Late Summer - A Sensory Experience: The Scent of Summer
Plus Spelt Competition News
Hello Readers
Welcome to the fourth post in my August writing challenge: Late Summer, A Sensory Experience. Last week was all about the physical sensation of touch and what might be noticed about the world around us through touch.
This week it’s all about the scent of summer. I’ve had a busy week. On Sunday I was part of a group of poets and musicians reading at an outdoor event in the Italian Gardens in Scarborough. I don’t think I’ve been in the Italian Gardens since I was a child. I have a strong memory of my mum and myself having a day there together, me playing with my Sindy doll and running around the pond and up and down the stairs imagining I was in a fairy world, my mum quietly reading a book in the shade. It was just as I’d left it, though in the mean time it had become quite run down, before receiving funding to be brought back to its former glory. As I sat in the shade with the other readers and musicians I could hear the breeze blowing through the leaves and the scent of the sea and the flower gardens were carried up to us.
Afterwards I met some friends down from Newcastle for a brief drink and then C and I went to Florio’s, an Italian restaurant popular with locals and holidaymakers for tea. It was busy and bustling and full of families looking toasted by the sun, pouring themselves through the doors looking for garlicky sustenance. The whole place smelt delicious, that special treat-food scent of oily, garlicky goodness.
Mostly I have been stuck in the office this week sending literally hundreds of emails to Spelt competition entrants, letting them know the outcome. Our brilliant judge Jane Burn has sifted through 788 individual entries to whittle down to a longlist of twenty poets. Alongside that I have been pulling the last bits of issue 09 together and sorting out problems with it. We’ll be going to print with it soon. And as if that wasn’t enough, I’m working on yet another Arts Council England bid for some Spelt stuff too. If you know me you will know filling in applications makes me want to pull my own eyes out and kick them out of the window. But I can see a light at the end of the tunnel. After spending so much time at my desk, we decided to have a walk along the beach last night at about 8pm. It was glorious. The sea was a gentle murmer, there were still people on the beach, some of them with little fires which seemed brighter in the dusk. Scent of sausages o the breeze. There were lots of dead jellyfish looking like hazy autumn sun sets.
This has been a week I’ve given over to getting on top of Spelt. Next week I bed down properly into edits for The Ghost Lake. And next week is also the last Sensory Summer week. If you want to be a part of the community I’m building as part of my subscription option, it starts on 1st September. Here’s a bit about it:
What’s in Store in September
At the end of August I’ll be switching on my paid option.
Notes from the Margin Paid – Season One
September - October - November
The overarching theme for the autumn season is Acknowledging Change. As well as the free Thursday essays, if you sign up for the paid option you’ll receive a Friday post which will include
Bonus essays and book news.
Posts on managing your publishing journey with topics focussed on kindness to self.
Insider knowledge on the publishing industry.
‘How To’ posts.
Regular writing opportunities posts.
Mindful creative practice posts.
Writing prompts and journaling exercises.
This is all aimed at building community, exploring your creative practice, and sharing my own knowledge of navigating the publishing world. Each month will include one journaling exercise and two writing prompts, looking at a different aspect of the season’s theme.
If you enjoy writing poetry and/or creative non-fiction at whatever level, and for whatever purpose, you’ll find something to enjoy here.
At the end of the season we’ll have a two-hour zoom meet up to celebrate the season and ourselves, including an open mic to showcase some of the writing we’ve been working on.
The theme of Season one – Autumn 2023 - is Acknowledging Change: change in ourselves, change in nature, seasonal change, changing up, changing down, changing values, changing passions. Let’s embrace the shift away from the hard, bright days of summer and embrace the slower pace of autumn, the season of reflection.
Paid members also receive a 15% discount on mentoring and retreats. I hope you’ll join me!
And so, onto this week’s challenge. Have you ever smelt something that takes you back to a strong memory? Cut grass is the obvious one. But what else has the power to take you back in time? Whenever I smell tar, the sort they put on flat rooves to prevent leaks, it takes me back to a specific year in primary school when I was looking forward to starting a new school year with a really brilliant teacher. She’d promised us we would be learning about dinosaurs when we returned from school holidays and as I watched them tarring the roof, just before the summer holidays began, I could imagine the thrill of what was to come. I was big into dinosaurs that year and had a scrap book of postcards from the Natural History Museum as we’d had a family trip to london in our battered old camper van. Now, every time I smell tar, I not only return to the memory, but to the feeling of excitement; a seven year old’s excitement.
Here’s your journal prompt this week. You can download it here and add it to the previous pages:
Experience is key, I feel, for journalling, so if you can, for any of the sections on the list, try and physically experience a scent. Close your eyes and really breathe it in. It’s difficult to describe a scent, but do try, and link those scents to a summer memory and the feeling that that memory evokes.
An environmental scent - step outside, what do you smell on this late summer day or evening?
A man-made scent - for me this would always be the scent of suncream which is on every holiday maker I pass in the street at this time of year. What else can you think of?
A food scent - this one is probably the easiest one, but also a good excuse to eat your favourite summer food.
An animal scent - horse stables, muck spreading, dog coat wet from the sea?
The scent of a place - every place has its own scent. What place are you visiting, or have visited over the summer, what is its special scent?
Try and link each of your scents to a specific memory and go further than simply capturing that memory, capture the emotions and the feelings felt in that moment, in that memory.
Prompt Seven
Have a look at this short poem, commissioned to be pulled behind a plane, by Matthew Sweeney:
This is a tiny poem, just six lines long, but manages to convey such a lot in that short space, giving the reader space also to build their own background. I can smell the fish from here.
Your prompt here is to write your own six line scent poem. You can choose whatever subject you want, it might be about a horrible smell, it might be about a beautiful smell, but the challenge I want you to undertake is to tell a short story in a six line poem. Good luck!
Prompt Eight
Here’s a fabulous poem by Julia Bird:
I love the idea of the street cracking and a flower shop springing up, like a dandelion pushing through the cracks. Cut flowers are a sort of portable summer, aren’t they. When you place them in your house you get to keep the heady scent of a garden nearby. But what else could be a portable summer? Write a poem, or a passage of creative non fiction, in which you explore a portable aspect of the scent of summer. What else could you bring into your home and smell, or what item is in your home now, that you can smell the summer in? It doesn’t have to be flowers. Yesterday I opened a bag I’d last used on holiday a few years ago and could smell the beach in it.
Spelt News
As I said earlier, the longest is now official for the Spelt competition, you can read it here:
The Dawn Chorus
And don’t forget, the Dawn Chorus returns in September. Come and join me for a week of quiet focus and gentle accountability.
Find out more, here: The Dawn Chorus
Thanks for reading, until next time
x
Wendy’s is the first publication I have recommended to my own readers. This newsletter is always jam-packed with useful exercises and engaging content <3
I enjoyed the post on scents. Here's a haiku:
like bees, sniff yellow
wild goldenrod flowers -- wait
for fall honey crop
Note: Not a surprise, but bees have a great sense of smell. I was smelling goldenrod flowers close up yesterday and remembering how strongly fall honey smells of goldenrod which is very common where I live and they are blooming now.