Finding right words with time aplenty
REGULAR readers will have spotted that the Laughing Badger Gallery & Cellar Bar has moved all operations to Howard Town Brewery Tap, in Old Glossop.
There, myself and Joanie Lucy promote live music, the arts, in all of its forms, and obviously beer.
Brewery owners Stuart and Emma Swann say: “Sean’s art and writing workshops, his wildlife knowledge, and his and Joanie’s enthusiasm for sharing live music, fit very well with our ethos.
“In time it will be great to see you all there, but for now, here’s a competition to get you started with a £50 first prize, and a chance to appear in print.”
Since many of us have that wonderful commodity, ‘time’, Facebook has become a fertile ground for would-be writers.
Now this is good, but beware, as Facebook can be a fickle master.
Just enjoy the good in it all, because there can be joy in communication, that is what we are here for.
This is the best time to stretch yourself as a writer, a storyteller.
I have always given the same advice about how to write, write about what you know best and just start.
You’ll need a middle, end and beginning, and 500 to 700 words about your own experiences of wildlife and the countryside, and you can of course include poetry, illustrations and photographs.
As a writer, words can come in two ways, hard or easy, so just go for it, and then the next day review it.
Scottish artist Edna Whyte asked me to capture the very essence of her 50-year obsession with a place called A’Mhoine, and in particular Moine House, which she has drawn since 1964.
“The place is as elemental as ever,” she said.
A’Mhoine is a desolate but beautiful bog-scape with a mountain backdrop, and the house provides the lynchpin for the view.
‘Imagine you are standing by the house...In my time, our time and your time the black burn (altan dubh) and the firebrand sky are joined in this house, the pivot, and they nodding as the day is long to the bog of ages, and beyond to where the violent sea breaks gentle across the apple green strand at the Kyle of Tongue.’
Edna thought this too wordy, so I came back with...‘For fifty years, the flux that is A’Mhoine has guided my hand.’ ‘Getting there’, she said. Never fear the critic. I’ve called the following ‘Little Victories’, after I thought that the precious little stone with it’s quartz oval was lost years ago.
I found the stone on the beach on Iona; I had camped in a small barn and was watching an otter eating an octopus, and reflecting on the rat which criss-crossed my sleeping bag in the night.
I was also debating whether to get my long curls wet in the ocean, Yep that’s me at 18, no joke.
The stone was my lucky charm, for thirty years, and it was on my person every day.
Then it was gone, who knows where, but I’ve just found it during a big sort out.
It was inside the silver bowl my Dad was awarded for Best In Show Blue Beveren rabbit in 1963, inside another treasure, one of my daughter Niamh’s milk formula tins which I had painted and displayed in the Cellar Bar for 10 years.
‘My own little Russian Doll, behind me all along.’
Send entries to sean. wood@talk21.com by May 15.
(There will be one winner and my decision final, although entries may appear here, and runnersup invited to the Tap Open Night).