Late Summer - A Sensory Experience - The Sounds of Summer Post One
Plus mentoring news, Spelt news and what's coming up in September
Hello Readers
Welcome to Late Summer - A Sensory Experience. You might be here for news of courses and mentoring etc, if so, scroll on down and you’ll find those things towards the bottom of the page. If you’re here for the writing challenge, welcome, I am excited to have you with me for the next five posts where we’ll be exploring the sensory summer and threading those sensory experiences into our work.
This week I managed to get out on my bike for the first time this year. It was a mild evening and I rode along the old coast road. This old road runs parallel to a newer road put in place when subsidence began to be a threat to the old road. When I first moved to the village fifteen years ago, the new road was just being built and the old road was the road I drove down to my new home each night after work in the nearby town. I thought about this as I was cycling, how even this road, quiet now and reserved for walkers, cyclists and runners, is known so well to me. Each dip, each curve, each rise of hill and sweep of shoreline is known to me and yet, I know it in different guises, from different perspectives and every day I find a new surprise. Each day the landscape evolves, moves shifts and changes. This I notice too.
Seasons rarely roll in all at once, the change is gradual and this month, August, has always felt to me like a time of rest, a pause, a deep sinkhole of summer in which we could experience a last blaze of heat and shimmering stillness or, like it is today and due to be for a while, an almost autumnal downpour. This is the time of harvest and though I’m noticing some fields pilled with bales, mostly I think it is too wet here to do anything with the crops yet. I am looking forward to the steady thrum of the combines on the hills, the choreographed night time harvesting so beautifully described in Nicola Chester’s Guardian Country Diary column:
There is a pause and celebration to be had here, in August. The first of the month is known as ‘Lammas’, from the early medieval ‘loaf mass’ a celebration and blessing of the first harvest by baking into a loaf the first flour. Here’s an interesting blog which explores the connections between the Christian harvest festival and earlier Anglo Saxon and possible earlier pagan rituals:
It brings to my mind also this king of witch-hare poems, which I have always loved. The imagery sings of darkness and an earthy magic that feels possible now in this transitional stage of the season. The Lammas Hireling is by Ian Duhig.
I hunted down her torn voice to his pale form.
Stock-still in the light from the dark lantern,
stark-naked but for one bloody boot of fox-trap,
I knew him a warlock, a cow with leather horns.
You can read the full, glorious poem on the Poetry Society website, here:
I have not had time to make a loaf myself (note to self: make time for the slow joy of baking) but if you wanted to make a loaf and bless it too, there are recipes about. This one, perhaps, if you are feeling witchy:
Lammas Bread and Protection Spell
This deep state of summer then, a grey area merging into the darker months has a feeling of having somehow ‘made it through’ the summer months, of preparing for the next season, of having now the time to reap, to gather and not just food, but thoughts, reflections, before the bridge is crossed into autumn and the time of change. The is what I want the next five posts to be about, this is what I want from The Sensory Summer - a pause, a time to reflect and capture the summer and bring it down to the page.
What to Expect Over the Next Five Posts
Each post, starting today, will be themed for the senses. There will be a journalling prompt with downloadable pages which you can print out, as well as two writing prompts designed to help you tap into your own source of creativity. The prompts can be used for any genre - poetry, creative non fiction, even fiction. You can post responses to the prompts and journalling prompts in the comments section, but do be aware that if you post your work here it may be classed as published, something that often isn’t accepted by magazines and journals, if you were considering submitting your work in the future. The Sensory Summer is a taster session for a subscription version, starting in September. This will be behind a paywall and so subscribers will be able to post their work freely and still be able to enter it into competitions and submit to magazines.
There are no deadlines here, no pressure, you are invited to simply enjoy the creative process, and I hope you do.
A Note on Goal Setting
In my experience as a mentor and creative writing workshop facilitator, people get the most out of a course or a session if they set a goal. Having a goal is not the same as sticking to a rule. Your goal must be something that you can accomplish and, more importantly, something you’ll enjoy accomplishing. A good example might be to set time aside for yourself, to put yourself and your creativity first, and enjoy reading the resources and prompts, perhaps get a notebook and make some notes. Don’t tie yourself up with what you MUST accomplish, but do make your creativity a priority in some way. You might find this goal setting powerpoint handy.
