Category Archives: Courses

Express Yourself Without Feedback

by Andrew | Leave a comment

This last couple of months I’ve had the great privilege of taking once again the online course based on Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down The Bones. It’s made up of a self-paced sequence of videos and readings, with additional live sessions for writing collectively. Most of the live writes had 250-300 people attending, or more. I first took it last year, and this year I signed up to take part in the live sessions (a kind offering from Shambhala Publications).

Every Wednesday and Saturday I sat and wrote off a couple of ten-minute prompts, and then I read out what I wrote to complete strangers in Portland, in New Mexico, in West Yorkshire, in New York State, in Boulder. And then I listened to their writing, and by the end of the session we were no longer complete strangers. It was some of the most special and precious writing I’ve ever heard, or read. Raw, real, true, intimate. Writing is, after all, about far more than being published.

One great feature is Natalie’s presence – even in those videos her spirit and attitude and emotional intelligence are infectious. The live writes were led by a group of wonderful facilitators who’ve worked with Natalie for years, but Natalie also came to some of them, and in addition she hosted three live Q&A sessions herself. It was a delight to see her field questions – direct, quick, wise, funny, generous, sometimes heartbreaking. No wonder she has so many fans.

In addition to Writing Down The Bones, I’d read others of her books before – Wild Mind, Thunder and Lightning, Old Friend From Far Away, Banana Rose – and I’ve been reading a few others recently: Long Quiet Highway, Living Color, The True Secret of Writing, The Great Spring. During these months of quarantine, when I’ve often found it hard to lose myself in a book, Natalie has been great company. Her voice, her concerns, her perceptions. Everyday life, straight talking. Those zen ideas of waking up, of following the mind, of being present. During a time when so much else feels trivial or scary or tedious, Natalie’s writing just feels REAL. I highly recommend anything that she’s written, and not just for writers. Again, Natalie is in all of her work: present.

And she is a phenomenal teacher. I once saw her read at the Boulder Book Store, and she said something I’ll always remember: ‘I think I’m a good writer, but I’m a great teacher.’  The self-insight and honesty of that statement struck me then and strikes me now. I think she is a great writer – a great communicator.

In the online class, as in her in-person workshops, Natalie’s prompted writes have simple rules. Don’t stop, keep the pen moving, don’t cross out, use whatever flashes in your mind – follow the mind, the ‘yooman mind’ as Natalie says, and write it down.

Also: feel free to write the worst crap in America (or Twickenham). I don’t believe in crap in writing, anyway. (Crap in published writing: that’s another matter.) This frees you to write authentically, and explore things on the page without self-consciousness. This is about writing freely, instinctively. This is about writing as a practice.

There are many, many gifts for us in Natalie’s work, but something I took away this time was the idea of sharing our writing without feedback.

When we went into our breakout sessions, we were instructed simply to listen, and then to say thank you, and that was that. (Sometimes you do simple acts of recall, recollecting simple details or impressions created in the writing – this can be one of the most useful pieces of feedback of all.)

This idea of not getting feedback on your writing runs counter to various models of writing workshops, especially in academic and professional contexts, where workshops are often founded on the idea of a dozen or so writers sharing work and then getting feedback one by one. Some workshops have strict guidelines: the writer with work under discussion cannot speak; timed sections of feedback; the word ‘flow’ cannot be used (yes, I’ve heard of that one).

Which is fantastic when it goes well. Deadlines produce work. Your writing is tested on readers. Valuable insights are given, and lessons are learned. A manuscript is revised. Creative community and genuine friendships are made. Sometimes manuscripts turn out to match the tastes and interest of agents and publishers, as well as the market. Happy writer becomes happy author, with happy readers.

But workshops and writing groups can have downsides. (1) Committee mind. Or love-ins. And (2) half-cooked feedback, sometimes made on the basis of the speaker needing to say something, rather than something needing to be said. And (3) half-cooked writing – the writing itself is often shared far too soon for any sort of valuable editorial input. Which can all end up a bit (4) fraying and dispiriting. No wonder writers such as Lucy Ellmann and Todd McEwen and Anis Shivani are so critical of workshops, and periodically culture sections reheat articles on the merits of the MA/MFA in creative writing.

There are other ways to organise workshops or feedback, though; Bhanu Kapil, for example, gets writers in her workshops to work in smaller ‘pods’ of three, which can be more fruitful for meaningful and manageable exchanges. Susan Bell, in The Artful Edit, encourages writers to find writing partners with whom you can exchange work, and many writers prefer to work one on one in that way. Many successful writing groups see writers offering supportive and helpful feedback.

