A Creative Space

“It’s a feeling of happiness that knocks me clean out of adjectives. I think sometimes that the best reason for writing novels is to experience those four and a half hours after you write the final words.” Zadie Smith

One of the great pleasures of being part of a teachers’ writing group is hearing other people’s writing. Another, is experiencing the diversity of any group and all the many ideas and perceptions that arise from it: this reception teacher likes nothing better than to write alongside her class;  that one has been walking and drawing maps and writing with her son; another is, over time, finding a way to write  about a crucial relationship; this one loves a good list. I love the fact that we come to writing for different reasons and that when we share our writing and our approaches to writing, our teaching is the richer for it. This summer, Mikela Bond from one of our groups finished a novel.  Amazing! She has written a blog about the process which we have permission to share with you. I think that much that she has to say will chime with you, even if writing a novel is the last thing on your mind.

What seemed most important to her was the finding of a ‘creative space in which none of the other day to day demands mattered.’ In the first instance, she writes, this was something to do with well-being in the life of a busy teacher and parent. And then the novel took over. I like the way that it came to her as fragments. First a glimpse of a woman washing up, sunlight on soapsuds. Mikela had to find the space, often writing on her knee while one child or another was busy with Beavers or swimming lessons. She joined a workshop run by the Unthank School of Writing where much of the hard work of reading and revising took place, but I will let her tell you the story.

Read Mikela’s blogpost here.

What strikes me is how much of what she says echoes through our writing groups: well-being, notebooks filled with fragments, reading aloud and hearing the work of others; researching through books and place, carving out a space. Now, on Zoom, we gather together and children hover around us. One of our Norwich group joins us from a swimming pool car park, her damp son creeping into the back seat towards the end of the session. What thrills me is that this is good for each one of us, and good for our teaching.

In Our Hands

With Toni Morrison’s words on the home page of the website, it was good to be reminded of our responsibility ‘to do language’; and to be reminded of so much that Toni Morrison wrote that faced up to self-pity and fear.  Since her death last year, I have had cause to read and re-read her Nobel Prize lecture, delivered in 1993 in which she speaks, again, about our responsibilities towards language. The speech is rich and complex. Each time I read it, I take something slightly different from it. The speech is framed by a parable, a frequently told story that Morrison shapes to her own ends. It tells of an old woman, blind, wise, and in this version, the daughter of slaves. A group of children visit the woman and one of them says, “Old woman, I hold in my hand a bird. Tell me whether it is living or dead.” The old woman does not answer immediately. She cannot see them, or whether or not there is a bird in the child’s hand. Have they come to mock her? What is their intention? Eventually, she answers,  “I don’t know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands.”

‘It is in your hands’.

It is their responsibility. Toni Morrison goes on to say that she reads the bird as language and the woman as a practiced writer. She thinks of language as a living thing, over which we can have control, and ‘mostly as agency – as an act with consequences.’ Language, she says,  is susceptible to death and in  the hands of those who would control and suppress, it is already dead but not without effect. ‘it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential. Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, fill baffling silences.’

Morrison imagines the woman thinking about language. She recognises that language can never live up to life once and for all. She sees its force in its reach for the ineffable. 

Word-work is sublime, she thinks, because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference – the way in which we are like no other life.

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

And then she gives the story another twist. She proposes that the children did not come to the woman in mockery but in genuine search for wisdom. They speak up:

 “You trivialize us and trivialize the bird that is not in our hands. Is there no context for our lives? No song, no literature, no poem full of vitamins, no history connected to experience that you can pass along to help us start strong? You are an adult. The old one, the wise one. Stop thinking about saving your face. Think of our lives and tell us your particularized world. Make up a story. Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created. We will not blame you if your reach exceeds your grasp; if love so ignites your words they go down in flames and nothing is left but their scald. Or if, with the reticence of a surgeon’s hands, your words suture only the places where blood might flow. We know you can never do it properly – once and for all. Passion is never enough; neither is skill. But try. For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don’t tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear’s caul. You, old woman, blessed with blindness, can speak the language that tells us what only language can: how to see without pictures. Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.”

We are not Toni Morrison. We are teachers. We write. Children are asking us about the world and about their future. We do have stories to tell. And we can make it possible for children to tell their stories. Together we can keep language alive;  do the word work.

It is in our hands.