NAWE Writing in Education - Summer 2022

Photo on cover by zhugher from Pixabay. Photo on page 3 by Lisa Koning.

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:

Winter 2022: 21 November (published January) Spring 2023 (Conference Edition): 3 April (published May) Autumn 2023: 1 August (published September)

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

Advertising Rates:

Eighth page: 3.5” (w) x 2.25” (h) £50

Quarter page: 3.5” (w) x 4.5” (h) £100

Half page: 3.5” (w) x 9” (h) or 7.25” (w) x 4.5” (h) £200

Whole page: 7.25” (w) x 9” (h) £300

Qualifying members receive a 50% discount

Please send advertisements as black and white JPEGs to publications@nawe.co.uk by the submission deadlines above.

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.

Welcome

A word from the Editor

Welcome to Writing in Education, Issue No 87. I have included the picture of a rollercoaster above, one that I went on recently. As I stood waiting to board, with mixed feelings including dread and fear, I did ponder why I was putting myself thought such an experience. But once the ride I started, the exhilaration kicked in, and actually it was quite fun (once I managed to open my eyes!). Much like the life of a writer, there are ups and downs!

For this issue I asked for contributions about writers groups and I’m delighted in the response that we received. The idea of writers groups stemmed from an email that I received back in March from Ceri Morgan asking if Writing in Education might be interested in an article about their writers group. I thought it was an excellent idea and it became the theme for the subsequent issue. You can read the article from Ceri, along with creative contributions from the Microclimates writers group, on page 47. The ‘Action Rebels’ share their experiences of sharing and collaborating as part of a writers support group, while Peggy Riley reflects on how a writing group can help during an anxious time. The pandemic saw many such groups forced to go online - as was my own writers group - and like many, we too were apprehensive about whether it would work. Previously, we had all enjoyed seeing each other every fortnight in person, and the thought of losing that connection wasn’t easy. But actually it worked, and indeed the group found that we could actually meet on a weekly basis when we didn’t need to travel. Now that we can once again meet up in person, and it’s certainly nice to have that option, we have opted to continue online - primarily for convenience. But this issue isn’t just about writers groups - there are some thought provoking articles, including a contribution from Kirsten Somerville on Creative Writing in Science classrooms and Liz Cashdan shares her journey from Historical Documents to Creative Writing.

You’ll find details of next year’s conference in this issue on pages 8 and 9 and we look forward to your submission ideas on the theme of Living as a Writer. In addition, NAWE has a Writers Network Event in London on the 17th Nov (see page 21).

Happy writing everyone, keep your ideas and articles coming.

Lisa

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

Contents

Editorial

A word from the Editor page 3

NAWE News

Chair’s Report page 5

Director’s Report page 6

NAWE AGM Reminder page 7 Conference 2023 page 8

HE Committee Chair’s Column page 10

Writing in Practice - Principal Editor’s Column page 11

AWP (US) Report page 13

AAWP (Australasia) Update page 14

EACWP Update page 16

Lapidus page 16

Members’ News page 18

NAWE Open Space page 19 Are you getting the most out of your membership? page 20

Articles & Contributions

The Writing Circle - Creative Hope in Anxious Times: Can a writing group make a difference? Peggy Riley discusses the evolution of her student group, The Writing Circle.

page 23

Sharing and Collaborating - A writer’s support network: Matthew Tett, Shelley Tracey, Fiona Linday, Susanna Roland and Judi Sissons share their experiences as part of the ‘Action Rebels’ writers group page 31

The Time Tunnellers: Susan Brownrigg, Barbara Henderson, Catherine Randall, Ally Sherrick and Jeannie Waudby are published authors that write historical fiction for young people. They have also formed a group sharing advice on markets, networking and other opportunities. page 34

The Blackpool Horror Society: How setting up a writing group for a laugh changed many lives Colin Davies reflects on the last two years running The Blackpool Horror Society page 36

The case for creative writing in secondary science education: Kirsten Somerville discusses how a more holistic approach can be harnessed to enhance science education in Scottish secondary schools, specifically through the use of creative writing page 39

From the Page to the Screen: Allen Ashley reflects on a writers group moving online page 45

Microclimates: A selection of creative contributions produced by the Microclimates writers group page 47

Histories and Stories From Historical Documents to Creative Writing: Liz Cashdan’s reflections, with contributions from Narimaan Shafi, Hazel Stuart, Elizabeth Uter and Sue Wright page 56 Reviews

A selection of book reviews page 60

NAWE NEWS

Chair’s Report

As I began writing this, it was announced that we had a new Prime Minister. I was already wondering if the impending financial crisis our country is facing would improve radically on the run up to Christmas, but also what impact it would have on our writing community. Little did I realise that a much more important announcement was also just about to be made.

I was saddened to hear of the death of the Queen. She was crowned the year before I was born and has been a constant cultural presence in my life, and indeed in the lives of all of us. In many ways it’s the end of an era, the closing chapter of an extremely long story. But like all good books, for some it will be a hard one to put down. There will be tributes and state occasions and eventually even a coronation, but right now my thoughts (and I expect many of yours) will be for her family. Apart from being the Queen, she was a mother, grandmother, and great grandmother and that is a human story we can all relate to.

What the future will bring, only time will tell because none of us possess a crystal ball (that I know of). Though, of course, writing the future is an acceptable way for a writer to work. What is clear is that we are writing in a period of historical and cultural change. Post pandemic, things had already changed and they are not completely back to what they were. What were the usual, ordinary and commonplace are different and the future isn’t what it used to be. Or at least how we viewed it a year or so back. But that is a huge challenge for writers who are already pushing the boundaries with new work, new stories, poems, plays and new ideas. In Four Quartets, T. S Eliot wrote,

...last year’s words belong to last year’s language

And next year’s words await another voice.

As writers we adapt to change and anticipate change and react to change, so keep writing for the readers of the future. I will be discussing this and my approach to ‘hope’ writing at the next annual Conference because we are already planning it. I hope you are all getting the dates in your calendar, to attend and perhaps contribute.

All of us on the Management Committee are also active writers and perhaps in my next report I will get us all to explain what writing we do. Perhaps you too will join us? In fact might it be an idea to have a feature every edition of this publication called ‘My Writing’. It could be a corner where members can simply discuss their own writing.

Stay safe and stay well everyone. We are now into autumn and winter beckons, but not quite yet.

Andrew Melrose, Chair NAWE

NAWE NEWS Director’s Report

I love autumn. I love the sudden rains, the crisp leaves and the promise of smoky communal bonfires, long walks, and cosy pubs. Small pleasures, each of which seems more meaningful now we’ve seen what life is like without the opportunity to come together with friends, family and colleagues. It has been joyful to spend the spring and summer doing things that once seemed everyday.

In July, NAWE was involved with several panels at the wonderful English Shared Futures (ESF), a great coming together of the disciplines in Manchester and Salford. Sitting in the new Manchester Poetry Library, listening to the City Poets for Manchester City of Literature (with UNESCO) celebrating multilingualism in poetry, I was reminded of how frequently change takes place when individuals with vision come together in a room. An idea, sparked by a conversation can, in the right conditions, lead to long lasting change.

At the NAWE panels for ESF, we spoke about the usual things: our emergence from the pandemic, the difficulties of combining creative practice with research, the balancing act that is a writer in education’s portfolio career, the sheer feat of effort that’s required to keep things going. These are all conversations we’re having here at NAWE as we put together plans for our next conference (see p.8 for more details).

Our theme for 2023 is ‘Living as a Writer’. As a team, we have been thinking through how we can be of most use to our members given the ongoing financial difficulties we face as we emerge from the pandemic into a cost-of-living crisis. While the conference’s key aim is to provide a space for members (and non-members) to discuss their projects and research, we will also programme practical, skills-based sessions to assist creative writers in education at all levels and in all settings, as well as outward-facing panels examining some of the wider trends and policy issues affecting the literature sector in 2023.

We were hoping to run this as a hybrid event; due to volatility in ticket sales across the sector, as well as the financial risk of running a large in-person event, the conference will again take place online. We hope to return to in-person events in 2024 if the conditions are favourable.

There are benefits to running an online event. It means we can commit to running an accessible conference and keep costs low. We will try to keep ticket prices affordable. If cost is a barrier, please get in touch with our team admin@nawe.co.uk. We can’t wait to read your submissions and to hear about the projects you’ve been running in 2022!

In the meantime, we’re working on several other pieces of work. We’ve continued to convene meetings for Arts Council heads of Literature in the Four Nations, leading to several interesting conversations about language which we hope will translate into new initiatives.

In Higher Education, we’ve been working with QAA, distributing the call for expressions of interest from the academic and subject communities to act as Chairs and Deputy Chairs for the review of the Subject Benchmark Statement for Creative Writing in 2023. We’ve got three more Regional Networking events coming up in London, Sheffield and Birmingham (see p.21 for details of the London event). Keep an eye on our social media channels, as we’ll be updating these with dates, times and registration details. Please do get in touch if you, your community group or institution would like to host one.

Our next Open Space event will take place on 30th November (see p.19 for more information). November will also see elections for new board members for our Management Committee and Higher Education Committees. Each committee meets virtually three times per year and feeds into NAWE’s strategic direction, helping us to make sure our services reflect the needs of members – please do get in touch with either Andy Melrose or myself if you would like to find out more.

NAWE NEWS

Those of you working in communities will be pleased to hear that Jane Moss is joining Caleb Parkin as co-chair of the NAWE Community Writers’ Sub-committee. Jane is delighted to join this double act which entails alternating the chairing of meetings, sharing the workload and generally lending support to the work of the committee.

Moving into autumn, we’re finalising details of our new participation programme. We’re listening to the needs of members, looking for funding, and hoping to build a suite of options that will be useful to both beginner and experienced writers in education.

As we head into autumn, and as the cost of living crisis ramps up around us, I find myself typing word searches into etymological websites which tell me that the word ‘cost’ comes from the Latin ‘con+stare’, meaning ‘to be with, to stand firm with’. I take comfort in the idea of standing firm with NAWE members and the wider writing community –against the rising tide of prices and bad news, and against my own fears about the impact this might have on my own finely balanced life. I’ll try to keep going for walks, try to stay connected - and who knows, I might even find time to write.

Seraphima Kennedy Director NAWE

Reminder:

NAWE Annual General Meeting 2022

All members are welcome to join us at the NAWE AGM, taking place online on Thursday 10 November 2022 from 6.30pm – 8pm

This is the formal part of our business where we sign off the annual accounts and share a report about NAWE’s achievements during 2021-22. Full notice is on our website: https://www.nawe.co.uk/about-us/nawe-agm-2022.html

Pre-registration for the AGM is essential. Please contact the NAWE office admin@nawe.co.uk to register. You will be sent a Zoom link on Wednesday 9 November with a link to the associated papers.

Elections:

This year is an election year, and all members are welcome to put themselves forward to join the Higher Education and Management Committees. Full information will be sent by email to all current members in October and is available on our website.

NAWE CONFERENCE 2023

Living as a Writer:

Creative Writing in Education & Communities in 2023 and Beyond

Friday 10 to Saturday 11 March 2023

Call for submissions

The NAWE Conference is the annual event devoted to exploring creative writing education in schools, communities and FE and HE settings. Next year’s conference takes place online from Friday 10 to Saturday 11 March 2023 and will see a mix of curated strands programmed alongside submissions from NAWE members and non-members.

In 2023, we’ll come together to ask: what is the cost of living as a writer in education in today? How can we keep going in challenging times? How can creative writing help communities address the current crises we face? How can we look after our own wellbeing – as well as our creativity, pedagogy and finances? What tools do we have to foster resilience in ourselves and the communities in which we practice? What is all of this costing our creativity and writing lives? How can these practices be made more sustainable for ourselves and for the planet? And what is the cost of not doing it – for us, for our communities, and for culture?

We welcome interactive sessions that explore what it means to be writing in education today. These may include: innovative approaches, interdisciplinary experiments, international collaborations, inclusive and accessible participa tion, and intercultural approaches to the theory and philosophy of creative writing in education.

When accepting submissions, we’ll consider the following five ideas:

• People: individuals, writers, freelancers, creative writing educators, members, non-members

• Planet: climate and sustainability

• Place: creating sustainable communities of practice across the UK

• Partners: working with the wider sector, including arts organisations, arts councils, and private philanthropic organisations

• Policy: changes in government and what they might mean for the sector, including arts and education.

We welcome ideas for interactive talks, workshops and presentations of 20 mins or 45 mins, or panels of 75 mins, on creative writing teaching and research that examines these themes. (If submitting an abstract for a panel, we ask that you confirm the details of all those attending including bios in your submission.)

Proposals should consist of a brief (100 word) outline, exactly as you would wish the session to be described in the programme, plus biographical information on all presenters (50 words each).

The deadline for submissions is 14 November 2022

NB. If selected, all speakers will need to purchase a delegate ticket for the full event, which will be heavily discounted. We want everyone to be able to attend, and we will have a limited number of bursaries available. If cost is a barrier, please get in touch with our team at admin@nawe.co.uk.

If you have any queries, please get in touch with admin@nawe.co.uk and a member of the team will help. We look forward to receiving your proposal!

NAWE NEWS

HE Committee Chair’s Column

A number of the HE committee, Andrea Holland, Celia Brayfield, Oz Hardwick and myself and Seraphima attended the Shared Futures Conference in Manchester in the summer. On the first day, Seraphima was on the MaxLiteracy: Writing with Resilience through the Visual Arts panel with Denise Bowler, Hannah Gaunt and Pauline Rowe, discussing how the MaxLiteracy Awards programme reflects on the conference theme of creative writing and resilience. The panellists share insights and experiences from galleries and museums and creative writers that have worked collaboratively with a range of learning settings. Adapting and working in innovative and resilient ways sometimes under challenging circumstances, the panel will also reflect on how this learning impacted on the development of those projects, resources and legacy outcomes.

Andrea Holland ran a panel discussing how for many writers, especially early career, postgraduate or recently graduated writing students, it can be difficult to feel part of a community of practitioners or know where to share your work; few are aware of the publishing opportunities and networks of writers that work to support writers in or recently out of education. The talk looked at some of the opportunities as well as the communities associated with the European Association of Creative Writing Programs and the National Association of Writers in Education in the UK. This includes European journals accepting writing in English, NAWE’s publications (Writing in Education and Writing in Practice) as well as some of the work of EACWP in their support for writers across Europe and the UK.

Celia Brayfield, Oz Hardwick and I presented on storytelling as a transformative writing technique in every form; in prose fiction and poetry but also in academic writing and critical analysis. The author who has mastered narrative can engage their reader more closely and persuade them more readily. The panel stripped down narrative to its essence and demonstrated its ability to transform even academic writing with compelling storytelling. Creating narrative may seem instinctive and its importance is misunderstood, especially by young researchers.

Finally, Oz, Celia, Andrea and I held an open session for creative writing academics, PhD students and anyone involved in creative writing practice, teaching and research in universities. We discussed developments over the past year, but also how to get the best out of the NAWE conference, the connections you make in NAWE – including editing, peer reviewing and writing for Writing in Practice. The discussion did veer towards ‘what is a creative writing PhD’ and this was useful to those who attended.

Looking forward, it’s the new academic year and the impact of the nationwide problems in Arts and Humanities is central to our thoughts, with programmes being closed and members’ job security at risk. It’s a troubling time for the country and we will be monitoring the situation.

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-seminars-spring-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

NAWE NEWS

Writing in Practice Principal Editors’ Column

Francis Gilbert, co-editor of WiP, writes:

I have been cogitating quite deeply on the nature of creative writing, and its value. What are our stories, poems and autobiographies worth? And how do we measure that worth, both in terms of our own lives and within the wider world?

These questions have a particular pertinence now for many reasons. There is a new push within government for Higher Education institutions to be more accountable regarding the ‘jobs’ and work that degrees generate; the so-called ‘employability agenda’. Creative writing degrees – and a number of other ‘arts’ subjects -- have been singled out by politicians and traditionalist commentators as having ‘low value’ in that they don’t lead to many graduates becoming economically productive in their chosen field. This may be true, but there is a wider picture here. For me and many others, creative writing degrees generate the sort of ‘soft skills’ that employers and the world are desperately crying out for; graduates who are imaginative, flexible and able to work in teams. It seems to me that the workshop environment of creative writing degrees, the emphasis upon original thought and deep reading, the focus on producing meaningful publications and performances is a template for the kind of degree that is needed now. Creative writing degrees have everything: they build knowledge, creativity and teamwork, they help their students become profound problemsolvers. Creative writing graduates leave university with a unique skill-set which makes them eminently suited to work just about anywhere.

Do you agree? Do think I am addressing the right questions and problems, or being pushed around by an interfering government?

Kate North, co-editor of WiP writes:

Issue 8 of Writing in Practice is soon to arrive. Apologies for the delayed roll out, it has been a busy spring and summer for the team. I am hoping that our new timeline, in line with the academic year, will make it easier for future publication schedules.

In light of the thoughts Francis has shared, I will happily stake a claim that the contents of issue 8 demonstrates much of what we celebrate as the ‘worth’ to be found in the field of creative writing. Original thinking, teamwork, deep reading and creativity (of course!) abound in the issue.

As we approach the beginning of the new term, I am thinking more about how we support students who have experienced distance and isolation. The height of the pandemic has passed but the impact of the experience runs deep, I think. The image of the writer as an isolated figure in a garret is a romantic one that carries a kernel of truth. Of course, we writers are readers and thinkers and there is a certain amount of solitude that can come with that. Yet, we also engage with the world, present ideas, provoke discussion and start conversations. Our job is interactive, communicative and engaging. I work with many research students in my academic role and I spend a great deal of time thinking about how to encourage a sense of community, how to encourage network building and peer interaction because doctoral research can be isolating and lonely. Now we have undergraduates and MA students who have experienced a couple of years of online learning along with the psychological and social impact of that milieux. For many of us, we won’t simply be returning to an established workshop environment to teach and engage in discussion. We will be working from the ground up to (re)introduce the vital experiences of the writing workshop along with new opportunities to engage with audiences and industry.

This is a busy time for many of us and a stressful time also, as we juggle teaching, writing and administrative commitments. While I am excited for what the new term brings, I am also mindful of the need to be kind to oneself.

Here’s to a vibrant and also manageable new academic year for all.

Writing in Practice - Volume 8 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.

NAWE NEWS AWP Report (US)

Hello NAWE readers! We are happy to share after a successful Conference & Bookfair in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, this year—our first in-person conference since 2020—we are thrilled to report some exciting news within the Association of Writers & Writing programs.

First, the upcoming annual AWP Conference & Bookfair will take place in Seattle, Washington, March 8–11,2023. Min Jin Lee, award-winning author of Free Food to Millionaires and Pachinko, will provide the #AWP23 Keynote Address. Early-bird registration rates are now available until November 22. Visit the AWP Website for more information.

(Image: Min Jin Lee Photo Credit: Elena Seibert)

The Writer’s Chronicle, a print publication for the last 50 years, has moved entirely online in an updated, interactive platform. To celebrate, we have made the September issue freely available to all! We will return to member and subscription access with the November issue of The Writer’s Chronicle.

AWP launched its new HBCU Fellowship program in August. The purpose of the program is to invite strong HBCU participation within AWP and will award faculty and student fellowships to attend and participate in the annual AWP Conference & Bookfair. The 2023 AWP Conference & Bookfair in Seattle, Washington, will feature A. J. Verdelle as creative advisor to work and speak with faculty and students that are granted the fellowship to attend #AWP23.

Lastly, our Writer to Writer Mentorship Program has moved into its seventeenth season since its launch. The program is a membership benefit that runs twice a year for three months per session. The AWP membership department matches emerging writers with published authors to work towards the mentees’ writing goals. Mentors volunteer their time and receive a free one-year AWP membership. To find out how you can be a part of Season 18, visit the AWP website.

We hope to see you in Seattle for #AWP23!

Juanita Lester Director of Communications & Technology

Applications now open for Churchill Fellowships

Are you passionate about improving or transforming how children and young people learn in schools? Or supporting positive social change through the arts, culture and creative practice? Would you like to explore new ideas and different approaches from around the world to achieve this? Applications are now open for a Churchill Fellowship programme focused on Education in schools, run in partnership with the Mercers’ Charitable Foundation, and a programme focused on Arts and communities. This lifechanging opportunity funds you to spend up to two months discovering new ideas and best practice from leading practitioners anywhere in the world and supports you to apply that learning in your community or sector and make change happen in the UK. Churchill Fellowships are open to all adult UK citizens regardless of age, qualifications or background. The international research can be undertaken in person through travelling, or online from the UK. Applications can be made via the Churchill Fellowship website until 5pm on 22 November for projects to begin from August 2023. For details and to apply please visit www. churchillfellowship.org

NAWE NEWS

AAWP Report (Australasia)

Dear NAWE readers.

We are grateful for the opportunity to provide an update about the Australasian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP), the peak academic body representing creative writing and research in Australasia. In particular we are delighted to share news about our annual national conference. Let us begin by introducing ourselves: we are Dr Julia Prendergast (AAWP Chair), Dr Elizabeth Ellison and Dr Lee McGowan (Co-convenors of the 2022 annual conference). In 2021, we decided a virtual gathering was in the best interests of the AAWP community. We delivered an engaging online one-day Symposium focused on ‘Looking Back and Thinking Forward’.

This year, we celebrate the AAWP’s 27th annual gathering: https://www.usc.edu.au/about/ structure/schools/school-of-business-and-creative-industries/australasian-association-ofwriting-programs-26th-annual-conference

Fire Country is our 2022 conference theme – which is inspired by the text of the same name by Tagalaka author, filmmaker and activist, Victor Steffensen. While Steffensen isn’t able to join us, the principles at the heart of his work remain the focus. We will gather on the Sunshine Coast, situated on the unceded lands of the traditional owners, the Kabi Kabi people – lands known for the superb beaches, lakes, rivers, creeks, mountains and forests. Steffensen’s book speaks directly to Indigenous practices, to conceptions of land that acknowledge more than human agency. Both Steffensen, and those Elders and guests who will join us, epitomise the wisdom borne of discerning regenerative methods, on the one hand, and wellintended though ill-informed practices that lead increasingly to tragedy and environmental devastation, on the other. As such, Steffensen’s work provides a focal point and is positioned as the overarching theme for the AAWP conference: 28 – 30 November 2022.

