Dear Reader,
I’m writing to you from The Queen’s Hotel in Leeds. James Bond always puts his faith in a station hotel, and so do I when there’s at least a two hour wait for the train and the north of England is wrapped in snow. I’ve spent a magical week teaching creative writing with the wonderful Adam Foulds at Lumb Bank, an eighteenth-century millowner’s property bequeathed to Arvon by Ted Hughes.
I arrived on Monday, a little bruised by the end of a busy academic term and feeling the miles of this exhilarating year in my joints. If I was an onion – go with me on this one – every layer of my skin would be tiredness. Alighting from the train, I was greeted by a sign that read: ‘Welcome to Hebden Bridge, 500 Years of Creativity.’ This seemed the place to be, if you’re an onion who would prefer to be a beautiful flowering allium, all things considered.
For those who might not know, Arvon offers residential creative writing courses at stunning properties around England. This was my first time at Lumb Bank. The taxi driver told me he was the only man brave enough to slide his car down the hairpin road. The trees stacked against the sheer walls of the valley blushed in the afterglow of a red-hot-poker affair with autumn. The sky was a blue umbrella.
Lumb Bank is arranged in a tenacious line across the scarp (a word I was pleased to form in a fierce Banagrams tournament one night). A river hidden far below makes itself known by sound alone, like the constant rush of overnight truckers on a motorway, audible from bed but never seen. The photographer who came to take mine and Adam’s portraits midway through the week told us she lives at the bottom of the valley, where her house is untouched by sunlight for three months. Good for the darkroom, she says.
The tutors stay in a cottage at the far end of the garden. As I unpacked that first day, the setting sun turned the trees across the valley the stained burnish of neglected brass. Frosted fields picked up long shadows. I lit a fire, shedding a layer of tiredness along with my coat.
I was thrilled to meet Adam, whose writing I’ve admired for years. Over tea, we worked out the proximity of our childhood London postcodes. Then the participants arrived, and the magic of the week truly began. I’ve already used the word magic, and I’ll probably use it again, because there is something bewitching about Arvon. Fourteen people arrive to a remote house as strangers, and because it’s not an Agatha Christie novel, no one dies. Instead, things are born. Fragile things. Important things. Stories, voices – confidence and confidences.
It starts, fundamentally, with breaking bread together. If I was a Borrower, I’d make my home in an Arvon kitchen. All teaching should come with a side of cake. Days pass and the moon grows as full as our bellies. Adam traces constellations in the sky and shows me where Mars flickers redly. We sit with participants in tutorials by the fire, the books and framed drafts of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath looking down on us. It’s an amazing privilege, being invited into a participant’s imagination, to walk the halls of a spaceship they’ve imagined for decades, or the dusty paths of an island they are just now creating. Midweek, Evie Wyld visits, reading from pulsing new work that has everyone listening with fingers pressed to their lips.
The week culminates with every participant rising to read their work in a barn charged with electricity but lit mostly by candles – the crackle in the air the same as opening night in a theatre when a production suddenly, miraculously, comes to life after uncertainty and bated breath. I love teaching, but sometimes academia can be demoralising, especially after a long period of necessary strikes. To hear participants say they discovered their voice this week, they’ve enjoyed writing again for the first time in years, they’ve gained renewed faith and self-belief – it restores my faith in teaching.
I have a hard time accepting praise or thanks sometimes, but if you promise not to cringe, I’ll tell you a very nice thing a participant said at the end of it all: ‘You’re a really good teacher. You make people feel good about themselves and what they’re doing, and that’s important.’ If I were to articulate a pedagogical ethos, it would be that. Reader, I was deeply touched.
Every day, dawn hit half the sloping field, sheep clinging to the golden line, frost turning to a veil of mist obscuring the opposite side of the valley. On this final morning, I opened the curtains to a full white wall and the muffling silence of hoar and falling snow. I felt the same awe an onion might feel when it remembers can flower.
From Kim, With Love x
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