The Workshop Handbook for Writers E-Book

Jackie Wills

• Herausgeber: Arc Publications
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 140

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Award-winning poet, journalist, teacher and lecturer, Jackie Wills shares her experience of more than 20 years running workshops, and offers her personal insight into what works and why. In different settings – business, working in the community and schools – she outlines the pitfalls and risks in a wide-ranging handbook that no writing workshop leader should be without.

Leseprobe

Published by Arc Publications

Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road

Todmorden OL14 6DA, UK

www.arcpublications.co.uk

Copyright © Jackie Wills, 2016

Copyright in the present edition © Arc Publications, 2016

Design by Ben Styles and Jackie Wills

978 1910345 03 0 (ebk)

Cover photograph by Jackie Wills

This ebook is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part of this ebook may take place without the written permission of Arc Publications.

Jackie Wills has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

The Workshop Handbook for Writers

How to run writing workshops in business, the community and education

by Jackie Wills

2016

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many people and organisations have given me work that has helped me write this book including: Sandra Morgan at Imberhorne School, East Grinstead, The Poetry Society, Tŷ Newydd, Alastair Creamer, Sean Gogarty, Unilever, Ann Bridgland, Liz Whitehead at Fabrica, Slipstream Poets, David Kendall, Mark Hewitt, The Poetry Trust, the Royal Literary Fund. Thanks to Debbie Taylor at Mslexia, who published four features on running workshops in 2015.

Thanks to Jane Fordham, a true collaborator, my children Mrisi and Giya who patiently helped out at many workshops even when they were so young and as ever, my mother Sheila Alcock. Nicola Heslop, too, helped on Saturdays when she was a student and is now teaching. I’ve worked alongside many writers, including: Catherine Smith, Brendan Cleary, Matthew Sweeney, Kit Wright, Nigel Jenkins, Tom Bullough, Jim Friel, Suzannah Dunn, Peter and Ann Sansom, Cliff Yates, Michael Laskey, Maude Casey, plus the people I started out with in the early days, Eva Salzman and Don Paterson.

ABOUT JACKIE WILLS

Photo by Tony Ward

Jackie Wills’ first pamphlet, Black Slingbacks, was published by Slow Dancer press in 1992. Her first full collection, Powder Tower, was shortlisted for the 1995 TS Eliot award and in 2004 she was one of Mslexia magazine’s new poets of the decade. Her fifth collection and most recent is Woman’s Head as Jug (Arc, 2013).

She has been an award-winning journalist, contributing to a wide range of national newspapers and specialist magazines. She was one of the first poets to hold a residency in business and among a group selected by the Poetry Society to deliver workshops for young people at Buckingham Palace.

Wills has made a living as a writer since 1978 and began running workshops when she co-founded Brighton Poets in 1990. She has been a visiting lecturer at Goldsmiths University and Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the universities of Surrey and Sussex, as well as an RLF Lector in Brighton, East Sussex.

INTRODUCTION

“The results were incredible. The workshops raised discussion, laughter, and openness. Our young people were encouraged to express themselves and their emotions by writing poems. They went from saying ‘I won’t’ or ‘I can’t’ to ‘I did it!’”

CHRIS SYLVESTER, Beechfield Secure Unit, Crawley, 1999.

The first writing workshop I went to was at South Hill Park arts centre in Bracknell in the 1980s led by Irish poet Matthew Sweeney. Once a week a small group of us was introduced to some of Matthew’s favourite writers and brought our own work for scrutiny. At the end of the course I read my poems in public for the first time and had work accepted by a magazine that immediately folded. It didn’t matter – the first poems I saw in print were in an iconic small magazine, The Echo Room, produced by poet Brendan Cleary who’s since become a great friend.

Here, I share my experience of more than 20 years running workshops. I focus on what works and why. I deal with different settings like business, working in the community and schools, share pitfalls and risks.

This is a book about reading and sharing the work of other poets, as much as about writing. It is also a record of the trails I’ve followed to expand a workshop idea. I rarely use my own poems in workshops because they are too familiar to me, although once or twice I’ve shown how a poem evolves out of many drafts.

I include plans for workshops of 45 minutes, to residencies stretching for months: half-days, full days, a masterclass, week-long workshops, and short courses. I reflect on work with musicians and artists, in galleries, with orchestras, arts and business leaders, young refugees and homeless men, with young people who cannot speak and young people in a secure unit.

When I began, I learned on my feet. Luckily I never found myself in danger, but I had some strange, exploitative and stressful experiences.

Once I turned up to run a writing workshop with elderly people and discovered two were illiterate, two were blind and one was physically unable to write. I wasn’t forewarned and hadn’t asked the right questions. I’d assumed the person inviting me would have thought it through. They hadn’t.

