Category Archives: writing process

A Seaboard to (Re)figure on

Posted on by
1
Camusdarach, Eigg, Rhum

On a recent, brief but brilliant, trip to the Arisaig / Morar area, I realised I have been holidaying in the Scottish Highlands for coming up (in 2023) for fifty years now.

My debut poetry collection A Landscape To Figure In was published by Red Squirrel Press last November. It’s about place and identity, and one of the soft-promo things I’ve been enjoying doing is taking it to places that feature in it, and taking photos in situ – in the wild – in different weathers and seasons. This may entertain friends more than it sells copies, but it’s been an important part of post-production for me – getting to read out loud, back to, and in front of, some places that inspired it and that figure in it. (Lest that sound narcissistic, this is something I have long done with words from others’ books. I think it can be a beautiful thing  – to let the words carry over the air of hills and beaches, fields and moors.)

A Landscape in Morar
A Landscape in the Sound of Sleat

I’m a (very) late adopter of most things tech. I still don’t have a smartphone. The previous time I was in this area, midsummer 2007, I didn’t even have a digital camera.  My mum was undergoing chemotherapy in Yorkshire, and would take her last breaths three months later, as an equinox sun set, over the Pennines beyond her bedroom window; through my train carriage window over Tinto Hill, and over the islands famous for sunsets that I first visited in the 70s with her and my dad. I have to live with the fact that I’d been in Edinburgh, sorting out things in my flat and organising work, and didn’t make it back in time to see her alive again – but it was a comfort, even at the time, to think of  her passing against (or into?)  this wider backdrop, and in this wider diurnal and seasonal context. 

On the Small Isles back in June of that year it could be a challenge to find places with a strong enough (simple)phone signal to keep in touch, but I remember calling her – all well – from the top of the Sgurr of Eigg. Now on holiday in this ‘thin place’ again,  memories of previous visits, and details dormant in the interim, exerted a greater pull than that of devices and social media. I logged on occasionally, though, and was moved to read – at this time, from this place –  poet Wendy Pratt’s FB posts about her father’s hospital admission and death, and then her beautiful blog tribute to him.

My first encounter with the Road to the Isles was actually taken in reverse – the road from the Isles – on the way home from a family holiday on Skye just after I left primary school. Loading the Armadale-Mallaig car ferry involved a labour-intensive, time-consuming turntable mechanism – though the service may still have been more efficient than that the islands are (not) receiving this summer – with an ageing, breakdown-prone fleet, and crews stretched too thinly. As an 11-year-old already attached to the islands, I clocked the Morar beaches as something to save for another time. 

Morar & the Small Isles: the early years

I was a student when I did return, for a summer stay at Garramore Youth Hostel,  between Morar and Arisaig, close to the beach that starred in Local Hero (1983); and a for lovely Easter-time break: snow on the Cuillins of Rhum and Skye, and a long, cold and beautiful day at sea on the Calmac ferry’s round to each of the Small Isles. 

This summer I was a co-driver for the first time, having returned to driving a few years ago after a very long gap. I take regular work or leisure trips to the Borders, and Dumfries and Galloway, and have been to Northumberland, the North Pennines and Yorkshire, but the unavoidable motorways around the Central Belt had so far prevented me from venturing to the North and West I love. The pandemic put paid to imminent plans to tackle this, and now for the first time I drove my own car up the Black Mount from Tyndrum, skirted Rannoch Moor, onto Glencoe and out to the coast at Ballachulish, beside Loch Linnhe, and then along the Road to the Isles. It’s – too – many years since I’ve taken that road at all, as I’ve been more likely to head up to Inverness and across to the west, or take the train, which follows a differently spectacular route over Rannoch Moor. (For sure I know about the increasing problems of motor transport in the Highlands, and car use generally, and this deserves a dedicated post later.) Yes, I found old Runrig CDs to play. It was all more powerful and evocative than I expected.

In Glencoe, August 2022
Blackmount to Glencoe

I’ve been looking out the photos from the earlier trips, still in the packets in which they returned from the developers, though never sorted into any searchable order. I can’t find my pictures from the earliest trip, captured on a Kodac Instamatic – though I still have the camera. I have some photographic record  of the hosteling years, from a Canon ?Sureshot autofocus I  no longer possess; and an APS (Advanced Photo System, which took panoramic photos), and an  SLR, which I still have, but do not or can no longer use –  as if  preserving them as artefacts to accompany the uncatalogued archive they produced.  I didn’t go digital  until the end of the first decade of this century, when I wanted to take lots of pictures of the environs of my childhood home before selling up and moving everything I wanted to keep from it, including some earlier photographic hardware, to Scotland.

A snapshot of cameras

My maternal grandma (Sarah Ellen – ‘Nellie’ – Booth, 1895-1987), always used to say ‘where are the people?’ when I showed her my holiday snaps. I do have plenty people-photos from a few years later, and it is both enjoyable and poignant to look through them now, at twenty-somethings larking around in wellies or by misty summit cairns. Heavens know when I last looked at them properly, but I’d be closer to that age than to my current 57, and certainly more lithe and fearless over rocky promontories. 

My closest IRL friends nowadays, apart from the poetry-reading ones, tend not to be big fans of social media or tagging. I respect their wish not to be co-opted to market my book photographically or make my travels look more sociable. I’ve remained firm friends with a few fellow-travellers from earlier decades, have lost contact with some, and re-connected with others through the Socials; so it goes.

I didn’t spend all weekend lingering over memories. Camusdarach Beach invited swimming, and close attention to crabs and starfish in the shallows. I started thinking about the changes in Highland holidaying over the past half-century, too. There’s the increasing traffic that the infrastructure can’t support, and to which I was contributing, of course. The local authority seems to be making workable medium-term solutions about facilities, after what I was not surprised to hear were serious problems with parking and dirty camping last summer. Artisan foods and other goods are now widely available in shops, cafes and  hotels, showcasing fantastic produce /products  that help to support a sustainable life for locals; to augment the visitor experience or compensate for bad weather. Special shout-out this time to: the Arisaig Shellfish Shack, Sunset Thai Food Morar, Isle of Skye Sea Salt Company, and Arisaig Bread Shed.

I never photograph my lunch but . . .

Back home, I  watched The Prince of Muck (2021), a documentary film about Lawrence MacEwen, laird of the smallest of the four Small Isles until his death in May 2022. In 2007 I’d stayed on both Muck and neighbouring Eigg. The contrast, or complement, between the hospitality of the benign-governed-with-consent island, and the vibrancy of one which had been in community ownership for a decade, was key to my experience – though the occasional visitor of course lacks a fully nuanced, informed understanding of a locality. Certainly the culture of both islands helped provide respite from life with a terminally ill parent.

