Elves in the Basement

In this post, a version of which was first published in Autumn 2015, following the launch of the 26th NWP writing group, NWP co-founder Simon Wrigley reflects on the power and peculiar workings of the imagination and the implications for writing.

Frazzled by the new term though they already were, Luton teachers talked and wrote about, amongst other things, a father’s memory,  the nervous rattle of cup on saucer in the hands of a straight-backed woman, and how a daughter could summon her mother to her bedside by running away. These images and ideas emerged from collaboration.  And there was pleasure, surprise and energy as the teachers overcame their fears and re-acquainted  themselves with the peculiar power of writing lives observed, remembered and imagined.

 ‘Elves in the basement’ was how the neuroscientist, Peter Tse, described the internal workings of the imagination.  This was part of a discussion of ‘ imagination’ on The Forum, Radio 4 29.8.2015.

Apparently brain scans show that some neuronal networks are more active when ‘day-dreaming’ than when the brain is ‘task-oriented’ , and that when we are busy imagining, our ‘elves’  hop about between our conscious and unconscious. So, encouraging imaginative play realises potential while too much ‘deliberative’ action may limit learning. 

Arundhati Subramaniam, who was part of this same discussion, spoke about the verbal choreography of poetry which provoked understandings beyond - and sometimes before - the literal.  It allowed you ‘to get from one point to another without realising how the dots had been joined.’ She also made a special claim for poetry being ‘the only verbal art that embraces silences – the high voltage zones from which a poem draws its life.’ 

She quoted the third of her ‘Quick fix memos for difficult days’,

Some nights you’ve seen enough of earth and sky for one lifetime
But know you still have unfinished business with both.

Six years’ of evidence from NWP groups shows that such a model of voluntary, collaborative creativity is valued by many teachers – and has measurable value to the pupils they teach.  NWP not only supports teachers’ sense of professional agency, but also introduces them to approaches which inform, engage and enrich their writing classrooms.

No more guilt about carving out creative space

Whodunnit Group Convener Marjory Caine discusses her return to writing through NWP.

‘Yes, I used to write, too.’

This was in response to a chance conversation at a NATE session on writing led by Simon Wrigley. We had been asked to jot down our writing memories and then discuss. Was this current lack of writing present across the whole English teaching cohort?

I joined the Whodunnit Group and found many tentative writers – those of us who wanted to write but just did not have the confidence, the time, the incentive, the stimulus. You name it, we had the excuse – but yet we asked our students to write every day – and then judged them.

Simon and Jeni’s approach was a breath of freshness into a classroom practice stultified by assessment objectives and fronted adverbials. As a group, we learnt to write together and share, and appreciate the richness writing brings to us as teachers, and now, writers too.

At the same time, I had started a doctorate investigating the creative writing of my A Level English Language students’ creative writing coursework (yes, in that brief flowering of creative opportunity in the classroom). What I had researched I found in the community of practice of the NWP meetings. 

And I found my voice.

It was a thrice trepanned skull in the Wellcome Collection. And that was where I found a way into the Neolithic world of my character, Rhia. Each writing session would end up with another appearance by her. And then I started writing at home. I made time. I thought about plot and structure. I shared my writing fears with my students. And wrote alongside them. Confidence improved both in the students and in me.

Writing retreats were made possible. I no longer felt guilty about carving out creative space. Here were members from other NWP groups who were willing to share and support. I felt like a writer. I thought like a writer.

And there was always another session with Simon leading our group with exciting and varied prompts. Then came the time when Simon asked me to lead the group. Since then, I have enjoyed the termly challenge of sourcing my source material. The venues are always stimulating because the group members are keen to write. We have been walking writers through Roman London, stood by the River Thames and heard its song, gazed into the faces at the National Portrait Gallery, toured the many stories in Westminster Abbey and many more. Always, I am amazed by the variety and breadth of writing that emerges from a Saturday morning in London.

