The University of the Self #67

A Workshop with the Weardale Writers

A Workshop with the Weardale Writers

Image description: 9 people are lined up along a long white table which is covered with crafting paraphenalia - glue, paper, scissors, notebooks, coffee cups. Three are sitting at the table, 6 stand behind them. They are all holding up homemade notebooks made in the concertina style. Behind them is a cream / white all with various artworks pinned to the wall, a brown cabinet and a dark brown piano.

I am taking a small break from writing out my therapy experiences this week. Sometimes I worry that I am too fixated on it, that I am neglecting other aspects of my creativity because of it. Sometimes I feel as if my mental health is trying to take me over and absorb everything about me I like (and some days, I don’t find much to like, so to lose any of it feels distressing). I am starting to worry that my therapy experiences are just too big, too difficult to explore — I worry that it is like the fairy tale Magic Porridge Pot — no matter how much I empty it all out, it just keeps on refilling. So it has to be beneficial to take a break from thinking about it, right?

Offers of work in the creative writing world are quite a rarity, so the times I am offered such work, I am incredibly grateful. I don’t have any other source of income apart from my creativity, so these times are precious both practically and emotionally, and help me keep hold of a little self-respect and a grain of independence, remind me that the creative world is not always lonely, and offer much-needed income. I feel I have so much to share, and there is such joy in sharing, in learning together, in supporting one another.

Sometimes, people express suprise that I am able to facilitate a workshop (not, I hasten to add at the Weardale Writers — I speak more generally). The reasons I do it are listed above, and I am often left feeling as if I must defend myself, justify my reasons. It might be sometimes well-meant, and sometimes not, but I am always struggling enough with years of internalised ableism without wondering if I am encountering it either intentionally or unintentionally in someone else. I am also a person with autism, which always adds its extra layer of uncertainty for me, when I attempt to fathom meaning and motive. Anyway.

I have run a number of workshops for this lovely group, and my workshops for them are always a hybrid mix of research, reading, writing and making, which is also a good summary of my creative process in general. The group had been delving into the history of the Pennine/Weardale lead miners. I really love local history, and how the connections between people and place can be so immediate, so tantalisingly near.

I spent a few months researching images and words that would help me to design the workshop. There is so much material it would be impossible to include everything, so I chose to focus on a couple of areas that stood out to me in their meaning — areas that would lend themselves to a creative workshop and be doable in three hours. The areas were as follows.

I named one of the areas ‘waste not, want not’ and my thinking was inspired by this quote, from this site: ““Knitting was also a widespread method of making a little income as well as clothes. Men, women and children knitted at every opportunity – even walking to work across the fells was to the sound of clicking needles. Everybody in the family knitted and this was an important evening social activity. Nothing was wasted – miners' tools were often made with recycled materials. Old cloth was used to make mats to guard against the cold of the stone floors.”

The other area of inspiration came from the paper The economic and social conditions of lead miners in the Northern Pennines in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, by Christopher Hunt, 1968, which can be accessed here: “the apparent stimulus to intellectual pursuit s given by the needs of their occupation… mining tenants on Alston Moor, explaining that "the nature of their Occupations as Miners, leads them to enquiries, which greatly quicken their understandings and urges them to seek from Books such facts of practical Philosophy as are applicable to their profession." The section continues: “"children in the lead country have the benefit of the example of their parents, and their encouragement to attend to their education…”

I brought in this quote from here: “Music was an important part of life. Singing was popular in the home and the public house…Probably the most popular pastime for the men was in the public houses where they could gather to tell tales, sing and enjoy a beer.”

My thinking was that the miner’s and their families made do and mended — they recycled and crafted what they needed. I myself am a keen up and re-cycler, and hate to waste what can be used again, in order to conserve the planet’s resources. It was difficult for people from the past to simply pop out and buy another notebook. I could imagine people creating notebooks of their own, using what they had around them. I decided to create a little folding notebook (A5 sized), which I would teach the group to make, and certainly felt appropriate for a group of writers. I spent weeks saving pieces of cardboard to be used for the covers, collecting images from pre-loved books and sun-printing paper using natural dyes.

I thought about the kind of musical instruments the miners may have had, and I have always loved the concertina. I hoped that the concertina action of the folded notebook would offer a wonderful extra sensory side to the notebooks, reminiscent of playing such an instrument.

While I was dyeing the papers, I had a strong sense of shades and shadows — the glimpses of incomplete patterns and stains on the papers seemed, to me, to suggest shadows and ghosts from the past. It felt like a way of linking us to the people from times gone by.