The AAWP annual conference is our most important national forum for discussing the practices and pedagogies, as well as current and nascent debates, at the nexus of creative writing and research. Our conference gathers some of Australasia’s most revered writers and writer-researchers. It is designed for creators, researchers, teachers and publishers of creative writing, who operate within and across the blurred lines of local, regional and national territories. We aim to build cultural capital and community capacity, and facilitate meaningful community engagement, while increasing our universities’ value and standing within our respective communities. You will find articles developed from many members of the AAWP community in TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses, Australia’s leading journal of creative writing research: https://textjournal.scholasticahq.com/

In 2022, AAWP aims to situate traditional practices, pedagogies and conceptions at the heart of the annual conference. Our conference guest speakers include Professor Sandra Phillips (Gooreng Gooreng Country), Professor Phillip McLaren (Kamilaro Country), and First Nations Advisor at Queensland State Archives: Rose Barrowcliffe (Butchulla Country). The conference will be held at the Sippy Downs (Queensland) campus of the University of the Sunshine Coast (USC). Approximately 150 AAWP members attend the conference each year. They include the most prominent researchers in the field, commercially successful and highly acclaimed authors and poets, Research Centre and Institute Directors and the academy’s most promising Creative Writing HDR candidates.

This year’s conference is co-hosted by Central Queensland University and the University of the Sunshine Coast and will include three full days of engagement featuring approximately 60 sessions, including: keynotes, presentations, workshops and panel discussions. The main conference program facilitates engagement with and reflection upon the theme of ‘Fire Country’, as it relates to creative writing and research. We consider the intersection between marginalised and mainstream voices and the way these voices are represented in wild acts of making and thinking. Further, we consider the way in which this intersection reflects an iterative discourse. The program includes academic and professional development sessions for research candidates and Early Career Researchers. We offer our membership body the opportunity to gather and to promote new creative and critical work, while building networks

NAWE NEWS

and engaging with industry practitioners.

This year’s conference will be supported by Arts Front, a visionary arts sector project led by Feral Arts, which connects and supports the Australian arts and cultural sector, online. Their interactive platform will host a full day of digital presentations, and offer program details before, during and after the event, as well as harvesting social media related to the conference. The platform is also a practical way to connect with and learn more about the presenters.

We have received abstract submissions that respond to the overarching theme of Fire Country through the following sub-themes: regrowth and renewal; Indigenous practices, concepts and experience; firebrands, backdrafts and ignition; minority and marginalised voices (including themes of disability, LGBTQIA+, and refugee stories); firebreaks: literal and figurative; exegetical friction; burnings – cool, mosaic, and cultural; collaborative writing; critical and ‘burning’ questions; storying regions; ecologies and crises (climate, literary and other); writing across boundaries, edges and limits; fire sticks / fire stick farming; performance and performative writing; and combustion, crises, and firestorms.

We are delighted to continue our partnership with NAWE, by welcoming a number of NAWE members as virtual guests to the AAWP conference. We hope to continue this gesture of reciprocity in the future. Our 2022 partners include Arts Front, Mantra Mooloolaba, Black Ant Gourmet, and Berkelouw Books. We are hosted by USC’s world-class Creative Industries facilities: the USC Art Gallery and the USC Maker Space (Queensland’s only MIT approved Fabrication Lab). We do hope you are able to join us for our annual conference. We look forward to welcoming our NAWE friends, across the seas, and to sharing published outcomes, after the conference.

By Julia Prendergast, Elizabeth Ellison and Lee McGowan

Reference: Steffensen V 2020, Fire Country, Sydney: Hardie Grant.

Julia Prendergast 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 story collection: Bloodrust and other stories, was published in 2022. Julia’s research focuses neuro/ psychoanalytic approaches to creative cognition (New Writing. The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, and TEXT Journal). 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.

Elizabeth Ellison is the Deputy Dean (Research) for the School of Education and the Arts. She is Manager and Chief Investigator of a number of regional arts projects, including the Savannah Way Public Art Trail and the Regional Arts Services Network (2022 - 2025), funded through Arts Queensland. Until recently, Liz was also the Academic Coordinator of ‘CARTA’, a Creative Arts Research Training Academy for postgraduate research students at CQU. Liz’s research journey began with her literary and film studies thesis examining representations of the Australian beach, and she continues to explore creative writing and storytelling in fiction and media.

Lee McGowan is a Senior Lecturer at the University of the Sunshine Coast. His primary research interests are in football studies, creative writing and digital narratives. In 2019, he published the monograph Football in Fiction: A History (Routledge) and co-authored the book, Never Say Die: the Hundred-Year Overnight Success of Australian Women’s Football (NewSouth). Alongside a number of traditional research outputs, his most recent project, a digital museum launched at Parliament House (2021), is a history of football in Queensland, funded by Football Queensland, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane City Council and Arts Queensland.

NAWE NEWS

European Association of Creative Writing Programmes (EACWP)

Back to the face-to-face scene

After overcoming the physical distancing of the past years due to the pandemic and after surviving one of the hottest and more fiery summers in most of Europe, our EACWP family is delighted to welcome you to the new academic year 2022-2023. In this new turn around the sun, our projects seem to be clearer on the horizon as one of our main goals, this year, is to renew our face-to-face events and activities.

It is such our desire that, indeed, we will immediately start with our XVI symposium to be celebrated from October, 12 to October, 14 in Arnhem (The Netherlands), hosted and co-organized by our Dutch colleagues from ArtEZ. The EACWP symposium is an ideal occasion for our members to present their recent pedagogical work in their own countries and institutions, meet our current and new colleagues as well as a great opportunity to find out about the different collaborative initiatives and projects within the association. Traditionally, the last day of the symposium is entirely devoted to a representative sample of lectures and workshops, proposed by our different EACWP members. The call for papers will be open until September, 15 (2022).

Lapidus

What we have known for so long is apparently ‘true’ according to scientists; ten to fifteen minutes’ daily selfreflection is good for us all especially when enacted on a regular basis as we age. Journal writing, is seen as a great way to reflect and review, can prolong our lives, improve our memory and reduce susceptibility to dementia. It seems to me that little of what is written, discovered or re-discovered about how to improve and maintain our health and wellbeing is new, however, we dwell in the benefits of repetition and returning time and again, seeking out recurring themes and messages about how to live well.

As readers and writers, when we encounter and produce words that meet our needs: those ‘aha’ moments of resonance, insight, exhilaration and connection that are so satisfying, so ‘true’ can stimulate a desire to share this

In the spring of 2023, our VI International Pedagogical Conference will take place in Madrid hosted and coordinated, this time, by our Spanish partners from Escuela de Escritores. Also, our Teachers Training Course will be back in the scene as in its greatest old-school first editions at the moulin d’Andé in Normandy or in the Alden Biesen Castle in Belgium.

Nonetheless, we will go ahead with some of our treasured on-line activities such as the VI edition of our Flash Fiction Contest and our Premium Virtual Editions of our course for teachers. Additionally, this year, we will launch a new EACWP shooting virtual event: the Individual Members’ Day, willing to gather around our European colleagues for meeting, networking and catching up about their different projects and initiatives.

Keep tuned through our EACWP website and social channels!

Looking forward to meeting you all over this year either in Arnhem, Madrid, Belgium or elsewhere around on our live European stage!

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

knowledge with others through writing; even if this truth has been expressed before. How else can we explain the amount of writing, published and unpublished on the same themes that already exists or has yet to arrive? How else can we explain the lengthening queues of writers waiting in the wings, fledgling writers who want to publish have their voices heard, engage in dialogue about their work? The adage insisting ‘less is more’ is both elegant and convincing, except, it seems, when applied to the increasing quantity of available written word. Apart from being a profession for some, writing is also the means by which we amateurs can publicly and regularly praise, propose, critique, challenge and oppose strongly held ‘truths’.

Western approaches to the ceaseless search for the truth through writing has led to the overdue exposure and

NAWE NEWS

debate about the damaging effects of white supremacy, climate change, health inequalities, food politics and oppression in all its forms on our global health and wellbeing. The space on earth we each occupy and the potential for ability to live healthy and enriching lives will always be worth writing about in whatever form that takes.

Speaking of ‘truth’, my current work environment has been variously described as busy, productive, a mess, untenable, ‘interesting’, creative, poky, overwhelming, bursting with books, writing materials, miscellaneous objects and other paraphernalia that have made their way into this space from the rest of the house because this is the last chance saloon. After this place there is nowhere else to go except re-purposing, re-using or the waste bin. Is my work room a reflection of my state of health and wellbeing, my mind? Possibly. Regular self-reflections often lead me to recognising that I could respect and take better care of my space, ergo my health treating both like a sanctuary to good effect.

A good clear out is the best option then? Probably. I have said and been told that I will feel so much better and be happily creative, calmer and productive once this cluttered work space is clear, free of the distracting junk and redundant remnants of the past that steal my space and enjoyment. When I see, hear or read about the beautiful, simple and minimalist work spaces occupied by some professional writers. Knowing full well that for many of us and our circumstances this is not possible or preferable. Allowing for space and time to reflect each day in another emptier space in or outside of my home is my way in and may be as close as I can get to nurturing the possibilities for greater health and wellbeing. Allowing for the air to circulate freely through my thoughts so that I can try and work out the truth of what, if anything is getting in the way of the big clear out.

Seeking someone with experience in the field of therapeutic writing:

We are hoping to recruit a strong, passionate individual who can support the board of directors to deliver the company’s vision and strategy while also believing and promoting its values.

Lapidus has no fixed office. The majority of this role will be delivered online, via email and video conferencing. Current staff and board members are based around the UK, but we will accept international applications.

Hours: Minimum required input - 2 hours a week. This is a voluntary role. There is also the possibility to share this role with another person.

How to apply:

Please send a short covering letter and CV to chair@ lapidus.org.uk explaining your background and why you

would like to be considered for this role.

I am co-research director on the Lapidus Board and co-editor of the LIRIC journal (see below). We welcome creative, arts-based, autoethnographic work that meets our interests.

We are a friendly, supportive editorial board who encourage and support people like yourselves who want to find a home for your work.

We also have a monthly meeting of the Lapidus Living Research Community (LLRC) with invited speakers/ performers (Kitrina was one of them this year).

You don’t need to be a member to submit to LIRIC. But if you should want to join us, membership is £55 per year (less than a cup of coffee a week!) and new members are very welcome. There are lots of other goodies on offer too! Students and those on low incomes can join for £35 per year.

The website has lots of information and can be found at: https://www.lapidus.org.uk

Warm wishes to all of you. Here’s to ICAE23!

Kim Etherington.

What is Lapidus International? Lapidus welcomes anyone with an interest, whether professional or personal, in words for wellbeing. The organisation has members throughout the UK and abroad.

https://www.lapidus.org.uk/faqs

The Lapidus International Research and Innovation Community (LIRIC) Journal is an international, peerreviewed, scholarly journal. Aiming to provide a forum for contemporary critical debate on the relationship between the written (and spoken) word and (mental) health and wellbeing. This includes writing as a social practice. The journal responds to the needs of Lapidus members to see their practices placed within scholarly and academic contexts that draw on diverse theories and frameworks of knowledge.

The LIRIC Journal is keen to enlist a broader constituency of interested and related academics, practitioners and researchers across disciplines which are currently active and interested in this area.

https://www.lapidus.org.uk/events-news/liric-journal

This body has developed a wide membership of creative writing practitioners who work across a variety of sectors including education, health and the arts, in community and voluntary, as well as private settings.

NAWE NEWS Members’ News

Jeremy Worman: forthcoming memoir publication

The Way to Hornsey Rise, about how a home-counties schoolboy ended up in the squats, drugs and hippie scene of 1970s Hornsey Rise, will be published by Holland Park Press in November 2022.www.hollandparkpress.co.uk/ books/the-way-to-hornsey-rise/

‘Jeremy Worman’s memoir is a compulsive read. He’s a beautiful writer with an eye for detail and a good ear for dialogue. The memoir really grips you from the start with Worman’s description of his horrifying relationship with his abusive alcoholic mother and her woebegone husband and boyfriends. The memoir rips away the veneer of the British upper-middle classes, showing them to be venal, despairing, corrupt. It’s no wonder that Jeremy seeks answers in the opposite to his upbringing in a commune in north London; his journey is moving and archetypal. We see him triumphing over his conditioning and finding a voice, a meaning to life...Highly recommended.’ Francis Gilbert.

Lydia Fulleylove: new publication

Lydia Fulleylove and Evelyn M. Wilinson’s new collection, Ampersand is out now with Valley Press, released July 2022. www.valleypressuk.com @ £10.99

‘When a poet daughter discovers a set of war diaries in a familiar hand, it sparks a spine-tingling creative response that forges a new bond with the artist mother she has lost. Fulleylove has created unique dialogue between mother and daughter, in poems, prose, and diary extracts. An experimentally-fascinating, often moving, beautifully crafted book.’

Robyn Bolam

SlamFresh Awarded Arts Council Funding to Deliver Poetry Projects Around the North East

SlamFresh CIC will deliver spoken word workshops in 5 schools around the region, working with over 100 young people to boost literacy and oracy skills. The young people will perform their work in poetry slams in out-of-school venues. The project will culminate in a final sharing event at Live Theatre Newcastle next summer.

SlamFresh have been awarded funding from Arts Council England to run projects in:

• Mortimer College in South Shields (11th October to 21st November 2022)

• The Grange Learning Centre- Witherslack Group (2nd November to 4th December 2022)

• Burnside College in Wallsend (2nd November to 14th December 2022)

• Cardinal Hume Catholic School in Gateshead (16th January to 6th March 2023)

• Sacred Heart Catholic High School in Newcastle (1st March to 26th April 2023)

The sessions will be run by poets Rowan McCabe, Donald Jenkins and Tahmina Ali. Each group will be guided through the process of writing, editing and performing their own poetry. They will finish with a poetry slam in an out-of-school setting (venues TBC). The whole project will culminate in a masterclass facilitated by World Slam Champion Kat Francois. This will be followed by a final showcase event at Live Theatre in summer 2023.

NAWE Open Space 2022

How do we live as writers?

https://bit.ly/NAWEOpenSpace2022

Join us online on Wednesday 30th November 2022, for NAWE’s second Open Space event, where we’ll be digging into the question: What is it costing us?

To foreground the 2023 NAWE Conference, which will focus on Living as a Writer, the aim of this Open Space event is to do some practical thinking and problem solving around this central theme.

NAWE’s Open Space will bring together writers, writers as educators and others who make up our ever-evolving sector to explore the big questions that matter to us right now.

We’re living in a time of unprecedented uncertainty, change and upheaval. How do we respond to this as writers? How do we keep progressing careers as writer-educators? How do we protect our creativity and wellbeing? The aim of this Open Space is to help foster the sharing of ideas, start to identify new solutions and bring us renewed hope.

WHAT IS OPEN SPACE?

For those new to Open Space Technology, the goal is elegant and simple: it’s about creating the space and time for those who attend to engage creatively and deeply with the issues that matter to them, often around a central but open question.

The agenda for the day is set by whoever is there. Participants are invited to bring an idea they want to test, a problem they need help to solve, a topic about which they would value a shared conversation or a provocation for the sector at large, and to explore it with their peers from up and down the country. Open Space events can often result in powerful and transformative experiences for all involved, new connections being made and a strong sense of shared purpose.

SO, WHAT’S GOING TO HAPPEN?

The process starts with a gathering of people; people who’ve come along because they care about the future of writing in education, a group of people that’s unique, and who have never and will never again be together in exactly this grouping.

To kick us off, we’ll here a couple of provocations in response to the central theme, to get everyone in the zone.

Then, there’ll be a chance for anyone with a burning issue, big question or great idea to timetable a conversation about it. All the questions and ideas put forward will get timetabled, and the agenda for the event will come together in front of our eyes. Over the course of the couple of hours that follow, people will join the conversations that ‘speak to them’ the loudest.

At any one time, there might be 5, 10 or even more breakout conversations going on at the same time – each of them in a separate Zoom breakout room - with people in each one working hard on the topic at hand.

The ‘law of 2 feet’ (or of ‘personal mobility’) means that you can dip in and out of conversations as you want (again using simple Zoom wizardry to do so); you might sit through 2 conversations from start to finish, or move like a bumble bee between loads more than that, adding a few ideas to all of them as you go.

THE CHOICE IS YOURS. THE RESPONSIBILITY IS YOURS.

Then, at the end of the event, everyone will come together again, to share their reflections, learning and the actions they want to commit to after the event. It’s people power in action, and taken together, these conversations and pledges will stand as a snapshot of our collective hopes, ambitions and plans for writing in education; a kind of manifesto if you will.

MORE THAN JUST A TALKING SHOP, THE AIM IS TO GET THINGS AND PEOPLE MOVING

‘Open Space’ isn’t about any one person or organisation taking control or promising to solve everything; rather, it’s way of bringing together people who want to address a complex issue, focus on what matters to them, make essential connections, and do what they think must be done. It’s about a culture of shared responsibility through which ordinary people can accomplish extraordinary things.

Attendees of the 2020 Open Space said what they valued most about the event was being part of a community: where they could share ideas and experiences and chat with peers to find solutions to what sometimes felt like intractable problems.

We look forward to welcoming you to Open Space 2022, on Wednesday 30th November, from 10:00am-1:30pm. The event is free to attend and will take place on Zoom.

Are you getting the most from your NAWE Membership?

You’ll know, of course, about all our advocacy work for Creative Writing, and, at the individual level, how we provide public liability insurance cover if you’re a professional member, but are you aware of all the other ways we can support you and your work?

For instance, we can help to spread the word about any workshops or competitions you’re running (or any jobs you’re recruiting for if you’re an organisation) through our weekly e-bulletin The Writer’s Compass and our website listings. We give priority to including member listings. All we ask is that it has a professional development element. You can find submissions guidance at: https://www.nawe.co.uk/the-writers-compass/contact-us.html

We also try, if space permits, to give a mention to any special news you may have of interest to members that falls outside our listing categories within the feature part of the bulletin. Our Information Manager Philippa Johnston pjohnston@nawe.co.uk is the person to contact about anything relating to the bulletin or website. She’s also very happy to share member news via social media.

We’re always very keen to hear about your news and successes and we can share these through the Member News section in our magazine Writing in Education. Publications Manager, Lisa Koning (publications@nawe.co.uk) will be delighted to hear from you. Or perhaps you have a book that you would like considered for review in the magazine. Do contact our Reviews Manager, Matthew Tett (reviews@nawe.co.uk) if you have a new book coming out that you think would be of interest to your fellow members. You’ll find details of submission windows at: https://www.nawe.co.uk/writing-in-education/nawe-magazine/submissions.html

Finally, we have a Professional Directory on the website which lists professional members who are available for projects, author visits and other events. This acts as a valuable resource for organisations looking to work with a creative writer so it’s worth revisiting your entry every now and again to check that it’s up to date. You can manage your entry at https://www.nawe.co.uk/membership/manage.html If you have any problems doing this, our Membership Co-ordinator Sophie Flood will be happy to help. Contact her on 0330 3335 909 / admin@nawe.co.uk

We look forward to hearing from you! ‘

WRITERS NETWORKING EVENT

Thursday 17 November 2022, 6 8pm Goldsmiths, University of London

BOOK NOW

NAWE is delighted to be teaming up with Goldsmiths, University of London and Spread the Word to run a networking event for London based writers involved in creative writing in educational and community settings

Whatever stage in your career you're at, join fellow writers for networking, information sharing and support Take part in a workshop with poet, facilitator, mentor and supporter of young and emerging poets, Jacob Sam La Rose, and connect with professionals working in the creative writing sector in London and beyond

This informal get together is open to all writers working in school, community, FE and HE settings and is entirely free but booking is essential as places are limited

Photograph by Amaal Said

Women’s Poetry Competition 2022

‘...We are floating here, our hearts filled with soft evening air and the sound of conversations in the rooms behind us, in love with the shape of each other and the dance we make together...’

from ‘Number 106’ by Imtiaz Dharker

SINGLE POEM

For single poems of any length. 1st Prize: £2,000 2nd Prize: £500 3rd Prize: £250 Unpublished Poet Prize: £250 The four winners plus 16 additional finalists will be published in Mslexia magazine.Entry fee: £10 for up to three poems.

JUDGE HELEN MORT

POETRY

For collections of up to 20 poems 1st Prize: £250 , plus publication of the pamphlet by Bloodaxe BooksEntry fee: £20

JUDGE IMTIAZ DHARKER for Bloodaxe Books

The Writing Circle by Peggy Riley

CREATIVE HOPE IN ANXIOUS TIMES

ABSTRACT:

Can a writing group make a difference in anxious times?

In Autumn 2018 I was a sessional lecturer concerned by the growing number of students who identified as anxious and required learning support plans to help them cope. I wanted to understand the source of this anxiety: did students need writing support to help them feel less anxious – or was it writing that was causing their anxiety? I created a voluntary, non-assessed writing group for first-year students, The Writing Circle, intending it to grow as they did. And it did until 2020 when the pandemic shut campuses and moved us all online. Anxiety ramped up for students – and for me. Could a writing group like ours survive the move? And how could I learn to make a digital space feel intimate as well as inclusive? Through years of writing together on campus and online, through lockdowns and what came after, I’ve used a range of creative prompts and approaches to get us writing about and through feelings, aiming to diffuse anxiety as well as to address and challenge it. Throughout, students have become empowered to find new sources of confidence, to share early work and to write collaboratively, to make and publish work together. As the world is poised again for change, how can we stay nimble and responsive as practitioners, so that our writing groups continue to meet the needs of participants – and also to inspire us, to fulfil our creative hopes?

