Washing Away

The world seems to be washing away, with landslides and roads closed and flooding. Wonderful, wet western Scotland. The other day I hung out four pairs of trousers and a few towels to dry on the line, took them in when it started to sprinkle, put them out again when it stopped, took them back in again... I did this about five times until I gave up.

Last Thursday and today (Thursday) I taught a creative writing workshop aimed at a group of adult literacy learners. They are working on creating a trail guide to some local trails up in Kinlochleven, a town between here and Fort William.

I was looking for ways to help them get started writing, to help them feel more comfortable writing, and to use strategies to make their writing more detailed and vivid. I came up with a handful of mini writing activities that we could do in short 5-minute chunks.

Last week we only had three students show up. J.P. was full of energy and seemed unable to keep it contained. His pencil came into contact with the paper once a minute or so, between excited outbursts. T. practically wrote a novel, writing page after page whenever I gave a prompt and looking rather pleased with herself. In contrast, R. dashed off a single sentence to a prompt and then shoved it at me, refusing to write more. Everything he wrote was abstract and had very little to do with the assignment at hand.

Only one of them had actually been on the hike that they were supposed to be writing about. I attempted to get the others to imagine a walk or a favorite place in nature to write about, but it didn't work very well.

This week we only had two, J.P. and T. I had modified my approach a little bit, breaking down each writing prompt into minuscule chunks. This seemed to work better for J.P., who could focus better on writing a single sentence or idea than an entire paragraph or page. T. again wrote pages and pages and enthusiastically talked about how much she loved the workshop.

There is hopefully going to be a field expedition up to Kinlochleven soon, so we can get the rest of the walks in and do some on-the-spot writing. I didn't expect to be involved in this project, but I'm glad to be helping it along. It will be fantastic when the learners can see the trail guidebook that they wrote and put together!