edge, fighting for continuance; unaware of full impact.

Zoom is my way out from lockdown isolation a link of faces smiles, laughs and moving bodies I’m growing old but zooming.

Almost dead, bought for fifty pence, the varia – gated yucca droops.

With air and light and wat – er and almost love it reached the sky.

I am sharpening a kitchen knife. First time I don’t know how. I sweep the blade across the stone, it promises something good.

I am a new self.

Two years, four days, ten hours new Longing for my old self.

How life has been in 2019?

Can´t feel it any more.

The florist tells me all the yellow sunflowers have sold out today the world wants their bright faces their petals are tears.

30 Writing in Education

Life inside and out: squirming, kicking, never still.

Always on the edge, fighting for continuance; unaware of full impact.

Sweat morphs into cloud rain waters earth, grows flowers petals shine hope, hearts bloom for small instances and sprout new growth in hearts and minds.

I went away and thought how things do not always feel the same, and if there’s still time I really must repair where needs repairing.

No exodus now.

Hand burrowed by bullet, bomb Lilac nail varnish Intact - renewal can’t be Crocuses splayed for the dead – The stick on the path is the root of a birch tree entwined underground with dogwood from my garden reaching, connecting beneath feet, I cannot buy the flowers but I feel the tears inside me as I grow.

A mixture of work and grace.

A mystery of sunshine.

This bombed earth cries, Russia what are you doing?

My mother’s homeland and Ukraine, my brother-in-laws Two places I need to love.

Washing and packing up all those toys decapitated through love ready for another, after a long wait he comes and claims them.

Zoom is my way out from lockdown isolation a link of faces, smiles, laughs and moving bodies I’m growing old but zooming.

Into the great loom, zooming out of the doom joining in as I ought and must and need in this wonderful big existence.

Acknowledgements A collective renga poem by the participants of the Renga for Resilience workshop at the NAWE conference, 2022 Renewal and Resilience: Creative Writing in Education & Communities in 2022 and Beyond.

The research referred to in this article: ‘The immobilities of gender-based violence in the Covid-19 pandemic’ was led by Professor Lesley Murray at the University of Brighton and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) as part of the UK Research and Innovation rapid response to Covid-19 (AH/V013122/1).

Thank you to the other researchers on the team: Dr Amanda Holt – University of Roehampton; Dr Sian Lewis – University of Plymouth; and Dr Jessica Moriarty – University of Brighton.

References

Breckenridge, J. P. (2016). The reflexive role of tanka poetry in domestic abuse research. Journal of Research in Nursing, 21(5-6), 447460. https://doi.org/10.1177/1744987116649635 Bullock, O., & Williams, J. (2021). Reading and trauma: how the openness of contemporary poetry and haiku facilitates engagement. New Writing, 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1080/14790726.2021.1891256 Chang, H., Ngunjiri, F. W., & Hernandez, K.-A. C. (2014). Collaborative autoethnography. CA: Left Coast Press Inc. Djerassi, C. (1998). Ethical discourse by science-in-fiction. Nature, 393(6685), 511-511. https://doi.org/10.1038/31088 Faulkner, S. (2018). Crank up the Feminism: Poetic Inquiry as Feminist Methodology. Humanities, 7(3). https://doi.org/10.3390/ h7030085 Furman, R. (2006). Poetic forms and structures in qualitative health research. Qualitative Health Research, 16(4), 560-566. https:// doi.org/10.1177/1049732306286819 Furman, R., Langer, C. L., Davis, C. S., Gallardo, H. P., & Kulkarni, S. (2016). Expressive, research and reflective poetry as qualitative inquiry: a study of adolescent identity. Qualitative Research, 7(3), 301-315. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794107078511 Gabriel, Y., & Connell, N. A. D. C. (2010). Co-creating stories: Collaborative experiments in storytelling. Management Learning, 41(5), 507-523. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350507609358158 Hacker, M., & Naïr, K. (2021). A Different Distance: A Renga. Milkweed Editions.

Hacker, M., & Shehabi, D. (2014). Diaspo/Renga: A collaboration in alternating renga. Holland Park Press.

Lahman, Maria K.E. et al, 2018 1-4, Renga, Research, Reflexivity: Poetic Representation, Qualitative Inquiry https://doi.org/10.1177/107780041878810 Mesch, J., & Kaneko, M. (2017). Signed renga: Exploration of collaborative forms in sign language poetry. African Studies, 76(3), 381-401. https://doi.org/10.1080/00020184.2017.1346341 Pithouse-Morgan, K.; Naicker, I.; Pillay, D., “Knowing What It Is like”: Dialoguing with Multiculturalism and Equity Through Collective Poetic Autoethnographic Inquiry, International Journal of Multi-Cultural Education, Vol 19 No 1, 2017 Prendergast, M. (2004). Inquiry and Poetry: Haiku on Audience and Performance in Education [doctoral dissertation].

Reichold, J. (translator) (2013). Basho, M. Basho: The Complete Haiku. New York. Kodansha USA Publishing.

Tusting, K., Mcculloch, S., Bhatt, I., Hamilton, M., Barton, D., 2019. Academics Writing. doi:10.4324/9780429197

Mel Parks is a writer, researcher and workshop facilitator. Her workshop series: The Writer’s Notebook, celebrates and values the writing process. She has an MA in Creative Writing (Distinction) and her research focusses on creative practice for social change, with a specialism of the maternal, building on 20 years’ experience writing about children and families. www.honeyleafwriting.com

Writing in Education 31

Collaboration, Fragmentation, and Invoking the Absent Writer Amina Alyal and Oz Hardwick Introduction: Who is the third who always walks beside you?

When I count, there are only you and I together But when I look up the white road There is always another one walking beside you …

In this centenary year of The Waste Land, it seems appropriate to begin with this quotation from the ‘What the Thunder Said’ section of the poem. With its echo of the Disciples on the Road to Emmaus (Luke 24: 13-35), Eliot’s own note to the poem, however, says that it was: stimulated by the Account of one of the Antarctic expeditions (I forget which, but I think one of Shackleton’s): it was related that the party of explorers, at the extremity of their strength, had the constant delusion that there was one more member than could actually be counted.

That the writing of this paper coincided with the Endurance22 expedition’s location of Shackleton’s ship beneath the Weddell Sea in March 2022 is purely fortuitous, but nonetheless makes for a rather neat example of how opening up a creative conversation invites unexpected guests to join us. Metaphorically, as creative writers, when we walk up the ‘white road’ of the page, perhaps there is always another walking beside us if we just look.

32 Writing in Education

This is especially true, we would suggest, when it comes to collaborative work. Jane Miller, speaking of her collaborations with Olga Broumas, talks of ‘the creation of a third participant, the “us,”’ and goes on to say how this in turn led to increased confidence in the ‘many selves’ which she herself brought to her own work.

(Duhamel et al: 96) Gene Tanta perhaps gets behind this when he says that: For me, the ‘I’ has always been the prime cause and the prime detriment to good writing but collaboration rescues me by effectively mitigating my static sense of identity and activating my dynamic sense of identity.

(Duhamel et al: 261) Collaboration, as is expressed by a number of writers in the 2007 anthology Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry, invites us both to lose ourselves and to find other selves through a process which Jack Collom rather beautifully describes as ‘keeping language in the air.’ (Duhamel et al: 215) Our session at the 2022 NAWE conference, ‘I didn’t say that: Collaborative Writing and Performance,’ had at its heart the creation of a collaborative text through inviting participants to respond via Padlet to a succession of nine paired images and short quotations. Each pair of prompts was shown without introduction or context for 2 ½ minutes, and it was stressed that responses could

be to either picture or text, or both (or indeed to another participant’s contribution), and the mode of response – for example, lyrical, ekphrastic, metaphorical, political, or confessional – was also purely down to individual choice.

We also explained that, following the session, we would assemble them through a combination of editorial rigour and arbitrary whim and, in the words of Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara: ‘Voilà, there you are, an infinitely original poet of a seductive sensibility, even if still not understood by the vulgar.’ (Poggioli: 190).

As Bob Rosenthall has said, ‘Collaborations lift the need to be great and reveal the need to just be together,’ (Duhamel et al: 103) so the text presented below should be credited to: Amina Alyal, Anne Caldwell, Deirdre Daly, Vassilka Dimitrova, Narayani Guibarra, Oz Hardwick, Melanie Jones, Joanne Reardon, Susanna Roland, Judi Sissons, and anyone else who was present but not captured by the fickleness of electronic devices (to whom we apologise). But what of that other figure walking beside us as we crossed the icy wasteland of the page?

In closing, we revealed that all of the quotations and images we used were suggested in some way by Eliot’s The Waste Land, read in a context of our literary enthusiasms, personal predilections, global concerns, and pure chance. So, for instance, lines of the brief ‘Death by Water’ section of the poem – ‘As he rose and fell / He passed the stages of his age and youth / Entering the whirlpool.’ – gave us the pairing of the closing couplet of Coleridge’s ‘Youth and Age’ (‘Nought cared this body for wind or weather / When Youth and I lived in’t together’) with an aerial photograph of a cyclone symptomatic of the proliferation of extreme weather events; an opulent interior drawing of Cleopatra’s barge in Caesar’s Palace,

Las Vegas, was suggested by the Shakespearean parody which opens ‘A Game of Chess,’ which also gave us Miranda’s ‘Sweet lord, you play me false’ from the chess game in The Tempest; the mountains which open the ‘What the Thunder Said’ section suggested Wordsworth’s more benign vision as ‘A lover of the meadows and the woods / And mountains’ from ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,’ yet we juxtaposed this with two armed figures on a white road in Ukraine, fraught with the implications of their love of their land and their ambiguous relationship to the possibility of unseen figures in the landscape.

As a final note, in discussing heteroglossia – that diversity of voice and perspective – within Eliot’s Waste Land, Brian Crews closes by observing that: In the end, this need to write with all our literary tradition in our bones … leads to a heightened understanding of human nature and just in what ways we create, attribute and discover significance as, with The Waste Land, the act of creation becomes an act of remembering. (Crews: 25) Our participants enthusiastically brought their human natures and the literary tradition(s) in their bones to this collaboration, and we are delighted by the small act of creation and remembering – to which we couldn’t resist adding a quotation from Shackleton in each section – which offers a heteroglossic prism through which to view a moment in our splintered world. To slightly misquote Eliot: ‘These fragments we have shored against our ruins.’

Writing in Education 33

Across the Storm-White Sea I. Salt in the Fields Fields freeze and lie fallow. Snow drops like a sleeping bear.

These streets – beneath ice, beneath fire – are very old, older than the houses, the old fields. What memories they hold of conflicts gone and yet to come, of small white voices that spring from the soil, hesitating before showing their faces.

The freshness of snowdrops in the rustle of last year’s leaves: hope bursts out of the darkness with perennial vigour.

Along the path through the graveyard, there are ancient yews and I like to think of them as spirits of the valley, of the village, guarding the path. In that time, before spring, when I still think of it as winter, snowdrops grow by the feet of these spirits, a silent hello, a remembrance. Conflicts are old men gone.

Walking the old ways, I hear your pale voice beside me.

I sang once as an alto in the Carmina Burana, the Damian chorus.

The wheel of fortune, turning and crushing, but awakening, enlightening, the journey from birth to death. Some parts were too high for me. As an alto, I dwell in the middle voice.

Unheard. All roads looks straight, but round and round our fortune.

A handful of salt like silver in my palm.

The Salt Path, the pillar of salt, Neruda’s ode to salt. Don’t look back, you say to me. Keep your eyes on the road ahead. Fortune can be kind or cruel.

Which way will she turn today? Can we be on both sides of the wheel at once?

Fortune favours the fickle, like salt in an hourglass or glass in a salt mine. Sometimes up, sometimes down, and sometimes there’s no difference. Some say the heart is like a wheel – a wheel of fortune – but does it squash us into submission or let us spin towards each other with hope? But life without salt?

Is there any point? The trappings of civilization are soon cast aside in the face of stern realities.

A person will hide themselves in some voyage like a second chance, as if the wheel of fate has been forgotten.

This will go on and on and all that remains are familiar turns of the wheel of time to root us to the rhythm of our lives.

Voyages, voices and rusty old Volkswagens bouncing across rutted fields.

II. Stalemate in the Hall of Mirrors A gondola sweeps past me, as I stare mindlessly over coffee and croissant.

Cleopatra wears a false moustache, like a puffed-up general surveying his mistakes, and I remember a line from school: The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne …

It just arrives, this line, from nowhere. From another self in a tight serge uniform and satchel full of dreams. I had to recite it in the school hall but my mind went blank.

