YOU, THE EXPLORER

There’s a basic narrative structure that is common to most (in fact very nearly all) stories that work well. Here I mean stories in the broadest sense, from the three-line joke, to the epic novel and the TV series. It goes something like this:

There is a hero, with a goal. We understand her. We know what she wants and what will happen if she doesn’t achieve it. We know that achieving her goal means everything to her. We know the unyielding nature of the obstacles that will get in the way of her journey towards that goal. Because so much is at stake, we care about whether she succeeds or not. We observe her as she goes, step by step towards her aim. At every step of the way, she encounters obstacles. We are on the edge of our seats. Will she defeat this one, or will she fail and lose everything? We journey with her. We are on the edge of our seats, gripped, enthralled by her journey.

You are the hero of your journey to be a writer-in-the wild. Only you know why you have embarked on it. You will meet challenges, both physical and emotional, on the journey towards that goal. Only you know where your greatest challenges lie, and how far to push yourself. For example, is it failure that scares you more, or success? After all, for some people, walking into a room full of people is more difficult that scaling the highest mountain in the world.

You are not alone on this adventure. You are taking a journey that has been taken millions of times before, in many different cultures, and on many different scales. The narrative arc of your story, that archetypal pattern of storytelling, is held in the unconscious of every writer, and stored in the collective unconscious of humanity. So, write in the spirit of every adventurer that has ever been. Just think of the stories you’ll have to tell, to whisper or shout out, upon your safe and celebratory return.

The Weekly Prompt

Think of yourself as an explorer setting out to discover your wild words. Then answer these questions:

What is your aim?

How will you try to achieve it?

What will get in your way?

What will support you in your quest?

What will the outcome look like?

If you’d like to work with fiction, rather than autobiographical writing, answer these questions for a chosen character about to undertake an inner or outer journey.

If you’d like to send me what you write, I’d love to read it.

THE BODY IN THE WOODS: PART 2

That night, I didn’t sleep. A strange insect bit me. It itched like hell. I scratched and scratched at it, obsessed by visions of poison seeping though my body. I reverted to biting my nails, an old childhood habit. I listened to the wild words rumbling in my head, like the variety of animal sounds outside the tent. I tried to differentiate between them. What was worth putting on the page?

I tried to write, but the fears were quite clearly restricting my words on the page.

I thought the wild words that night should be about my pained experience of being in the woods, but instead I found that I was writing an uninteresting summary. I was focusing on the more comfortable aspects of the story, like my preparation for the expedition, rather than risk getting too deep into descriptions of body sensations, or my fears. I wanted to sleep. I wanted to dream about those beautiful prowling wild words. Instead my mind always returned to its antithesis, the caged words, still trapped in his cage. In my half-awake, half-asleep state, I thought I heard the wild words, mewing plaintively, somewhere far away.

By daylight, my mind was worn out. My thoughts were tired, and seemed to be drifting into sleep, even if the rest of me wasn’t. I crawled out of the tent and stood in the cold. The fog had frosted around the trees, mummifying them overnight. I was a failure, I’d written nothing of worth.

I felt the reaction in my body, almost before I heard the sound that had caused it. It was like someone had put a large fist round my guts and squeezed them. The noise came from somewhere in the back of my mind, a scrubby, dark place, and it was, indeed, soft, mewing words. Words were coming, unbidden. Wild Words.

I moved towards them before I thought about it. I took my notepad out. But just as I began to write, the ideas evaporated away. Somewhere in my mind there was now a circular space where the vegetation had been flattened. It was a similar effect to when your pet cat lies in your Azaleas, but the imprint was much bigger. Steam was rising into the air. I felt the warmth. The words were no longer there, but had been there so recently that I thought I could still see their breath moving the grass of my thoughts.

I had almost got those wild words on to the page. It had been a near miss and I no longer felt like a failure. I realised that however hard it had been, I had stayed in that place, with my feelings and my notebook, all night. I hadn’t run away.  Despite the fact I hadn’t written wild words that night, I had got much closer. The next time, I felt sure, I would harness them on the page.