The Writing Circle began as an experiment in 2018. What could we do about increasing levels of student anxiety at our university? More specifically, what could I do? Anxiety might be the “handmaiden of creativity” for T. S Eliot, but anxiety in our students didn’t seem to be creative or productive. It was keeping them from attending workshops; it was stopping student writers in their tracks. Anxiety is nothing new for humans as a species (Crocq, 2015), but as a new sessional lecturer teaching creative writing students, I was unprepared for its prevalence and concerned by the growing numbers of students who seemed to require special learning plans to cope with it. Every year, students seemed to be more anxious than the group that came before them. I wasn’t just imagining it. In 2018 the Office for National Statistics reported that 26% of young people (and one third of young women aged 16 – 24) reported symptoms of anxiety or depression (Rees, 2020). If students were becoming increasingly anxious, what could we – what should we - do about it?

During the pandemic, research has focused on how anxiety affects student wellbeing, but in 2018, studies seemed out of touch and out of date. In 1981, Tomlinson notes that students entering college writing programs frequently exhibited anxiety about the writing process as well as ‘reluctance to engage in writing activities’ (24), while 2001’s Understanding Writing Blocks suggests:

‘Psychologists and writing teachers often use the term writer’s block interchangeably with the term writer’s anxiety, on the unexamined assumption that emotions

such as fear are the underlying causes of a writing block. Yet blocked writers are not always anxious writers. Some, in fact, are quite calm and have no noticeable fear of writing itself. In many other cases anxiety appears likely to be the effect of a block, not the cause’ (Hjortshoj 2).

I wanted to know: was anxiety causing writers’ block – or was a perceived inability to write causing their anxiety? Anxieties which only relate to writing are considered ‘transient or situation-specific’ (Zhang & Rahimi 2014) and therefore, perhaps, more manageable and fixable. In the belief that we can ‘alleviate students’ anxiety through teaching effective writing knowledge’ (Zhang 2019), I wondered if a writing group that focused on knowledge and skills could help. I asked the Programme Director if I could create a drop-in workshop space for new first year students to offer academic support any who were struggling. Fortunately, she liked the sound of it and added 25 hours to my sessional contract, as a PAT (Personal Academic Tutor) to start a pilot project group for one year.

In my first session, two first-year male students turned up. A modest beginning to be sure, but it was a start. Through the semester they came back every week, bringing work for formative feedback on grammar, presentation, and structure. We worked on punctuation and got to know each other. Their confidence grew, as they realized that their work would be received with compassion, and my confidence grew too. Slowly, things began to change. Over time, they began to bring their own creative work for feedback: not the short plays they had to write for my module, but things they were writing for themselves: ghost stories, adventures, ideas for films. At first, they presented this work shyly, not knowing what the rules were. I didn’t know what they were either, but I followed their enthusiasm. We made them up together as we went along.

By the end of the first semester, we were a tight trio. Through the second semester, another few students joined. Self-confidence grew – as did marks. The following year, the university offered me another 25 hours to carry the project on, and I became a lecturer in my own right. By autumn 2019, I had a growing group of regulars, returning second-year students as well as a couple of brave new first-years. We sat together in a physical circle and talked about writing – for assessment and ourselves. Sometimes, there were more of us than could fit in the room. Over time, they volunteered their feelings, began speaking openly about anxieties and struggles. Members of the group became increasingly invested in each other’s wellbeing as well as their writing. Students continued to be anxious, sure, but they seemed more at peace with it. Safe in our circle, we made plans for the new year.

No one knew what was coming in 2020. The pandemic changed everything – for everybody – overnight. Of course, it did. No longer could we meet - in circles or physical spaces. Students were put into yearspecific bubbles, so our group was split. The campus emptied, students hurried back to families and home countries, and classes moved haphazardly online. I was overwhelmed by new tasks and methods, struggling

to master Teams and Blackboard Collaborate, trying to balance software with pedagogy, module by module. There were hours of lectures to be recorded, and I put The Writing Circle into hibernation. I had to. Now, I was the one too anxious to engage.

Working online was a shock to our systems. Lagging and rebuffering made students self-conscious. I spent days lecturing at the kitchen counter to black squares and silence, begging for emojis to gauge if anyone was there. I missed my students, but I didn’t blame them for switching off. Teaching through the screen, I felt how hard I was leaning in. How could I reach them? Everything felt awkward, and engagement was next to non-existent.

I felt instinctively that the need for The Writing Circle was greater than ever.

Initially I had thought anxiety could be conquered through a mastery of craft, and then I had learned it could be eased by talking about it, but Covid-19 changed the sources of anxiety for much of the population. Was anyone not anxious? I hoped our writing group could just help us to feel better, if I could figure out how to run it online. I was also worried that anxiety might stop students writing entirely; I was having trouble staying creative myself. As the university put measures in place to assure students about their marks, anxieties eased a little. What began to emerge was a need for continuity, community, and hope.

Writing can be a therapeutic practice, whether done individually or in a group (Bolton 2006). As a lecturer, I was invested in helping students to develop their abilities, to improve and to make excellent work despite anxiety, but I began to realize that I was as interested in how students felt while writing as about their writing. I thought we might all improve how we felt by writing it down. I wanted to recapture that old feeling we’d had of sitting in a circle – even if it was online.

I made an email offer: a worksheet of prompts that students could access that wouldn’t require bandwidth or tech. Kent is a huge county, with significant levels of digital poverty. If they could open an email, they could participate. But the take-up was tiny. It didn’t meet the brief of our old group: it didn’t feel like a workshop or community. It was more like the workbooks I used to slide under cell doors in the segregation unit at the young offender prison when I worked as a writer-inresidence. If I wanted lockdown to feel less like prison, I’d have to find another method.

Blackboard Collaborate offered a way out. I emailed a link to every creative writing student: first and second years, who knew about group, as well as third years and MA students who did not. I waited, heart in mouth, to see if anyone would come. Never had a woman been happier to see rebuffering. Every student finding a way in through the digital door felt like hope.

As each joined, they met this slide:

I wanted students to know that they were in charge. There was so little else they could control. If they wanted to be silent and unseen, that was fine with me. In modules, there was reluctance to have cameras or mics on. Students said they were broken, which might have been true. It was probably truer to say they just didn’t want to be seen. I decided it didn’t matter for The Writing Circle. Only I would switch on. My screen would be a window, letting them into my home and writing practice. I didn’t need to be able to see through it. The only thing I asked for was an emoji at the start of any session to let me – and each other – know where moods were. There were lots of thumbs down and unhappy faces, but that helped us to find common ground.

Sessions began with simple sensory prompts to root us in time and space. Routinely, I had used such exercises to help students with scene setting and world building, but the more I read about anxiety in the time of COVID-19, I learned the practice is also a tool for anti-anxiety and coping during panic attacks (Young Minds 2020). We ground through the senses to calm ourselves and to be present:

SEE: What can you see? What can you see around you? We have become too used to seeing the same things: screens, kitchens, beds. What can you see with fresh eyes? Find a window. Look up – look out – look away –and breathe. How far can you see?

HEAR: What can you hear? Is it silent? Are you alone? There might be birdsong, the drone of my voice, the scratch of pens or tapping of keys. Can you hear others, where you are? Are they close or far away? How far can you hear? Whenever the wail of ambulances cuts through the sound of seagulls, we register it: send it a silent prayer.

SMELL: What can you smell? Everything is overfamiliar. It all smells of sanitizer. I ask students to find something with a scent, to light a candle or rub a plant. I remind them that smell is our oldest sense; the olfactory bulb’s nearness to our brain’s amygdala and hippocampus links scent and memory. Sometimes we try to remember things and places we cannot smell right now.

TASTE: What can you taste? Students add what they have to the chat bar: tea, coffee, Pot Noodles or toast. There might be shame in letting others see our chaotic kitchens and bedrooms, but it soon becomes a badge of honour to be living on pantry food and doing without. We also talk about how emotions can have a taste: fear, regret, disappointment, bitterness. Some students feel

able to add those to the chat bar too.

TOUCH: What can we touch? We re-establish our grip on pens and keyboards. We place our feet on solid ground, carpeting, and beds. We dig in deeper: what touches us? We remember that we are supported by our chairs, as well as our practice – and each other. We go further in, into our clothing and our bodies, into our skin and bones to note where there are fears and discomfort. How can we find more ease in ourselves – and how can we seek it in our writing? There is such loneliness, so little touch. I don’t know how this digital space can recreate it, but I try.

Sessions were designed to stand alone. There was no register – I gave no comment on who came or didn’t. Everybody got the same hello, whether they had come before or not. As a project, The Writing Circle was no longer interested in improvement or anxiety about writing. Now, it was just to keep us writing through an anxious time.

There would be simple prompts, first lines to get them going. I would put a line on a slide and set the timer for 5 minutes:

She wasn’t expecting that. It was in the corner. No one knew it. He opened it. They could see it from here. Where did it go? It is falling. You hold it in your hand.

Opening lines could help beginning writers to start something new, as well as to help more advanced writers find a fresh angle on a work-in-progress. I would remind students that they can change any tense or POV to reinforce the idea that they were in control of their voice. It was also a little Trojan Horse opportunity to slip in bits of grammar.

Sometimes, we played word games. I had jars of nouns and decks of cards, like the Literary Witches Oracle (Kitaiskaia 2019) or the Tarot. With a first line, such as “The door is open”, I would throw out a word a minute for writers to catch: moon, fox, key, milk, finger, wing, dress. These simple words could be used literally or metaphorically – as nouns as well as verbs. I didn’t ask writers to share their work, but I did ask them to share how it felt to write. We weren’t invested in the product – only the process. Often, students remarked that writing fast made them focus. They could forget about the pandemic or their circumstances for a while. There was a lot of laughter in the chat bar at the wild leaps stories had to make to “fit” the words in. Games like these also helped to stress how individual we all are as writers, creating vastly different stories from the same set of words.

We created characters from details like shoes or the contents of pockets. We created scenes through “Pic’n’Mix” prompts. I asked students to pick two numbers between 1 - 10 and report them in the chat bar for accountability. Numbers gave them corresponding settings and situations:

FIRST NUMBER: SETTING

1: Supermarket

2: Library

3: Nightclub

4: Gym

5: Rowboat

6: Church

7: Closet

8: Bathroom

9: Hospital

10: Forest

SECOND NUMBER: SITUATION

1: Squeezing avocados

2: Reading something you shouldn’t

3: Dancing by yourself

4: Boxing your own shadow

5: Fishing – you feel a tug on your hook

6: Praying out loud

7: Hiding from someone

8: Plucking your eyebrows

9: Waiting to be seen

10: Running – away from or toward something

It was silly writing, but it helped us to remember and imagine other places than our lockdown rooms.

Over time, I invited writers to offer their own prompts, to share an object or photograph to inspire a story for someone else. We practiced bibliomancy, opening books at random to find a sentence to use for a prompt or to offer to another. It was a low-stakes way of asking students to engage, and a sense of community was created through this giving and receiving of ideas and of words. These were creative prompts that they could use at any time.

I became increasingly interested in “the tension between catharsis and craft” (Robinson 2000), mine and my students. If this group was really going to address wellbeing, we would have to grapple with it. I began to look for exercises that would help us to build empathy and courage. For empathy, we often worked on POV and the senses. Because so many of us were writing in unusual or awkward spaces, we looked for something out of place. We would capture the object through their senses, to consider the world from the POV of a dirty dish or a bottle of Fairy Liquid. We practiced letting the objects perceive us, the fragile humans holding them. How did we look and smell and sound to them? Our only objective was to write with empathy. It was surprisingly moving to let ourselves be seen by someone/something else and not to be judged, to let our human vulnerabilities be seen by a mask or a bottle of hand soap.

When things must have felt particularly scary, I started a session with a question: are you scared? I told them I was too, but I also tried to remind them that we had lived through scary times already. I asked them what we should do with our fear. Where could we put it? How could we keep writing through it? In my fear, I turned to the wise writers who were my mentors, my touchstones. I found in Toni Morrison’s essay ‘Peril’ in Mouth Full of Blood this quote: “I have been told that there are two human responses to the perception of chaos: naming and violence” (2019). As I did not want our chaos to be violent, I asked the group if we could name the things that frighten. Inspired by Morrison and poet Emily Berry’s “Some Fears”, I asked us to write with tiny and fierce specificity: “Fear of breezes; fear of quarrels at night-time; fear of wreckage; fear of one’s reflection in spoons; fear of children’s footprints” (2016). We all made lists of the things that truly frightened us, in a time when we were made to be afraid of breath, saliva, bodies. We shared the most ridiculous – or our most painful – items in the chat bar. For many, the biggest fear was that the world would always be like this, no matter how many times I said it wouldn’t be.

To counter this fear, I asked the group to make the same kind of list about hope, to offer a hope for every fear we listed. As we looked at the words they chose, side by side, I began to feel a little shift – in the group and in me. This was creative writing, but it was addressing wellbeing – actively. We were writing about and through our feelings, beautifully.

Through the summer, we continued to write responses to the work of other writers: Sylvia Plath, Kathleen Jamie, Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry. We wrote in – and out – of our various comfort zones in style, form, genre. I began to experiment with more thematic offerings. On Dalloway Day, we experimented with ideas from Virginia Woolf, who made her own connections between writing and mental health, noting a ‘whole nervous breakdown in miniature’

from a Tuesday state of exhaustion when she “avoided speech; could not read. Thought of my own power of writing with veneration, as of something incredible, belonging to someone else; never again to be enjoyed by me.’ By Friday, she notes ‘slight activity of the brain” and on Saturday, “Thought I could write.’ As she tracks her returning health, she finally finds the power ‘to make images’(Woolf 95-96). We experimented with stream of conscious writing and free indirect to make our own Dalloway Days in our gardens.

For the Solstice, we worked on structure: the halfway point of the year felt like a good time to talk about the midpoint in a story or a project. How could we find a pivot to increase narrative drive? It felt like we could all use more propulsion by this point in the year. There were sessions on the power of words, magic, and writing in nature, whether in our gardens or simply near a window, for those who were shielding. We wrote about secrets and saying the unsayable, in a group where no thought or feeling was unwelcome. We wrote about time. One week we considered curiosity, looking at how literature treats the curious protagonist, rewarding Alice’s tumble into Wonderland while cursing Eve and Pandora. We wrote new stories for modern-day Pandoras who had to choose whether to open a box, a letter, or email. Would it let out secrets or infection?

We wrote through every lockdown. At the start of each one, I asked students to increase their writing time, to lean harder into their work and feelings. I began to run #lockdownpages on social media to see if students would meet the challenge of starting a morning pages practice, even in isolation, knowing that they were writing with a community online. The feedback was good.

One MA student participant began a lockdown journal which she wrote as a morning pages exercise and has continued to keep it: she says it has been an important tool for maintaining her mental health (Atkinson 2021).

Through 2020, attendance continued to grow. New students joined in. I grew in confidence as well, unafraid now to address wellbeing directly. Somehow, the screen became more permeable. It no longer felt as if it were something standing between me and the group; it had become an open window or a conduit, the thinnest layer of skin. Even if this intimacy was digital, it was still intimate. It felt like we all understood the tools at our disposal: break out rooms, polls, emojis. Though the screens continued to take their toll on mental health, I felt more confident than ever. When one MA student told me that I made it feel “completely natural to be online” it felt like a major achievement. It still does, even if it is a sad one.

Through the autumn, there were sessions on planning, before things took a spooky turn toward Samhain and Halloween with ghostly prompts and gentle writing on loss. As the year swung around, we gave each other virtual Christmas gifts: kind words, supportive feedback, memories. We wrote about sources of light and rituals, family and cultural, before we wrote our way into a hopeful new year, eager to leave 2020 behind. In 2021, we wrote about love through online Valentines and celebrated Irish poetry and drama for St Patrick’s Day. We wrote ourselves back around again to spring, still online together.

To mark our first anniversary of writing together online, we created a collaborative poem together made from basic sensory prompts to explore feelings and memories of lockdown:

Students were invited to post their pandemic lines anonymously into a Padlet. A poem was stitched together from the writers’ pool of words.

It is called “a year of this”:

In an online session, I read it aloud and asked writers to share in the chat bar when they recognised a line of their own, and it was lovely to see the screen fill with emojis – hearts, smiles, tears. It felt like something sacred made from all our love and fear. I sensed the hunger for them to share this work, and I asked if they would like to make their work public.

Yes, they said. They would. Anxiety had been replaced by quiet confidence.

Flushed with success, I decided we were ready to create an anthology – this time, with their names. We went back to an old prompt: what do you see? I asked students to offer objects that could serve as prompts. We took an online poll for the winner: a deck of cards. The anthology would respond to the idea of a card, whatever the word inspired. I set a deadline for one-page pieces to be turned in after Easter, hoping the goal would keep students writing through the break, so that I could finally take one myself.

Work rolled in. There were poems about Tarot cards, flash fiction about playing cards and feedback forms, and short stories responding to funeral cards, postcards, Valentines. Thought students complained that it was hard to keep work down to one page, they understood why such limitations were in place. Rather than disengaging or giving up, students learned to edit and to cut hard, to work together to build our diverse anthology, Snap!

The publication gave the group tremendous confidence. We had a strong cohort of writers at all levels: Level 4 to 7, ages 18 to 50+, a richer community than I’d ever imagined possible. If there was such a thing as digital intimacy, I believed that we had found it.

In September 2021, the university moved us back into socially distanced physical classrooms, but I announced that The Writing Circle would stay online. As the world went back to being ‘normal’, I believed our ‘new normal should continue to be conducive to both writing and wellbeing by creating a safe space that was both private and shared, one that would allow student writers to engage how and when and where they like.

However, something felt different. Graduating students moved on, but current and new students seemed less keen to attend. Some wanted only face-to-face contact, masked and not; they were all Zoomed out. The Office for National Statistics bore this out (Johnston 2021), but many students were still dealing with situations that kept them house-bound and glued to screens: chronic illness, caring responsibilities and probably anxiety; others were still studying remotely, outside the UK. While staff struggled to manage the range of support plans students needed to help them cope with their changing circumstances, numbers for The Writing Circle plummeted. Our group dropped from 20+ to 10 and then to single figures. Some weeks, it was just me and a handful of students. I feared it was screen fatigue. When we created our intimate digital space, there were no other options. Maybe we had only bonded through our screens because we had to. Now, I began to worry. Had the group run its course? Or had I lost my touch? How could I make the group inclusive if it wasn’t online? With anxiety on the rise again, I dug in and carried on.

There were small successes, a collaborative poem written for COP26 and an invitation to write a set of lyrics for the university’s Jubilee with the theme of “light-giving”. Online, we moved back to the Padlet to contribute sets of words about a changing climate and the need for light in times of darkness. Our song, “Find Your Light” was set to music for a choral piece, and we prepared as a group to attend its premier face-to-face, the rise of a new variant cancelled indoor celebrations. Its premier was delayed as so much else had been.

By spring 2022, participation in The Writing Circle was at its lowest, and I felt demoralised. I didn’t want to take away my online offer, but students didn’t seem to want it. Maybe we were all just running out of steam. I decided our last Writing Circle of the academic year

would be a hybrid session. Given the option to attend online and on campus, what would students choose? I invited author Zoe Gilbert to read from her new novel, Mischief Acts, and speak about her work. To prepare, I ran an online session to get students writing their own responses to myths, and a small but enthusiastic group took my prompts and ran with them. I felt that old hope stirring in me, and I threw myself into publicising the event. On the big day, Zoe was ill, so she had to attend online. That was no problem – I figured she would have company there. I set up a room on campus, wiping tables, propping open doors and windows, crossing all my fingers to see who would turn up where.

The event itself went smoothly – we’re all dab hands at presenting hybrid events now, managing audiences in real and virtual spaces together – but attendance was inconclusive. I had 3 in the room and 3 online. Zoe was gracious, but I was grateful not to have pulled her across the county for such a low turnout. It was a relief to finally thank everyone, wish them well for the summer, and logoff. Finally, even I was tired of smiling at a screen.

In 2018, I wanted to understand why students were experiencing anxiety. In 2022 we all know more. Mind. org reports that 88% of the young people they surveyed ‘experienced mental distress during or before the coronavirus pandemic’ (2021). People who had struggled before struggle more now, and young people find it increasingly hard to cope. While many feel hopeful, anxiety remains, and people in general need more support.

We’re not done with Covid-19 – and it’s not done with us. How will we handle the next variant? And the next? How can we stay nimble as teachers and practitioners, so that the work we’re doing really helps and really matters? I’m still unpicking all the ways I coped and didn’t through the pandemic. The Writing Circle taught me that staying engaged to others and to my own practice helps me to stay resilient, creative, and flexible. It helps me to stay human and vulnerable. Having started this group to tackle student anxiety, I found it helped when I experienced it myself. The pandemic makes me want to keep the raw humanity we found in each other. I don’t want to go back there, but I don’t want to deny that we were there. We have all been changed – and we will

all keep changing.

So, what’s the future of The Writing Circle? Come autumn, I’ll be propping doors and windows open in a seminar room for the group to come back onto campus. Our university wants us to work face-to-face, but I’ll still be logging on for those who can’t. Having said I would let students vote on how to attend the final session, I’ve come to realize that they did. I had thought a split vote of 3-3 was inconclusive, but it was really a vote for both. We need to be on campus – and we need to be online. The future is hybrid, for me.

I want to continue to cultivate digital intimacy. The online tools we put in place can continue to keep us safe and engaged. We shouldn’t abandon practices that help everyone to participate. In The Writing Circle, I will continue to offer prompts that stimulate creativity, compassion, and collaboration. I will continue to ask students to write about and through their feelings and circumstances, rather than to deny them or let them derail their writing. I will continue to be honest about my own, and to find new sources of hope.

