Four writers in residence in nature
We are very pleased to share with you the end of project Zine.
The Black Nature in Residence Zine is here. As promised at our recent showcase event, the Zine with a selection of creations from the four writers in residence is free to flick through online as well as to download from here now.
We hope you enjoy it.
We’ve just complete our first reading/ presentation of our residency as hosted by identity on tyne with Northumberland National Park Authority.
The writers did not disappoint. They were spectacular in their writings, and creations, in their honesty and emotions.
Sure a rare and unique event, which we know the audience appreciated.
As the next steps within the Black Nature in Residence Showcase, please feast your eyes on the virtual Black Nature in Residence Exhibition.
Enjoy.
A recipe for happiness
An autumn sun ( morning).
A little mist draped over purple mountains.
Birds singing from orange bracken.
Strong black coffee taken in my traveling home.
A pen moving across the painted page.
My heart in the right place –
– the centre of me.
Autumn is my season.
You’ll find me taking up more space in the landscape as I easy into the season.
This time, with the changing colours and temperatures, is my time to shine.
My time to expand.
So it makes sense to be working on pulling together my final creations for my residency with Northumberland National Park.
In all honesty, I feel as if I’m just beginning. Just scratching the surface.
I’m thinking I’m going to stay in residence indefinitely. Just take up the space.
Claim the space as my own. Just like when I venture out into nature and connect with her as kin.
As my birthright.
As we near the end of our residencies, it gives us great pleasure to share with you an event planned to mark the occasion.
Thursday 28 October, 6.30-8.00pm, there will be a live reading/ presentation/conversation about our time in residence on Zoom.
We made sure we stayed safe during our time working with our respective partners, and that’s not going to change at the end.
Come along to a virtual evening of words and voices and shares as we explore the highs and lows of our experiences of being Black and Brown and People of Colour in and writing about nature.
After this live virtual event, an online exhibition will go live on this website, showcasing our visual creations in residence.
And keep checking back, as come the end of November, the Black Nature in Residence Zine will be launched here too, presenting our creations.
You can grab a ticket for the final event here.
This week saw me finally meeting Patrick Norris from Footsteps in Northumberland to walk across the Pilgrim’s Way, a pathway that only becomes available when the tide is out, to reach Holy Island. This is a nature reserve rich in resources for rare and special wildlife. It was such an amazing walk, as we set off at 5.30 across to the island. getting over there, in the rain and wind at times, we were getting by the howlings from a gathering go grey seals hauled out onto the sand flats. They were grey, but also mottled white, and black and brown, and had such a way of moving across the sand. Patrick called it ‘garlumphing’. And to hear them sing. Their haunting cries carried to us within the wind, in harmony with the wind. It was like the sound when there’s a window left ajar and the wind comes inside. Like a draught coming inside. After a picnic on the island, for the way back, we saw the setting sun. It was all about the light.
Just as we stepped off the causeway, as dusk was starting to settle in for the night, out from the long grass, flying low across the tarmac to the banks of seaweed on the other side, was a beige-tawny, wide wing span of the curlew. The curlew, featured within the Northumberland National Park’s logo; this was my first sighting of the bird. It was a wonderful way to end the evening with it’s evocative ‘curlee-curlee’ call sending us off home.
Unfortunately, due to illness we had to cancel our scheduled writing group session. I was most disappointed as I find these meetings, with writing exercises included, a way to focus my attention. Making this specific time and space to work together on our individual residencies is really useful. I find that the weeks go by and I might be thinking about the writing, the landscape, the message, but putting pen to paper to try and make sense of it all, ends up being at the bottom of my to-do list. Then it keeps getting switched to another list when I don’t reach the bottom of the list each day, each week.
At least with an hour or so, sat down with the other writers and talking and sharing about our work, our writing and our residencies, then I’m in the zone and something usually comes out of our this together. So I suppose I”m saying, lets organise our next meeting for sometime soon, as I need the discipline of turning up to the page together, please. Thank you.
For the online nature journaling workshop which took place on International Earth Day, 22 April, we had five participants. It was a lovely group of women with different experiences of writing, but everyone brought their enthusiasm to the table. It was so lovely to have Gill Thompson, the Park’s Ecologist, there presenting around the different landscapes, fauna and flora to be found within the National Park, as well as giving it a personal flavour with insights into her personal delights.
The workshops was part writing and then going out into the landscape on the participants’ doorsteps. If we were meeting within the Sill, National Landscape Discovery Centre, we would have been able to walk out together, probably up to Steel Rig and along the crags for a bit of a jolly, making sure all our sense were open to the surroundings and what they had to offer.
But I think it worked well, with the hour outside alone and then coming back to the group online for the final task of creating something from the outing. What I used to structure their musings while out there, was something I picked up a few years ago from the book Writing Wild by Tina Welling. There’s three parts to the exercise; naming, identifying and interacting.
NAMING – serves to alert our conscious awareness to our senses.
Name what you see and then move into the other senses, notice the smaller things – e.g. the clouds, the tree, the straw coloured grass.
DESCRIBING – engages our senses and body responses on a deeper, more intimate level.
Choose one thing that attracts your attention and describe in detail e.g. lichen – the feather tangle, delicate filigree, soft against the finger, pale snowy green in colour.
INTERACTING – invites us to create a relationship with our surroundings.
It’s when you open yourself to place and allow an exchange, or interaction , between the outer works of nature and inner world of emotion, experience and memory.
Try it next time you’re outside and want to get some words down, record some kind of reaction that you can work on later once you get back home.
Hopefully, I’ll be able to share some of the women’s writing, as well as some of my own, once the Park has created a writer in residency page on their website. More details to follow soon.
All the writers in residence for the project met again virtually for a writing workshop over the weekend. I’m really enjoying this space where we get to create together, as well as share our developments and concerns about how each residency is going. It is definitely a life source for me as I have to move in other circles where I am the only Black face in the room. Usually in these space, I am communicating, or so I think. But from the reactions or usually non-reactions, I feel as if I’m on the other side of double glazing and trying to connect to the group through words and actions but they are just not listening, not even giving me the time of day.
This is what it’s like moving through this world as a Black woman and being judged on my appearance rather than on the value and worth I could bring to the table if you only took the time, and gave me the rightful respect, and listened.
Within our little group of writers, this isn’t the case. We meet under the understanding of our shared experiences. Of being deemed as ‘other’ within white supremacy society, even though again and again through our actions and words we strive to centre ourself in our own experiences. In our space, writing, talking and laughing together, ‘whiteness’ is not centred. We are centred and this is liberating and food for me soul.
I want more of this. More. Thank you fellow writers for being on this journey with me. You make this ride easier and much more enjoyable.
Out walking, I see a blackbird.
Black body, orange beak.
Weaving in and out of the grasses
along the verges, I step into again and again,
to allow the cars to roll by, slow and stare.
Black Nature in Residence 