This week I taught a workshop at Cambridge University’s Judith E. Wilson Drama Studio as part of Bhanu Kapil’s workshop cycle on Water, which forms a natural overlap with my own sequence of classes on the Four Elements.

I introduced the idea of the Four Elements as an alternative to binary ways of looking at writing (and the world – let’s be ambitious). And then we considered Water for its associations with feelings, which can so often be out of balance in writing. We listened to a passage from Annie Proulx’s ‘Brokeback Mountain’, and through close readings identified aspects of craft that brought a particular emotional charge to that scene. We also read aloud from Joe Brainard’s I Remember, and discussed how memory can activate feeling through specific associations.

And then, after giving ourselves watery workshop names (including Pebble, Fleet, Kelp, Great White Shark, Newt, and Goddess of the Eels and Wrong Fishes), we did some contemplative drawing exercises and wrote some powerful I Remembers of our own.

What was special about this class was that it took place in the Judith E. Wilson Studio – we had watery props, and communed with a manatee! And we had lighting: I’ve not considered so deeply before how classroom lighting might affect how we write or how I teach, and it was a real treat to be working in such a shadowy turquoise space; it was like writing on the ocean floor. It reminds me of an exercise suggested in Elaine Showalter’s Teaching Literature where she tasks students of Victorian literature to write by candlelight – such a simple idea, yet one with the potential for profound shifts in what we create. Thanks to Lorraine Carver from the English department for making this possible.

Thanks also to everyone who came for joining in so fully, and special thanks to Bhanu Kapil for hosting this workshop; the whole series of classes sounds rich and imaginative. Cambridge is one of my favourite cities, and it was a real pleasure to be teaching there.

I also saw the sacred lawns dug up by Extinction Rebellion, eek! See below. As a gardener, I was probably unconvinced … though as a teacher I’m thinking ahead to my next workshop on 21 March, when we shall mark the equinox with the WRites of Spring at Earth Works (shovels not required).