BRANTWOOD CREATIVE WRITING COURSES 2014
Had a great meeting at Brantwood with Rachel and
Howard this afternoon, plenty of ideas for future courses. Like
dragonflies we zoomed from one idea to the next, pausing on an imaginary leaf to
reflect. We arrived at two ideas for next year: June 20th, 21st
& 22nd 'Stimulate Your Writing' with New York poet George Wallace and in November 7th-9th,
a “Writer’s Retreat” with a guest writer, to be confirmed.
We thought November was a quiet time, a time to hunker
down for winter, go inside, metaphorically and physically, to a log fire, bright
in the hearth, gather round of an evening for storytelling and poems, a glass
of mulled wine, perhaps, to warm our hands. Spend time on your own writing,
share it with the group for feedback and enjoy listening to a guest
poet read from their work.
And June, when the gardens at Brantwood are glowing,
we can spend time in them with outdoor writing sessions, enjoy the expertise of
Brantwood’s own gardener/s sharing knowledge of what’s planted where and why,
which plants attract insects and birds and spend time
‘sketching’ your thoughts.
Already poems with a garden theme are jostling in my
mind: Sylvia Plath’s ‘Tulips’ Louise Gluck’s ‘Wild Iris’, Ginsberg’s ‘Sunflower
Sutra’, or Robert Hass’ “Sunrise." On the "Write from the Garden" course you can interpret gardens anyway you like and, in response to a variety
of writing prompts and stimuli, create new writing.
Here’s the last part of Ginsberg’s take on sunflowers:
SUNFLOWER SUTRA
So I grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck
it at my side like a scepter,
and deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack's soul
too, and anyone who'll listen,
--We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread
bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all
beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we're blessed
by our own seed & golden hairy naked
accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black
formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our
eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive
riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening
sitdown vision.
Allen Ginsberg
Berkeley, 1955
A PLACE WHERE MAGIC REIGNED
Dragonflies seem to be a
motif right now. A number of facebook friends have referred to them, and I
pondered on this today as I walked around the gardens at Brantwood. At Ruskin’s
Pond I stopped to reflect – then realised that that is exactly what I did,
because what caught my eye immediately were the reflections of ferns in water.
Click click and another click as I took photos disturbed a large, bluegreen dragonfly. It zoomed up from the fronds by my side and whizzed off. Sunlight
caught its wings, turned them golden. Now I’m typing this and ideas are
flashing through my mind: transformation, shapeshifting, metamorphosis. Turn to
my book ‘Medicine Cards’ find this:
“Dragonfly’s shifting of
colour, energy, form and movement explodes into the mind of the observer,
bringing vague memories of a time or place where magic reigned.” – eds. Jamie
Sams & David Carson.
Both "Write in the Garden" and the "Writer's Retreat" will be aimed
at allowing time to be in ‘the still hour’
SUNRISE
It is not the fire
we hunger for and not the ash. It is the still hour,
a deer come slowly in the creek at dusk,
the table set for abstinence, windows
full of flowers like summer in the provinces
vanishing when the moon’s half faced pallor
rises on the
dark flax line of hills.
- Robert Hass
Geraldine Green 13.8.2013, photos: Brantwood and Kansas Sunflower copyright Geraldine Green
