Greetings!

Greetings to all my writing friends of all ages! I hope to be able to share useful and inspiring bits and pieces with you all, though as one of you was 81 on his last birthday, and some of you are not yet 5, each of you may well find some things of more interest than others.



I meet you in church meeting rooms, and among ruined walls of castles and monasteries, in classrooms and in galleries and museums. I meet you all, but you will never all meet together, so this will become a place where you can learn about each other, and about what you all share - a love of writing! I hope you will also learn from each other, so that those of you who are not yet 5 may come to understand that your writing is something you can love to do until you are 81, and beyond.



So ... please watch this space. You will find news of writers I meet with and what we are all writing, suggestions for you to try out in your own writing, useful website addresses and book titles, and, I hope, inspiration. You are a member of the most amazing community! Let's all write!



How do you use your writer's notebook(s)?
and what do you do with what goes into them?


Yesterday, at Oughtibidge Junior School, Sheffield, I was discussing this with Year 3/4 writers (8 and 9 year-olds), who were having great fun gathering ideas to use in their writing later. Some had cut out images from magazines/newspapers and stuck them in for future inspiration. One had started from a photo of her mother as a baby and explored in a draft poem how much she loves her mum. Others had begun stories.

They thought about what else they might collect:

Our Writers' Notebooks/Sketchbooks/Gathering Books
What could go in here?

§ word/phrase/ sense impression
§ a mindmap or spidergram
§ image/words from the internet/books
§ a drawing or sketch
§ photo
§ map
§ note about something you remember
§ a list …
§ a cutting from a magazine
§ words from thesaurus
§ a pressed leaf or a little bit of …..?
§ anything you like that will fit and stay flat …


Here's some of my notebooking - the result of collaboration with my partner who is a visual artist, exploring digital images:

















And here are two of the resulting poem drafts:

I
the
many-
eyed ob
serving all
see her blind-
ness veiled with
root rootlet root-hair
warp and weft of barbules’
under-water iridescent only light
as hammer blows echo and the last
stone puzzle-piece perfects the dark



here

she lies
veiled and shrouded

in rough weave of root

rootlet root hair - she who

clothed emperors in sculptured silk

stitched with barbules under-sea blue sea green
flickering lamp at one hand moonlight at her back
she wove her tiny luminescent paths through the night

***********************

Why not find another artist to collaborate with?
Or try using your words in combination with another of your own art forms?