Anxiety is still on the rise. Students are reporting everincreasing mental health concerns (UCAS), and we will have to continue to find new ways to help them cope, for beyond Covid-19 are other threats, from wars to climate collapse. Recently, Rebecca Solnit launched a new climate project, Not Too Late. On the website’s homepage is a quote by Václav Havel: “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something is worth doing no matter how it turns out.” The only way I know to stay hopeful is to write my way through. It is worth doing, no matter how it turns out.

On a last, happy note, I’m still in contact with my first two students from The Writing Circle, back in 2018. Both are writing, thriving, and completing MA courses: one in creative writing and one in screenwriting. I am fiercely proud of them and of all of The Writing Circle writers who kept going through it all.

Let’s all stay hopeful – and keep going.

REFERENCES:

Atkinson, H. (2021) ‘On Morning Pages,’ National Writing Project UK. Available from: https://www.nationalwritingproject.uk/ blog-main/on-morning-pages/ (Accessed 17 June 2021).

Berry, E. (2016) If I’m Scared We Can’t Win: Modern Poets One. London: Penguin.

Bolton G. (1999) The Therapeutic Potential of Creative Writing. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Crocq, M-A. (2015) ‘A History of Anxiety: from Hippocrates to DSM,’ Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, 20-15 Sep; 17(3): pp. 319325 doi: https://doi.org/10.31887/DCNS.2015.17.3/macrocq

Gilbert, Z. (2022) Mischief Acts. London: Bloomsbury. Hjortshoj, K. (2001) Understanding Writing Blocks. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Johnston, C. (2021) ‘Coronavirus and first year higher education students, England: 4 October to 11 October 2021,’ Office for National Statistics. Available from: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/healthandwellbeing/bulletins/ coronavirusandfirstyearhighereducationstudentsengland/4octoberto11october2021/ (Accessed 27 June 2022).

Kitaiskaia, T. (2019) The Literary Witches Oracle. New York: Clarkson Potter. Mind. (2021) ‘Coronavirus: the Consequences for Mental Health,’ Mind. Available at: https://www.mind.org.uk/ (Accessed 27 June 2022)

Morrison, T. (2019) Mouth Full of Blood. London: Chatto & Windus. NHS. ‘Feeling Anxious?’, Every Mind Matters. Available at https://www.nhs.uk/every-mind-matters/mental-health-issues/ anxiety/ (Accessed 27 July 2022).

Rees, E. (2020) ‘Young people’s well-being in the UK: 2020,’ Office for National Statistics. Available at: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/wellbeing/bulletins/youngpeopleswellbeingintheuk/2020/ (Accessed 27 June 2022).

Robinson, M. (2000) ‘Writing Well: Health and the Power to Make Images,” Medical Humanities, 26 (2), pp. 79-84. Available from: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23670142/ (Accessed 27 July 2022).

Solnit, R. Not Too Late https://www.nottoolateclimate.com/ (Accessed 27 July 2022).

Tomlinson, B. (1981). ‘Reducing Student Writing Anxiety,’ Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Western College Reading Association, Volume 14 (1). Available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/ucrl19/14/1/ (Accessed 11 June 2021).

The Writing Circle. (2021) a year of this [vinyl installation]. Daphne Oram Creative Arts Building, Canterbury Christ Church University.

––– (2021) Snap! Available at: https://peggyriley.com/2021/05/07/snap-the-first-writing-circle-anthology/ (Accessed 11 June 2021).

––– (2022). “Find Your Light”. Canterbury, unpublished.

UCAS (2021) ‘450% Increase in Student Mental Health Declarations over Last Decade but Progress Still Needed to Address Declarations Stigma,’ UCAS. Available at: https://www.ucas.com/corporate/news-and-key-documents/news/450-increasestudent-mental-health-declarations-over-last-decade-progress-still-needed-address/ (Accessed 28 July 2022).

Virginia Woolf. (1982) A Writer’s Diary. San Diego: Harcourt.

––– (2006) Mrs Dalloway. London: Penguin.

––– (2019) Genius and Ink: Virginia Woolf on How to Read. London: TLS.

Xiaodong, Z. (2019) ‘Exploring the Relationship between College Students’ Writing Anxiety and the Pedagogical Use of Online Resources,’ International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 16:18. doi: https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-0190149-y/

Young Minds (2020) ‘The Grounding Technique That Helps Me When I’m Anxious,’ Real Stories. Available at: https:// youngminds.org.uk/blog/the-grounding-technique-that-helps-me-when-im-anxious/ (Accessed 27 July 2022).

Zhang, L. J., & Rahimi, M. (2014) ‘EFL learners’ Anxiety Level and Their Beliefs about Corrective Feedback in Oral Communication Classes,’ System, An International Journal of Educational Technology and Applied Linguistics, 42, pp. 429–439. Oxford: Elsevier Science.

Peggy Riley is a writer, playwright, and Senior Lecturer in Creative and Professional Writing at Canterbury Christ Church University. Her work has been produced, broadcast and published; her short fiction has been shortlisted for prizes including Bridport and the Costa Short Story Award. Her first novel is Amity & Sorrow. Originally from Los Angeles, she lives on the North Kent Coast. www.peggyriley.com.

Sharing and Collaborating: A writer’s support network

by Matthew Tett, Shelley Tracey, Fiona Linday, Susanna Roland and Judi Sissons

Way back in 2020, when we were all battling through significant changes in our lives which have since become the norm, we were fortunate enough to work with The Hub’s Julia Payne, as part of an action learning set organised through NAWE. This group consisted of eight writers from different parts of the UK—and in true action learning style, it helped us to explore real-life problems in our creative work, and use the knowledge and experience of our peers to support us. We are nearly two years down the line and most of the group has continued to meet monthly, albeit with a slightly different purpose, while not losing sight of what action learning can offer.

Action learning involves ‘working on real problems, focusing on learning and actually implementing solutions’ – and one of its main aims is to ‘unlock really powerful reflection, decision making and action’ (https://thehubuk.com/projects/re-set/). We were all novices where action learning was concerned and being fortunate with our involvement in Julia’s ‘re-set’ programme set us all on an upwards trajectory to where we are today.

When Julia’s course concluded, most members committed to keeping the meets going, although not as regularly. Whereas the action learning set met weekly over two months, for up to three hours at a time, the evolved group has met each month, online, and we generally still start with offering the opportunity to

share a concern, or something that requires input from other members. Contributions have ranged from seeking encouragement for Arts Council England funding, to managing the editing and compilation of an anthology, through to interpersonal dynamics within groups that members facilitate. What became quite clear, quite quickly, was that as facilitators and writers, we all wanted more time to produce our own writing. We were adept at managing others’ work, at juggling workshops with competitions, and slotting in plenty of other projects, too. Seemingly, we all wanted time to write, and this monthly meet-up changed, into the Action Rebels.

As writers, we all love to write, from those who are keen poets, to others who prefer short prose. However, we felt that we didn’t always carve out sufficient time to produce our own work—and the Action Rebels became a perfect place for this to happen. The group is somewhat fluid, in that there is rarely a full group, due to other commitments that members have, but the meet-up is always relaxed, always productive, and leaves us all with myriad ideas to take away and work on. After some welcomes and catch-ups, we move on to see if anyone has a particular work-related issue that needs support— and we follow the action learning principles, often quite loosely, to work through this. The focus is regularly on our own writing, and having that allocated time is extremely valuable and refreshing.

Each time we meet, a different member takes responsibility for setting prompts, or for providing some stimulus material. We then have an agreed amount of time, anything from five minutes to much longer, to work on a piece, or pieces, of creative writing. We share. We comment. Then, it is a case of taking crafted pieces away to work on for submission. We usually select a piece to send around the group and we each offer our observations and thoughts—a wonderful feature of the virtual world a lot of us inhabit nowadays is the flexibility that it offers. Whether we are on the beach in Brighton or overlooking the Atlantic in Madeira, work can be submitted and enjoyed by each other.

What follows is a short section by different Action Rebels members – a mini snapshot of experiences and thoughts, and what this writing group means to us all.

MATTHEW TETT

Having time to write is something I always value. I have great intentions, plans, set-out schemes, ways of getting my ideas on paper. Quite often, I am proficient and stick to my self-imposed deadlines; sometimes, I am prolific, although we all know that quality is more important that quantity. The Action Rebels group forces me to write things I might not ordinarily choose. I am, naturally, a prose writer, so being ‘made’ to write poetry is good for me—a healthy way of writing in a different form is stimulating and makes me realise what it is like for students—young or old—to be put in a discomfort zone.

Some great things have come out of the workshops. I crafted a monster-themed tale, loosely based on a foodbased prompt, which is going to be published in a zine in the autumn. Another piece I drafted, flash fiction about a man’s journey, was published in an Arts Council-funded anthology. I love hearing other people’s pieces—I want to know more about Claudia at Paula’s Air B and B; the way that people’s titles lure me in, stick with me, like ‘Herb Omelette Burps’; I love the sensory detail I am privileged to read, the total immersion into other writers’ characters’ lives. Sourcing fun, original prompts is a great way to assess one’s own craft, and to be put in the position of the writing student—maybe something I do not do enough of—is a great way of making me reflect on my own and others’ practice.

I look forward to the monthly meet-ups—and even if I can’t make it, I try to catch up with the prompts, to submit for the next workshop. Geographically, we reside in different parts of the UK, but that doesn’t mean that meet-ups can’t be fruitful and productive. The Action Rebels group is a great place to meet like-minded creatives and to write—and with writing being at the core of my work, this is what it should be all about.

SHELLEY TRACEY

I am a poet, a writing facilitator and a poetry coordinator for a community arts organisation. As the only member of the Action Rebels from Northern Ireland, it has been wonderful to work and play with writing facilitators from other parts of the UK. The work has involved reflecting on and developing our practice, and the play is

about our own creativity and writing.

At the start of the pandemic, the three writing groups which I had been facilitating at local arts centres asked if I would support them to continue online. There were few breaks between our weekly sessions. I also began to offer journaling and creative writing classes for family carers on Zoom for a local health trust. Apart from the usual considerations for preparing and facilitating classes, I had to take account of issues raised by online learning, and the emotional and psychological impact of COVID-19. I became aware that writers were facing many challenges, including loneliness, isolation, anxiety, depression and lack of energy. I have been able to manage this by drawing on professional supervision sessions and my experience and training as a poetry therapy practitioner and facilitator. However, the intensity of the facilitation work has detracted from my own creative energy and the time available for my own writing.

The Action Rebels group is a supportive and confidential space for exploring practical and ethical aspects of our work. It’s also an inspiring space—I have learnt so much from the other members of the group, and have been inspired by their writing and their creative projects. Our discussions have enabled me to understand my facilitation and my writing as equal and interdependent aspects of my creativity.

It is wonderful to meet with other writers to share and respond to prompts. As a poet, I have been challenged to try my hand at flash fiction, and indeed to return to a novel which I started and abandoned several years ago. The Action Rebels sessions have enabled me to add two chapters to this piece of work, and have motivated me to keep going.

I really appreciate the regular online meetings—they have been an oasis throughout COVID. In April 2022, I went to London for the first time since lockdown to see my family, and to meet up with two of the Action Rebels in person. I really appreciate the time they took to come to the Royal Festival Hall. It was a treat to have a cup of coffee together—and to visit the Poetry Library, which was a first for me. I hope that there will be many more face-to-face meetings in the future—perhaps at a NAWE conference. This would be fitting, as it was through NAWE that we met on the Action Learning course.

FIONA LINDAY

I am a fiction writer and facilitator. The Action Rebel sessions help extend my boundaries of creative influence through rubbing shoulders with successful poets and writers of various genres, from around the UK. There are six impressive authors to role model their practice whose broad styles I appreciate. There, we share inventive ideas of adapting to stressful creative output situations and acquiring funding for writing projects. Collaboration involves valuing the process of writing that we accentuate to seek wellbeing for workshop attendees while guarding our practitioner space. After bringing my collection of stories together recently, ‘Count Our Blessings’, Onwards & Upwards, 2021, I gained a generous review in NAWE’s magazine from one of the

set members.

Matthew Tett also introduced the group to his StoryTown Festival offering many opportunities for our members to join his literary virtual activity. As well, during an ACE Council England supported anthology writing project during lockdown, I benefited from the group’s advice on adapting the delivery of workshops online in a hybrid manner.

Now, I’m back freelancing in person to young people and children with The Mighty Creatives. Happily, I’m exploring picture book writing further. That comes after drafting a couple of natural habitat-promoting, mockedup wildlife stories for under 8s. Presently, I’m extending my awe and wonder series to appreciate wildlife living by the sea, with Sampson Seal. Again, I seek a publisher interested in raising awareness of our special natural history and the environment. One of the members commented on my current writing and helped me explore possible outlets for the work. So, during the creative process I am encouraged by the group to write to my optimum and given the benefit of their experience on how to reach an audience. Being stretched by the short writing exercises gives relief between projects and offers useful insight to prompts to spark new writing. I have submitted pieces sparked from such activity. We recently enjoyed food writing together, giving and receiving feedback.

I especially value being part of this group, where we act as sounding boards to each other, which was a lifeline during lockdown.

SUSANNA ROLAND

I was thrilled to be accepted into the NAWE Action Learning Set facilitated by the Hub in 2020.

I had recently graduated as a mature student from the Creative Writing MA at Brunel University London and I was in a period of creative flux and career shuffle when the pandemic hit. I had decided that I wanted to slow down my fast-paced work as a Cultural Producer and concentrate on my writing and creative facilitating.

As well as my own writing, I had a few projects on the go, including a writing residency, some one-to-one mentoring and an international writers’ group I had set up in lockdown that I was attempting to run online, across geographical and cultural time zones.

The prospect of group support and creative sharing with likeminded professional ‘strangers’ was a weirdly comforting proposition. We all got on and respected each other straight away and the confidential, structured format of the Action Learning Set helped us to quickly gain trust and understanding in each other’s worlds. As the formal period of the facilitated group came to an end, we agreed to stay together but redefine the terms and purpose of the group—hence the name Action Rebels!

I really appreciate our monthly get togethers, although I don’t make each one.

We catch up, laugh, scribble, set prompts—encourage each other to write, share feedback and offer a safe space to revert back to our AL origins—should one of us have a particular work-related issue we want to mull over.

It’s wonderfully laid back, a ‘come when you can, contribute what you will’, kind of vibe and it is remarkable that such an informal group has grown out of such a formal structure. There is something to be said about laying strong foundations but then again we all know how writers like to break the rules!

JUDI SISSONS

I first witnessed the transformative power of Action Learning back in 2011 on a NAWE course in Relational Dynamics coaching, so when I heard that NAWE were offering a specific training in the process, I jumped at the chance to join the Action Learning set. The structured approach of open questions and gentle challenge offered a confidential space in which to work through tricky issues.

I had been running a women’s online writing group since the start of the pandemic and was contemplating putting together a collection of their work. This was a step outside my comfort zone, and being able to share ideas and concerns with the group gave me the confidence to keep going through many ups and downs. Our anthology, Words from a Distance was published in December 2021.

As a freelance writing facilitator and coach, I am often juggling a number of different responsibilities and my own creative projects can get shunted to the bottom of a long to do list. When the set evolved into a writing group, I welcomed the opportunity to focus on my own writing.

A wide variety of creative prompts are generously shared by group members, offering a chance to experiment and try out writing exercises to see what works. I find I can often adapt an exercise to fit a particular project I’m working on at the time. When offered a prompt about the contents of a fridge, I was able to create a scene in a story in progress that I would not otherwise have thought of. The food theme also inspired me to write about my parents’ café as part of a longer piece submitted to an anthology.

Our roots as an Action Learning Set may partly account for the resilience of our now hybrid group. The grounding we had in this kind but rigorous method has encouraged authenticity, openness and a feeling of being in safe hands. No doubt the challenging times we’ve all lived through have also helped to cement our creative friendships. After almost two years of meeting online, some of us recently got together in London for a visit to the Poetry library. It was a joy to finally meet each other in person.

To conclude, it is clear, hopefully, that we have all benefited from our experiences, from the initial meeting in the autumn 2020 lockdown, to where we are at now – a supportive group of writers, with different projects and ideas evolving in myriad ways. Working in such

a collaborative, relaxed and supportive way enables us all to continue sharing our work in a safe space, as well as putting into practice the principles of action learning – something we all hope to continue to do in the future.

All members of the Action Rebels group are writers and facilitators, residing in different parts of the UK. The group continues to meet monthly online, sharing good practice and developing new pieces of writing.

REFERENCE:

Payne:

The Time Tunnellers

by Susan Brownrigg, Barbara Henderson, Catherine Randall, Ally Sherrick and Jeannie Waudby

Back in April 2021, an online friend got in touch to ask if I would be interested in creating a small online writers’ group based on our joint passion for historical children’s fiction.

The five of us - Ally Sherrick, Catherine Randall, Jeannie Waudby, Barbara Henderson and myself – Susan Brownrigg - each knew at least one other writer in the group.

We are all published authors, and each of us now writes historical fiction for young people.

Geographically we are spread out across the UK –Middlesex, Lancashire, Surrey and the Scottish Highlands – so meeting in the real world would be rather tricky!

At first, we didn’t have a firm idea of what our group would be, but during our first Zoom chat a concept began to take shape.

We decided early on that we didn’t want to be a critique group as all of us were already members of established organisations that offered that. Instead, our group would give us an opportunity to share advice on markets, networking and other opportunities. At our initial meeting we discussed our publishing experiences and a desire to work together to help build our profile as well as wanting to share our passion for history with young people.

We agreed on a name – The Time Tunnellers - and a slogan – Digging for the story in history.

Matthew Tett, Susanna Roland, Judi Sissons, Shelley Tracey, Fiona Linday

By June we had a logo created by our friend, author Eve McDonnell and a plan to start a weekly blog and YouTube channel for schools. We set up social media profiles and agreed on a launch date – Thursday 26th August.

Our topic themes often match the history curriculum and cover important events and dates – so far we have blogged and vlogged on Vikings and Romans,the Great Fire of London and the Gunpowder Plot, WW2, castles, Black History Month, pirates, Women’s History Month, Windrush Day, World Book Day, the Highland Clearances, the first recorded flight … the list goes on! We highlight suggested reads and always include a writing challenge for schools and young people.

Since January we have been thrilled to feature a number of guest historical children’s authors, including Eve McDonnell, Claire Fayers, Julia Gray, Lindsay Littleson, Alison Weatherby, Joe Lamb, and Frances Durkin, with more timetabled. We are especially keen to support debut authors and to highlight the historical inspiration behind their books.

Over the last year we have had a lot of fun while learning lots of new skills, from recording our own five-minute videos – so many retakes! - editing, using Blogger, and upping our social media skills. Our friendship has grown as we have talked through our struggles, commiserated on our disappointments, cheered each other’s successes and celebrated our book launches.

ABOUT US:

The Time Tunnellers are authors Susan Brownrigg (Gracie Fairshaw and the Mysterious Guest, Kintana and the Captain’s Curse, Gracie Fairshaw and the Trouble at the Tower), Barbara Henderson (Fir For Luck, Punch, The Wilderness Wars, Black Water, the Siege of Caerlaverock, The Chessmen Thief, and The Reluctant Rebel), Catherine Randall (The White Phoenix), Ally Sherrick (Black Powder, The Buried Crown, The Queen’s Fool) and Jeannie Waudby (One of Us).

LINKS: https://timetunnellers.blogspot.com/ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCY7LQZiq-eVaIg4AINuLpKg/featured @TimeTunnellers

The Blackpool Horror Society

How setting up a writing group for a laugh changed many lives.

by Colin Davies

I am writing this article to reflect on the last two years running The Blackpool Horror Society (BHS). I will explain how and why it came into being, the philosophy of the society, and how it has transformed the lives for the participants. Finally, I will discuss how it has affected my life, and how it has altered my academic career path.

The story starts in the most unacademic way. I had been furloughed at the start of the pandemic from a job I tolerated because the money was not bad. In the space of a few hours one morning, as the chancellor was announcing the furlough scheme, my career as a graphic designer ended. I was still being paid 80% of my salary, but the security of the post was removed.

At the same time the schools closed their doors and the challenge of home schooling my SEN child was thrust upon me and my partner. At first, I pushed forward with

my writing and published a book of short stories within the first months. In between the school day lessons, which were becoming increasingly harder due to my son’s condition, I tried applying for writing jobs I could work on from home. The rejections made it perfectly clear: though I may have the talent, I needed a degree.

This realisation coincided with an advert that appeared on my Facebook feed for the Blackpool & the Fylde College’s BA (Hons) English Language, Literature and Writing. So, at the age of 49, I applied. My published books helped me get an unconditional offer for the degree which is awarded by Lancaster University. I was going to be the first of my family to study for a university degree.

I applied for all the student finance and was shocked to get it. I read every word of every document relating to the

college to extract the maximum information regarding university life. I had never thought it possible to be here, so I was not wasting the experience. It was in these pages that I discovered the Degree Plus programme. An extra award tagged onto some degree programmes that shows future employers that the recipient is more than just a student: they got involved and helped others. I decided that a Degree Plus award was a good thing to have, only I did not want to get involved in someone else’s thing. I tend to take on too many roles in such cases and ultimately cause myself too much stress for someone else’s project. I decided the best solution was to have my own enrichment club, something I controlled. If I was going to have the stress, it would be for me.

The concept of writing groups is something I have a lot of experience with. I have mainly worked with poetry groups, but I have always found them to be rewarding and enriching. If run correctly they can be a force for good by providing an environment that gives the writer protected time to create and review (Calkins & Ehrenworth 2016) and have freedom of ideas without the threat of rebuke (Mearns 1929) writing group can help writers build confidence and improve their skills. Though most of the groups I had been involved with were more about continuing workshops, rather than real progression.

