Take ten minutes a day
through the month of November
to undertake some
memoir-inspired writing.

November 30th

In this final post of the month, we return to the journal, Hinterland, a print and digital magazine devoted to new creative non-fiction. The latest issue, Issue 15, is entirely devoted to memoir and life-writing. However, the writing covers a wide and usually surprising range of subjects, style and points of view. Its website and substack are rich sources of pleasure and of writing inspiration. Subscribers are encouraged to submit their own work.

On this last day of the month, a Saturday this year, take some time to look back over what you have been writing. You may have been writing in response to some of these prompts. You may be preoccupied with something else. Take this opportunity to identify something you might like to make more public. Reread it. Read it to a good listener. Brush it down and shape it up. Prepare it for a wider audience

We recommend all the memoirs listed here. Read and enjoy them.

Many of them contain wonderful provocations for writing that might inspire you and those whom you teach.

November 29th

If you are a fan of Allan Ahlberg’s picture books and poetry and have not already encountered The Bucket Memories of an Enchanted Childhood, the memoir of his ‘enchanted childhood’, then find a copy. It is a treat. It is a mixture of prose and poetry, documents, drawings, old photographs. Allan was born and adopted during World War 2, brought up in the Black Country. He writes:

This is a book of short pieces in verse and prose, an attempt to recover or otherwise conjure up a particular time (the 1940s), a particular Black country town (Oldbury) and a particular childhood (mine). There is, I will confess, some unreliability here. I start with good intentions and a true memory – day-old chicks, street lamps,  a clip round the ear – but soon, often as not, the fictional habit kicks in and I am led astray. One sentence lures me to another, has the seeds of anther in it, or is a template almost. Like knitting, that first row of stitches which sets up the rest. Or a rhyme reveals, some possibility. And I follow.

In ‘The Richest Woman in the Word’ … there is a man in the Co-op serving my mother. I give him an apron, which I know he had, and place a pencil behind his ear, which I can only say I would like him to have had. He looks better with a pencil, in my opinion, more convincing, businesslike. He can tot up my mother’s bill with it. There again, it’s probably indelible. Yes, I think I detect a slight smudge now along his lower lip where he’s been licking it. like a young child, me, for instance (or you for that matter), from those days, those remote, mysterious days. Eating liquorice.

Try writing a short piece, in verse or prose, that captures a bit of your childhood. As if you were dipping a bucket into a pond. See what you come up with. Start with good intentions -let one sentence lure you, reliably or unreliably, into another.

November 28th

After her mother died in 1992, the poet, Susan Wicks, took care of her increasingly dependent father. She has created the memoir, Driving My Father, from sharp vignettes, juxtaposing moments of caring for her father, her encounters with him at his home and beyond that, with memories of her childhood. Through her writing, she reconsiders the man and her relationship with him.

Today, the invitation is to write about a parent, or grandparent, someone who was part of your childhood. They may, or may not be still living. Try writing something about them now or how you have known them as an adult. See where that writing takes you. Can you set it beside a memory from your childhood so that each inform the other?

November 27th

Whilst Hungry by Grace Dent highlights her relationship with her father, Comfort Food, is full of memories and love for her mother. Both are extremely readable: funny and heart-breaking, though Comfort Food is not strictly a memoir. The book is based on a series of podcasts Dent created with a whole host of celebrities. The premise is that they visit Grace, bringing with them, and sometimes cooking, their ultimate comfort food. Comfort food must be something ‘we cobble together when nobody’s looking’. It is quite likely we are a bit ashamed of our polystyrene tray of kebab shop chips or the slab of Dairy Milk washed down with Guinness. But we recognise these foods, often eaten on the sofa in mismatched pyjama tops and bottoms in front of our TV of choice. As Grace Dent predicted, the people who arrived with their comfort foods also brought with them their stories: why and when they eat that food; how they make and source it; what events and places and people it reminds them of.

 The oven chips are nearly ready now. Their plastic bag is returned to the top drawer of the freezer cabinet, alongside Birds eye potato waffles, Asda cheese and garlic ciabatta slices, Magnums and Warburton’s Toastie white loaf, in what my other half Charlie and I call ‘the Drawer of Deliciousness’. This is the drawer full of things a frazzled individual can rely on when life feels difficult: bready things, potatoey things, buttery things; sweet things to soothe and cheesy things that melt in strings and cling to your chin as you watch Police Interceptors on Channel 5. Sometimes a human being just wants comfort food they can make on auto pilot.

It’s your turn. What do you make a consume behind closed doors. What’s your go to when you are frazzled? Describe it. Say how to make it. How do you eat it. What are its origins?

November 26th

The opening chapter of Rose Tremain’s memoir, Rosie scenes from a vanished life is called ‘Paradise’. It is her grandparents’ home, Linkenholt, from which her daily life in London seemed one of exile and constraint.   

