Inveralmond International Book Festival

I was very honoured today to read and be interviewed at the inaugural 'Inveralmond International Book Festival'. It was put on at Inveralmond Community High School by a third year class who writer, Mary Paulson-Ellis, and myself have been working with over the last three weeks, as part of Scottish Book Trust's 'Writers in Schools' programme.

Over the six sessions in Michael Stephenson's English class, we transformed the usual layout of the room into a writers' workshop. Everyone had their own notebook, quite unlike a jotter which might be examined by a teacher. Mary gave us a series of prompts to respond to in short bursts of writing - places in the school with particular atmosphere or smell or feeling; characters from memory and imagination. We built up a series of jottings. When we wrote, silence fell over a roomful of bent heads and scratching hands. The concentration was palpable.

It wasn't long before stories emerged quite naturally from the jottings. Then it was the whole school which transformed as corridors were tiptoed for the first time at night; zombies and demons invaded; the SAS had to be called in; the drama studio became a refuge for a solitary pupil who then discovered she was not alone; there was a school for shape-shifters... Stories demanded to be told.

And today, some of them were read, Mary and myself were interviewed by two pupils on behalf of the class, and we celebrated in style with drinks and snacks.

The idea was to give these pupils an opportunity to write, to play with words, to let stories arise naturally and then to capture them in black ink on white paper, whether complete or not, and celebrate them together. We adapted some of the ideas from an article in Writing in Education 49 (NAWE's magazine) by teaching consultant and writer Raymond Soltysek, which chimed with the playful and writerly approach we wanted to take. It worked! I think we left many of them unconvinced about a career as a writer (once I'd explained how royalties worked), but it would be lovely to think that this process of story-writing will leave a lasting legacy in their attitude to imaginative writing.

A new school project

I start a new project tomorrow in Inveralmond Community High School, Livingstone. Working with writer Mary Paulson-Ellis and teacher, Michael Stephenson, we'll be helping a third year group to develop stories through prompts which we hope will emulate our own creative processes and also emphasise the 'play' aspects of writing.

Michael is also currently the Scottish Book Trust's on-line teacher in residence, so his thoughts on the project can be followed through his blog, starting with his explanation of our approach to generating pupils' choice and enjoyment in their creative writing.

Tomorrow we're thinking about our first impressions of high school life, and what footwear tells us about characters...

The Written World

Last week I was working on 'The Written World'. This is a project run jointly by the Abriachan Forest Trust and Moniack Mhor writers' centre, which lie two miles apart on a hilltop above Loch Ness. children from Inverness-shire schools who visited for the day used their powers of observation, spades, nets, and pens and paper, in an exploration of the biodiversity of the Forest.
Suzanne Barr expertly conducted the forest stage, getting children to plant native trees, listen to goldcrests, find owl pellets and badger tracks, and briefly remove from the burn for inspection nymphs, larvae, tiny trout, tadpoles and frogs. Real spring weather arrived with us so we were treated to the song of the tiny willow warbler after its three week flight from Africa, orange-tipped butterflies in first flight to coincide with the first cuckoo flower, and on the last day, the hatching of a dragon fly. Such was the children's focus and enthusiasm that when I sat them down later with a pencil around the long table at Moniack Mhor, each brilliantly conjured a creature into a riddle and challenged everyone to guess.

Moniack Mhor is in a glorious location with an unhurried atmosphere. It was the first time I'd stayed there when a residential course wasn't running, and I had it to myself each evening, high up with views to Ben Wyvis, the curlews burbling above me for company. Highly recommended for a writing retreat. I'll be back there in July to tutor on a fiction course with Jonathan Falla.