In the seven years I have been with NWP I have changed from being someone who used to write, to someone who writes regularly, because it is part of who I am. I enjoy the creation of a poem, a piece of prose. I write fiction and non-fiction. I respond to my environment, to the people I know, to new experiences. Having my work valued by the group has given me the right to say that I am a writer who writes. Playing with language, working at finding the best phrase, figuring out a poetic rhythm: these are challenges that enrich my writing life.

Yes, I write. I am a writer.

Giving voice to the things inside

Teacher Writer Katie Kibbler shares her NWP journey - and tips for curing a hangover…

I joined NWP’s Whodunnit group towards the end of 2017. I had known about NWP since I was a PGCE student in 2014, when Simon Wrigley had been to give a workshop on book-making at the Cambridge Faculty of Education. I hadn’t attended a group because I’d always found an excuse: I’d start when I’d completed my NQT year; I’d never be able to make 10am meets on a Saturday morning; I didn’t have time, I didn’t have energy, Friday evenings in the pub poisoned all my creative juices and I couldn’t write on a hangover. After three years at my first school, in 2017 I had decided to leave and join the Children’s Hospital School at GOSH and UCH. The move gave me the freedom, time and sleep that I just hadn’t had as a newbie teacher in a high-octane inner London academy. 

A few weeks into my new job, I stumbled onto the NWP website while trying to find some creative writing prompts for a student and found the list of teacher writing groups. I emailed Simon, the group leader for Whodunnit. This wasn’t the first time - I’d emailed him a year before, and chickened out of attending. Apparently forgiving my previous flakiness, Simon was very warm in his reply, and gave me the joining details: I was very welcome, writing expertise was not a prerequisite, and in a lovely twist of chance, the group would next meet in the Wellcome cafe - a twenty minute cycle from my home, purveyor of excellent cakes, and promisingly friendly in name. I told myself I’d just turn up, do one session, and if I was terrible I could just abandon it on the pile of my other failed whims, along with rocket yoga, jam-making and knitting giant snoods. 

I arrived sweaty and windswept, slung my bike up on Euston Road and pushed through the revolving doors into the shiny calm of the museum. Saturday sluggishness became a nervous fizz, as I found most of the group already set up, cafe tables pulled together, hands wrapped around frothy coffees in thick turquoise cups - and my new colleague, Emma, perched on a stool. We hadn’t discussed the group together - neither of us knew the other would be there - and the coincidence was confirmation that I had come to the right place, both in terms of the group and my new school. The session ended with the group sharing our morning’s writing upstairs in the reading room and being told off for too much giggling. I had approximately zero regrets about attending, and since then I’ve tried to attend every meet (even during a hiatus in Uganda last year, I used the prompts remotely). Completing my journey from scared, sheepish, semi-coherent-on-a-Saturday starter to fully-fledged NWP enthusiast, I jumped at the chance to double my writing group attendance when Alison, a Whodunnit stalwart, invited us to join her Wembley group too. 

In the groups, we take time to reflect on the process of writing as a person and as a professional: a teacher, and a human. What I knew but didn’t understand was that I had always written (from painful teenage poetry to spoof features in a university newspaper to silly blogs about early-career car crashes in the classroom) - but nothing I’d regard as ‘proper’ writing. If I couldn’t be Dylan Thomas or Zadie Smith, what was the point? What NWP has shown me is that the point for us (as teachers, as humans) is the same as it is for our young people: to give voice to the things inside that we don’t always find the place or time to say; to do something we find creative, good and challenging; to feel part of a supportive community; to look closely at and set in context the small and extraordinary and banal and enormous things we don’t have time to in the rush of an ordinary timetable. Nobody cares if it is 'good' or 'bad', or agrees on what those qualities look like. Whenever I find the mean voice of necessity trying to stymie the pure, free-wheeling pleasure of a free-write, or the unpretty bloom of an idea, I speak to myself the words of reassurance I’d offer a student: writing is not self-indulgent, it is being alive to the world around you. It isn’t egoism to write; it is empathy.