The most challenging time was working with young people in a secure unit. It was brilliantly organised and I was well briefed. But I’ve witnessed teachers marking at the back of the room and on one hot afternoon a teacher put her head on the table and fell asleep. I forgave her when I found out she was pregnant.

Freelancing is precarious. You are at the mercy of the inexperienced or the canny. One company wanted to grab the copyright of a course I developed. Some keep a date open until the last minute, and then cancel with no ‘kill’ fee.

But then I’ve spent weeks in the Devon and north Welsh countryside working alongside amazing poets to give young people experiences of writing they’ll never forget. And moments in boardrooms where I believed poetry really could be an instrument of change.

CHAPTER ONE

STRUCTURE AND TONE

I learned how to run workshops by trying to mirror what I’d experienced in the workshops I attended. I’ve often been nervous, sometimes daunted and occasionally felt I’d failed miserably. But at its best, a workshop leaves me feeling exhilarated because of the ideas, lines and metaphors that have been delivered around the table or in a circle of chairs.

SECTION 1

WHAT MAKES A WORKSHOP?

The room, for the time a workshop lasts, is a world. The writer puts the elements in place – a quirky room, a view, a place with history, and a group of people.

I want a workshop to make me feel I’m in the moment of a poem or story – everyone sitting at the same table, feeling excited because we’ll be creating something new.

For people taking part, the day is time out to stretch, concentrate on writing, so I make the tea, fill up water jugs, and get out plates and cutlery. They want to fill up pages, walk at lunchtime and come back with something to tell.

I remember my excitement being driven down the track to the Arvon Foundation in Yorkshire and the careful feedback of tutors James Berry and Vicki Feaver. I encountered writers I’d never heard of in workshops with Matthew Sweeney. From a day at the South Bank Centre in London, I remember Liz Lochhead’s generous and relaxed approach and this has become a standard I aim for.

Figure 1.1 Tiles made by children at a workshop with potter Julian Belmonte

Photo by Julian Belmonte

ORGANISING IT YOURSELF

Most writers are invited to deliver workshops and don’t have to deal with administration or publicity. I’ve occasionally organized a workshop myself, but juggling bookings, fees, venue and publicity takes time and is risky because people drop out at the last minute. To put on your own workshop you need public liability insurance, payment in advance with no refunds if someone cancels, a reliable venue and a good network of people to spread the word. You also need to calculate the time it takes you to organize and add that into the cost.

Themed or specialized workshops attract attention. Ask writing friends what they’d like. Decide on numbers. Find a special place to put it on – but when you’re calculating what to charge, add up venue hire, your fee, travel, planning time and publicity costs. Warn participants it can only go ahead with a minimum number. Set a cut off date so if you don’t break-even, you can cancel and refund.

WORKING FOR SOMEONE ELSE

I’ve done workshops on beaches and in woods, in a stately home, a youth hostel, a touring youth bus, secure unit, galleries, Japanese garden, arboretum, school grounds, in pubs, libraries, day centres and museums. Once I heard someone say, "Let’s put Jackie in the skate park." It didn’t happen. I’ve been asked to suggest themes, build a workshop around specific writers or ideas and develop a session on journal writing.

When someone rings or emails me, the first things I need to know are:

When is it?

Where?

How long do you want?

Who’s it for?

What’s the fee?

I allow at least a day to develop new materials for a workshop, particularly if I am doing new research for a theme, or on writers I haven’t covered before. I expect my fee to cover preparation as well as the time I’m delivering the workshop.

When I write a series of workshops I build in time for meetings – face to face or on the phone – to share a draft plan and amend it if necessary.

I want to know who’s taking part and what will work for them. If it’s in a school, I need to know the students’ ages, if anyone has special needs. If it’s for adults are they beginners or experienced writers?

I’m cautious if the organiser is putting on a workshop as an outreach activity – maybe a drop in. The risk is that participants have no interest in writing but the organiser thinks it might be good for the clients. Perhaps she has never put on a writing event before but has found a source of funding.

So before undertaking an outreach project, I need to know if participants have been consulted, if there’s a goal for the project e.g. book, recording, performance, who is responsible for the group’s welfare/safety, who will be supporting me and how, that there are minimum and maximum numbers of participants and that the venue’s suitable.

Well-planned outreach work combined with workshop planning can deliver life-affirming and long reaching results.

