Writing Competition Runner Up: Robyn Curtis

Through The Wood

Don't fear this wood

though its thin growth shivers your skin;

these mists and whispers,

this slightness is your own voice;

 

it doesn't matter

what shape, what leaning, each leaf, tree

what weeping, what bright blazing -

each has his own mould;

 

once you too were floating spores

settling on the skin of ripe fruits

like a balm or an irritation,

a bloom or a pallid woe;

 

briar can cling, entwine with runners

but puts her own roots in the soil;

a seed falling on good ground doesn't need a gardener.

 

***

 

so take wing with the linnets in the evening;

settle on a branch

fly off

tap tap the earth where you will

perch on the shoulder of another

they will be pleased to hold your weight a while.

 

And if there's bleeding from thorn and bramble

walk right through

like a dreamer

it's only pain leaving -

 

only listen to your forest sounds,

your special friends trust

that your bird-tongue

speaks your truth.

 

This poem came through several incarnations – I knew I wanted to write about a transformative process and that it had to be in nature.

I also wanted a mythological feel and was thinking of Persephone – but it didn’t really come to life until I put my own self into it. I also wanted it to be a kind of help, a teaching, that it is OK to go into the darkness when you have to. Resisting is not going to get you through to the other side. And the other side is more of a self not tossed around by the needs and wishes of others, but a self who can know pain, be OK that it hurts but also know you can be as light as a bird once you know that you are really free in your soul. Sounds a tall order! But I find the more I am in nature, the more I am helped to see the way through difficulty – not by avoiding but by being part of our world in all its pain and glory.

It's really just about becoming oneself, I suppose – sounds easy! But for many of us it is far from easy. It’s worth the walk in the woods though – there is so much to learn. Autumn's my favourite time of year, September, colouring up and ripening and the air moving. It’s been a hard summer, grief coming unexpectedly in the middle of holidays. So I welcome Autumn even more than usual. The house martins have flown off leaving a strange quiet round the house. Harvests are in and the fields and hills losing their August gold as we all start to think about preparing for winter in a slightly leaky house. It’s gathering time and a good healing to collect wood, light fires, share some cosiness with our loved ones.

And out with the notebook and wait to see what comes along. 

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to share my poem and thoughts on WildWords and, as Winter moves in, I hope you've all had a fruitful Autumn. 

Writing Competition Runner Up: Nina George

I am a writer. This has been difficult to say and own about myself, submitting my writing to Wild Words is me stepping into this place.

I have followed the blog for some time; the writing intrigues me and, no brainer, anything “wild”. I liked the fact that you were asked to submit at solstice, I am a pagan so this was good for me. I procrastinate so deadlines are also good for me. The best thing was that I loved the prompt/quote. Travelling had long been my “thing” when I was younger, and travelling inward also, now that I am older. I felt claimed by this and knew I would have something to say/write about this.

I always at least start, if not write all, of my first drafts in pen on paper. This way, I can write anywhere and capture those moments the awe (inspiration) strikes and I don’t have to have my computer nearby. Writing on trains, waiting in airports, snatched moments or sitting outside.

I also love the way that I can write really fast – on the edge of the subconscious maybe – and interesting stuff can come out this way.

I write quickly, trying not to overthink things too much, to see what happens. I use an ink pen whenever possible as this means that I can write really quickly. I love the feel of an ink pen on the paper as well.

I don’t edit too much as I am drafting, unless it is very obvious to me or just isn’t working. As this subject “spoke” to me, the words came relatively easily. Editing the word count though, was a whole other issue. When I had typed out my draft, I had nearly 1,500 words. And I liked them all. I determined to use this as an exercise in fearless editing. I know I can use many words to wax lyrical, being precise is not usually my art.

It felt, at times, like slash and burn farming, but I tweaked and pulled at the piece.

Tried to strike that knife-edge balance between brutal and careful. Second draft made it to 1,236. I took a deep breath and went back in. Third time I got to under the 1,000 mark. I took a second deep breath and sent the piece off.

The Role of The Body

As people who like to write and tell stories we can have a tendency to believe that our mind is the primary player in our chosen discipline.

While it obviously plays a key role, the thinking mind is also partly responsible for creating and sustaining many blocks to creativity. When we involve our bodies as well as our minds when we tell stories, we change the status quo and dissolve many of those blocks. We discover a way of operating that is similar to the way in which animals function in the wild. In this sense, we re-find a ‘natural’ state of storytelling. We become ‘wild writers’ – unblocked, prolific, satisfied and successful in our chosen field. 

