Counting days up, counting days down.

My life seems to be pivoting on counting up and counting down now...

I've been doing the #100happydays on Facebook. 42 days later, without a day missed, I can say it has changed the way I look at things. Each day I'm looking for what I'm going to post, it's making me much more aware of the positive things in each day. Some days I'm spoilt for choice!

I've also noticed that so many of my happy things are to do with Lee or Willow, both of them make me smile so many times each day. I feel so lucky to be where I am right now.

So that's the counting up... Now the counting down, it's 32 days till the wedding!! We seem to have been doing the proverbial blue-arsed fly rushing around, but things are slowly getting sorted. All the major things are in place now, it's just the finer details that need tweaking. We are alternating between panic and excitement!

New Year's resolutions

It's been over a year since I blogged - and that's pretty bad for a writer! So one of my resolutions is to properly blog, I actually made loads of resolutions, but have been sensible and cut them back to basics. My main one is that I'm going to find things to motivate me to make time to write. I've taken some whole days recently to write (I have a portfolio due in at Uni), and I had forgotten how much I love it!

So, with this in mind, I'm taking part in the 100 Happy Days challenge. The idea is for 100 days you post a picture of something that made you happy that day. We all have sometime, no matter how little, that gives us happiness in our days, just half the time we don't pay attention. This challenge makes us pay attention. You can read about it here: http://100happydays.com/

I'm going to be posting on Facebook each day, but will stick the pics up here too, it just won't be everyday.

My one today was a really bad photo of some scribbled notes, but it shows the thing that made me happy today was doing lots of poetry editing.

Reflections on Wise Words

Taking part in the Wise Words project has been an amazing experience. It began with the launch of the project in the cellar area of the ancient Eastbridge Hospital in Canterbury, where we met the others involved, and were introduced to our partners for the project. I think everyone was a little nervous, I certainly was, but soon we were chatting away and getting to know each other.

My partner Kasia and I had a lot in common from the word go, and when we heard that one of the groups of young people had special needs, we requested to work with them as we both felt they would be an interesting challenge. And we were right.

Our first session at St Nicholas school was a real education, and I think we probably learnt more than the young people. We had to adapt the usual range of writing workshop activities as the young people we worked with had a whole range of special needs; their reading and writing abilities varied greatly, as did their concentration span.

One of our main aims was to create an enthusiastic response to language, to share some of the pleasure that we both enjoyed when writing, and in order to do this we had to think laterally. We saw that working in groups really helped the young people’s confidence and created an ideal situation for the ladies from Moving Memories to work together with the young people.

I really enjoyed the challenge of creating new ways for both young and older people to use language, and it was fantastic to see the reactions our activities generated.  One of my favourites was asking them to draw shapes and lines in response to some music from Doctor Who. They were encouraged to think about the dynamics and the shapes of the sounds in the music and really responded well, concentrating for much longer than we expected. One boy produced some fantastic doodles and we were told afterwards that he always draws in groups of four – however this time he didn’t, the doodles continued on down the page. The groups were then asked to write words around their doodles in response to the music, and even the most reticent young people joined in.

One of the most rewarding aspects was seeing the relationships that developed between the generations. The Moving Memories ladies were very supportive of the young people, listening to all their ideas, scribing for them, and helping with spelling. I heard a lot of laughter as funny stories were shared, and fantastical ideas were conjured up for their group writing. When I look at the work produced by our group I am impressed at the power contained within its rawness.

Taking part in Wise Words has been an incredible experience, I have learnt a lot about myself, about other people, and about how language can be used in so many different ways to bring people together. 

Wise Words finale!

Last Saturday was the launch of the Wise Words anthology, which is an amazing testament to the work carried out by all the community groups involved. It contains raw, powerful writing both from experienced writers and from many who have never written before. You can read about it here.

The evening was held at the Canterbury Heritage Museum and was full of wine, wise words and laughter. The official Wise Word exhibition was opened, full of gorgeous writing, images and interactive zones. Participants from community groups read their poems and we were treated to a reading by Sarah Salway.