The Weekly Prompt: Taking Body Sensations Into Fiction

Take the body sensations on which you based your writing for last week (for Part 1 of The Body In The Woods) and write a fictional poem or story of up to 1000 words. None of the facts need to be the same as you experienced in that exercise, although they might be. Only the physical, bodily sensations must remain the same.

THE BODY IN THE WOODS

Part 1 I was spending the night in a tent in the woods. My notebook was on my lap; my pen was tucked into my hair for safekeeping. My intention was to listen to the noises around me, and to focus on becoming aware of the most subtle reactions of my body to external stimuli. I hoped this training would help me to convey my experiences vividly on the page.

I was putting into practice what I already knew theoretically, that describing the body sensations of the main character/narrator in our writing allows the reader to feel into their experience, to live in their shoes. And that more broadly speaking, being in touch with our bodily experience can free something up in our writing, and help to release wild words.

In the small canvas space, I tried to stay with my bodily experience. Initially there didn’t seem to be much feeling there anyway, or not much of interest.  Then, as I tuned in, what I felt was only unpleasant. I was stiff and aching from sleeping on the hard ground, and the damp seemed to have got into my bones. My flat mate had primed me for exploration with homemade stew, made of God-knows-what. It was not digesting well, and my stomach began to ache.

Because, or perhaps despite of the physical discomfort, my mind kicked in. I don’t want to stop thinking. If I do, how will I keep my fear under control? Perhaps if I first make a plan to deal with the wild words if they attack me, then I’ll be able to focus on just being here. I realised how nervous I was, waiting for the wild words to emerge. What repressed stuff would come up from the powerhouse of imagination and memory? I was scared those words might tear at the tent and devour me.

I was becoming very aware of not only my physical, but also my emotional fragility. I was sure now that just one scratch from a wild word would be enough to finish me. Anxious thoughts snowballed. Would I even survive this night, let alone be able to write about it? Well, at least I was getting in touch with my present moment experience. That was what I wanted, wasn’t it? Yes. No. I had no idea anymore.

To be continued…

The Weekly Prompt

Create an intense bodily experience for yourself. If possible go into nature to do this. You could, for example: eat apples from a tree, swim in the sea, roll naked in sand, jump into a muddy puddle. Don’t worry if you don’t have access to a natural environment, there are plenty of opportunities in the town, even inside your house! You could: have a hot shower, record the experience of coming into a cool house from the heat of the day, feel delicious food go down your throat, or have a massage.

Spend 15 minutes describing in prose, or poetry, how the experience feels in your body. Pay careful attention to all the different parts of your body, the various textures, movements, and rhythms.

IN THE MOUTH

A talented student of mine sent me this wonderful poem. It’s a response to the weekly Writing Prompt, that mentioned the following quote from the Tomas Tranströmer poem ‘From March '79’ ‘Words but no language…language but no words’

 In The Mouth

 First it was like a mustard grain                                                   in the mouth

Then the size of pea rolling about                                                 in the mouth

Lost your words                                                                           in the mouth

And found new ones                                                                    in the mouth

Rattles on her teeth                                                                     in the mouth

And soaks up her spit                                                                  in the mouth

Their stories                                                                                in the mouth

It’s the boulder                                                                            in the mouth

As big as Dog Tor                                                                        in the mouth

It’s grey and old                                                                          in the mouth

Dressed in lichen and moss                                                          in the mouth

Spitting out a collective noun                                                         in the mouth

For language                                                                               in the mouth

Val Shearer

Val’s subject has really resonated with me, as last week I completely lost my voice for two days. I’d been struggling to express myself around a personal issue, when, quite suddenly, it dried up. It was as if my body was saying ‘I’ve had enough of trying to make myself heard here, so I’m going to stop trying’. As someone who is usually able to mould and craft speech with ease, it was an interesting experience to be voiceless. Initially, there was a sense of peace in not needing to try and influence those around me via the spoken word. Then, my hands took over and conversed with gestures. We human beings are creative in finding routes to self-expression.