Put simply, the process goes like this: The storyteller experiences life from an embodied vantage point. (How can it be otherwise? Our body sensations, emotions, thoughts, perceptions and images all reside and influence each other there). They then assigns that embodied experience to their character or narrator. The reader/listener then feels that experience as they read or listen. It is from the physical body of the storyteller, to the body of the narrator/character, and then to the body of the reader, that meaning is transmitted.

A key idea comes out of this: the more strongly the storyteller is in touch with all aspects of their embodied experience - particularly their body sensations, and the relationship between them, the more strongly the reader or listener will be impacted by the narrative.

Conversely, if they are only aware of their thoughts, not their bodily sensations or emotions for example, the receiver will be impacted very little. The role of the storyteller’s embodied experience is fundamental to the creative process.

Another idea that is key to the Wild Words work is that what happens on the page is a reflection of the behavioural patterns that the storyteller demonstrates in other areas of their lives. When we look at the page or listen to an oral tale, we glean clues to the functioning of the writer/storyteller. Conversely, if you work with your relationship to your embodied experience, you can fundamentally affect what happens on your page, or in the telling of stories (‘true’ or imagined), to others.

At Wild Words, the crafts of writing and storytelling are taught from the ‘bottom up’. This means that the most physical level of the storyteller’s being- the body, is considered the most important focus, and the thinking mind, with its meaning and narrative-making, is of secondary importance.  Here we’re turning traditional writing tuition on its head. In the writing world, I’m doing the equivalent of telling you that the world is round when you’ve always been told it was flat. Exciting isn’t it!

Is the end of sitting in a room learning ‘writing techniques’?

Certainly, as writers we have a tendency towards over-thinking, over-analysing, and self-criticism. This often takes us further away from being in touch with a ‘natural state’ of writing, and our innate ability to tell great stories. Many, if not most, writing classes exacerbate this problem, by teaching us to ‘think more’ in order to be a better writers.

When we use only our thinking minds, and set up ideas of what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ on the page, it’s always a quick fix. We don’t identify and deal with the source of problems, nor learn to make the most of the opportunities that come our way. Our creativity does not improve sustainably. However, nowhere in this course do I suggest that we jettison our thinking mind completely. It’s a valuable asset to the storyteller-writer, if used correctly. What I do suggest is that we re-prioritise and re-order the process.

When we do that, we are shocked and delighted to discover that the body is a powerful ally in the quest to live, communicate, and write well. It ‘knows’.

We can learn to listen and respond to its cues. To do this we must re-train the body-mind relationship, as well as, where necessary, make unconscious material, conscious. Then we too will have the awareness, and dare I say it, wisdom, to achieve our goals.

A Writing Room of My Own: Diane Woodrow

When I was feeling lost, scared, depressed or any of those other things that make it impossible to sleep I would dream of having a room of my own; a room I could just be me in.

Not somewhere with another function but just where I could sit and look. I have had many rooms of my own but they were bed-sitting rooms or even just bedrooms of my own; always rooms with other functions. When I would dream of this room it would always come with a view of something beautiful, of something that would hold my eye and take me away even from this perfect place of perfect room.

I gave my room away one day.

I shared my safe place with a friend who was suicidal. For me that dream of the room of my own gave me hope and solace. I wanted to help him find that hope and solace too. He killed himself when he was in the his house on his own. For four years I struggled to regain my dream as I struggled with my grief but the Lord is good and now my dream no longer a dream but has become a reality.

We sold our house and moved over two hundred and fifty miles away and now I have my room of my own which has no purpose other than to let me be. Yes I do things in it, write, read, keep in touch with friends, build a website to set up my new venture, and it holds my stuff; those things that are inherently mine – pictures, quotes, books, that I do not want to share with those who pass through the rest of my home.

But mainly this room is for me to watch the seasons.

I am blessed by having a large sycamore tree on the verge opposite and then a view to hills beyond. I can sit and look, watch the seasons going past. Today my view of the Victorian mock castle is obscured by the sycamore in full leaf but in not too many months the tree will be bare, my view will change, but the constant will be that this room is mine and mine alone. 

 www.barefootatthekitchentable.weebly.com 
 www.aspirationaladventures.wordpress.com
 

On Samhain

      Since men wrenched back the clocks, twilight catches me unawares.