What’s it doing here, this ridiculous plaything 34 Writing in Education

in the middle of our lives, playing havoc with history?

We all play games with each other, don’t we? And we all play false.

No one is true. Nothing is truth. There is no such thing. I hate the phrase, this is my truth. There is no truth. And if there were, you certainly wouldn’t own it.

You mean your opinion, I suppose. That thing that for you cannot be false.

Yet truth in falseness I cannot hide from but if play me you will, then I will take you on and you’ll be surprised at what I can do.

From pillar to post, ghosts play false, play fast and loose, and lose their bearings on the rolling, rolling sea. She did lie In her pavilion … Whose clothes are these? Are they mine?

What is this place from a forgotten world? A forgotten youth.

It used to seem so important to be in places like this, didn’t it?

I can’t even begin to remember why. Everything that is here I can get in my home. And alcohol? The mind shift?

Why shift the mind when the world has shifted so irrevocably?

It’s cocktail hour at the end of the world and all the tunes are broke and rusty.

It is curious how thirsty we all are.

I worked behind the bar – rum and coke, vodka and lime, pint of shandy – add up all those prices in my head. Why is the mirror hidden by so much booze? See the bright colours of the bottles. Don’t see me, don’t see you.

The music flies out of the window this morning. A double bass with wings from the back-to-back in Talbot Terrace. The crows are singing to each other, or croaking. It’s difficult to tell these days. I once drained it all away, just to see if I could live a life without it, but it seeps into so many flavours, insidious and inseparable from everyday life. The fountain of glass can just go back forever. Is everything we remember just a dream now?

I wake, I think I wake, but no sound comes from my mouth, not a whisper, not a stepfall, as I edge one foot to the floor, moving dust away from my feet like water.

I’ve built a pub in the spare room.

Most nights, I’m the only customer.

Take your hat and open it up for love, small change, forgiveness and Polo mints.

Take your hat and leave the glasses. The music of wine and dreams – or nightmares.

III. The Flats Joy is nowhere to be found this morning. She’s sleeping in feathers.

When the fleet comes in, the sailors have turned to plastic, the sea’s harvest melting under a weeping sun.

I am not deathless I am frightened to behold death yet I want to I want to inure myself with gritted teeth to its injury.

In Hong Kong there are no more pink dolphins.

Writing in Education 35

The mothers consumed so much plastic that their breastmilk became toxic.

The babies, already deafened by the Macau bridge, died at the breast.

Washed up to become tomorrow’s new purchase, they clung together, resisting the new.

On the shoreline there was only darkness, a light where life had been, now extinguished by the movement of water and the sinking of oil into tar.

Joy is subjective – a clear sky and a small girl

singing in an underground station. Time is a trick mirror and it’s always night somewhere.

Running headlong down a sand dune towards the sun, sky beneath my feet and sand above my head, I am a late commuter in search of my lost umbrella and my mother’s shadow, heat beneath her toes, a desert sky with a long horizon.

As a child, I was taught to draw tower blocks as huge rectangles with L shapes for the windows. The L shape is the shadow cast by the light inside. The light is not drawn. Nobody tells you that every light is a window to another world. That behind every tiny L a person works or sleeps or plays. L after L after L. Offices forever.

Every time I walk by a window at night, I look into the lamplit lives of others and wonder how we are all here, still waiting for whatever it is we think might happen. The chief distraction is to walk from the slaughterhouse to the graveyard.

For a change one may walk from the graveyard to the slaughterhouse.

Who’s this gremlin at my back? Go away. I don’t need you!

The lamplit lives of others in a dark city. Comforting somehow.

How many thoughts, hopes and dreams are bubbling behind these windows? How many hopes burn brightly, how many dreams dashed? Sooner or later, all rooms become empty, their tired stories curling at the edges in yellow light.

I am looking down at the whole world from my window.

But when it falls dark, you can see me, lit up, in my glass apartment.

IV. The Perfect Storm The push of the wind nudged me over the edge of the path.

At one time I could have withstood it without walking sticks and the hard stone wall beside me. My fingers fit neatly into the stones of the wall, into the hands that placed them there centuries ago. Shoring me up. Beside me, the sea wild shouts at the cliffs.

Three storms in one week hit Yorkshire.

Macbeth’s witches on the loose. Every day we checked the count, the same way we checked the weather forecast, sometimes more than once.

See that little face in the corner? See their smile, 36 Writing in Education

although they don’t even know how to smile yet.

Will they learn?

This is storm music.

Weather is the business of the old and young, while the rest of us are just looking for our place on the map.

We’ll have a baby, she said, and the storm broke loose.

My body’s stuffed with storms but my mouth’s sewn shut.

Mostly, I missed swimming. A bath didn’t cut it.

Cyclones and anticyclones of love and hate swirling towards the Baltic, towards the Black Sea. Play your wooden flute to calm this stormy weather, I beseech you.

How odd that when I saw this image the Ancient Mariner was my first thought.

And then, zooming in on the quote – Nought cared this body for wind or weather When Youth and I lived in’t together – I saw Coleridge. What does this say about him and me, that the image of a storm from space should bring him to mind? The terrific winds penetrate the flimsy fabric of our fragile tents and create so much draught that it is impossible to keep warm within. I try to tell my A Level students that they will love this poem one day. But what if they don’t?

We count blessings, blooms and bombs.

The dead will count themselves.

V. One More Mountain to Climb Meadows and woods and mountains and a dry, angry season.

A cruel month. I heard a curlew this week and smiled for once.

Once, the border was but a line of bushes, without leaves, the wind blowing through. He could easily step aside to let an oncoming stranger pass. The journey was simple.

Today, in the bright sun, we are striding out towards the wall.

Can we find the same home in the other parts of the world?

The forest which here I love, that fills me with the smells of a hundred years of soil, the songs of birds, the place I wrote my stories – can this home be found elsewhere?

Or is it only here? And what will happen when I leave it?

What a lovely day to go for a walk in the snow with a gun.

Walking helps us keep pace by helping us drop our concerns, our woes.

Is beauty still there when no one pauses to look? When soldiers march through snow, where is the childlike wonder of seeing those flakes fall outside of the glass, of maybe a day off school, of a kitten chasing every new falling star?

When nothing is left of our humanity, the stones in our stomach will guide us through the savage land. Iron ice will freeze our individual bones.

Yet, we are still lovers of the soft earth, the finger-gentle twig.

A small flame in an empty cathedral.

Empty shelves in local shops.

Empty eyes in the storm.

I love to put myself in cages. To peer through bars.

Writing in Education 37

Curtain blinds, the drying rack. A den to peer out of.

Bars to hold onto. A persecuted expression on my face.

But then to step backwards and be released. It’s only freedom if you can still see the bars that once held you in.

I wrote my revolutionary prison letters in a child’s copybook, with a broken-ended biro. No one can give me my freedom.

I take my paper prison, fold it small, and light it.

The flame of the heart ever burns, even when we forget its brightness.

I always light a taper for my mother when I visit a church.

I am not religious but the calm flicker on stone holds her ghost close to me. We walk alongside each other down the chantry.

Difficulties are just things to overcome, after all.

Kindness is a small flame. I am free.

There is a little candle burning in my chest, always.

Note: The poem’s title is taken from Shackleton’s account which Eliot refers to: When I look back at those days I have no doubt that Providence guided us, not only across those snowfields, but across the storm-white sea that separated Elephant Island from our landing-place on South Georgia. I know that during that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia it seemed to me often that we were four, not three. I said nothing to my companions on the point, but afterwards Worsley said to me, ‘Boss, I had a curious feeling on the march that there was another person with us.’ Crean confessed to the same idea. One feels ‘the dearth of human words, the roughness of mortal speech’ in trying to describe things intangible, but a record of our journeys would be incomplete without a reference to a subject very near to our hearts. (Shackleton 1919: 199) Works cited: Coleridge, S. T. (1997) The Complete Poems. Penguin Classics.

Crews, B. ‘Tradition, Heteroglossia and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land,’ Atlantis 28.2 (1998): 17-25.

Duhamel, D., M. Seaton and D. Trinidad. Eds. (2007) Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry. Soft Skull Press.

Eliot, T. S. (1961) Selected Poems. Faber and Faber.

Shackleton, E. (1919) South: The Last Antarctic Expedition of Shackleton and The Endurance. William Heinemann.

Shakespeare, W. (1987) The Tempest. Oxford University Press.

Poggioli, R. (1968) The Theory of the Avant-Garde. Belknap Press.

Wordsworth, W. (2004) Selected Poems. Penguin Classics.

Amina Alyal is Senior Lecturer in English at Leeds Trinity University. She is programme leader for English and Creative Writing, and teaches on the Creative Writing MA. She has published widely in journals and anthologies, and has two collections, The Ordinariness of Parrots (Stairwell Books, 2015) and Seasons of Myth (Indigo Dreams Press 2016).

Oz Hardwick is Professor of Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity University, where he leads the postgraduate Creative Writing programme. He is author of nine poetry collections and chapbooks – most recently Wolf Planet (Hedgehog Poetry Press, 2020) – editor of several anthologies, and author of numerous academic articles on aspects of literature and art.

38 Writing in Education

Writing Through Photographs Pauline Rowe

REFLECTIONS ON MAXLITERACY, 2021 The ubiquitous nature of photography as a means of communication makes the art form a useful and democratic educational source for improving literacy skills and creative explorations of language in Key Stage 3. In 2021 I was the writer for the project Writing Through Photographs working with Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool and the Wirral Hospitals’ School, Joseph Paxton Campus (JPC). The project was made possible through the MaxLiteracy award 2021, supported by ENGAGE and NAWE. It provided me with an opportunity to learn about new ways of working and a time to reflect on my own practice.

This award provided the opportunity to do something interesting and new with the resources at Open Eye Gallery. The gallery was established in Liverpool in 1977, and its archive started in 1980. It now contains 1600 prints by more than 100 photographers. Andy Yates, Creative Producer at the gallery, worked with Sarah Marrion, the Deputy Head of Wirral Hospitals’ School to curate, develop and install a school-based exhibition, selecting 15 photographs that reflected the concerns and interests of students. The combination of black and white and colour photographs included work by a range of famous photographers, such as Martin Parr and Chris Steele-Perkins, as well as unknown and emerging photographers. The selected images reflect Writing in Education 39

ideas of identity through place, objects, urban and coastal landscape and the experience of being young in a changing world.

JPC is an alternative therapeutic school for children between the ages of 11 and 16, with 80 students on roll, with over 50% eligible for pupil premium funding.

OFSTED judge it to be an outstanding school. JPC students are unable to access mainstream education and many have highly complex needs including multiple medical conditions, mental health issues, and gender dysphoria; many are diagnosed with an Autistic Spectrum Conditions (ASC) and Attention-deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Some students also have selective mutism, sensory issues and language disorders and 25% have an Education Health and Care Plan. All students take core and optional GCSEs. In recent years the school welcomed Andy Yates as Artist in Residence and, as a result of his commitment to coproduction methods with students, there has been an increased interest in photography.

As a writer working in Liverpool I have developed a practice in gallery and health settings, especially in my roles as Mersey Care NHS Foundation’s first poet-inresidence (2013 – 2020) and the first writer-in-residence at Open Eye Gallery (2016 – 2019). Through this experience I have developed a particular framework for my work which includes the following objectives and methods: • • • • • • •

To listen and understand the people I’m working with and respond to their interests: as well as their learning, emotional and support needs.

To enable creative and expressive writing through a range of visual materials, poems, music and other relevant media.

To encourage collective and individual responses in ways that reflect and respect learning needs.

To provide clear materials and learning activities that have creative outcomes.

To reflect on and incorporate feedback from learners in activities.

To assess and evaluate projects as they are being delivered and when they are concluded.

To produce project/activity publications, toolkits and exhibitions as needed.

This framework, common to many writers working with a wide variety of people, helped me to approach the MaxLiteracy project with confidence about what I needed to learn myself before I could start delivering activities and workshops with students at the JPC. The first requirement was to understand the ethos of the school and to show myself as a trustworthy and committed addition, albeit a time-limited one, to the education offer for students. Andy, Sarah and I had discussions about the kind of project we might offer in preparing the application to MaxLiteracy. Sarah sent me lots of information about the school, learning approaches and achievements, and Andy shared his experiences as Artist-in-Residence at JPC. We worked carefully on the application, thinking deeply and clearly about what we might do, how we could share tasks, and the best strategies we could deploy to enhance literacy skills in an 40 Writing in Education

exciting and inclusive way.

We decided that we would take the gallery to the school and install an exhibition as the central learning resource.

