The Whodunnit group gathered at Euston’s Wellcome Collection for their regular meeting on Saturday 25th January - where their numbers were swelled by members of other NWP groups, and even some newcomers - to celebrate a decade of the project and to mark the stepping down (but not stepping away!) of one of its co-founders, Simon Wrigley.
Inspired by Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style coupled with a focus on voice - and then by the exhibitions at the Wellcome: Play Well, Being Human and Misbehaving Bodies - writing was, as ever, varied and distinctive. From Stanislavsky to snails, buckets to bathrooms, cancer to Argos catalogues, writers shared their efforts to say the unsayable.
Perhaps the dynamic of writing in a space like the Wellcome Collection comes from the disruption afforded by the tension inherent in art and in good museum curation. A disruption that provokes interesting writing.
We raised the roof of the Wellcome’s reading room with diverse voices telling diverse stories on diverse subjects. They were by turns funny, frivolous, far-seeing and philosophical.
The occasion was all that the NWP embodies. It was about using writing as a way of understanding, to explore and to be playful, to permit and to be permissive.
Jeni Smith, the projects’s other co-founder and Simon Wrigley’s partner in crime (this was the Whodunnit group, after all) spoke movingly about Simon’s immeasurable work in setting up and sustaining the NWP: the thousands of miles traversed and thousands of pounds spent in setting up groups up and down the country; a determination to succeed borne of suppressed rage and sadness at the straitjackets imposed on writing teachers in the contemporary educational climate.
Simon was presented, fittingly, with a hand-bound book of writing: of poems, personal messages, stories, and anecdotes from NWP members past and present; each uniquely commemorating the love, esteem, appreciation and gratitude felt for the man and his work.
So we walk away collectively energised to write - for ourselves first and foremost - and for our students; because the more writing we do, the better we get at writing with them.
