Word Saucery

I have a long-held interest in Amerindian culture, particularly traditions of making: masks, tools, jewellery, stories.

For people who live in harmony with the earth’s cycles, winter is a time for turning inward, for intense creativity, for gathering around the fire, sewing and shaping  and dreaming and telling stories.

Since I moved back to North Yorkshire, I find myself in greater synchrony with the seasons. Winter has become an increasingly fertile time for me. I find myself thinking about painting walls, making poems and, yes, even knitting more ‘wild tea cosies.’

I know that many people do not like this time of year, the idea of the evenings drawing in, the days shortening. But when you think about all the possibilities of those longer winter evenings, it can be very exciting.

I found this poem by Emily Dickinson yesterday:

‘Winter under cultivation
Is as arable as spring.’

In perfect Dickinson fashion, those two little lines speak everything that I’ve been trying to say so far, rather more clumsily, in this blog post.

I’ve just returned from the  Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, brimming with ideas and experiences.

This was my first visit to both Aldeburgh and the Festival and the five hour journey was well worth it.

Besides the powerful effect of being immersed in poems read by many different poets and hearing what others think about the process of making poems, one of my favourite features of the weekend was the Aldeburgh ‘Short Take’, a fifteen minute presentation by a poet on an aspect of poetry.

The chosen theme this year was ‘Love and Death’ and poets were asked to explore the idea that these are the only true subjects for poetry.

Pascale Petit’s ‘Short Take’ particularly struck me. She told us that, for her, making poems is ‘a way of making a home in the world,’ making a home in a world where she doesn’t feel she has a true home, and in a world which she ‘doesn’t understand.’

From the little murmur that travelled around the room, I think this idea resonated with many other people in the audience. It’s also a very interesting idea when we think about the way that the process of writing can be used in the field of personal development, in health care and in education.

The idea of ‘making a home for oneself’ with words on the page seems to make room for the idea that the process of writing is not primarily - not even necessarily -  about making a great poem, although the wonderful Petit certainly knows how to  do that.

Making poems, it seems, can also be about making meaning in a meaningless world, about creating a sense of belonging, about carving out a space.

I watched an interview by Simon Armitage recently in which he also spoke about making poems as making meaning ‘in a life where there isn’t much meanng, unless you’re devoutly religious. So I think it’s a way of not finding significance but actually inventing it, inventing significance and sort of proving it to yourself, and I think it’s a way of manifesting ourselves to ourselves.’

Yes. That resonates with me too.

Here is a very interesting article by Jonah Lehrer over at The Frontal Cortex blog. He draws our attention to ‘the neuroscientific case’ made by Michael Posner and Brenda Patoine for arts education among children.

Posner and Petoine claim that:

Recent research offers a possibility with much better, science-based support: that focused training in any of the arts–such as music, dance or theater–strengthens the brain’s attention system, which in turn can improve cognition more generally.

We know that the brain has a system of neural pathways dedicated to attention. We know that training these attention networks improves general measures of intelligence. And we can be fairly sure that focusing our attention on learning and performing an art–if we practice frequently and are truly engaged–activates these same attention networks. We therefore would expect focused training in the arts to improve cognition generally.

In his discussion of this claim, Lehrer also makes what I think is a very valid point: that education in the arts also offers children the opportunity of self-expression and of experiencing ‘flow,’ the state first proposed by Czikszentmihalyi as crucial to both creativity and general well-being.

The research in attentional states, though controversial, is very interesting to me in terms of my research into the neuroscentific underpinnings of creative writing for personal development.

There is growing evidence to suggest that engaging in regular periods of activity that train the brain’s attention networks increases their efficiency. This may help us to understand why regular creative writing practice and regular self-hypnosis are both ways of strengthening attention and increasing mental focus. Indeed, Sharon Begley has written extensively on the way that meditation may literally change - or retrain - our brains, citing fascinating research with Buddhist monks.

However, I agree with Lehrer that there are likely to be many other benefits to these activities, which the focus on attentional networks does not measure.

For example, over the last decade, James Pennebaker has researched the benefits of writing and linked them to the external expression of internal thoughts and emotions (the Expressive Writing paradigm).  And I personally believe that we can go beyond that too, as my recent paper in the Journal of Health Psychology argues.

There is also the theory that activities such as creative writing and creative visualisation create experiences of novelty and newness, the ‘numinous’ quality characteristic of traditional descriptions of artistic or spiritual experiences, which may actually turn on the expression of genes associated with well-being and/or rehabilitate neural networks damaged after stroke. The psychotherapist, Ernest Rossi, is integrating interesting neuroscientific explorations of this area and the possibilities are exciting.

We certainly need more research to be done, but this is just some of the growing evidence that the benefits of creative experience, no matter what age we might be, might be measured neuroscientifially, helping us to model best practice in this particular area of personal development.

These are the words that caught my eye in this interview with Samantha Harvey, whose novel, The Wilderness, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Orange Prize and is now also on the shortlist for the Guardian First Book-Award.

When asked what she was most pleased with in the novel she said:

I wrote The Wilderness with my heart, if that’s not too sentimental a thing to say. So I’m most pleased that this thing that was in my heart has found expression in the world, and is interesting to people. Not everyone, I know, but some – and that really is enough.

It’s interesting to me that Harvey seems almost to apologise for saying such a thing. You did what? You wrote it with your heart? As if it is not the done thing, not terribly cool to write from such a felt sense of things.

And I find that so refreshing!

The book is written from the point of view of Jake, a sixty-year-old man with Alzheimer’s, and Harvey engaged in some comprehensive first-person research. She says:

‘I used first and third-person accounts and case studies of people with Alzheimer’s, I read medical books, went to Alzheimer’s care centres, spoke to carers, to a researcher and a neuroscientist. I watched films, I read poetry by people with dementia. I felt a huge responsibility to get it if not right exactly then at least plausible, and for it to resonate with those who know more about the disease than I do.’

I haven’t yet read the book but I’ll definitely be adding it to my Christmas bookshelf.