Defining Awen
If you are new here, hello and welcome! I am Mel Parks and I have been running creative writing workshops in Sussex, UK for ten years while being a freelance writer, researcher and editor. I began this Substack, Awen, in 2022 as a gathering place for my thoughts about the writing process and to share some stories and creative inspiration along the way. Awen is free to read and share.
If you can’t join me in Sussex, I have a weekly guided creative writing Zoom hour on a Tuesday afternoon (2-3pm UK time; pay what you can).
Dear all
I woke up last Sunday morning with an idea. It didn’t exactly pop out of my head but emerged during my morning pages, which I love to write in bed on a Sunday with a cup of tea. Sometimes ideas are so clear and so insistent and make so much sense that I wonder why it’s taken so long for things to slot into place. For a long while, I’ve had a vague idea of making something of these weekly newsletters, a book on the creative writing process maybe. But I couldn’t see what would make this idea stand out from the thousands of other books about writing that are out there or what would pull it together. Then on Sunday morning, the idea became clear. I would begin the work of defining awen, the name of this newsletter and a Welsh word for poetic or creative inspiration. Through my research, I would also offer suggestions for how we can open ourselves up to it, how we can help it flow and how we can get more of it.
In a way, that has been the work of this newsletter all along, but my defining purpose wasn’t that clear to begin with. I just began with the thoughts I wanted to share. This purpose has become clearer with regular practice and time. I publish Awen on a Friday morning, but mostly, I also write it just before I publish. I have created a regular weekly slot to round up my thoughts and what I’ve been working on during the week and I struggle to write it at any other time. I think about what I’m going to say during the week and somehow on a Friday morning, it flows easier. I feel this is awen at work.
I began my research with a quick scan of the internet, didn’t find much except a Wikipedia page, but there were a few YouTube videos (thank you creators!) which helped. They said that people have different definitions of awen, and these are some notes on what I found so far:
awen comes from the Welsh legend of Ceridwen, the story of which Kim Willis tells beautifully in her video here:
awen is a powerful pure song or sound
the function of a bard was to bring awen forth
bards in Wales had very strict training involving lots of repetition of poetry. They accessed awen by sensory deprivation
awen is a flowing force or entity in itself
awen flows through past, present and future
awen flows from the otherworld to the mortal world
as well as inspiration, awen can also mean wellness, benevolence and bliss (or in today’s terms - goodwill, spirit, spark of life)
awen comes from another Welsh word, gwen, which means smile, bliss, a gleam, wish
awen is connected with our soul as an individual and as a collective
awen is the flow of creativity.
Then, I dipped into The Book of Taliesin, which I had on my shelf but hadn’t read yet and the introduction by translators Gwyneth Lewis and Rowan Williams had a discussion of awen included. They explained that it would be wrong to interpret it as ‘muse’ but rather:
awen involves technical skill in bardic craft but also the shamanic gift of inhabiting another life or shapeshifting
the gift of awen produces the same kinds of extreme behaviour as are associated with spirit possession: loud shouting, trance and catalepsy…
I think there is room for acknowledging the historic and mythical use of the word while defining it for our present day.
How does awen show up for you? What do you do to access it or make space for it to flow?
I felt awen flowing this week in my workshops, while people were all scribbling away in their notebooks. I love that collective sound of pens on paper. The advice to creative writing workshop leaders is to write with participants, so there is less separation. To create a feeling of joint work. But while holding the space, often I can do nothing but sit there with everyone as they write and notice the nuances of how people respond to my prompts. Does it seem to flow easily? Are they writing furiously? Do they need more time? Are they thinking then writing a few words? And this time, not for the first time, I sat and felt the power of that collective creative energy that I’m sure you’ve experienced if you’ve ever written alongside someone else.
YouTube creators defining awen:
Kris Hughes: youtube.com/watch?v=EA-tQM1sh7Q
Hugh Evans: youtube.com/watch?v=Al47WM_cbRo
Celtic Source: youtube.com/watch?v=I7ZsGjQevO0
and Joanna van der Hoeven
youtube.com/watch?v=jM8KJ_5BALY
Writing Invitation
Begin your freewriting with ‘I want to tell you something…’.
What do you want the world to know today?
Thank you so much for reading!
Until next time…
Mel
This newsletter was created by Mel Parks, a writer, researcher and workshop facilitator based in Sussex, UK. Mel runs writing workshops locally and on Zoom and researches creativity in midlife as well as her personal connection to nature. She has been widely published and is currently working on a series of moon and plant-inspired essays.
It is free to read and share, but if you value my work, please do stop by my virtual honesty box and leave a handful of loose change.
Thank you for sharing. And yes - a book purely on Awen would be amazing. My friends and I have started to use the word - trying to bring it back too!!