The big house stood on a hill in Hampshire, where the wind was always strong. It was never a beauty. The colour of its brick was too screechy a coral red. Its white-painted gables were too massive. It reminded people of a lumpy three-masted ship, riding its waves of green and beautiful land. But all through my childhood I longed for it – for the moment of walking through its heavy front door and breathing its familiar perfume. What was that perfume? A composite of beeswax furniture polish, Brasso, French cigarettes and dogs. It was the smell of home.

…at Linkenholt, we were free. Around the house on the hill were spread two thousand acres of chalky farmland, owned by our grandfather, across which, on our Raleigh bicycles, in corduroy dungarees or sometimes improbably dress as Indian chiefs, we were allowed to roam. …

The room Jo and I shared was at the back, overlooking a rose garden and a wild spinney beyond, where the wind sighed at night. To drift asleep to the sound of this wind, knowing that we were ‘home’, that the morning would lay before us the paradise we kept dreaming of, was to feel drugged with happiness.

Write about your paradise. Where did you, do you, long to be?

November 25th

Notes to Self by Emilie Pine is a fierce, uncompromising, personal collection of essays. She writes about things that we often don’t write about; and if we do, we may well present them in a way that tempers the force of feeling which they engender.  She writes about being silenced, silencing herself, ‘bleeding and other crimes’, infertility, caring for her alcoholic father, women in academia. Her writing is clear and immediate; she embraces complexity and paradox and does all this with humour. 

When Emilie Pine’s father was dangerously ill due to alcoholism he was in and out of hospital for a year. At the end of that time when he was recovered and not drinking, she had not done with it. So she wrote a journal of the experience, printed it out and put it in a drawer. Later her partner came across what she had written. She describes it:

Then my partner, who is a writer – and great reader – stumbled across them. He read the top sheets, asked what they were and what I was going to do with them. I said: leave them in the drawer, obviously. He said it was maybe the best thing I had written. I thought about it for two years before sending it to Tramp Press [the collection’s original Irish publisher]. I knew they didn’t publish non-fiction but wanted their opinion. A couple of months later, they asked, on the basis of 8,000 words, if I had a book. I said: “What would I write about?” They said: “Anything you like.”

Women sometimes feel the need to be given permission to treat their emotions and lives as important. It was like being given this massive permission slip. I sat on the bus, on the way home – all the glamour! – and had a random piece of paper – because I believe in paper – and scribbled down five ideas, which became the other essays in this book.

Men, as well as women, sometimes need to be given permission to treat their emotions and their lives as important. Here is a permission slip. Write something that is important to you. Write it as it feels for you. Maybe print it out, and put it in a drawer!

November 24th

In Making an Elephant,  Graham Swift we are offered more essays by a writer; more memoir; more insights into the life of a writer. In one he writes about the significance of place in the novel. He describes ‘a belief in the local as a route to the universal, combined with a belief that in the local (including those seemingly familiar localities, ourselves) the strange and dislocated are never far away.’

He reflects that he had, for a long time, not considered place, setting, as a significant part of his writing. In fact, he thinks that one reason why he chose the Fens as his setting for his novel, Waterland, was because he thought of it as an absence of landscape that would leave the stage open for his characters. In fact, the Fens become a significant character in their own right. Swift says that he loves townscape as much as landscape. However familiar a place may be, there are bound to be disruptions, dislocations. And, we  he says, without physically going anywhere, ‘to step  … into unsuspected zones; to cross, for better or worse, lines of inner geography.’  

Recount a story, an anecdote, set somewhere you know very well. No need to describe the setting in detail, but allow it to shape the story and how you tell it.

November 23rd

If you enjoy the novels of Ann Patchett, you will enjoy These Precious Days, a collection of her essays, though it is, perhaps, an uneven collection. With a focus on writing two essays from this collection have inspired these prompts. 

In one essay Ann Patchett writes about a year when she set herself the challenge of not shopping. She sets her own perameters (she may buy books and food). The thing she found hardest was wanting to give presents (she describes herself as a gift giver), she also found how much she had stockpiled (when she ran out of lip balm, she found she had five unfinished sticks). You may have tried, be trying, No shop November. Though I think (because of Christmas) this is a hard month to start. So, you could write about shopping, not shopping, only buying second-hand…..

Or, there is an essay on reading Kate Dicamillo. Ann Patchett had met and liked the author, but had read nothing by her. In fact, even though she is a bookseller as well as writer, she says she does not read children’s books. Shame on her! Kate DiCamillo changed her mind, opened her up to the fierceness and love and courage that children’s books can contain, and sent her back to her own experience of being a child.

Write about the experience of reading a children’s author; write about why you choose not to read children’s books, write about your own favourite children’s book, whether you read it now or when you were a child.

