Inspiration

I'm writing a lecture for a creative writing class at University of Brighton tomorrow and came across this in the wonderful Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones. I just had to share it...

Her friend, Russell Edson writes 10 short pieces of writing at any one sitting, and finds that when he comes back to re-read them, it's the ones that have the best first lines that work. Here are a few of his favourites:

"A man wants an aeroplane to like him"
"A beloved duck gets cooked by mistake"
"A husband and wife discover that their children are fakes"
"Identical twin old men take turns at being alive"
"Like a white snail, the toilet slides into the living room, demanding to be loved"

Maybe I'll set them this exercise tomorrow...

Pulling on the Shoots

It's a long old road from where Education first dropped me off to where I am now - beginning a second year as a university lecturer as well as my Post Graduate Certificate in Education. Soon, if all goes well, I'll be decked out in gown and mortar board and tottering down the Dome steps clutching a scroll, a Fellow of the University of Brighton.

But it wasn't always going to be like this, and it's an essential part of the PgCert to sit back and reflect on the various roads that got me to this point. Taking any conclusions into a room full of school-leavers next week is part of the magic of teaching.

I watch my own kids now and marvel at just how engagement and encouragement are all that it takes to be good at schoolwork, and how resistance, control and childish stubbornness are what stands between the bright and the dull. Years spent watching small children investigate the world, picking it up and exploring it with their mouths at first, their thoughts later proved to me that it's education itself that sorts kids into those who can and those who can't. Creativity, the keen insinctive desire to know and grow is in everyone until it's knocked out by streaming and target levels. How different would school have been for me if my teachers had remembered that. Learning how best to tease it out of the recalcitrant and applaud the energy in the already shiny without skipping a beat in my teaching is what I need to do now.

But maybe the first thing for me to do is to recognise the rhythm of a learner. How many artists have I heard recently admit to being 'observers' at school now that their thoughts are cooked and dished up so elegantly for us all to try? I was one of those, and I have a 14 year old version sharing my roof right now. Watching her sit on the sidelines, much the same was as I did, just taking it all in, is not as simple as 'lack of engagement', 'shyness', 'laziness', 'recalcitrance', 'teenage behaviour'; it's perhaps more about taking time for all the ingredients of life to steep.

I was a slow-cooking student. School for me was a long sleep over party, and college pretty much the same. I was conscientious and did what I was supposed to and on time - unlike most of the brighter sparks around me - but only because I didn't trust all those chaotic thoughts to come out with anything of any substance. Relying on any creative brilliance or original thought that might be the result of a morning deadline and a night full of caffeine was just too much of a risk. There were the bright kids, and then there were the drones like me who slogged and did just fine. Nobody then showed me what sparks really looked like. Most of the teachers who stood in front of me for all those years would be scratching their heads now - if they could even remember my name.

If I'd only known when I was at school, at college, at the BBC, where Oxbridge was the elephant in the room, that some of the brightest, most creative people take their time to come to the boil, I would have enjoyed life so much more. It didn't feel to me like I was simmering; it was me that put myself on the back burner. Paranoia, defeatism, constant judgements - on me by me became chips so heavy that I was weighed down throughout my twenties. I hid myself away and watched all my 'brighter' friends taking risks, trying things out, doing well. Being seen. I was vicious then, mentally lashing myself for not blagging my way into being a radio producer like Clare, for hiding under the duvet while Al sashayed her way through the music business, for just not being an operator like Charlotte, Phil, Carolyn and Mark. For being me.

And now, here I am twenty years later with more ideas than a saucepan full of popping corn. Of course there were a lot of crossroads and many wrong paths along the way, but where I am at 46 is where I could only dream of being when I was 26.  Simmering my little pot of life, finding more ingredients along the way, increasing the quality as my palate becomes more refined, and stirring it all up every now is what slow cooking is all about. And any cook will tell you that the quality of your curry is down to how long you cook your onions....

Getting on

If I die tomorrow, I will have known what it is to be truly happy.

It's not just Jed, the kids, the dog, the cats, the pigs, sheep, chickens and the goslings either. It's taken a while, but it's true; the older I get, the more I realize that squeezing myself into tight boxes and trying on uncomfortable versions of myself was just about laying the hardcore of what I'm only now really beginning to understand. All that experience - good and bad, all those books I've read and films I've watched in skived afternoons and (not so often, but just as thrillingly) late night flea pits were the edges and blue sky of the jigsaw now falling into place; all those courses, workshops, mentors and gurus, pains in the backside, energy vampires and moments of pure inspiration are all now fluttering down to produce a picture of my life aged 46. And it doesn't look bad.

Stumbling into The University of Brighton, laden down with my rucksack of life experience, propelled me into classrooms of raw, uncarved genius and reminded me how jaw-droppingly beautiful it can be, particularly when its owner trips over it at the same time. Pulling those students, not always willingly, into the darkness of their own soggy minds means taking all of us into unfamiliar territory, and how refreshing that can be. Then, tentatively at first but increasingly with more spontaneity and confidence, reaching into my bulging bag of tricks, I've helped them find gold. What will it be like when I use those exercises on the scientists, the maths students, the business students? And then into Big Business with my academic research, suitably fellowshipped-up to make me 'proper'...

The Sussex House Party's creative dinner parties start next week with Philip Carr-Gomm on magic and spirituality, and with them, the launch of the writers' retreats here in the most beautiful house in the world, with its giant gossamer curtains turning the rain pink.

And the synchronicity of it all is what makes the incessant rain seem like a glorious garden sprinkler rather than a heavy downpour, and reminds me what it's like in the slipstream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily...