Word Saucery

Do you fancy being a hermit? If so, you may have been tempted to apply for the job as the Manchester Museum Hermit?

The museum has just announced that it will employ 43 year-old Ansuman Biswas for 40 days and 40 nights to contemplate a series of objects from the museum’s collection. He will be writing about an object per day and engaging the public in dialogue about it on his blog.

What a fascinating project. Now, if I had seen the job advertised, I would have been very tempted to apply. After all, I am experienced in self-hypnosis, consciousness studies, writing and blogging. I have been talking about writing as self-hypnosis for years. I could have written poems about the objects in question and it would have been fascinating research into the object-based model of creativity with which I work.

However, it seems that these days one needs specific experience to be a hermit and Mr Biswas comes with much previous professional hermitage experience. He has lived in a cave as a hermit for the National Trust and once spent ten days and nights in London living in a cardboard box for an exhibition. With this kind of pedigree, he was selected from over three hundred applicants for the post. He told The Guardian:

“I will be developing a dialogue with the public, drawing attention to certain objects and asking why we care about them - and if we care about them,” he said. “As Joni Mitchell said, you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.”

He will ascend to the Gothic Tower in Manchester Museum on 27 June. I really look forward to reading his blog.

So, if you were to spend 40 days and 40 nights in contemplation, where would you choose to be? What objects might you take with you to contemplate? (Keep your answers clean, please.) Seriously, it is an interesting question, isn’t it?

I would certainly take plenty of notebooks and pens. I think I would be tempted to leave my laptop at home, since I spend so much time on it anyway and I’d like to experience how the internet silence changes things for me. I would choose an inspiring view, if at all possible.

Would I take my usual stock of very dark chocolate? Would I listen to music or simply lose myself in the sounds around me? I think I could be quite content as long as I had pens and paper. How about you?

Over at her blog, Sarah’s Writing Journal, author Sarah Salway has a ‘50 word photo story’ thread.

Each day she posts a 50 word story in response to a photo. You can add your own story in the comments.

I just posted one under yesterday’s theme of Blossoms. I thoroughly enjoyed the process of crafting it into 50 words. Why not join in?

Just in time, I have discovered the Great British Summer Haiku Competition, sponsored by Kings Place and Network Rail.

You can read the guidelines here at the Kings Place website but the rules are poetically and appropriately simple.

To enter, just Twitter your haiku-style poem on the subject of the British Summer using your existing Twitter account with the phrase @kingsplace at the beginning.

Your poem will be picked up by the Kings Place Twitter account and you may even see it displayed on the maindigital advertising board at Kings Cross.

The competition closes this Friday 22 May.  Haikus will be judged by Yoko Ono and leading UK poet Jackie Kay.

The best haiku poet will be awarded free entrance for themselves and a friend to the Words on Monday events at Kings Place for the rest of the year.

If you live in the UK, you may have seen the latest ads on TV right now on the theme of ‘Let poetry into your life.’

There is Lauren Laverne, waxing lyrical to a friend in a multistorey carpark and Phil Jupitus in a cafe describing honey in… well, what can only be described as honeyed phrases…Wonderful.

As Andrew Motion, retiring Poet Laureate, recently observed, ‘Poetry is a primitive pleasure. It is precisely as natural as breathing.’

Oh, yes.

This kind of shake-up has long been overdue in my humble opinion. It’s time people realised that poems are as vital a part of our cultural and internal lives as music and song - which, of course, are closely related to poetry. Poetry is sexy . Poetry is alive.

It’s what people reach for over and over on the important occasions and milestones in our lives: weddings, christenings, funerals. But it can also enrich our regular lives. Why not make space to read a poem at the beginning or end of your day?

Here in the UK, we have a weekly request programme on BBR Radio 4, called Poetry Please, which is celebrating its thirty year anniversary right now. You can watch a short film about it here.

There are lovely interviews with people who describe themselves as ‘into poetry’ because of the patterns poems make and the memories they evoke.

How wonderful that this campaign may introduce more people to the pleasures of poetry. And if you want to write poetry, it is so important to read and listen to lots and lots of it.

Poems, more poems, please.

How does the way that you tell the story of your life - to yourself and to others - influence how you feel?

A very interesting article in Scientific American by research psychologist Jessie Bering, this month discusses ‘the psychological science of life history research.’

Looking at the work of Northwestern University psychologist Dan McAdams, Bering suggests that the way in which we put together our own life stories is:

‘just as fundamental to scientists’ understanding of personality as are the more conventionally studied dispositional traits (which are those textbook global, stable, comparative dimensions of personality such as “extraversion” or “conscientiousness”). ‘

The article quotes McAdams claim that: “some people construct life stories that are modelled on classical tragedy, whereas others convey their identities as television sitcoms.”

The article discusses McAdams finding that there are two types of people in this world: those who understand life-altering experiences such as relationship issues, loss, grief, or crime as “contaminative episodes” in their previoulsy well-formed life stories; and those who view very similar events as “redemptive episodes” through which their lives and their selves are transformed for the better. Those who viewed dramatic events in their lives as ‘redemptive’ tended to feel happier and also to engage in ‘generative’ activites that benefited society at large.

