theworkshopbook

Keeping workshop plans

2012-03-12T07:35:00.000-07:00

When I look at this swan I can remember the workshop room, its view and the walk we took from the slipway where the swans gather, to the Oyster Pond.
I wouldn't remember so precisely, though, what we did in the workshop and that's why it's useful to keep workshop plans.
Sometimes themes crop up again and you can rework a day or afternoon you spent hours finding materials for. Sometimes, when I was busy running workshops much of the time and had a follow up, I needed to remind myself what I'd done before.
Then there are the times when I'm invited back and I have to remember what I've done a year earlier.
I rarely stick absolutely to a workshop plan but when I veer off, because perhaps I've included too much, I always make a note for myself about what I've ditched. One of the most useful notes to make, too, is on timing. This is always hard to judge and sometimes I don't like to kill an interesting discussion just in order to keep to my schedule.
Workshop plans are interesting to look back on as well. I sometimes forget poems or exercises that worked well because I've found new ones and want to keep experimenting.
But when I revive something, I bring something else to it, season it differently.

Making your own anthologies

2012-03-04T22:19:00.000-08:00

So you decide on a theme for your workshop - hair maybe, or shoes....time or gardening. You might have one poem in mind but how do you even begin to find more? You do an internet search but it throws up too much by amateurs and self-publicists.

You can search The Academy of American poets website by subject. Look in anthologies for titles and first lines. Some magazines like Magma and Poetry Review have special themed issues and some poems are available online. Email friends and ask for suggestions.

And if you're serious about this, collect poems when you see them. Stick them in a folder or a scrapbook. Make your own anthologies.

Keeping a journal

2012-02-11T01:33:00.000-08:00

Some are chroniclers of the everyday. Others have kept their books only in special times - over the course of a trip, or during a crisis. Some have used them to record journeys of the soul, plan the art of the future, confess the sins of the flesh, lecture the world from beyond the grave. And some of them, prisoners and invalids, have used them not so much to record lives as create them, their diaries being the only world in which they could fully live. Thomas Mallon.

As I read my notebook of a trip to Morocco in the 1980s, a boy reappears at the hotel, on the dunes, in shop doorways. I’d totally forgotten him. My diary kept during a year in France when I turned 21 is a chronicle of depression detailing the emptiness of a modern university campus but contains lyrics to a hilarious jointly composed blues song about the caretaker. Recently, one of those co-writers emailed me – he’s now a head of English at a secondary school.

When I have lots of time, on holiday or on a writing retreat, I write a journal obsessively. At other times I write when I can – generally something every day but I don’t give myself a hard time about it.

I write as I speak. My notebooks record smells and tastes, meals I’ve eaten, sounds I hear and people I encounter, road names, café, the blue Transit van that cuts you up, the bunch of tulips I buy for the kitchen table or were given to me and what I’ve been dreaming of, too.

My notebooks have changed – now, as well as ideas and drafts of poems, they work as scrapbooks with tickets and newspaper cuttings in them. They have ideas that may never come to fruition, work notes, books I’ve read, lists. I write them for myself, not for anyone else. The most important thing I’ve learned in looking back on a boxful of notebooks covering nearly 40 years is that my memory is unreliable. I’d never be able to recreate the six weeks, the year, the three months that these books document in their scrappy, chaotic and messy way.

The other attraction of a journal is it justifies my love of fountain pens (I use a Lamy and a Parker) and ink – generally black, but I have a brown ink and a grey. I don’t stick with any particular style of notebook, but A5 or slightly larger is probably my favourite. At the moment I’m using a square artist’s notebook and while it gives me lots of space, it’s heavy to carry around. I prefer unlined paper and absolutely not ring bound.

I developed a workshop on journal writing for the Unleashed leadership course created by Alastair Creamer, Catalyst producer at Unilever. The course was for staff at Unilever and arts organisations. Later it was taken up and run by Arts and Business in London.

Journal writing got busy people whose writing was limited to functional e mails and reports, back to the sensory pleasure of writing with a pen or pencil on paper – feeling the shapes of letters and words, connecting their bodies and their brains in a way many people hadn’t done since they were at school.

Case study: a workshop based on journals, witness and celebration

The theme is informed by one of the greatest poems of the 19th century, Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself. I introduce this workshop by speaking about the importance of witness to individual and community, of celebration, plus why I keep notebooks.

