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
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