Teacher, Kate Worsley and student, Caroline Woodburn write about their experience of our Saturday Writers Retreat 'Writing Through the Darkness'.
Here it is again, the darkness. How do you feel about it? I always have to remind myself that the winter solstice is already in sight, the days actually start getting longer again before Christmas. I just have to get there. But how?
This time last year, staring down our first Covid winter, we launched our on-line Saturday morning writers' retreat. I light a candle and wait for you all to light up my screen. We chat a bit, I provide the prompts – one visual, one verbal – and then we just... write. Whatever comes into our heads. And then we chat a bit more and off we go into our weekends, a little brighter.
We're doing it again this year. Why not drop in and join us for the next one, this Saturday 13 November. Click here to sign up.
Meanwhile, read this:
Swing boats - how a story came from a single image.
It is amazing what a single moment can do to the mind of a writer: a single image.
This week it was a grainy photograph, from eighty years ago or more, of a girl, cropped hair, playful, teasing face, on a wooden fairground swing boat. The boat had been caught in mid-flight and her face met the lens with a provocative stare.
She was so much like someone I had known. It was as if it was her, looking back at me. And yet the expression on her face conveyed a joy and teasing childishness I had never seen on the face of her modern counterpart. It made me think - what if that really was a side to her, one that was only seen by those closest in her life?
More ideas came. How time repeat; people recur, their faces reappear; life ebbs and flows like the tide or the swing of a fairground boat; there are moments that come and pass but change us forever.
And then I wrote: a brief thousand words about the woman I knew and all I had conjured up from that one image. Oysters tossed by the waves against rocks. The joy of one summer. The ambiguity of gender. The brief pleasure of new love. A story of timelessness and human feeling.
All that, from a single image one Saturday morning.
By Caroline Woodburn
