Lismore Immrama Festival of Travel Writing - Creative Writing with Robyn Rowland

Beautiful landscape, an inspiring facilitator, a wonderful building. Everything was in place for this being an excellent morning of writing.

Lismore Immrama Festival of Travel Writing is a festival, which has been held annually, in the beautiful and historical town of Lismore in County Waterford, Ireland, since 2003.

Last Saturday, I was really pleased to be attending a creative writing workshop, led by Robyn Rowland - an Australian Irish poet.

The session itself was enormously enjoyable. Robyn introduced herself and then spent time getting to know each one of us, as individuals, before speaking about her fascinating interest in archaeology and writing as archaeology of our own life experiences. It was genuinely fascinating and a concept I had not previously thought about. 

We looked at images of artefacts, buildings and bodies from Pompeii, The Irish Bogs, Troy and various other sites from ancient Greece and Turkey and many other places. After that, Robyn led us on a guided meditation, and then we were free to write anything which we felt compelled to write. 

My own inspiration came from the bodies and it occurred to me that our own bodies can be archaeologically explored to tell the story of our lives, through the scars and lines and other features that are added to our bodies as we age and experience life,  illness and injury.

At the time, my sister was going through her recovery from a hysterectomy. She has been unlucky with her health, has been through multiple surgeries and suffers from a range of incurable, invisible illnesses, which impinge on her daily life constantly. You can read more about her journey and her use of art to tell her story and reach and support other sufferers of invisible illnesses on her blog: blog.endowarrior.co.uk

Prior to her hysterectomy, my sister experimented with the concept of Kintsugi - an ancient Japanese method for repairing broken ceramics with gold. The idea is that in being broken, the ceramics actually become more beautiful than they were, before.

In one of her endlessly creative attempts to take back control from the effects of her illnesses, she took a jar of gold paint and painted her scars gold, posting the resulting images online, to encourage others to feel more positive about their own journeys through illness.

Images © courtesy of: @endo.adeno_warrior on Instagram

Images © courtesy of: @endo.adeno_warrior on Instagram

 Robyn's workshop and my sister's bravery led me to write this poem about how I see her - a courageous young woman who refuses to give up, no matter what is thrown at her.

Kintsugi

by Annie Bell

Kintsugi: a Japanese method for repairing broken ceramics with a special lacquer mixed with gold, silver, or platinum. The philosophy behind this ancient art is the idea that nothing is ever truly broken.

A small, plastic pot, A paintbrush in hand.

Her broken body, No-one understands.

A dig site, soon to be excavated:

Awaiting, her womb to be evacuated.

She looks at her landscape - her peaks and her troughs.

She curses the way it just hurts when she coughs

or walks

or laughs

or cleans

or sits

or rests

or sleeps

or dreams.

She hardly even goes out any more. 

When she does, it all just gets too bloody sore. 

So she looks at her landscape and scans the white lines

That mark the passing of treatments gone by.

The patterns of stretched skin, from forming her kin:

Two children: two miracles, created within.

She's broken, for sure, but not done by a mile.

She fights back. She's brave, so she musters a smile.

She lifts up her brush and she fills in each scar

With gold paint to show that she's come so far:

A beautiful, human Kintsugi jar. 

Images © courtesy of: @endo.adeno_warrior on Instagram

After we had written our pieces, we were all given the opportunity to read out our work and Robyn provided us with very useful feedback. I really enjoyed her workshop. It was fascinating, educational and very, very inspiring. If you have the chance to attend Lismore Immrama or one of Robyn's workshops, I would thoroughly recommend both.

You can follow my sister on Facebook or on Instagram: @endo.adeno_warrior

© Annie Bell 2019

Travel Writing - A WriteNight Story

Last month, on 27th May 2019, at the monthly WriteNight meeting in MakerSpace, Colchester, I had a delightful experience, which took me completely out of my comfort zone - in a good way. 

Melissa Shales - award winning travel writer and Essex University PHD student led the session. She gave a fascinating talk on travel writing and on her life experiences connected with it. After that, she led us through an interesting exercise, which involved selecting a souvenir, which another member of the group had provided. 

• First of all, we wrote down an imagined travel story, inspired by our own perception of the object.

• Second, we wrote down what our own souvenirs meant to us and what the story behind the object was.

• Third, we shared the real story of our item with the person that had chosen it.

• Finally, we combined our imagined story with the true story behind the object, to create a new piece. 

Travel writing is not something I have tried before but I wanted to give it a go, as I find it very interesting to see what I can write, given a prompt that I might not otherwise have thought of. 

The object I selected was a beautiful oval shaped pebble. It was white with grey and black marks on it and it was remarkably smooth, without being shiny.

Here is the piece I wrote:

Heatwave

I reached into my pocket and held my favourite pebble; felt the smooth surface caressing my fingers. It comforted me: bringing me back to the moment when I first laid eyes on it. 

It was an unusual pebble - at least it was, if you looked closely at it. At a glance, it was a generic grey rock but much more attentive viewing revealed a micro-landscape of white, dappled with grey and interspersed with almost universally sized hair-like, black rock fibres.  The surface had been worn flat by years of bumping and grinding between the waves and the ocean floor. 

Every time I see or pick up the stone, it takes me back - right back to that day on the beach.

Charmouth - Summer of 2006. Hideous heatwave: totally unexpected for a UK Summer. When we booked the beautiful caravan with sea views for a holiday with our three children, we pictured lazy days on the beach and in the caravan park, splashing in the sea, kicking a football about, building sandcastles and searching through the tidal debris to see what treasure we might find. 

That summer was too hot for such energetic pursuits. Picture us - sweating and lobster-tinted, attempting to keep the kids cool in the water of the outer reaches of the English Channel. 

