The workshop in practice

For anyone who wanted to get to my workshop but couldn’t, I’ve decided to write up a version of it here, so as many folk as possible can benefit.

Introduction:

I’m a writer and artist currently engaged in this project as writer in residence at Oxfam Books and Music Dumfries called ‘Deep Mapping Dumfries’. It’s grown from the creative practice I’ve been developing in recent years of trying to know and represent place in a profoundly layered and multiple way, as well as an awareness that nature isn’t something separate from the human, but something we are part of.

My own story is that I was a stay-at-home mum for years (and at the same time also a self-employed artist and garden nursery assistant) and then I found out that I could go to university in Dumfries, and I did and absolutely loved it, become totally absorbed in learning and was a student for most of the years between 2007 and 2016.

It was great, freeing, challenging, rewarding. But it also meant that I was spending more and more time indoors in front of a screen (or buried in books) and less and less outdoors, but especially less and less in the moment, in the here and now.

One of the things that helped me/is helping me to remember to pay attention to the here and now is mindfulness meditation. I was lucky that just at exactly the time I needed it, there was a free 8 week course in 2014, also at Dumfries’ Crichton Campus, and I’ve been practising and benefiting ever since.

Today I’d like to explain how this has helped me in my creative practice, and share some exercises that have helped me feel more at home in whatever place I am; we’ll do a short breathing and grounding exercise together then split up and pay attention to something particular in the world nearby and then regroup to try out some writing.

Writing about place

In both art and writing, I’m better at trying to describe what’s in front of me than I am at making stuff up. But in order to build the richest portraits, you need to learn to see as many aspects of your subjects as you can. Partly this is about paying attention, as we mostly don’t in our busy lives. With mindfulness I’ve been learning to practice ‘Being Here Now’ – noticing as much of the experience of living as I can, knowing that the mind will always wander because that’s what minds do, noticing where it wandered to without judging myself for letting it wander, noticing what the senses are experiencing, noticing what it’s like to be the creature I am, right now, right here, in this body, breathing. Practicing really being in place, feeling at home in yourself. And this is difficult, and impossible to do all the time, but the more you practice the easier it gets.

I’m also trying to practice getting to ‘know’ place deeply. Knowing that every place you ever are has journeyed through time to become what it is now, being shaped by humans, non-humans, weather, climate…

So, since researching for this project I ‘know’ Dumfries is on this marshy sandstone bedrock, and has burns flowing hidden beneath its streets and pavements – as another layer of my experience here. You’ll all have things you ‘know’ about Dumfries, about this particular spot in Dumfries. This might include history, folklore, memories, rumours. This all contributes to your experience of place.

Next, we’ll do a short breathing and grounding yourself exercise and then we’ll all go (inside or out) and pay attention to something, then come back together and do a bit of writing.

Meditation

So let yourself settle into where you are now, your back supporting itself away from the back of the chair.
Close your eyes or just let your eyes rest on the floor if that feels comfortable.
Pay attention to the feelings where your body is in contact with whatever is taking your weight; the chair, your feet on the floor.
Finding a position of stability and poise, upper body balanced over your hips, and shoulders in a comfortable but alert posture, hands resting on your lap or your knees, arms hanging by their own weight, stable and relaxed.
Feel yourself breathing.
Pay attention to your breathing, this breath coming in…
this breath coming out.
Notice where you feel the breath in the body, maybe in your belly, your chest, or even your nostrils as the breath flows in and flows out.
Letting go of the need to feel a certain way, there’s no right way to feel.
Just paying attention to how you feel in this moment.
Notice that your mind will wander because that’s what minds do, and if you notice this congratulate yourself for noticing and gently bring your attention back to the breath, this body, sitting here breathing.
Gradually bring awareness to the sounds outside yourself, begin to wiggle your toes, your fingers. Notice how you feel in your body, in your mind and allow your eyes to gently open….

 

We pause to say how that felt.

