Louisa Shorney

We’ve come to the last week of Writing with Nature online. Using nature as our muse and our senses as our connection, we have journeyed through the senses and some of the general writing genres, to liberate our creative potential with words. Unshackling our inner wordsmith with a few simple tools and techniques.

Each week a genre and a sense-field was picked out of the hat (singing bowl in our case) and coupled together to give us our weeks task. I must say that the pair randomly picked for the first week was no mean feat, taste and article /prose, not the simplest of starts. Just to be clear here, this did not mean go and write an article about taste, that would be a food critique’s dream. We use the sense field to focus our awareness through, feeding all of our other senses and stimulating our imagination as our awareness is focused upon the nature all around us. After a few minutes of this complete absorption, we pick up our pens and write, a free-write or stream of consciousness. So the sense field and nature are a trigger for opening up our creative imagination, not the subject matter.

In our first session we all brought with us an aromatic herb and a pot of hot water so that we could stimulate all of our senses, seeing it, feeling it, smelling it, listening to it as you roll it in your fingers and finally tasting it as you place it in the boiling water and make a tea. I brought lavender.

"A foaming frothy  ice-cream soda sat invitingly on the café table, accompanied by the lacy form of a spun sugar basket, cradling strawberries on a bed of Chantilly cream. Violet was lost somewhere amongst the regimented rows of flea's bane grace. She was pulled back from her imaginative wanderings when the waiter injected a question into her dreamy world.
'Is zare any zing else madame? Perhaps some cardamom shortbread?'
Madame!..cheeky buggar.
'Oh...eh...no, that'll be all thank you.'
She had come here, to Provence, in the hope of bottling some of its charm and to bathe in its pink and purple haze."

On week two we were paired with hearing and a character vignette/sketch. This is probably my favourite theme, the creation of a character. A whole world, even a universe, is created in the back ground to fuel the presentation to the reader and that presentation can be so slight and subtle. It is less about describing how a character looks and much more about their response to the environment in which they’re placed. How they act, how they behave, internal thoughts, emotive responses and general mannerisms. This world, this contextual environment, needs to have blossomed in your imagine, to hold a place there for you to draw upon whenever you bring this character into play. You can utilise clusters and spider diagrams, as well as focused free writes to develop and hold this world for your imaginative access.

It was the “WooHoo” of the wood pigeons outside that fired my imagination. Often in their private conversations I hear a “Yeah-us, yeah-us, yeah-us” from them and so it was this, coupled with their salmon pink breasts, grey coats and white collars, that gave me my imaginative building blocks.

"Algernon Woodcock-Wigeon deftly twirls his white moustache between his fingers and thumb, he flicks the tip into a perfect upward curl and with a final wiggle of his top lip he is satisfied that all is in order. Waiting for Beatrice to take up her place on the step next to him, he pulls at the opening of his grey tweed jacket to make sure that it is sitting correctly - Bea has only just finished fitting an extra panel in the back to allow for his broadening girth - and dusts down the front of his salmon pink waistcoat checking for any unsightly dribble stains. He continues to adjust himself in his clothing until Beatrice arrives with the hounds. It really doesn't matter how many decades they’ve been doing this, he's just not at all comfortable with posing for photographs. Having his wolfhounds beside him though calms his nerves and gives his hands something else to focus upon. Bea, on the other hand is your no nonsense sort of gal, stout in body and heart. As a pair they look like Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee stood in front of the crumbling old Wigeon Manor, donning the family tweed, salmon pink waistcoats and brogues to match, all finished off with a crisp white cravat."

Last week we had poetry with scent, how evocative. There's nothing quite like smell to trigger memory, and it certainly did that for me. Here's the first draft, it definitely needs some working, but as yet I haven't had time.

"Oranges groves and lemon trees
Laden with plump ripe memory
Of ice-cream and soda
With blood running in the back streets

Easter on the island
A goat's sacrificial plight
Roasting spit in the Taverna
All gather to lend a hand

Rose flavoured pink squishy delight
Powder sugared and dusted
Tingles at the tip of my tongue
A daily gathered highlight

And at night the fire flies will walk you all the way home."

For our final week we shall have touch married with short story I wonder what will be conjured up.

It has been an absolute delight running this four week online course. Witnessing the opening and expanding freedom of imagination, blossoming in all the participants has been a joy to experience. I will be looking forward to the next one, do come and join us. keep an eye on ‘Dates for your Diary’ or to be kept up to date on all my courses, workshops, paintings and products, do subscribe to my newsletter below.