I was keen to include every student, so I prepared workshops for all year groups using the exhibition photographs as stimuli for reading, writing, speaking and listening.

There is an essential relational element in the writer’s work that comes long before our role in a classroom or community hub and yet it is rarely discussed. It helps to be aware of such matters as organizational structure and culture, potential colleagues, and students, their expectations of our work and realistic time-frames. This all precedes the establishment of trust with our learners and audiences - and these matters are rarely included in the planning or preparation when we are commissioned to deliver work. There was a question at the NAWE conference about how such projects as MaxLiteracy might be sustainable and it was this question that made me think about how the relational elements of a writer’s work are usually ignored when planning projects, especially by writers themselves. Yet they are crucial matters and may make a difference to our sense of achievement and the success of our work. In short, how are we included in the place where we offer our services as writers? How is the writer welcomed as an essential part of the learning process?

MaxLiteracy provided a framework that allowed these matters to be considered. The relationship between writer, gallery/museum and school started, for me, long before the application was made. Soon after the awards were announced all partners met in virtual conference to share our strategies and ideas, the aims of MaxLiteracy and project plans. This was a useful forum which emphasized shared values of inclusivity, imagination and ambition for our learners. This framework of support continued throughout the timeline of the project.

This was especially helpful given the uncertainties of lock-downs and working through a time of pandemic.

When I first visited JPC I received a wonderful welcome.

Sarah introduced me to the Headteacher and reception staff, took me around the school to show me the spaces and classrooms and introduced me to students and staff in every classroom. I also had the opportunity to deliver a creative writing workshop to the English staff. This not only gave staff a chance to have a good look at me, but I was able to learn about their teaching and creative approaches. I also visited the school when Andy was installing the exhibition: another chance to talk to students and show my face. By the time I started the workshops I felt comfortable in the building, knew my way around and had talked to Sarah in detail about the students learning needs. Everyone was invested in the exhibition and the opportunity to do some new and interesting work.

The usual bread and butter stuff of designing and planning workshops took a few weeks as I wanted to use a variety of methods and specific photographs for individual workshops. I also prepared a box with writing prompts for each photograph as part of the

exhibition and we had a large creative wall in the hall, where students could write responses to the photographs and share creative ideas The English staff gave me all their lesson time for two weeks so I was able to deliver 24 workshops to the students. Themes included: ‘Think Like a Writer,’ ‘A Voice on the Page,’ ‘Writing Through Objects,’ ‘Writing Through Colour’, ‘Cut-Ups’ and ‘Writing Martian.’ We found ways of interrogating the exhibition images to discover vocabulary, voice, stories and language. I was particularly concerned to show the students that writing is a process, not a product. That it begins with an itch or an idea, a fragment of thought or source (like a photograph). To gain confidence as a writer you need to write. In one of our workshops ‘Thinking Like a Writer’ I encouraged creative thinking and followed the writing process through reading, choosing a stimulus or source for writing, searching out and finding words and writing down our ideas, first lines and a first attempt at a poem or short piece of writing. This helped students to begin their writing journey. In all of our workshops we emulated the writing process.

Students responded with imagination and enthusiasm.

They recorded their poems and stories, redrafted their work and used the techniques and strategies from our writing workshops to write about their own photographs taken on photo-walks with Andy. Their own publication Beautiful, Tell Me I Am is joyful and rather beautiful itself. Within the next few months MaxLiteracy will publish resources from Writing Photographs, which can be shared and used by teachers and galleries.

This has been an important project for me. It made me pay attention not only to the needs of learners, and the design and delivery of workshops but also to the holistic needs of the students, and curriculum and project frameworks. I have also given time to writing the materials and resources for MaxLiteracy to disseminate and I hope they encourage others to explore and use photographs as a source and stimulus for creative writing.

MaxLiteracy: https://www.maxliteracy.org Open Eye Gallery archive: https://openeye.org.uk/archive/

Pauline Rowe has two recent pamphlets with Maytree Press: The Ghost Hospital (2019) was shortlisted for a Saboteur Award and The Weight of Snow (2021) won the 2021 Saboteur Award for best poetry pamphlet. Pauline has a PhD from Liverpool University. She was the first poet-in-residence with Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust (2013 – 2020), and first writer-in-residence at Open Eye Gallery (2016 –19). She also founded and worked as project lead for the charity North End Writers (2006 – 2020).

She has an interest in collaborative practice and interdisciplinary work especially with photographic artists. https://paulineroweblog.co.uk twitter: @PaulineRowe_

Writing in Education - Summer 2022 - Edition 87 Interested in submitting to NAWE’s members magazine?

In the next edition of Writing in Education, we would like to include a special section on Writers Groups. We’re interested in articles, creative submissions, or practical advice with a focus on writers groups - whether in person or online. Maybe you’re part of a group that has been meeting regularly for some time = we’d like to know what makes your group so special! Or maybe you have some useful suggestions to share with someone who’d like to set up a local group. Perhaps you setup a writers community online during the pandemic and it’s become a valuable part of your writing life.

Writing in Education is our members magazine and we publish articles and creative contributions that we hope our members find useful. We are always interested in submissions - they don’t need to be in relation to the special section - so if you have something you’d like to share with other writers in education, please get in touch.

Guidance on submitting to Writing in Education can be found on the NAWE website: https://www.nawe.co.uk/writing-in-education/nawe-magazine/submissions.html Writing in Education 41

Our Fear of ‘Reading Wrong’ Elena Traina

CHALLENGES IN TEACHING CREATIVE WRITING IN ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE This article explores two challenges which arose in my experience delivering Finding Your Other Voice, a course on writing creatively in English as a Second Language (ESL) included in Scuola Holden’s online adult education offer.

This mixed-genre fiction course was intended to meet the demands of the increasing number of writers wanting to write in ESL. In other countries, these writers “constitute a salient and legitimate social group which is ripe for investigation” (Zhao 2015: 1) but in Romance-language countries they are not seen as a target community, so their specific needs are rarely addressed.

The core objective of the course was for students to develop awareness of their linguistic/stylistic choices and acquire metalanguage to reflect about them in their creative practice, using an approach drawing heavily on stylistics. Applied to creative writing, stylistics can “promote students’ awareness of how language works formally and functionally, so as to enable them to perceive the subtleties of linguistic choices present in a text and the effects that these choices produce in readers” (Zyngier 2006: 26); applied to writing in a second language, it can highlight what constraints hinder the writers’ creativity and, in turn, what creative opportunities become available.

Students were encouraged to use reflective writing 42 Writing in Education

as a “platform to assimilate practice and diversity of experience and broader thought about identity and cultural influence in their writing” (Taylor 2021: 129) as well as to explore what challenges they encountered while writing in a second language and give their peers an opportunity to address these concerns in their written commentary.

Self-reflexivity was also at the core of the critical and engaged pedagogy which prompted me to ask “questions about the content and the way in which is taught” (Tay 2014: 111) and thus to identify my own challenges in teaching creative writing in English as a second language.

Before the course started, I distributed a survey in which I asked participants about their expectations, prompting them to write three things they wanted to learn. In this survey, only one participant stated that, along with “style differences between English and Italian writing”, they also wanted to learn the “basics on how to write a short story” and gather “a basic understanding of what ideas work in a short story/novel and what do not”.

After the first two lessons, while I was monitoring the students’ learning, reading their creative and reflective writing, and actively asking for feedback, it became clear that some of the students lacked some fundamental notions of storytelling (e.g. narrator and point of view, plot and theme, structure, characterization, atmosphere, etc.), indicating that that need was more widespread than

the survey revealed. This led to a collective decision to make space for aspects of fiction to be incorporated in the discussions on theory, with the syllabus now featuring a third thematic block on storytelling (See Appendix).

Engaged pedagogy is based on “the assumption that we learn best with interactive student/teacher relationship” (hooks 2010: 19); and this responsibility to be in a dialogue with students is an invaluable learning opportunity for the teacher who, “while being taught also teach” (Freire 1970: 53). This exchange with my students taught me several things: that adult students might not be as aware of their learning needs to the extent I had assumed; that it is legitimate and possible that adult students might approach writing in a second language having never written creatively in their native language; and that a stylistics-approach and a more traditional craft technique-based approach are not necessarily mutually exclusive, especially if they work towards “languagebased, student-centred activity-minded and processoriented methods” (Zyngier 2006: 228).

The second, and more insidious, challenge I had to face as a tutor of Creative Writing in ESL was how to address my students’ concerns about linguistic accuracy. Consider these answers to the initial survey’s question on students’ expectations: “I expect to work on the construction of the sentences.

I think this is the main challenge for an Italian speaker who wants to write in English. Also I would like to work on style in general terms. At the end of the day, anything that gets me into a deeper understanding of my English voice will be welcome.”

“I’d like to learn ways and tools to improve my writing style, as well as how to use the English language in a more effective way. By the end of this course I expect to have learned to recognize the strengths and weaknesses of my writing.”

“Start using English in a less scientific manner while writing, a more appropriate sentence construction for the language.”

“To become more confident with writing in English, express myself in more English style, be able to find my voice and use the right tone of voice […]”

As a late bilingual speaker and writer, accuracy has always been my own concern, too, and potentially the reason why I designed and proposed this course in the first place.

This is a consequence of the way English is taught formally in Italian secondary and higher education, both systems that “direct [us] to believe that writing is designed to practice grammatical structures and perfect word choice” (Hanauer 2014: 14) and of the assumption that texts that do not read as if they had been written by a native writer simply ‘read wrong’. In academic writing, for example, “ESL texts are often portrayed as possessing a less authorial or sharp ‘voice’ […], viewed by the researchers as owing to the lack of English

proficiency, sociocultural ideology and knowledge of specific discourse conventions in a Western academic world” (Zhao 2015: 15), which prompts Zhao to ask these questions: “Are normative language patterns prevalent in Creative Writing in English, a genre which most likely expresses personal style, one’s sociopolitical origin and creative freedom? Is an L2 flavour or taste welcomed or frowned upon”? (2015: 15).

My approach to tackling the challenge of linguistic accuracy was to set myself precisely this challenge: attempting to shift my students’ perspective from writing accurately to writing authentically, or “from correctness to the resourcefulness of writers as social actors who bring personal and cultural histories to their writing and particular understanding of the texts they are asked to write” (Matsuda et al 2003: 167).

Numerous case studies have shown how similar experiments to “elicit meaningful literary communication” less concerned with issues of accuracy in form and “more concerned with what students have to say and how” (Hanauer 2014: 15) have produced interesting results in poetry writing, which, by nature, welcomes and encourages experimentation with form, style and language. Prose conventions are stricter, although I found that both stylistics and literary translation offer plenty of examples of strategies that can be used to bring out authenticity and pursue the aim of finding one’s own other voice.

For example, I introduced the subject of language varieties and strategies to represent them in writing, such as semi-phonetic respellings, allegro speech spellings, use of regionalisms and eye dialect. Then I showed students some examples, including how Camilleri’s series of Montalbano novels was translated into English, pointing to the translator’s choice to maintain the use of Sicilian regionalisms and dialect in speech, but not in prose.

We then had a discussion on how to represent foreign characters’ speech and how similar strategies could be used to experiment with different narrators. The idea was that writers would feel empowered to let their first language and culture emerge in their writing as intrinsic value, rather than oppress it for the sake of more nativelike sounding writing.

On one level, while practising different voices in their prompts, writers were experimenting on how to reflect their bilingual identity in their writing. On a more profound level, writers were reflecting on their identity of “independent L2 users who can function across two languages, with mental abilities that monolingual native speakers cannot emulate” (Cook 2003: 7).

Similar approaches have been adopted in postcolonial contexts, where English as an official or widespread language traditionally has been competing with other national languages. In these areas – Kachru’s outer circle in the “World Englishes” framework – creative writers have produced works distinguished by language that breaks canon, featuring words, expressions and syntactic structures from the writers’ native language.

Writing in Education 43

These works fall under Kachru’s definition of “contact literature”, that is “any text in English written by the users of English as a second language to delineate contexts which do not form part of what may be labelled the traditions of English literature” (Kachru 1990: 61), and they often “reflect regional and national identities [that] are ‘specific and context-bound’ in bringing identifying features to bear” (Kachru & Nelson 2006: 118).

For example, current scholarship in creative writing has looked at case studies of creative writing workshops in places such as South Africa (Law-Viljoen and de Villiers 2021), Macao (Kelen 2014), Brunei (Tay 2014) and Asia in general (Whetter 2022).

It is not difficult to understand how “contact literature” has a role in these countries, and how, in these particular contexts, Creative Writing in a second language has the potential to become the “creolized discipline incorporating difference, experimentation, hybridity, invention and intervention” envisaged by Disney (2014: 10).