I found the silence restful- for the first day, that is. But then I started having to cancel meetings. My computer provided an outlet for my growing frustration as I stamped each word hard into my keyboard. I was suddenly struck, as if I’d never realised it before, by the immense value of being able to write. That ability to express on the page released a sense of relief akin to a mute given a blackboard and chalk (please forgive the stereotype).

Now my voice is back, I’m trying not to forget what the words mean to me.

The Weekly Prompt

Our bodies speak in so many more ways that just via our mouths vocalising. Write about a time when your body, or a certain part of your body, communicated to you- for example through pain, absence of pain, movement, stiffness etc… What was it trying to say? You might also find it interesting to write a monologue from the point of view of a part of your body. You might be surprised at what it communicates.

WHY WRITE OUTDOORS?

  Why it is that I love to write outdoors?

At first I was just desperate to unchain myself from my desk, break out of the building, and write in nature. I craved seeing something other than a computer screen. I wanted to feel the movement of the pen again, instead of just the striking of keys.

I wanted to free up the qualities of ‘wild’ in myself and my words- expressiveness, spontaneity, the untamed, the intuitive. I dreamed of becoming the writer that I’d always wanted to be. Writing begins with living.  How could I write in full colour, if I wasn’t living in full colour?

Once out there, stripped of the trappings of society, I felt I could be more honestly myself, and that my words could be more honestly themselves too. I found that surrounded by movement, my words gained a sense of movement and drama too. When I explored and went into unknown territory, my words followed hot on my tail.

The closer I looked at the minutiae of nature, in order to describe it in words, the more vivid the outdoor world became, and the more I needed to express what it, and its salvation meant to me. It’s a virtuous circle. Not only is great writing enabled by living fully and vibrantly, living is also enabled by bringing our attention to a writing subject that embodies those qualities. Picking out details of nature to describe, I saw that everything was hitched to everything else in the universe. The world was indeed in a grain of sand, and the ocean in a drop of water.

And above everything else, I love to write outdoors because it is truly the most joyous experience. In the words of American poet, E.E. Cummings, the world becomes ‘mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful’. There is no better feeling than when my words canter on the broad savannah, dive deep in the dark ocean, and swoop in the vast blue sky. 

The Weekly Prompt

Why are you a writer-in-the wild? Please write and tell me about it.

THE FRENCH EXPERTS

Last weekend I went from my home in the foothills of the Pyrenees, into the high mountains of the neighbouring department of Ariege. I had appointments with two expert animal trackers. I wanted to learn more about ‘wildness’ in order to go deeper into my work with ‘wild words’. My first meeting was with Serge, a wiry, self -effacing man in his fifties, sporting a moustache and 70’s shades. He’s spent twenty years tracking the Pyrenean brown bear. His job is to mediate, and to try and diffuse tensions, between the bears and the local shepherds, who regard the sheep as a threat to their flocks.

My romantic images of Serge the solitary tracker, running barefoot through the forests, were quickly dispelled when I discovered that the bears are tracked via a series of cameras.  ‘This is the only way to do it’, he told me. ‘Unless you want to stay up all night’ (they are nocturnal), ‘and unless you want to risk your life’.

It’s certainly true that most of the cultures where tracking was practiced extensively are dry earth, or desert-based, aboriginal Australians being an example. Animal prints are much easier to see in sand. In your average forest, strewn with leaf litter, sticks, and leaves, tracking not an easy task.

I then met Ernest. He’s an ichnologist. That is to say, he specialises in the science of animal traces. His house is an Alladin’s cave of casts and other art works that put into solid form the wanderings of animals over our earth.

This is a man who spent three months living on a frozen lake. This is also a man who is about to take his wife and five children to spend two months in the Brazilian rainforest. I was swept up into a brave new world by his stories.