The night steals in stealthily, and lands fast. Tonight will be imbued with magic. Samhain- the turning of the year. The going into the dark. I watch through the office window, as the soft light casts long shadows, and fades. Like powder cast into water, dissolving, tinged with melancholy.  And strangeness.

      Hauling on my rucksack, and tucking trousers into socks, I go out into the sharp air. I smell wood-smoke. A chill fog moves in. The twilight hangs like a fine veil between the worlds. I think about ghosts. Of my wonderful Grandmother, not long gone. I want to be home before I am encased in darkness, and the army of witchy creatures from all history, swoop down at me.

      I climb on to the bike, and ride for home.  I turn on the lights, but the beam only sharpens the fog, and bounces back to me. Fiery-copper autumn trees are half-seen. Mistaken and morphed. They recede from my eye, like boats sailing away into the mist. The silent turning world.

      Now you see things. Now you don’t. Now you see things. Now you don’t.

      Descending the hill, my hands tighten on the handlebars. My Grandmother flashes into my mind. She imprints herself upon me. Her hands snap into position where mine should be. ‘Off we go then’ she says, in the spirit of adventure. And my heart flips over. Tears swell to my eyes silently, softly, achingly.

      I can’t find her at all in the outside world, but she sometimes takes up residence in my body like this. I am not consumed by grief. I am disoriented by it. It is her absolute presence and absolute absence that confounds me. She is so clear, but when I reach out, I put my hand through clouds.

      Now I see her. Now I don’t. Now I hear her. Now I don’t.

      Flying down the mountain to the plain, I see it from far away. The mute, scarlet, swinging blink, of an ambulance light cutting through the fog.

     I freewheel alongside the empty country airfield. Where the airfield ends and a field of maize begins, a helicopter sits like a resting dragonfly, limp winged, alongside the ambulance. There is the jagged remains of crashed glider too, glowing white in the dark. I guess that it came down too steeply, before the runway. Its face is shattered into a thousand pieces across the shorn grass ground.

      A group of silent, uniformed men are standing, quietly, head bowed, as if round a grave.  They shelter a still, prone form from view. A tableau. They don’t move for a long time.

      I bring my bike to a halt, somehow inside the drama. Alone on the deserted road I peer at the scene through the half-light. The smell of newly-turned harvest soil in my nostrils. No one moves. No one looks over. The utter silence roars. 

      It’s hard to get a grip of what’s happening. Slowly, piecing the half-seen together, I realise that the unremitting flashing light of the ambulance is pacing out a death scene. The uniformed men, bearing the sad disappointment of how life turns out in the end, move medical equipment away.  There is nothing more to be done.

      My grandmother’s voice chortles in my ear ‘Well, well, well’. And that small, sharp intake of breath that she used to do, escapes my lungs.

      The men perfunctorily turn a blanket out to cover what they guard. They carry it to the helicopter, its weight causing their gait to roll.  I know there is a person under there.

      My Grandmother’s head, (or possibly it’s my head?), shakes slowly in disbelief. Hers was a proper death at almost 94, not like this young thing, gone at perhaps a quarter of that.

      Now you see me. Now you don’t. Now you’re here. Now you’re not.

      The utter silence roars.

      I am lost in other bodies, swathed in death. And all I want to do now is to fly from it. Shake them all off. Turn on the silenced siren to blast through the fog.  That something might reach me.

      Don’t let the light fade. Don’t let the light fade.

      On I pedal. I go fast, fast. In order to jerk myself awake. I want to come back from between the worlds. I try to contact the fall of my feet on the pedals, and my breath. I latch on to beacons of colour. I drink in the amber and gold-sparking chrysanthemums, that wait outside houses. They will be placed on graves, on tomorrow’s Day Of The Dead. My eyes can’t get enough of the glittering citron poplar trees, and the popping ruby berries strung along the road.  

      And when I arrive home I grasp too the bubbling laughter of my son, and the scratch of the pouncing kitten, to bring me back to the land of the living.

      In the evening, at official celebrations of All Hallows, I am delighted to be only with those who still breathe. There is the pulsing, crackling fire. There is sharp cold-slap on my face as I surface from the bobbing bucket, a scarlet apple clenched between teeth, juice sour in my mouth.