November 22nd

When Tony Judt was diagnosed with a severe degenerative disease he discovered that its salient quality was ‘that it leaves your mind clear to reflect upon past, present, and future, but steadily deprives you of any means of converting those reflections into words. He still wanted to remain ‘a communicator of words and concepts’ but conversation became partial and frustrating. He found that he was writing whole stories in his head during the night, interwoven segments of his past that he not previously thought of as related. The problem was how to recapture these steams of consciousness on the following day. His solution was to use a recognised mnemonic device: to use a building with many rooms to store the details. Other users of the device has built palaces for their memories, but this did not sit easy with Judt. However, he had been remembering a small pensione in an unfashionable village in the Swiss Alps. He had stayed there for a winter holiday with his family when he was ten and he remembered the detail of it vividly, the layout of its room and other guests who made a great impression.

This became his memory chalet, not assigning all stories of a particular kind to one room, but rather creating a new route through the building for each story, essay or lecture. Judt had a clear memory of the chalet and its layout. In The Memory Chalet he is able to walk the reader through its public spaces.

Our suggestion for you today is that you write with a particular building in mind. If you wish, simply write a tour through its rooms. If you prefer, choose a building you know well to house your memories as you go through the day, are out for a walk, are lying in bed not able to sleep. Use the rooms and spaces of the building to hold the ideas or memories as they come to you. Place them for retrieval later.

November 21st

May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude is journal written over the course of one year spent living alone in her house in New Hampshire. It was written, in part, to work through a personal depression. It was also written in reaction to her own earlier memoir, Plant Dreaming Deep.  She writes:

 Plant Dreaming Deep has brought me many friends of the work (and also, harder to respond to, people who think they have found in me an intimate friend). But I have begun to realize that, without my own intention, that book gives a false view. The anguish of my life here — its rages — is hardly mentioned. Now I hope to break through into the rough rocky depths, to the matrix itself. There is violence there and anger never resolved. I live alone, perhaps for no good reason, for the reason that I am an impossible creature, set apart by a temperament I have never learned to use as it could be used, thrown off by a word, a glance, a rainy day, or one drink too many.

Both books are about living alone, about creating both written texts and a house and garden where one might live. These are accounts of truly living alone and wrestling with what it means to do so, and what it means to be a writer. Caroline Heilbrun in Reinventing Womanhood suggests that “What Sarton did was to write a new plot for women, a new script.” Just knowing such a life is possible, knowing what it might feel like or mean, she suggests, is something other women needed. 

These two books, written roughly ten years apart, show Sarton working towards a less comfortable account of her solitary, creative life. Heilbrun argues that women have allowed themselves to be muffled, to create an acceptable, even biddable, picture of womanhood through their writing and that in Journal of a Solitude Sarton is working against that expectation.

How do any of us write about our lives and how might we smooth the rough corners for public acceptability? Today, you might be happy just to write a journal entry in whatever way you wish. You could also try writing a second entry that comes nearer to the unvarnished truth, or airbrushes your thoughts for the day so they seem more palatable.

November 20th

the wave in the mind by Ursula LeGuin is, as its subtitle says a collection of Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination. It is a book full of good things, not least an essay on Stress-rhythm in poetry and prose and a long poem The Writer On, and At, Her Work. There is also a short talk, ‘My Libraries’, given at a celebration of Portland’s Multnomah County Library in which LeGuin gives an account of the libraries in her life, starting with the library in Saint Helena, California, where her mother would leave LeGuin and her brother while she went shopping. She gives a hint of what she read and what was important at different stages of her life. Libraries and their librarians, key elements for many people, not only writers. They can be a place of refuge and escape; knowledge and the freedom brought to us through knowledge.

Leila Berg, also writes about her encounters with libraries and the wonder that they can engender when you realise, as LeGuin says, they may contain ‘All the words in the world, and all for me to read.

Do you still use a library? Do you, like me, live in a village where the library van visits once a month and will bring books you have ordered and a few surprises besides? Do you use the university library, wonderful in dark winter afternoons, warm, and light and full of books? Have you known your local librarian, who gets to know you and who places books you might like into your hands?

Write your own history through libraries.

November 19th

In ‘Mother Tongue: A Memoir’ by Ian McEwan, which appears in Writers and Their Mothers edited by Dale Salwak, McEwan describes his own evolving relationship with language and his gratefulness for his mother’s contribution to it.

I don’t write like my mother, but for many years I spoke like her, and her particular, timorous relationship with language has shaped my own.

When I started writing seriously in 1970, I may have dropped all or most of my mother’s ways with words, but I still had her attitudes, her warinerss, her unsureness of touch. Many writers let their sentences unfold experimentally on the page in order to find out where they are, where they are going, and how they can be shaped. I would sit without a pen in my hand, framing a sentence in my mind, often losing the beginning as I reached the end, and only when the thing was secure and complete would I set it down. I would stare at it suspiciously.