Italy, and Romance-language countries in general, however, have completely different non-colonial and colonial pasts, so our relationship with the English language is somewhat different. English is taught at all stages of formal education (by the time students get their secondary school diploma, the maturità, they are supposed to have reached a B2 level in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) but dominant pedagogies tend to deny opportunities to “construct and perform agentive and authoritative subjectivities through imaginative, creative, personal or aesthetic self-articulations” (Zhao 2015: 25). In our adult lives, English tends to be seen as “instrumental to academic and career prospects rather than a language that is at the heart of [our] identity” (Tay 2014: 108), yet, as digital citizens, we are receivers of incessant creative and media content in English: e.g. watching British or American series with subtitles, scrolling past memes and Tumblr screenshots on Reddit, sharing articles from the Guardian on Facebook, etc.

Therefore, reflecting on proposing this approach to creative writing in ESL to my Italian studentship of intermediate-to-advanced speakers, mostly latebilinguals, these questions emerged: • • • •

How can my students experiment with their native language and English in a country with a completely different and non-colonial past?

How is English part of our identities as 21st century citizens of a globalized world, consuming globalized art, music and literature?

Why do writers in Romance-language countries choose to express themselves creatively in English as a second language?

And, finally, as a tutor, will I be contributing to “authorizing hegemonies” (Disney 2014: 8) by choosing (and encouraging) English as an artistic mode of expression?

44 Writing in Education

These questions all emerged while I was reflecting on my teaching and I did not expect to find answers over the course of an eight-week programme. More likely, they will form part of a lifelong investigation on why and how creative writing can be taught in English as a second language in Romance-language countries. In the words of Lania Knight, who is paraphrasing Tim Mayers: “There is nothing natural or neutral about anything I ask of my students” (Knight 2021: 182), starting from the very premise upon which this course was based, i.e. writing creatively in English as a second language.

Conclusions The first important takeaway from this course was having to adjust the content and learning goals on the run to accommodate a third block on storytelling. In the future, I would like to experiment with an approach which encourages students to experience a sense of agency and control on what they are learning more directly.

Secondly, what I am also taking away from this first experience is that I intend to make an even greater effort to move away from a ‘product-based’ view of creative writing. Shifting the perspective from product to process will challenge a view of ESL texts as possessing a less authorial voice acknowledging the writers’ unique life histories and individual voices. Also, a more experimental approach with language will pave a way to empowerment for bilingual/multilingual (rather that ‘non-native’) writers reacting creatively in contexts where English has not permeated daily life but where it is steadily establishing itself as the dominant language of arts and media.

Paraphrasing Dan Disney’s quote and drawing my own conclusions here, bilingual/multilingual writing transforms writers from passive consumers of English to empowered creators of Englishes, participating in what Disney calls “a forum for dissent, resistance and speaking out” in which creative writing in ESL becomes the medium to “enable amplification […] of subaltern conversations already under way” (Disney 2014: 8).

Appendix Lesson 1

Lesson 5

Style 1: Writing in English as a second language. Style 3: Landscape and language.

Linguistic and stylistic challenges. Accuracy.

Foreignization and localization. Striving for Introduction to stylistics: foregrounding. authenticity. Schema theory. Text-World theory.

Lesson 2

Lesson 6

Voice 1: Narrators and characters. Point of view. Voice 3: Stepping back, fine-tuning, selfActive/passive voice. Modality. editing. Sophistication and defamiliarization.

Lesson 3

Lesson 7

Style 2: Literary devices. Imaginative writing.

Ambiguity.

Workshop.

Lesson 4

Lesson 8

Voice 2: Breaking down Dialogues. Speech and thought presentation. Formality, tension, beats.

Workshop.

Syllabus: before starting the course

Lesson 1

Next Steps: Options for publication and research.

Lesson 5

Introduction to writing fiction in ESL. Linguistic Style 3: Text-World Theory, text-worlds and and stylistic challenges. Accuracy. Sentence modal-worlds construction. Collocations.

Storytelling 3: Setting, landscape and language.

Lesson 2 Style 1: Introduction to Stylistics and foregrounding.

Voice 1: Modality, narrators & POV.

Storytelling 4: Character and characterization Lesson 6

Style 4: Stepping back, fine-tuning, self-editing style. Sophistication and defamiliarization.

Lesson 3

Lesson 7

Storytelling 1: Training the eye, first thoughts, autobiography and research.

Voice 3: Your narrator’s voice and POV.

Style 2: Imaginative writing, literary devices, the aesthetic of “show don’t tell”.

Workshop.

Lesson 8

Lesson 4

Lesson 9

Storytelling 2: Story theme (discussing “This, the Only World”, by C. Turnbull)

Next Steps: Dismantling myths. Publishing: Italy vs the world. Options for further learning and publication. Q&A.

Voice 2: Dialogues and foreign voices.

Adjusted version of the syllabus

Writing in Education 45

Works Cited Cook, V. 2003. “Basing Teaching on the L2 User”, in Non-Native Language Teachers. Perceptions, Challenges and Contributions to the Profession, E. Llurda (ed.) New York: Springer.

Disney, D. 2014. Exploring Second Language Creative Writing.

Beyond Babel. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Freire, P. 1970. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London: Penguin.

Hanauer, D. 2014. “Appreciating the Beauty of Second Language Poetry Writing”, in Disney, D. (ed.) Exploring Second Language Creative Writing. Beyond Babel. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, pp. 11-22. hooks, b. 2010. Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom.

London: Routledge.

Kachru, Y. & Nelson, C. L. 2006. World Englishes in Asian Contexts. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

Kachru, B. B. 1990. The Alchemy of English. Chicago IL: University of Illinois Press.

Kelen, C. 2014. “Process and Product, Means and Ends: Creative Writing in Macao” in Disney, D. (ed.) Exploring Second Language Creative Writing. Beyond Babel. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, pp. 75-102.

Knight, L. 2021. “An American Walks into a Bar (with Her British Creative Writing Students” in Moore, M. & Meekings,

S. (eds.) The Place and the Writer. London: Bloomsbury, pp.

173-184.

Law-Viljoen, B. & de Villiers, P. Y. 2021. “Ukubhukuda: Not Sinking in Language but Swimming” in Moore, M. & Meekings, S. (eds.) The Place and the Writer. London: Bloomsbury, pp.

13-30.

Matsuda, P. K., Canagarajah, A. S., Harklau, L., Hyland, K. and Warschauer, M. 2003. “Changing Currents in Second Language Writing Research: A Colloquium”, in Journal of Second Language Writing 12, 65-83.

Tay, E. 2014. “Curriculum as Cultural Critique: Creative Writing Pedagogy in Hong Kong”, in Disney, D. (ed.) Exploring Second Language Creative Writing. Beyond Babel. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, pp. 103-118.

Taylor, M. 2021. “Through the Looking Glass and Back Again: Writing Reflectively in Creative Writing”, in Moore, M. & Meekings, S. (eds.) The Place and the Writer. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 129-143.

Whetter, D. 2022. Teaching Creative Writing in Asia. London: Routledge.

Zhao, Y. 2015. Second Language Creative Writers: Identities and Writing Processes. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

Zyngier, S. 2006. “Stylistics: Pedagogical Applications”, in Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, pp. 226-232. Oxford: Elsevier.

Elena Traina is a writer, tutor and researcher in Creative Writing Studies. She has lived in Norwich, UK, for six years, working for a local authority. In 2021, she won a Special Recognition for her first script for a short film The Morning After at the Venice Film Festival; and published her debut novel Amarantha with Kurumuru Books. She is now on a six-month writing residency in Norfolk Libraries, working on her second novel, set in mid-Brexit Great Yarmouth. As a researcher, she is interested in writing creatively in English as a second language, and in conventional and unconventional approaches to teaching Creative Writing in non-anglophone institutions.

46 Writing in Education

Digital Storytelling Antonia Liguori and Alison Mott IN FORMAL AND NON-FORMAL EDUCATION A conversation with Antonia Liguori and Alison Mott of The Storytelling Academy, Loughborough University, UK “Sometimes, all we need to do is observe, to witness someone telling a story and letting them become a participant in it for the very first time. At the end she leaned back on her rickety old chair on the strangely even floor and said: ‘I’ve never told anyone that story before.’

Now she had. And it became real to her. It became real to us.”

Daniel Weinshenker, Center for Digital Storytelling, recalling the moment a workshop participant took her turn in the story circle. (Lambert 2013a: 52) “As facilitators, we are working to hold the space for [participants’] movement toward deeper and clearer insight.” Joe Lambert. (Lambert 2013b: 57) Digital storytelling (DS), as Story-Center co-founder Joe Lambert terms it, is “the shortest and most direct method to have someone invest in the power of their own story.”

(Lambert 2013c) The Digital Storytelling methodology, as devised by Lambert and his colleagues in California in the late 1990s, facilitates workshops where participants create self-revelatory stories about personal, lived experiences, told in first-person narrative in short-film form, using supporting images overlaid with a voiceover and a soundtrack of music or ambient sounds which add impact and meaning to the story.

For the NAWE Conference 2022, Antonia Liguori and Alison Mott of Loughborough University’s Storytelling Academy led a workshop on digital storytelling practice and shared their experiences of using the methodology, both for teaching and interdisciplinary research, across a broad spread of projects promoting inclusion and diversity, mental health and well-being and knowledge acquisition. The following is an adaptation of their talk and the conversation between them during that workshop.

Antonia: My background is in History and Computer Science, so I arrived into digital storytelling from the heritage education perspective, thinking about storytelling as something closer to what you would think of as oral history. But in the past seven to eight years, I’ve worked all over the globe thanks to the international community of digital storytelling that brought me to this fantastic participatory and creative practice. I’ve been applying it in a variety of projects now for more than 15 years, firstly in my previous work in the heritage sector in Italy and now at Loughborough University in the UK. You can see Joe Lambert tell the story of how digital storytelling was conceived at storycenter.org/history, but though the practice has evolved over time since the very first digital story was created 30 years ago, his ideas for the foundation and ethos of it still apply today.

One of the key principles of the movement was the idea of empowering people, of making knowledge and tools and digital tools accessible, and this is still one of the three key principles of the practice. So, one of the key words for us is accessibility, and then participation as well.

When we reflect about what makes digital storytelling different from other storytelling practices, it’s that it’s a workshop-based activity which involves a five-step process (or seven stage process as some practitioners would say). These five creative steps start with a briefing, or what we would call a story circle, in which we ask participants to share their story verbally.

Then we move through writing a script for a twominute video, which is generally around 200-250 words long. Then we go into the more technical phase, where sometimes we apply a storyboarding technique. We do voice recording, video editing, and then there is a sharing phase in which all the stories, all the videos produced at the end of this co-creative process, are screened, and there is a discussion about the digital stories produced.

Writing in Education 47

So digital storytelling is a creative process, very often facilitated in a workshop in which people work together and share a space, working around this notion of storytelling and story-listening at the same time. Which is why it’s so good for education.

In our practice at the Storytelling Academy in particular, we also think about digital storytelling as a form of public engagement, as audience development - for instance when we work with museums and heritage institutions.

But mainly it’s about sharing, and this is why it’s very effective also for what we could call participatory action research. It’s about sharing knowledge, but because it’s a process of co-creation, it’s an incredible experience in terms of building trust and supporting each other.

There is a beautiful definition by Daniel Meadows, one of the giants of the digital storytelling experience in the UK who was involved in the “Capture Wales” project with the BBC. He thinks about digital storytelling as a form of holistic thinking, and again, there are multiple applications of this definition within education.

(Meadows 2009) “A means of sharing knowledge, building trust, and cultivating identity.” (Ciancia et al 2014) Another quotation that I really like is the idea of thinking about digital storytelling both as a process and as an output, as a tool to make students, participants, learners, re-elaborate facts through emotions and therefore elaborate what they learn, interpret their knowledge, through their emotions.

We’ve been applying this in a variety of projects, mainly where the objective is to think about how to enhance what in Europe and the European Commission are known as the skills for 21st Century Learning, known in some frameworks as the 4C’s - critical thinking, communication, collaboration and creativity.

There’s also this challenge of knowledge hierarchies that we sometimes have within formal education. So, one of the good - though sometimes challenging - outcomes of a digital storytelling process is that collaboration happens, knowledge sharing happens, not just within the group of students, but also between the students - the learners - and the teachers, who in this case act more as facilitators of knowledge exchange. Collaboration is therefore one of the key elements of this process and gives us an opportunity to learn about our students in a way different approaches wouldn’t. And it’s also an opportunity to create a safe space to amplify those voices that are often silent in our groups.

