A Winter Walk

Writing prompts fo winter

Photo by Filip Zrnzević on Unsplash

I’m posting this substack a little earlier than usual this week. Think of it as something to look forward to when you get through the manic phase of the Christmas build up, and are able to take time away from chocolate, wine and tele to reconnect yourself to your landscape. The writing prompt below is from a winter writing workshop I ran in 2020. What you produce from the prompt doesn’t have to be a poetry, prose or even ‘proper’ writing. It can just be a way for your to use yourself as an interface to the world in which you exist. The experience is the main thing, the act of connection, the placing of oneself in the environment around you to see what happens. make notes, make a poem, write down your connection points. Enjoy.

Let’s step out of the real world and go for a lovely walk in a winter forest. Wrap up warm.Let’s step out of the real world and go for a lovely walk in a winter forest. Wrap up warm.

Listen to the crunch of snow under foot. It has a very particular sound, doesn’t it? you can hear the snowflakes being compressed. What else do you hear in the video? There’s a real sense of the world being muffled by the snow isn’t there.

It reminds me a little of this poem by Gillian Clarke:

Snow
Gillian Clarke 

The dreamed Christmas,
flakes shaken out of silences so far
and starry we can’t sleep for listening
for papery rustles out there in the night
and wake to find our ceiling glimmering,
the day a psaltery of light.

So we’re out over the snow fields
before it’s all seen off with a salt-lick
of Atlantic air, then home at dusk, snow-blind
from following chains of fox and crow and hare,
to a fire, a roasting bird, a ringing phone,
and voices wondering where we are.

A day foretold by images
of glassy pond, peasant and snowy roof
over the holy child iconed in gold.
Or women shawled against the goosedown air
pleading with soldiers at a shifting frontier
in the snows of television,

while in the secret dark a fresh snow falls
filling our tracks with stars.

And the famous Frost poem:

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
BY ROBERT FROST

Whose woods these are I think I know.   
His house is in the village though;   
He will not see me stopping here   
To watch his woods fill up with snow.   

My little horse must think it queer   
To stop without a farmhouse near   
Between the woods and frozen lake   
The darkest evening of the year.   

He gives his harness bells a shake   
To ask if there is some mistake.   
The only other sound’s the sweep   
Of easy wind and downy flake.   

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,   
But I have promises to keep,   
And miles to go before I sleep,   
And miles to go before I sleep.

Now, go for a walk, and write your inter walk poem/prose/notes. You can make your poem any length you wish, but in each stanza or paragraph I want you to describe a different thing you see on your walk. Think about the sound of snow being compressed under foot, the sound of trees creaking and try to bring those sensory perceptions into your poem. Pin down the sensory in your own walk.

If you didn’t already know, my memoir, The Ghost Lake and my poetry collection Blackbird Singing at Dusk are both for sale right now and would make EXCELLENT Christmas gifts. Just saying.

Until next time.

x