Ian McEwan describes how his mother’s language was inhibited and strained by her upbringing, and then her life as the wife of an army officer, moving in circles where she worried about how she spoke. He describes the different ways she spoke: her commentary on car journeys: ‘Look at all them cows.’ a way of expressing a contentment in his companionship; her straining for the posh voice for strangers or the Colonel’s wife, ‘aitches distributed generously’; her ‘roaming, intimate chats’ with friends.

Think about where your language comes from and how you use it. Write about your mother’s language, or your father’s. Write about your own relationship with language. How has it evolved?

November 18th

Cairn by Kathleen Jamie published in 2024, is a collection of poetry and short prose pieces which, as the title suggests, gather together to form a waymarker, a pile of carefully placed stones that mark a moment in Jamie’s life as she turns sixty. She looks backwards through her own memories and forward to whatever the future may hold for her children.

Thank you for the whaup’s skull, which is safely arrived. Now isn’t that a sentence Gilbert White might have scratched out with his nibbed pen? Or was it a quill?

 … Ach, the curlew’s last flight.

Her writing is very present, acutely aware of her surroundings, capturing its detail and its life: a spray of yellow hawkbit, crushed cans, flowers in a jam jar, jackdaw, swallow, a human-shaped hole wrenched in the wire fence. It is political, aware of the urgent need for us to take action. There are people, too; those who have shown her things, taught her things, those she cares about. There are moments from throughout her life, as child, student, mother, writer. It is beautifully crafted. Words match what the eye, and the heart, see. Each piece is both meditation and provocation. This is a robust, challenging, beautiful book.

Write, today, to capture a moment. Write what you see. Write a story from your past.

November 17th

Small Fires by Rebecca May Johnson is a book about cooking, about recipes and kitchens, friends and relationships, living a life. Its reach is broad. It returns repeatedly to the cooking of a tomato sauce for pasta. It is the same and different.

The heat of small fires. Tying and untying my apron strings. A recipe that is both a ship that carries me and the hot red sea. In this book I tell the complicated story of cooking for ten or more years in ten or more kitchens. I tell of the people I encounter, whose desires and refusals rewrite the recipe a thousand times. I tell of what I have learnt.

The contents of this book might have vanished unrecorded – cooked and eaten and washed up, leaving no trace. Documenting what I do in the kitchen can feel like the task of recording almost nothing. But it is the nothing I am doing, and do almost every day. …. It is the nothing through which I have been sustained and transformed.

I realise that in the kitchen I am grappling with the same questions as in my academic study. When I cook the recipe, I experience the difference between the knowledge promised by language, and the unboundedness of embodiment, which is both richer and more dangerous than the text can convey.

Write about yourself in the kitchen. Write about cooking. Write about the dish you cook repeatedly; that you cook for yourself, for others, for one special person. Write the recipe. Write the things that surround it and are part of it.

November 16th

The stories Claire Messud tells in Kant’s Little Prussian Head & Other Reasons Why I Write: An Autobiography Through Essays are dense, complex, and alluring. Her French grandparents, searching for the the Beirut of her father’s childhood, of the family’s move from Connecticut to Australia, her beloved Canadian grandmother, are vivid and beautifully told.

Threaded through them, are the reasons why she writes and how she writes. Other essays tackle the subject head on and reiterate why writing, imagination, art are so important now. Messud writes of her belief in the significance and power of the written word. In one essay, she commends the writing of letters and hails the essay and the review as more public forms of the personal letter. These are the forms she has used here.  Her writing invites repeated readings. Each time it is possible to find something that will strengthen our understanding of what writing can be.

 I advocate moreover for the actual, irreducible, and irreplaceable animal record -outside the age of mechanical reproduction, if you will. The movement of the hand that holds the pen; the imprint of the ink upon paper; the dignity and intimacy of the individual letter, written for a particular addressee (and hence so different from a blog or post), without thought of other readers./ The loss of what that represents philosophically is enormous: my grandparents, my parents, even my friend and I myself in youth, spent hours writing letters about what we were doing and thinking, where we were going and what we noticed, as a gesture of intimate communication. It signified that each of us mattered, that the person to whom I wrote mattered, and that our communication was important – often precisely because it  wasn’t widely shared. Privacy, intimacy, dignity, and with them, depth and richness of thought – all were a readily available part of  daily life, for even the most modest amongst us.
Claire Messud

Take the time to write to someone today, about today. Even if that person is simply yourself.

November 15th

The Accidental Memoir The Remarkable Way to Write Your Life Story by Eve Makis & Anthony Cropper grew from a Christmas present that Eve Makis made for her father who had arrived in England from Cyprus and built a life here. He was never able to talk about his life so Eve gave him a notebook filled with prompts that she give her creative writing students and plenty of blank space where he could write. Despite his initial ‘underwhelmed’ response, her father did write in the book. Subsequently Eve worked with Anthony Cropper in a whole range of settings (refugee groups, probation centres, homes for the elderly), to try out what became the prototype for the book. It is a book full of prompts and pictures and plenty of room to write. Many of the prompts are familiar, others unexpected, or taken from novels and non-fiction. It is a nice sized book that fits comfortably in the hand; nothing too daunting about it.