“Our minds act as a patterning system creating ideas out of experience. Once created, these ideas become firmly established and control the way we look at situations. Yet all patterning systems demand a method for breaking out of an established pattern in order to see things in a different way. Without such a method there can only be continuity of the old ideas which become more and more obsolete. Creativity provides a means for change, but it is haphazard, and we wait for unusual events or unusual minds to stimulate new ideas. We rely on this passive waiting because we have never developed creativity as part of our thinking system but instead have put our efforts into developing the YES/NO system which is anticreative. PO (Provocative Operation) provides a mechanism for changing ideas.” (de Bono 1973).

I have been contemplating the nature of creativity since my school days, so when creating a writing group, I wanted to find a way of allowing the members to explore new ideas, take them out of their comfort zone which in turn would help them improve as writers (Fleischer & Andrew-Vaughan 2009). So, I devised a PO: does the ability to write horror give an author the skills to write in any genre? This is something I hope to explore further as part of a wider research project for a Mphil/PhD. So, while walking from the canteen to the classroom for one of the very few onsite lectures in 2020, I announced, with an air of bravado, that I was going to start the Blackpool Horror Society (BHS) to prove my theory and get a Degree Plus award. My friend, Simon Dooley, who had signed up to do the degree at the same time, thought it sounded like a bit of a laugh and agreed to help.

We approached the Student Union, and they were more

than happy to set us up a page on the student enrichment site. So, on Friday 25 September 2020, the inaugural meeting of the BHS commenced online. In attendance that night, as well as myself and Simon, were a few of our fellow students from the course, the student union enrichment officer, and the course coordinator and tutor, Dr Ashley Lister.

I started the night by explaining my theory of how techniques used in horror stories can be used in all genres. I wanted to create an atmosphere that was calm and yet confident. This is something I had achieved at poetry groups where I hosted evenings, but they had been live events in rooms with an audience full of energy to feed from. This was during the pandemic restrictions, so the meetings had to be on MS Teams.

After the mini lecture, I read one of my own short stories; this was to break the ice and relieve the nervousness of being the first (Calkins & Ehrenworth 2016). It was just after I finished that the final piece of the puzzle fell into place. Instead of just moving on to the next reader I went round the group asking each person present to comment. I encouraged them not just to say whether they liked it or not, I wanted reasons, however ridiculous. I wanted them to think about it, not just be nice and bow to the conventions of politeness. In that moment I turned the tables of the writing group from the writer to the audience, instant reader response. The feedback from each member was wonderfully insightful, each having a slightly different perspective.

I called the next reader. After they finished and took the applause, silent until we all unmuted the microphones, I repeated the same idea. Asking each member to comment with more than simple platitudes. It was obvious this forcing people to critique rather than just smile, was having an impact. The confidence in people’s faces was visible. By the end of the first evening, we all agreed it had been a success and set the date for the next one.

We meet on the last Friday of each month, and have done so, without a single evening missed, for the last two years. Simon set up a website for the group. The intention was to give the members a place to publish their work. Not a simple ‘post anything’ blog, the pieces had to be submitted and edited before publication. We thought this would be a good way to boost confidence and allow them to say, “I have been published.” However, within months of starting the BHS the quality of the work being shared had become so high, that publishing them on our own website could hold them back where submission policies stipulate that the works must not have been published anywhere else before.

The group has continued to help its members grow as writers, with each monthly meeting being filled with work that would sit so comfortably in any anthology. The nature of the meetings and the way each member has to pass comment on everyone’s contribution has been deemed as being supportive of other students and as such, attending the meeting on a regular basis is now considered worthy of Degree Plus status.

So, from a silly idea to avoid volunteering for someone else’s group to get a Degree Plus, I have built a group that is helping students improve their work. But it is not only the students that have benefited from this writing group. A student teacher that was taking some of our classes as part of their training, asked to come along. They told us they had not written any fiction for years. After attending one meeting as an observer, Ellie is now writing her first novel and sharing extracts with the group to gage how it is going. Dr Lister has aired his views on how inclusive the group is, and how much it has been a major factor in advancing the writing and creative skills of his students. The students have voiced gratitude to the Blackpool Horror Society, citing the group in essays submitted to the degree. Simon had to pause his studies, but his return is imminent, this also includes a return to the BHS. We have members now from outside of the college and a link to another writing group in Liverpool is being established.

On a personal note, the Blackpool Horror Society, though it may have started somewhat tongue in cheek, has had such a massive impact on me that my future studies, research and hopefully employment have been informed by it. Even my membership with NAWE was a direct recommendation from Dr Lister after he saw first-hand, the impact this writing group has had on other people.

In 12 months I will be graduating, my journey into helping others find and develop their creativity has begun, and long may it continue.

REFERENCES

Calkins, L., Ehrenworth, M. (2016). Growing extraordinary writers: Leadership decisions to raise the level of writing across a school and a District. The Reading Teacher, vol 70 (1) p. 7-18. Available at https://ila.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ trtr.1499 (Accessed 14 July, 2022)

De Bono, E. (1990) Po: Beyond Yes and No, London, Penguin. Fleischer, C., Andrew-Vaughan, S. (20009) Writing Outside Your Comfort Zone: Helping Students Navigate Unfamiliar Genres, Portsmouth NH,. Heinemann Educational Books. Mearns, H. (1958) Creative Power: The Education of Youth in the Creative Arts, New York, Dover Publications Inc.

Colin Davies is an English Literature, Language and Creative writing undergraduate at Lancaster University, studying out of Blackpool & the Fylde College. A member of NAWE and the H. G. Wells society, Colin has published three children’s books, a poetry collection, a book version of his acclaimed spoken word show, and a collection of short stories framed as an anthology. Founder of the Blackpool Horror Society and poetry night ‘Magical Words’ Colin champions creatives and prides himself in the help he tries to give them.

The case for creative writing in secondary science education

by Kirsten Somerville

INTRODUCTION

Since modern science first emerged during the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment, it has had a complicated relationship to the arts and creativity. For Kant (1892 [1790]: sect. 46), art and science are diametrically opposed: the former is a skill that creates truth (characterized by originality), the latter is a type of knowledge that discovers truth (characterized by imitation). In this conception, true art can only be produced by “genius” (it cannot be explained or taught), while a great scientist can never truly be considered a “genius” (their thinking process can be explained and taught) (Kant 1982 [1790]: sect. 47). While aspects of the genius myth in artistic endeavours arguably persist to the present day, it is now widely accepted that creativity also plays a major role in scientific endeavours. Indeed, scholars exploring the distinction between “artistic” and “scientific” creativity acknowledge that there is considerable overlap between the two (Hadzigeorgiou et al. 2012).

As an alternative to the Kantian opposition of art and science, Pope (2005: 4) points to Deleuze, who starts from the premise that truth is always created rather than simply discovered. For Deleuze and Guattari (1994

[1991), art and science, along with philosophy, form three “intersecting planes” of creation. While art is primarily concerned with the creation of “affects” and science is primarily concerned with the creation of “percepts”, the planes are interdependent and overlap in a continuous, unpredictable process of “becoming”. Crucially in this conception, creation is not the preserve of a rare and mystical artistic “genius”, but central to the human experience of being in the world.

Despite the recognition of creativity as an important skill in science, most conventional formal education arguably still follows a Kantian model that divides subjects into “creative” (ie. artistic) or “scientific”. In what follows I will argue that a more holistic approach, following Deleuze & Guattari, can be harnessed to enhance science education in Scottish secondary schools, specifically through the use of creative writing. I will begin by outlining the value of this approach in terms of learning theory, before considering some challenges in applying the approach in practice, and proposing some pedagogical strategies to overcome these challenges.

The Scottish context

The Scottish Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) is a learner-

centred approach that aims to enable young people to develop four fundamental capacities (Figure 1). The curriculum is coherent from ages 3–18, and is applied across four contexts (Figure 2).

As can be seen in Figure 2, CfE is structured according to a traditional subject-based model, divided into eight curriculum areas: expressive arts, health and wellbeing, languages, mathematics, religious and moral education, sciences, social studies and technologies (Education Scotland 2022). At the same time, it elevates interdisciplinary learning (IDL) to the same importance as subject-based learning, particularly in the “broad general education” phase which runs until the third year of secondary school (Education Scotland 2012).

The official guidance notes on implementing CfE contain advice for each curriculum area on potential connections with other areas, and identify three areas as the “responsibility of all practitioners”: health and wellbeing across learning, literacy across learning and numeracy across learning (Education Scotland 2009).

According to Humes (2013: 83), it is understood that in the context of CfE, IDL can “encourage an inquisitive attitude and strengthen motivation as well as helping to develop confidence in facing challenges, both intellectual and practical”. However, despite CfE being in place since 2010, it has been recognized that interdisciplinary learning “has not yet become a habitual learning approach in all of Scotland’s schools” (Education Scotland 2020a), and has been identified as an area for development in order to rebalance the curriculum in line with its original ambitions (Education Scotland 2020b).

Additionally, there has been a focus in recent years on “creativity across learning”, with a “Creative Learning Plan” introduced in 2013 (Creative Scotland 2013) and an updated action plan published in 2021 (Creative Scotland 2021).

Thus, the time is ripe for interdisciplinary innovation in Scottish schools. Exploring scientific ideas through creative writing aligns with the core principles of the Curriculum for Excellence and follows official guidance

whereby “learning in different subjects or curriculum areas is used to explore a theme or issue” (Education Scotland 2012, emphasis in original), in this case learning in languages and sciences. Creative writing in particular also provides a valuable opportunity to combine “literacy across learning” with “creativity across learning”.

Motivation

The first capacity of CfE is to enable all young people to become “successful learners”, which includes having “enthusiasm and motivation for learning” (Education Scotland 2019). As noted above, Scottish Education authorities already have an appreciation of the ways in which interdisciplinary learning in general can “strengthen motivation” (Humes 2013: 83). This is especially true for creative writing-based IDL activities, which are particularly well-placed to cultivate intrinsic motivation in students. Intrinsic motivation refers to “doing something because it is inherently interesting or enjoyable”, in contrast to extrinsic motivation, which refers to “doing something because it leads to a separable outcome”, such as rewards or punishments (Ryan & Deci 2000: 55). The recognition of the importance of intrinsic motivation in education has increased as reward-andpunishment-based learning theories, inspired by the radical behaviourism of B. F. Skinner (1953), fell out of favour and more humanist-inspired learning theories came to dominate (e.g. Rogers & Freiberg 1994). While both forms of motivation have a role to play in education, intrinsic motivation is widely held to engender higher quality learning over the long term (Ryan & Deci 2000).

Following the basic definition of intrinsic motivation as learning for interest or enjoyment, creative writing can play a major role in its achievement. This is because, put simply, stories are inherently interesting and enjoyable. This may be due in part to the positive associations developed during childhood experiences of being told stories, stored in the emotional memory as an experience of feeling cosy, calm and cared for (Willis 2017). But it is largely due to the fact that the human brain is wired for

story. Anthropological research has shown storytelling to be a universal of human behaviour (Hsu 2008): in the words of Ursula Le Guin, “There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories” (1979: 31). A high level of cross-cultural commonality has also been found in the stories our brains continue telling while we sleep, in the form of dreams (Gottschall 2012: 82). A landmark study in 1944 even demonstrated that humans see stories where there are none, with participants spontaneously imposing animistic narratives onto random patterns of shapes moving across a screen (e.g. one shape “chasing” another) when asked to describe what happened (Heider & Simmel 1994). The findings of this study are particularly relevant to the question of writing creatively about non-human themes in science – far from being an outlandish proposition, it reflects our natural propensity to narrativize all forms of experience and information.

The process of creative writing itself can also be considered amenable to fostering intrinsic motivation. Achievement Goal Theory argues that motivation is linked to orientation towards “performance goals” – based on “normative or comparative standards of performing” – and “mastery goals” – based on “intrapersonal standards of learning” (Svinicki 2009: 25). “Mastery goals” are associated with higher levels of intrinsic motivation, including the so-called “flow state” of pure intrinsic motivation (Mustafa et al. 2011). Flow theorist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi strongly linked this state of optimal task absorption with creative activities (Csikszentmihalyi 1997). While the traditional science classroom may be filled with questions that have right or wrong answers, creative writing “is rarely a pursuit of answers but, rather, about investigation—of the self, of one’s work, and of the world at large” (Malla 2017). Similarly, writing creatively in the science classroom can open up a space free from the pressure to “perform” by demonstrating linguistic skills or techniques, as might be expected in the English classroom. This freedom from normative standards of right or wrong allows students to set their own goals for mastery of the concepts they explore in their writing, granting them permission to play around, try things out and work things out.

Autonomy

Intrinsic motivation is closely linked to autonomy, another prominent attribute in the CfE capacities. “Successful learners” are deemed to be those who are able to “learn independently” and “think creatively and independently” (Education Scotland 2019). More broadly, “confident individuals” are able to “develop and communicate their own beliefs and view of the world” and “live as independently as they can” (Education Scotland 2019). The freedom of creative writing can help to develop students’ confidence in their abilities to find their own way through scientific ideas and find their voices more generally. This ties into broader notions of education being about more than accumulating knowledge. Educational theories from anarchist (e.g. Stirner 1967 [1842]), constructivist (e.g. Piaget 2001 [1947]; Vygotsky 1980), critical (e.g. Freire 2000 [1970]) and humanist (e.g. Maslow 1943; Rogers & Freiberg 1994)

perspectives have emphasized the role of education in self-actualisation and the need to treat learners as subjects rather than objects. These learner-centred approaches stand in opposition to what Freire (2000 [1970]) called the “banking model of education”, a traditional approach whereby a knowledgeable teacher transmits their knowledge into the empty vessel of the student’s mind. While Freire proposes a form of problem-based learning as an alternative method, creative activities also have the potential to allow students to develop autonomy and ownership of knowledge.

In the first instance, creative writing affords students a significant degree of choice in the elements they focus on and the way they present them. Even when the teacher pre-selects a scientific concept as the subject matter, even when students are required to write in a specific form (e.g. poetry or prose), no two students will produce the same piece of work. In this way the process of creation can be understood as a process of selection: exploring what an individual finds significant about a given phenomenon, and valorising that personal perspective. Recentring the learner-subject’s active process of knowledge construction is particularly useful in the science classroom. Reflecting on a creative writing programme for STEM students at Imperial College London, Aifric Campbell (2014) observed that “students learn to tolerate uncertainty in process and outcome, embrace risk (creative, intellectual and performance) and practice humility – since writing is an exercise in failing better each time”. As secondary school students begin to specialize, writing creatively about science can help overcome self-limiting beliefs that science specialists are “not creative”, and indeed that arts specialists are “not scientific”. By drawing on the innate human propensity for storytelling, students of all specialisms can engage creatively with scientific ideas. As Carter (2004: 13) points out, “linguistic creativity is not simply a property of exceptional people but an exceptional property of all people”, and students can take confidence in discovering this for themselves.

Memory

Unsurprisingly, the memorisation of knowledge is not featured as a core principle of a self-consciously progressive, learner-centred curriculum like CfE. Yet at the subject level, learning outcomes still need to be met, and information retention and recall undoubtedly remain key concerns for educators, particularly for foundational knowledge in the sciences at secondary school level. This is another area where the universality of story can be exploited to enhance learning. While some science teachers may be uncomfortable with Muriel Rukeyser’s proclamation that “The universe is made of stories, / not of atoms” (1968: 111), research in neuroscience reveals that it is substantially accurate – at least in terms of our personal universe. Storr (2019: 20-21) explains how the human brain does not have direct experience of the outside world – only of a limited range of signals, which it uses to generate a reconstructed “model” of the world that forms our subjective experience. Thus, our experiences – and our memories – are created as “brain stories”, which “have a basic structure of cause

and effect” (Storr 2019: 51). Storr (2019: 49) notes that human memory is both “episodic” (simplified into cause-and-effect sequences) and “autobiographical” (tied up with personal meaning and associations). Therefore, writing ideas into meaningful stories makes them more memorable (Willis 2017).

The use of poetic language is a powerful tool in creating the meaningful associations that make stories memorable. As Diane Ackerman suggests, humans “seem to require a poetic version of life” (2005: 175).

On the one hand, “all language is poetic”, in the sense that “we ignore the picturesque origins of words when we utter them” (Ackerman 2005: 174). Indeed, studies show that we use up to one metaphor every ten words, even if their use has become so ingrained that we no longer recognize them as such (Storr 2019: 43-44). But the power of metaphor increases when new associations are built, echoing Orwell’s (1946) warning against the use of “dead” metaphors. Brain scans show that simply reading metaphors of sense and movement activates the same regions of the brain as those activated when actually experiencing sense and movement (Lacey et al. 2012; Lacey et al. 2017), but brain activity is lower when reading well-established metaphors or abstract descriptions (Bergen 2012: 206). In fact, an emerging body of neuroscience research indicates that metaphor may be the primary method for understanding abstract concepts, by means of association with physical properties (Bergen 2012: 206).

While scientific writing is characterized by the use of abstract and technical language, the creative writing mantra of “show don’t tell” has a lot to offer to students trying to understand and remember scientific concepts. Because of the way the brain generates subjective experience through sensory and affective signals, abstract information is more difficult to process (Storr 2019: 29). Instead, stories that focus on the particular, highlighting the concrete details that evoke abstract ideas, create more vivid scenes that are more powerfully encoded in memory (Storr 2019: 29). Since these stories can be told in everyday language, this approach has the potential to make scientific concepts more accessible to students who are struggling to internalize the abstract, technical language of science, by exploring them “from the ground up”.

Balancing the particular and the universal

Science classes at secondary school level, at least in my own subject area of geography, tend to take a “zoomed out” view of scientific concepts. The aim is to provide an overview of a given geographical process, such as river formation, highlighting the typical landforms that are universally associated with it. If the particular does come into play, say on a field visit to a local river, this generally takes the form of measurement: taking readings of width, depth and so on at different stages along the river, which are combined to build up an overall model. The creative writing approach of “zooming in” on specific details, particularly sensory and affective ones, could be seen to undermine the goal of comprehensive knowledge.

However, with the right pedagogical framework, the goal of universality can still be achieved by other means. Rather than seeing the particular as an end in itself, it is more useful to conceive of it as an “opening”, one of many possible avenues into a broader understanding of a process. This thinking informed my own approach to a writing exercise I prepared for classmates on a “teaching creative writing” course, where I took an unassuming rock on campus as the point of entry into the historical process of glaciation in the UK. By asking participants to imagine the sensations of a particular rock’s journey on the glacier, I tried to create an opportunity for a more enlivened appreciation of the process than might be achieved through a top-down, model-based approach.

Balancing fact and imagination

While writing his popular science book Histoire d’une montagne (“The History of a Mountain”), nineteenth century geographer Elisée Reclus confessed in a letter to his editor that he was struggling with the task of maintaining scientific accuracy while writing with artistic flair: “Like in German meals, I have to serve the meat and the jams at the same time” (Ferretti 2012: 88-89, my translation). This reflection encapsulates one of the key challenges in writing creatively about science: while we want to encourage an imaginative engagement with scientific concepts, there is nonetheless an imperative to remain faithful to the facts involved. Though we can imagine what the last period of glaciation might have “felt like”, we cannot simply imagine how it progressed, or how it impacted the landscape – in the science classroom, the materiality of the world is not up for debate.

Thankfully, insights into resolving this predicament can already be found in the realm of creative nonfiction. In Lee Gutkind’s “5 Rs of creative nonfiction”, the third “R” represents “Research”, which he deems crucial to “the mission of the genre, which is to gather and present information, to teach readers about a person, place, idea or situation” (Gutkind 1996: 6, emphasis in original). The fourth is “Reading” other works of creative nonfiction, before the fifth and final stage of “Riting” (Gutkind 1996: 8). In the context of creative writing about science, Gutkind’s practical framework could be translated into a pedagogical one: beginning with the foundational scientific input, then examining model creative texts on the topic, before moving on to the writing stage. When facilitating the discussion of example creative texts, the teacher can guide the discussion to address both the scientific content and its artistic presentation. This will ensure that students are familiar with both the base scientific knowledge and some approaches to engaging with it creatively before they embark on their own writing. In other words, it is vital to serve the meat before the jams.

Balancing the human and the nonhuman

Nevertheless, creative writing about scientific topics still differs in important ways from other forms of creative nonfiction that focus on human stories. Creative writing about science involves a specific tension: how

can we understand and represent the nonhuman in a uniquely human way, with feeling and emotion, without imposing the human onto the nonhuman?

This is especially challenging in the physical and earth sciences, which are often concerned with phenomena that cannot be directly experienced by humans, whose scales (e.g. atoms) or timescales (e.g. fossils) do not correspond with our own. Ironically, attempts to write less anthropocentric geographies have been plagued with issues of anthropomorphism, and attempts to recognize nonhuman forms of agency are stymied by debates around how far we can really understand the “intentions” of nonhuman beings (e.g. Johnston 2008).

In geography and environmental studies, some researchers have responded to this challenge by advocating a form of “critical”, “responsible” or “informed” anthropomorphism. This recognizes the prevalence of anthropomorphism and its potential to develop understanding of the nonhuman (Quinn et al. 2016), “when it is coupled with reflexivity by the human observer as to their own situated positionality” (Lorimer et al. 2017: 8). This approach can also be translated into a pedagogical framework that can help students to recognize their subjectivity. I recently attended a “more-than-human story” workshop with the writer and artist Fiona Glen that employed such a framework. The workshop, which explored “ways of writing about, to and with other beings” (Climate Fringe 2021), was structured in three parts: “observing”, “addressing” and “voicing”. Similarly to the creative nonfiction approach, the starting point was to observe, research and develop an “outside” understanding of the chosen entity. Next, we had the opportunity to express our own feelings towards it, before eventually attempting to write from an “inside” perspective. This approach was effective because

the perspective shift of the final stage was foregrounded and built up to gradually, thus avoiding any unconscious mingling of subjectivities. The necessarily imaginative nature of the final step was also made explicit. There was space for participants to reflect and recognize that while a full understanding of another being’s experience may not be possible, it can still be instructive to imagine it.