But, too, this Natalie Goldberg rule of No Feedback really gave me pause.

Of course we get feedback on our drafts along the way, and of course we need cheerleaders. But I realised: when and where that feedback comes is vital, as is opening yourself to what comes out of writing when it’s freed of a particular outcome. I’ve blogged about getting feedback before.

What was so powerful about the Writing Down The Bones reads was that the act of listening was emphasised. Listening to other people. Simply listening to people express themselves. And then being listened to by people who say thank you and otherwise remain silent. There is a very straightforward pleasure in these intimate transactions. It’s also a powerful way to develop your intuition.

This class also introduced me to a wonderful listening meditation practice. We usually follow the breath in meditation, but this time we followed what we heard, though without paying attention to it. If you don’t quite grasp that: you had to be there! It felt profound.

Through all of this, what happens most strongly is that you start listening to yourself. You are simply voicing what you have to say in a safe space, aware you are being listened to but not waiting to hear what they think. Instinctively, you start paying attention to your own writing in a new way. You start to feel your own writing – its vibrational qualities, where it comes to life, what you are wanting to say.

I also relate this to the distinction I’ve come across in Buddhist thought between observing mind and judging mind. All writing – or any creative output – relies on a mix of sensory perception with critical evaluation to be rendered into form. (More of that in another post, perhaps.)

We can of course solicit views from the professionals. I give editorial feedback for a living, after all! It’s what editors do. And we can, if given a tangible brief, write towards a tasked outcome with a commission attached. But so often, with creative projects, we have to find our own way. We have to develop an instinct. And whatever other people tell us, we often already know deep down inside what it is we need to express in writing.

We haven’t always got there yet. Sometimes we have to get out of our way first. We have to shelve neurosis, stop grasping, give up trying to second-guess the market. Not least, if we’re interested in publishing, because we know that so often the agents and publishers are second-guessing the market anyway. When they start working with her, Natalie tells writers not to think about publishing. She tells them to go away and write for two years. Develop a writing practice. Discover what you have to say, and how you want to say it. Listen to it.

Sometimes we simply have to rid ourselves of the prospect of feedback (at least for now). By listening to what we have to say, and telling ourselves that the feedback can come later, we start to observe our writing, rather than judge it. What’s there? Suddenly we start to own our writing, and feel its power.

This zen approach to suspending judgment as a means of developing our intuition is not unique to Natalie Goldberg. Lynda Barry, for example, tasks her students on drawing tight spirals as they listen in silence to their colleagues read their work. Otherwise Lynda says, ‘Good! Good!’ And that is it.

That simple act of expression is golden. Read your work to someone else. Be heard. And listen carefully to yourself.

As a writing experiment: Find someone to read your writing to. Exchange prompts, and write for ten minutes on each one. Then read them to each other. Then say thank you. No other feedback. Just thank you. It’s one of the most empowering writing practices you’ll ever develop.

 

Further information

Writing With Natalie Goldberg – Shambhala Publications, including a video selection from the class

Writing Down The Bones: Thirty Years Later – Taos News: a video interview with Natalie (she’s wearing purple, yay! there was lots of purple in the live writes)

 

Water Workshop at Cambridge University

by Andrew | 2 Comments

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).

 

 

Water Ways

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On Saturday a lovely group of writers came along to Water Ways, the newest of the Four Elements workshops that I’m running as a series with Kellie Jackson of Words Away.

Among the Four Elements, Water is identified with feeling, and as the workshop approached I realised the field of emotions presents a pretty HUGE and amorphous subject as a topic within writing. Given my ambition slash weakness of needing to be comprehensive, how would we cover it ALL?!

So we approached the subject of emotion through a few specific lenses. We started by discussing memory and symbolism as ways to activate, contain or convey feeling in writing. Inspired by Lynda Barry, we also gave ourselves watery names for the day – with my teacher hat on, I became Professor Newt.

We then looked at methods of crafting narrative tone, paying special attention to perspective and sentence structure and examining the emotional shifts within a particular scene in Brokeback Mountain. A good scene will contain CHANGE, especially in the feelings of characters – and readers. We also looked for Proulx’s use of water imagery.

And I forgot to ask: where in the story do Ennis and Jack say, ‘I love you’? What does that say?

