Dear all
Welcome to my new newsletter - Awen. You’re receiving this newsletter because you are on my email mailing list for people who’ve attended or who are interested in my creative writing workshops.
I have decided to shift over to Substack (a newsletter platform) and open out the topics that I write about and share, to align them closer with the things I’m interested in and working on, while also offering tips and suggestions on the writing process as usual. I’ll play about with the format until I find something that sticks. As ever, if this stops interesting you, then feel free to unsubscribe.
I hope you’ll find inspiration (or Awen in Welsh) here for your own writing as well.
Writing a book
Since finishing my workshops for the summer, my attention has turned to back to my own writing and the issue of when exactly I’m going to write the book that I always have on the back burner. The problem is (well, there are many problems with this idea) that I never know what my book is going to be about, I change my mind from one week or month to the next. I have plenty of ideas and overlapping themes and I’m sure they’ll converge one day, but there isn’t a strong story that I must tell to carry me through.
I found myself, in a work retreat, introducing myself to new people by saying I wanted to write a book. ‘Not just any old book,’ I told them. ‘But an award-winning book on the Times bestseller list.’ While the book stays in my head, it is a work of complete brilliance. But the problem is that it’s that very thought that keeps it there in my head, as Oliver Burkeman outlines in his book Four Thousand Weeks: Time and How to Use It. Because as soon as I begin, it won’t match up to the idea I have of it.
So I decided to share extracts along the way. Or pieces I’ve written that may or may not end up in a book. The idea is that I’ll find out what works and what doesn’t work by writing and sharing, much like my workshops. And create community as well, which is an idea we were talking about at my work retreat with Ideas Alliance and inspired me to think about what my community might be.
Dandelion roots
I begin with the dandelions. I don’t know where the urge comes from. Maybe the midlife cravings, as Pinkola Estes describes: ‘A woman may crave to be near water, or belly down, her face in the earth, smelling that wild smell…She may have to plant something, weed something, pull things out of the ground or put them into the ground.’ (Women Who Run With The Wolves p. 432) I am kneeling in January mud, digging at the roots with my trowel, bunching the green leaves together in my other hand. I try to loosen the earth around the thick root without breaking it. The rain comes, intensifying the earthy smell. I work faster, loosening, pulling, shaking off the clay, teasing out the white, then piling my treasures on a piece of soggy cardboard.
At home, I wash the roots in cold water, fingers red and numbing. I watch the mud settle at the bottom of the bowl. I pick off each hairy tendril to leave the thick, white parts, then cut them into even pieces to dry in the oven. Is half an hour enough? They look toasted, brown. Relying on the internet for instructions, I boil my roots in water to make coffee. I take a sip and get that bitter taste I enjoy from my morning cup. I know I could do this again, if I wanted to. January foraging helps me feel resourceful and resilient, as if I could manage, whatever happens. The labour reminds me of a time in my childhood, when I foraged for periwinkles in rockpools.
Growing up in working class south Wales, without the privilege of a garden to grow vegetables, my family foraged what they could from their surroundings. My earliest memories are of my father with a rifle, bringing a rabbit home for tea or a trout caught in the local river. Food acquired like this was celebrated and appreciated, often shared with neighbours. I have a memory too of helping my father dig for lugworms on the expanse of beach left empty after the tide went out, and of my hands turning blue in a pushchair as I sat at dawn wrapped in a blanket waiting for him to catch something. Older, I sat with him on a pier, sipping tea from a thermos, while he waited, holding on to the rod, ever hopeful with the whirr of reeling in the line.
Later, following the divorce, my mother’s boyfriend didn’t fish but took me to gather periwinkles from rockpools. I tried not to slip on the seaweed-covered rocks, looking for flattish rocks encrusted with barnacles to stand on. Holding a blue striped Tesco carrier bag for our spoils, we ripped the winkles from their homes by the handful. The animal inside the tiny shell that looked like a snail retreated and the bag became heavy. Back home, he would boil them in a large pot, then serve them up for me to pick out the animal with a needle and eat. As I write this, it feels brutal. But back then, it was never about the plants, always about the meat. I didn’t know you could boil up dandelion roots to make coffee. My mother told me that dandelions make you wet the bed and the fathers in my life wouldn’t have seen the point in this when coffee comes in a jar. Unless it was to make alcohol. My grandfather brewed alcoholic drinks from elderberries, sloes and peaches, then he would offer a taste to me in tiny shot glasses.
Writing prompts
Feel free to use any or all of these sentence starters to begin your own writing.
I begin with the…
I don’t know where…
At home…
Growing up in…
Later…
Thank you for reading.
Until next time…
Mel