     The dead are absent and life blazes. Hypnotised by the flames, I hear, in their dancing flicker, these words-

 Live fiercely, while you can.

Hold those you love very tight.

Don’t waste a second on discord.

Set a blaze in your heart.

Because one day, too soon,

A veil will be thrown between you and them,

And you will be gone into darkness. 

A Writer's Process: Penny Asquith Evans

I can’t say, hand on heart, that writing is always a complete joy for me.

I persevere through very dark days with Morning Pages, practically screaming with frustration at how long it can take to write three meagre, miserable pages of meaningless drivel.

But then there are those blissful days of flow. When your writing transports you to another time and place. Your hand can’t keep up with the outpouring of words, turning, twisting and tumbling over one another to be heard, diving onto the page with the force of a waterfall crashing into the valley below.

It isn’t necessarily easy to work out how to get into that state of flow, although, for me, it helps to have a definite end-point in mind.

Most recently, this was an article about ‘being brave’ for a travel writing competition.

The particular time and place was easy to choose, and I knew how to relate my story to the brief. All I had to do after that was write the thousand words! I dabbled for days on end, making notes, writing, re-writing, and abandoning an opening sentence artlessly designed to grab the reader’s attention. I went for long, solitary walks, muttering endlessly to myself as I tried to coax the article into being.

With only two days left until the submission deadline and nothing to show for my efforts, in desperation I took myself off into the countryside, and set up a makeshift writing desk on my favourite picnic table, next to a fast-flowing stream in the heart of the Derbyshire Dales.

I closed my eyes, and listened to the sound of the water rippling over stones, catching the occasional ‘plink’ of a fish leaping out of the water in pursuit of a fly. Soothed by the sound of the wind rustling in the trees, and the feel of the breeze catching an errant strand of hair, it became easy to take myself back to my big, brave adventure. Suddenly, I was back in Yosemite, climbing up the steep, rocky path to Vernal Falls, bathing in a rainbow of spray.

Words gushed out in a torrent; sights, sounds, smells all as fresh in my mind as the day I had been there, and as my mind wandered through the memories, the emotions came back with vivid clarity as well.

The article pretty much wrote itself after that, and though it didn’t win any prizes, for me, it was probably the most authentic piece of writing I had ever done, and I was immensely proud of that. 

On Emotion

The Wild Words Retreat. Photographed by Peter Reid. 

Emotion is common to us all. It’s basic to our experience of being a human animal.

Reading or listening to stories imbued with emotion stimulates much more of the brain than reading an emotionless account would do. The empathy areas light up, and oxytocin, a chemical related to feelings of love and trust, is released.
 
When our words are imbued with emotion, for both the storyteller, and the listener or reader, it’s like having the wild animal very close, breathing down our neck.
 
These wild words hook the reader. The power and the passion within them sweeps us along, all the way to the end of the story. There is nothing tame about these words, nothing predictable. They live in extremis. One moment the receiver is roused to laughter and joy, the next they are devastated by tragedy. Hooked by emotion, they journey with the narrator/lead character. It’s quite a trip.
 
Rachel Shirley gives a relevant example of how to work with emotion on the page. She explains that you could write,
 
She waited by the door. She felt so frightened, she thought she would begin to panic.
 
However, it would be stronger to write,
 
She waited by the door. Her heartbeat thrummed against her ribcage, her mouth tasted like iron and her breaths hitched in her throat.
 
Although wild words are infused with emotion, as you’ll have noticed in the above example, the emotion is often not named on the page.

Instead the experience of feeling emotion in the body, which is actually the experience of the intensifying of bodily sensations, is described. As these experiences are common to all of us, we know exactly what emotion is being experienced, even if it’s not named. Indeed, it’s more impactful for not being named.
 
Below is a wonderful (if stomach turning) example of how to work with emotion on the page, from Ian Fleming’s ‘Casino Royal’. Le Chiffre is torturing Bond. Notice how the emotions are never named, but there is attention to the detail of bodily sensations.
 
Bond's whole body arched in an involuntary spasm. His face contracted in a soundless scream and his lips drew right away from his teeth. At the same time his head flew back with a jerk showing the taut sinews of his neck. For an instant, muscles stood out in knots all over his body and his toes and fingers clenched until they were quite white. Then his body sagged and perspiration started to bead all over his body. He uttered a deep groan.