There are two European-funded projects of relevance to the resilience and renewal theme which Alison and I are currently working on. The first is CERTIFY, which focuses mainly on Adult Education, and whose main objective is to apply digital storytelling techniques to support people to self-assess the four skills identified in our research as most required in the creative sector. The aim is for participants to submit digital stories along with their CVs when applying for jobs, to show hidden aspects of their creativity.

48 Writing in Education

The second project is called SOLIS and is about developing wellbeing and social inclusion in education through digital storytelling. Its main target audience are teachers of students aged 12-16, with a particular focus on how digital storytelling could be applied to address cultural diversity and discrimination in schools. Unfortunately, we can’t always offer learners a collective workshop experience in a digital storytelling environment, but we’ve developed an e-learning platform - and a card game to support it - with prompts to guide online users through the DS process, firstly to make them aware of those particular skills, and then to self-assess and showcase them through digital storytelling.

The platform will therefore guide learners to understand how to create a digital story and also to reflect upon how a story could condense, make visible and tangible, a particular skill through the sharing of a personal experience. There will also be an opportunity to upload digital stories which online users make.

“We should be moving towards becoming creators of knowledge, not necessarily just rehashing what other scholars have said. So I feel like digital storytelling … gives you permission to do that work, to let people know your story. And, like, use your story for … the bigger, larger body of knowledge.”

“What we need is people that are interested in learning and most people are intimidated by learning, the idea of reading a scholarly paper is overwhelming to them. So if you can introduce them to a topic in a more manageable form, I think you can get a long ways to educate people.”

These are excerpts of just two of many recordings we’ve collected of the reactions of teachers who’ve participated in digital storytelling workshops and of what schoolteachers in particular think are the key elements of the DS process that could be applied in their classroom practice. We’ve also collected the digital stories created by teachers in the first international (online) DS training for the SOLIS project.

Alison: To throw my story as a writer in here, I met Antonia a few years back when I was a participant in digital storytelling workshops for one of her projects. I’ve been writing for a long time, so I came at it thinking, ‘I know how to write stories, you can teach me nothing about storytelling, but I’ll go along anyway for a bit of fun.’ So I did, but instead of learning nothing, I was completely blown away by digital storytelling and what it can do.

The two magic phases for me are the story circle where you share your story with other people, and the bit at the end where you see people viewing your film; the impact of that is phenomenal. There are many, many positive educational outcomes of the digital storytelling process that are very valid, but for me, the connection people make with each other when they share stories, the trust they build between each other, is the most wonderful thing. It’s life changing. It certainly changed my life!

Any writer would recognise the story-creation process

and the key things a story needs to have: the prompt to tell a personal story on a theme and what that theme means to you; an emotion that you experienced as you were on the story’s journey; a turning point that changed you from one state to another; the message you want the audience to go away with. The stories themselves don’t need to be beautifully written - a conversational tone is best and bullet points are fine, and we also let people draw images as a storyboard if they prefer.

I’ve made three different films now and they’re not particularly polished, but they do their job. And though built around perfectly ordinary things - a key, a handkerchief, a play script I wrote as a primary teacher each turned into a deeply personal story about something I didn’t realise I needed to say.

Those are the kinds of stories that people share in the story circle, the most unexpected stories. And that’s where the magic happens, in my opinion. That’s the thing that’s phenomenal. In my first workshop ever I looked at people and made judgements about them - people I didn’t like the look of, people that I decided wouldn’t like me. But by the end of the process it was like we were Blood Brothers or something, because we’d shared and witnessed each other’s intimate stories of what it means to be human.

I’ll never forget one workshop where I shared a story about my dad dying and how difficult that had been, and a lady from another country - who I would never have met otherwise - leaning forward and just rubbing my shoulder. Such a powerful, powerful moment of connection with an almost complete stranger.

Antonia: You’ve made me think about the other beautiful thing of this process, that even for people with no experience at all of video editing, in the end they can create something like your video.

The object that you mentioned, too. We often send preparation notes asking learners to come to the workshop with an idea on a very broad theme they will explore, but also we ask them to bring an object to make a tangible connection to the theme with something that is meaningful and personal to them. Digital storytelling lets people tell the story that is unique to them, so even if we share the same prompts, the same theme, at the screening we will watch a diverse range of stories, because all our pathways are so interesting and so different.

So the beauty of it is actually the thing about how we come together, even if from different perspectives, and actually, we come closer together the more diverse those perspectives are. So the key objective for a facilitator and an educator is actually to make sure that participants and learners explore that freedom, that they explore it freely through the different languages of creativity. This is why we think of digital storytelling as a slow creative process and why we break it into chunks and steps and stages, because then the stories have time to be refined.

Alison: As you say, you don’t need to be a trained filmmaker to do it at all, and you don’t even have to use images of yourself if you don’t want to. The video-editing site we use has lots of stock images and it’s good for using with young people, too, because it’s safe, isn’t it? You don’t have to worry about safeguarding issues.

Antonia: Yes, we tend to use WeVideo, which is a cloud-based software for video editing, and that has a free library of stock images, animations and footage. It gives us different profiles for teachers and students, and as administrators, we can control the students’ films in a positive way, where stories can or cannot be published at all. So it’s quite a safe space.

Alison: Yes, because there are some deeply personal stories told, which may not be best for a young person to have up on YouTube or anything.

Antonia: Absolutely, yes. And it also allows collaborative work, which is another very interesting aspect of digital storytelling, about co-editing and co-creating the story.

Alison: That’s a key thing about the workshops, in that there’ll be people who’ve never used digital filmmaking platforms of any sort whatsoever, so you share with each other your story, but you also share your skills. So it’s a great tool for intergenerational learning, for instance. That first workshop, we had a guy who was absolutely fab at recording everybody’s voiceover to go over their film, other people knew where to find clips and how to edit them together. It’s a truly collaborative thing that builds bridges between people.

Antonia: Yes, and it’s versatile and flexible, so even if we think of these five steps being in such and such an order, those can be mixed and changed depending on time availability, on the skills of the group, and so on.

Alison: You’ve used digital storytelling with people who can’t write or draw themselves, haven’t you? Wasn’t there a young man you worked with that you helped tell his story, you were his amanuensis kind of thing?

Antonia: Yes, we did that. We also used it for students with visual impairments, so we had blind students this year working on digital stories and they produced films at the end of the process. And that’s quite interesting because there was a new sort of a role emerged of digital story director, and again, this emphasizes the importance of collaboration and mutual support in this process. The beauty of it is about expressing creativity at any stage, not as an individual but as a group, with all the collective skills that we can identify.

Writing in Education 49

Alison: So for me, the film is like the cherry on the cake.

They’re fabulous, the films, and as I’ve said, you have to experience it to believe the impact of sitting in an auditorium watching your story on a big screen and witnessing people connecting with it. That definitely changed my beliefs about my right to tell my own stories, both as an individual and as a writer.

But the film itself is almost an added bonus. The process of creating it and all the different stages you go through as a group to create them, that’s the key thing for me.

It’s community building, just wonderful. And then the film’s there forever, and people carry on interacting with it online (when they are online). But either way, whatever happens, you’ve had the learning from it that you needed.

Antonia: The learning bit is the most memorable part of the process, I would say. Because those emotional interpretations of stories and those understandings of stories make that information more long-lasting.

References

Alison: Yes, definitely. There are topics we’ve covered in the workshops - global warming, for instance - that I now understand because I watched a story about the impact of it on someone’s everyday life. I get it now, whereas I didn’t before.

Antonia: We’ve been asked about images and whether digital storytelling can be just sound. The answer is yes. Digital storytelling by conception and convention is a short film with a voiceover, but we’re also working on soundscapes as well, where we use only the voice. We could also invite participants to combine music and different sound effects to create the surround space.

So, we are exploring different things, different techniques, which can somehow be identified as digital storytelling, even if not completely in line with the conventional model. We like to disrupt the notion of what digital storytelling is!

‘Rise Up! Reconnect. Rebuild. Recreate,’ the 10th International Digital Storytelling Conference, will take place at Loughborough University from 20th to 22nd June 2022. See storytellingacademy.education for more information.

BBC [2008] Capture Wales Digital Stories. Available from: https://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/audiovideo/sites/galleries/pages/ capturewales.shtml [4 April 2022].

CERTIFY Project website (2022) Available from: https://certifyproject.com/ [3 April 2022].

Ciancia, M., Piredda, F., & Venditti, S. (2014). Shaping and sharing imagination: designers and the transformative power of stories.

In Proceedings of the Interactive Narratives, New Media & Social Engagement International Conference (pp. 37-46).

Lambert, J. (2013a) Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community, 4th Edition. New York: Routledge.

Lambert, J. (2013b) Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community, 4th Edition. New York: Routledge.

Lambert, J. (2013c) Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community, 4th Edition. New York: Routledge.

Lambert, J. (2012) The History of the CDS - a short story behind the short stories. Available on: https://www.storycenter.org/about [4 April 2022].

Liguori, A. (2019a) Extract from an interview with a professor who participated in ‘Explore Teaching with Digital Storytelling: An Interdisciplinary Workshop. Available from: https://soundcloud.com/antonia-liguori/digital-storytelling-makes-you-a-creator-ofknowledge/s-0Ek7U [3 April 2022].

Liguori, A. (2019b) Extract from an interview with a professor who participated in ‘Explore Teaching with Digital Storytelling: An Interdisciplinary Workshop. Available from: https://soundcloud.com/antonia-liguori/digital-storytelling-to-engage-largeraudience/s-vLbYd [3 April 2022].

Liguori, A. (2021c) SOLIS teacher interviews. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1cgSyS5FIB6P72G6_ mFGRQ/featured [3 April 2022].

Meadows, D. and Kidd, J. (2009). “Capture Wales, The BBC Digital Storytelling Project”. In Hartley, J, and McWilliam, K, (eds.)

Story Circle: Digital Storytelling Around the World. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

SOLIS Project website (2022) Available from: - https://www.solis-project.eu/ [3 April 2022].

Alison Mott is a writer, creative writing teacher and writer in the community interested in the role of memoir and storytelling for building personal and communal resilience. She is a Research Associate with Loughborough University’s Storytelling Academy, where she researches the benefits of staging digital storytelling activities in educational and community settings. Alison has a Master’s degree in Creative Writing and a PGCE in Primary Education, and prior to her current role worked in the state education sector as a teacher specialising in supporting English-language learning, inclusion and diversity.

Dr Antonia Liguori is a Senior Lecturer in Applied Storytelling at Loughborough University, School of Design and Creative Arts. She has a PhD in History and Computer Science from the University of Bologna and, before joining academia, worked for over ten years as a digital strategist in the heritage sector. Her research focuses on three main strands: digital storytelling in (cultural/heritage) education; storytelling for eco-social justice; digital storytelling and wellbeing. She is involved in many international research projects to develop methods and tools to foster innovation in education, and to trial digital storytelling as a participatory methodology for trans-disciplinary research. a 50 Writing in Education

Scan Rave Sunni Brown Wilkinson THE PARTY THAT IS POETIC METER AND SCANSION What is it about poetry that engages the body? What lulls and bewitches us, somatically? For many, it’s not only the imagery or language of the poem but the rhythm itself. A specific, repeated rhythm is called meter and the analysis and notation of this meter is scansion.

Our panel, Scan Rave: A Transatlantic, Collaborative Approach to Scanning Poems, highlighted the benefits of familiarizing ourselves with meter in poetry in order to appreciate the poem’s effects in terms of its musicality.

As poets, we try to emphasize that scanning a poem, by writing out the stressed and unstressed syllables and feet on the poem itself, is more art than science, and because of that we enjoy rich and sometimes hilarious discussions about how we read the poem based on our accents and backgrounds. As a “transatlantic” group of poets, our locations range from London, UK to Arkansas, Utah, and D.C. in the U.S. We also frequently consult the dictionary to keep us straight about pronunciation.

The basic markings we use while scanning include: • • • • • • •

u - unstressed syllable / - stressed syllable u / - iamb / u - trochee / / - spondee u u / - anapest / u u - dactyl

Each stressed/unstressed combination equals a foot: 3 feet - trimeter; 4 feet - tetrameter; 5 feet - pentameter; 6 feet - hexameter Most of us remember being taught that Shakespeare wrote in iambic pentameter, but beyond that we don’t often know how to unlock the meter of a poem or

understand the magic behind the music. While many classical poems are metered, there are also contemporary poems that engage with meter. Departures from the meter, often called “substitutions,” are generally not accidental. Instead, the poet emphasizes a certain phrase or wants the poem to sing a little differently in that place, sometimes in support of its thematic concern.