Thinking about tone in relation to pitch, it also occurs to me now that we use the word pitch to describe that brief description we use to sell books. Which makes me think how a good sales pitch really goes to the heart of a book, and ideally grows out of the narrative tone and voice and style of telling the story.

We ended the day looking at the emotion created within the intimate space of a letter with reference to works by Ocean Vuong and Tove Jansson. And then we wrote thank you letters of our own.

I wish we’d discussed the idea of the unconscious a bit more. But it was certainly present; we talked plenty about Ocean Vuong, and only now do I realise: the clue is in his name! OCEAN = WATER, right?! There: the unconscious in beautiful action.

A highlight of the day was our brilliant guest tutor and resident wavemaker: author and illustrator Sally Kindberg. I am really keen in this series of workshops to experiment with practices and viewpoints from creative fields that rely less heavily on verbal forms, because words are so often the problem with writing – words can get in our way, just as writers often need to get out of their own way too, and it often makes sense to develop writing without actually doing any writing. So on Saturday we drew.

At the start of the day, instead of a meditation we did a contemplative drawing exercise using our hands and lines. And then in her drawing workshop Sally got us to make some (hilarious!) self-portraits, and, using her magic top hat, guided us through the creation of characters that we took on adventures in four-frame comic strips. Clouds became potatoes, and much mirth was had. Under my student pen name of Simon Seahorse, I was very pleased to learn how to draw wings in flight.

Comic strips also prompted a brief discussion about yonkoma manga and kishōtenketsu, and we bonded in questioning the necessity of conflict as the central drive in writing (an idea that many of us are fed up with – more on that anon).

Sally inspired me so much I spent the following afternoon watching the wild and brilliant Studio Ghibli classic Porco Rosso and then playing drawing games with a friend who’d come to visit. Thanks, Sally! I finally got to art school.

And thanks again to Sally for bringing drawing into our class so purposefully, and to everyone who came for joining in so fully.

Our next Four Elements workshop is Earth Works, where our guest earthshaker will be dancer and Physical Intelligence expert Claire Dale. It’s held on 21 March, which is the spring equinox; I promise we shall be marking the wRites of Spring in appropriate style!

 

 

Food in Writing

by Andrew | 1 Comment

On Sunday I taught for the first time at the Victoria and Albert Museum: a workshop on food in writing called Food: Bigger Than The Page.

We started off talking about food as a genre or genres (plural) of writing. Some books of food writing have an investigative or campaigning approach, such as Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, and then there are works of food history such as Dorothy Hartley’s Food in England and Mark Kurlansky’s Cod.

Someone also brought up the name of one of the great food writers: MFK Fisher. And I forgot, oops, to mention Julie Powell’s Julie and Julia, which was inspired by the blog she wrote cooking her way through Julia Child’s classic cookbook – if you are interested in the publishing process, you might enjoy this piece from the publisher Knopf on The Making of … Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

Moving on to the use of food in fiction and memoir, we discussed the role of food (and hunger) as symbol and driver of plot in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, then explored the part that food plays in activating memory, using Joe Brainard’s I Remember and Nigel Slater’s Toast.

Paying attention to the ways in which all five senses create images that bring writing to life, we listened to some poems by William Carlos Williams, Pablo Neruda, Seamus Heaney, Galway Kinnell and Meryl Pugh. (Meryl teaches popular courses at Morley College and the Poetry School, should you be interested.) Some of these poems celebrate food or everyday life in very straightforward ways, while others have more layered meanings.

And then, after a brief palate-cleansing meditation, we became hunter-gatherers: we created Word Hoards of our sense perceptions by getting intimate with mint and star anise and kiwi fruits, and carrots and lime-blossom tea, and a fancy tiny pear called Piqa Reo (Waitrose, we salute you – and you’ve even given us a further way to use the Q tile without a U in Scrabble) (though the lime-blossom came from Gaia in St Margarets – support your local indie!).

We then paid a visit to supermarkets in California with Allen Ginsberg and Armistead Maupin, and created some characters of our own by thinking about the ways in which food acts as a social marker.

We fitted in a snack-sized look at recipes in food with Heartburn by Nora Ephron (and Like Water For Chocolate by Laura Esquivel also got a mention here). And then we finished off by discussing recipes as a form for poems with ecopoet Jack Collom – something to try at home?

I had a lot of fun putting this workshop together – see the links and titles above and also below in the list of resources. Thanks to the V&A and everyone who came along – and especially to Stacy for thinking a writing workshop would be a good idea (I first met her when I attended a V&A book club for The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver – I’m going to tell myself that Frida Kahlo led me here). Thanks also to Michelle for the photos (and the kind words) below.

