From the archive: The London Square

The suggestions as to where I could run ‘Wild In The City’ weekend workshops have ranged from the rambling 88 acres of Hampstead Heath, to the smallest, most secluded square in Bloomsbury.

And actually, I am more drawn towards the latter. I fantasise about my assistant’s eyes opening wide as he reports back, ‘I’ve found the perfect place’. He then places a heavy, golden key into my hand.  ‘The Perfect Place’ would be hidden in the beating heart of the city, sandwiched between Georgian houses, and ignored by bustling commuters. It would be bounded by ornate Victorian railings. Tendrils of Persian Ivy and Clematis would make a climbing frame of the railings and reach for the sky. As the key creaked in the lock, a secret garden, a wild green space, would be revealed to me.

Later, when I land back from my fantasy, I begin to wonder: why is my ideal venue small and contained, rather than one vast, unbounded space, like, say, Hampstead Heath?

My sense is that Hampstead Heath is the ‘catharsis’ of Wild Words venues. It’s a great place to run wild and ‘let it all out’. But ‘letting it all out’ can be the worst thing a blocked writer can do. Contrary to what is often taught, unleashing an emotional and literary explosion often causes the writer to freeze up more, rather than doing the opposite, and enabling flow.

No, the answer lies in another approach. The answer is in the quiet containment that I’m reminded of when I think about that secret garden square. It’s in facilitating words that are charged with emotion out on to the page in a controlled way, like tendrils pushing their way out from between railings. When we do this we channel creative energy. It’s then that we find the power in our words.

The Weekly Prompt

Close your eyes and imagine:

You’ve seen a poster on a city street: ‘Wild In The City: Weekend courses located in secret wild spaces in the heart of urban areas’.

Now imagine that a heavy, golden key is put into your hand. Feel the weight of it. You know instinctively that this key unlocks a gate that gives you access to the place in your mind where the wild words live.

Imagine now that you walk through the city with that weighty key curled in your hand. Follow you feet as they lead you to the lock that the key will fit. No need to think about where you are going. Your body knows.

You reach that place. The key fits the lock. It turns.

Now, write for fifteen minutes about what it is like inside the secret, green space in the heart of the city.

This article was first published on 10th October 2013

From the archive: Urban Green

I left London when I was 30 because I was desperate for my eyes to be able to swivel their whole arc, to see wide and distant views, to smell clean air, and to rest in silence.

The other week, almost exactly ten years since I left, I went back. I spent two days walking the streets in search of a wild green space in the heart of the city. I was on a quest for a location for the ‘Wild In The City’ weekend workshops that are starting in the spring.

Twenty-five percent of the capital is made up of public green space, and the variety is tremendous. I saw the most regal royal parks, the most ragged parts of Hampstead Heath. I went into community gardens smelling of lavender and tomatoes, and locked myself into the seclusion of a private square in Bloomsbury.

Each one of those green spaces had a very different feeling, but all of them held a certain power. Their power derived from their juxtaposition with the concrete, metal, and glass that loomed over them, and from their ability to keep human progress at bay.

Suddenly there seemed to be so much space and silence in the city. And so many stories.

In Nunhead Cemetery, ghosts rose from the overgrown graves. In St James Park, the pomp and ceremony of monarchs came alive. In Greenwich Peninsular Ecology Park, tales of working in the gasworks in the 1880’s, and roars of victorious Olympians, seemed to hang in the air, even as butterflies, newts, moorhens and reed warblers went about their everyday business.

Not everything in cities is controlled by human beings. Not everything plays by our rules. There is room for the unpredictable, for those who live by intuition. There are quiet, inspiring places for the writers who seek to create a space into which magic might come.

The Weekly Prompt

This week, instead of working at your desk indoors, write something outside. If you live in an urban area, take a walk into the unknown to seek out a quiet, green space. Learn something about the history of the place you are in. See what inspiration you find. 

This article was first published on 20th September 2013

From the archive: Wild In The City (Part 2)

I went walking througris in search of the wild. I stopped on Pont Neuf, and let the tide of commuters flow past me.  As I recited my mantra of the day ‘wild, wild, wild’, the strangest thing happened. A small brown mouse came out from under the bulwark of the bridge and sat by my feet, cleaning his whiskers. Where I live, in rural Southern France, a wild animal is gone if your tread snaps a twig, or even before that. But this was a town mouse, used to noise and bustle, fearless.

But there was another place I found wild in the city, and that was in one of the homeless people I saw on the streets. It was a head scarfed young woman, and she was turning circles in the street, shouting words I didn’t understand. A dog on a lead followed her movements, yelping excitedly.

You can spot the quality of wild by how we react to it. We are scared of it, because it isn’t kept in check by the straightjacket of the rational mind. It is instinctual, emotional, energised. That makes us nervous.

I knew the quality of wildness was present because I saw Parisians look at her as if she wasn’t there, or walk in wide circles to avoid her. I had difficulty not doing the same. I noticed I immediately judged her to be ‘mad’ or similar. Because if she was mad, then I was sane. She was doing life wrong, and I was doing it right.

And I asked myself: what aspects of myself am I not acknowledging when I locate all the emotional unpredictability, or all the madness in someone else?  How can I take back the parts of myself I’ve disowned, so that I can write from the broadest emotional spectrum? I want my writing can be mad and unpredictable when required, instead of always sane and predictable.

This article was first published on December 14th 2012

From the archive: Wild In The City (Part 1)

I live in rural Southern France, on a mountain. Yesterday I got on a train going to Paris, heading into a throng of 2 million people.

My work is based around the natural environment. It’s about exploring the ‘wilds’ out there, in order to understand how to bring that quality into our words, to find freedom in writing. I’m interested in those parts of ourselves- the spontaneous, intuitive, instinctual- that we’re afraid of. Our fear is such, that instead of acknowledging these aspects within ourselves, we project them outwards, saying they’re out there ‘in the wilds’ , in the ‘wild animals’.

On my mountain it’s clear where ‘wild’ resides. In the badger, the deer, the wild boar. But where those disowned aspects go when we live in, or visit a city? Where do we see ‘wild’? I’ve been feeling excited by the challenge of tracking it down.

So, this morning I went walking beside the Seine in central Paris, that mission on my mind.  I was swept along the pavement by a river of people. The noise of feet and cars swirled in my ears. I found places where the city had replicated the wild. There were garden shops with fountains shaped like elephants.

When it hadn’t replicated wild, the city had tried to tame it, contain it, to take a moment of its beauty and fix it in time. There were posters of big cats, and plants in pots. But best of all, on sale for 90 euros in Centre Pompidou, I found green grass, neat as a lawn, growing in a frame, a living picture.

This was all fascinating, but I wasn’t seeking castrated nature. No, what I wanted to find was the places where wild was living free in the city. Then I wanted to see how people responded to it. The search continued…

First Published November 30th 2012