Driving home I stopped by a man-made lake. It was deserted. The tourist season hasn’t begun here yet. Walking across the volleyball court to get to the café, I saw several clear sets of tracks in the sand. During the previous night deer had skipped through. Wild boar had lugged their heavy weight across too.

I might not be up to the facing the deserts of Australia yet, but the sand- based culture of the volleyball courts of Southern France, I can do that.

The Weekly Prompt

Find an area of sand, or fine soil. This might be loose sand on a building site, a children’s’ sandpit, the sediment left by a river, or a beach.

Go to this place in the early morning. Write about what you find. Who, or what has left its mark overnight?

SHARPHAM HOUSE

  On Friday we went in search of our Wild Words at the magnificent Sharpham House, two miles upstream from the town of Totnes, in Devon. The famous architect Robert Taylor designed the house and the great landscape architect Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown is thought to have landscaped the extensive grounds.

We moved fluidly between our base camp, a room where the log fire warmed our bones, and explorations of those grounds. We dodged the raindrops, and luxuriated in the moments when the sun peeped through the clouds.

We gazed down on what is, I believe, one of the most wonderful views in the country. The fields and wooded slopes fall effortlessly to the banks of the River Dart.  We felt the slow passage of time in the way that, since the ice age, the river has pushed its way through the landscape. That river became the main artery for goods going to the thriving market town. Now it enjoys a lazy role as the ambassador of fleets of summer pleasure boats.

We tapped into the rich history of the inhabitants of the house, and found a wellspring of stories. There was the ‘mad hermit’ Willelmus in the 14^th century.  There were wealthy merchants, politicians, and due to its proximity to Plymouth and Dartmouth, naval heroes too. Captain Pownoll was a high seas adventurer who made his name in 1762 by capturing a Spanish treasure Galleon.

We explored our fears of the wild, and were inspired by it too. The cat dissecting the bird. The snake-like river. Exploring those qualities of ‘wild’ led us to think about how what we considered ‘natural’ had mostly been cultivated, planted, tamed, as well as exploited and abused, by the human hand. Except perhaps for that river…

Some hours after the workshop had ended, those wild words were still reverberating through me. A friend phoned, and told me that he’d found a dead peasant that had been hit by a car. ‘A road-kill bird will lie there by the side of the road all day, and no one will stop for it. What a waste’. He’d picked it up and cooked it. So we enjoyed peasant casserole that evening. A taste of the wild? Or just another victim of the human species? Both, I suppose.

Weekly Writing Prompt

What do you know about the inhabitants of the building that you are in at this moment? What are their stories? Write about one person who has lived there, or the procession of dwellers through time. If you don’t know the facts, use your imagination. 

TRACKS

The workshop last Saturday went swimmingly. We based ourselves in a clearing in the woods, and there explored our yearning to connect with the wild, and to write wild words. We looked also at the fears that sabotage this connection. For the last exercise of the day, we took this quote, by John Stokes, as a starting point for our writing.

‘The earth is a manuscript, being written and unwritten every day’.

The responses to this quote by the participants took my breath away. People wrote, among other things, about the tracks of tears down the face of an ageing woman, the tracks that human beings make on the earth, and the tracks that our words leave behind in the hearts of others.

What I remembered, what I re-learnt on Saturday, is that everything is a track. Everything around us displays the marks of the passage of time.  Every physical, psychological and emotional influence is recorded. The movement of wind and rain carves out patterns in the rock. The patterns of emotion in the human being, over time, bend and mould and shape the muscle and bone of our physical body. Even those things that we call ‘inanimate objects’ are museums of movement, energy fixed in time and space.

There are stories everywhere. We only have to learn to see them.  And from that melting pot of myth and fable, we create new stories, new tracks.

The Weekly Prompt

‘The earth is a manuscript, being written and unwritten every day’.

Write a non-fiction or fiction piece, in prose or poetry, using this quote as a prompt.

