Mandy Ross (www.mandyross.co.uk) led our July workshop. She had asked us to bring along a piece of fruit and some tree seeds. There were redcurrants, gooseberries and strawberries from gardens, and a lemon, an apple, a pineapple, a grape and a slice of watermelon from people’s fruit bowls. The tree seeds included rowan, ash, elder, silver birch, oak, beech and sycamore and there were also a few flower seeds.
Free writing
As a warm-up exercise, we spent a few minutes doing free writing inspired by our piece of fruit. Then we underlined a word or phrase and used that to start a second piece of free writing.
In the voice of a seed
Next, Mandy asked us to spend a bit longer writing a piece of prose, dialogue or poetry in the voice of a seed. Following on from that, we could either continue with the same piece, or write something in the voice of the seed’s parent tree, before sharing what we’d written in small groups.
Seed packet
To finish, we wrote a letter and folded it to make a packet for our tree seeds. As Mandy said, it’s nice to find ways of turning writing into gifts. And if you had a seed that filled you with anger (sycamore seeds in one case), you could choose to write a letter to someone you were angry with. One person wrote a letter to Dominic Cummings.
Collective piece
At Mandy’s suggestion we are going to produce a collective piece – a Bilston writing forest, made up of two to three lines from each person on the subject of a tree or seed.
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