Bond, Abigail Bond

I've just finished a project at Pinkie Primary School, Musselburgh, with children's writer Lari Don, funded by the Scottish Book Trust. We had a great time with a P5 class, writing imaginative stories. The class invented a character who would appear in all their stories, one Abigail Bond, story-investigator (see photo). She had some handy character features such as a photographic memory and made herself distinctive with her black fedora hat and a banana always in her pocket. Using the three elements of stories - character, setting and 'plot' - we worked with the children to explore places where some mysterious stories might lie, and then set Abigail onto them, plotting her activities first on storyboards. As practice in close observation from a real location, we spent one lesson at a beautiful 17th century doocot more or less in the school grounds. We gave each pupil a lovely hard-backed notebook, as writers deserve, and led them through a series of activities involving the senses (hands on stone, blindfolded) and imagination. the notebooks started to fill. Pigeons clattered in and out of the high loft windows, the air smelt of cut grass and pigeon poo, and the children told us about a Green Lady said to hang around the doocot at night with a small child. I found out later she was believed to be the first wife of the Earl of Dunfermline who died in slightly mysterious circumstances having borne him four daughters and no sons.

The children chose their own locations to write about and examined them in the same way. Then each wrote up their story which they read to an audience of P3s on their final day. The project inspired smiley faces and many interesting comments in the final evaluation, perhaps the best being 'I felt like a writer'. Which was our point.

I found myself intrigued by the doocot and its ancient function in providing protein for the Earl and his family. It was old and mysterious with its locked doors, and still half inhabited by descendants of the originals. The children had been studying Mary Queen of Scots, and a timeline hung across the classroom telling of her adventures and misadventures through the years. My imagination started to grow a story out of these collisions, and here it is:

The locked doocot of Pinkie

As Abigail Bond approached the doocot, something started clapping above her head. She pulled the black fedora hat low over her eyes and hurried on. Her long shadow stretched ahead of her towards the square-shaped building that sat alone in the school field. The windows of the loft stared back at her like two dark eyes.
When she reached the doocot, her hands grazed the rough wall and she could feel the great age of the building. It was as if the stories were vibrating in its pink stone. The sudden clapping of wings above her head made her heart jump into her mouth.
‘I’m not afraid of you!’ she shouted up at the pigeons. They were whirring their wings as loudly as helicopter blades, as they flew in and out of the loft windows. They should be going to bed, she thought.
‘Coo, coo’, they answered.
‘It’s because of you that the Council are going to knock this doocot down’, she accused them.
People had been complaining that it smelt of poo. They said it was dirty and unhealthy. But she’d been to the museum, and the P5 children at the school had told her some amazing things about the doocot. She knew there were stories in it. She was a story-investigator, she had to find them out before it was too late!
She dragged an old gate out of the woods and leant it against the wall. She was an athletic girl, and climbed it like a ladder, higher and higher towards the window. The clattering pigeons came closer now, flapped cold air onto her face while their wings batted at her hat. Like fighter jets they dive-bombed her and pushed her off balance.
Now it seemed that instead of their annoying, ‘coo, coo’, they were saying, ‘boo, boo!’ and then, ‘shoo, shoo!’
‘They’re guarding something,’ she told herself.
But what could it be?
At the museum, they told her that pigeons were kept here to be killed for the Earl of Dumfermline’s supper. But she felt sure there was more to it than this.
When she reached the window, a wall of pecking beaks stopped her from looking in. She cried out as she felt a claw scratch her cheek. The hurricane that their wings were beating up blew a terrible stink into her face, up her nose. It even seemed to wriggle into her ears. She put an arm up to protect herself.
‘Shoo, shoo!’ hooted loud in one ear, and then in the other what sounded like, ‘Our fathers flew for you!’
She looked down. The ground was a long way below, frost-hard and dark. The gate wobbled underneath her. Her legs trembled and her hands sweated, slipping on the gate. Then the gate lurched under her and she dived forward, through a curtain of feather and stink, into the dark. Bump.
She sat up in the loft, spread her hands beside her and felt twigs, moss, something sticky.
‘Nests,’ she thought.
The pigeons flapped and pecked and scratched around her in the dark, and she had to swim breast-stroke in the air to keep them away. She spluttered on all the feathers she was breathing in.
‘Our grampas flew for you,’ she heard again. And then, another muttered, ‘You ate our grampas and our grandmas too,’ and then, ‘You used our poo so your gardens grew!’ She knew that all these things were true, but not any more. That was the Earl of Dunfermline hundreds of years ago, she thought, the man who’d built this Doocot.
‘Stop!’ she shouted. ‘There’s no point in being angry with me.’ But they carried on their attack.
She searched in her pockets for something she could calm them with, and that was when she felt the banana – the food she never travelled without. She scattered pieces of it around her, and gradually the flapping settled.
‘Phew’, she breathed. ‘Phew, phew.’
‘Coo, coo,’ the very hungry pigeons replied.
Now her arms were free, she reached for the torch in her story-investigator’s belt. The first thing she saw was a beautifully woven nest around which stood a sentry of three puff-chested pigeons. The torchlight glinted on something in the nest. It was red and silky, tied with a bow of ancient-looking ribbon.
‘Is that human hair?’ she asked.
‘Coo, coo,’ one of the sentries replied. ‘Our grandmas flew for you. To Borthwick and back, they flew and flew.’
‘How many years ago?’ she asked.
‘Four hundred and forty two.’
She calculated quickly. ‘1567, Borthwick.’ Her photographic memory whipped through the papers she’d seen at the museum. ‘Got it! Mary Queen of Scots. In 1567 she escaped from Borthwhick Castle disguised as a pageboy, didn’t she? She shaved her hair off, and you and your parents and grandparents and great-grandparents have guarded a lock of it ever since.’
The pigeons jostled, nodded, puffed up their chests with pride.
‘Don’t worry,’ she told them. ‘I won’t let you lose your home. It’s not that smelly, once you get used to it.’