Dave spent most of the holiday, struggling to battle heat and hayfever in equal measure. Little Harry refused to take off his jumper, despite the fact that he has baking hot - Little Jacket Potato Man we called him. Lucy complained that the pebbles hurt her feet and the seaweed was trying to trip her up all the time.

All the while, we tried to escape the scalding furnace above us, until the cool night would ease our pain and suffering and our oven of a caravan would return to temperatures a human could tolerate.

In the midst of all this heat and chaos, I picked up a stone: a little pebble, just large enough to fit in the palm of my hand and just heavy enough to be pleasing to hold. It gleamed at me through the surf and the seaweed and I plucked it from its resting place, not realising, then, the significance it would hold.

Now, I hold it in my hand and I examine it: a dappled grey reminder of the fleeting moments of my children's youth, before adulthood swept them away, to create their own adventures. 
 
WriteNight meet on the 4th Monday of every month, 7:30 - 9:30pm at Colchester MakerSpace. The next meeting is tomorrow, led by the very talented Doug Smith. Please click the link below for more details. 

https://www.facebook.com/events/2369254296730535/ 

© Annie Bell 2019

Bread Tags - a Poetry and WriteNight Story

A few months back, I attended Colchester WriteNight for their session on performance poetry.

Led by Mark Brayley, this was a truly fascinating session. Mark spoke about how it is possible to convey very powerful emotions through the description of objects. He provided us with a selection of objects, including an hourglass, a clockwork robot, a cocktail shaker and others. He then instructed us to select one and write down any ideas, which came into our heads.

Next, we were asked to construct a poem, using some of those ideas.  

Strangely enough, I found myself obsessing on the subject of bread tags - the square plastic things that we used to close bread packets with, back in the 1980s, before we had to put up with the stupid sticky ones, which always seal themselves shut, and how I could use those to write about a memory that was painful for me.

This is what I came up with.

Bread Tags

by Annie Bell

She picks at the glued up tie on the bread,

stubbornly sticking. Her toast dreams are dead.

The past creeps forwards; memory awakes.

An abandoned solution - such a mistake.

An ancient invention of plastic perfection:

Flat, square, with a hole and the corners lopped off.

Every piece of plastic that ever existed, still exists.

David Attenborough drones from the TV.

Her bread liberated;

Her toast duly plated;

Her hunger soon sated.

The flavour of Marmite and toast soothes her soul.

She thinks about bread tags:

His wonderful bread tags: 

The collection of thousands he kept in a drawer.

Each one representing Marmite toast

From that comfortable host,

Who hosts with toast no more.

Every piece of plastic that ever existed, still exists.

David Attenborough drones from the TV.

But he does not

Will not.

Not ever again,

Except in her memory.

 

The event I was writing about was the death of my Grandad, when I was sixteen. He always used to make us - his large collection of grandchildren - round after round of Marmite toast, until the bread ran out.

After his death, we found that he had a box filled with old bread tags in his kitchen drawer, which he had collected over the decades. I've always wondered what he was collecting them for.

It was wonderful to be able to convey my own sadness in a way that is so much more universal than what I might ordinarily have written. The session really opened my eyes to different ways of expressing emotions and I would like to explore this concept much more.

WriteNight meets on the fourth Monday of every month, 7:30pm - 9:30pm at the Maker Space, Trinity Street, Colchester.

For more information, please follow them on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/writenight/ or Twitter: @ColWriteNight 

© Annie Bell, 2019

Berechurch Mysteries - a 'Jane's Walk'

Why do you call me 'The Lady in White'?

Why do you act like I give you a fright?

Why do you see only this satin dress?

Can you not see that I look like a mess?

*

October 1845. Charlotte White wakes to find that all is not well and life, or death, will never be the same again.

Haunted by a devastating secret and compelled by powers beyond her comprehension, Charlotte must find a way to escape from the ghosts of her past, present and future, together with a torn white dress that holds brutal significance.

Life and death are, indeed, strange masters. 

* 

'Charlotte - The Lady in White' is my novel, based on the true story of Charlotte White, nee Smyth, late of Berechurch Hall, Colchester, Essex: a lady, who is said to haunt the former grounds of Berechurch Hall, to this day.

On Sunday last, as part of the annual 'Jane's Walks', my friend Wayne Baker organised a walk around the Berechurch area of Colchester, taking in various aspects of local history and local issues.

As part of this event, I was asked  to reprise my role as Charlotte. I was able to surprise the crowd off 33 walkers, by making a few appearances along the way. The first was at 'Charlotte's Pool' - a very beautiful location in Friday Woods. The second was at outside the Audley Chapel of St Michael's Church, off Berechurch Hall Road, where Charlotte was buried and her burial monument still remains. 

There, outside the Audley Chapel, I surprised the walkers, by appearing again and performing 'My Past Existence': the poem, which opens my novel.

After this, inside the Audley Chapel, I read an extract from 'Charlotte - The Lady in White', set in the Audley Chapel itself.

The walk appeared to be well received by the walkers, the weather behaved itself and Charlotte's story was shared, once more, with the people of Colchester.

Photo courtesy of Belinda Baker

For more information on Charlotte White and my adventures in researching her life, please read the following past posts from this blog.

Remembering Auntie Hazel - an extract from 'Charlotte - The Lady in White'

Jane's Walk - Monkwick Memories - A Charlotte White Story
Charlottes Pool - History and Legend
More on Charlotte White nee Smyth
My Past Existence - Charlotte White nee Smyth
Charlotte's Pool
Charlotte Exhibition Preparation Part 2
Charlotte Exhibition Preparation Part 1
Charlotte's Pool Colchester

© Annie Bell 2019