MOMENTUM

A good workshop has a momentum and a rhythm that keeps the creative process energetic. It has four parts: introduction, ice-breaker / lead-in, focus, wrap-up.After names and introductions, go quickly into an ice-breaker or easy exercise to loosen up and lead into the theme of the workshop. It can be a writing exercise you know achieves results easily. When people are loosened up, focus and take them inward so they can write.At the end of the day, everyone needs time to share work, talk or ask questions. In a longer workshop, the structure doesn’t change but you can vary exercises, the mood and experiment. By the afternoon of a day-long workshop, people are writing well, are excited by their material and want to shape a piece of writing.

SECTION 2

KEEPING WORKSHOP PLANS

Figure 1.2 Your workshop plans are valuable resources

Photo by Jackie Wills

I have a photo of a swan on a slipway and whenever I see it, I remember a room, its view and the walk we took. I couldn’t remember so precisely though, what we did in the workshop and that’s why I keep workshop plans.

Sometimes themes crop up again and I rework a day or afternoon I’ve spent hours finding materials for. Then there are the times when I’m invited back and I have to remember what I’ve done a year earlier.

I try to stick to a workshop plan but when I veer off, because I’ve included too much, I make a note of what I’ve ditched.

One of the most useful notes to make, too, is on timing. This is sometimes hard to judge and I don’t like to kill an interesting discussion just in order to keep to my schedule.

Workshop plans are interesting to look back on. I have held onto certain exercises because I know they work, but after a while need to try something else. Then I forget them because they’ve been sidelined by new ones.

When I revive an exercise, I bring something else to it and season it differently. My workshop plans show me which exercises I am over-reliant on. They keep me inventive and enquiring.

I haven’t got a comprehensive record of workshops I’ve delivered and I regret it. Three A4 books I’ve glued poems and exercises into over the past decade have been my reference books and personal anthologies, constantly updated with new material.

I could probably trawl through endless notebooks if I was desperate to locate a particular workshop plan, but it would take a long time. I’ve lost records, too, when I’ve upgraded computers. So now I have a workshop folder and everything goes in there.

CAUTION!

Everyone has a bad or difficult experience of a workshop. Some are almost a rite of passage – it’s a drop in session and no-one turns up, you’re in a classroom full of teenagers who think they have a free 45 minutes and the teacher’s gone off to do his marking, a care home engages you for a reminiscence project but won’t turn off the TV.

But my worst experiences have been when someone has attempted to interfere with the content. Indeed, the very worst was a firm that returned my workshop plan with comments on my choice of poems. It expected learning objectives for each exercise and wanted to circulate my proposal to a steering committee. When it demanded copyright on my materials we parted company. But I kept one of the comments scribbled on my schedule:

“Here are some random thoughts after a quick read. Please feel free to disregard them, since I haven’t read a poem since Philip Larkin died…. I don’t know how each poem illustrates your points, but my sense is that there are too many of them, and some may be a bit precious.”

EVALUATION

There’s a wonderful tradition at the end of a course at Tŷ Newydd or one of the Arvon Foundation centres of producing an anthology of work written during the week.

Increasingly, too, organisations expect formal evaluation of a workshop, whether to please funders or fit their own procedures. After residencies I have written reports and sometimes left a collection of exercises with examples of work.

All these things mark the event and in some cases I have used the results of evaluation sheets to alter or promote future workshops. Sample evaluation sheets are simple to find and adapt. I keep to one page and no more than five questions with space for comments.

At the end of two school residencies, I put together a book of exercises for teachers. I used a simple template to summarise how I had used each exercise and as I brought them together I found I was also evaluating my work and methods:

How does this poem work?

How can it be used?

Example of poems written in response to this poem

My favourite end of residency books were handmade with primary school children. We used card, handmade paper and stitched them simply. But Boiola, a booklet produced during a Unilever residency reached the heady heights of the D&AD awards where it was shortlisted for a pencil! This was a reminder for participants of exercises we’d done together and was initiated largely by the writer I was working with, John Simmons.

Here is an example of formal evaluation of writing workshops I delivered for Impact Unleashed, a leadership programme originated by Unilever, run by Arts and Business in London and funded by Arts Council England.

CHAPTER TWO

WORKSHOP MODELS

There are broadly two workshop paths – to generate new writing or bring writing for critical feedback. Some merge both.

SECTION 1

CRITICAL FEEDBACK MODEL

Both writers’ workshops I attend – one in London and one in Brighton – are for sharing and discussing poems. These groups have become the first place to try out a new poem or a sequence.

I was invited to join both groups and I miss them badly if I can’t attend. Why? The poets in these groups are friends, peers, trusted readers and experienced writers. I trust them to read my work closely, to be honest, to identify the weaknesses and strengths in my writing and to ask questions, if they don’t understand what I’m doing.