NWP Whodunit group convener Marjory Caine writes about the evolution of her writing group over the last year of lockdowns.

Subject: NWP Whodunit 14.3.20
Dear NWP Whodunit Teachers,
We’re meeting this Saturday at the British Library…

Not many of us turned up to that session! The fear of travel on public transport was already infecting our lives. But it was difficult to know how to write during a worldwide plague. My next email began:

Subject: Teachers as Writers Whodunnit Saturday 6th and Saturday 13th June 2020
Hi, our next session is scheduled for Saturday 13th June. I suggest a bit of a change to meet the extraordinary circumstances we find ourselves in….We will meet on zoom…

By the time of our next scheduled meeting, life as we knew it had changed completely. I remember that first zoom. Yes, it was great to see fellow writers again after so long, but that was the same as the usual coffee pre-writing meet up. This time, it was relief to see us still here. And then, the personal worries and experiences of each of us could be put aside for the time of our writing.

I had chosen walking writers as the focus – and wow, was it amazing what the group came up with for
‘your street, your lane, your garden, your footpath’. The prompt was simply to jot down a few words, phrases to describe what you focus on. Trees, wild flowers growing in the cracks of pavements, a bird call, the clouds.  

I can still see Susie’s description of flowers escaping through city railings in their exuberance of colours, shapes and scents.

As a group, we decided that as we had few social engagements that we would prefer to meet up more regularly, rather than keeping to the termly sessions. So, we have found character from archaeological artifacts and sites; nature writing from detailed observation and research; landscapes real and imagined; description of months and what they can mean to us – and this took us back to Anglo-Saxon ideas which we meshed with our own experiences.

Theresa’s evocation of the past and present became ‘Bronze Age Sister in my Sussex Country’ – a powerful meeting across the millennia:

Only fifteen minutes’ away through green
tree tunnel towns
when I put my foot
down early till I reach
South Downs Way and I come to you,
wending upwards
via gentlest graduations,
then steep slopes.
Half an hour to the top
non-stop although that’s hard
to do because of your view that shouts to be heard

 Katie’s vivid, in the moment, description of snow in the turning point of the year –

When winter raged in a silent
Manic confetti of calm, and it
Smashed softly into our coats,
Latching, glittering, onto lashes,
Hitching lifts on the tops of our trainers,

As the leader of the group, I’ve enjoyed preparing material to share with others, and to build on their personal responses that take the topics in so many different directions – all at once – as multiple directions are possible, of course.

It is the variety of the responses of the group that has really got me writing. And, as we have begun an e-booklet of polished session writing, I look forward to reading the next set of contributions from my fellow writers.

First of all, I will have to polish my own piece!