PRIVATE WRITING - Exercise 1

I ask participants to describe the last few minutes of their journey to the workshop in detail. What they noticed, heard, smells, textures. People, sensations. 10 mins

Next to describe their experience walking through the front door, focusing on the physical – first impressions, colours, light, sounds, faces, clothes, things. 10 mins

STYLES OF JOURNAL WRITING - Exercise 2

In groups we discuss different types of journals and notebooks, read examples out loud in the group and talk about them. We discuss how we would use a journal, how what we’ve just written fits into what we’re looking at now. 20 mins

EXPERIMENTING WITH STYLE - Exercise 3

The next task is more extended. I ask participants to write an for 25 minutes. This is private writing based on “here and now”. It starts with this point in the writer’s day, life, month, year and what’s going on, but I encourage each writer to allow the piece to develop instinctively, go with the flow. 30 mins

CELEBRATE YOURSELF - Exercise 4

I introduce Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself and read an extract. The poem is a symphony of voices, witness, a journey, in which people and details of ordinary life are made extraordinary. 5 mins.

I guide people through a series of questions based on different parts of the poem, asking them to respond intuitively in their journals. 20 mins.

Each participant shares his or her piece of writing around the table. Approx 20 mins.

Journals I use - brief extracts (I would hand out longer extracts - these are illustrative)

From: Alistair Cooke's first Letter from America, broadcast in 1946

“I want to tell you what it's like to come back to the United States after a sobering month in Britain and say what daily life feels and looks like by comparison.

I sailed back on the Queen Mary with a couple of thousand GI brides ….”

From: A Letter to Our Son, Peter Carey, The Granta Book of the Family

“Before I have finished writing this, the story of how you were born, I will be forty-four years old, and the events and feelings which make up the story will be at least eight months old….”

From: A Dance in Queen’s Gate, Virginia Woolf, A Passionate Apprentice

”The music has begun again – oh dear – the swing & the lilt of that waltz makes me almost feel as though I could jump from my bed & dance it too. That is the quality which dance music has – no other: it stirs some barbaric instinct – lulled asleep in our sober lives – you forget centuries of civilisation in a second…”

From: The Roy Strong Diaries

“Elizabeth Longford’s delayed seventieth birthday took the form of a gathering of the clans at the Irish Club in Eaton Square. Awful rooms and filthy red and white wine. It was the first time that I’d seen Antonia (Fraser) for a year, worn but marvellous, wearing expensive black…”.

From: In Ethiopia with a Mule

"As I write, injara is being cooked beside me. The batter is poured on to a flat iron skillet from an earthen jar (in which it has been fermenting for three or four days) and is then covered with a conical pottery lid…”

From: Max's Antarctic Diaries

"The cliff faces are alive with the crack of ice, the whoosh of tumbling snowdrift, the rustle and clatter of falling scree. Occasionally there is a really startling boom, reminiscent of the one o'clock cannon above Edinburgh's Princes Street - or an even more spine-tingling deep, deep gong stroke, as a small geological event changes the landscape just one iota, in the course of its eternal metamorphosis….”

From: Isaac Newton’s Fitzwilliam notebook listing fifty-eight sins he remembered committing before and after Whitsunday 1662

Squirting water on Thy day. 7

Making pies on Sunday night. 8

Swimming in a kimnel on Thy day. 9

Putting a pin in Iohn Keys hat on Thy day to pick him. 10

Carelessly hearing and committing many sermons. 11

Refusing to go to the close at my mothers command. 12

Threatning my father and mother Smith to burne

them and the house over them. 13

Wishing death and hoping it to some. 14

Striking many. 15

Having uncleane thoughts words and actions and dreamese. 16

Stealing cherry cobs from Eduard Storer. 17

Denying that I did so. 18

Denying a crossbow to my mother and grandmother though I knew of it. 19

Setting my heart on money learning pleasure more than Thee. 20

A relapse. 21

A relapse. 22

A breaking again of my covenant renued in the Lords Supper. 23

Punching my sister. 24

Robbing my mothers box of plums and sugar. 25

Calling Derothy Rose a jade. 26.......