The Scottish islands unsurprisingly became a necessary backdrop to my own grief. I spent the first anniversary of my mum’s death on Arran, location of more family holidays than anywhere else (with the possible exception of Scarborough). Places where the dominant soundscape was waves, wind, birds, and not urban traffic, gradually walked me into acceptance of a new phase in my life. I wrote the poems that would be collected into A Landscape To Figure In, grounded in the Pennines where I grew up and the Pentlands where I stay, but reaching out to, and back from, places including the US / Canada border, Italy, Zimbabwe. Domestic and theatre interiors also feature, plus several hybrid or fictive locations. And there are real – with real 21stC problems – Greek and Scottish islands and coasts.  None of the poems specifically reference the Morar/ Arisaig area, and  ‘landscapes’ outnumber ‘seascapes’ (though the collection plays on the terminology of both) –  but this one is is after a delectable set of ink and egg tempura paintings by Emily Learmont, themselves after a voyage in the  Sound of Sleat, between Skye and the peninsulas of Knoydart and Morar:

Some Seascapes

After Emily Learmont 
   
(i) Graphic

an inkblot cloud pursues the boats
like a speech bubble
flurries of vowels        morphemes       ideas
on a punctuation-flecked sea          

swirls       whorls
of inverted commas
conversation billows
between the fleet

a thought detaches           memory sprays
                             a wake for the clearances

will they consolidate 
into a skerry of memory?

night        nautical twilight       civil twilight       day   
                      calm       storm      calm      storm     calm

plot the sound

I saw three. . .


(ii) Isthmus

Skeletal-chalked -
fine lines of rigging
fresh-vein the moon



(ii) Clearance 

Ship parts the coasts
of Knoydart        Sleat
like a centrifugal force

funnels thought

when the storm has passed 
through the vessel

is that a second ship
or fata morgana
the soul of the boat
or its counterpart
inverted on the horizon
beyond         the end of the sound

is the ship    or weather    
fugitive -
one vessel the other’s unconscious      or ours

ship drops anchor in the sound
sets a lantern
a thousand onshore lights
glow back          as the darkest hour departs

departs        for Carolina

leaves a filigree wake
                                          a waning moon

a morning sun like marbled paper

 From A Landscape To Figure In (Red Squirrel Press, 2021)
An evening sun

A Pentland Thread

Posted on by
Reply

Tying and tidying up some strands from the year as we face new restrictions and an uncertain festive period and start to the new year – this was one of the most affirming things I was involved in in 2020.

Edinburgh’s Pentlands Book Festival appointed three ‘Thread Leaders’ for an online experiment to encourage community responses to the 2020 Book Week Scotland theme, Future. Panashe Nyadundu wrote about Black Lives Matter, and why they matter in Currie. Reta MacLennan started a thread on the dreams and aspirations of residents of the upper Water of Leith valley villages: Colinton, Juniper Green, Balerno and Currie. I drew on my experience of lockdown locality and daily exercise in ‘Pandemic Perspectives’ – reflections on lockdown time & place, social and other forms of distance, seasonal shifts and more. Each leader curated the thread of new work responding to theirs for the PBF website. In Book Week Scotland itself we had a panel event, with readings, discussion and a q&a on Zoom, which was recorded and can be viewed here.

As a postscript, I made a ‘sampler’ poem using words and phrases from everyone who contributed, which can be read here. With huge thanks to all of them (I would have pasted it here were the WordPress block editor not so unstable – please click on the above links to read the Sampler and other writing on the threads, and to see my photos in better resolution!)

My own articles appeared in instalments, interspersed with the community responses in the form of poems, prose, maps and art work in several other mediums. Here are my text and photographs:

March/April: The Stretched Cleughs

By the end of the month it didn’t rain and we didn’t drive, Arran and the Cairngorms could be sighted from the Pentlands. Ben Lomond had been visible beyond the Lang Whang horizon for ten consecutive days. This was (to knowingly use an overused word) unprecedented in post-industrial times. And it broke my heart – it is how things should be, could be, and yet was only possible because of the pandemic. The occasional aeroplane still took off from Turnhouse, for Amsterdam or Heathrow. I should’ve been flying to Verona at the end of March; instead I was locked down beside the hills of home. And holiday-Italy seemed unimaginable compared to Covid-Italy. For that matter, hills I could see but couldn’t reach on foot – Scald Law, East Cairn – might as well have been in the Alps. As further-afield started to feel less feasible, a kind of mourning set in.

But something differently imaginable began to happen at that that turn of year when things change visibly, daily, when the horse chestnut across the road comes into leaf and we lose sight of Hillend. There was a bit more greening every time I walked through Dreghorn Woods to the hills. I opened yesterday’s quarantined mail with my cup of tea when I got back in. I found a rhythm. I found: various versions of out-and-back, circular, from-the-door exercise. Pacing, grounding, I found lesser-trodden paths. I found a hold, a bield, below the rounded hills.

The clocks went forward. There would be no light-evening walks on Arran, but I could make a virtue of what was around, with more daylight, and good weather, to explore it. But we didn’t know what our capacity was for our own, or our household’s, company, and for staying very local – because many of us had never been tested in this way before. When I mentioned this to a disabled friend, though, she effectively responded, ‘welcome to my world’.

I was, literally and figuratively, in a good place, though very aware of my comparative privilege and good fortune. There were things about pre-Covid life I had been enduring, rather than enjoying, finding subtly but cumulatively stressful when I left this edge of Edinburgh for the city centre: crowds, congestion, pollution, noise. So much of this ‘new normal’ suited better than the old. And yet the news and fake news gave a constant reminder of why we were in this situation.

I found a rhythm. The rhythm was disrupted. I found a rhythm.

In the now emptier Pentland spaces, I developed a fresh appreciation of the valleys, or cleughs, that run south from the back of Capelaw and Allermuir hills, of the crescent swoop of the cleugh-head skylines. With sense of time increasingly distorted by the absence of normal routines and presence of some strange new ones, I became acutely attuned to the shapes, and especially the glacial incisions, of hills I have walked for more than 25 years. Beneath the seasonal, vegetational surface they could hardly – unlike the city centre – have changed much in a month, but they felt different, their glacier-sculpted forms broadened and post-glacial weathering accentuated. I became a sort of semi-feral creature of the place where the Covenanters fled from religious persecution in the seventeenth century. The air was full of skylark song amplified by the stilling, the quiet, the lack of traffic on the bypass. 