Here is a sample prompt:

Rituals and superstitions
Do you walk under ladders? Throw salt over your shoulder? Put your left sock on before your right? Believe in the predictive power of tea leaves? What illogical beliefs do you harbour?

Or

Coincidence
Have you ever had any strange things happen? Bumped into your neighbour on the pother side of the world? Seen a long-lost friend just after you’d thought of them?

American novelist Anne Parrish was browsing in a second-hand bookshop when she came across Jack Frost and Other Stories, a childhood favourite. Opening the book she found the inscription Anne Parrish and realised it was once hers and had made its way across the Atlantic.

November 14th

At the age of seventeen, after years in a foster family and then successive care homes, Lemn Sissay discovered that his name was not Norman. He was British and Ethiopian and his mother, who had been a young nurse at the time of his birth, had been pleading for his safe return ever since. My Name is Why is an account of the racism, the brutality and unthinking lack of kindness of the care system that dictated Lemn Sissay’s early life.  This is a fierce and uncompromising story.

Be the window at dawn
Be the light be the ocean
Be the calm post-storm
Be open

 Click clack clack. I was alone, at eighteen, in an apartment on Poets’ Corner. I had a letter from my mother dated 1968 and a birth certicicate with my name. Lemn Sissay. All the names which came before – Norman, Mark and Greenwood – were created to hide me from my mother and from Ethiopia.

My mother is from the Amhara people of Ethiopia. It is a tradition of the Amhara to leave messages in the first name of the child. In Amharic the name Lemn means Why?
Lemn Sissay

Write about what your name means.

November 13th

When Polly Morland was clearing her parents’ house she found John Berger’s wonderful book, A Fortunate Man, The Story of a Country Doctor, a portrait of the day to day life of a country doctor working in the Forest of Dean in the 1960s. It is illustrated with photographs by Jean Mohr and forms a meditation upon what it means to be a general practitioner and to devote one’s life to one’s work. Polly Morland lives and works in the very same place as John Berger’s ‘fortunate man’ and knew his successor, a woman her own age, who had being working in the area for twenty years. The two women met during the pandemic and from their meeting grew A Fortunate Woman, A Country Doctor’s Story which echoes and makes new John Berger’s original book.

The doctor who is the subject of A Fortunate Woman insisted that she was not out of the ordinary.

except for the turn of good fortune that had brought her to this valley, this practice, this community. For such is the nature of the landscape here and people for whom it is home, that it shapes, indeed demands, a form of medical practice that is fast disappearing. … Put simply, she is a doctor who knows her patients. She is the keeper of their stories, over years, across generations, witness to the infinite variety of their lives. These stories , she says, are what her job is all about. They are what sustains her, even in days as hard as these.
Polly Morland

This is a book that does not succumb to the melodramatic. It is an everyday story, firmly set in a particular landscape. ‘A landscape doesn’t know who will build its life in its folds and undulations, walk its paths, make breath of its air.’ Think about your own work and the landscape and community that is its setting. Try writing some stories about your working day; or, some of the stories of those with whom you work.

November 12th

The American poet, Philip Schultz, learned of his own dyslexia only when his son was diagnosed in second grade. Schultz struggled at school and, eventually, was asked to leave his school, still unable to read. And yet he became a poet and was awarded a Pulitzer prize. As he witnessed his son’s unhappiness, he realised that he wanted to write about his experiences partly as a way of speaking to others about what it can mean to be dyslexic. My Dyslexia is another slim volume and. like Adam Pottle’s book, Voice, it’s a wonderful way of learning something of his experience.

When I taught poetry in grade schools I used the children’s enthusiasm as a resource. Though many of their other teachers later came to enjoy the “magic”: their students performed in class -perhaps because of the “creative” focus of my job – they were often suspicious of me. What could this poet from New York City do that they couldn’t? What was the purpose of teaching something as arcane and elitist as poetry in often overcrowded classes when so many of their students struggled with the basics? Although I didn’t know about my dyslexia then, I did know that I would’ve loved being taught how to write creatively. I would’ve loved to learn to put words together with feelings, through poetry. Philip Schultz

Here is an extract from the beginning of the book, and here is Philip Schultz reading from it.

Think about the children whom you know and teach. There are bound to be those with dyslexia amongst them. Try writing about your response to them; maybe you are aware of their capacity for creative writing; maybe you have sometimes found it hard to teach them. Maybe you have dyslexia yourself. Write about what you know about dyslexia, from the inside or the outside.