If you’d like to send it to me, I’d be delighted to read it.

THE FIRE

In the winter this house is heated solely by a wood-burning stove. It’s fairly labour intensive to chop logs.  And it takes commitment to keep bringing them in, to keep the fire burning through the day. But I love it. We have something alive, something wild at the centre of our world. It hisses and cracks and roars just like any other wild thing. The Beech wood, with its silvery snakeskin bark, lights easily and sizzles. The Oak, its raised bark like the tyre of a four-wheel drive truck, is frustrating slow to catch. But once it does it smolders enduringly, with an intense heat.

Like anything wild, you have to create a relationship with it, rather than impose your hurried ways upon it. In the mornings if I’m anxious, or impatient, it never catches. If I bring patience to the task it’s ablaze in an instant. There’s a real art to fire lighting. Logs need the friction with other logs to burn, but there has to be enough air between the wood for them to breathe.

At first glance the flames have the delicacy of silk, and it’s alluring. But I know better. Their licking tongue is always hungry. The memory of the terrible smell of burnt hair and skin pricks sharp in my mind.

During the day, whenever I take a break from writing, and come down from my cold office, the fire is waiting. The orange flames endlessly shape-shifting remind me of my potential for creativity.

Some days my body has rigidified into the question mark shape of the anguished writer too long at her desk. Then, those flames laugh at the inflexibility of my body, and my words. They tickle and taunt me. It shifts me from my petty concerns.

On the worst writing days I’m thickheaded and wobbly-limbed. Then they seduce me back to life, stroking my face and my back. Painfully wonderful. They know that I’ll never write well with that tension in my mind and body. After these encounters, I go back to my desk with their enchanting laughter ringing in my ears.

Back in my cold office, I ask myself: how can I lay my words side by side so that they have space to breathe, but are close enough for their friction to make my stories blaze? How can my words form shapes as endlessly varied as flames? How can I release the energy contained in those words, but not be burnt in the process, or smother them for fear of the heat?

The Weekly Prompt

Observe a fire. Write about the shapes you see flickering in the flames. First, describe it using as wide a variety of verbs as possible. Then, relax your eyes a little. Now, what do you see? Let your imagination blaze.

SNOWED IN

  On Monday this week, I awoke and looked out of the window. There was nothing but white. I saw only the inconvenience. I would never get a car down the mountain track with that much snow. S***! That was the end of the meeting that I had booked with an animal-tracking expert for later that day. Now I would never know his secrets.

On my second look out of the window, I saw the beauty. The fresh snowfall was casting a silent spell over the land. There might be no formal tracking lesson that day, but conditions were ripe for exploration.

The snow was still falling fast, presenting me with a time capsule- a record of the few animals that had dared to leave their sheltered places in the previous half-hour. One brave deer had taken a route down the edge of the track, where the snow was lightest. There was also the hopping pencil-line print of a robin, searching for food. And cutting purposefully straight across the track- the crawling, claw-toed prints of the badger, his stomach dragging on the ground. The entrance to his sett was just there, cut into the clay soil of the mountain.

And it wasn’t only animals. At the bottom of the hill, engraved on the blank canvas of the builders’ yard car park, the swirling tracks of a van. Evidence of the driver’s difficulty, with sleep still in his eyes, of fitting himself into a narrow parking space. And the valiant post-woman had been there too, her determined prints weaving in and out of every domain.

Turning, I re-traced my own solitary path, my autobiography printed on the snow. At the places where the distance between my tracks closed sharply, I read the history of my excitement. Arriving back at the house, I saw where I’d dragged my heavy feet away from its shelter at dawn, disappointment weighing on me. Now, an hour later, I was forward on my toes, a lighter touch on the ground. I wouldn’t swap anyone else’s secrets for those I discovered myself that day. 

The Weekly Prompt : Tracks

Go for a walk. Look for the tracks of animals, birds and people. When you find a set of prints, make an educated guess as to the owner. Then, observe:

-How light, or heavy are the prints? Are there any changes in weight?