Letter from America, Alistair Cooke, bbc.co.uk

A Year in Nature Notes (Times Books 2004) by Derwent May

The Granta Book of the Family (Granta Books 1995)

Virginia Woolf A Passionate Apprentice The Early Journals 1897 - 1909 (Pimlico 2004) ed. Mitchell E Leaska

The Roy Strong Diaries 1967 - 1987 (Weidenfeld & Nicholson 1997)

In Ethiopia With a Mule (John Murray 1968) by Dervla Murphy

Max's Antarctic Diaries 1997-8 by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies (www.maxopus.com)

Isaac Newton Fitzwilliam notebook. Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge/The Newton Project, Imperial College London. www.newtonproject.ic.ac.uk

Journals on the web

British Library: http://www.bl.uk/about/ontheweb.html
British Library Leonardo manuscript: http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/themes/euromanuscripts/leonardo.html
The British Diarist (rare bookseller):
www.picrare.com/Diarist/Diaristeditorial.htm
Selection of blogs and online journals:
www.diarist.net/
US National Public Radio site on blogs: www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1220496
Essay on the diarist’s art:
www.narrativemagazine.info/pages/njdintro.htm
US Public Broadcasting Service site on historically valuable notebooks, including Leonardo da Vinci’s and Thomas Edison’s:
http://www.pbs.org/now/arts/davinci.html
Project Gutenberg, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci.
It is thought da Vinci's pupil Francesco Melzi inherited at least 50 notebooks. Today, 28 of them survive in museums and with collectors, including the British Museum, the Louvre and Bill Gates. The Louvre is digitizing its 12 notebooks and E-text archive Project Gutenberg has put the complete 1888 translation online: http://digital.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=5000
Thomas Edison’s papers: Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey has more than five million pages of documents chronicling the work of Thomas Edison. Edison is responsible for many modern inventions as well as formulating the first industrial research laboratory:http://edison.rutgers.edu/

Anthologies

The Faber Book of Diaries (1990) Simon Brett (Editor)
Four centuries of British writing with 1400 entries, taken from more than 100 diaries.

The Assassin’s Cloak, Anthology of Diarists (Canongate 2003) Ed Irene and Alan Taylor
Laid out like a diary, with up to five different entries a day from more than 200 diarists including Pepys, Boswell, Scott, Woolf, Brian Eno, Cocteau and Alan Clark.

A Book of One's Own (Penguin 1986) by Thomas Mallon
Diarists throughout the ages. Mallon also analyzes why we choose to do it.

New exercises on identity

2012-02-05T03:10:00.000-08:00

I've tested the exercises I've added on identity over many years and used them with people of all ages. These first exercises are all related in some way to the statement 'I am'.

In other batches, I'll post exercises relating to personal power, how a writer can describe herself through what she knows or collects, the idea of a family album and listing of names, the idea of split identity and a poem that explores the idea of the animal within, shared by so many cultures as spirit animal or guide.

Postcards and other props

2012-02-03T02:43:00.000-08:00

When I was a child I collected postcards and china horses. None of them survived but my obsession with postcards was revived when I began running workshops.

I have boxes on top of my wardrobe marked 'portraits', 'animals', 'objects', 'landscapes', 'people'. The most-used cards have softer corners and pen marks on. I know some of them so well, I feel I should retire them.

Postcards are one of the most effective ways to get people writing and I've found that matching them with a poem model works even better.

I used postcards in two broad ways. One taps a writer into a model or a theme. The other engages them in concentrated looking and pure description - ekphrasis.

That's the first stage. Later the writer will take her own direction, break away from the prompt and turn the writing into something that doesn't need anything but itself.

Boy taking a thorn from his foot

I learned not to give anyone the choice of a card - I just hand them out as they come out of the folder. I've prepared them in advance, I know how many people are taking part, I know what exercises I'm going to do and I know what I want the postcard to do. I want it to give someone a reason to write, something to look hard at, a point of stillness when there is nothing to worry about but the image and the words that it will release.

I've used postcards with poem models on animals by Ted Hughes and Carl Sandburg, on identity with models by Margaret Atwood and Etheridge Knight, on reincarnation (after an exercise of Sandy Brownjohn's), on art with models by William Carlos Williams and U A Fanthorpe and on place with various different approaches. Postcards are useful for inventing similes and metaphors as well as monologues.