 

Further resources

Sandra M. Gilbert and Roger J. Porter, eds., Eating Words: A Norton Anthology of Food Writing

Mark Kurlansky, ed., Choice Cuts: A Savory Selection of Food Writing

Jill Foulston, ed., The Joy of Eating: The Virago Book of Food

Dianne Jacob, Will Write For Food (practical advice on writing about food)

Diana Henry, What Goes On Behind The Scenes Of A Cookbook (for more about the creative and production processes, and Diana Henry is an inspired writer and cook too: I have enjoyed many of her recipes)

Lynda Barry, Syllabus and Making Comics (great on creativity – you might also enjoy this interview with the genius herself: at the least, watch the first five or ten minutes)

Plus, just because, a gorgeous piece of food/cookery writing on candied oranges I read earlier today.  (Will edit for candied oranges: a trade, anyone?!)

 

And before I go: as I type, I believe there might be one space left on the day-long Four Elements workshop Water Ways on 8 February, which explores how we evoke feeling in writing, and I’ll also be looking at food among other experiences of the earthly realm in Earth Works on 21 March. More info via the links at the Words Away website.

 

One of our frondy inspirations.

 

Such a grand setting!

Workshops for 2020: Food, Water Ways, Earth Works

by Andrew | 2 Comments

In 2020 I’m continuing the ongoing series of new Four Elements workshops with Kellie Jackson of Words Away.

Four Elements workshops follow a holistic approach, using mindfulness techniques and placing a strong emphasis on play and experiment, while also addressing practical matters of craft and the business of publishing. Each day-long workshop considers the symbolic powers and perspectives of the elements: fire for the energy it creates, water for the feelings it evokes, earth for conjuring up the material world, and air for the way in which it structures the world and brings clarity to our thinking. We also discuss ways to balance all four elements in our writing, as required.

We held the first new workshop last month; in Finding Your Fire we paid particular attention to how the power of fire fuels our intention and charges up our voices, with one session devoted to crafting dialogue, which is perhaps one of the most striking ways to add a spark to our writing. We also looked at many ways in which fire appears in writing.

Writers sometimes overthink our work (too much time spent in our own company?!), and we all gain something from getting out of our own heads, and to do so it often helps to work with creative materials other than words. So we are also inviting guest gurus to lead sessions during each day – practitioners who bring in fresh (and elemental) perspectives from different fields in the arts. In the pic above, guest firestarter Kate Beales is showing us how techniques from theatre help summon up fiery energies to empower our writing. In other workshops we’ll gain insights from teachers or coaches from the worlds of illustration, dance, and poetry.

I usually circulate brief writing assignments as well as reading suggestions in advance, so that everyone comes prepared. And of course there is plenty of writing during the day, and afterwards too, as I provide writing prompts and resources, as well as follow-up notes with plenty of suggestions for further writing and reading. We also make time for brief meditations.

Our workshops are attended by published authors as well as beginning writers, and the spirit is engaged and collaborative; it’s good to observe community forming and writing partnerships developing.

If you are interested, below are the dates for the next workshops – my Forthcoming page also has more information, and you can find booking details via the links below:

* Saturday 8 February 2020, 9.45am-5pm Water Ways: A Four Elements Workshop on Feeling, Tone and Perspective – our guest wavemaker is artist and author Sally Kindberg

* Saturday 21 March 2020, 9.45am-5pm Earth Works: A Four Elements Workshop on Description and Action – our guest earthshaker is dancer and coach Claire Dale

* Saturday 16 May 2020, 9.45pm-5pm Writing On Air: A Four Elements Workshop on Structure, Form and Focus – our guest aeronaut is poet and performance artist Bhanu Kapil (more info and booking link to come)

* June 2020 (date to be confirmed), 9.45pm-5pm
The Four Elements of Editing (more info and booking link to come)

Also, on 26 January 2020, 2pm-5pm, I’m leading Writes at the Museum with Food – Bigger Than The Page, my rescheduled Sunday-afternoon workshop on food in writing at the Victoria & Albert Museum. Inspired by the V&A’s recent exhibition Food: Bigger Than The Plate, it will explore all sorts of ways in which we use food in writing. I might even wear a pinny.

Have a good holiday break – and I hope to see some of you in the new year. Let’s see 2020 as the beginning of something good – in our writing, in the world.