November 11th

In Giving Up the Ghost (pp 4 - 5), Hilary Mantel writes:

I hardly know how to write about myself. Any style you pick seems to unpick itself before a paragraph is done. I will just go for it, I think to myself, I’ll hold out my hands and say, c’est moi, get used to it. I’ll trust the reader. This is what I recommend to people who ask me how to get published. Trust your reader, stop spoon-feeding your reader, stop patronising your reader, give your reader credit for being as smart as you at least, and stop being so bloody beguiling: you in the back row: will you turn off that charm! Plain words on plain paper. Remember what Orwell says, that good prose is like a window-pane. Concentrate on sharpening your memory and peeling your sensibility. Cut every page you write by at least one-third. Stop constructing those piffling little similes of yours. Work out what it is you want to say. Then say it in the most direct and vigorous way you can. Eat meat. Drink blood. Give up your social life and don’t think you can have friends.  Rise in the quiet hours of the night and prick your fingertips, and use the blood for ink; that will cure you of persiflage!

 But do I take my own advice? Not a bit. Persiflage is my nom de guerre. …

Why, Mantel asks, does the act of writing generate so much anxiety? She suggests Margaret Atwood’s words in answer to her question: ‘The written word is so much like evidence – like something that can be used against you.’ Mantel apparently began writing her memoir as a private thing, not to be published. Now it is in the public domain. These are stories of childhood, loss, chronic illness. They are also stories about writing and becoming a writer.

Writing about ourselves begins privately and may remain so. The act of writing is itself worthwhile. Once it is written you are free to destroy your writing. Just don’t do  that immediately. Put your writing away somewhere. Read it much later. You are likely to be glad.

Mantel rejects writing a smartened-up version of the past, but still she believes that, if we try hard enough, we can remember "a face, a perfume, one true thing or two".

Write a face, a perfume, one true thing or two…

November 10th

Near encounters with death? A child with a severe, life-threatening allergy? The subject matter is not always comfortable in Maggie O’Farrell’s I Am, I Am, I am, but she treats this catalogue of events with grace and fluency. Each chapter is titled with a body part: neck, lungs, bloodstream, cranium; each one refers to the element most directly under threat. Some examples are almost humdrum, others, frankly, terrifying. Each one prompts the reader to think about their own life, its precariousness, its preciousness.

One of the regular celebrity interview features in a weekend paper often includes the question: what was your closest encounter with death? Ask yourself that question. If you feel you can, write in response to it.

November 9th

Adrian Henri’s collection, Autobiography, was first published in 1971. The ragged state of my paperback copy is testament to how much I have read and returned to it when teaching. The first three sections of Part 1 1932 – 1952 can be found on the Adrian Henri website.

The Part 1 verses cover the first nineteen years of Henri’s life. The three sections printed on the website have proved the most fruitful for young writers. They are impressionistic, aware of the child’s view point, of place and of people. These are essentially list poems and so an amenable and flexible form for young writers as well as older ones. There are powerful evocations of place:

round redbrick doorway
yellow soapstone step cleaned twice a week
rich darkred linopattern in the polished lobby
front room with lace runners and a piano that you only go in on Sundays
or when someone comes to tea

And of emotion:

lying in bed
in the dark crying listening to my mother and father argue
wind banging a shutter
indoors somewhere
dead eyes looking out from flyblown photographs

Have a look at the lines. Use them as an invitation for your own writing.

November 8th

I remember one very hot summer day I put ice cubes
in my aquarium and all the fish died.
I remember Liberace.
I remember the sound of the ice cream man coming.

I remember by Joe Brainard is a small book filled with sentences that begin ‘I remember …’ considered a cult classic, enjoyed and returned to by writers of all kinds. Why hadn’t we thought of this before? they asked. It was first published in 1975, when Kenneth Koch was working with elementary school children in New York. Kohl quickly found that ‘I remember …’ was a great starting point for all children. Each new ‘I remember …’ on a new line. That chance to have lots of different attempts at the same thing. Paul Auster, in his introduction says there are nearly fifteen hundred entries. It is a work that surprises and sometimes shocks. It holds many voices, tells stories in a sentence. Allows one to speak to another. Auster writes of the music of the text. It is never mundane. Though it deals with the mundane. And the highly personal.

Both Paul Auster, and Ron Padgett in his Afterword, mention that I remember has become a standard writing exercise ‘wherever writing courses are taught.’ As Padgett explains, ‘…the most successful versions of I remember – by both children and adults – show the same qualities as Joe’s original: clarity, specificity, generosity, frankness, humor, variety, a rhythm that ebbs and flows from entry to entry, and the sense that no memory is insignificant.’

So today, take Paul Auster’s prompt:
I remember … It seems so obvious now, so self-evident, so fundamental and even ancient -as if the magic formula  had been known ever since the invention of written language. Write the words I remember, pause for a moment or two, give your mind a chance to open up, and inevitably you will  remember, and remember with a clarity and specificity that will astonish you.

