Writerly Connections In The Wood
How a simple conversation led to powerful connections and writerly gold.
Last Sunday, I walked through woods with some people in my walking club. I could waft about the height and strength of the trees, or the delicate purple foxgloves, but I’m more about the chat. If any of you want some nature, here’s a pic.
Photo Description: Purple foxgloves growing in high green grass.
As this wasn’t one of the club’s more strenuous walks, it attracted a lot of new members. In the way of Irish people, we spent most of the walk establishing connections with each other. I discovered I was connected to a few of the other walkers without knowing it.
One name snagged at me – where had I heard it before? When I talked to the woman, I discovered we were from the same town, and then the pieces slid into place. This woman’s mother and daughter had shaped my writing career in small but significant ways.
The Daughter
On the morning of the first-ever children’s creative writing camp I gave, I arrived at the venue to find a man and a girl waiting outside. The wood-walker’s daughter She looks way too small for the camp, I thought. Maybe her sister will be along in a minute.
‘Are you here for the writing camp?’ I asked.
‘Yeah,’ she said in a perky voice.
Merciful hour! One wrong move and I could quash her like a bug. I would just have to hope the slightly too strong orange squash in my bag would win her over.
Turned out I didn’t need the orange squash. This girl turned out to be one of those people that writing was made for. All six of the girls who attended the camp were sparky, arty and imaginative. But she had that slanty way of looking at the world that is the hallmark of a good writer, and an instinctive understanding of how to shape a story.
And she took my simple story prompts and spun them into more writerly gold than you could ever imagine. Through her, I discovered the joy of writing with children, a joy that has remained with me ever since.
The Mother
As a child, I attended ballet classes. I didn’t care about learning steps. I was there for the cloakroom next to the studio, a gentle dominion under the reign of three gentle women. One of these was the wood walker’s mother.
About ten years ago, I wrote a piece called Two Rooms, where I compared the ballet studio and the cloakroom to the two faces of childhood. The ballet studio, a place of order, rules and discipline, and the cloakroom, a place of freedom, play and comfort, created by the wood walker’s mother and her friends.
The piece was well received at the spoken word event I was attending at the time and it was subsequently accepted for publication in The Ogham Stone Journal. I felt a mild thrill to see my name listed on the same page as the names Donal Ryan, Joseph O’Connor and Nickolas Butler, an American novelist I admired.
The Aftermath
The girl recently became a doctor. Though she didn’t continue on a creative path, she talked about the course for a long time after she’d finished. And as I said to her mother, when doctors write books, they sell by the bucketload, so she could be an author yet.
The cloakroom queen is now in her nineties, still lives in her own house with her husband and has a keen recollection of the songs and poems of her schooldays, which she’s happy to sing or recite for her family.