At nine o’clock the next morning, she burst into the East Lothian Council office, and marched up to the man on the desk who was reading a newspaper.
He looked up, a little surprised to see a girl with a hat covered in grey feathers, a long scratch down one cheek, and some green slime smeared on her coat sleeve.
‘Now young lady, you can’t just march in here and expect…’
‘Bond,’ she said. ‘Abigail Bond. Story-investigator.’
He was silent. She spread her hands onto the desk and stared into the man’s eyes. ‘Pinkie Doocot,’ she said. ‘There’s a very important story there.’
After she told him, the man straightened his tie, and said, ‘Well, young lady, it seems you have made quite a discovery.’
‘So you won’t knock it down?’
He shuffled his feet. Something moved behind the man’s head, and Abigail heard a distant clapping. She looked through the office window and saw a squadron of pigeons fly past.
The man turned to look too. ‘Good Lord,’ he said, and turned back to her, almost smiling. ‘Certainly not!’ he said. ‘We’ll not be knocking it down’.
And they both watched through the window as the pigeons looped the loop.

The End

Written by Linda Cracknell for Primary 5 at Pinkie Primary School. With thanks to the children for their help with character, setting and the title.

new publication: How culture and creativity can enrich the whole school curriculum

In 2006 I worked with Langholm Academy and its associated primary schools as part of a national research project 'Arts Across the Curriculum'. I was one of the artists who planned with and worked alongside teachers in the classroom to help bring a creative approach to the mainstream curriculum. It is gratifying to see the experience of this project, which was managed by CREATE, gathered into a publication to showcase the approach and its outcomes. 'Connect - How culture and creativity can enrich the whole school curriculum' is available as a pdf or in print form.

The Visiting Author

I wrote this story for the children at the International School of Tanganyika who I visited last week and who were full of curiosity, just as writers should be.

‘Why have you got such a big bag?’ a boy in the first class asked the visiting author.
She was a little surprised. She usually got questions like, ‘Where do your ideas come from?’ or ‘How many books have you written?’ Was her bag really so big, she wondered. She peered inside it to try and find the answer.
‘It’s because I have to carry so many characters around with me,’ she said. She counted on her fingers: ‘There’s the girl who’s fantastic at listening but is afraid of swimming, and would really like some more friends. There’s a boy who’s very good at shouting because he’s captain of the school Football Team, and a girl with bright red hair who likes to cause chaos. And that’s just in one story,’ she said. ‘There’s already an idea in there for another character.’
‘Who’s that?’ All the children were goggle-eyed.
‘It’s a large stripy cat with very sharp teeth but only half a tail. What do you think its name should be?’
While the children talked about the cat’s name, she picked up her bag and weighed it.
‘It’s heavy with characters,’ she said.
The class nodded and let her go now that they understood.