We were in a perpetual state of adaptation, to which body and mind responded at different rates – and to which front-line workers of course didn’t have the luxury of time to adjust. Body-clocks were out of kilter. Simple tasks, like unpacking the shopping, were exhausting because we were constantly in a heightened state of alert / vigilance. Routine activities became more demanding, and underlying anxiety about the raison d’etre of all this, the virus, grew. Bare shelves in Tesco brought home just how much food & shelter had become the immediate priority, followed by exercise & fresh air. There could be scant space left home-working, home-schooling, creativity. And sometimes, despite evident slowings-down, it could feel as though there wasn’t enough time. With dyspraxic tendencies that make co-ordination and being methodical hard at the best of times, my best efforts to sanitise everything in the right order felt too haphazard. In a manner more superstitious than scientific, I’d bargain that if I was extra-careful elsewhere, all would be well. 

New ethical dilemmas, a new territoriality, presented themselves in the hills as well as in shops. The question of what constituted reasonable etiquette exacerbated differences between people. Were you prepared to stay local, and not risk taking your contact-train further afield? Even if a farther field was only populated by sheep, it was lambing time, and farmers shouldn’t get sick because people go for a walk to make themselves feel better. In the nearest hills from home, the North Face of the Pentlands, I was as careful as I could be with gate fastenings, the main contamination-hazard, and became adept at using elbows and even walking poles. There was some (online) occupation of moral high ground from those sticking to the lower ground.  Fire risk increased. I tried not to think too far ahead. It became even harder to imagine further ahead.

For the first few weeks I resisted Zoom and the apparent rush to take all of life online. As others embraced remote working, and Hillend and everything beyond it vanished, I was unable to write. Instead I stilled a constant internal chatter by reading others’ poems out loud to the emptying cleughs. Everything I read seemed somehow apposite, prescient of this time.  Then I started to become bombarded by my own words, started a journal, blogged, transcribed exercise itineraries and walk routes, wrote a dozen poems, plus dozens more haiku.  Six weeks in I became acutely aware I was speaking my thoughts, or fragments of them, out loud, as though my unconscious were seeping up from under my breath. Deprived of a normal range of in-person communication, and surrounded by the clichés and metaphors of Covid, it was as though I was finding an – uncomfortable – way to externalise a concentrated interiority. 

Weeks divided into walk-time, that could generate a kind of euphoria, and a more anxious home-time, when I worried about the collateral effects of the pandemic: income, faulty and temporarily unfixable appliances or teeth, the thought of being in a crowd, or on public transport, again. Domestic plans would frequently be postponed by unplanned therapeutic walks. At this time of year I’d normally be ready to travel further. My ambition now was to watch the very-local change over the season. Would I settle into this, contented, or find it too limiting?

April / May: Shelterbelts

Slow-forward a few weeks and mindful of the demands on emergency services, and their contacts, in the event of an accident, I stopped climbing hills. Instead I drifted – it really was unplanned – further up the Water of Leith valley. Swapping heights for lengths, I cycled, walked, and delivered biscuits to a friend in Balerno recovering from a Covid-unrelated medical procedure. 

Then, ritually, obsessively almost, I paced the cracked-mud paths of the shelter-belts and that I’d previously overlooked, bypassed, when heading for the Pentlands: the woodland grids, dating back to the eighteenth century, that right-angled round a dozen fields. They proved very fit for purpose when walking in a colder wind. I found out more about the ‘Cockburn Geometric Wooded Farmland’ from council documents (https://www.sesplan.gov.uk/assets/files/docs/supporting-studies-and-docs/GB_Landscape_Character_Assessment_December_Final.pdf ), and from knowledgeable locals. We’d engage in a sort of shelter-belt dance, improvising the choreography (and protocols) of a distanced pas-de-deux: swerve and greet, greet and swerve (judge and be judged by those who don’t observe at least two-metre distancing). Passing places were pausing places – we needed this pause, us and the planet. 

I loved the idea of a ‘Landscape Character Assessment’. Sloping Wooded Farmland! Geometric Wooded Farmland! Watercourses modified to follow field boundaries!  I became interested in where the ‘character’ of the land changes and opens out, where broadleafs thin along the lanes beyond the village. Through Cockburn, Buteland, Haughhead, Glenbrook, my personal route map from lockdown connected up the places I’d whizz past on my bike a few times a year.  Fieldside, woodside, forestside; farmstead, formal garden. I noticed lots of details for the first time, like the mossy walls. I almost didn’t mind not being able to get further afield. 

A lodge called ‘The Boathouse’ inland at Bankhead, and a memorial garden (for Charlie Cope of Goodtrees, who died in April), planted in an abandoned boat by local children, aptly symbolised the world-turned-upside-down of 2020.  Hope that it would right itself was expressed in the lovely lane and gate-art made by young people.

There was hope too in the changing verge flora: spring daffodils, primroses, garlic and bluebells, then gorse, so much glorious gorse. Later, iris and bog cotton at Red Moss. Orange-tip butterflies abounded, sensitised to the clean air and quiet. Laburnum, rhododendron and honeysuckle wilded where big house grounds met the lane. Their beech hedges re-greened. Limes and oaks leaved at different rates. Warm air released the aroma of bluebell, gorse, timber, pine. The upper Water of Leith, normally silenced by traffic from the A70, was audible in its incised channel below the gorse-bordered straight from Whelpside. There was four-part burnsong, with curlew solo, at Haughhead. 

(See also https://www.edinburgh.gov.uk/downloads/file/23010/balerno-villas)

Overhead, power-lines drew an elevated hypotenuse across the axes of the shelterbelts. Above the green belt and the Central Belt, cables charted a diagonal course to / from the capital. Punctuating rights of way, pylons plotted a line for the hills. Beyond, visibility extended, hopefully, out of the parameters of lockdown. Below the National Grid, desire paths graphed the woods. 

June: headwaters, headspace and an imaginary island

I ventured onto the ‘Leith Plateau Farmland’, the countryside beyond Balerno. I imagined this area as a small, fertile island bounded by the Pentland horizon, the visible circumference from Capelaw, Black Hill and the Cairns, round to Auchinoon and Corston Hills on the Lang Whang, down to Kaimes and Ravelrig. Centred here, around Buteland, I felt these skylines wrap around me, like an amulet: curative, protective. How much of this feeling of islandness, of peace, calm, was due to the gorse, I wondered; to the meadows, cnocs, and single dwellings?  The fineweather blue firth to the northeast made seacliffs of Dalmahoy and Kaimes. More wildflowers – yellow, purple, grass-heads, orchids – bloomed into a passable machair. This was my sanctuary: a substitute Rousay, a replacement Barra, a bield to experience the quiet of a Uist evening, that I  sought out several times a week. 

I’d continue from the Buteland road-end, through forest on one hand, past fields with growing lambs and calves, red-ploughed earth or ripening crops on the other. Where the lanes and shelter-belt paths right-angled round the fields, the track here described a dusty-earthed parabola: up to the moor, down to the ruins at Buteland Hill. Then it opened out above the buzzard-patrolled valley-bottom scraped flat by the glacial young Leith.  On the way back I could cycle through several seasons: wind and rain on the moor, gorse-scent releasing sun in the forest. 