If you're in Canterbury over the next week, go and see it :)

Wise Words goes live!

On Tuesday 29 May we (Kasia and myself) ran our first Wise Words workshop at St Nicholas School. We worked with some year 9 students and some ladies from the Moving Memories dance group.

The session kicked off with a couple of ‘getting to know you’ game. Firstly, each person chose to take 1, 2 or 3 sweets and then had to tell us that many things about themselves. Everybody took 3, so by the time we had finished, we felt we all knew a lot more about each other. On hindsight, chocolate buttons weren’t such a good idea on a really hot day! But luckily everyone ate them so quickly, they didn’t have time to melt.

Then we played a game designed to show people how much they have in common whether they are 14 or 60. Each group drew round someone’s hand and then thought of as many things they all like or have in common. It’s surprising how many things are the same about people, no matter how different we seem.

We spent the rest of the time writing group Kennings poems, each group read theirs out and we tried to guess what animal they had written about. I’ll add them on here once they’re typed up.

Both the school class and the Moving Memories were a pleasure to work with, they all got on really well and afterwards told us the workshop was ‘awesome’, ‘refreshing’ and that they liked working in groups.

Thanks to everyone who took part, we had so much fun with you all, and we’re looking forward to the next session where we’ll have some more fun writing activities for you to try.

Wise Words

Last Friday I went to the first meeting and launch of an amazing project. Wise Words is an intergenerational creative writing project run as part of Canterbury’s Laureate scheme. I am lucky enough to be taking part in the project, which involves four trainee teachers from Christ Church Uni and four creative writing postgraduates from Kent Uni pairing up and delivering writing workshops to community groups. The work coming out of the project will be compiled into an anthology, and there will be performances at the local festivals. The people taking part all seem to be so enthusiastic and very talented at what they do, so I think it’s going to be an amazing experience.

The launch event took place at Eastbridge Hospital in Canterbury, which was founded in the 12^th century. Walking down into the building you can feel the age of it. And it’s a little chilly! Just before 4pm there weren’t many people, and we wondered whether anyone would be here. But by ten past four it was packed, and we were shuffling along to make space.

Along with an introduction to the Wise Words project, we were treated to readings from Sarah Salway and Patricia Debney. Maybe it was something to do with the atmosphere, as well as the words, but I know I wasn’t the only one brought to tears by the readings.

I’m so excited to be part of this project, this afternoon is our first training session to help plan our workshops, and I’m expecting to be bubbling over with ideas afterwards.

Journal Musings

I need a new journal – possibly easy to remedy, pop to the shops, grab a notebook of some description. But it’s not that simple.

I go through phases of journaling. I might write pages every day for a few months and then nothing for ages. Most of the time it's angsty outpourings that I wouldn’t want anyone else to read. Often what I say doesn’t matter, the words are just shapes on paper, it’s the physical act of scribbling to the page that’s necessary, so I need something in which I can enjoy the physical act of writing.

Which is probably why the journal itself is important to me: what it looks like how it feels, the colour/texture of the paper. Ideally it has to look gorgeous – I’ve written in suede-bound books that are just wonderfully tactile to handle, ones with beaded covers, and lookswise, you can’t beat some of the paperblanks journals.

But also the paper inside is important: ideally unlined, lines seem to constrict emotional outpourings, if it’s unlined I can scribble as huge and angry as I like. And the texture of the paper has to be supersmooth as I like writing in turquoise ink. (On a side note, Oxford A4 notebooks have fantastically smooth paper). (On another side note, paperblanks don’t score so highly here, as their paper is slightly textured).

If the paper is rough, I can swap to writing with fibre-tips, but it’s not the same. I just love the way the nib of my parker pen seems to float ink over the page.

And size is important too – yes it really is! ;) When I’m writing I prefer A4, but for journaling, A5 is more comfortable. An A4 pages is big and blank, it’s hard to tell a secret to, A5 is cosy and inviting. Even the briefest of thoughts fills a chunk of space.

So I’m keeping my eye out for the perfect journal, I just hope I find one before I fill up these last few pages.