In this wonderful sonnet by the Irish poet Patrick Kavanaugh, the main meter is traditional iambic pentameter, meaning it uses a pattern of five “feet” of unstressed and then stressed syllables. Iambic meter is said to be the meter that mimics the heart (da DUM, da DUM), and five repetitions of that is about the length of a normal breath. This is the most common traditional meter in the English language.

In this selection of the poem (the first stanza and the final lines of the poem), there are only three variations from the set meter. You can listen for their differences as you read the excerpt from the poem below: “Inniskeen Road: July Evening.”

The bicycles go by in twos and threes There’s a dance in Billy Brennan’s barn tonight, And there’s the half-talk code of mysteries And the wink-and-elbow language of delight….

A road, a mile of kingdom. I am king Of banks and stones and every blooming thing.

In the opening of the second and fourth lines, the iamb (da Dum) becomes an anapest (da da DUM): “There’s a DANCE” … “And the WINK”, possibly to show excitement and anticipation about the dance or to capture a colloquial sense of this country setting. The third line Writing in Education 51

also substitutes an iamb for a spondee, or two stresses: TALK CODE. The language of the dancers is more physical than verbal. What is being said between them is not so obvious as casual language. It’s a departure from the usual talk, and the emphasis of those two stresses draws attention to that. Otherwise, the poem rolls along in iambic pentameter and, in that repetition, imitates the dancing in the barn and the breathing of the dancers and the speaker.

The end of the poem returns to stricter meter as the poet contemplates his life and the beauty of his world. The poem ends, as we expect it to, by closing with not only the rhyme but the established meter, and it is the craft of that closing that feels so satisfying.

Using meter with intention and skill gives a poem life and breath, room to feel alive and organic, and it is also part of the mystery of the cadences we live by. We love meter because it soothes, and departures from it surprise us. Scanning helps create a meaningful understanding of how and why a poem is built the way it is, often making connections to poetry of previous generations, collaborating with the canon and with our human need for movement and the recognisable collective.

line, how each person has interpreted the meter and why. Some of the most rewarding moments come in our disagreements. We analyze the context of the line, the tone, the subject, and consider if and why the poet may have used substitutions. We also discuss how one person may have heard a line differently based on our locale, our education, or our personal understanding of what’s happening in the poem at that moment. It’s a creative workout, one that we do together, and by the end we have a deeper appreciation for the construction of the poem and for the music of language itself.

There are excellent sources that can help bring meter to life for a reader: For Better for Verse is a website through the University of Virginia that allows readers to try a hand at scanning classic poems while offering clues and examples. You can find it at: https://prosody.lib.virginia.edu/ Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters by Annie Finch is an excellent guidebook through a variety of metered verse.

When our group meets via Zoom to scan a poem each month, we’ve each read the poem and scanned it, but the real pleasure comes in our collaboration. We read the poem aloud once and then assign each person a specific line (or set of lines) to scan, using the annotation tools in Zoom. Then we step back and examine, line by

Jocelyn Page, a poet and educator from Connecticut, living in London, has published in various journals including The Spectator, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Salzburg, South Carolina Review and Poetry Review. Her debut pamphlet, smithereens, was published in 2010 by tall lighthouse press and her 2016 You’ve Got to Wait Till the Man You Trust Says Go was the winner of the Goldsmiths’ Writer Centre’s inaugural Poetry Pamphlet award. http://www.jocelyn-page.com

Maya Ribault’s poetry has appeared in Agni, Bloodroot, Cloudbank, North American Review, Speak, The New Yorker, and TSR Online. Her chapbook, Hôtel de la Providence, was released by Finishing Line Press in 2020.

Sunni Brown Wilkinson is the author of the full-length poetry collection The Marriage of the Moon and the Field and the chapbook The Ache & The Wing (winner of the Sundress Chapbook Contest). Her work has been awarded New Ohio Review’s NORward Poetry Prize and the 2020 Joy Harjo Prize from Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts.

Other members of this panel included Cath Drake and Wendy Taylor Carlisle.

52 Writing in Education

Rooms of Whose Own? Sonja Frenzel

AN ECO-POETICAL PERSPECTIVE ON RENEWAL AND RESILIENCE THROUGH WRITERLY PRAXIS Introduction The question – how do we write? – is as old as it is timely.

How do we tap into creativity, when we are faced with political atrocities, humanist catastrophes, an everaccelerating ecological emergency? How do we find words to not only articulate our human experience of dwelling in such precarity, but to imagine a more peaceful and sustainable future on this planet? Resilience and renewal, it may seem, are two pivotal qualities for writing today.

Beyond its historical predicaments, however, my initial question – how do we write? – resonates with spatial implications. In fact, Virginia Woolf’s famous dictum that “a woman needs a room of her own if she is to write fiction”[1], is more relevant than ever. Writing today still requires the privilege of owning and inhabiting a proper room; at the same time, writing today occurs in a planetary space in which human creativity is thoroughly entangled with more-than-human agencies. How do the convoluted materialities of writerly rooms facilitate writerly praxes? How are writerly spaces and writerly praxes conducive to resilience and renewal?

In this essay, I will trace these questions by sketching, firstly, writerly praxes from an ecopoetical perspective, i.e. from a perspective that merges ecology and poetics.

This vantage will translate “writing” into a holistic and mindful praxis of “writing-with” the more-than-human environment. Based on these ecopoetical premises, I will proceed to explore, secondly, how these writerly praxes may be implemented in a teaching model for creative

writing in literary studies classrooms. Finally, and thirdly, I will conclude with some tentative thoughts on how teaching this ecopoetical “writing-with” may serve to put into practice the qualities of resilience and renewal.

II Writing Scenes: Ecology, Poetics, Ethics In line with Jane Bennett’s curious as well as pertinent definition, I take ecology to mean “the study or story (logos) of the place where we live (oikos), or better, the place that we live”[2] (emphasis added). Every story we have told and will tell is complicit in poetically making our planetary dwelling-place, “the only home our species currently knows”[3]. When ecology thus merges with poetics, storytelling and creative world-making practices cease to be an exclusively human prerogative.

Along these lines, the Environmental Humanities have advocated for a radical de-centring of human exclusivity and, consequently, for the radical altering of relations between human and nonhuman. Notably, these paradigm shifts in-the-making, too, abound with ideas of story and storytelling [4], which find their most illuminating exemplifications in Bruno Latour’s notion of a shared “geostory” [5] as well as in Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann’s notion of “storied matter”[6]. What these approaches share is their endeavour to entangle human stories with more-than-human agencies.

For the present purposes, I will be exploring how these entanglements affect writerly praxes. To begin with, writing occurs in a material setting – such as a room – into which a writer themself is immersed through their corpo-reality, through their physical as well as their Writing in Education 53

psychological presence, and in which writerly praxes are influenced by unpredictable forces from within and without.

Virginia Woolf describes one such scene of writing-with in her memoir-essay “Sketch of the Past”: The little platform of present time on which I stand is, so far as the weather is concerned, damp and chilly. I look up at my skylight - over the litter of Athenaeum articles, Fry letters – all strewn with the sand that comes from the house that is being pulled down next door – I look up and see, as if reflecting it, a sky the colour of dirty water. And the inner landscape is much of a piece. Last night, Mark Gertler dined here and denounced the vulgarity, the inferiority of what he called ‘literature’; compared with the integrity of painting. […] a criticism which has its sting and its chill, like the May sky.” [7] From an ecological vantage, this passage evokes a story of the place that Woolf lives at the time. This place is poetically made by material agencies offering wor(l) dly equivalents of a ‘sting[ing]’ and ‘chill[ing]’ memory.

In these ontological and epistemological conundrums, Woolf’s writerly praxes operate as a participatory act of translation. Her words become mediators between her embodied experience and her creative making practices.

Furthermore, this scene of writing-with articulates the writer’s mindfully embodied presence. Her words “describe as closely as possible the way the world makes itself evident to awareness, the way things first arise in our direct, sensorial experience […] not to explain [the world, SF] but simply to pay attention to its rhythms and textures, not to capture or control it but simply to become familiar with its diverse modes of appearance.”[8] Even as “A Room of One’s Own” still constitutes a prerequisite for writers – and particularly for women writers – to tap into their creativity, this room is inhabited not by the writer alone, but accommodates multiple more-thanhuman agencies.

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In a recent seminar, titled “Rooms of Whose Own?”, I set out to explore these agencies with my students. For starters, we discussed some images of “writers’ rooms”, taken from The Guardian’s recent series of the same title.

[9] The students then received a template image of an empty room, along with the task to “furnish their perfect writer’s room” either in writing or in drawing. This freewriting exercise of 6 minutes encouraged students to not only become aware of their writing spaces, but to further shape these environments so that they would facilitate writerly praxes. In ecopoetical terms, these rooms exemplified places that the students lived and that they could entirely control.

In a second creative task, however, their initial pieces were curiously “other-taken”[10]. To this effect, I adapted an exercise from improvised acting: revisiting their piece, students were asked to identify the most significant item in their writerly space. This in itself offers insights into their individual writerly praxes. Yet, they were asked, in the following partner work, to present this special item to a fellow student as a gift. The receiving student was asked to justify how and possibly why this gift would complement their writerly space.

The purpose of this exercise was to yield authorial control over the initial creative piece to outside influences: to a well-meaning, gift-giving human influence as well as to the less predictable more-than-human agency of the given item itself. Effectively, this exercise provides an example of how writing-with compels writers to realise that “[l]ife is subject to swerves – sometimes gentle, often violent out-of-the-blue motions that cut obliquely across material and conceptual logics […] they afford opportunities to usefully rethink habits of thought”[11].

In my teaching model of writing-with, these swerves include the ecopoetic forces of literary and theoretical texts as inspirational influences on the students’ writerly praxes.

III Writing-With: A Teaching Model This teaching model is based on what in Germany is referred to as “artistic research” – a newly developing method or approach in the visual and performative arts that has only randomly been adapted into literary studies [12]. Although it corresponds roughly to research-based practice and practice-based research, it is also and specifically designed to accommodate creative writing practices into literary studies classrooms. In other words, it integrates creative storytelling with critical readings of literary and theoretical texts.

This teaching model puts into practice the afore-mentioned premises of ecopoetics: it recognises any piece of writing for its world-making capacities. Today, it is commonplace to assume that literature makes the world evident to its readers, while the processes of its composition will have made and will continue to make the world evident to its writers. Writing relies as much on a critical appraisal of a status quo as on a creative thinking forward from the cracks in these foundations. Arguably, theoretical texts may draw on different genre conventions, but their inherent storytelling will follow the same patterns of critique and creativity. In sum, these texts equally partake in the story of the place that we live, in its perpetual renewal and in its resilience.

IV Resilience Writing constitutes one among many creative making practices “converging on the oikos, the planet earth that is the only home our species currently knows” [13]. Harking back to a paradigmatically human mode of being in the world, writing has offered a means to preserve our stories across time, to distribute them across space, and to thereby poetically build a home on earth. As an eco-poetical practice, however, writing allows us to reach beyond the modernist confines of humanist “writing-about”: rather, writing-with re-thinks writerly praxes as an eco-translational mode of being in and with the more-than-human story of the place that we live.

Our story, as human beings, perpetually unfolds in the very process of its being told. In this day and age, it demands for renewal from an ecological and poetical vantage, upon which human and more-than-human world-making projects may meet on equal terms. And yet, it remains an utterly “fluid text”[14] that requires to be written and rewritten, to be read and re-read, critically and creatively. If we surrender to these processes, in their radical openness, we may yet discover rooms of our own: creative-critical tradospheres, in which we ourselves may become more than human.

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what is the most important item in your room? give this item to the person next to you as a present!

• •

“I am [name]. The most important item in my writing room is [name item].

And I’d like you, [name partner], to have it, too.”

“Thank you, [name]. I‘m really happy to have [name item] in my writing room, now, because…”

Endnotes: 1.

2.

3.

4.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. London: Penguin, [1928] 2004, 4.

Bennett, Jane. “The Force of Things: Steps Towards an Ecology of Matter.” Political Theory 32.3 (2004): 365.

Skinner, Jonathan. “What is Ecopoetics?” Jacket 2 (2011), 1.

Cf. Frenzel, Sonja. “An EcoPoetics of Storied Matter: Agency, Affect, and Errantry in the Anthropocene.”

Ecocriticism: Environments in Anglophone Literatures. Eds. Frenzel, Sonja and Birgit Neumann. Heidelberg: Winter, 2017. 59-81.

5. Latour, Bruno. “Agency in the Anthropocene.” New Literary History 45 (2014): 1-18.

6. Iovino, Serenella, and Serpil Oppermann, eds. Material Ecocriticism. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2014.

