Museum Pieces - Week One
A four week course
Hello, I’m Wendy Pratt, author and poet. I wrote a memoir, The Ghost Lake, about my experience of living on an ancient extinct glacial lake called Paleolake Flixton in North Yorkshire, and how I found my place in a long line of lake ancestry going back to the palaeolithic. I also wrote a poetry collection, Blackbird Singing at Dusk, a kind of sister project to the memoir.
This is a post for paid subscribers. It’s quite a long post so probably best viewed on a computer, rather than a phone. A little way down this post you’ll find a paywall, behind which is week one of my four-week, online course, Museum Pieces.
Thinking about becoming a paid subscriber? This is the sort of thing you can expect:
Monthly Dawn and Dusk Chorus zoom write along groups
Quarterly zoom writing workshops
Subscriber only essays of behind the scenes of the writing world
Access to my entire archive of subscriber only posts
Discounts on some external writing courses
Occasional month-long online courses
Occasional one to one writing surgeries
Supporting me to write my new book
A subscription is £6 per month or £50 per year when done through the Substack website, rather than the app. You can unsubscribe at any time.
My next zoom workshop, in August, is a poetry workshop all about putting the surprise into your poetry. More details coming soon.
Now, let’s step into the museum…
A Museum is not just place to house collections. Museums are not just repositories for interesting artefacts of scientific, religious and cultural importance. Museums are repositories for stories. They collect the lives that have been around the objects, as much as the artefacts themselves. For us, as writers, this is where the magic happens. Even with the most advanced technology, even with actors dressed as Romans and interactive videos, a museum still requires a certain amount of imagination from the visitor to bring the collections to life. We might stand in front of a flint arrowhead and admire the skill of the craftsman that made it, but we are, at the same time, telling the story of the arrowhead, we are imagining it being handled, being created and being used. We see the hunter firing it at deer or elk or mammoth and a whole world opens to us from the portal of that plush cushion, that glass case.
The Creative Brain Approaches the Museum
How we interpret the objects in museums is interesting. This article in The Guardian talks about the way in which creative people seek to understand museum objects compared to non-creatives. One theory is that non creatives have a ‘convergent’ method of analysing what they see – they want to understand and label it as fast as possible, where as creative people tend to have a ‘divergent’ method of analysing what they see – they put off the classification for longer so that they can look at the object from many different angles first. Imagine that: the creative brain, when presented with something stimulating to look at opens many small doors in the concept of the thing in which many small stories may be explored.
How to respond to the prompts
The prompts are deliberately open and accessible. They’re there to help you to find ways into the stories within the museums. There is no right or wrong way to write in response to the museum pieces prompts. You might respond to the prompts with a reflective piece on self, or a fictional representation of how the object was used, or even how the object came to appear in the museum, it doesn’t matter. The important thing is the creative process, the experience.
Week One
This week we’re taking a virtual visit to The Victoria and Albert Museum, London