writing our way whole: 21 at home under the weather (from 7 Aug 2020)

I plan the titles of these “sessions” (sessions? from Latin sedo, sedere to sit) –

well, I for one am sitting down, at my laptop, facing due west as it happens, with the attached house – in the terrace-of-three – between me and my view of Ben Horn –

I plan them [sentences as well as titles] in a rather random way, a bit like what the weather throws at us, up at 58 degrees north, although behind the randomness there’s a deeper pattern of air currents and oceanic currents; cycles of tides. day and night, moons and planets, suns and stars, galaxies and nebulae…

Am I speaking of weather, or of creativity, or of life cycles?

“I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now“, as Judy Collins sang so poignantly throughout my teens, and still sings today – at 81 – a role model for my future).

I offered this exercise as part of a class supported by the wellbeing charity Arts and Minds in autumn 2017, as part of my first public outing as a writing tutor. We met in a room at the Michaelhouse Centre, an inspirational church conversion in the centre of Cambridge.

And that’s where, after Brain Dump, and a time for shaking out. relaxing and soothing our own writing hands, we did this indoor laundry:

Now cast your mind back to any books you’ve read, or films you’ve seen, in which a particular weather event forms an important context for the development of the plot. Jot down some key descriptive words

Or where the character’s “internal weather” is reflected in the actual meteorological conditions. What would happen if the weather turned out to do something opposite to what is going on in the mind?

For example, I thought of my internal weather feeling “hesitant” this morning. How would that have interacted with a flash bang wallop of a thunderstorm? Would I have shrunk under a dripping tree, or made a rush for a drier shelter? Would the liveliness of the pyrotechnics have woken me from my torpor?

(As it was, I went to bed for the afternoon, on an overcast day. When I was awoken by the phone, it was seven o’clock and tippling with rain. By nine o’clock I sat in the little conservatory facing north west, watching the sunset and enjoying another phone call in which we talked about Lammas growth on oak trees, as you do…)

Do you have any vivid recollections of deluges or thunderstorms from childhood? Or of a time of great drought, real or imaginary? Or of the hardest frost, meanest blizzard, – or the most forgiving dew at dawn? Go, write.

Further Resources

Lucky dip:

Select a word from this assemblage on a theme of weather:

blizzard	mist	cloud	glare
drizzle	shower	shine	dust
hail	scorch	humid	puddle
drench	thunder	gale	haze

• Now write down as many words as you can that rhyme with it
• Share your word-clusters and add any further rhymes from others
• Explore / play with any poetry that emerges from your cluster

I had intended to introduce you to some weather poems here. Since I am feeling under-the-weather, I open up that to you – to share links, or the poems themselves, with us here.

Have a good week, and enjoy what shelters you have available, from the sum, the rain, or the vicissitudes of your own weather patterns.