My 2019 diary recorded where I was this time last year: often down in the Borders. Recompensed by local magic, I missed and didn’t miss these trips. On the day that 300 covenanters met at the Cauldstane Slap, I walked up to the border of the Borders again for the first time. 

Early and late exercise at midsummer fits around work and helps to offset seasonal insomnia. The lethargy of lockdown made it harder to get out of bed this year, but when I did make the effort I was amply rewarded. The imaginary island looked especially Hebridean in a haary dawn or dusk. In the evening and early morning it became clearer that we’re the guest species here. There might be hares in the first field after the road-end; the buzzard of Buteland Hill shoulder-swooped humans daring to reach Leithhead. 

It is an expanding experience to wait out the simmerdim of a clear June night, to determine when it  starts to get lighter, and hear the dawn chorus crescendo from silence. To see the sun come over the horizon at Buteland Farm, rise over the Water of Leith channel at Haughhead, risen above Whelpside. To turn to see the lit land brightening behind on the way home for breakfast.

Was it still an island? Irises were out, and so was more traffic. People came back, and with them new ethical and environmental dilemmas about parking and littering. Would the magic have served its purpose (and vanish) as the carparks re-filled and gorse faded? Dawn brought back the islandness, almost of-course-it-did, but the air, land-settled, also felt and smelled autumnal.

Like strict poetic forms such as the sonnet, lockdown could be an enabling constraint. I was glad when I could actually drive to the road-end on my ‘island’ and walk further upstream from it, pleased to have new horizons & visions again. I started to imagine having the confidence to do more, but was wary of going much further too quickly. I even wondered if my bodily and psychological readiness to emerge followed government permission to travel further. We were collectively exhausted from being in a prolonged fight-or-flight state: the pandemic had also taken its toll on those lucky enough to stay well and keep their jobs. I posted on Facebook about having a sort of simultaneous claustrophobia and agoraphobia and over 40 people agreed.

Annoyingly, if symbolically, when I tried to go away overnight, just into the Borders, my old car refused to accelerate on the open road, and had to be towed back. For a few days I just wanted to return to on-foot local exercise, to be held in hills that held me at the start of the pandemic. I took an evening walk up Howden Glen – now with a pink foxglove, rather than yellow gorse, border – and along the cleugh-head. Good to be back, amidst

the glacial channels / datytme slowing / the accelerating year

Afterword: Summing up the Pandemic Perspectives thread

Things changed visibly, daily again, as they did at the start of lockdown back in March. Hillend came back into view once more, as the leaves of 2020 fell from the horse-chestnut opposite. 

During a November week of still air and stunning cloud inversions, the Pentland cleughs filled with mist. Partially recognisable hilltops emerged from a sky-sea, the mingled elements creating an elevated shoreline liminality. Hard not to try to find metaphors in this, as we faced an uncertain winter and new, changeable restrictions, and took in the hopeful news:  progress with a vaccine; Joe Biden as the US President elect and Kamala Harris the first woman and person of colour to be VP elect. 

Back home, PBF posters and ribbons festoon local landmarks. To mark the end of this project, I placed and photographed ribbons in (and then removed them from) locations I’d written about for this thread. 

It’s been a privilege to read, see and assemble a rich array of responses: words on memory, in-the-moment presence, and virtual reality; visual representations – drawings, paintings, photographs, maps – of our place at this time. Here’s to the magic of language and landscape; here’s to the future.

Covid-era Poems by the Thread leader

I have poems about local lockdown published here: http://pendemic.ie/three-poems-by-helen-boden/ and here. I am also a contributor to Beyond the Storm – poems from the Covid-19 era – proceeds from sales go to NHS charities: https://www.writeoutloud.net/public/bookshop.php https://www.writeoutloud.net/public/blogentry.php?blogentryid=105446

Wordsworth 1770-2020 and 1984-2020

Posted on by
2

I’m not a huge fan of  anniversaries and commemorations (though I have recently contributed to an anthology for the 700th anniversary of the Declaration of Arbroath, and two years ago it was important for me to mark the centenary of Wilfred Owen’s stay at Craiglockhart, just down the road from here). 7 April 2020 was the 250th birthday of the pre-20thC poet who has probably influenced me more than any other.

IMG_3027

I had a back operation when I was nineteen, after my first year at Newcastle University. Recovering a couple of days later I started on Wordsworth’s verse autobiography, The Prelude, from the 2nd year reading list (such girlyswottiness then was to contribute to other health problems later on, and I’d actually attempted to read Dryden the day before, but never mind). It was one of those transformative moments, an epiphany, or what  Wordsworth would’ve called  a ‘spot of time’ – even though for him, as for me normally, these tended to happen in quiet, outdoors, upland places. I went on to write a PhD on Wordsworth, Autobiography and 18th-century Psychology, and then to study Dorothy and Mary Wordsworth.

My thesis was supervised by the late Robert Woof, former director of The Wordsworth Trust, and I was lucky enough to be able to study the manuscripts of The Prelude, and later the Scottish and Continental travel journals of Dorothy and Mary Wordsworth, in the Wordsworth Library, Grasmere.  The re-opening of Dove Cottage (where Wordswoth lived from 1799-1808, the home with which he is most readily associated), and the anniversary celebrations scheduled for 7 April in Grasmere are currently postponed due to the Corona virus pandemic.

6B444D78-5FE2-4F8C-832F-721527AF7E7E

En route to Romanticism & Revolution conference, Lancaster University, ?1989, photo by John Goodridge

Three and a half decades on from a hospital bed in Huddersfield, it’s easy for me to understand the effect that discovering  Wordsworth had on a child of Northern England who had been scholarly and feral in equal measures. I can see how well the Romantic poet vocalised and lineated  so much of her own experience – of the rural and seasonal, of the workings of memory and of attempts to record, represent and draw conclusions from that experience (though the specifics may have altered: she didn’t steal boats or rob nests, and she wasn’t orphaned at an early age). She was, too, lacking in role models from the women writers who were shortly to become more widely taught. 

I’d read some of the Brontes – not a great deal was made of their local significance – and Jane Austen at school, but had been rather more excited by my discovery of the WW1 poets and the virtuosic style of Gerard Manley Hopkins.  Then I read Woolf’s  To The Lighthouse and was stunned by what was possible in prose (and I’ve since grown to hugely respect Austen’s syntax and to be more impressed by the Bronte novels’ connectedness to a locality),  but I still hadn’t read any women poets at that stage. My first year at uni featured a lot of drama written by men; and Anglo-Saxon, also to become a great love and influence.

