The title of these workshops comes from Carol Mavor’s evocative and eclectic collection of essays which draw on the colour blue through the history of art, photography, literature, folklore and mythology.
In the introduction to Blue Mythologies, Mavor, who claims to be a connoisseur of blue, says:
“The French novelist, Marie Darrieussecq, remarked that ‘astronauts are trained not to go insane when they see the Earth from above, round and blue, smaller than their porthole.’ More soothing are the words of Rebecca Solnit who poetically claims that ‘the world is blue at its edges and in its depths’.”
In this 7-week course we’ll look at all things blue and use this rich and colourful theme to inspire our own writing.
In the past you have brought me wooden owls, hand-made perches for my birds, niger seed, cuttle fish, sunflower hearts, mealworm, lavender, fine bone China frogs, Jay’s feathers, hag stones, sea urchins, wishing stones, mermaid’s purses, Kraken rum, Apostle spoons, water colour paints, chestnuts, quince, acorns, vine tomatoes and bamboo boxes full of light.
Today you bring me toast, tea and custard creams in bed, leave me with my books, go out and brave the briny lash of February by the sea, come back later with your pockets full of blue, for me, so much blue.
You tip it out onto the rug and it fills the room in our borrowed home with salt and waves and curlew song, and blue, so much blue, and you light the fire, pour us both a glass of wine,
and we sip, and we stare at, we study, this blue gift that now lies between us. And we try to determine its colour, this particular kind of blue.
And we talk about Orkney, how the darkness came without warning, the way we clumsily tangoed through my grief (which was the sore, raw, pulpy blue of a bruise) every night to the songs of Carlos Gardell in my father’s dusty workshop surrounded by bald, white, un-glazed vases and death masks and raku bowls and jars of pigments.
We talk about how, despite all the whiskey and the weeping, we almost remembered the dance in the morning, how, some nights we slow-danced together in our dreams.
We talk about how we kept missing the bright blue, electric green, flashing, pulsing, peep show of the Aurora Borealis because we were too tired, because I was too blue, because I needed to dream of other colours for a while.
We talk about the way we made a bed up on the floor of the damp caravan, angled the pillows so that we could see the sky before we slept. tried to rename the constellations to match our moods and drifted off with sharp, bright lines of stars glowing on our tongues.
We talk about that snowy dawn in May when you dragged me down to the harbour in my pyjamas and wellies, to hear the seals singing, to see jellyfish, the colour of Turkish Delight, wobbling amongst the deep, green dulse on the strandline.
And you say this blue I’ve brought you is the colour of a robin’s egg.
And I say this blue you’ve brought me is the colour of contentment. If I’d known before, this is the kind of blue I’d have asked for.
The title of these workshops comes from Carol Mavor’s evocative and eclectic collection of essays which draw on the colour blue through the history of art, photography, literature, folklore and mythology.
In the introduction to Blue Mythologies, Mavor, who claims to be a connoisseur of blue, says:
“The French novelist, Marie Darrieussecq, remarked that ‘astronauts are trained not to go insane when they see the Earth from above, round and blue, smaller than their porthole.’ More soothing are the words of Rebecca Solnit who poetically claims that ‘the world is blue at its edges and in its depths’.”
Blue blood. Blueprint. Feeling blue. The blue hour. Blue-sky thinking, Mood indigo. Bowerbirds, Blue-footed Boobies, Cyanometers. Rhapsodies in blue. Azure. Cerulean. Novalis’s enigmatic Blaue Blume and the precious blue planet that we inhabit…
In this 7-week course with writer, Gaia Holmes, we will delve into the vast, rich, variegated worlds of the colour blue. We’ll look at blue in poetry, prose, art, psychology and folklore and use it as the inspiration for our own writing.
Join award winning local writer, Gaia Holmes, for inspirational weekly creative writing sessions to generate poetry or prose upstairs at The Grayston Unity in the homely, cosy snug.
When: Wednesdays, 6-8pm (re-starting on the 10th of January, 2024)
Where: The Grayston Unity, 8 Horton St, Halifax HX1 1PU
‘Unloved Flowers’ is about resilience, bats, homelessness, justice and beautiful weeds. It is my contribution to ‘The Cuckoo Cage- New Origin Stories’, a recent anthology published by Comma Press.
“In this unique experiment, twelve authors have been tasked with resurrecting that tradition: to spawn a new generation of present-day British superheroes, willing to bring the fight back to British shores and to more progressive causes. From the dimension-jumping statue-toppler, to the shape-shifting single mum raiding supermarkets to stock local foodbanks… these figures offer unlikely new insights into shared, centuries-old political causes, and usher in a new league of proud, British (social justice) warriors…”
“Fiction is a spider’s web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is barely palpable.” Virginia Woolf.