November 7th

In Elena: A Hand Made Life, Miriam Gold, an artist and teacher, has found a way to tell the story of her beloved grandmother through drawing and painting, collage and found objects, and photography. Dr Elena Zadik was born in Kharkiv in 1919. The family left there in 1921 and settled in Leipzig, but in 1936 events forced her to leave Germany alone. She was determined to become a doctor and she did so, against all odds, moving from London, to Sheffield and, after a war full of hardship and isolation, settled with her husband in Leigh, Lancashire. There she became a GP, serving the local community until she was 70. Miriam Gold manages to evoke this rich and complex life through her own words and drawings and her use of all kinds of memorabilia: passports, knitting patterns, pages from text books, photographs. Elena is also a wonderful evocation of Miriam Gold’s relationship with her grandmother. What at first seems quite a simple text, becomes, as one reads and re-reads, rich and many-layered.

We all have photographs, letters, objects that are part of the story of our lives, including the lives that were lived before we remember or were born. Take that as a start. Choose a photograph, or your great aunt’s bread knife, or a cardigan that your mother knitted for your first baby. Write its story. You might even make a drawing of it.

November 6th

Nigel Slater’s memoir of his childhood, Toast, the story of a boy’s hunger, published in 2003, is constructed of many small memories rather than attempting a single and monumental narrative. These collections of fragments -large and small – seem very similar to the way we gather our memories of the past. Each memory bears its own title. Most are food related. Sometimes a story is involved, sometimes the emphasis is on the taste, texture, smell of particular foodstuff. They are, inevitably linked to the people who enjoyed or cooked of insisted on the food. They evoke, wonderfully, the experience of eating, anticipating or trying to avoid that food. There is a good share of unhappiness in the writing. We choose the extracts we use with Year 5 and 6 with care. The memories are, of course, particular to Nigel Slater, but they immediately tap in to our own experiences of food.

Mashed Potato. The Lunch Box. Flapjacks. Milk Skin. Birthday Cake. Prawn Cocktail. Walnut Whip. Jammie Dodgers. Salad Cream, Mushroom Ketchup and Other Delights. Cheese on Toast. Tinned Fruit. Apple Crumble. Sunday Roast. A Sniff of Basil.

There is no wonder that we return to Toast again and again as a way in to writing. Each time the extract generates stories - of unique and shared experiences. Food is a really wonderful subject for writing. We have all experienced the pleasures and painfulness of eating. We can all speak with authority about it.

Write your own lists: family food; eating out; favourite foods and those you really cannot stand; foods connected to particular people; signature dishes; seasonal rituals.

Having whetted your appetite, take something from your list and write more.

Guardian review of Toast

November 5th

I wouldn’t be a writer if I wasn’t deaf.
With my deafness I have a bivouac around my imagination.
No distractions, and my mind is free to roam.
Adam Pottle, Voice: On Writing With Deafness

Adam Pottle’s book, Voice, is a book full of energy and anger and humour that allows us a glimpse into the world of a boy and man who is profoundly deaf. It is a vital book for any teacher because it makes us think about, and invites us into, the world of those with hearing loss. And it disrupts and enriches our ideas and beliefs about writing. Its second part Deafness and the Writer’s Voice is a compelling exploration of language, words and writing that changes and expands one’s thinking. Pottle gets us to think about the disjunct for the deaf writer between the inner and outer voice, about how that works for him (he also writes about the rich sensuality of Sign Language and the way it can speak directly from the performer’s interiority) and about how that has developed as he loses more hearing.

The section ‘On Silence’ begins by listing the noises that bombard us every day: ‘washers, dryers, motor cycles, lawn mowers, stereos … dogs, cats, …along with all the little in-between sounds, such as scratching, scraping, rustling, ripping, sliding, slamming….’

It goes on to explore the experience of silence:

My deafness has also shown me the preciousness of silence. …
My deafness prompts me to look for what is missing in a particular situation, and in our noisy world we’re missing silence. Silence is among the most beautiful things in the world, not only because it’s so precious. Even if you have just a few seconds of silence at work, or in the car, or at home, that brief, brief silence has a sacredness to it, a quality we immediately appreciate, because it allows you to hear yourself, and when you can hear yourself you can begin to think, and imagine and grow.

Write a list of noise and noises; or a moment of silence. You choose.

Review and interview with Adam pottle for the University of Saskatchewan.