It sounds dramatic, but being part of the NWP groups has changed my teaching and my life (and made me see how much of our life we put into teaching, and how much teaching gets into life - how porous that boundary is). I am now teaching in the mainstream classroom again, and credit our NWP writing groups with helping preserve my sense of self when I’m at home (or away, as I was last year), and when I’m standing firm about the type of teacher I want to be in school: the type who runs Creative Writing Club using the same format as our teacher writing groups (albeit in slightly less stately surroundings than a London gallery, with less caffeine and more crisps); who tries to model creative writing as a point about courage, process and spontaneity, instead of precision, assessment objectives and attainment. I have recycled whole NWP sessions as two-hour writing workshops for my Year 10s in a bid to avoid death by GCSE practice papers - the students’ writing was miles better than normal, and so was my lesson planning. And in a less soaring-strings orchestral epiphany kind of way, being part of NWP has improved my (wait for it) marking, feedback and analysis, too: it’s so much more natural and genuine for me to say what I think is interesting about a piece of writing, why it is working, how it is working and what it is making me feel and think, now that I’ve started to regularly get inside writing myself and drive the car - and now it’s not the sleek ride of self-reflexive non-fiction, but the honest, unfinished chaos of a soapbox racer. It’s made me simultaneously more rigorous about teaching writing, and more compassionate; speaking from a position of ‘I do this too, and we are in this together’ is so powerful for the students. The teacher gets to be the person who writes with us, not the master who presents the task of writing to us. 

Please, go and find your own NWP group - and if there isn’t one close, make your own! Whatever excuses you’re making for yourself, stop. For what it’s worth, I’m pleased to report that there’s no hangover a coffee and a communal writing session won’t help. 

Wellcome Celebrations

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.

10 Years of NWP

The National Writing Project is now a decade old in the UK: a worthy achievement and a significant milestone deserving of celebration.

At its heart that is ten years of encouraging and supporting teachers to become experts in the teaching of writing through a network of teachers’ writing groups. London’s ‘Whodunit group’ is one of the oldest and well-established of these, so it is fitting that it is their meeting this month which is being taken over to mark this special anniversary on Saturday 25th January.

We will meet at the Wellcome Collection, a museum on the Euston Road in London, in the cafe at 10am. NWP co-founder, Jeni Smith promises ‘writing fun and games’ between 10am and 1pm. The current exhibition at the Wellcome is called ‘Play Well’ and considers the transformational impact of play in our lives, so prompts will, of course, be appropriately playful!

All are welcome to join us. If you are an NWP member past or present, or considering becoming one in the future - and you are in London that weekend - come out and play! It will be the perfect opportunity to meet up with others from the NWP community, to write, to share, and to celebrate how far the project has come.

Started back in 2009 by Jenifer Smith, University of East Anglia, and by Simon Wrigley, English adviser for Buckinghamshire, 2004-2013, and chair of NATE, 2004-6, the UK’s project built on the long-running, successful US National Writing Project. Since then it has evolved through exciting partnerships, research and collaboration, carefully cultivated by the huge commitment, creative ideas and winning inspiration of Jeni and Simon.

Here’s to the next decade!

November 2019: Change is afoot

November 2019 Change is afoot at the National Writing Project.

Alongside our shiny new website - and new and invigorated social media platforms - we have plenty of new faces on board to help Simon Wrigley and Jeni Smith move the project forward into its next phase.

At its core, it remains a network of teachers' writing groups, run by teachers for teachers. It is still a grass-roots, not-for-profit, teacher-owned research project that aims to explore writing and find out further answers to the question, 'What happens when teachers gather together to write and share their writing?' But we have done some further thinking about our principles and values, and about how best to promote them.

The first is that we work together to foster and celebrate the authentic voices of teachers and children across all phases of education. That means that in our ‘galleries’ on the website, for example, we will aim to do more celebration of the work that writing teachers and children do. And by ‘authentic’ we mean real writing - writing that diverges from formulaic structures and ‘Lego linguistics’ and encourages genuine independent voices to emerge in the classroom and beyond.

It is taking us a little while to transfer everything over from the old website, but you can still see favourite resources there at https://thenationalwritingproject.weebly.com/ , so fear not, nothing is lost - but please bear with us as we transfer everything over. Meanwhile, happy writing.