Conclusion

The moment has come to extend the remit of creative writing beyond the English classroom in Scottish secondary schools. As I have outlined above, introducing the practice into the science classroom is a step towards achieving the original aims of the Curriculum for Excellence, and towards current goals of improving interdisciplinary learning, literacy across learning and creativity across learning. The use of creative writing creates opportunities for enjoyable, independent and memorable learning experiences in the sciences. It is not without challenge, but the risk of partial, inaccurate or anthropomorphized understandings of scientific concepts can be mitigated through the pedagogical frameworks I described. By drawing on all students’ innate storytelling abilities and recognising the value of subjective ways of knowing, scientific knowledge can become more accessible. This serves as a reminder that creativity is a fundamental part of the human experience, and that “art is not a luxury, but a necessity” (West 2010: 152).

REFERENCES

Ackerman, D. (2005) Language at Play. Creative Nonfiction. 24/25, 174-188. Bergen, B. (2012) Louder than words: The new science of how the mind makes meaning. New York: Basic Books. Campbell, A. (2014) Scientists outshine arts students with experiments in creative writing. The Guardian [online], 6 November. Available from: https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/nov/06/scientists-outshine-arts-students-with-experiments-in-creative-writing [Accessed 31 July 2022]

Carter, R. (2004) Language and creativity: the art of common talk. London; New York: Routledge. Climate Fringe (2021) Writing Workshop: A More-Than-Human Story with Fiona Glenn. Available from: https://climatefringe.org/events/writing-workshop-a-more-than-human-story-with-fiona-glenn [Accessed 31 July 2022].

Creative Scotland (2013) What is Creativity? Scotland’s Creative Learning Plan. Available from: https://www.creativescotland.com/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/21394/Scotlands-Creative-Learning-Plan-2013-v-d4.pdf [Accessed 31 July 2022].

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Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1997) Creativity: Flow and the psychology of discovery and invention. New York: Harper Perennial. Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1994 [1991]) What is Philosophy?. Trans. G. Burchell & H. Tomlinson. London; New York: Verso. Education Scotland (2009) Curriculum for Excellence: Experiences and Outcomes. Available from: https://education.gov.scot/Documents/All-experiencesoutcomes18.pdf [Accessed 31 July 2022].

Education Scotland (2012) CfE Briefing 4: Interdisciplinary Learning. Available from: https://studylib.net/doc/12960642/cfe-briefing-4-interdisciplinary-learning [Accessed 31 July 2022].

Education Scotland (2019) Refreshed Curriculum for Excellence Narrative. Available from: https://scotlandscurriculum.scot/3/ [Accessed 31 July 2022].

Education Scotland (2020a) Interdisciplinary Learning: ambitious learning for an increasingly complex world. Available from: https://education.gov.scot/media/pv0fvaxw/curriculum-idl-thought-paper.pdf [Accessed 31 July 2022].

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Ferretti F. (2012) Elisée Reclus: Lettres de prison et d’exil. Lardy: À la frontière. Freire, P. (2000 [1970]) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York; London: Continuum. Gottschall (2012) The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. Boston; New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Gutkind, L. (1996) From the Editor: The 5 Rs of Creative Nonfiction. Creative Nonfiction. 6, 1-14. Hadzigeorgiou, Y., Fokialis, P., & Kabouropoulou, M. (2012) Thinking about Creativity in Science Education. Creative Education. 3, 603-611.

Heider, F. & Simmel, M. (1944) An Experimental Study of Apparent Behavior. The American Journal of Psychology. 57 (2), 243-259. Hsu, J. (2008) The Secrets of Storytelling: Why We Love a Good Yarn. Scientific American Mind. 19 (4). Humes, W. (2013) Curriculum for Excellence and Interdisciplinary Learning. Scottish Educational Review. 45 (1), 82-93. Kant, I. (1892 [1790]) Critique of Judgment. Trans. J. H. Bernard. London; New York: Macmillan and Company. Johnston, C. (2008) Beyond the clearing: Towards a dwelt animal geography. Progress in Human Geography. 32 (5), 633-649. Lacey, S., Stilla, R., & Sathian, K. (2012) Metaphorically feeling: Comprehending textural metaphors activates somatosensory cortex. Brain and Language. 120 (3), 416-421.

Lacey, S., Stilla, R., Deshpande, G., Zhao, S., Stephens, C., McCormick, K., Kemmerer, D., & Sathian, K. (2017) Engagement of the left extrastriate body area during body-part metaphor comprehension. Brain and Language. 166, 1-18.

Le Guin, U. (1979) The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. Ed. S. Wood. New York: Putnam. Lorimer, J., Hodgetts, T., & Barua, M. (2019) Animals’ atmospheres. Progress in Human Geography. 43 (1), 26-45. Malla, P. (2017) What Julio Cortázar might teach us about Creative Writing. The New Yorker [online], 23 October. Available from: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/what-julio-cortazar-might-teach-us-about-teaching-writing [Accessed 31 July 2022].

Maslow, A. H. (1943) A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review. 50 (4), 370-96. Mustafa, S., Elias, H., Roslan, S., & Noah, S. (2011) Can mastery and performance goals predict learning flow among secondary school students. International Journal of Humanities and Social Science. 1 (11), 93-98.

Orwell, G. (1946) Politics and the English Language. The Orwell Foundation. Available from: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/ [Accessed 31 July 2022].

Piaget, J. (2001 [1947]) The Psychology of Intelligence (2nd ed.). Trans. M. Piercy & D. E. Berlyne. London; New York: Routledge. Pope, R. (2005) Creativity: theory, history, practice. Abingdon; New York: Routledge. Quinn, F., Castéra, J., & Clément, P. (2016) Teachers’ conceptions of the environment: Anthropocentrism, non-anthropocentrism, anthropomorphism and the place of nature. Environmental Education Research. 22 (6), 893-917. Rogers, C. & Freiberg, H. J. (1994) Freedom to learn. 3rd edition. New York: Macmillan. Rukeyser, M. (1968) The Speed of Darkness. New York; Toronto: Random House. Ryan, R. M. & Deci, E. L. (2000) Intrinsic and extrinsic motivations: Classic definitions and new directions. Contemporary educational psychology. 25 (1), 54-67. Skinner, B. F. (1953) Science and human behavior. New York: Free Press. Stirner, M. (1967 [1842]) The False Principle of Our Education, or, Humanism and Realism. Trans. R. H. Beebe, ed. J. J. Martin. Colorado Springs: R. Myles. Storr, W. (2019) The Science of Storytelling. London: William Collins. Svinicki, M. D. (2009) Fostering a Mastery Goal Orientation in the Classroom. E-xcellence in Teaching. 9, 25-28. Vygotsky, L. S. (1980) Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Eds. M. Cole, V. John-Steiner, S. Scribner, & E. Souberman. Cambridge; London: Harvard University Press. West, R. (2010) The strange necessity: Essays and reviews [ebook]. New York: Open Road Integrated Media. Willis, J. (2017) The Neuroscience of Narrative and Memory. Edutopia. Available from: https://www.edutopia.org/article/neuroscience-narrative-and-memory [Accessed 31 July 2022].

Kirsten Somerville is a doctoral student in Education at the University of Glasgow. Her PhD research explores the use of creative writing in secondary geography education, specifically the learning and teaching of glacial processes. She recently completed the Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching Creative Writing at the University of Cambridge Institute for Continuing Education. Kirsten is also a Widening Participation tutor, teaching general academic skills alongside subject-specific content on humanenvironment relationships and the GeoHumanities.

From the Page to the Screen

by Allen Ashley

Teaching is in my blood. I’ve been a primary school teacher over half my life – nowadays working in a supply capacity – and have been running creative writing groups and workshops for adults on a regular basis since 2012. Like everyone else in the UK, I was living that long-lost “normal” life up until the Covid-19 pandemic and the first lockdown derailed everything. It was: local school on Tuesday, writing groups on Monday and occasionally Saturday, family visit on Sunday.

I was last teaching in a school on 17 March 2020. With their continual closure, reopening and closing again, coupled with schools being considered as “vectors of transmission”, I haven’t taken any supply work since. Similarly, my last in-person writing group was held on 24 February 2020. I had several sessions lined up across north London during March 2020 but as the news worsened and restrictions loomed, I had to make on the hoof decisions to start cancelling classes. Many of the writers in my non-genre groups are in the “senior” bracket and some have medical conditions to contend with; even if I ran a March 2020 workshop they would be unlikely to turn up.

The decision was taken out of my hands and I confirmed cancellations to all participants as well as venues. Most places charge room hire fees in advance. Because I’m quite organised, I had booked and paid for slots several months ahead. Things were quite uncertain back in March 2020 and the Prime Minister disingenuously suggested that three weeks of lockdown would do the trick with Covid-19. So what should I do about sessions I’d arranged for May and June? Eventually, I bit the bullet and set about claiming refunds for bookings that were no longer feasible. One library still has my thirty quid on

credit as we started thinking maybe September, maybe November, maybe 2021…

Like many other people, I entered a somewhat depressive state as I struggled to acclimatise to the uncertainties of the first lockdown. After years spent building up membership of and loyalty to my writing groups, I was facing the possibility of them suddenly withering away.

The obvious solution was to move online, for which the default platform seemed to be Zoom. A friend held her novel launch on Zoom; Fiona Bruce and the Question Time team on BBC-1 started moving away from actual panellists and audience to a small range of screens; even the government were holding Cabinet meetings on Zoom. I needed to get with the program. However, even though I’m a science fiction writer, I’m not at all a tech geek -- more scientific romance than Neuromancer

But I took the plunge, got a Zoom account, had a couple of practices with close friends and then organised my first online workshops, including one for my advanced SF/F/H group Clockhouse London Writers. By now, we were heading towards June 2020. The Premier League was setting up “Project Restart” and, on a smaller scale, I was doing the same. Given that I was no longer tied to specific geographical locations, I combined all my other regular writing groups into one new group. In the invitation email, I let them know that there would be people attending whom they hadn’t met before but that I would still be fostering a friendly and welcoming atmosphere. Things went so well with this new supergroup that they begged me to organise another session ASAP, so I slotted in another Zoom workshop in July 2020. Clearly, they had been missing our sessions

and hearing from and sharing with each other.

These are the changes that I had to make. In my previous “in-person” sessions, the workshop would run like this: I introduced our topic or theme; I walked around the room and gave people prompts and submission details printed on paper; we had some quiet writing time; people shared what they had written; I offered feedback and sometimes other class members made comments as well; I closed by informing them of the date and theme for the next meeting. If I was holding a longer session, we might repeat the process above two or three times.

For a Zoom session, though, I would send out all the prompts about five days ahead of the meeting. People would be encouraged to start writing or make notes on ideas before the workshop and then share them during the meeting. This usually works well and there will be two or three brave souls ready to share. Just the once, though, I spent a couple of hours preparing a whole heap of ideas for a flash competition themed around loan sharks (including “friends” who lend you money) and I asked, “Anyone got something to share…? No…?” And listened to the virtual tumbleweed… Until I jauntily said, “All right, moving on, then…”

In terms of producing written work during the actual session – which has been a defining feature of how I run my groups – I have still kept in at least one on the spot activity. Before I upgraded to Zoom Pro, I was using the ordinary version which cuts out on 40 minutes. So, at minute 35, I would explain a short writing activity and set everyone off on it. That meeting would end but we would all log on again 10 minutes later to “Part Two” and share our work then.

It’s not all been positive. There are some participants I may have lost forever. Some of them have not felt able to engage with the technology. Some others saw my groups as both a writing session and also an opportunity to meet up with friends and go for a coffee afterwards. Those lost days…

Of course, we’ve all learnt to be a little less stuffy in this Zoom Age. I was watching a poetry event last night and one reader had a cat climbing over her lap whilst another had a lively parrot hopping from shoulder to shoulder. In my classes, I had one participant talking to me from the back of a taxi, another babysitting her granddaughter, and another tuning in from his holiday on a boat touring the Greek islands.

“Jonathan,” I said, “I’m getting a bit of whooshing feedback from your connection.”

“OK,” he answered, “I’ll move to another cabin.”

An important distinction is that there is a “virtual space” when using Zoom. When I first started Zoom sessions, I was cautious and wanted everybody to feel comfortable about who else was sharing this virtual space with them. At first, I had a “No new members” policy: if I hadn’t met you in the real world, you wouldn’t get an invite. But I’ve softened since. At the most recent Clockhouse London Writers session, four of the writers were people that I’ve yet to actually encounter in-person. Of course, I have an audition system in place for Clockhouse, so as host I was assured that they were genuine and not time-wasters. Writing this in February 2021, still in the middle of the latest lockdown, it seems likely that my groups will con tinue online for the foreseeable near-future. I have Zoom sessions booked for March and I suppose there is some poetry in a science fiction group like Clockhouse meeting on 21st Century video screens.

Looking a little further ahead, there is maybe not the greatest impetus to return to real world settings and the problems they can bring – bad weather putting people off attending, transport issues, or venues double booking rooms and I only find that out on the day when I turn up (a frequent problem). Even so, I still miss the frisson of in-person tutoring. I expect that once the “Stay Home” message has been consigned to history, I will eventually settle on a hybrid model. Mostly, I will run events online but will also factor in occasional real-world meet-ups. At these latter, we may focus more on the craft elements of writing; or perhaps “Script Surgeries”, where writers will bring something they have got stuck with or which has failed to achieve publication and as a group we will work on ideas for improvement

Or else, we’ll all go down the pub. If we can find one that’s survived and has reopened.

Addendum: If anybody wants to get in touch with tales of tutoring or being tutored, feel free to email me on: allenashley-writer@hotmail.co.uk

This article was originally published in issue 72 of the British Science Fiction Association journal Focus in 2021.

Allen Ashley is an award-winning writer, editor and tutor from north London. His most recent books are: Echoes from an Expired Earth – poetry collection (Demain Press, paperback, 2021) and The Once and Future Moon – Edited by Allen Ashley (Eibonvale Press, 2019). Allen is the founder of the advanced science fiction writing group Clockhouse London Writers and is an ex-President of the British Fantasy Society. .

Microclimates

INTRODUCTION

Microclimates is an online reading and writing group set up in April 2020 in response to social restriction and isolation measures prompted by Covid-19. During the 30-minute meetings, members can listen to other people’s writing and read aloud a piece of writing-in-progress if they so choose. There is no obligation to read, or even speak at all. For the first 6 months, Microclimates met every week. Since then, it has met fortnightly. In what follows, several members offer their reflections on the group, along with creative contributions coming out of their participation in it.

I set up Microclimates as I had just finished a project with participants with persistent pain that highlighted the challenges that come with a shrinking of everyday life [1]. Realising that the pandemic was likely to impose limitations on movements that would be difficult for everyone, and severe for anyone deemed particularly vulnerable to infection, I decided to create a small online community. It was very much an experiment, as I only had a tiny amount of relevant experience. In July and August 2017, I’d led a creative tweets project on parks and gardens inspired by the work of geopoetics colleagues in Montreal. Benoît Bordeleau, Yan St-Onge and Victoria Welby tweet creative micro-responses to what they see in their everyday walks around the city, posting them with the hashtag ‘dérive’ (drift). The ‘dérive’/drift is defined by psychogeographer Guy Debord as a period (between two sleeps) in which ‘one or more persons […] drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there’[2]. The drift is a time outside of clock-time, a break from routine and responsibility: I aimed to shape virtual moments that would offer participants mini-escapes.

‘Microclimates’ is used by Debord in his famous, ‘Theory of the dérive’ to describe elements that contribute to urban ecologies. In adopting the term, I wanted to suggest a smallness of scale whilst referencing psychogeography, which I combine with geopoetics, geo- and/or eco-criticism and other spatial theories and approaches both in my own writing and art I make with others. I also wished to think about the emotional ‘weather’ prompted by the pandemic. I kept the timing of sessions to 30 minutes, approximating the length of a coffee-break, and invited people to join: students, participants in Circling, colleagues from my own institution or elsewhere, writers whose work I admired, family members. The decision to invite participants rather than be entirely open access was shaped by policies at the institution where I work, but I sporadically send out Twitter invitations to join the group (which can be done by messaging me first to ask to be added to the invitations list). Membership has fluctuated slightly, and has never been huge: the largest meeting had 11 people at it, the smallest, just two. We’ve had participants from places and time zones outside the UK, notably the U.S. and Thailand. Some Microclimaters attend most weeks, others just now and

then. We’re a mixed bunch: at one time, undergraduates (now moved on or postgraduates themselves), postgraduates, academics and published writers, with ages ranging from 20-something to 50-something. We check in with each other, encourage each other, listen. Microclimates is not an on-line workshop: we don’t offer close critiques of each other’s work. We are not goal-oriented. Rather, the sessions offer regular spaces and times of sharing, trying things out, seeing where we go.

My writing has been greatly improved by participation in the group: although, like many, I struggled to write during lockdown, several of the poems and creative nonfiction pieces I managed to produce and shared with the group have been published. More importantly, however, Microclimates has provided me with crucial support as I struggled to live lockdown in challenging domestic circumstances. As a specialist of Québec fiction, I have spent much of my adult life travelling between two continents. A restless person, I’ve moved around the UK, and love to walk outside when I can, in company or alone. Lockdown, Covid and Long Covid were extremely difficult for me, starting with the death of a much-loved friend and continuing with home-schooling (loosely interpreted), health impairments, and significantly reduced mobility. It has been amazing to be taken elsewhere by other people’s writing, and to feel part of something outside of my home. The generosity of other Microclimaters is something I will remember and cherish as I look back on the time of Covid in years to come. We have become friends as well as colleagues or a collective. We celebrated our first anniversary with an outdoor public reading on the terrace of Keele’s Postgraduate Association clubhouse. It is wonderful to be celebrating our second with a publication in NAWE magazine! Ceri Morgan

In 2020 when the world seemed to be shrinking, Microclimates provided the opportunity to focus in on the detail of the environment around me. The garden pond, the water beetles, the slime of decaying vegetation, all things which I had failed to see with the rush of everyday life. Our regular Monday meetings were the best way to start the week and the joy of listening to new work from other members of the group renewed my creative energy, giving it a boost that lasted through the rest of the week. Sylvia Crawley

Microclimates has been a lifesaver for me. From January 2022 to April 2022, I was in an isolation room, seeing nursing staff every three hours or more, no chance of having any visitors and too much time for introspection. The times when I was well enough to attend Microclimates gave me the opportunity to talk to friends and listen to their work. Most importantly it gave me a sense of purpose and an audience for my work. John Mills

Conceived during the Covid-19 pandemic, Microclimates is an online space where creative writers gather to discuss and read their work every fortnight. We explore different genres and styles through work-in-progress pieces. I find the feedback on my writing friendly, but reflective, and coming from knowledgeable, informed, and successful writers. It is a group that I am proud to be a part of. Lizzy Trafford

The Microclimates little community are such a lovely group. I have learned a lot from sessions with them and I have thoroughly looked forward to the sessions and enjoyed each one I have attended. During lockdown, the meetings were something to look forward to during the week and were something I could depend on to start my week with some joy. I was privileged to listen to others’ works of creativity and listen to how people were responding to those pieces of work. I feel I have gained so much from my involvement with this group academically and personally; I am very grateful and thankful for it. Meg Burkinshaw

Microclimates has enabled significant developments of my work. First, through the sharing of fragments over time a novella length work (the first I have done), Instructions from Light was assembled and nurtured into being, and second, my first overt fiction, the short story ‘Am/Thought/Always’ was produced through sharing and was included in Best British Short Stories (Salt, 2021). Under lockdown, Microclimates became a space for a collective ‘taking of breath’, not just as in a pause—a breather—but also as in an inspiration, a re-oxygenation of life and practice: microclimates became, and has continued to be, the fortnight’s punctum. Microclimates has become a place of what I call the amica-critical [3]. A place where writing is shared and discussed alongside the social contexts of its making, a place where creative-critical friendships are formed. Microclimates’ contingent nature—in some senses, that of a refuge—means that writing is framed by it being done, or being needed to be done, or not being done, rather than by an agenda of what writing is supposed to be. Microclimates wonders about and wanders through writing with an open-ended rigour. Emma Bolland

I love writing but, frankly, sometimes I hate it too. I struggle to focus, to find words, to see the point especially since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. At a time full of pain, danger and an increasingly intense unravelling of our world it has felt hard, maybe even self-indulgent, to write or read creative fiction. This is of course a fallacy because words help us know, understand and change our worlds no matter how isolated or despairing we are. Microclimates is a generous, warm and nurturing greenhouse. A place to grow, share, cross-pollinate and learn from each other. Ceri has fostered a community that feels very special, a network of connections, friendships and mutual support. The continuity has motivated me, and encouraged me to share, and to stretch myself. I have also learnt much, been moved and inspired by listening to the wonderful work members have produced. My hearfelt thanks to the fabulous Ceri, and everyone else who contributes. Microclimates is so precious, here’s to a future of creative community and many more glorious words. Morag Rose

There are many types of writer groups. Some writer groups function like a workshop, which exists solely to provide constructive criticism, or indeed attempt to do so. Other writer groups skim the surface of constructiveness, functioning like an echo chamber of studio-recorded applause. Other groups exist to provide a safe space for their writers to experiment and be bold, for newborn works to be introduced – works that have not yet found their homes or, in some cases, themselves. But, ultimately, what makes a writer group is not its brand nor even its intended purpose, but its members – their personalities and writing-reading interests – that shape a given writer group into what it needs to be.

At Microclimates, we meet virtually every other week on a Monday morning, which doesn’t sound too sweet (being on a Monday morning) unless you’ve actually been to one of the sessions. A Microclimates Monday is a Monday I look forward to. Here, creative pieces are almost always fresh and raw – alive and kicking out of the literary womb, so to speak. These pieces are read aloud by their writers – often times on the spot, often times accompanied by introductions or post-scripts that, without stripping away a piece’s magic, make one appreciate all the more the creative alchemy that went into its construction.