7. Woolf, Virginia. “Sketch of the Past.” In: Moments of Being. Boston and New York: Mariner Books, 1985, 61-159: 85.

8. Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. New York: Vintage Books, 1996, 33.

9. https://www.theguardian.com/books/series/writersrooms (last accessed 04 April 2022) 10. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, 45.

Sonja Frenzel is a senior lecturer in Modern English Literature at Heinrich Heine University Dusseldorf, Germany, where she coordinates the creative writing programme in English. As writer-teacher-researcher, Sonja’s work is dedicated to opening pathways into creative and critical thinking. Her main interests revolve around ecopoetics and environmentally oriented post-human/ist scholarship. She has published several short stories in literary journals and has participated in two online collaborative writing projects.

To date, she has translated seven novels from English into German. Her current writing project is tentatively titled “Now/Here”, and it accommodates both scholarly and creative pieces.

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REVIEWS

Out of Time: Poetry From the Climate Emergency Simpson, K. (ed) Valley Press, 2021.

ISBN: 97871912436613, 142 pages, paperback, £12.99 Kate Simpson writes in her introduction to this important collection of poetry, which she has also edited, that ‘Out of Time engages with the power of poetry to ask questions, subvert expectations and raise awareness in 2021’. She points out that the anthology has been very definitively ‘datestamped’ as having been brought together in 2021, because it explicitly rejects the notion that poetry can be timeless, relevant to all eras and audiences. For Simpson, the poems here invoke the true power of ‘ecowriting’ which is ‘about using language to relearn our direction on the planet not as one of sovereignty but of responsibility—of co- and interrelated existence with the non-human’.

Out of Time: Poetry From the Climate Emergency is grouped around specific themes and concerns: emergency, grief, transformation, work, rewilding.

The first section, entitled ‘Emergency’, explores in a visceral, eye-opening fashion ‘unimaginable ecological realities’.

The opening poem of ‘Emergency’ (and the whole collection) is ‘New planet who dis?’ by Rishi Dastidar. It is a stream of consciousness riff on our destructive behaviours: ‘stone pebble that Galileo dropped next to the feather like that straight down spirit level down plumb line down lift shaft down oh maybe Tower Inferno is somewhere in this mix too remember all the flames up the lift shaft Faye Dunaway’s eyebrows shoot up anyway the point is down i’m going down...’

For me, the most telling poem in the ‘Emergency’ section is Cath Drake’s ‘What I’m Making With the World’: ‘I’m making a handbag out of the hide of the world I’d been hunting for something contemporary, unique.

It gutted and skinned fairly easily: the soil, rivers, oceans, seams of hot tar, broken glacier chips and molten yolk fell out into a pile that I’ll take in a sack to the tip.’

The almost playground quality of the first line takes a sinister steer as the poet embarks upon a ‘hunt for something contemporary, unique’. Throughout the collection, there is a deep sense amongst the poets about how complicit we all are in the earth’s destruction.

Hannah Lowe’s ‘The Trees’ is a wonderful contrast to Philip Larkin’s bucolic poem of the same name: ‘All summer the trees in the park have been plummeting down.

Most wait until dark, when the skaters and smokers and dealers have made their way home’

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Lowe’s Anthropocene urban pastoral gives agency to the trees, which ‘wait’ for their moment to plummet. Many of the poems in the collection similarly personify the earth, but there is nothing coy or Disney like about this personification; it’s more that personification is used to provide agency to nature. It indicates a new sense of holism in nature writing; the poets do not perceive themselves as separate from nature but rather they are in it; immanence is the name of the game here. It’s as though the Cartesian dualism of mind/body, humans/nature have been emphatically replaced by the idea that we are all intimately connected in both knowable and unknowable ways. This outlook provides many of the poems with a richness and originality which is often absent from much nature poetry.

In the ‘Grief’ section, Gboyega Odubanjo writes in ‘Oil Music’: ‘we in the black, we both in a barrel. call it a village. we both in the pumping. the people no get no nothing’ The themes of social justice and the climate emergency are admirably represented in the collection. As in ‘Oil Music’, the voiceless are given voice, the powerless are taken seriously, they conveyed the power of their experiences. Equally, the non-human is focused upon. There are poems about butterflies (Fiona Benson), the origins of the modern rose (Sarala Estruch), and ones that also feature fishing as an imaginistic thread (Romalyn Ate and Andrew Fentham). The closing poem of this section by Linda France is about the Giant Sequoia in New York’s Natural History Museum. The last two lines are particularly compelling: ‘I swear I can smell the forest where you were felled – ancient and piney, earth’s incense rising.’

This is what these poems do to the reader as a whole; they provide a kind of ‘incense’ from the earth—the smell of our planet rises off most of these poems. In the section on ‘Transformation’ Raymond Antrobus asks at the end of his poem ‘Silence/Presence’: ‘What would the trees say about us?

What books would they write if they had to cut us down?’

Again, there is an important personification going on here. The reader is invited to imagine a world where trees can speak and write, and have the power to ‘cut us down’. As with many poems in the anthology, we are drawn into a parallel world where non-humans are conveyed in a capacity rarely accorded in any other forms of thought. This is what poetry can uniquely do; set us thinking on different pathways.

Ella Frears undergoes the most profound transformation in this section in her poem ‘Becoming Moss’: ‘I lie on the ground I open my mouth.

I suck on a spoon.

I embrace a stone.

I empty my mind I stuff it with grass I’m green, I repeat’ I love the insouciant humour and mystery here. Frears poem both debunks ‘greenwashing’ and celebrates it. In poems such as these, we are permitted to think two contradictory thoughts at the same time: to see the futility of much of our attempts to ‘connect’ with nature, but also to perceive and feel the necessity and elliptical meaning in it.

In the next section, ‘Work’ Inua Ellams’ poem ‘Fuck/Humanity’ curses modern life, and Will Kemp appoints David Attenborough as his PM when he goes abroad. In ‘Geography Lessons’, Mariah Whelan poetically explores her teaching about soil erosion and Fair Trade, and concludes: ‘…extinction might not be the world ending but a correction, righting itself of its heavy, human tilt.’

Quite a few poems do express this anti-humanistic approach; they pulse with humanity’s self-hatred and self-loathing.

They are difficult, sobering poems to read.

In the final section, ‘Rewilding’, Martha Sprackland goes beach combing and remembers: ‘…When I was younger, desperate for a place to call my own, I’d scour the pavement on the way to school, head down, scuffing, for money to add to the shoebox under my bed.’

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The poem is entitled ‘Savings’ and explores what can be saved from the earth in the era of the Anthropocene in a poignant, oblique fashion. This poem really works in the way it combines personal description of a beach littered with both human and natural ‘savings’. In ‘I am a person’, Dorothea Lasky talks about how she told the afternoon she is a ‘person from the future’: ‘It was the afternoon of the world The window winter light an endless ravine Outside the window…’

The poem evokes a definite sense of the uncanny as does the last poem in the collection ‘Leaf’ by Send Hewitt. These two poems also share a mystical optimism in their endings. ‘Leaf’ concludes: ‘For even in the nighttime of life it is worth living, just to hold it.’

It is a fitting end to a triumphantly potent and cogent collection of poems. This is a truly wonderful anthology; it contains poems by some of our finest poets, weaving very well-known names with poets I hadn’t encountered before. For me, it takes an admirably ‘decolonised’ approach both in its choice of poets and its thematic threads; you won’t find colonialized visions of the English pastoral here; the self-serving nostalgia for the ‘good old days’ or an imaginary golden age of ecological utopias. Rather, you will uncover a constant interrogation of what it means to be part of web of life on earth in 2021. I really appreciate the care that has been taken to construct this anthology, even though it is ‘date-stamped’, I feel it will be relevant for many decades to come.

Reviewed by Dr Francis Gilbert.

Francis is a Senior Lecturer in Education at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has published articles about ecoliteracies in ‘Writing in Education’, (2021: Issue 83): https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/30308/1/Whats%20Next%20Ecoliteracies%20 FGilbert%20March%202021.pdf He is the Principal Investigator for the Parklife Project, which aims to get young, disadvantaged people to research their local parks and change them for the better using creative, innovative research methodologies. He has published three novels and writes poetry.

Sing Ho! Stout Cortez: Novellas and Stories Thomas, Michael W. Black Pear, 2022.

ISBN: 9781913418-54-0, 224 pages, paperback, £8.00 Sing Ho! Stout Cortez is an intriguing title, and the book is made up of several intriguing stories and novellas, set in different locations and with very different characters, but deftly linked together by Thomas’s poetic and accomplished literary style.

The first story, the novella Esp, was shortlisted for the UK Novella Award in 2015, and expands on the experiences of Henderson Bray, first encountered in ‘Misshapes from Cadbury’s’ in Thomas’s story collection The Portswick Imp. It creates an excellent opening to the collection, introducing us to Thomas’s mellifluous style in a beautifully written coming-of-age story that follows a group of friends as they discover their roots and the power and of music, in the Caribbean island of Grenada. ‘We were at an age for a thirst for drama,’ we are told early on, and this thirst is quenched for the reader by the energetic and rich use of dialogue including vernacular nuance (translation notes are provided) and references to pop culture and music traditions. The sense of mystery and curiosity regarding one’s peers, that is so often a part of being a teenager, is well developed, revolving around the question of what happened to key musician and talent, Esp. Here, Thomas adopts a lightness in his writing which leaves the reader plenty of room to speculate—as Henderson himself says: ‘May be I sound mad, but this piercing it all together is more fun than downright fact.’ And, for me, Henderson’s narrative voice was so authentic and compelling that it was easy to keep in step with him and end up caring, like him, about what happened to Esp. Writing in Education 59

In the preface, Thomas talks of the unifying theme as the characters search to escape current circumstances (or the impact of past events on their present reality) and there is no one that has more of a right to seek escape than the narrator in the second novella, Tickle, Tickle. The narrator attends a writing group where friend Tracy is reading (‘It was funny, really, seeing your best friend in a new place and saying things in a new way, like half of you is rooting for her and the other half doesn’t know her at all’) and here, the main theme of the story is foreshadowed by a member of the writing group who refers to the topic of domestic abuse. Thomas takes us deep into the narrator’s consciousness as we learn of her experiences as a teenage victim of sexual assault and rape. The details up to the tragic climax are heartbreakingly sketched through her own young voice (‘I asked Mum if I could wear my jeans for the next visit, but she said not on your nelly’) emphasising the regret and mistaken complicity she feels in the act, increasing our sympathy for her. Through skilful writing, Thomas manages to create a realistic but satisfying end to this gripping story.

Thomas’s skill is his ability to fully inhabit each of his characters and show us their internal workings. In certain sections, however, it can feel like the internal monologue digresses a little too far from the action, which makes the story less compelling and harder to follow; that said, Thomas is a skilful enough writer to return us to the heart of the story in the end where he creates satisfying, nuanced endings that leave us thinking about the characters and their predicaments long after the book has ended.

Reviewed by Nicole Moody.

Nicole Moody has spent over 20 years working in the study abroad sector, first as a programme manager and later as an academic. She is Associate Professor and Academic Advisor at the American Institute for Foreign Study (AIFS) based in Kensington, London and along with teaching she is responsible for AIFS’s student mentorship programme.

A Wonder Woman Kohli, K. Offa’s Press, 2021.

ISBN 978-1-9996943-6-4, 80 pages, paperback, £9.95 When the poet Kuli Kohli was a child, she loved ‘free family days out’ in the Black Country with her brother and sister, and her dad, ‘his own boss on a double-decker bus’. In ‘On the Buses’, one of the standout poems in this compelling debut, Kohli uses Punjabi Black Country dialect to show how language changes landscape. Dudley becomes Dada-jee—meaning Grandad; Merry Hill is Meri-hal—My plough or tractor. Kohli observes her father in the mysterious world of adults: ‘blonde and brunette women/ in tiny dresses and high heels giggled, ‘How am ya luv?’/ Replying in his Indian accent, ‘I am very fine, lav.’ When they ‘ey gor enof’ pennies, he lets them on for free. But there are other passengers too: ‘young skinheads boarded/ shouting, ‘Bludy stinkin Paki! Rag head! Tekkin ower jobs!’ Sometimes he carries on, ‘like he was deaf’; other times he swears back.

