Wednesday 31 December 2014

WRITE IN THE FOREST, GRIZEDALE FOREST



GRIZEDALE FOREST WORKSHOPS

Write in the Forest - a series of four creative writing workshops with local writer Geraldine Green. Drawing on the natural world and forests in particular, these workshops will help inspire your writing and get you back in touch with nature. Workshops will take place in the inspirational Yan Centre and also outdoors - please wear suitable footwear and clothing.

Saturdays 11am-3pm
February 28th 
June 6th 
September 5th 
November 7th 

Booking essential. Adults £25. Refreshments available. Please bring own lunch or use cafe facilities.

Wildlife Trusts recognise the importance of nature on our wellbeing, which is why they've created the Nature and Wellbeing Act. http://www.wildlifetrusts.org/NWA

http://www.forestry.gov.uk/theyan

The first workshop will focus on the award-winning photos of Luke Duggleby, currently on display in Grizedale Forest

http://www.forestry.gov.uk/forestry/infd-9ppeem


For booking: please email: geraldinegreen.poetry1@gmail.com
Visit my website: http://geraldinegreensaltroad.blogspot.co.uk/

Tuesday 16 December 2014

Light, Darkness, Compassion and Reflection.



Rookhow, Grizedale Forest, Cumbria, UK
December 3rd 2014

Spent part of this evening at Rook How, an early 18thC Quaker Meeting House in Grizedale Forest.  The room steeped in stories, scent of woodsmoke from logs burned, past and present. A time of quite reflection, smiles, handshakes, welcomes. Large log hefted into the wood burning stove and silence. Candlelit silence.

I stared at the log in the wood burner. What kind of tree was the log that was burning? Oak, I think.

This led me to recalling John Wyatt's wonderful book The Shining Levels that I read oh ages ago, when I was in my late teens, early twenties. How he spent time living in the forest.

How he knew the heft and feel of each log he burned.

Ash incense bright. Holly, hard as iron - a good back burner. Apple its scent saved for special occasions, Christmas. The log tonight was, for me, very much an elder. Not the Elder tree, no, but an elder, shaping the time we spent, sitting in silence.

At first the red glow appeared to me as a heart. Then the heart split in two, became an Owl became a tree, looked like an Ash tree. it burned and sparked, we sat in silence.

The Ash tree turned into sparks. Someone gave witness, spoke of light, mirrors, compassion and reflection.

The log on the fire, it just burned away. Turned, for me, as I watched it mesmerised, into a Bull's head. Two eyes sparked from it, until it then shapeshifted into a Wolf then a Bear and the Bear had fire sparking from one eye. One Bear eye of Ursa Major glowed red and steady. The other, pale green-yellow sparks a shower, as if sprayed from a rainbow.



I got to thinking of dark as well as light. Positive dark, I mean, not fear or terror.

But the dark that is needed. Sleep. Rest. Germination. Hibernation. The dark that is rich soil, composting ideas, allowing germs of seeds, or ideas, to come to fruition.

The log subsided onto its side. The meeting ended.



A Wing and a Prayer 

Geese practice their own form of meditation              

a wide-winged song
that the supplicant hands of the horse chestnut reach out              
to catch.


photos: Geraldine Green, Firepit Swarthmoor Hall 11th/12th November 2014; Sunrise from Birkrigg, 28th October 2014
"A Wing and a Prayer" poem from a new pamphlet collection of that name to be published by Swarthmoor Hall Spring/Summer 2015

Geraldine Green
Writer-in-Residence Swarthmoor Hall
Associate Editor Poetry Bay






Tuesday 28 October 2014

DATES FOR YOUR DIARY: NOVEMBER 2014-AUGUST 2015


DATES FOR YOUR DIARY: November 2014-August 2015

November:
7th-9th Writing Retreat Brantwood Coniston Cumbria, Geraldine Green and guest writer Pippa Little. One-day option available: Saturday 8th November £60 incl lunch
email: enquiries@brantwood.org.uk
brantwood.org.uk
16th ‘Living Words’ 2-5pm Creative Writing Workshop  Swarthmoor Hall 2-5pm  “Healing Well” Swarthmoor Hall
info@swarthmoorhall.co.uk

22nd Write to Roam creative writing workshop Jane's farm near Kirkby Lonsdale 10.30am-4.30pm £30 incl. refreshments, please bring own lunch - all welcome!

