Using Eight Words (AGAIN)
A couple of days ago I had the privilege of facilitating a creative writing workshop for PhD students in the Public Health, Policy, and Systems Department at the University of Liverpool. Exercises included writing pieces (e.g. fiction, memoir, lyrics, scripts and so on) from pictorial prompts and with the intention to challenge 'grand narratives' (in research and more generally). The session also included some creative editing; which involved not just the cutting of words but also changes of genre, of mood, of time etc.
The second writing
task - ‘chose eight words from those chosen by others and….’ - followed
the first exercise which involved each person picking out four words from a warm-up
eight minutes of free-writing. This generated a whole bunch of great single words;
analysis, loss, supposed, diseases, bland, basil (to list just a very few),
and a few linked words, including ‘I am very lost’ and ‘keep going’
which participants put together, in a variety of extremely interesting ways, to
write stories and poems and more.
As at other such events I joined in with this exercise. Here's what I wrote on Thursday, with my (more than) eight words, highlighted:
I love food, I love preparing and
cooking food for others too. I don’t really follow recipes much except perhaps
when I have a guest who I’m not used to cooking for and I’m anxious I
might produce something less than edible, something less than pleasing. Mostly
though I have a fair bit of confidence in the kitchen and think that I
mostly produce meals of some quality.
During the Covid-19 lockdowns I discovered a
renewed interest in baking, after not having much time or inclination for such,
for a number of years. I found that the effort this activity took provided
a calming alternative to my feelings of anger and frustration with government
ineptitude, mismanagement and bad, bad, behaviour. I shared some of the
food that I prepared during this period with friends (left outside my door to
be exchanged with something they had prepared for me) and with a homeless man I
met on an early walk one morning. I think he enjoyed the quiches and scones
that I made, even though I had no kitchen scales and guessed at the quantities
of flour, butter, and so on, that I needed.
The relationship between food and wellbeing,
with health and illness, is of course of much concern, not
least with reference to food poverty and inequality more generally. This
is something I have written about before in both fiction, memoir and academic
writings, and I feel sure it’s something I’ll return to. To conclude today I’ll
just say how grateful I am to the participants of today’s workshop for their
hard work and their word sharings which have encouraged me once again to
reflect on the pleasures and problems with food.
If you’d like to try a similar exercise on your own, pick a
book from your bookshelf/ves (or if you're like me, one of the many piles around
the house), open the book about a third of the way through and write down the
first five or six words you are drawn to. Do the same another couple of times with
the same book or another one. Spend a minute or two looking through your ‘chosen’
words then set a timer for TEN MINUTES and write something, anything, remembering
to use at least eight of the words.
Enjoy.
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