A collage I put together recently that is framed on my wall for inspiration - featuring antique photographs, postcards, snippets of my own textiles and an older painting.
We will be in September in just a few days time. No longer is this month for me associated with the start of school, that churning stomach sensation that lasts for weeks before, during, and into October. I am grown up, apparently, and my children are also no longer in education. So I look forward now to September, the very start of autumn. I look forward to seeing green acorns on the trees in the park, bright golden light, birds migrating or making quiet shadows, relaxing into autumn. No fraught pencil case hunting.
Not that I ever considered school terrible, completely awfully terrible. I enjoyed learning and lessons but did not enjoy the shift of routine from summer freedoms. Indeed, thinking about it, I loved school, being bright and a bit of a show-off, it was just everything that was not a disciplined classroom that made me uneasy. The travelling to school and back was a drag: two buses each way, often chaotic journeys on rammed-full buses with the boys swinging their bags and shouting, and having to sit upstairs in the cigarette smoke, if there was a seat at all. The dread of having the conductor tell you to go upstairs to sit down when you feared the mouthy kids upstairs throwing paper or worse. Then there was the dread of PE, which could take up so much anxious space in my mind. It was more than anything the pointlessness of PE, when we spent two thirds of the time changing. We gentle girls, so slow and unenthused, barely broke out into a sweat and yet the PE teachers insisted we run in and out of showers. I think we spent about half of one term having the teacher lecture us on how important it was to shower. I got more physical exercise walking about the school playing fields in my lunch break, often in the rain, eating a tepid sandwich - my group of friends and I refused to sit in the canteen. Instead we walked about, or sat on steps, or the grass in fine weather. We would write stories for each other, romances about our favourite pop stars. I shudder and grin remembering.
Most people leave school to learn, my daughter (now in her twenties) tells me, and I agree with her. Since she has left school she really has self educated herself (thank you YouTube) in subjects and ideas (history, science especially) that were just not her thing, or not taught well (if at all). Not being one of the most academic students meant she was often sidelined, put into disruptive classes and made to feel less than. This was not the education I had hoped for her. My own experience was better - so why has education got worse? My daughter tells me it is to do with critical thinking, how children are made to learn sheets of facts and are not encouraged to question. To go off on a tangent and learn something because you find it interesting is not part of the current way. In my day it was encouraged and if you decided to write an essay that did not quite answer the question, so long as you wrote well, you were rewarded. Of course, exams were all about staying on topic, answering the question, but having learned to write well you could answer the question in hand when you knew you had to.
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Today I question myself and my writing skill, in a way that I did not back at school. Back then I really thought I ‘had something’, or might one day ‘find something good’, because my teachers told me this was how I should perceive my work (thank you Mrs Taylor). At times, now, I fumble about to express myself, in words. Which feels like a slightly alarming/odd thing for me to say, considering I have the academic MA in Creative Writing to my name and still think of myself as a writer. Just a writer who doesn’t really write all that much these days.
I wonder if this is because I spend so much of my day not writing or thinking in sentences, but am using the visual areas of my brain. I don’t narrate what I do as I work, but instead drop the words and find a way into things that transcends spoken or written language. This might sound rather esoteric but I am sure you might do this also. When I begin to draw, I may have words in my mind but they are often superseded by something other, a kind of rhythm or impulse. That is on a good day. If my mind is cluttered with language I find it hard to get into the visual world I am trying to create. That’s a stop and begin again kind of day.
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Now that Back to School signs no longer make me shudder, September has been reinvented for me. It is a time to notice the changing light, shortening days and subtle changes to natural colours. But it is also a time to consider new projects. This September I hope to write more. Not just these essays. I hope to write a poem a day. I give myself full permission to write terrible, awful, crass poems - or quite good poems. Just the act of writing is what matters. I am interested in taking on different persona, exploring ideas I have not attempted in poetry. I do not want to make the writing of a poem each day into something like homework that I put off until 9pm. Daily process is one thing but learning something from it is more important.
It’s been a while since I wrote poetry on a regular basis and whilst I don’t know if this will lead to more poetry writing, at least a month of attempts will allow me to see ways into ideas that may or may not stay as written language. How this writing each day may affect my visual work, we will just have to see.
I recently came across the songwriter Jonathan Mann and discovered his impressive, longterm project to write a song a day. I like his approach to this and I encourage you to look/listen. His daily YouTube posts make me smile.
I am not going to share my daily poems online. So don’t worry I am not going to request you sign up to read! I will, however, put together a small collection of ‘the best of September’ at the start of October and share that in some way. Meanwhile, I will keep you posted here on how the poetry writing is going. This is going to be a no pressure kind of September project, as a way to enjoy writing.
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I always feel more inspired and enthused at this time of year, a new beginning, more so than January. I had very mixed experiences of school, I was a very tall, gentle girl who wanted to study in a very rough school, inevitably I was bullied. I went to a different school at 15 and even though I was nervous and completely out of my depth, everyone was years ahead academically, I loved now being in an atmosphere of learning. My favourite teacher was Mr Scott who taught history, but he taught so much more. One lesson was spent discussing his favourite French films, my parents were not particularly interested in European art house cinema so this was my first introduction. This lesson has probably had more impact than learning about repealing the corn laws ever could. It opened up a new world of literature, philosophy, music. I was introduced to Sartre and De Beauvoir, the left bank, Miles Davis and Bebop. I probably would have discovered them at some point but I don’t think the impact would have been the same, hearing Miles Davis at any time is wonderful but at 15 it is life changing. I saw myself as Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face. Yes I was pretentious, and I don’t think that was a bad thing, I read a lot that I didn’t fully understand as a result, all of it important.
Well, this is a longer comment than I intended and I can’t remember the point I was going to make, but your post has got me thinking.
I remember what I was going to say. I just read an article about Fran Leibovitz, a writer who hasn’t written for 40 years. If you haven’t seen her Netflix series with Martin Scorsese, Pretend it’s a City, I highly recommend it.
I cannot tell you how much I enjoy all of the words you share, especially the stories in these Studio Notes! This is what I crave in my life, what those in the Bloomsbury circle referred to as ‘intelligent discourse’. This, by its very nature, runs counter to popular culture and does not have a broad or easily accessible audience. I have friends who share particular interests which is lovely but I find those conversations eventually tend towards mundane topics after the common thread between us has been exhausted. Nowhere but here have I found a kindred spirit who is passionate about art, literature, poetry, thoughtful living and reflection, and, (because I adore London and Sussex) can satisfy my love of travel and sense of place. Through your words I can be transported back in time and feel the same discomforts you describe and feel comforted for feeling awkward or displaced because I didn’t fit in in a louder, more common environment, and I can feel validated for being a quiet, deep thinker when all of life was rushing and swirling and critical thought was disregarded. The comments left here indicate that others also recognize a need for this new community that you are forming! I find myself returning to your words during the week between posts and feeling uplifted!
As for September and school, I fear that these will always be synonymous in my life. (Although now it’s in mid-August…). When I retired from teaching I looked forward to a new approach to the seasons and the annual calendar but alas… all three of my children are working in the schools and the three grandchildren are getting older and our lives continue to revolve around the school calendar. I am looking for ways to free myself from this constant and look at life more holistically. Your thoughts on this are inspiring. The idea of writing a poem a day is a wonderful way to shift thoughts into awareness and reflection.
Thank you for creating space here for these thoughts and inspirations. 🍁🍂