December 1st 10.30am Monday writing group Milnthorpe

Currently working on her sixth collection Geraldine’s latest collection ‘Salt Road’ was published September 2013 by Indigo Dreams Publishers Indigo Dreams Publishers, you can find details here:




Planning ahead, 2015:

January 6th: workshop and reading for Suffolk Poetry Society delighted to be invited for the third year running, from one Peninsula to another.you can find more info about the workshop and reading, here

February-June: Write on the Farm -  writing workshops Jane's farm, near Kirkby Lonsdale: cost £35 incl refreshments, please bring own lunch
February 22nd, March 22nd, April 25th, May 23rd, June 27th
Note: April 25th with David Burbidge (tbc), May 23rd full day workshop on Piel Island

February 22nd Write on the Farm, 10.30-4.30pm £35 incl refreshments, please bring own lunch. Morning session: indoors writing exercises. Afternoon session: part of it outdoors, part spent on quiet writing time. Suitable clothing and footwear advisable

March 22nd: Write on the Farm Jane's farm, near Kirkby Lonsdale

April 
16th 2.30pm-4pm Launch of Arachne Press Anthology 'The Other Side of Sleep, Grange Library, Grange-over-Sands Cumbria Arachne Press

May 23rd Write on the Farm Jane's farm, near Kirkby Lonsdale

June 
12th-13th: Midsummer Festival of Words, Swarthmoor Hall, Ulverston, Cumbria
 Swarthmoor Hall mini Literary Festival celebrating my time as writer-in-residence at the Hall and also celebrating work produced on the Living Words workshops by participants - all welcome!

19th-21st  Midsummer Poetry Course with Penelope Shuttle and Geraldine Green  Brantwood Coniston email: Brantwood - early booking advisable

June 27th Write on the Farm Jane's farm, near Kirkby Lonsdale



Poetry Trip, North America:

July
18th Acorn Books, Dover, Delaware with George Wallace, host Ezzie Mondragon
Acorn Books

August 5th
William Carlos Williams Centre Rutherford New Jersey, host Claudia Serea
William Carlos Williams

Friday 24 October 2014

SOUTH WALNEY NATURE RESERVE September-October 2014

REFLECTIONS ON RAMBLES, SOUTH WALNEY NATURE RESERVE 




I've spent a lot of time over at South Walney, sometimes wandering the beaches on West Shore, sometimes North Walney, but mostly I'm at the Nature Reserve, at the south end of the island.

Each time I drive there from Ulverston, along the Coast Road, watching out for different sea birds, oystercatchers, cormorants (occasionally) dunlins, curlews overwintering, resisting the urge to turn off at the roundabout and go to Foulney island - another blog post to be written! - as I say, each time I go there it feels fresh. Like a pilgrimage to another place.



The coast road, then into Barrow over two bridges onto Barrow Island with its memories of working there at Vickers, over the Jubilee bridge to Walney turn left down Carr Lane. Simultaneously listening to memories in my inscape as much as watching out for starlings gathering and swooping on telephone lines near Biggar. The movement of the outer landscape mimicking my inner landscape of memories, swooping and arcing, fluttering.



Stories told me by parents, grandparents as i drive from one place to the next: "that's Myerscough Street where we were bombed out in the war" "The Queen's at Biggar's haunted you know, and smugglers would go there" To my own memories of walking to Walney beaches, Earnse Bay in particular, in our teens. Walking from Hawcoat, bag of jam sarnies and a bottle of pop...



I digress, back to this blog! The road from Biggar to the caravan park at the south end of Walney narrows. One side alpacas, sheep, goats, the other the mud flats and Walney Channel, mudflats and marsh, gullies and views across to Black Combe, Piel island, Roa island, the gas works, Lifeboat station, BAE systems (once Vickers Shipyard) Town Hall clock puncturing the skyline dwarfed now by the covered sub dock.

If the tide's in you'll see a variety of birds, bobbing on the calmer seas on the sheltered side of the island. If it's out you'll see egrets poking and prodding the mud. If you have binocs you'll see their feet are a lively colour, lime green yellow, contrasting with their snowy white plumage.


I tend to walk alongside the Walney Channel side of the reserve first, towards Seal Bay, where you can seal watch when the tide fills the Bay, when it's high. An incoming tide brings with grey seals, swimming in with the tide as it fills the small bay, swimming in following fish, sea bass and others, I watch them cavorting, twisting turning, swimming playing. The other week I watch six of them twining and diving, lying on their backs, plainly enjoying the warm autumn sunshine.