While the author was speaking to the second class sitting on their carpet, she saw out of the corner of her eye a little girl peer into the bag and then put her hand inside it. The girl suddenly snatched her hand back and sat with it under her arm as if she had been bitten. The author stopped speaking and looked at the girl.
‘What did you find?’ her classmates asked.
‘I saw some beautiful shells in there, lined with silver,’ said the girl. ‘And sitting in each one was a bright butterfly, each one with wings together like hands in prayer.’
The class gasped.
‘But when I put my hand in there, I felt some things squirming like slugs and they had horns like twisted branches and they smelt like mouldy old socks.’
‘Disgusting,’ the class said.
‘I think perhaps you came across my imagination,’ said the author. ‘You have to be brave to let your imagination go. It can bring things to life that you’d rather were asleep.’
The class looked at her. ‘But we are very brave,’ they said.
‘In that case,’ she said. ‘Close your eyes and ask yourself, “What if I found a big egg under a tree in the school garden…?”’
When they opened their eyes again, their imaginations had made eggs with spots and stripes and inlaid with gold. They had scrambled up trees and down drains and leapt between the stars to invent whole stories as different to each other as fishes in the Indian Ocean.
‘See how enormous your imagination is,’ said the author. ‘You need a very big bag to carry it around in.’

In the next class, the children couldn’t take their eyes off the basket, woven in red and purple. It seemed to have grown nearly as tall as the smallest pupil.
As they seemed unable to concentrate on what she was saying, she stopped and asked: ‘What are you all looking at?’
They giggled a bit, and a boy pointed at the bag and said, ‘Why’s it so big?’
‘Ah,’ she said. ‘That’s because I have to carry so many places around with me.’
‘Places?’ asked a boy.
‘She means settings for the stories,’ a girl corrected.
‘There’s a long white beach on an east African island in there,’ she said. ‘Hermit crabs scuttle across it, and if you listen hard, you might be able to hear a coconut falling from a tree.’
‘Where else?’ they asked.
‘There’s a snowy mountain-top in Ecuador at night-time; a tunnel under a Scottish mountain with rails running into the dark; a café by the sea in winter where you can eat special ice creams. It’s crammed with settings, you see.’ She held up the bag.
‘Will you need to get a bigger bag?’ someone asked as she left the room, struggling to lift it onto her shoulder.

At the end of the visit to the last class, she noticed the children were looking puzzled.
‘You brought a huge bag in with you,’ a girl said. ‘But you never took a single thing out of it.’
‘Ah,’ she said. ‘That’s because we didn’t have time to get to the end of the story. There’s plenty of endings waiting in there to jump out and attach themselves to our stories. They have strong pincers, just like crabs.’
‘Does it matter which one jumps out?’ asked a boy at the back.
‘Yes it does,’ she said. ‘Sometimes you have to pull one off so that you can try out another one and see how it fits.’
‘Ouch,’ the class said. ‘Why does it matter?’
‘Because we might disappoint our readers if we choose the wrong one, or if we don’t choose one at all, and say “then she woke up and it was all a dream”. If there’s something missing at the end, it will feel incomplete.’
‘Like a cat with half a tail?’
‘Exactly.’
The children were getting restless now, worried about getting this right.
‘But how do you choose?’ asked a girl at the front, straining with her hand up.
‘If you trust the story, it will know its own ending,’ the author said. ‘It feels right. In here.’ She pointed at her stomach.

When she stood up to leave the classroom, the children saw that she was struggling to lift the bag onto her shoulder. They were a little afraid to offer help in case they ended up inside the bag as characters for her stories.
But as they watched, a stripy cat skulked out from under a bookcase, lowered its stomach to the floor and put its back under the bottom of the bag. Its very short tail poked out at the back. The children heard tapping sounds, and realised that four crabs had scuttled from the edges of the room. Each one took up position under a corner of the bag, lifting it off the ground. The author stood tall, and she, the bag, the cat with half a tail and the four crabs all processed out of the room.