November 4th

In Leila Berg’s memoir, Fliickerbook, first published in 1997, Berg recalls what is was like to be growing up in Salford from 1921 to 1939. She writes from the point of view of the child she was, making sense of what it meant to be a girl, Jewish, interested in words and stories, making sense of what was often the puzzling and unthinking behaviour of adults. Her story is built of many small pictures, put together like a flickerbook. Like Nigel Slater, sometimes she writes only one or two sentences before she moves on to the next thought. The pictures build up to make the story and draw us into thinking about how a child builds a picture of who they are and what it is to be in the world. Each tiny picture is vivid and provocative. A TES review observed that the book ‘goes a long way to explain why Leila Berg has spent so much of her life fighting fiercely and often provocatively for the right of children to be listened to and accepted.’

I love the colours of hopscotch when they are scrunched together by feet. They go thick and fat and creamy. When they are separate they are thinner.

 I keep reading about The little Match Girl, and about The Red Shoes. How cruel is has to be, being a little girl. But I need to know.

 The most horrible thing about Opening Medicines is  the way they pretend to be Licorice Allsorts. I don’t mean you think they are Licorice Allsorts. But they pretend. But you know they aren’t.

 Our memories are often fragmentary. Sometimes we remain puzzled by things that puzzled us when we were five or even ten. Try capturing some of your own early memories. Just a sketch of what you remember. No need to fill it out with extras.

November 3rd

Nigel Slater’s A Thousand Feasts is a ‘memoir of sorts’ and a truly wonderful book. Not only does it demonstrate an excellent way of writing and compiling a memoir, but also it would make a wonderful gift. Place it on your wish list; add it to your list for someone you love.

Nigel Slater keeps kitchen diaries. It is part of his practice as a chef and food writer. But he also keeps notebooks. He keeps notebooks in the way that many of us would recognise. They are pocket books and cheap ring-bound notepads; a faded pink exercise book bought in Delhi, manilla-covered school books, a blue ring-bound journal. Some notes are written on envelopes or loose sheets of paper. Sometimes he writes in pencil, sometimes in pen. Often he writes no more than a sentence. He writes in response to the need to keep a written record of the good things. Each one, he supposes, is ‘a short story to remind [him] of something, ordinary or extraordinary, …They are chronicles of quietness and calm, busy days in the kitchen and sensuous afternoons spent in the garden.’

He describes the sadness of jelly babies and eating a hot cross bun; a greeting of shoes in Kyoto; a description of his writing desk; queuing for sheeps’ heads in Teheran; a diary of the tulips in his garden.

The way damson stones float to the top of the pan when you are making jam.
Six white-shelled eggs, stamped with green and pink in a green egg carton. As pretty as a box of fondant creams.
The luminous green moss that grows on the sides of a terracotta flowerpot.

Of course, there are many meals and the cooking and growing of food. The memories come from travels across the world and the happiness of home. Your ‘small moments of joy’ will have a different flavour. They will be yours. Look back through your notebooks and make your own collection of feasts. Capture the moments.

November 2nd

If you are a regular visitor to this website, it is more than likely that you already know about Natalie Goldberg’s lovely book Old Friend From Far Away that prompts us, no exhorts us, to write memoir. You may already know one of her earlier books – Writing Down the Bones, perhaps – and this one is full of that same enthusiasm and zest. Our minds, Goldberg says, work in a zigzag way. We don’t remember in an orderly chronological fashion; one remembered detail leads to another and before we know it, what began as a thought of Cheerios leads us, hop, skip and a jump to ‘the first time we stood before a mountain and understood kindness’. How many times, when writing in a workshop, has at least one person said, ‘Well, I hadn’t expected to write that. I’d forgotten all about that green cardigan…’ or whatever has emerged in the writing.

Memoir is not about the grand life story. It is about making sense of all the small things -which sometimes turn out to be much bigger things – now, at this moment.

Old Friend from far Away is a book of short sections, some no more than six words long. Each one is a provocation to write, and to write boldly and without fear. It is the book that I turn to most frequently when I need inspiration for my own writing or for a workshop. It speaks directly to the reader with warmth and encouragement. Natalie Goldberg writes:

Writing is … not a diet to become skinny, but a relaxation into the fat of our lives. Often without realising it, we are on a quest, a search for meaning. What does our on this earth add up to?

And with that in mind, here’s one of those short prompts. Potatoes. Write everything you know about mashed potatoes.

Or what about Say: Often in the middle of a timed writing practice you feel muddled, you are not really saying anything. Try this: don’t even wait to finish your sentence, right in the middle put a dash, then write, “What I really want to say is,” drop to a deeper level, and keep going.

November 1st

In Hinterland, a print and digital magazine devoted to new creative non-fiction, Jarred McGinnis and explores the unreliable and fluid nature of our memories:

Memories are not a recording of fact, but the story you tell yourself about the last time you remembered that memory, which is being remembered by a different you in time, space and experience.

How close we are, as writers of literary non-fiction, to writers of fiction. He suggests:

Writing a memory that we couldn’t possibly have: something that you have been told, that happened before you were born, that exists for you only in a photograph or in someone else’s story.