This year, for over three months, there was a loud, anti-social sea monster of a man living in the flat next door to me. The walls here are very thin. It was frightening. His presence was intrusive. Often it felt like we were in the same room and I was dodging all the cups and curses he threw, hoping they wouldn’t hit me.
“If you continually write and read fiction, you can change what’s crushing you.” Jeanette Winterson.
My way of coping was to write about what was happening. I changed what was ‘crushing me’ by fictionalizing and embellishing the facts (with smoke, tentacles and general witchery) and, through this process I discovered that the act of writing fiction can be empowering. In fiction I could take control of parts of my life that, in reality, were beyond my control.
Here are the results. I’m not sure if you’ll be to discern the places where the spider’s web of fiction is attached to the facts, but I’ll tell you now- no real names have been used, the bit about the potato is true and it should be ‘octopuses’ not ‘octupi’!
I run a weekly creative writing group in Halifax, West Yorkshire. As well as this, I also offer weekly inspirational prompts sent to your inbox in PDF for people who are physically unable to attend the sessions due to work, travel, logistics, etc.
The weekly prompts feature texts, images and links to accompany the exercises. Subjects are diverse drifting from the mundane to the arcane. In recent sessions we’ve looked at bricks, umbrellas, sink holes, mythological birds, Victorian ice fairs, alchemy, bridges and Tupperware! I believe that every subject, no matter how mundane, can offer inspiration if you look for it. And also, exploring these ‘random’ subjects might lead you away from your usual topics. Here’s what the writer, Raymond Carver, has to say about the matter:
“It’s possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things– a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman’s earring– with immense, even startling power.”
I offer this weekly prompt service for a small donation payable to me via paypal.
If you are interested in subscribing, please email me at gaiaholmes@hotmail.co.uk
Below are some examples of the inspirational prompts I send out.
This house is distressed. At night when I feel it twitching and trembling, hear it whining in its sleep, I get up, go and try to find a good place to rub some calm in.
In the corridor the air is black with fruit flies and some giant orange has shed its pith and peelings in piles all the way up the steps. The night beneath the wood-wormed rafters smells of blown fuses, soft apples and bad luck. The bats are no longer here.
I would rub vick’s vapour rub into the house’s bones if I knew where they were, but instead I lie on my belly in the hallway of the West wing, where the servants used to live in cold rooms without hearths, and I whisper in to the place where the house’s ears might be. I tell it about new windows and clean carpets. I tell it about varnish that will lacquer its wounded banisters, sweet oils that will soothe all its rusty locks and creaking hinges. I promise it soft-footed tenants who do not swear or kick and burn things. I tell it soon there will be snow and the world will seem softer, quieter. I tell it the rats are tamped down, sleeping curled beneath the flickering meters in the cellar head. I tell it that tonight no wires will be gnawed. There will be no chip pan fires in any of our tinder-box kitchens.
I dream of the house and in my dream it is puling. In my dream I bottle feed it a smooth formula of WD40 and wet cement then I lay it over my shoulder and sing it lullabies about red brick and granite as I pat its back to bring the wind up.
I started making Sunday dinners for Elvis in March. I feed him mashed potato, pulped banana or cold, cooked macaroni cut into tiny pieces. Elvis dines on these mushy meals, tottering with the weight of his plump Christmas pudding body, almost too big to fit on the narrow windowsill of my tiny top-floor flat.
Elvis is a wood pigeon with a deformed beak also known as a ‘cross beak’ or ‘scissor beak’. He might have been born with it or he could have damaged it by flying into a car or a building. Due to this condition, Elvis struggles to pick up small seeds, worms and berries, hence my soft Sunday dinner service.
Elvis is just one of the many feathered friends I’ve made since I started feeding the birds on my windowsill.
At the start of the pandemic, like many others, I obsessively listened to the rising death toll with grief, fear and a feeling of hopelessness. As the tide of horror grew, so did my friendly babbling, cooing, cawing, tweeting, trilling flock. I began to count them and name them: Black Betty and Brown Betty, the male and female blackbirds, Paloma and Picasso, the pale and exquisitely pair of pink-eyed collared doves, Roderick the robin, Duncan the dunnock, Thea the song thrush, Elvis scissor-beak and King Henri, his smooth lady wife. And each day as the death toll rose and I learned of some new tragedy in this poor bruised world, I learned something new and joyful about the birds. I learned that wood pigeons and collared doves mate for life. Mistle thrushes sing in a minor key. Blackbirds sing louder after rain. I taught myself to coo gently, studied the language of birds- that vast, fascinating vocabulary of feather, song, beak and wing.
I was alone for the first three months of lock-down and the birds sweetened my enforced solitude. They made me laugh. They made me look at the world differently. They gave focus and structure to those slack and edgeless early lock-down days. They made me want to get up at 6AM to listen to the rich textures of their dawn chorus as they carol something pure and sweet and light into this dark, fevered season.
I was delighted to have this broadcast on BBC radio 4’s ‘PM’.
Gaia Holmes 