Using postcards with a more ekphrastic approach, I've teamed them with poems by Moniza Alvi, William Carlos Williams, Carol Ann Duffy. There are many poems, classical and modern, that take an image as inspiration, from Homer's Shield of Achilles to the books of poems inspired by works in the Tate, produced by Paul Durcan.

A small brass cat

When the Sussex Arts Club existed in Brighton, it was one of the venues used by Brighton Poets, a group I helped set up with Don Paterson and Eva Salzman. We put on readings and workshops in a small upstairs room as well as the ballroom with its cloud-painted ceiling. Craig Raine read there, Christopher Reid, Jackie Kay, Cieran Carson and the late Michael Donaghy. Michael also ran a workshop that I attended and used random objects to kick start our writing.

He handed me a small glass snow dome with flamenco dancers inside and the poem it produced was based on a memory of my aunt, who often visited Spain.

My own bag of props contains a spiderman figure, gifts from Christmas crackers like a miniature tape measure, things I've put in drawers because I don't want to throw them away like a dice, marble, odd earring, old bunch of keys. I have odd pieces of Lego, a brass cat, stone with a hole in and lump of crystal.

The prop works like the postcard, but with the added benefit that you can hold in in your hand and let its textures prompt you, too. Often a prop taps straight into memory that the writer wouldn't otherwise have arrived at and this is the delight of them.

I keep my props in a small bag I made sitting round a fire in a village in Venda. It's half a trouser leg embroidered with beads. Sometimes I use it as a lucky dip, so workshop participants choose without looking. Sometimes I hand objects out randomly, as they come.

The brief is simple - write whatever it provokes. If you feel blank, describe it until something else happens and it invariably does. Michael's wise instruction was to meditate on the object. An instruction that eventually led me to Vasko Pop's quartz pebble sequence.

A good room and large table

2012-01-31T03:31:00.000-08:00

What makes a great workshop?

The room, for the time a workshop lasts, is a world. The tutor puts the elements in place. I like a room that is quirky in some way, with a view or history. I like a room to make me feel I've travelled outside my everyday routine, even if it's close to home.

I don't often use rooms above a pub or in a community centre. But if I do, I have to bring tables together and put a cloth over them. If a place is dull and institutional, it needs a jug of water and glasses, ideally flowers and books to browse over lunch. If I've promised free biscuits and coffee, I try not to stint and realised that bringing cake too makes a big difference!

The best writing makes me feel I'm in the moment of the poem or story so I want a workshop room that does the same. I want everyone sitting at the same table, feeling excited because we'll be creating something new.

For people taking part, the day is special - time out to stretch, concentrate on writing, so I will make the tea, fill up water jugs, get out plates and cutlery. For the people I am working with, this is their time to fill up pages, walk at lunchtime and come back with something to tell.

My list of essentials

A long table that everyone can sit at.
Ground coffee, leaf tea, juice, food.
Natural light.
A log fire in winter.
Air and open windows in summer.
Somewhere to walk at lunchtime.

Welcome to the workshop book for writers

2012-01-07T01:49:00.000-08:00

A masterclass at Chesworth Arts Farm, Horsham with Peter and Ann Sansom of The Poetry Business

The first writing workshop I went to was at South Hill Park arts centre in Bracknell in the 1980s. It was led by acclaimed Irish poet and children's writer Matthew Sweeney, with occasional sessions led by poet Peter Pegnall. Once a week a small group of us were introduced to some of Matthew's favourite poets. Here I discovered Selima Hill, Charles Simic and James Wright as well as the astonishing work of American undertaker poet Thomas Lynch, among others. At the end of the course, I read my poems in public for the first time and I had work accepted by a magazine that immediately folded. But that meant the first poems I had published were in an iconic small magazine, The Echo Room, produced by another Irish poet, Brendan Cleary who's become a great friend. In the workshop book, I'm sharing my experience of more than 20 years running workshops with people who write because they want to be better. I'll focus on the basics of running a workshop - what works and why. I'll deal with different settings like business, working in the community and schools. I'll share pitfalls, hilarious moments and risks. I'll look at workshops that last an hour...half-days, full days, masterclasses, weeklong workshops, weekends. I'll reflect on work with musicians and artists, work in galleries, with orchestras, with arts and business leaders, with young refugees and homeless men, with young people who cannot speak and young people in a secure unit. This is the start.