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