Lin Goram shares her reflections on writing in public spaces after a recent NWP meeting.

It was busy again at the cathedral refectory. Lots of people coming and going, including a couple who shared our table for a while. We talked about the possibility of booking a private room to meet, and meeting in spaces created and designed for writers to write together. Meeting to talk, read and write together in public spaces feels important: it is a social activity and one which can be commonplace and unremarkable, in the mix with eating scones, drinking (excellent) coffee and chatting with friends or relatives.

In this session we wrote about nature, about the small but precise things we can notice and record in our everyday, outside lives. We warmed up our words, ironically, with words about the cold: monochrome, grey, fresh, crisp – and Mark’s lovely dialect words: hozzy nozzy, among others! As usual, Gilbert White’s observations in his diaries were a starting point. Our short diary entries for this morning inevitably focused on the current cold snap: crisp, frosty doorsteps and grey colours. Observing with precision, then distilling these observations into short but vivid descriptions is harder than it sounds!

The writing of Laurie Lee (Village Christmas) and Charles Dickens (Bleak House) led to writing about warm and cold places: Mark’s snow-covered beach and Helen’s unexpected encounter in Venice. It led us to talk about how we had written about places where things meet: home (a warm bed in a cold room), a wintery beach (snow and sand), Venice (British and American tourists), Romney Marsh – my choice (land and sky). I love to share what I’ve written, though for me it is always about making the words I’ve written real by saying them out loud. As we share our reading, there is the occasional nod of heads as we can picture the voices, the landscapes, an image or sound.

There is something about being in the cathedral – the natural light, the bustle – which contrasted with the quiet phases of writing. Another unexpected pairing.