My own early attempts creative writing, after I moved to Scotland in 1995, were too much influenced by extensive reading of Wordsworth and Coleridge – far too much verbal solitary wandering above seas of mist. In the last couple of decades I haven’t read much from the Romantic period at all. Wordsworth exhorted readers to let nature be their teacher, but still spoke with the authority of the dominant-species lyric ‘I’. Thanks to the work of Jonathan Bate (especially Romantic Ecology) and others who have rehabilitated him as an eco-poet  he is proving to be an important poet again in the time of climate emergency. He may be an important poet for lockdown. Certainly his work on the healing powers of nature and our relationship to our thoughts looks prescient of  21stC therapeutic techniques including Mindfulness and CBT. For the past week he’s the poet I’ve been reading on my permitted daily exercise in the hills I’m lucky enough to call home (with sincere apologies to RLS), walking to the beat of  that most measured of blank verse; reading aloud, facing southwest towards a locked-down Lake District, those unsurpassed recollections of childhood adventures and fears.

Tales from Two Residencies

Posted on by
Reply

Not been on here for a while, though I feel to have been fairly ubiquitous on other forms of social media, mostly promoting workshops and posting photos from my walks. My apologies if that’s become annoying – I am pleased to have what looks like quite a lot of work, but the freelancer is often working on short-term or one-off projects, whilst trying to make new contacts and find new clients and funding (and this may not be their strongest skill, or have much to do with their ability to deliver the actual work). And I’m pleased to be well enough to walk and cycle and visit the out of town places I love, given that a year ago I was not; and that I have several friends whose health and mobility problems mean they are not.

I’m also genuinely excited to be  involved in two writer residencies. One is in Dunfermline, for 150 hours over a year, with YesUAre Partnership.This is a charity that is renovating the derelict Erskine Building, a former town centre church, for community use. It’s already running several projects, one of which is Creative Writing. Funded by Santander Foundation, with working title Survive & Recover, this is a work-in-progress which offers writing workshops for those  whose lives have been affected by trauma – including early life experiences, mental health problems, addiction, homelessness, the criminal justice system. I have wide experience of working with groups of vulnerable people, but usually there’s a common denominator  –  the group comprises mental health service users, or carers, or refugees, or survivors of sexual abuse, for example. They meet in a familiar place and often already know one another. My challenge here is to bring into a new environment individuals from very different backgrounds, who may have little in common other than an interest in or curiosity about creative writing.

 

We have regular meetings on Tuesdays, where we use existing texts and visual images as starting points or prompts for new writing, as well as  proven Writing for Wellbeing and Bibliotherapy approaches. I also give 1:1 mentoring, and go out to other organisations in the town, whose members may initially feel uncomfortable about coming to a new place to work with new people and embark on something they may not have tried before.

I’m particularly interested, though, in responding to the physical environment of the building, itself surviving and recovering, as it is repurposed for twenty-first century Dunfermline.

 

 

Every time I visit, more progress has been made with the building works; more materials and furniture have been donated. The writers previously met (round a lovely table, photographed above) in the office, now there is a dedicated group room. A cafe will be up and running this summer. We are developing a blog, which features work by participants, documents the writing project as it documents the wider project, and offers a resource of creative and therapeutic writing ideas – please take a look:

https://www.yesuare.org.uk/blog/categories/creative-writing-workshop

 

And during March I did a residency to mark the 50th(ish) anniversary of the Moredun high flats in south Edinburgh. The aim was to produce text for a booklet (designed in the shape of a tower block) that will be distributed to each of the 540 apartments in six blocks of 15 floors. It was a project that could well, but for limited (council) funding, have run for much longer. It was not a project where you advertise a creative writing workshop at a specific place and time and expect a lot of people to show up. I worked one-to-one with many residents, and visited groups that already meet in Goodtrees Neighbourhood Centre and Moredun Library. Thanks to introductions from members of the  dynamic residents’ association, community workers  and the local minister, I heard the stories of residents ranging from the first tenants from the 60s to the newest occupants, and visited 15th floor flats. Social media also played an important part – I posted about the project on various Facebook groups, initially requesting the sharing of old photographs of Moredun. This didn’t really happen, but what did happen was that residents and former residents started to chat  to each other across generations, across the green between blocks, across the city and beyond. Common themes that emerged include: stuff you can get in lifts and chuck out of windows, getting stuck in lifts, sunbathing and drying laundry on the roof before the days of health & safety, extreme weather & the wind tunnel effect. The resulting booklet, containing reminiscences, new writing and photographs, will be available soon.

 

 

 

I’m working on new poems from both residencies, and loving my regular Tuesday commute to Fife.

IMG_2411

Walking with Wilfred Owen

Posted on by
2

10 August 1917: a dozen walkers from the Craiglockhart War Hospital Field Club, including Wilfred Owen, walk in the Pentland Hills. According to an article Owen wrote for the hospital magazine The Hydra, the route took them from Balerno tram terminus to Threipmiur Reservoir, Bavelaw Castle, Green Cleuch, Loganlee and Glencourse.

DSCN3585

Threipmuir / heather

10 August 2017: a dozen walkers, and a dog,  from Edinburgh, Glasgow and Canada retrace Owen’s route, led by Neil McLennan, chair of the Wilfred Owen’s Edinburgh 1917-2017 committee, and indefatigable researcher of Owen’s time in Edinburgh, Tommy McManmon, Natural Heritage Officer (that’s a Ranger, pre-rebranding by the council), and me, poet of these parts.

DSCN3581

We departed, in both senses of the word, from Owen’s route, at Harlaw Visitor Centre, to have a cuppa, make introductions and do some warm-up exercises to prime us for walking as poets. Then along to Threipmuir to fall into century-separated step with Owen (I’m reminded of Nan Shepherd’s ‘one is companioned, but not in time’, The Living Mountain, ch 5).  We also fell into step, conversation, and companionship with each other, sharing stories of what brought us here, today, literally and figuratively. Periodically we  stopped and Neil took us back to 1917 and the findings of his own research.

DSCN3582

2017 historian / walkers

After a lunch stop at the Howe (‘Habbie’s Howe’ to Owen), we fell into silence for a spell, to observe, hear and generally ‘sense’ the experience of walking in August 2017 – both to be mindful of the present moment, and to remind ourselves of  the 1917 walkers, here as part of a rehabilitation that would make them fit to be returned to the front, that would see Owen unnecessarily killed a few days before the Armistice. Beneficiaries of post-WW2 peace and prosperity struggling to come to terms with Brexit and Trump, we used our minutes of silence to walk in an act of remembrance and maybe resistance, for peace, integration, tolerance; and to write. The results were stunning and I hope they will be in the public domain at some point.

