I have been circling around this piece of writing for a while now. My recent reading has set me thinking – Simon Armitage’s Oxford lectures, Annie Dillard’s essays in The Abundance, Richard Mabey on nature writing, reflections on Hilary Mantel – but I continue to circle, unable to reach a satisfactory resolution. Sometimes writing goes like that: more time, more thinking, needed.

Then, in the last three days, I have had two glorious, joyous, hopeful face to face encounters. On Thursday, our school Writing Club met after school for the first time in several years (we have been squeezing into lunch times) and on Saturday, five of us from the Norwich Writing Teachers group met in person for the first time since January 2020. I have loved our on-line workshops. During the height of the pandemic, they seemed like a sacred space where teachers and, often, their children, met on screen against the background of home. The on-line workshops have allowed us to write with people from across the country. When time differences have allowed, we have even written alongside a teacher from Dominica. It has been, and continues to be special. But, oh, the pleasure in sitting around a small cafe table with our pastries and our cooling cups of coffee. We didn’t write. We talked. There was so much to say and conversation flowed in between and over itself in ways that a Zoom meeting does not make easy.

Our talk was of the classroom, of our reading and our writing, our hopes and ambitions and the obstacles that stand in our way. As always, I worry if we are not writing. Our notebooks and pens lay untouched. Rightly so. We orientated ourselves. We discovered how things had changed for us all, and how they remain the same; the importance of placing children at the centre of our thinking; the nonsense that pervades schools and stands in the way of growth, despite the rhetoric; the courageous head teachers who place children’s happiness at the forefront of their thinking; the ways that each person around the table finds ways to open up possibilities for those they teach; the ways we make reading and writing a special part of children’s lives.

On Thursday, I met with the three children who had signed up for Writing Club. It has always been a popular activity in the school and I am sure it will be so again. There were two Year 1 children and one from Year 3. As always we began with words. It never ceases to please me! Off we went, one word each: heffalump pizza amungus sketti bolognaisi.  That was so enjoyable and so quick that we did another round. Let’s do foods, I said, taking their lead: raspberry oranges curry apples. And then we did four more rounds: scrabble chess jigsaw bingo; swimming walking bobbling climbing; turquoise bobbly blue  (lots of giggles) pink gold; red shoes, my pyjamas, flower dress, woolly jumper. There is something exhilarating about compiling lists of words together. There is laughter and there are pauses for explanations (the pyjamas are hard to get on but she likes to wear them as soon as she gets home from school). We discover it is both funny and OK to say bobbly blue -and how good that is to say. Try it! There are stories within the single words. We see the fun of hearing our own words amongst the words of others.

The words became a great preface to the little books we were about to write. I had brought each child a small folded book and some bird stickers to decorate the cover. No matter how old you are, part of a writer’s pleasure is the stationery (read Hilary Mantel on stationery). And so we wrote our names and began to draw and write. I drew my son and daughter, because they are always goading me to say which child is my favourite. But food had taken hold amongst the  rest of the group: tomato pasta, pizza, egg -but not the slimy centre bit. They drew and wrote, providing a running commentary as they did so. Their talk unfolds the thoughts and experiences that underpin what they choose to represent on the page. It is true for us all, I think, that the words on the page rise up from the great underground caverns of our lives.

Writing Club comes at the end of a long school day. Before the time was up, we broke out the washi tape. Of course we did. And we continued to talk and shape our ideas and experiences. Reading, drawing, talking, laughing, choosing stationery, breaking out the washi tape.

As far as I’m concerned, all these things and many more are an important part of writing: indeed are writing.