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In my heat of the moment rampage last post, I clean forgot to mention important stuff about Thursday:

1) M had a violin exam that morning. Who knows how it went! We were all a bit perplexed when she came back downstairs saying that the examiner had asked her to play D minor to the 5th. Apparently she paused, then said that she didn’t think she knew that one, she knew E minor to the 5th. Whereupon the examiner shuffled papers and asked her to play what she knew. Good for M for speaking up. But we wonder if he thought she was doing a different grade….Oh well. She played like a trooper anyway.

2) Also spent last Thursday arranging WORD ON THE STREET, a Canterbury City Council and Kent Libraries event connected to the Laureateship. In celebration of the National Year of Reading, and the launch of the 2008 Write Here programme, we are holding open mic (and open air!) readings and performances on the steps of the library (the Beaney!) on the High Street Saturday 29 March, 10-4. There are three reading slots, 10 am, 12 pm, and 1 pm, and so far — hey — a great and varied line-up, FREE OF CHARGE.
10 am: yours truly, Alis Hawkins — and three super students

12 pm: Stewart Ross, Poet-of-the-Year Vicky Wilson, Lyn White — and two super students

1 pm: six members of Save As, a thriving local writing group…(hey guys, where are you on the web?!)

AND — Danny Rhodes says he’ll be lurking. Perhaps in true performance manner, he will have a little baton of work in his back pocket. Pick a slot Danny!

Word on the Street is the first of several ‘well-public’ things the Council and the Laureate (er, me) have arranged in the hopes of encouraging literary activities, and especially of consolidating what already exists in the region. And I have to say that putting this together has been nothing but pleasure: the response has been so positive, so willing. I’m particularly grateful to Alis Hawkins and Stewart Ross — I’ve never met Alis and only spoken to her once online, and she just said ‘yeah, alright’ — and Stewart Ross — known him for years, lives up the road, a busy man…he just said ’sure’ as well. Ian Hocking too was all up for it…but is on his way back from a far-flung place. Thanks anyway Ian! And with a 20% student take up — hey, it’s pretty good!
It’s beginning to feel like there may actually be a writing community hereabouts…

Also on the day: drama and word games by Whippersnapper Theatre Company; Great Beach reads survey; details of a Call for Work (I love this: come one, come all!) for an eventual anthology; and notification of the website www.write-here.net — currently holding…but I’m informed its life is imminent.

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Phew. And just in case that isn’t enough Thursday for you, Word on the Street (arf arf) is that I’m supposed to be on BBC Radio Kent this afternoon at 2.30. Talking about it all. I think.

Here’s the thing. A long discussion with a seven year old about point of view. I mentioned M’s new obsession with Nancy Drew mysteries last week or thereabouts… Now it emerges why she’s so taken with them: she feels she’s trying to solve everything along with Nancy. Ah yes. And how with Harry Potter she felt that she sometimes knew more than Harry did (because there were different scenes) and she was waiting for Harry to catch up…Ah yes again. So at the moment she loves Nancy Drew, because she’s right there with her.

I clearly remember having a similar discussion with E at about the same age, about what we know as narrative tension. This time it was over how the beginning of Brian Jacques’ Redwall didn’t grab him, didn’t make him ask questions like ‘what happens next’, whereas the first Harry Potter does. I remember him getting so excited that he took down both books and read the first paragraphs to me: see, see!

It’s remarkable how early on in their reading lives children — people — become aware of what works, and what doesn’t. For them, anyway. Which brings home with an awful crash how utterly vital it is to feed children the right books, to keep your eyes and ears open for where they are, what they might like, to keep broadening and opening out…And yet of course, my children are priviledged enough to have constant access to books of all sorts. So stupidly many aren’t.

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Related to this, as part of my Canterbury Laureate brief I’m putting together a shortlist of children’s books — three categories I think, 5-8 years old, 8-12, then Young Adult. About three titles per category, to be used as ‘Summer Reads’ in the last term of 2008, put then to an online vote…Great stuff.

Any contributions or thoughts for unmissable children’s books would be gratefully received! I’ve got some ideas of course, and am spending some delicious time reliving the bookcases of my children…But I’d love to know others’ thoughts. Many thanks!

The Canterbury Laureate stuff is just getting going: tomorrow morning I’m doing a preliminary visit with a group of young mothers, just to see if they are interested in doing some writing. As the theme for this year’s Laureateship (heavens!) is ‘identity’, I’ve found myself for this group thinking about returning to an exercise I’ve used frequently over the years — one indeed I think I was introduced to as an undergraduate (when dinosaurs roamed the earth…).

The exercise is ‘I am the person who…’ Write for 15 minutes without stopping. Any form. If you get stuck, re-write the last few words and see if that spurs you.

It’s remarkable how productive this exercise is. I’ll use it again in two days perhaps, when I meet my second year undergraduate students for the first time. The module is Narratives from Life — you can see why it might work! Inevitably makes you square up.
I do most writing exercises alongside my groups, and read back when they do too. This one in particular. It focuses the mind. If I’d had any idea that I would do it so many times, I might have started a book of my responses. Because over the years they’ve changed, shifted: from looking at where I’m from, to looking at where I am, to looking where I might be going. I remember one year all I wrote about was getting up at night to look after the children. I am the person who gets up in the night, stands over your cot, watches you sleep. One year I seem to remember it being all about writing. And one year about grief.

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That exercise always reminds me of something I saw on a toilet wall when I was in high school: We are the people our parents warned us about.

I don’t know how — or even if — they relate. But there’s a tension there I quite like being in the middle of….