-How evenly or irregularly spaced are the prints? Are there any changes in spacing?

Use this information to write a short piece about how the bird/animal/human being is feeling. Also talk about where they are going, and why. The piece will necessarily be fictional, but will be based on your real-life observations.

WISE WILD WORDS

I’ve been seeking out poems and quotations that convey the spirit of Wild Words. Here are a few that have nudged at my shoulder, grabbed at my sleeve, or tousled my hair: “The mind I love most must have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, the chance of a snake or two, a pool that nobody fathomed the depth of, and paths threaded with flowers planted by the mind.”

 Katherine Mansfield, ‘Katherine Mansfield Notebooks: Complete Edition’.

“Writing starts with living.”

 L.L. Barkat, ‘Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity and Writing’.

“The artist is a translator; one who has learnt how to pass into her own language the languages gathered from stones, from birds, from dreams, from the body, from the material world, from the invisible world, from sex, from death, from love. A different language is a different reality; what is the language, the world, of stones? What is the language, the world, of birds? Of atoms? Of microbes of colours? Of air?”

 Jeanette Winterson, ‘Art Objects’

“The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful.”

E.E. Cummings

THE DISCLAIMER

I’ve found the process of writing the 8-week ecourse a challenging one. I’ve been facing the same hurdles as if I were writing any memoir. My journey into wild words has not been as much of a linear progression as I would like. For every moment of revelation, there’s been one of stuckness. For every time I remembered what it meant to write wild, there was another of forgetting, and having to go round the learning process again. Until, at last, I truly knew it. In order to make the course into the best learning vehicle that I can for my students, I’ve had to wrestle it into form that engages the reader. If I don’t achieve that, then I’m writing only for myself, and that’s not my aim. My aim is to teach. The reason my story is in there is that is stories reach deeper into our psyche than dry facts. And much more important than being true to the facts, is being true to the emotional heart and spirit of a story. So, I’ve employed artistic licence. I’ve removed complications and deleted repetition. I’ve given a sense of linear progress, a narrative arc to my journey. I’ve based it in one location, and focused it around one hero, the extraordinary tiger. There’s no doubt that the tiger has been pivotal in my journey, but here he’s also representing the sea and the dolphins, the lynx, the wild boar, and the eagles, who have played equally important roles in my life. Really, it’s not a ‘disclaimer’ I want to put at the start of the ecourse, it’s a  ‘reclaimer’, and for that matter a ‘re-finder’. I reclaim my right to free myself from the tyranny of facts. In doing this I re-find the passion and power of my original experiences. This is one way I can reclaim the wildness, and pour it into my words.

10 EXPERIENCES OF WILD

The Red Admiral butterfly flitting on to my hand, and settling a moment to dust his wings. Feeling touched by magic….

The sound of the Wild Boar cracking fallen walnuts and snorting, close to the house…

The necklace of Lapis Lazuli I was given by my boyfriend. It’s silver veins sparkling like sunlight on water. Feeling loved…

The warm wind from the tropics whipping round me, caressing my skin, and spinning golden autumn leaves into a whirlwind…

Standing in the Negev desert, when there was nothing but gently undulating sand in every direction. Nothing had ever seemed so vast…

Diving into a wide river, my whole body being gently pulled and pushed by its flow, and the duck gliding serenely past…

Lying down in a wildflower meadow in the mountains of the Pyrenees, and the shock of smelling strong wild garlic…

In France, hearing a high yelp from above me. My head snapping up to see a huge golden eagle circling in the limitless sky above, eyeing me up as prey…

The delight of the moment when they delivered the new coffee table to my first house. Running my hand along the grain of the wood, and smelling pine…

Standing, awestruck, in Devon, in the dark of the night, close to the roaring sea. The waves rearing up before me at twice my height. The moonlight catching the spray that flicks, cold into my face…