Lin Goram reflects on a supersized Norwich Writing Teachers’ Group March Meeting
Date: Saturday 23rd March 2024
An unusually big group met at Norwich Cathedral this week – snagging and completely filling a big corner table. Before we started writing we all shared news and a lot of this centred on change – Sarah’s move to a rural school and successful writing workshops, my new job in teacher education, Rebecca’s recent circus workshops for home-education groups, Caroline’s first time writing with us.
Today’s writing was centred around the theme of time – we began with words and phrases associated with time. Lots of interesting words and phrases popped up, including ‘every nob and his dog’, ‘witching hour’, ‘the sun’s over the yardarm’. This led to some free writing using one of our words and phrases as a starting point. A long queue for coffee meant that we had started late, so carried on with writing with plans to share at the end.
Ann Patchett says: ‘There is no such thing as an old book; if you haven’t read it yet, it’s always going to be new to you.’ Jeni’s ‘new book’ is Niall Williams’ This is Happiness, in which he captures small moments – precise memories – in just a few words; and tells rambling stories that focus on the teller as much as the story in long, unwieldy sentences. We had a go at doing both, inspired by Le Guin’s writing exercise: write your story in one sentence. Some of our sentences were short moments, others were long stories. Moments shared included the birth of two of our children, a childhood memory of running downhill with Grandad at Framlingham Castle, wandering through Portobello market just last week. Stories shared included an early, silent commute to work, a trip to Mount Everest, young cousins fighting, a memorable trip to Israel.
Sandwiched in-between our Niall Williams writing, Jeni read two poems called ‘Today’, by Billy Collins and Frank O’Hara. I do love the Collins’ poem: I chose to read it at my niece’s naming day. ‘A spring day so perfect…so etched in sunlight’. There was spring in the air as we wrote – though some rain too! Suzanne shared her ‘today’ and captured our moment of writing.
We talked about time and the things we had chosen to write about: we’d recalled moments from our childhoods, from our younger days, from our current lives: from last week, last year, last century. Some of the things we had chosen to write about were one-off, treasured moments. Others were the repeated, habitual experiences of our lives, memorable because they are woven into our days and nights. As well as being rooted in a particular time of day or time in our life our memories were also rooted firmly in a place, so that remembering a particular place took us to a particular time. It seems that time and place are hard to unweave.
I wonder which times and places you could write about in one short sentence, and which would be long, wandering tales?
Next Norwich Group Meeting: Norwich C of E Cathedral, Saturday 27th April 2024 from 10:30am