Mountains of Stories: The Role of Creative Writing in the West

High Street, Penrith. The horizon that sits above the buildings is the Blue Mountains. This elevated horizon allowed me to always know which direction was 'west' when I was a kid.

It's perhaps undeniable that the Blue Mountains exist as a kind of nexus point for artists and teachers. I've heard it said that there are more school teachers living in the Blue Mountains per capita than anywhere else in Australia, and my wife and I have crossed paths with more famous artists in this area than anywhere else we visit. Living in Penrith, I've come to appreciate being equidistant from both the mountains and the city. The opportunities my geography has afforded me hasn't gone unappreciated and, no matter how often I may feel despondent at some of the attitudes I've grown up around, I know that I will forever remain tied to this town with some degree of belonging. But being a writer here isn't a way of life that I have come to easily.

Yesterday my friend Kira and I travelled up to the Springwood Learning Hub for the Mountains of Stories creative writing workshop run by Cymbeline Buhler.

This was the advertisement for the workshop. It was $25, which is incredibly inexpensive considering it went for 4 and a half hours.

It was a fantastic day in that it focused on letting us write. Cymbeline used prompting activities to encourage creativity (new activities that I hadn't really had any exposure to before) and we experimented with synaesthesia, unreliable narration, and grounding our writing intentions in figurative analogies. 

It got me thinking about this writing game and why it's important.

I have to admit that, having grown up in Western Sydney around the practicality of 'working class' concerns, I often struggle with a certain inherent tension that arises from wanting to write. I hear this nagging voice that tells me that delving too far into creative pursuits is a waste of time... art has its place in enriching society but there's just so much of it. There are so many people who want to devote their entire life to writing - how could they all be worth listening to? How do I know that I'm worth listening to?

It's insecurity but I can also recognise that it comes from being enculturated by those around me. So many of my peers, my friends, my neighbours, my extended family live their lives in the pursuit of creating a foundation of security and comfort for the generations to come. Writing about feelings and the senses just doesn't come into it; how does one earn a living from that? How can people in this community connect to each other over discussions of the abstract?

I've spent a lot of my life thinking about the role of the intellectual in a world of sport, cars, trades, and family. I worked in retail for ten years because I wasn't convinced of the value of an ideology grounded in thinking and writing. I played music in a handful of bands and wrote countless film reviews, but it never felt like a real thing to do. Becoming an English teacher at the age of 29 was my first step in accepting that education and academia had an important role to play in the West.

Cymbeline Buhler brainstorming word associations during the 'Mountains of Stories' workshop.

So why write?

I've come to realise in recent years that the extension and development of a beautiful and extensive vocabulary allows us to put increasingly complex thoughts into words. Words are the backbone of symbolism; each letter represents a sound, each combination of letters becomes a word that means something. The denotative and connotative possibilities of each word means that these small collections of symbols have great potential for meaning. 

The more combinations of letters we know, the more shades of meaning. The more we can express in language, the closer we get to articulating the endless complexity of thought. 

Regardless of whether every aspirant writer becomes professional or well-known in this field, the pursuit of increased lexical expression can only serve to improve the depth and breadth of our communication with one another. When teaching my classes, whether it's a low ability Year 7 group in need of extra support or a Year 12 Advanced English class, I spend a lot of time teaching vocabulary through explicit instruction. The exponential development of individual vocabularies allows for more nuance in language.

Even if some students walk away from school unable to write an essay, or completely unmoved by the works of Shakespeare, I would hope that they have at least achieved two things:

1. Improved the lexicon from which they draw upon when communicating.
2. Acquired the skill to continue building their vocabulary by using the materials around them (conversations, TV shows, news stories, etc.) to expand on their ability to think.

This is creating active, intelligent citizenship. By achieving a mindset of growth in relation to language we can instill the foundation for life-long learning that will enable future generations to advocate for themselves.

I've always written. When I was a student I wrote extensively - I loved 'Journal period' where, once a week in English, we could write our own stories in our journal book. After school I studied journalism and went on to write a range of published and unpublished materials but nothing extensive. As an English/History teacher I've rediscovered my love for writing through the creation of texts for student engagement and it's been an empowering experience. I now find myself working unprecedentedly close with language after a long and winding journey to this point and I'm voracious to know and learn more. Creative writing workshops like Mountains of Stories have been instrumental in reinforcing my role as a 'writing English teacher': IE. Someone who engages directly with creative language in order to model sample texts for students.    

Word associations. Cymbeline had us brainstorm words in relation to a central term and then we had to describe the central term on the other sheet using the words from the first one.

 

 

Here is the piece I wrote in response to the brainstorms above. The brief was to describe 'Hope' with words relating to 'Sweet' in just a few minutes. I found it tricky to get my head around at first but I found a bit of a groove after thinking about it a bit:

Hope is sugary. Its saccharine, ebbing through the bloodstream to cause intense emotion. It flows across my gums, soft and watery, and leaves a sticky residue that is hard to shift. The high leaves me exhausted. My jaw aches as if it has been closing around the fibrous stem of sugar cane, my teeth working against something essentially inedible yet fraught with potential for sweetness. Hope is like love. Hope defies us with our experience of it and it never, truly leaves us.

Anyway.

The vast majority of our students won't become professional writers. In fact, you might not ever have a student who becomes a (successful) professional writer. So what does this mean for us as English teachers? How do we teach creative writing authentically if it's not going to be an authentic experience in the sense of a post-school career for many of our students? 

The answer is that creative writing provides a forum for the extension of our vocabulary. We can use creative freedom to experiment in word choice without the restrictions necessitated by other text types, and through this students can exercise their imagination with increasing complexity. With a wider variety of terminology a person will be able to better express what's going on in their heads or respond to the language used by others.

For more on Cymbeline Buhler's creative writing workshops: Big Stone Creations