Here, at Microclimates, we give on-the-spot feedback, informed by our immediate reactions as readers and listeners. I think this is very helpful. We repeat back to the writer the lines and images that stick in our memory like molasses. We point each other in the directions of existing pools of works – be they literary, academic, commercial – with the best intentions and resulting in productive outcomes. What has impressed me the most as a member of this group is the way everything seems to happen organically – especially our practice of extrapolating a pedagogy, a critical theory, a ‘What is this story really about?’ from work-in-progress pieces, articulating them in a manner that at once validates, humbles, and encourages the writer.

Lastly, at Microclimates, we celebrate each other’s literary and life successes, share our lifelong writing woes as well as more immediate frustrations, and we sympathise – with the cards each of us have been dealt, with the injustices (small, personal, professional and/or systemic) each of us have experienced and will unfortunately continue to do so throughout our writing careers. We do not shy away from talks of publishing politics and diversity problems, and I believe that being on the same page – or simply knowing which page each of us is on and respecting that – helps bring the group together. Boo Sujiwaro

CREATIVE CONTRIBUTIONS

IN THE ABSENCE OF TREES

In the absence of trees, I offer spruce at Tadoussac, where orthogneiss rocks frame the bay [4]. My sister and I spent mornings on the beach, reading novels and crumbling croissants as clouds collected up the Saguenay. Afternoon storms sent us to the red-roofed hotel for Shirley Temples. We sipped, distractedly, whilst through the bar’s windows, minkes played in the rain-pocked sea. With no leaves to be seen, I propose les Îles Mingan, looming limestones spun by ice and wind, boreal forests of gaunt, knowing firs. I went there one mid-August morning, setting out in the mist from la Promenade des Anciens in Havre Saint-Pierre. A curious humpback swam up to our boat, looked me in the eye, dipped away. With no bark to touch, I dream the pre-tundra, stretching across the windscreen on the four-hour ride to Sept-Îles. The driver told jokes the whole time, tapping the side of my thigh at each punch in a way that was friendly, not sexual. I smiled, stared past the wipers at the leadening peat bogs, solemn in the slanting rain. At the 50th parallel, French had a whistling, whispering sound. I couldn’t understand it all, no matter how I tried.

Ceri Morgan MUDSTONE

The rock, with its ancient wormcasts, fits comfortably into the palm of my hand. When I hold it, as I frequently do to coax my words on to the page, running my fingers across its sea-smoothed surface, I think of their bodies rippling through prehistoric soil. Of layers of sediment stretching across time to a small pebbly shelf at the base of the cliffs. And my luck at the finding of it on an August day in a late-sixties summer. The outer surface of the rock shaped like a slice of cake, its filling the colour of fudge that was passed, with mother ’s awkward arm movement, backwards from the front passenger seat. Memories of car-sickly sweetness on the long drive home; hot, plastic scorching the backs of my legs.

Sylvia Crawley

TOUCH AND GO

Hb. 3.6 normal 16

Platelets 9 normal 150 -450 White cells 0.5 normal 4.5 Temperature 43 normal 37 Chances? not good.

My arms flail my legs contort I’m in the hands of a demented puppeteer

I am cold and sweating and shaking grasping for breath gasping for the alarm I try to shout but I’m already shouting

I rattle the radiator like the cages of bedlam The room fills with people. there is a sense of hysteria

I don’t know if it is them or me. Window snatched open; fan focused on my head Arm bruised as a cannula is rammed in

no time for just a little scratch, something, initially cold, enters my vein. I think I’m given oxygen.

Cold, wet towels wipe my body, it is not erotic, but it is soothing as if my body is being ritually cleansed.

The sideshow is over the ghouls drift away leaving me, the revenant, at peace. Soothed, comfortable, I fade into sleep.

John Mills

THE SUMMER WIND

is not a fickle friend but a crush of maple leaves with bellies full of fat. sweet, suckling cadences. spring violas and Circling fingers, Make Juicy music.

Massaging to a flat. This over-rehearsed summer Is for proper men.

Misty grazed nights That cut clothes Nakedly flying those painted kites That Come and go. [5]

Lizzy Trafford

DEEP BREATHS In Remembrance of Stephen Anthony Burkinshaw

Meg Burkinshaw

NOTES TOWARDS THREE BUILDING #1

I. ABANDONMENT (MENSTON, WEST YORKSHIRE, 2005)

in this great room i have twenty eyes. turned inward to the dust. spinning. in sunlight. motes to fill an empty belly. i once ballroom was. with dancing. once were lights of glass. hanging. now strips. on winter days they dim when electricity needs elsewhere. golden observes the joystick. (t)witchery.

in the corridor grand i sense. my undulations. dips to where the warm is soft. lies cold. rises to the grand hall. walls. green with fern. fired mouldings. echo. at night fast patters. whoops. chases. morsing my surfaces. a dot. a dot. a dot. a dash dash dashing. three of stop. around i go. again. swimming a great. circumnavigation. dark. and darker. and flash. through. the great entrance the great hall and glimpse. i am the great. each time the great light the sky and always forget to slow. to exit and i am afraid AFRAID that i will. invaginate my walls. and what then what then if i must circle outside of my skin?

here in the high tower. i. breathe. the air rolls down from the moor. i. a time-bridge to the sky. tick tock. but gasping. always. time emerges out of breath. trachea towers sucking but never enough inside. inside. somewhere. dark. beneath. they lock the suckersackers crammed. together in a windowless room. where there is nothing. to burn but tobacco tongues. and fingers—long softs that stroke my walls—tick tock in out issy hissy gold lung cube coppered alveoli plaster pores painted gilded up here I am gasping at. the sky.

dear dear dear bones. rattle i shiver. in the winds rushing. through the valley creeping in through stone and. whole body of me is empty and cold. but full of soft warm that trickles. on every floor and in the below in where damp creeps. crackle of twister. tongues sparking. stone.

a light touch. about this part is soft patter on my tesserae. like the drumming. wet. on my slopes. but warm. if i could feel the warm. i hear them speak of it. if i could hear. i hear a future. not. future. parsed.

II. REDEVELOPMENT (MENSTON, WEST YORKSHIRE, 2022)

In institutions such as psychiatric hospitals, the spaces of the building, no matter how confined—from the room, to the ward, to the corridors, the recreation rooms, and the gardens—are the microclimates of resistant dérives. The building and its particularities are the spaces in which communities of ‘patienthood’ struggle to establish degrees of covert self-determination. ‘Notes towards Three Building #1’ explores these ideas via Erving Goffman’s concept of the ‘total institution’, whose ‘encompassing or total character is symbolised by the barrier to social intercourse with the outside world and to departure that is often built right into the physical plant, such as locked doors, high walls, barbed wire, cliffs, water, forests, or moors’ [6]. Written in the voice of a decommissioned asylum, High Royds (1988–2003), since redeveloped as a luxury residential village, ‘Notes Towards Three Building #1’ considers what remains of the total institution in the interim between decommissioning and redevelopment—a re development that was also an erasure [7]. The building, now alone, remembers the trace, the touch of its lost community through its derive though its own interior, in search of (or grieving for), the possibilities for its own self-determination.

Emma Bolland FRAGMENTS OF A WALK

27

Shamrock, heartland, paradise green.

Audaciously verdant now.

This is not how it was, or supposed to be. A challenge to memory. The school fence, spikey wood and chainmail, smothered in brambles. Past the haunted house, laundry in, windows closed, blinds and nets gone of course. What was I expecting? The mountain path, perilous race track, smoothed over, reduced to a gradual incline bordered by pampas grass, privets, bungalows, maisonettes. These were the edges of my world: from the hill top to the redbricks. Round the corner seduction alley. Fireworks, bin-bags, ice cream, Keyop. Graffiti still screams adoration of the Sex Pistons. Greatest band there never was. You, me, us, maybe. A ghostly BMX clatters by pretending to be a horse.

Sangria, Ochre, Pompeian red.

19

I was a bottle of red wine pretty You were Special Brew rage Ice cold vodka White Lightning Blood Lemonade Gin, no tonic

Morag Rose

FRAMING THE WORK, ‘A FRIEND LIKE YOU’

As children, we witness things, experience things, are hurt by things, are terrified by things – and then we carve these things into memory – vividly, graphically to the point of being hyperreal. As adults, in the epoch of mental health awareness, spirituality and personal growth in the West, we are encouraged to unbuild the selves we have patchworked together as children and adolescents in order to rebuild better. ‘A friend like you’ is an extract from a longer body of work that explores the relationship between memory and trauma, specifically early socialisation of violence and its hyperrealisation in childhood – how they are passed on and carried into adolescence and adulthood.

Boo Sujiwaro

A FRIEND LIKE YOU

You meet him in the summer at a sports camp in the middle of a match, introduced to his rage before his name. He tackles you into the grass, knees digging hard into your ribs, pissed that you are faster than him. You’re dead, you’re fucking dead, he snarls, squeezes your throat with alloy-fingers, thumb cutting through your jugular. You gag, writhe, sure he’s going to kill you, rip you open, make you spray blood—Elias, Elias! the adults scream. He silences them with a lion’s roar, head tossed back, blotting out the sun. He pounds his chest with the fists he used to kill you—Elias! He rolls off you, laughing. You scramble onto all fours, resurrected, yanking in each breath in desperate stops and starts. His hand appears in front of you. You take it, in fear of what might happen if you don’t. The adults watch on nervously as you are pulled to your feet. Football’s fucking boring, don’t you think so? He grins, and you can’t decide which of it he had faked, the laughter or the rage. At nine years old, your world stops being clear and easy.

The sky swelters and the air sweats. A strange woman with a winter scarf around her neck is sitting in your kitchen, drinking coffee with your mother. Arne, come say hello, your stern mother says, and all of him returns full-formed into your waking memory; you don’t remember him ever standing there and suddenly he is, seven months older than you, three inches taller, grinning, ready to rip you limb by limb through the blazing afternoon. Stroking his head with her white lion-tamer’s hand, the strange woman whispers, Go on, Elias. You run like a lamb to his laughter.

Later, your soft-spoken father kisses you good night. Mangled body tucked in star-spangled sheets, you are told to be understanding, be a friend. You cannot protest, shocked silent, two bullet holes to the sides of your skull where Eli performed his mercy shot, blew your brains to bits. Blew you to bits. Good night, good night, be a friend.

You don’t have anything like a best friend, but you are friendly with everyone and everyone is friendly with you. You quit football, decide to focus on other things that won’t require you to compete with Eli. In the warm months the world rip-roars. Cosy, cartwheeling happiness, the word hygge comes to mind: the breeze off the coast, the bellybellowing laughter of adults clinking coffee-beer glass in the sun, you often go on bike rides with your neighbourhood friends Sofie, Freja, Jakob, Ras. And now there is Eli, your fifth friend from outside of school. Honestly, you are terrified of him. Sofie and Freja don’t like him either, refuse to play with you whenever you are with him. These days, you are always with him.

On your tenth birthday, your schoolmates who haven’t gone on holiday abroad pile in with presents, pretend-punch you. You clutch your gut, groan—play dead; you’re getting good at that. They laugh. You laugh. They hug you, wish you a happy birthday.

You notice that everyone calls him Elias. You notice that you call him Eli. You don’t know why, or when it started, and you don’t remember ever calling him anything different. He likes it. You’re sure of it. If not, you’d be dead already. Dead, like Jakob just before Hallowe’en.

Since Eli’s started playing with you, Jakob’s been acting cold. You don’t know why, but he is especially cold to you when Eli is around. One afternoon on your way home from school you notice them standing in front of your house. Eli’s teeth are bared. He is foaming at the mouth, ready to rip Jakob’s dagger-eyes out. The moment they see you, their row is over. Just like that. Do what you want, Jakob snaps and shoves past you as if you are the one who has wronged him. A few days later, you see Jakob again at the neighbourhood park. His row with Eli no longer in your mind, you climb after him up the Giant Octopus slide, call his name—Jakob. He turns around, stomps you in the chest. Hard. The air gets knocked out of your lungs before you even hit the ground, the sound of your ribs caving reverberates inside your skull. You drop six feet into the sandpit, land on your shoulder, scream. Eli silences you with his lion’s roar— APOLOGISE!

You open your eyes. Jakob is lying next to you, sand in his eyes, cheek scraped raw, skin peeled open, mottled like Two-Face. Eli is on top of him, alloy-fingers around his throat. Jakob writhes, gags out an apology, apologises, but not to you—Sorry, I’m sorry! I won’t touch your things anymore—Eli shuts him up with an elbow jab to the nose, beats him, beats him until his face doesn’t look like a face anymore.

Eli spits, turns to you. You’re next, you’re fucking next. He pounces, knocks you into a pile of dead leaves. His fists blot the sky high above, plunge a blade into your carotid. Ignoring the pain in your shoulder, you spasm, making ugly, gurgling sounds just like Jakob three feet away from you. Eli shouts, twists his blade. You shudder, go slack, lying limp under cotton-ball clouds soaked with rain. He laughs, satisfied with your performance. You let yourself breathe. Thankful you’re not Jakob, thankful you’re just a game.

You are eleven when Eli tells you his dad is a painter, even though you already know he isn’t. On this particular day, summer moves like static on early morning television, bright noises from outside crashing in through the windows. Eli crashes his bike into the fence in front of your house, storms up to you, a frozen still-image on the doorstep. He glares at you through one black eye, splashes of red and blue, punch-drunk purple all over his arms, legs. Horrified, you turn away. ARNE. Punching out your name through cut-up lips, he seizes you by your nape, forces you to look. Fucking look. Here is your answer. His dad is a painter.

ENDNOTES

[1] Circling, with Anna Macdonald (2018-20). See http://www.circlingartproject.co.uk/. I have a chronic illness and persistent pain, but have done so almost all my life. Consequently, I do not have a sense of a more expansive ‘before’ time described by participants whose conditions developed later in life.

[2] Guy Debord, ‘Theory of the dérive’, in Situationist International Anthology, ed. by Ken Knabb (Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006), pp.62-6 (p.62). First published Les Lèvres nues, 9 (1956).

[3] Emma Bolland, ‘A Conversation with Hestia Pepé’, in Salon for a Speculative Future, eds. Sharon Kivland and Monika Oechsler, MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE, 2020.

[4] After ‘The Walking Library for Forest Walks’, Dee Heddon for The National Forest, 2020.

[5] A response to Frank Sinatra’s version of ‘Summer Wind’, which is the most well-known, and released in 1966. James Dean Bradfield covered it in 2006 as a B-Side to ‘An English Gentleman’. ‘Summer Wind’ (Heinz Meier and Johnny Mercer, 1965).

[6] Erving Goffman, ‘introduction, in Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates, London: Penguin Books 1991 [New York: Anchor Books, 1961] p.16.

[7] Like most Victorian asylums High Royds had its own mortuary and graveyard, with the last burial taking place in 1969. 2861 patients were buried there, including babies born to patients. Survivors of High Royds undertook a long battle with the redevelopers, campaigning for the preservation of the old chapel and a small parcel of land as a memorial garden to those interred while patients.

Ceri Morgan is Professor of Place-writing and Geohumanities at Keele University. In 2015, she began animating participatory creative workshops or ‘happenings’ on a variety of themes, including food, persistent pain, and deindustrialisation. Considering creativity an everyday practice, Ceri plays with its potential to reimagine spaces and places in ways that are hopefully inclusive. Ceri has published creative nonfiction and prose-poetry in Littoral (2017), GeoHumanities (2019), NAWE Writing in Education (2020, 2021), Nightingale and Sparrow (2022), and Forge Zine (2022). Her prose-poem, ‘Avenue Bernard’ was broadcast on RTE Radio 1 extra and RTE Radio 1 in Spring and Summer 2020.

Sylvia Crawley is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at Keele University. A former museum curator, she is currently writing a novel set on the Isle of Sheppey and researching the landscape of the island’s coastal edge through an ecocritical lens. Place writing, in particular the mudscape of the Thames Estuary, provides the main inspiration for her work. She has been working with the Microclimates project since its inception in 2020.

After a working lifetime teaching, John Mills swapped desk sides to become a student on Keele University’s Creative Writing MA. The course leading to the publication of his collection No Guiding Star (Fair Acre Press, 2020). Two years ago, he added a bone marrow cancer to Parkinson’s Disease and, although not entirely ecstatic about it, he has used his illnesses as an inspiration to write. He is working on a collection of poems about Cancer and Caving and is constantly surprised when others don’t see, what to him, is an obvious connection.

Lizzy Trafford is a PhD student at Keele University, studying the cut-up work of American author William S. Burroughs. She is also a musician, singer, and poet who is interested in all music genres, and she writes about how music combines with, and in, poetry.

Meg Burkinshaw is a postgraduate student at Keele University, studying a Masters in Counselling and Psychotherapy. She studied English and Psychology at undergraduate level, also at Keele University. She is 23 years old and originally from Wakefield, West Yorkshire. She moved to Newcastle-UnderLyme in 2017 to study and has been living there ever since with her partner and child. She originally joined Microclimates as she had enjoyed a creative writing module with Ceri Morgan in her final year of her Bachelor’s degree and thought it would be an excellent and fun opportunity.

Emma Bolland is an artist, writer, and lecturer interested in expanded understandings of translation, and the wider politics of communication. Forthcoming publications include Instructions from Light (forthcoming, Joan Publishing, 2022) an illustrated long poem/novella that includes the first translation into English of Louis Delluc’s screenplay Le Silence (1920).

Morag Rose is a walking artist, activist and academic. She is a lecturer in human geography at the University of Liverpool and founded Manchester based psychogeographical collective The LRM (Loiterers Resistance Movement). Recurrent themes in her work include the value of public space, the intersections of Feminist psychogeographies and critical disability studies with urban regeneration, radical histories, participatory methods, and walking as artistic, political and cultural practice. Morag was a co-investigator on Walking Publics / Walking Arts: Walking, Well-being and Community during Covid-19. She has performed, exhibited and shared her work widely.

Boo Sujiwaro is a writer-illustrator born in Bangkok. They’ve read for BAs in Fashion Design at the Accademia Italiana and in English with Creative Writing at Keele University where they graduated with First-Class Honours and two awards. A multilingual reader, they’ve worked as a lyrical translator for Korean music distribution channels, as a literary translator for webfiction publishers in Asia, and as a localisation copyeditor for a Japanese poetry organisation. They’ve had works published and featured in Reflex Press, Kotoba Japan, The Lunar Codex. Boo is currently studying for an MA in Prose Fiction at the University of East Anglia.

Twitter: @pacemori Website: helloboo.com

Histories and Stories From Historical Documents to Creative Writing

By Liz Cashdan with contributions from Narimaan Shafi, Hazel Stuart, Elizabeth Uter and Sue Wright

I became interested in Creative Writing when I was a secondary school History and English teacher with a degree in History. My tutor at St.Anne’s, Oxford, had been Marjorie Reeves, a well- known medievalist who was also interested in education and became the founder and editor of Longmans Then And There series helping Key Stage 2 and 3 (not known as that in the 1950s) learn about the Middle Ages through fictionalised history – you learned about the daily life of a serf, a knight through stories, not through run of the mill text books. And that’s what has always interested me, how to find about history through story-telling and how to tell stories through finding out about history.

My personal journey from history teacher to English teacher to university Creative Writing Tutor and eventually poet, was rooted in that first passion for history. I started writing after attending a National Association for the Teaching of English conference where a lecturer in education from Exeter University asked a group of English teachers what we had been writing

lately. We looked at each other in stunned silence and eventually someone whispered, “Reports”. The lecturer’s response was firm: “How can you teach kids to write if you don’t write yourself. You are starting now.”

If Reeves and then NATE set me off on the camino, the next influence came from Richard Holmes’ Footsteps (1985: 1-69) where Holmes describes a pilgrimage he made in the footsteps of among others, Robert Louis Stevenson in the Cevennes, using Travels with a Donkey as his guide. It wasn’t long before I was footstepping too, using Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written during a short Residence in Norway, Denmark and Sweden (1987) which led to my own series of letters to Wollstonecraft, Dear Mary (1995) following her round Scandinavia. Meanwhile I’d had a short time in Somerset sleuthing Wordsworth and Coleridge along the Quantocks till I found the historical suggestion that The Ancient Mariner had been inspired by the story of the mutiny on the Bounty: Wordsworth had been at the same school as mutineer Fletcher Christian , so that led to some

more footstepping in the Lake District and the Isle of Man, where the Christian family originally came from. Available time and money did not stretch to Tahiti where Christian mutinied and Pitcairn where Christian finally got ashore. This was all pre-internet so I couldn’t get there online either, and had to rely on that old historical source, the written word. That resulted in The Mariner’s Tale published in Troublesome Cattle (1991: 1-47).

Recently I’ve not done much footstepping but I’ve continued with itchy feet and itchy fingers so when I heard about an Arts and Humanities Research Council project being run at Leicester University to explore Pepys’ Diary, inviting writers to a workshop where they would be asked to respond online in the voices of some of the characters mentioned by Pepys, I polished my seventeenth century walking shoes, and dusted down the keyboard on my laptop. The project is being run by Dr Kate Loveman, Associate Professor of English at Leicester, and she invited Dr Yvonne Battle Felton, novelist and lecturer in Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University, to set up the writing workshop. Kate and Yvonne chose extracts from Pepys diary and sent them to the group of self-selected writers who were to participate in the project.

The extracts chosen referred to people in the seventeenth century many of whose voices or whose very existence would not have been made public if Pepys had not mentioned them: eg Mingo, a young black man enslaved as a child, who worked for Sir William Batten, Pepys’ neighbour, Jane, Pepys’ own servant, a deaf boy whom Pepys called upon to help him with his coach. Eliza Knip, an actress and many more. After some discussion the workshop participants were given 20 minutes or so to choose a character and start writing in their voice or about them. We then shared what we had written and after a two week gap where we could research further and write more, some of us performed our fictional pieces of writing at a showcase online session. It was interesting to see both the similarities and differences in the approaches taken. This was going to be different from footstepping where the final pieces of writing had been partly in my own voice as writer, and partly in the fictionalised voices of real people, fictionalised because little was actually known about them. This time all the voices would be fictionalised because Pepys had either said very little about them or not mentioned them at all although they had been his contemporaries.