The Sensory Summer - The Sound of Summer
Your first prompts are focussed on tuning in to the sounds of summer. Try to pull yourself away from the obvious and impersonal, think about what summer means to you, where you are in this deep state of summer as the year begins to turn towards the dark. Below you’ll find a downloadable journal for you to print out and work in. I suggest getting yourself an A4 binder so you can keep everything together. Each week I’ll add a few more pages to download and print, so that at the end of the writing challenge you have a folder of journal prompts and hopefully ideas stimulated from them.
Journal Prompt One
Open a window or step outside. Stop, tune yourself to the sounds around you. Settle yourself. Go slowly allowing your brain to catch up. There is no need to rush this exercise, simply be in the moment and tune to where you are. What are the first three natural sounds that you hear? List them in your journal, along with any immediate emotional or physical reactions you have to those sounds.
Choose one of those sounds and add some descriptive or figurative language around it. What is the sound like? Don't be constrained by thoughts of producing work here. Your journal is a workshop; a place for creativity and reflection, not for perfection.
Write down any memories you associate with this sound. What moment of time are you taken to, what other sensory reflections does this sound lead your creative brain to?
Repeat this exercise as often as you want over the week.
Writing Prompt One
June, July, August. Every day we hear their laughter.
Follow this link to a poem by Mary Oliver, titled ‘August.’ It’s on the fabulous Poetry Foundation website.
The season of summer is embedded in a cycle; it returns each year. But in this poem the focus is on one particular summer, the last of a long line of familiar summers in which the neighbours can be heard over the fence. The narrator tells us that the neighbour is sick. This line stands out in particular, a brutal, painful image that leads us to images of terrible pain, the folding of life around this terrible thing:
she has come to the fence, walking like a woman
who is balancing a sword inside of her body,
The painting referenced is Van Gogh’s ‘Sorrowing Old Man’.
The poem leads us down a path in which we become aware of the desperation of the situation, the putting on of a face, and of the terrible change that is about to happen. When I read it I became very conscious of the background neighbour sounds of my own summer, the children that have grown up and moved on, how I don’t hear them any more. This sense of a permanent change, of not being able to have back what has passed moved me, and made me wonder if this is part of our connection to the season too, an acceptance of change, of endings and knowledge of beginnings. I think there is something of this here with the woman who has a ‘laughter-edged voice’.
Is there a sound from this summer that you will never hear again? Or a sound that you worry you will never hear again? Explore this in your creative writing. If you are writing poetry, you might want to emulate the sturdy, almost prose-poetry like stanzas of the Mary Oliver poem and ask yourself how that style of structure affects the reading of the poem.
The sound I will write about will be the swifts over the village. Each year I welcome their return with my heart full of gladness at the miracle of their journey. But each year the climate disaster, the erratic weather, the loss of habitat gets worse for them and I worry that there will be a year when I do not hear the shrill, joyous screech of them again over the village.
Writing Prompt Two
The day before Eunice, we all knew that it was coming. I walked here in a place where nothing moved. It was a soundless prelude, the unreality of utter calm before the storm.
The change from the stillness of a peaceful wooded valley to the chaos that a storm ripping through the same valley causes is explored in Derek Niemann’s Guardian Country Diary from 2022:
The Wild Sound of a Storm Among the Trees
For your second writing prompt, think about how the natural sounds around you change dramatically. Here in the UK we see the sudden change in weather often, in Yorkshire we can have four seasons in one day, in fact often I will look out of my front window at the rain while in my back garden the sun is shining. A sudden change like this is quite unsettling, isn’t it? In the article above, the narrator knows the storm is coming but still, the force of nature is a terrifying surprise.