Walkers reflecting on the centenary of Wilfred Owen’s Pentland Hills trip

 

A humbling, inspiring and companionable experience for someone who, like many, was introduced to, and became enthralled by, modern poetry when studying the WW1 poets at school; who has lived somewhere between Craiglockhart and the Pentlands for the last 7 years, and walked this route for over 20 without realising until now that it was the one taken by Owen. Not my average day’s walk in the hills of the adopted home.

DSCN3601

harvest / Harlaw

Sightlines at StAnza

Posted on by
1

This year’s StAnza Poetry Festival started for me before Aurélia Lassaque sang in Occitan at the  launch in the Byre, before I crossed the Forth on an auspiciously bright first morning of March. It may even have started a few years ago,  in exhibition venues around the town where poetry was combined with visual art, and I thought how it would be fantastic for  Words on Canvas to do that.  WoC are an ekphrastic group formed at the National Galleries of Scotland in 2008, who also respond to exhibitions by working artists, give readings and produce pamphlets.

Forward to the winter of 2016-17, and we started responding to linocuts by last year’s artist in residence Hilke MacIntyre as jpegs of them were emailed to us. In mid-Feb we sent fourteen new poems back to festival director Eleanor Livingstone, who combined them with their corresponding images (big shout-out to Eleanor here: it’s not like she doesn’t have enough to do two weeks before her festival starts). When I arrived  in Fife on the 1st, StAnza’s printers had turned them into rather lovely 30cm sq foam boards. Local WoC member  Susan Grant and I hung them in the room above the Public Library that is used for the StAnza workshops. Then I checked into my favourite B and B, quiet by the Kinness Burn, where the owner keeps his own hens – my marker for good holiday accommodation when not staying in a town.

dscn3347

A wall from the Sightlines exhibition

The weather was stunning. Before going off to my first booked event on Thursday I  bought a selection of participants’ books from the StAnza bookseller JG Innes, before stocks ran low – I was too late to get everything I wanted last year – and sat in the sun for a couple of hours, sheltered from a still-cold wind in a south-facing  nook in the harbour wall, watching the tide come in.

And then into the flow of words. I’ve already gushed on Facebook, in my own post and on others’ feeds, about how Paul Stephenson gave a masterclass in the delivery of a poetry set, reading from his Happenstance pamphlet about living in Paris during the November 2015 attacks. How I thrilled to the sounds of Occitan, Catalan, Arabic and French (that my friend Tessa Berring was one of the four poets on a four-day residency devoted to translating each other’s work between English, French and Occitan, added another layer of interest). How Joan Margarit, Robert Crawford, Alice Oswald and Kathleen Jamie played to the strengths of their voices, personalities and material. How Jacque Darras’s homage in sound to Jean Tinguely’s kinetic sculpture was one of the best examples of ekphrasis I’ve been privileged to experience. How stimulating I found the mix of poetry and themed discussion (& coffee!) in the breakfast panels on this year’s themes: the Heights of Poetry, and On The Road. And more.

The first time I attended StAnza I was struck by how it was like a mix of a Hebridean holiday and being back at university: you bump into the same people everywhere and you made new friends quickly. This year, most of the members of the two peer crit groups I belong to in Edinburgh where around at some point, as well as regulars from the Scottish poetry scene and guests from many parts of  Europe and beyond – more of a joy than ever in this post-brexit vote year. Before taking your seat in the Byre auditorium,  you can greet familiar faces on all four sides of you.

On Friday this sense of community was augmented by the arrival of the remaining members of WoC, who had made a very early start, from the Borders and East Lothian as well as Edinburgh. If they were tired by the time our Meet the Artist event started at 3.45pm in the Library, they didn’t show it. We’d hung the Sightlines boards randomly, because, after a bit of experimentation with grouping and ordering, we thought they looked best that way. The  reading proceeded thematically, however, in the spirit of  On the Road, beginning with poems inspired by  Hilke’s townscape (the one that’s on the front cover of the brochure), moving into a café scene, progressing to The Byre, and concluding – with sound and shape poems – with our responses to Hilke’s response to last year’s Jazz evening.

dscn3340

Jean Taylor’s poem responding to linocut of St Andrews streetscape by Hilke MacIntyre

There’s a lot going on at StAnza, and you have to make difficult choices, so I had been a bit worried that the 11 of us might outnumber our audience, but we didn’t. They asked interested questions that enabled us to open up about our process, how we use artworks – or sometimes a small detail from them – to trigger a linguistic response. This could form a kind of poetic commentary on the image or be a ‘translation’ – a poetic equivalent – of it; or it could send the writer on a geographical or historical path or other associative journey well beyond it, or into personal memory. I’d become very familiar with this set of fourteen poems, as we considered constraints such as readability on a wall, and made decisions about fonts. Voiced by their authors, they took on fresh life. Like Hilke’s linocuts, they sang.

Sightlines1

Meet the Artist reading & discussion for Sightlines

 

fullsizeoutput_233

Cafés scenes: poem by Moira Scott, linocut by Hilke MacIntyre

Simultanism: Words and Pictures, Reading and Looking

Posted on by
1

 

image2

I’ve just had a love-my-job couple of weeks. This is possibly because it’s been quite a workshop-intense fortnight, and workshops are one of my favourite aspects of my job. Also, a lot of them have taken place in beautiful gallery settings, which does tend to enhance one’s sense of creativity and zest for life.  Within the ekphrastic-workshop (writing about art) category I’ve enjoyed quite range of different activities over a short time period. What follows are some notes and observations on this, in words and photographs.

I  attended a  rich panel discussion on writing and sculpture at the Fruitmarket Gallery  the other week, during Sara Barker’s exhibition Change-The-Setting. One of the speakers argued for a fluid transition or ‘translation’ between the two mediums, rather than the old ‘influence’ model. Of course this isn’t always desirable, or possible, particularly if you are a specialist in only one field. So how do we find an equivalent language for sculpture? Another spoke of Barker’s own reading, of authors including Virginia Woolf, and her attempt to make spatial equivalents of the texts in which she was immersed. The closing remarks drew an analogy between sculpture and spoken word: both operate in space. This seemed an appropriate conclusion, as  I was en route to Kevin Cadwallender’s monthly poetry event 10RED in Leith.

Change-The-Scene, Fruitmarket Gallery: visit by Third Thursday Writers in April 2016. Photographs by Rosemary Bassett.

During a decade of working as a freelance educator  at National Galleries Scotland – often as the only one  who didn’t go to art school or study art history – I’ve developed a love for works in the collection that incorporate writing in some way: in mediums ranging from collage to neons; by substituting objects drawn or painted in perspective with their names; playful working with signs and messages; almost-text marks, and words in unfamiliar scripts. Are we reading or looking  when we view them?  One of my favourite works has to be Sonia Delaunay’s collaboration with French poet Blaise Cendrars, A Trans-Siberian Prose. 