This idea of storying our lives according to ‘contaminative’ or ‘redemptive’ episodes is very interesting to me in my work as a therapist and as a researcher in developmental creative writing . For example, in working with people who had experienced severe psychological and physical  torture, I found that those who viewed these terrible events as a ‘turning point,’ enabling them ‘a second chance’ or ‘an opportunity’ were able to move on much more quickly than those who analysed the ‘mistakes’ and ‘bad luck’ that shaped their stories.

What I am particularly interested in is the way that we can use a therapeutic process - such as writing our life story down, shaping it and re-framing it on the page, perhaps telling it from another person’s point of view - in order to gain new insights and make new meanings from our lives.

In this sense, we are remade or transformed by telling and re-telling our stories.

I think it’s time to talk about this phrase ‘creative writing’?

I was reading an article the other day over at the Bookslut blog called ‘On Creative Writing‘ by JC Halman. I am wary of paraphrasing  Halman’s thoughts here, so do go and read the article, which seems to conclude that ‘creative writing’ is ‘good writing,’ writing that aspires to being something other than the ’stale, staid, tedious, soulless, and artificial.’

The article makes the very good point that we use this word ‘creative’ in relation to writing when:

‘Whoever has heard of creative painting? Or creative sculpting? Or the creative play of an instrument?’

It is rather odd, isn’t it, this ubiquitous phrase ‘creative writing’? Halman’s article traces it back to Emerson and argues that Emerson wasn’t talking about writing poems and stories in the way that the many ‘creative writing’ classes, courses and workshops use that term today. For Emerson, creative writing was simply a way of distinguishing between language that is tired, cliched and dead and language that seeks to communicate in new, fresh ways.

Photo: Harvard Gazette Archives

Halman feels that this good writing cannot be boiled down to a series of points, outlines or instructions but that perhaps we can communicate it in metaphor such as Emerson’s:

“The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when all your arrows are spent.”

I like this idea. When I use the term creative writing I am not necessarily talking about writing that will be published; published in the way that we have come to think of publication as books available for sale in a bookshop. I am talking just as much about a creative process of writing.

This process of writing might be a way of cultivating a daily practice of stillness or mindfulness. It may be a means of expressing difficult emotions, getting them out there on the page and developing a helpful kind of distance from them. It might be writing that we go on to make and re-make, crafting and redrafting it into a particular form. It might be writing that, ultimately, we never look at again.

The processes of creative writing and reading help us to know ourselves in new ways. They can also help us to become better, more skilful writers, less likely to get ’stuck’ or ‘blocked’ in our own thoughts and more able to get our feelings into words.

For me, creative writing is a kind of creative living. What does ‘creative writing’  mean to you?

I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the amount of media interest this week in the the story that Carol Ann Duffy has been appointed as the new Poet Laureate in the UK.

Duffy, 53, is the first Scot and the first woman to be appointed to the position in its 341-year history.

Whatever your personal view about all the hoo-ha that has surrounded the coverage of the story - for example, whether we should even be speaking in terms of ‘the first, ahem, female Poet Laureate’ and whether there is such a thing as ‘women’s poetry’ written by women - I find it amazing to think that there has been a poet in the role for over 300 years.

Duffy told Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour this week:

“Poetry is all around us, all of the time, whether in song or in speech or on the page, and we turn to it when events, personal or public, matter most.

“In accepting this Laureateship, I hope to contribute to people’s understanding of what poetry can do and where it can be found.”

She has said she will donate her annual honorarium of £5,750 to the Poetry Society to fund a prize for the best collection of the year. Wonderful news for poets everywhere.

It’s true, isn’t it? I am always fascinated by the way that, whenever I attend a wedding or a funeral, people choose to read a poem at some point in the ceremony. People who may never pick up a poetry collection for most of their lives choose poetry to express and honour their deepest emotions at such moments.

Equally, when I work with my private clients, they often share with me that they have woken up in the middle of the night and - much to their own surprise - written a poem about the difficut emotions they are feeling.

Poetry is indeed all around us - and anything can be the subject of a poem. Making poems is something we have been doing for centuries, as the history of the Laureateship demonstrates.

It’s good to hear Carol Ann Duffy reminding us of this. I am sure she will do many more good and wise things with her position.

Well, today I am feeling happy and excited because the participants on my 2008/09 Word Sauce Online Programme in Creative Writing for Personal Development, Health and Well-Being have come to the end of the course and have been sharing some of their thoughts and reflections about their process of writing, exploration and discovery.

There is always a sadness for me too when I’m nearing the end of my work with a lovely group of people. But most of all I feel happy to share in their pride at their achievements, the things that they have discovered along the way and, of course, their writing.

This year, I’ve had the privilege of working with a particularly amazing group of people. It has been so good to see how they have supported and encouraged one another in the writing process, with such generosity. I know that they will all go on to use their regular creative practice in many exciting and nourishing ways.

I have also just discovered that one of the course participants, Mary Potter, has won a short story competition. Many congratulations, Mary!

And then today I was delighted to read Eric Carr’s blog, in which he shares ‘A Midnight Poem about Making,’ one of the beautiful poems that he wrote on the course, and his thoughts about writing it. Eric is a hypnotherapist in Tucson, Arizona. I am so happy that he has chosen to share his work and process with a wider audience.

The wonderful people I work with using writing are a constant inspiration to me. Today, I am particularly thankful and grateful for this work that I am so privileged to do.