What does it feel like to experience extreme weather in the summer when it’s ‘supposed’ to be sunny? What does a heavy summer thunderstorm feel like? Concentrate on the sounds. What sounds frighten, which sounds soothe? Try and capture that sudden change and the unsettling nature of in a piece of creative writing, in which the focus is the sound itself. If you’re writing poetry, you might like to start each line with a different sound and thread them together.
From September
What can you expect when I switch paid subscriptions on in September? Firstly, thank you to those people who have already pledged to support me in this new venture. It’s boosted my confidence in ways you can’t imagine. From September you will still receive my free, weekly newsletter Notes from the Margin, but if you subscribe to the paid service you’ll also receive a Friday newsletter for subscribers only. The paid service will be split into seasons, beginning with Autumn, and will include writing challenges, industry insider articles, resources, plus regular opportunity lists and advice on submissions to magazines, journals, agents etc. It’s aimed at the writing community and I hope that the community that has been with me through the courses that I have run, mentoring, workshops etc over the last seven years will enjoy this new streamlined version in which everything is in the same place. You’ll have the opportunity to post your work behind a paywall and receive some feedback on it from myself and other subscribers and there will be occasional day retreats, zoom talks and seminars and, I hope, guest bloggers and speakers. My aim is community, and a pressure free way of enabling other writers to develop their own writing. Subscribers will also have free access to my early morning writing workshops and a 15% discount on feedback and mentoring services.
Other News
The Dawn Chorus
Don’t forget The Dawn Chorus, my early morning writing group returns next week on the 7th August. Come and join us for a quiet writing hour. 7-8am UK time. Find out more here:
Spelt
The Spelt competition is now closed. Thank you to everyone who entered, we’ve had a bumper crop of entries and I am making my way through them, confirming, filing and processing as fast as I can. We’ll be opening for submissions soon again. In the meantime why not check out this review of the fascinating book Rural by previous creative non fiction contributor, Rebecca Smith. It is absolutely flying and I’m so happy to see Rebecca getting the praise she deserves. The book is a fantastic exploration of the real working class rural experience. I’m hoping Rebecca will come and chat to Spelt for a future issue.
Mentoring and Feedback Packages
I am now in a position to take on some new mentees. I’ve mentored upwards of fifty people now, initially as part of Kerry Hudson’s Womentoring project and then professionally for the last seven years. There’s a range of different options including a new ‘road map’ package of structured mentoring. I’ll be taking on new clients from September nd can’t wait to work with you.
Follow this link to my website for more info:
Until next time
x
My Journal Prompt exercise: As I step into the evening air at the front of the house I hear the familiar rumble of combine harvesters at work in the fields around the village. It is the second day without rain and the harvest is in full swing. I walk to the end of my road and see them up on the hillside crawling up and dow the field with a constant thrum of engines, something like the sound of rock fall or far away thunder. On top of this, the territorial screeching of seagulls; a slicing, torn sound, ripping through the evening. I stand still, tuning my ears, waiting for something else and then there is the humpf-lowing of a bull some fields away, and the answering throaty baa of sheep. A slight breeze lifts the beech leaves, a background gentle shush, a lullaby of trees.
Transition, a Haibun
Seven years in junior school and it was their last afternoon. Year six had done their exams, spent a few days on the Isle of Wight and finished the term by rehearsing and performing an excellent musical play.
Staff who had taught them since Reception
formed a guard of honour
as the leavers came out of school, wearing white shirts covered with the signatures of their friends. Some were struggling to hold back the tears, others quietly weeping, many of the girls sobbing - the move to high school, so excitedly anticipated, overshadowed for the moment by the sadness of goodbyes.
We parents and grandparents were little better. Two or three times a week Granddad and I had been taking and fetching him,
watching him learn, grow, increase in confidence. We'd stood on that playground in all weathers,
waiting for the opening of the doors and the excited chatter of the emerging children, a sound we will never hear again.
This August, for him, is a time of transition, from childhood to puberty and to all the new challenges that high school will bring. For us, it's a time of memories, of trying to adapt to old age and its limitations.
enforced transition
from dependability
to dependence