2012AA43177

Delaunay was a proponent of simultanism. This meant finding a visual equivalent for the text, rather than illustrating it. She and husband Robert Delaunay aimed to present simultaneously a number of different ‘modern’ experiences – distilling words, colour, or their signature take on the  Eiffel Tower  (bottom left in the image above) into a single picture. This could be a great way of thinking about the text and image relationship, rather than seeing them in more hierarchical terms of influence or inspiration. Of course there are pictures that serve to illustrate text, and writing that captions images, and the ‘responsive’ model of using a visual artwork as a writing prompt remains a productive one. But ‘simultanism’ seems to offer a way into thinking about some alternatives.

The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art has a monthly session called ‘The Drawing Room’. This  ‘examines the range of possibilities within contemporary drawing practice and explores how mark-making can also be conceived as sculpture, installation, video, performance, writing, sound, textiles and animation.’  When organiser Sharon Quigley invited me to lead this month’s session, I jumped at the chance. We walked round the top floor of Mod One, collecting words from the artworks, before settling down for a series of  practical exercises. All the participants were visual artists. Once again I was reminded how writers and artists work differently: short, intense bursts of concentration suit the former; long, slow periods of concentration seem more appropriate for the latter – in workshop settings at least. And of course there will be individual variations and preferences. We can learn a lot from listening to each other and observing each other’s practices. I’d wanted to show  a range of activities, options and possibilities, but I realised I also needed to respect their way of working – some of them might well be out of their comfort zone here. I felt reluctant to stop them and move onto a new activity as they settled into a task, though Sharon reassured me they welcomed interruptions. During writing groups, it’s usual to pause, read and critique at several points – here saving up all the work done to display at the end worked best. I was hugely impressed by the quality and range of what they’d produced, and the way they displayed it.

The regular groups I work with use a lot of visual stimulus. The raison d’etre of the fortnightly writing group at National Galleries Scotland, Words on Canvas, is ekphrasis or responsive writing. Their recent writing triggered by synaesthesia, light, colour, time, ‘random constructions’ and ‘looking out / looking in’ in the prints of Whilhemina Barns-Graham was amongst the best they’ve ever done.

The termly-theme approach at South Side Writers tends also to encourage responsive work:  like many writing groups, we often use prompts in the form of images, objects and other texts. Writing on ‘Mapping’ just now, this seems especially the case. As always, there is a massive range of relevant historical, geographical and cultural material available to use, enhancing individual and collective knowledge of the subject. Some great discussions take place in the room. We’ve used old maps, personal maps, art maps, maps of the imagination and obsolete maps; poems about maps, and novels that contain maps. We’ve considered the aesthetics and politics of cartography, and used place names and landscape features in our word hoard. As always, members have written original, funny, moving, lyrical and surprising responses.

P1300165_Writing Room groupMapping South Side Writers. Photograph by Olga Wojtas.

Third Thursday Writers go to a different exhibition  each month. Most recently we were at the Ingleby Gallery, in its final week in its Calton Rd premises, looking at Kevin Harman’s No Man’s Land – beautiful glassworks made by repurposing double glazing units and household paint. We used them  to think about synaesthesia; and about chance and choice, mood and perspective in art and writing. Ingelby Gallery  is a wonderful writing space – I  do wish I’d used it more. The station announcements audible from Waverley across the road can seem intrusive, but we found a way to incorporate them into response to the artworks, combining place-names, remembered journeys, and imagined locations with ideas suggested by the artworks.

At No Man’s Land on the Third Thursday. Photograph by Rosemary Bassett

Cartoonist, musician and generally brilliant colleague Malcy Duff and I reprised our Text & Image workshop, previously set in art galleries, at the Scottish Poetry Library. This was about hybridity in more than medium and form: writers and artists combined their ways of working, their energy and interests, to make shape poetry, found poetry and sound poetry.  One participant blogged about his experience here. The day  also encouraged me to consider  the relationship between creative and pedagogic practice, as I participated in Malcy’s exercises, drawing different shapes of speech bubbles; collaging; reproducing pictures using only words; making non-linguistic sounds to fit a ‘script’ of drawn shapes.  Afterwards I  put the four letters of the word PLOT in the corners of a rectangle, and I drew the outlines of Yorkshire and its constituent parts before, and after, the 1973 local government re-organisation. The shape of Yorkshire uncannily resembles a speech bubble –  into which I might put the words wool, or steel, or scone, or STOP FRACKING – or that common lament of Yorkshire people living in Edinburgh who haven’t got the time to go and stand in a queue in Anstruther: decent fish and chips.

Text & Image

Text & Image workshop – spreading out at the SPL. Photography By Hector Michael Fried.

Stravaig

Posted on by
Reply

Interesting reflections from a participant in Saturday’s Text & Image workshop at the Scottish Poetry Library – including a rather lovely film-poem he made afterwards.

stevedsmart's avatarsds

script1_verticalI accidentally attended a workshop at the very excellent Scottish Poetry Library yesterday. ‘Accidentally’ because the workshop wasn’t exactly about what I though it was – my fault for not reading the small print in sufficient detail once again!  I should have looked up acrostic first (well, now I know…)

stravaigWhat the workshop was about was about image and poetry, but in the sense of using text and other elements to make a poem that is spatial as well as (or maybe more than) temporal.  Well, so to speak…

…clear as mud? Think ‘concrete poetry’ (for example).

Nothing ventured, nothing gained, however, so I decided to give it a go…

To be honest, I felt a bit at sea – I’ve always found this kind of thing quite difficult to get into. But in any event it was good to grapple with it with people who didn’t.  I was impressed by the range…

View original post 168 more words

Text & Image, Writing & Surrealism

Posted on by
Reply

Two ekphrastic day workshops coming up in the next couple of months:

On 21 May I’ll be teaming up again with cartoonist Malcy Duff  for our Text & Image gig – but for the first time in a library setting. We’re thrilled to be doing this at the Scottish Poetry Library, where we’ll use the archive – including some amazing concrete poetry, and the text art in the building itself – as a starting point for practical and experimental exercises in writing and drawing. This will be the fifth, sixth even, time we’ve collaborated, since co-facilitating a comic book workshop at the Fruitmarket Gallery in 2007. We’ve run Text & Image as a six-week course and as one-day and two-day workshops at National Galleries Scotland, considering many ways in which words and pictures combine – including in illuminated manuscripts, political cartoons, calligraphy and pop art. We’ve worked in a variety of mediums, including collage and acetates, and with our non-dominant hands – and our vocal chords! We look forward to adapting the exercises we devised for this new setting.

For writers, and artists, and folk who identify as both, or neither.

More details and how to book here. Please book by 6 May.