I hand out a piece of paper with these instructions:

1. Go out (or stay in) in silence. Wander until something draws your attention, takes your interest.
2. Pay attention to this thing, notice everything you can about it. Sensory experience, colour, smell, sound, feel. Small detail, how it makes you feel, what it reminds you of. Can it move? Write about its movement or stillness – how fast does it move, what quality of movement? Or has it been there days or years. Notice things you already knew about it. Something that surprises you.
3. Switch perspective back to you – where are you grounded, what’s under you? How does your body feel in this space? Relaxed? Tense? Cold? Warm? What thoughts and feelings are you experiencing?
4. What do you ‘know’ about the place you’re at, paying attention? Facts? Memories?
5. What else does your mind keep wandering to? Notice without judging yourself.

You can take the instructions with you if it helps and you can choose to write down your experience at the time or afterwards. You don’t have to do all of the things in the list, just as many as seem right to you at the time.

Regroup in about half an hour

We regroup and talk about how we found that experience of paying attention, we all found it both difficult and very rewarding. The list was really useful.

I point out that although this workshop is described as a poetry workshop, I’m not intending to try to teach you how to write poetry. For one thing, it’s too big a topic, too big a claim. What I am doing is sharing some of what I’m learning about being in place and writing about it.

I’d like to read a quotation from Ursula Le Guin’s foreword to Late in the Day in Conversations on Writing, Ursula K. Le Guin with David Naimon:

‘Poetry is the human language that can try to say what a tree or a river is, that is, to speak humanly for it, in both senses of the word “for”. A poem can do so by relating the quality of an individual human relationship to a thing, a rock or river or tree, or simply by describing the thing as truthfully as possible’

What I want to draw attention to in this quotation from Le Guin is this idea of ‘truthfulness’. You can write poems that are fictional, and in a sense all poems are – the ‘I’ that speaks in my poem is not me, but a persona I’ve created, but at the same time, I’m always trying to understand and represent my subjects and my relation to them as truthfully, or maybe as truly as I can.

I’d also like to read this poem by Ursula Le Guin:

The Small Indian Pestle at the Applegate House

Dense, heavy, fine-grained, dark basalt
worn river-smooth all round, a cylinder
with blunt round ends, a tool: you know it when
you feel the subtle central turn or curve
that shapes it to the hand, was shaped by hands,
year after year, by women’s hands
that held it here, just where it must be held
to fall of its own weight into the shallow bowl
and crush the seeds and rise and fall again
setting the rhythm of the soft, dull song
that worked itself at length into the stone,
so when I picked it up it told me how
to hold and heft it, put my fingers where
those fingers were that wore it softly down
to this fine shape that fits and fills my hand,
this weight that wants to fall and, falling, sing.

 

I love the rhythm of this poem, that so perfectly describes this object as in use by a line of women throughout its history, the idea that the object carries this history even in its shape, continually being shaped by use.

In some ways the town is like this pestle, continually changing and being shaped by use. The objects in this shop too, all carry stories of their relation to the humans that have used them, owned them. In order to build this layered knowledge of place, a method of being fully in place and gathering sensory experience and other knowledges seemed like a fruitful approach.

We each share a bit about what particular thing we paid attention to and what we noticed. Very rich, the material realities of the things, the stories attached to them, our own physical being in place.

Next, I thought we could do a bit of writing. Either write a poem, a letter or a short piece of prose to the thing you focussed on or from that thing, including as much or as little of the material you gathered during the exercise as you want. This is just a way of developing more of a rapport with something outside yourself while at the same time accepting your own physical and mental reality in place.

One of the best things I learned at a writing workshop is that although it can be uncomfortable to write in front of others, it’s important to remember that all you’re writing is material for later – that it doesn’t matter how good or bad it is, it’s about getting something down in the moment.

We take ten or fifteen minutes to do this and then share what we have.

Finally, we discuss Dumfries as a continually changing entity, a repository of remembered place, talking about the Old Dumfries facebook page and the new book by Mary Smith and Keith Kirk, Secret Dumfries, and our own memories of Dumfries places from childhood that are no longer the same. We write for a few more minutes about particular remembered Dumfries place and then reflect on how the workshop has been. I’ve enjoyed it immensely, and participants describe it as useful, inspiring and positively relaxed and informal.