I propose to share with you here the pieces of fiction (prose and poetry) written by myself and four other writers who participated in the workshop with some of our comments on what the writing process was like for each of us.

I decided it would be interesting to use female voices of women either directly from the Pepys extracts, and my example was Eliza Knip, an actress; or other contemporary women whom Pepys could have known: eg Aphra Behn, royal spy, novelist and playwright almost certainly known to Eliza Knip, though not mentioned by Pepys; Mary Carvajal, the wife of merchant, Antonio Carvajal who founded the first synagogue in London,

Pepys describing his visit without naming the Carvajals. My fourth woman’s voice was that of one of the Carvajals’ black servants.

Here is an extract from my piece in the voice of Mary Carvajal berating Pepys for his lack of understanding of Jewish synagogue ritual. Her husband being a ship owner and merchant might have been known to Pepys because of his work in procurement for the navy though Pepys does not mention him apart from the visit to the synagogue and attendance at his funeral.

(http://www.ferdinando.org.uk/antonio_fernandes_de_ carvajal.htm)

“Mary Carvajal - wife of the Jewish merchant Antonio Carvajal 1663

There came to our synagogue last week in Creechurch Lane a certain Mr Pepys with his wife, that same gentleman who attended the memorial to my husband not many weeks since and was operated himself by the surgeon who removed my dear Antonio’s bladder stone, though Mr Pepys survived the surgeon’s knife… The occasion of Mr Pepys’ visit was our festival of Simchat Torah, the rejoicing of the law when our menfolk carry the Torah scrolls round the synagogue singing and dancing in praise of the Lord but Mr Pepys found this tradition lacked the decorum expected in a church and I fear he has been too much influenced by Puritans.”

Sue Wright, Sheffield writer who also participated in the workshop, took the voice of Jane, one of Pepys’ servants. Here is Sue’s comment on the workshop:

“I was immediately drawn to Jane’s story, someone who may easily be overlooked. My own maternal grandmother was in service in the early part of the twentieth century. I wish I had asked her more about her experiences but I do remember her telling me about being homesick and crying. Jo Baker’s novel “Longbourn” gave life to the servants from Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” – Elizabeth Bennett’s muddy shoes and petticoats had to be cleaned by someone. There will be experiences modern-day servants and staff will have in common those who worked for Pepys and his contemporaries. As a writer I enjoy using various sources for prompts. I enjoyed the challenge of writing about the era, thinking of the language that may have been used and the everyday experiences of living and being in service in London in the 1660s – something I perhaps would not usually have written about. Pepys’

diary is a rich source for creative writing ideas.”

And here is the fictional piece written by Sue in Jane’s voice;

“Although many houses were lost in the fire, we remained safe, thank the Lord. Our neighbours were uninjured, but there are people without homes. My master woke early, demanding breakfast. I told him of houses burned down in the night and he ventured out to explore, returning with his clothes and wig smelling of smoke and smeared with ash, hurriedly changing before his guests arrived. He has no thought for the laundry he creates or the laundry-maid’s chilblains.”

Hazel Stuart, researcher and award-winning author, took the deaf boy as her character to fictionalise. She wrote a third person narrative using free indirect discourse to give us the boy’s actions, thoughts and use of signs. Hazel explains her involvement and research as follows:

“For me, it was the opportunity to learn about deaf people and sign language at the time that drew me to my character. I had no experience of deafness and had therefore never learned to sign. You Tube came to my rescue with deaf people sharing all the ways they communicate and videos where you can practise lip reading. It was a relief to find there was a wide spectrum here. I was less likely to get it wrong. I learned so much about the deaf community from this research and I feel much richer for the experience.

In Pepys time, one of the sources on the subject was Juan Pablo Bonet’s 1620 Simplification of Letters and Art of Teaching the Dumb to Speak. This I refer to as ‘the Spanish book’ in my creative narrative. The university had also provided us with some information about ‘finger-spelling’ as one of the possible methods of communication with the deaf. Putting myself in the shoes of my character however, I imagined he already had a quicker method of sign language that he was using at home as this ‘finger spelling’ seemed longwinded and to rely on the deaf person first being taught how to read, write and spell. It seemed to me as superfluous as the tuition in Pygmalion and I think my character of Captain Downing probably has more than a touch of Professor Higgins about him.”

Here is Hazel’s piece based on Thom, the deaf boy, delivering a message about a new fire in London: “Relieved, Thom raised his own (hand) in response and delivered his pressing message, of the advancing flames and the King’s retreat, in the simplest terms he could – with sweeping arms as if he were at home telling Ma or Pa. Downing reached out calmly to him and Thom checked himself. He gave a sigh of consent, accepting the captain’s mild rebuke, noticing that, though framed by lace and adorned with gold rings, those hands were still calloused and worn by a life at sea. Thom knew full well that flailing arms were not to be seen in polite society – whether or not a fire was raging at the Palace.]

The captain reached across, and his fingers touched the mute’s own in encouragement. Thom felt them warm against his own skin, which had been chilled in the November night air. He stilled his mind to concentrate as Downing continued to finger-spell: ‘K. C. G. O. N. E. G. E. T. D. U. K. E. Y. O. R. K.’ KC was King Charles. The Duke of York was his brother, James. Well, that made sense. They were a winning team. The heroes of the last fire.

‘C. L. O. S. E. R’ Thom replied, the pads of his fingers moving methodically, as he did his best to convey the urgency of this with his expression.”

The next two extracts I’d like to share are based on the character of Mingo, the young black man who worked for Pepys’ neighbour, Sir William Batten. Writer and instructional designer, Narimaan Shafi, has written her fiction in the form of letters, one lot in the voice of a modern researcher, and others in the voice of Mingo. Here is Narimaan’s piece in the voice of a researcher, followed by her first piece in the voice of Mingo:

“Dear fellow researchers, I hope my letter finds you all well and moving forward successfully with your research. I cannot contain my excitement and keep this discovery to myself any longer. The papers unearthed at a property in London have left me unable to sleep. What I believe we have are diary excerpts written by Mingo, the slave boy belonging to Sir William Batten, friend, colleague and neighbour of Samuel Pepys. Indeed, Pepys mentions this boy fondly and often, in his diary entries. The excerpts I have included below marry up well and corroborate Pepys. I wonder if reading them you will feel the thrill, as I did. (Date smudged)

The fire still burns. I am forced to think what I would do to flee the flames. There is nothing material I would salvage, save the clothes on my back, for they give me my perceived status. My wit and my brain would come with me. They’re all I need to start anew. I would not be afraid to do so.”

And finally here are extracts from award-winning short story writer and poet, Elizabeth Uter; first her comments on taking part:

“In my re-imaginings Mingo’s new name is William Battenby and at the age of eighty he reminisces in a letter to a dear friend and fellow lighthouse keeper, George Wickenby whose surname coincides nicely with a light’s nickname,’Wickie’ - so named for the candle wick they constantly lighted at night to bring ships to safe harbour.”

I researched extensively into 17th and 18th century life as the letter covers the mid-1660’s to 1723. I made numerous lists of what I knew and didn’t know - from the exact clothing worn by servants, food eaten, shops, houses, type of roads/streets, marriage ceremony, wills, a lighthouse keeper’s duties, life of housewives,

authentic seventeenth/eighteenth century forenames and the nicknames ie lightkeepers ‘wickies.’

I was fascinated by the entries about Mingo’s wit and his ‘forced’ dancing at a party - I decided to give him an opinion on this. Mingo charmed the Batten household and I wanted to reflect this by giving him a harmonious family life and wisecracking friendship with Wickie.”. And here is part of the letter written in Mingo’s voice:

“My Dear George!

Here am I, your poor William Battenby, lying deep within his bed of sickness with the pain of old age plaguing me, readying me for death. Wickie, old fellow - I hope you will not mind that old nickname? Wickie, If you have the means to run from Death, pick up your frail legs, coat-tails and all - flee - Death is an older man than you or I - with nobbling knees, chattering teeth in a skeletal frame - he cannot outrun us.”

It’s clear from the extracts that we all as writers researched beyond Pepys’ diary itself and while four of us used the creative writing to expand the characters’ own voices, Narimaan Safi invented a framing device giving us the voice of a modern researcher with the added fiction of their finding new historical documents, which to some extent plays the same role as my real-life author-cum-footstepper when I followed Coleridge and Mary Wollstonecraft.

I have long used literary-historical sources as a way into creative writing, and the creative writing as a way into history and litetature. On one school visit I got Year 8 students to learn about life at the time of the

REFERENCES

Black Death by offering them extracts from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to set the scene and then asking them to write about the Black Death in the voice of, for example, The Wife of Bath, The Pardoner, The Knight.

More recently, I’ve done workshops on the theme of the footstepper or follower for the Folk House in Bristol, where one student has been writing back to Jane Austen from Basingstoke and Southampton to tell her of how the two towns have changed in the last two hundred years; and another student wrote a poem to Mary Shelley whom he “came across” on the shores of Lake Geneva. Another variation on the writing back theme is to get students to write letters between two fictional characters: for example, Tess from Tess of the D’Urbevilles to Sarah from The French Lieutenant’s Woman, not to mention their possible responses to the odd letter from Anne Elliott in Persuasion. There is always an enjoyable and profitable link to be found between history, literature and creative writing. So research your documents and get your students writing.

Cashdan, (1991) The Mariner’s Tale in Troublesome Cattle Sheffield The Poetry Business Cashdan, Liz (1995) Dear Mary Sheffield self-published Holmes, Richard (1985: 1-69) Footsteps London Penguin Books Pepys, Samuel (1970-83) ed. Latham, Robert and Matthews, William The Diary of Samuel Pepys Glasgow Harper Collins Wollstonecraft, Mary (1796) ed. Holmes, Richard (1988) Letters written on a short residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark London Penguin Books

‘Reimagining the Restoration’ is an AHRC-funded project on the reception of Samuel Pepys’s Diary. Read about the project here: pepyshistory.le.ac.uk The full pieces by Liz and the contributors above can be found at: figshare.com Copies of Liz Cashdan’s Dear Mary and The Mariner’s Tale are available from Liz: £5.00 each including postage: email: lizcashdan@gmail.com www.lizcashdan.weebly.com

Liz Cashdan, M.A. PhD is a poet and Creative Writing Tutor at the Open College of the Arts .She also teaches at the Folk House, Bristol, runs an online Stanza group for the Poetry Society, and is a founder member and former Chair of NAWE where she now serves on the Community sub-committee. Her most recent publication is Things of Substance: New and Selected (Five Leaves Publications 2013)

With contributions from Narimaan Shafi, Hazel Stuart , Elizabeth Uter, Sue Wright

REVIEWS

Towards a General Theory of Love Shaw, C. Bloodaxe Books, ISBN 978-1-78037-604-2, paperback, £10.99.

As the title suggests, this is a book about love. But Clare Shaw’s poetry—and this is their fourth collection—is known for its fierceness, its pinning of raw emotion, heart still beating, to the page, so be prepared. That title references A General Theory of Love by psychiatry professors Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini and Richard Lannon— an examination of love and human connection from both scientific and cultural perspectives. A quote from the book at the outset, “Love, and the lack of it, changes the young brain forever”, highlights Shaw’s trajectory: here we explore an absence of love, or, more specifically, the experience of love being torn away—something underlined by a second quote, from psychologist Harry Harlow’s Total social isolation in monkeys, referring to his controversial experiments in the 1950s which proved the lasting effects of maternal deprivation on baby rhesus monkeys, delivering powerful implications for all separations of mothers and infants. In fact, Shaw, who works as a mental health trainer and has taught and published widely in this field, repeatedly uses the character of ‘Monkey’ in this book to explore the terri tory of love’s absence, and how the effects of that might be assuaged. In the opening poem, ‘What the Frog Taught Me About Love’, which considers the relationship of various creatures to love, we learn that “Monkey goes mad for the lack of it”.

There is madness of sorts in the following nine or so poems, in which Shaw portrays with painful clarity the impact of their mother’s death. There is an overt embrace of lived experience over theory, not least in ‘An Empirical Exam ple of the Stage Theory of Grief’, where the five stanzas touch only loosely, but with metrical musicality and glorious lyricism, on those stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Denial, for instance, gives us:

The silence of lakes. Rain in the evening. The music has stopped and the people are leaving. Her face was a shadow. The sound of her breathing.

That ironically clinical title is typical of a quirky, defining style that frequently sees poems labelled prosaically, like jars; another example is ‘This Is About My Mother’, a poem seemingly, and contrarily, about wild animals—until the crushing closing lines: “… when the fawn cries for her mother / she will come.”.

The book’s grief, as in life, eventually begins to move aside, and with masterful choreography: ‘The Day Thou Gav est’, which gives us “Death was her final act / and I accept it”, appears opposite a literal new beginning (of the poet’s daughter) in ‘Lesbian Conception in the Euston Hilton’, with its magical “It was there. / It was one cell dividing.”.

The idea of love being torn away also manifests in poems about the loss of a relationship, along with more label-ti tles – particularly good is ‘The Titanic Reflects on the Recent Ending of a Long-term Relationship’, a clever extended metaphor which ends “Sweetheart, the orchestra did its best / but they all drowned.”. This grouping also has exam ples of another much-used style feature, repetition/list poems. For instance, in ‘Self-portrait as Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore’, we begin “We were art. We were collage. We were in pieces”, with most of the subsequent lines in the

five quatrains either beginning with, or including, ‘we were’, preparing the way for the emotionally devastating first person singular ending, “You left me / and I was the sky and the sea, I was empty.”.

Water is a recurring and unifying theme, along with fish/swimming; winter/snow; the moon/stars; forests and a cast of totem animals to guide poet, reader, the bereft. These elementals not only ground the poems in the real world but, ironically, also give a sense of fairytale, literary quest, the latter in all ways fitting for the book’s journey from trau ma to re-empowerment and the embrace of new love that is, ultimately, for oneself. Monkey, in ‘conversation’ with the psychologist/narrator throughout, progresses from not sleeping or being able to verbalise trauma, to discussing self-injury, joining a dating app and getting drunk, before finally attaining wisdom and (of course!) learning to write poetry. In the last, muscular poem, ‘Monkey Reads William Blake’, it is Monkey who explains to the narrator that it is necessary “still to believe in the sun… to be dropped / and to save yourself.”.

The collection reaches out well beyond the bounds of its 58 component parts, feeling by turns like a play, therapy, friend. Indefinable, then, but no matter—it is a triumph.

Review by Dawn Gorman.

Dawn uses creative writing and aural history work for therapeutic purposes with groups and individuals, and is a poetry mentor. She presents The Poetry Place on West Wilts Radio, is Poetry Editor of Caduceus magazine, organises the nationally-acclaimed poetry reading series Words & Ears, and collaborates widely with writers, visual artists and musicians. Her poetry books include Instead, Let Us Say (Dempsey & Windle, 2019, winner of the Brian Dempsey Memorial Prize), and two Pushcart Prizenominated books, Aloneness Is A Many-headed Bird (Hedgehog Poetry Press, 2020, collaboratively written with Rosie Jackson) and This Meeting of Tracks (Toadlily Press, 2013).

A Squatter o Bairnrhymes

Paterson, S. Tippermuir Books Ltd,

Stuart A Paterson’s collection, with a foreword by Billy Kay, contains 25 poems in the Scots language, supported by a glossary of key words for each poem. Although written for ‘bairns,’ these rich, accessible poems are just as appealing to adults (including outsiders who don’t ‘bide here in Scotland’) and a beguiling resource for creative writing teaching in schools or the community.

According to the The Scots language Centre, the Scots language, as distinct from Scots Gaelic, is ‘the collective name for dialects known as Doric, Lallans and Scotch.’ (https://www.scotslanguage.com/pages/view/id/6). Paterson seems to take issue with the ‘dialect’ definition. In ‘The Wey Ye Speak,’ a narrator expresses frustration with their mobile phone’s voice app:

The words ye yaise…

They arenae slang, No dialect, They’re oors, they’re yours, They’re Scots – respect!

The book is divided into sections ranging from ‘craturs’ to ‘fowk,’ ‘wirds’ and ‘oot there.’ Even without the glossary to each poem, the fluid rhythm and accompanying illustrations by Zack Fummey draw the reader into the tonal

complexities.

Like all poems, these are meant to be performed to best appreciate their roll-in-the-mouth onomatopoeic quality. In ‘Ettercap,’ for example, an arachnophobic narrator leaps out of bed when he feels a suspicious tickling on his foot— and reaches for his secret weapon,

It’s muckle, terrible an affy –The ettercap-destroyin baffy!

A ‘baffy’ is a slipper, in this case employed to defeat the ‘ettercap’ or spider, incidentally a ‘cratur’ that turns up in another poem, ‘Slater,’ but this time referred to as ‘speeders.’ Similarly, in the poem ‘Ma Wee Mammy,’ the word ‘stooshie,’ meaning a row or argument, is rendered as ‘stushie’ in the glossary. ‘Breenge’ means ‘rush’ in ‘Space-stane,’ while ‘breenges’ means ‘pushes’ in ‘Snaw-Breaker.’ You get a sense of language evolving according to context and in quicksilver response to rhyme, without losing sense or meaning.

The linguistic diversity in play also offers wonderful rhyming possibilities that turn on pronunciation (‘insteid’ rhymed with ‘heid’), while one word can encompass a whole phrase, such as ‘fyoonach’ meaning ‘a light dusting of snow.’ Alongside rhyme, you find an enjoyable use of anaphora in poems such as, ‘Ma Wee Mammy,’ ‘The Wey Ye Speak’ and ‘Bears,’ the latter a list poem in praise of ursine diversity. There are a couple of blank, lined pages at the back of the book, encouraging children (including grown-up ones) to ‘Write yer ain bairnrhyme here!’ A nice touch.

Without a grounding in either the words or the way they’re spoken, you may end up checking the glossary sometimes even mid-poem, which tends to disrupt rhythm. My preferred approach was to check the glossary after each poem, then go back and read the book in its entirety without checking the glossary at all, having let the unfamiliar words steep inside me.

It might be equally useful, especially for non-Scots speakers, to read aloud one of these poems in a class alongside the likes of Lewis Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky’, to get a feel for the sonic power of words and their ability to upend perceived or culturally ratified meaning. This is not to imply in any way that Scots is non-sense writing (‘Jabberwocky’ contains many imaginary or portmanteau words unique to the writer), but rather, to acknowledge that the words in Paterson’s poems reflect and capture the world they embody.

Let’s leave the last word to the poem ‘Mixter-Maxter’ from the appropriately named section ‘Wirds’, in which the narrator reminds us to look beyond the ‘how’ of the spoken and written word, to the history and evolving relevance attached to its etymology:

In Scotland oor wirds

Are gey different, aye.

When ye speir someone how? Then yer speirin them why?

*I’ve counted the number of pages in total inside the book, beyond the poems, though Amazon says the book contains 64 pages.

Reviewed by Gabrielle Mullarkey

Gabrielle Mullarkey is the author of three published novels. She’s been a freelance journalist for nearly 30 years, contributing over 2,000 short stories and serials to women’s magazines, alongside features and travel articles. Her work has been recorded for radio and audio download. She has an MSc in creative writing for therapeutic purposes and works as a creative writing tutor for Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Adult Learning.

When I first encountered I saw a bird once by Alex Vellis, I was confused. I read it through once, then put it aside. How was I going to write a review of this interesting prose poem that seemed to veer between at least three characters’ heads but didn’t seem to connect in any kind of narrative. Then, I started reading Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff and suddenly Vellis’ fractured realities started to make sense. Zuboff’s argument is about the existential crisis facing people living now, people she calls ‘second-modernity people’. Unlike earlier generations whose destiny was defined by birth, or the newly modern masses of the early twentieth century, we are individuals who ‘know ourselves to be worthy of dignity and the opportunity to live an effective life.’ She goes on, ‘we want to exercise control over our own lives, but everywhere that control is thwarted … Like a denotation’s rippling sound waves of destruction, the reverberation of pain and anger that have come to define our era arise from this poisonous collision between inequality’s facts and inequality’s feelings.”

Pain and anger are two emotions that are perilously near the surface of Vellis’ poetry, no matter whose perspective we’re taking. There’s the mid-30s binnie, who’s married to an ethnic Arab with whom he has a teenage daughter. He loves them, but sometimes he wishes his wife was dead and his daughter was living with her grandparents. He endures racist slurs and jokes about them on a daily basis from his fellow binnie, Baz, and gets badly beaten because he befriends an immigrant from work. There’s an artist painting his walls red to match the colour of his eyes. He avoids phone calls from his dad, too late mourns his dead mother whom he never saw. There’s an office man, apex of the copier machine, who makes Sarah the highlight of his day until he asks her out and she turns him down—‘I’m married’ and that’s ‘Zara with a Z’. Ashamed and belittled, he looks for a way out—just as the artist does. But there’s no way out and this is the existential crisis that Vellis seems to convey through the anguished voices of his speakers.

All the mundanity of human life is captured here—the idea for the book started with ‘a day in the life of’—and we see the impetus for self-determination thwarted over and over. Stymied by lack of money or love, illness, regret, or guilt, these men soldier on into an ever-diminishing future of older bones and slack skin. Art cannot save them. Only the human imagination won’t give up, although the clock is ticking. Vellis shows us that whilst there’s thought, there’s hope: to reimagine a life, friendship, home and family.

Reviewed by Rachel Wright

Rachel is an English teacher at the Shanghai American School, Puxi. She is currently writing a family biography based in China and Japan. You can contact her at rachelwrighty@gmail.com

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