Welcome to 2023!
Dear all
This morning as the blue sky opened up beyond the clouds, I carried my notebooks, computer and basket of pens down the wet path to my garden summerhouse office. I switched on the radiator, lit a candle and sipped a warm drink of raw cacao (experimenting with morning coffee replacements!). I am beginning my process of remembering. Where was I before the break? What was I doing? I see my labelled folders, check emails, write commitments into my new diary. I am waiting to pick up the threads of creativity that live in my mind and carry me through each working day. I rely on intuition, but it doesn’t come from nowhere. It comes from the practice of freewriting each morning as well as gathering what has gone before, then giving myself space to think, dream, conjure.
When I created The Writer’s Notebook, I wanted a standard set of workshops I could pull off the shelf after a year or two. I would go back to the beginning and just run the whole lot again, I thought to myself. That would make things easier for me. But I have realised that I can’t do that. First, I have a lovely core group of regulars who have done all my exercises again and again, so I like to keep things fresh for them. Second, I’ve moved on since then and I like to incorporate what I’m writing, reading, working on - my creativity feeds the workshops and vice versa. So I am going through the process of looking through old workshop outlines, dipping into the books on my shelves, as well as my baskets of objects, prompts, photos. I’ll go for a walk, freewrite, create a mind map for the five weeks and trust in the themes that emerge. I’ll also keep the outline loose to allow space for ideas that come up inspired by participants in the groups.
I’m excited to begin a new five-week set of creative writing workshops next week. The Zoom group is on Tuesdays 1-3pm and Chequer Mead (East Grinstead) is on Thursdays 10-12noon. There are some new people in the Zoom group, so if you are daunted by joining a group of regulars (though they are very welcoming and friendly!), then Zoom could be a good place to start.
If you’d like to join us to make time for writing this January, please click this link to book. Or reply to this email to ask a question.
I’ve been reading
This Christmas, my husband gave me a book I’d never come across by an author I’d never heard of and it was exactly what I wanted and needed to read. This is not an easy feat, as you can imagine!
I wanted to share it with you as it is the type of memoir writing I’ve been aiming for or considering. It has a story but isn’t a straightforward narrative (like a novel). It includes reflections, memories and transcripts of the author’s conversations with her father as they planned a book together at the end of his life. It slips from third person to first person and back again and covers different times and moments from her life, while never losing the reader. It is a poignant exploration of ageing, grieving, loss and parent-child relationships. She doesn’t name her father in the book, but he was the Swedish film director, Ingmar Bergman. The island in Sweden he lived on and where she spent childhood summers is just as intriguing and beautifully evoked as the man and their relationship. The book is: Unquiet by Linn Ullman and this quote is from page 63:
For a while I remembered nothing about my father, I read the notes he wrote to me, looked at pictures of him, but remembered nothing, and by the word “remember” I mean that I couldn’t conjure him up, picture him, imagine what he would have said or done in a given situation, recall his voice. To mourn someone is to remember them, I couldn’t do either, neither mourn nor remember. I walked around blindly, saw neither the dead nor the living, my husband wrote in one of his poems: You have vanished into your father’s house.
Writing prompt
Another quote from Unquiet (p. 130):
The other day I came across a light-brown imitation-leather album filled with photographs from when I was little. I’ve taken many of the photos myself. Like the two almost identical photographs of a pair of rag dolls sitting next to each other on a blue folding chair. These photos were taken at Hammers. It might have been Papa who gave me the camera. I don’t know. Another photograph is from the flat in Erling Skjalgsson Street. Mamma and I are sitting in the big bed with the golden bedposts, she’s wearing a red nightgown and her hair spills over both of us. I think she must have given her hair a quick brush before we took the picture - we used a self-timer. I’m wearing a retainer over my braces. I sleep with a retainer at night. There’s lots of fiddling inside my mouth every evening to get the retainer in place. Mini rubber bands and hooks and fingers all the way in the back. We’re sitting in the golden bedpost bed and Mamma has put her arm around me.
I’m wearing a white top and a red corduroy skirt. Mamma has just woken up, you can tell because even though her hair has just been brushed, she still has traces of sleep in her eyes.
In this extract, Ullman has not only described the photos, but the what she remembers of the situation around the photos. She slips from past tense (The other day I came across…) to present tense (Mama and I are sitting in the big bed…) as she enters the memory more fully.
So my suggestion is this:
Either begin a piece of writing with - The other day I came across…
Or
Find a photo (or a few from a similar time) that you’d like to write about. Describe the photo as an object (digital, polaroid, age - is it creased, torn? Does it have a note or timestamp on it?), then describe what and who you can see in the photo. After that, write your reflections or memories on what happened before or after the photo was taken.
Until next time…
Mel