This was Britain in the 1970s, when Wolverhampton-based Kohli, appointed this year as the city’s poet laureate, arrived as a small child with her parents. The tender ‘A Piece of India’ acknowledges their struggle. A young Indian woman, wearing her best clothes, her ‘vibrant colours smudged in shadows of charcoal’ goes to the cinema for ‘a touch of gold dust’, her baby clinging to her hip. ‘Porcelain dolls sway in the wind, fearless like the rain’: white women, who call out insults. But, Kohli insists, ‘They exchange gentle nods in a cultural clash.’ Her parents’ resilience and grace means that, ‘A generation later, that baby, that child made in India/ a lost mosaic piece glinting… [is] An ideal fit in the Black Country’.

Kohli is big-hearted and humorous. She recognizes the female battle to hang on to identity, among the demands of family life: A Woman Like Me ‘should/ get up in the early hours,/ prepare and cook good food,/ get kids ready with magic powers.’ Yet she admits, I don’t know/ a woman like me,/ I only know me.’ She has an extra difficulty to overcome: she was born with cerebral palsy. In ‘Life Under Lock Down’, with time to think, she imagines living in a 60 Writing in Education

war zone: ‘as an Asian disabled woman/my life would not have been worth much./ Here umbrellas give me shade, keep me dry.’

She does not shy away from examining her disability. In ‘Wedding Day’ – ‘the day I thought/ would never come’— she wonders, ‘Could someone really accept me as a wife?/ Maybe as a sacrifice?’ She’s given her husband’s ring to hold: ‘With a sudden spasm and a jerk,/ I dropped it!’ They watch the ring ‘roll away like a penny, like a dream’.

In another poem, Equilibrium, she writes, ‘I survive crossing roads, bridges,/ tree roots, rocks and uneven slabs;/ collecting coppers, notes, a diamond earring/ on my travels, people’s lost possessions.’ Adventure comes at a cost: ‘I barely look forward or above;/ all I have to lose is my balance.’

Some of Kohli’s most vivid images are inspired by nature. In ‘I Wonder’, she walks ‘among the gossiping trees; / evergreens clothed in prickly shades of jade,’ under ‘the blue sky wired with branches’, hearing ‘cold secular silences, broken by roaring chainsaws’. Closer to home, she’s puzzled by a Chile Pine, an ‘exotic creation/ like industrial chimney brushes,/ with stems like giant cactuses.’ She wants to know ‘why and how/ these Chilean gauchos live/ so comfortably in a tarmac garden.’ She asks her neighbours, but ‘The family, who had moved recently/ into our estate, were obsessed with drinking,/ weddings, expensive cars and big houses,/ never answered my questions.’

Many women might have felt, during the pandemic, that they had to be Wonder Woman. For Kohli, the feeling is not new: she’s a survivor, who, in her poem of the same name, ‘entered the world like an uninvited guest’. She was ‘different – an alien from outer space’. Her marriage prospects made her feel like ‘a British visa for Asian men to chase’. Yet she has made a happy marriage, and family life, and found her place – as ‘a valued writer, poet, working mum’. As she acknowledges, ‘I survive this sentence – a tough test’.

Reviewed by Sarah Hegarty.

Sarah Hegarty’s short fiction has been published by Mslexia, Cinnamon Press and the Mechanics’ Institute Review, and shortlisted for the Fish and Bridport prizes. She has an MA in Creative Writing and is writer-in-residence at George Abbot School, Guildford. She is represented by Annette Green at Annette Green Authors’ Agency. www.sarahhegarty.co.uk

How to Write Short Stories and Get Them Published Lister, A. Little Brown, 2019.

ISBN: 97811472143785, 244 pages, paperback, £9.99 Books about the writing process are plentiful. If you want advice about how to make a character believable, there is a multitude of books on offer to help. The same applies to plot. And setting. In fact, writers are spoilt for choice when it comes to books about their craft, so much so that it can, at times, feel overwhelming. Ashley Lister’s How to Write Short Stories and Get Them Published fits perfectly into the ‘support guide’ category—and it does what it so clearly says on the cover.

Lister is well-established in his field, and he has been published in many magazines, anthologies and academic journals. He lectures in creative writing and this ‘how to’ book is proof of his skills and experience. It is a superb example of a text that ably amalgamates what we, as writers, look for: each of the nine sections tackles different areas of short story writing, or challenges, and is followed by an exercise.

For example, the first section, titled ‘Ideas’, is followed by a number of different sub-sections, such as ‘Writing Prompts’—and then, an exercise is provided. One of the main selling points of this book is the breadth of ideas it covers. As a writer myself, I often look for a quick fix—and this book provides such a treat, although, of course, there is no obligation to complete all the activities; it is a case of picking and choosing what works best for the reader.

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The nine sections cover the well-trodden paths of fiction writing, ranging from ‘Point of View’, through to ‘Plot’, as well as ‘Editing’. The final section focuses on how to pursue publication, along with entering competitions and persevering—something we can all struggle with from time to time. There are also some helpful refreshers, such as ‘Freytag’s Pyramid’, and this is one example of how Lister incorporates the theoretical into the practical. I find this helpful in different ways, and I am sure that readers of this book will feel the same.

One of the beauties of such a guide is being able to dip in and out of sections that hold the most appeal—or aim to provide some sort of resolution for the reader. I sometimes struggle with dialogue, for example, and one of the exercises in the ‘Characters’ section asks different questions. The intention here is to force the reader into thinking about how a character would speak, and how might they address different people. Being forced into being reflective is useful—but having guidance ahead of new writing is also of great benefit.

Lister references a wide range of books throughout, and examples include The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, when discussing narrative viewpoint; Keats’ ‘To Autumn’; and, the much more contemporary Conversations with Friends, Sally Rooney’s debut. Even though several the references do not pertain to the short story, the message is the same, whether it is about dialogue, as it is in the latter, or something else.

How to Write Short Stories and Get Them Published is a perfect addition to any writer’s desk, regardless of their experience. Established short story writers can learn a lot here, but so can those who view the form as some sort of bête noire, which is sometimes the case for writers who craft in the long form. Regardless of experience or knowledge, this is a very useful book and one that I will return to time and time again.

Reviewed by Matthew Tett.

Matthew Tett is a freelance writer living in Wiltshire. He has been published in Writing in Education, the Cardiff Review, the New Welsh Review, and Ink Sweat and Tears. His short story ‘Spun Sugar’ was published in the inaugural edition of Liberally. In 2021, he won Word After Word’s mini memoir prize. He is also the coordinator of StoryTown. Matthew is currently working on his debut short story collection.

The Kids Lowe, H. Bloodaxe Books, 2021.

ISBN 9781780375793, 80 pages, paperback, £10.99 Ask any teacher about the best—and worst—aspect of the job, and they’ll

invariably say: the learners. The students. The kids. Now poet—and former schoolteacher—Hannah Lowe, a guest speaker at NAWE’s recent conference, has made the kids the focus of her third collection. The power imbalance between student and teacher can make such an enterprise tricky; but Lowe pulls it off with respect and compassion. In sonnets that sing off the page, she expresses the joy, fear and frustration of the classroom relationship.

In ‘The Art of Teaching [part] I’, “before I’d learnt the art of teaching wasn’t/ to have all eyes on me, but on each other” Lowe is unsparing of herself: “I sat behind my desk and talked and talked/ like a manic newsreader, while their faces balked/ in boredom or horror, and one by one glazed over”. Even in part II, she despairs: “Boredom hangs like a low cloud in the classroom. /Each page we read is a step up a mountain/ in gluey boots. Even the clock-face is pained/ and yes, I’m sure now, ticking slower.” What’s the answer? In part III, she identifies two approaches: “Squeeze/ their names out like a flannel. Swap their chairs/ and split the windows for a freezing breeze”; or, “study them—what’s in their bag, their walk/ to school, their grandmother in Tower Hamlets/ or Istanbul.”

She might have got to know her kids, but she has no illusions that she’s cracked the classroom dynamic. With the 62 Writing in Education

insight that only experience can bring, she warns, in ‘Red-handed’ that “if you set the kids exam practice/ then excuse yourself—even for five minutes— […] to eat a Twix, or bite your hand to keep/ from crying” you might come back to a quiet classroom, but “know how quick/ the kids can zip their chat, though leave it hanging/ in the air so you can smell it”.

There are so many fresh and funny, affectionate images in these poems that each page is a delight. Lowe has said that she ‘wanted to give a very honest view of the working life’. It’s that honesty that makes her vulnerable, often with unintended consequences. In ‘All Over It’ she and her student Dwayne are discussing his project on graffiti, and she tells him about her older brother, “years back, spraying one train then another/ with a jangling sack of cans he’d robbed/ from Homebase and wire-cutters from the shed.” Her student’s reaction makes the reader squirm for her: “You tell Dwayne this/ but he’s backing out the room, Yeah, nice one, Miss –” She worries whether she can make any impact at all. In ‘Balloons’ she writes, “But the kids I taught, who came to me at the edge/ of childhood – was it really, then, too late?” She describes how “In the common room we said it only took/ one class, one hour, to know the grades they’d get”.

The students come alive on the page, although Lowe has stressed that the portraits are fiction: each a composite of students she’s known, meshed with her own experiences. She’s also explained that the demands of the sonnet meant she had to invent, to achieve rhyme and metre.

The collection isn’t solely classroom based. In ‘White Roses’, Lowe is cleaning her mother’s house after her death.

She pulls out the mattress and finds, “the ring she said was stolen; a fort/ of crumpled tissues, white roses wet with crying.” There’s also a lovely section of poems dedicated to her young son. In ‘Skirting’, he “rides these streets in his battered pram/ like a prophet, his milky arms spread open, / face first into the world.”

There’s so much to enjoy here that it’s no surprise the book won Lowe the 2021 Costa Poetry Award, as well as the overall 2021 Costa Book of the Year—a remarkable feat for a poetry collection. Lowe has described how she came late to poetry, and started writing while she was trying to enthuse her own students. There’s a humility here—but also love fitting for a book of sonnets.

Reviewed by Sarah Hegarty.

Sarah Hegarty’s short fiction has been published by Mslexia, Cinnamon Press and the Mechanics’ Institute Review, and shortlisted for the Fish and Bridport prizes. She has an MA in Creative Writing and is writer-in-residence at George Abbot School, Guildford. She is represented by Annette Green at Annette Green Authors’ Agency. www.sarahhegarty.co.uk

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NAWE is a Company Limited by Guarantee Registered in England and Wales No. 4130442 and a Registered Charity no. 1190424

Membership

Participation Director: Fiona Mason f.mason@nawe.co.uk

As the Subject Association for Creative Writing, NAWE aims to represent and support writers and all those involved in the development of creative writing both in formal edication and community contexts. Our membership includes not only writers but also teachers, arts advisers, students, literature works and librarians.

Membership Co-ordinator: Sophie Flood admin@nawe.co.uk

Membership benefits (according to category) include:

Information Manager: Philippa Johnston pjohnston@nawe.co.uk

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Publications & Editor Manager: Lisa Koning publications@nawe.co.uk

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Management Committee (NAWE Board of Directors)

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Higher Education Committee

For Professional Members, NAWE processes DBS (Disclosure and Barring Service) checks. The Professional Membership rate also includes free public liability insurance cover to members who work as professional writers in any public or educational arena, and printed copies of the NAWE magazine.

Staff

Director: Seraphima Kennedy

Andrew Melrose (Chair); Anne Caldwell, Derek Neale; Michael Loveday; Lucy Sweetman; David Kinchin (co-opted)

Andrew Melrose (Chair); Jenn Ashworth; Yvonne Battle-Felton, David Bishop; Helena Blakemore; Celia Brayfield; Jessica Clapham; Sue Dymoke; Carrie Etter; Francis Gilbert; Michael (Cawood) Green; (Paul) Oz Harwick; Andrea Holland; Holly Howitt-Dring; Derek Neale, Kate North; Amy Spencer; Christina Thatcher; Amy Waite; Jennifer Young

Patrons

Alan Bennett, Gillian Clarke, Andrew Motion, Beverley Naidoo NAWE is a member of the Council for Subject Associations www.subjectassociations.org.uk

64 Writing in Education

3 free issues per year of Writing in Education reduced rate booking for our conferences and other professional development opportunities advice and assistance in setting up projects representation through NAWE at national events free publicity on the NAWE website access to the extensive NAWE Archive online weekly e-bulletin with jobs and opportunities

Institutional membership entitles your university, college, arts organization or other institution to nominate up to ten individuals to receive membership benefits.

For full details of subscription rates, including e-membership that simply offers our weekly e-bulletin, please refer to the NAWE website.

To join NAWE, please apply online or contact the Membership Coordinator: admin@nawe.co.uk NAWE Tower House, Mill Lane, Askham Bryan, York YO23 3FS +44 (0) 330 3335 909 http://www.nawe.co.uk