Welcome to the website and to this, newly formed, Director’s Page. As you may know, we have had to create a new website to support the activities of NWP members and all teachers who have an interest in writing. Theresa and Stephen, our trusty editor and website manager, are migrating the old site to the new and in the meantime you can still access all the resources on the original ten-year-old site.
At this moment, with the world turned upside down, writing is more important than ever. Writing has always been a source of solace and reflection. It allows us to remember and to record the moment. We find solutions to problems when we write and we discover ourselves. It is a distraction and it brings sharp focus. It is a way of making sense of things when that seems well-nigh impossible. It helps us find a way through. Writing puts us in touch. It puts us in touch with ourselves and in touch with others. When hugging is out of bounds and we are placing ourselves at several broomsticks away from each other, writing has the capacity to bring us closer.
Writing also may have a meditative quality. With that in mind, we are going to post a prompt a day, just to help you establish a daily, nurturing writing habit. There are so many ways in which writing can work wonders for us as individuals and as members of a community. I thought we might begin with thinking about a journal of the times we are living through.
Recently, a writing weekend with beloved friends was cancelled and we conducted a virtual weekend. During the weekend, one of our group, who was able to join us from France, responded to some Natalie Goldberg prompts and it struck me how useful it was for her individually, but perhaps even more so for those who read her work. It seemed to me that we can begin to make sense of what is happening through writing. And that some kind of record of what are being repeatedly called ‘unprecedented’ [that word is driving me to distraction] times would be worth having.
Here is Monica Melinsky on the contents of her freezer:
We can't live without
The well-stocked freezer: celeriac and pea soup, chicken curry with the spices carefully ground, two always popular orange and almond cakes, gluten free, garden tomato soup ( it was a glut crop in...2017..oh dear... ), figs pureed and more figs roasted, haricot beans, more figs, chestnut purée, more soup, useful items in boxes with sadly no longer any labels, must chuck now. Frozen egg yolks saved from the meringue last summer? I think I can live without them. Enough to fill our ark- for how long? Let's just hope it doesn't come to that.
And a more personal response to the same [Natalie Goldberg] prompt:
What I can't live without
I couldn't live without a cup of china and Darjeeling tea. Apparently as soon as my daughter heard my key in the door my first words were, 'Put the kettle on,...'
But I can't live without Whatsapp. We are now all confined: in three countries with European borders closing today and all flights cancelled. Never before in our life-times. Outside my window the village is silent, no traffic passing, no planes, neighbours indoors, no social contact permitted. The world is drawing in. Life is changing forever. We are still a family. But I can live without them if I can still speak to them.
It made me think of the Mass Observation project which collected information about the lives of men and women from 1937 to the early 1950s and then again from the 1980s.
It seemed to me that we could write to record these times that we are living through and capture the varied, unexpected ways in which we do so.
And we are teachers. Here is an opportunity for us to allow ourselves to write, just for our own purposes. No guilt. We are teachers. Through writing for ourselves we will continue to learn about teaching writing; about writing alongside our students; about how we can best work with them as they write and how what we say and how we respond can help student writers grow.
However you choose to write, I wish you well. It seems to me that writing, and drawing, are essential human practices which will enrich and expand our lives. And perhaps steady them.
Jeni Smith