What a day to start back! In the middle of a storm. I saw a man half-way up Harbour Street stop and rest for a while, leaning into the wind at an angle where he would usually have fallen on his face!
So... much respect to those who made it along. (And for those who stayed behind to mind the various forts.)
It looked like the group would be entirely composed of new (and newish) members at first. Then our regulars started arriving. All in all, we had eight attending (with the promise of almost as many again next week!) and we welcomed George, Alison, and Charlie into the fold. They are going to be strong additions to the group.
We discussed January, all the cliche things people say about it, how nature and the world don't actually know what January is, how it might have a purpose other than simply making us depressed, and how it's the writer/poet's job to find those non-cliche aspects.
I mentioned the Ayr Sketch Club exhibition at the Maclauren Gallery and suggested a wee vsit for inspiration.
Ellie had asked about doing some Show-Don't-Tell work, so I brought in my Moulin Burn poem and read Ellie's pice about the woman in the cafe. Two different takes on Show-Don't-Tell.
My poem was, up-front, about a burn that runs through Pitlochry, but was written with adverse childhood experiences in mind. I don't think the reader would guess that, but I hoped they might get the feeling there was something else not-being-said and fill that space themselves.
Ellie's Flash Fiction piece, described a situation and a resolution, but left the back story completely un-spoken. She could do that because the resolution make it suddenly irrelevant.
Moira , had a different idea of what Show-Don't-Tell meant, and, as usual with creativity, there are no hard and fast rules. The best I can do to describe it is to say, don't put the whole story on the page. Leave something for the reader to guess at.
The On The Spot writing exercise was inspired by me listening to a librarian cope with the wildly different conversations that came from one queue of people. So, you have someone in a public service situation, behind a desk, and someone walks up and says...
Fill that space.
I mentioned that for the exercise it would be fine to have a superficially funny, frustrating, heartbreaking, annoying conversation. If you wanted to use Show-Don't-Tell you would suggest that there was a deeper problem not being addressed in the conversation. And, if you wanted to develop it into a longer piece, then you would have the customer say something that "hooks" the person behind the desk, requiring them to get more involved.
The results were entertaining! Bobby walked in after the exercise started, had a couple of words from me, then sat down and wrote a rhyming poem that summed the whole scenario up!
It turns out that four of the group - myself, Bobby, John McCutcheon, and Alison - will be reading at the Scrieving and Scran event at the HAC on Friday. If your not reading, come along and support your fellow writers. Then give it a go yourselves next time!
For a homework prompt, I used (with permission) Jo Bell's book 52. I have already posted the prompts for weeks 1-3 on the group page. This week's prompt is The Invitation. She encourages us to invite someone to something - a teenager to personal hygiene, someone to faith, a corrupt leader to step down, a weak leader to step up, to cycling, to masturbation, a future partner to appear, the unborn into the world, the birds to dine on the snails in your garden.
She stresses that you are writing an invitation, not writing about one. And you must stress what is in it for the other person. Sell it to them. Make it a good thing for both of you.
The poems she suggested as examples are down below. But feel free to go your own way!
When it comes to Show-Don't-Tell, ask yourself what Galway Kinnell is really talking about as he talks about oatmeal.
FROM 52 by Jo Bell
“Look here Vita – throw over your man, and we’ll go to Hampton Court and dine on the river together and walk in the garden in the moonlight and come home late and have a bottle of wine and get tipsy, and I’ll tell you all the things I have in my head, millions, myriads – They won’t stir by day, only by dark on the river. Think of that. Throw over your man, I say, and come.”
Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackvill-West
INVITATION TO FABULLUS by Gaius Valerius Catullus
You’ll dine well, in a few days, with me, if the gods are kind to you, my dear Fabullus, and if you bring lots of good food with you, and don’t come without a pretty girl and wine and wit and all your laughter. I say you’ll dine well, and charmingly, if you bring all that: since your Catullus’s purse, alas, is full of cobwebs. But accept endearments in return for the wine or whatever’s sweeter and finer: since I’ll give you a perfume my girl was given by the Loves and Cupids, and when you’ve smelt it, you’ll ask the gods to make you, Fabullus, all nose.
OATMEAL by Galway Kinnell
I eat oatmeal for breakfast.
I make it on the hot plate and put skimmed milk on it.
I eat it alone.
I am aware it is not good to eat oatmeal alone.
Its consistency is such that it is better for your mental health if somebody eats it with you.
That is why I often think up an imaginary companion to have breakfast with.
Possibly it is even worse to eat oatmeal with an imaginary companion.
Nevertheless, yesterday morning, I ate my oatmeal porridge, as he called it, with John Keats.
Keats said I was absolutely right to invite him: due to its glutinous texture, gluey lumpishness, hint of slime, and unusual willingness to disintegrate, oatmeal should not be eaten alone.
He said that in his opinion, however, it is perfectly OK to eat it with an imaginary companion, and that he himself had enjoyed memorable porridges with Edmund Spenser and John Milton.
Even if eating oatmeal with an imaginary companion is not as wholesome as Keats claims, still, you can learn something from it.
Yesterday morning, for instance, Keats told me about writing the “Ode to a Nightingale.”
He had a heck of a time finishing it. Those were his words “Oi ‘ad a ‘eck of a toime,” he said, more or less, speaking through his porridge.
He wrote it quickly, on scraps of paper, which he then stuck in his pocket, but when he got home he couldn’t figure out the order of the stanzas, and he and a friend spread the papers on a table, and they made some sense of them, but he isn’t sure to this day if they got it right.
An entire stanza may have slipped into the lining of his jacket through a hole in his pocket.
He still wonders about the occasional sense of drift between stanzas, and the way here and there a line will go into the configuration of a Moslem at prayer, then raise itself up and peer about, and then lay itself down slightly off the mark, causing the poem to move forward with a reckless, shining wobble.
He said someone told him that later in life Wordsworth heard about the scraps of paper on the table, and tried shuffling some stanzas of his own, but only made matters worse.
I would not have known any of this but for my reluctance to eat oatmeal alone.
When breakfast was over, John recited “To Autumn.”
He recited it slowly, with much feeling, and he articulated the words lovingly, and his odd accent sounded sweet.
He didn’t offer the story of writing “To Autumn,” I doubt if there is much of one.
But he did say the sight of a just-harvested oat field got him started on it, and two of the lines, “For Summer has o’er-brimmed their clammy cells” and “Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours,” came to him while eating oatmeal alone.
I can see him drawing a spoon through the stuff, gazing into the glimmering furrows, muttering.
Maybe there is no sublime; only the shining of the amnion’s tatters.
For supper tonight I am going to have a baked potato left over from lunch.
I am aware that a leftover baked potato is damp, slippery, and simultaneously gummy and crumbly, and therefore I’m going to invite Patrick Kavanagh to join me.
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