 

Back at NGS, on 25 June I have a day workshop on writing and surrealism, in response to the Surrealist Encounters exhibition which runs from 4 June – 11 Sept. There will be time to look at and discuss aspects of the exhibition, try some innovative writing exercises, and develop your own piece of work. We’ll cover topics associated with the surrealists, including automatic writing and dreams, and explore  how the relationship between chance and conscious decision-making contributes to the creative process. Includes refreshments, and a day pass to the exhibition (normally £10/8).

Details and booking information here.

Writers of all levels of experience, and in all genres, welcome on both days.

the third thursday, or why workshops work

Posted on by
4

Apologies for the formatting at the end of this post. WordPress’s ‘new improved posting experience’ is failing to deliver as promised.

Patricia Oxley’s editorial in Acumen78 focused on the lack of suitability for publication of many poems begun in workshops. I do sympathise if she’s inundated with unpolished submissions born of writing group prompts, but I also want to present an alternative perspective. I encounter publishable work resulting from such prompts quite frequently nowadays. I’m not making great claims for my own powers here – it’s what the writer does with the prompt that counts. Nor am I entirely advocating Keats’s naturally-as-leaves-to-a-tree requirement. But I’ve worked with enough writing groups to know that, given an unexpected, external stimulus, i.e., one they didn’t seek themselves, and a time limit, writers produce some remarkable work that wouldn’t have happened in the same time period in their private writing space. For those who seek publication, their writing will of course need some editing and tweaking and rest time before submission – both it and the magazine editor deserve this respect –  but I regularly witness how minimal this can sometimes be, before work is submitted to and accepted by respected journals.

The rapid response to workshop stimuli is equally applicable to beginners, who frequently exceed their own expectations and gain confidence as a result. Many workshop participants, for many reasons, do not see publication as the main outcome of their experience. I figure many of the South Side writers come on a Friday for some regular writing practice, and to hear how their peers respond to the same prompt. If something publishable happens as a result, that’s a bonus. I don’t think they would submit in haste, omitting the usual phases of rest and re-drafting.

I once led a workshop at a Lapidus conference, where participants made poems originating from the rhythms of their own breath, heartbeat and footfall. Graham Harthill was kind enough to observe that ‘the workshop is the poetic moment’. I was privileged to be able to experience this kind of moment myself as a participant last week. Dumfries and Galloway’s Spring Fling open studios event held a preview exhibition at the Dundas St Gallery in Edinburgh. It was delightful to meet one of the Spring Fling artists, and former South Side Writer, Isabell Buenz, who makes exquisite paper shoes.

IsabellBuenz_PaperShoes

Marjorie Gill, writer in residence at Spring Fling, ran a workshop, using the ‘duo prompt’ and metaphor-generating method of applying vocabulary the writer thinks of in association with artwork A, to their choice of artwork B. We had three short periods of writing. Unusually, I hadn’t seen either A or B beforehand and hadn’t had to think about what to do with them. The connections I started to make, the creative potential that was opened up, startled (and eventually exhausted) me. I see this (ideally not the exhaustion bit) happening with others on a weekly basis. That it happened to me provided confirmation of the value of what I do: workshops work. Personally I am a tweaker, a slow-burner, a perfectionist who finds it hard to say ‘it is finished’ (or abandoned) and to press ‘send’, or commit to the post box. I sent a couple of concrete poems (rare genre for me) off to Marjorie for the Spring Fling website. These were inspired jointly by Isabell’s shoes, a ceramic bird sculpture and a print of a deer that incorporated some text. I shall continue to work, with gratitude, at greater length on words and ideas triggered by these artworks.

The National Galleries Scotland education dept isn’t running CW courses this year as these don’t enrol as well as, say, textiles or life drawing. I had a half-full beginners class in the autumn who all wanted to continue, so, supplemented by occasional others on my mailing list who’d been to gallery writing events, we formed Third Thursday. We meet on the eponymous day in a different gallery each month, and I use the art on display for whatever writing prompts and themes it suggests (though there is of course an argument for a more arbitrary relationship between stimulus and product).

We started off on NGS sites, before moving to City Art Centre last month and Fruitmarket  Gallery this month, on the day before the Spring Fling workshop. Their current exhibition is The Possibilities of the Object: Experiments in Modern and Contemporary Brazilian Art. We considered the possibilities of these objects for creative writing, paying attention to their metaphoric and sonic potential, making concrete poetry, or allowing the object its own first-person voice. At the entrance to the exhibition is a group of ten ballot boxes, entitled Cabecas (‘Heads‘). In post-Referendum, pre-General Election Scotland, these are suggestive of talking heads, debate and democracy. But the work was made in 1968, under the military dictatorship of Brazil. Consideration of cultural difference gave a further, more political dimension to the writing. One member produced a memorable piece by juxtaposing two adjacent works in her words: a fistful of dead leaves behind glass, and a bullet-pierced bundle.
At the end someone else pointed out how this kind of writing genuinely supplements and communicates the artwork, and I have to admit I’ve often had a post-workshop desire to do some guerrilla placing of poems and stories next to artworks in galleries. A number of visual arts organisations, including NGS, of course, have been great at posting creative writing online, or running competitions or supporting publications.
We’re off to Dovecot to write about photography and textiles next month, and hopefully will have studio visit to a working artist at some point.  A minor and not very interesting sub-plot of my working life at the moment seems to involve checking out the portable seating arrangements in Edinburgh’s galleries.
I think it was AL Kennedy who said that workshops can infantilise writers. They can – but they can also be as grown-up as the facilitator and attendees wish. And what about the importance of play for creativity?
Workshops work . . . rapidly updating the AOCB, since I haven’t posted for far too long, Lapidus Scotland is piloting an online Bibliotherapy Toolkit, a collection of prompts and accounts of workshop situations which will eventually be in the public domain. There are entries on working in mental health and palliative care, with dementia patients and sexual abuse survivors, and in prisons. If you’d like to work with the pilot material, either for yourself, or with any groups you lead, get in touch. I contributed a section on working with a group at the MS Therapy Centre Lothian, after running an 8 week course there in autumn 2014. A pamphlet, MS: MY Story will shortly be available from PlaySpace Publications. Proceeds will raise funds for the Centre, which, prior to the CW course, offered physical and complementary, but not creative, therapies. The participants continue to meet independently, and have written a play about MS, which they hope to have performed.
We think of workshops as a way to initiate a process. They can also be a way of reflecting on one. This summer I’m leading a monthly session in Linlithgow at a residential weekend for carers. Writing is used to create a record of the experience for the participants and the organisation, care4carers.  Activities on offer over the weekend include boat and cycle trips, art and craft work, and relaxation and complementary therapies, and conclude with creative writing. That’d be on the Fourth Sunday (or Forth Sunday).