My thinking also involved the sense I felt, from my research, of the miners and their families coming together to share knowledge, to teach and entertain one another. It is wonderful when people come together to share what they have learned, instead of hoarding it jealously, in case their ‘edge’ against another contemporary is lost. I told the writing group how I never forgot the song we used to sing in Sunday School, when I was little: Magic Penny (by Malvina Reynolds, 1955):

“Love is something if you give it away,
Give it away, give it away.
Love is something if you give it away,
You end up having more.

It's just like a magic penny,
Hold it tight and you won't have any.
Lend it, spend it, and you'll have so many
They'll roll all over the floor.”

If ‘love’ is substituted with ‘knowledge’, then we support one another with shared experience and learning — we empower one another with generosity.

So, while we would be made our notebooks, we took breaks to read sections of information about the lead miners. I read them lines from poems I had found from WH Auden (great essay about this subject here). Then, as we snipped and folded, we took turns to share with the group what we had just learned, made notes and discussed each topic. This combination of literature and practical crafting would, I hoped, offer the group an alternative way of working into creativity, allowing one method to nourish another.

I gave away the notebook I had made to a friend afterwards, so I recreated it here — with the addition of front and back cover pockets and a bookmark. Now all the group have to do is fill their notebooks with writing inspired by the workshop. We all had a wonderful session, and now they have the skills they need to continue using scraps to make more notebooks of their own. There is something about writing by hand (especially in a fountain/nib pen!) in such a unique notebook. It makes the words seem more precious somehow — more like art-writing, rather than just writing. I hope it was an interesting experience, and I dearly loved the opportunity to get out of the house and share art and words with others.

Image description: On a dark brown table top is a handmade notebook. It is made from tea, coffee and cabbage dyed paper. The cover here is shades of tea & coffee pale beiges and browns. It has a brown front pocket with a black/white picture of a teapot on it. In the pocket is a bookmark, which has three pictures of old-fashioned adverts stuck to it. On the top, through the hole, is a pale pink ribbon. The words ‘today’ and ‘yesterday’ are written upon it in black ink. The notebook is tied together with a plaited piece of brown jute string.

Image description: On a dark brown table top is a handmade notebook. It is made from tea, coffee and cabbage dyed paper. The cover here is shades of tea & coffee pale beiges and browns. It has a brown front pocket with a black/white picture of a plate on it. The words ‘tomorrow’ is written upon it in black ink. The notebook is tied together with a plaited piece of brown jute string.

Image description: On a dark brown table top is a handmade notebook, made in the concertina folded style. It is lying stretched open. It is made from tea, coffee and cabbage dyed paper. The cover here is shades of tea & coffee pale beiges and browns. The paper inside in in shades of beige and blue. It has a brown front pocket with a black/white picture of a plate on it. There is a bookmark to the left, which has three pictures of old-fashioned adverts stuck to it. On the top, through the hole, is a pale pink ribbon. Behind each cover, extra pieces of folded paper have been glued in.

Image description:

Image description: On a dark brown table top is a handmade notebook. This picture shows a detail of a pair of concertina folded pages which a blue in colour. The pages have traces of doily and lace printed upon them.

Image description: On a dark brown table top is a handmade notebook. This picture shows a detail of a pair of pages which are woven with blue and beige paper stripes. There are faint prints of a doily on the brown pares and a fragment of lace on the bit of blue page on the left.

Image description: On a dark brown table top is a handmade notebook. This picture shows the inside of the front cover. Papers in shades of blue and beige are folded out. There is a bookmark, which has three pictures of old-fashioned adverts stuck to it. On the top, through the hole, is a pale pink ribbon.

Image description: On a dark brown table top is a handmade notebook, made in the concertina folded style. It is lying stretched open. It is made from tea, coffee and cabbage dyed paper. The cover here is shades of tea & coffee pale beiges and browns. It has a brown front pocket with a picture of a teapot on it. The words ‘today’ and ‘yesterday’ are written upon it in black ink. The back cover has a brown front pocket with a black/white picture of a plate on it. The words ‘tomorrow’ is written upon it in black inkThe paper inside in in shades of beige and blue. It has a brown front pocket with a black/white picture of a plate on it. There is a bookmark to the left, which has three pictures of old-fashioned adverts stuck to it. On the top, through the hole, is a pale pink ribbon. Behind each cover, extra pieces of folded paper have been glued in.

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