Little egret on the channel side of the reserve:



You see them swimming on the outgoing tide at the Groyne Hide end of the reserve where the Irish Sea rushes out, emptying Morecambe Bay's wide flat sands as if someone had pulled the plug and the bath empties in a great swish and suck, a rush and foam back into the sea.


grey seal, i wish i was you, when i watched you today, on the south end of walney, your diving for fish your nose diving for pleasure, your instinctive surfacing splashing dowsing your diving. i wish i was you o grey seal. diving and snuffling your snorting your whiskers your curiosity in watching us daft land locked humans i wish i was you. i can only mimic your snuffle your surfacing from sea, let me try it... smnnmufff snuff smuuffff smuuffff, then down you go, under your water. playing with me standing watching you from this dune of marram.

(from Burning Water, Hooking Clouds, new collection I'm working on)



Cormorants at the tideline:



But as well as the constant fascination of seals, sea birds, clouds, sky, Piel and watery reflections of silver gold mud and sand I look at the small: heart's ease lying so fragile yet hardy at my feet, harebells,


harebells:


and the amazement of what seems miniature forests of viper's buglosss.


Horned poppies growing among flat stones and shingle


My last trip to the reserve was yesterday, 23rd October 2014. Unlike most of the visits this year it wasn't in warm sunshine and blue skies, no, it was dry enough at first but then soon closed in as I walked from Groyne Hide to Seal Bay Hide in increasing misty drizzle, blowing in from the west. It wasn't cold tho' and I enjoyed sitting in the hide looking at a cobweb on one side of the window that I'd opened, to take photos of Piel Castle in mist. Hoping to capture the blowing water beaded cobweb in the foreground (I didn't) but Piel Castle looked suitably Gothic and ghostly


So, yesterday wasn't a day of blue and yellow, of horned poppies and gold, of bugloss blowing pink and purple or harebells nodding. It was a day of wind and  mist, of seals fishing off the Groyne, of mergansers on the old gravel ponds and curlews always curlews calling overhead and around me. It was a day of parasol mushrooms, some as big as soup plates, their textures and elegance hypnotic:



From the sea Hide you can walk on to Pho Hill Hide (I didn't yesterday) or swing  round to the Bank Hide, overlooking the pond you see on your right as you drive in to the reserve. I love the reeds here between one hide and the path back to the car park. I posted a note on my Facebook page, yesterday, saying I like to pretend I'm a non human when I take photos, a beetle, mole, rabbit, dragonfly, so as to get a different perspective on my photos. Here's one of reeds I squatted down to take


Sometimes it can be a day of wall to wall blue and hot sun, marram grass spiking the wind, waves doing their cliched sparkling thing. Sometimes you can't even get to the reserve, because of high tides, floods over the causeway. October 9th was just such a day


one man and the waves



watched the storm heading in



and sometimes...



"ALWAYS THE FLIGHT
and always the song of freedom hung in the air 
above skylarks and bracken,. Always migrating curlews 
passing through, landing briefly, to overwinter 
from moorland to coast and back again. Always 
the movement of quicksilvered sand. Always 
the changing seasons

shapeshifting from black to white to red to brown 
to yellow to August, September, April. Always 
the movement of gulls swift acting. Nose diving. 
Always the patterning of possibilities, changing shape and skin. 
Autumn to winter skin. Spring to summer and 
back again.

Always the shrill call of terns,
 defending their territory,. Flying of red kites over fell and estuary. Puncturing of clouds, thundering tides. Always 
the movement of birds and humans. Red 
to white, black and gold, silver and red, tawny skinned, wrinkled, smooth. Flesh of old. Flesh of 
young. Bright and dying"

(Geraldine Green 7.9.2014 - taken from Burning Water, Hooking Clouds, new collection I'm working on)




Dr. Geraldine Green is a freelance creative writing tutor, published poet, poetry editor and mentor. Currently writer-in-residence at Swarthmoor Hall Ulverston, home of Quakerism, Geraldine gets inspiration for her poems from the Furness Peninsula. She's available for workshops and readings throughout the UK and North America.
You can contact Geraldine here

All photos by Geraldine Green (copyright)