Eating poetry

I was very excited this summer to finally eat figs from my ten-year-old fig tree.

Yesterday, I couldn’t resist this tray of plump splendour at my local market. Eating figs always reminds me of that deliciously sensual poem of female desire, by the brilliant Ellen Bass.

‘Unclasp it like jewels, the gold
still hot from your body. Empty
your basket of figs. Spill your wine.’

***

Sky spaces for writing

I first encountered James Turrell’s sky spaces here in the North, at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. This place has particular significance for me. I grew up running around the wide open spaces and the Henry Moores and the lake, long before there was a visitor’s centre and paths through the fields. My mum was a student here in the 60s, when the space was home to Bretton Hall, a cutting edge training ground for the arts and art education.

In a full-circle moment, I brought my own group of Creative Writing students here when I moved back North after finishing my PhD and beginning a teaching post at the University of Leeds. I took them to write in the sky space that Turrell carved out of an old deer shelter on the estate. It’s a space with a powerful sense of grandeur and ceremony. You enter through a small archway and walk inside the hill, emerging into a chamber filled with sky.

This summer, I took my daughter back there. She immediately loved the feel of the space and we spent a long time just sitting, watching the clouds move across the sky. Even on a dull day, there was so much to notice about the light, which seems to reach down into the chamber. It’s a place where you can slow down and really look. Which, of course, is what writing can be too.

‘We live within this reality we create, and we're quite unaware of how we create the reality. So the work is often a general koan into how we go about forming this world in which we live, in particular with seeing.’ - James Turrell

Last autumn, I was lucky enough to visit two of Turrell’s sky spaces in Arizona: Knight Rise at the Scottsdale Museum of Modern Art and Air Apparent at Arizona State University Campus.

Each was a very different experience. Each was about looking deeply, noticing, becoming more and more aware of my own being as a seeing, looking, listening being.

When we really look, anything can become a sky space – the light glimpsed through tree branches, the moon reflected in a puddle on a city pavement. It’s all good practice for writing.

***

Barbara Hepworth’s stone collection

The sculptor, Margaret Hepworth, was born and grew up in my home town, Wakefield, West Yorkshire. I have always been drawn to her beautiful work, which reconnects me with the landscapes of my childhood – the moors, the undulating hills, which have always felt to me like gigantic bodies, holding my own smaller one.

‘I, the sculptor, am the landscape. I am the form and I am the hollow, the thrust and the contour.’

Barbara Hepworth, 1971. A Pictorial Autobiography

On this visit, I was fascinated all over again by Hepworth’s personal collection of pebbles, stones and artefacts. Their influence on her later work is so clear: pebbles ringed with lines; carved and etched figurines; shapes smoothed by weather and time.

‘Many people select a stone or pebble to carry for the day,’ she wrote. ‘The weight and form and texture felt in our hands relates us to the past and gives us a sense of a universal force. The beautifully shaped stone, washed up by the sea, is a symbol of continuity, a silent image of our desire for survival, peace and security.’

Perhaps this is true of a poem or a piece of writing – or even a single word. We carry it with us. We hold it and are simultaneously held by it.

Here are some of the ‘scrying stones’ that I’ve collected over the years, stones worn through by wind and sea, making holes to peer through, into the future and the past, as well as the present moment. Sometimes, I like to hold them when I write.

***

Your notebook as a private space

I shared this page from my notebook over on Instagram recently and it seemed to resonate with people.

It sometimes feels as if we all need to talk publicly about everything. But as writers and artists - actually, as human beings - it’s so important to have a private space where we can say anything, make mistakes or, as Keats wrote, be ‘in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason’.

When we write with sharing in mind (on social media, for example) we tend to edit, craft and shape. We feel that we need to know things, or at least have a more fully-formed opinion.

When we write privately, we can write to find out what we’re thinking and what we’re afraid of. We are more likely to find out what we don’t know yet.

Many of my students - and not just those signed-up for writing courses - tell me that they have found their writing practice transformed when they allow themselves this private, secret space.

The irony of this blog post is not lost on me. I hesitated before sharing this particular page because, when I wrote it, it was just me talking to myself. I think if I’d written it with the aim of sharing it on Instagram, I’d have written it differently.

I love to see other people’s notebooks. I think most of us find it fascinating.

But write for you first.

You can craft and shape it later. You can decide what to share and when and with whom.

Writing and editing are not the same thing.

***

My thank you journal: A new (for me) daily practice

Although I know that there’s a growing body of research on the positive correlation between gratitude and wellbeing, I have always struggled with gratitude journaling practices.

Over the years, I’ve experimented with gratitude in my journal, including writing ‘three good things’ at the end of each day (a practice sometimes called ‘sifting for gold’.) I’ve tried writing a gratitude list, which sometimes seems to shift my mood when I’m feeling a bit low or sorry for myself. But it never really stuck.

Until a few weeks ago.

I now realise that the main problem for me was that word, ‘gratitude.’ It sounds a little finger-wagging, like something I should be able to feel. And as a recovering ‘good girl,’ I really don’t need another voice in my head telling me what I should or ought to be doing, feeling, thinking: You’ve got so much to be grateful for, Sophie. So just get on with it and stop moaning.

I don’t mean that this kind of talking-to isn’t useful at times. But what is more helpful for me, at this point in my life, is to make a space of quiet and calm, a place that feels nurturing.

And lately, I’ve been experimenting with ‘thank you’.

Since losing my Dad, very suddenly, in September 2022, I have struggled, some days, with overwhelming grief, a depth of sorrow that can feel bottomless.

I knew that I needed something to support me through this time. Something that will help me to turn my face to the sun.

Thank you seems to be working for me in a way that ‘grateful’ never did.

Thank you for… Thank you for… feels a little like a prayer. It’s the way I begin each morning right now. Just me and the page and all the things I can say thank you for.

***

Is your phone getting in the way of your writing?

If you write, you’re probably already very aware of how easily all the distractions of email, social media and the internet can steal your writing time.

Just how crucial it is to carve out time for thinking and writing is the subject of research and inquiry for Cal Newport. His book, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, and his newsletter and short articles, are some of my favourite sources of support and inspiration.

This week, Newport’s newsletter pointed me to a very real example of the profound positive effect that limiting phone use can have on our ability to produce ‘deep work.’ The example is that described by Adam Weiss, a doctoral student in Chemistry at the University of Chicago. In February 2022, Weiss published a column article in Nature in which he shared the story of the drastic action he decided to take, having ‘hit a rut’ in his studies. Realising that, although he was putting in increasingly longer hours, his work ‘felt chaotic and disorganized,’ Weiss writes:

‘As I began to search for the cause of my struggles, I became increasingly aware that my ‘quiet time’ at the lab bench — for instance, when I was running chromatography columns or microscopy experiments — was anything but. Instead of thinking about science, I was watching television or interacting with social media on my smartphone… I would come home from a long day in the lab and respond to e-mails or Slack messages over dinner or in bed.’

Weiss began to limit time on his smartphone, replacing it during work hours with a phone with basic features. He also implemented ideas from Digital Minimalism, another of Newport’s books. As a result, he has experienced an increase in creativity, focus and engagement, and a decrease in anxiety

The ‘quiet time’ that Weiss noticed he was missing is crucial for writers. Quiet time is time to dream, time to think, time to roll words around in our heads, as well as time to scribble ideas in a notebook or try things out on the white page of a blank screen.

But how easy it is to open our eyes in the morning, reach for our phones and begin to scroll. How many of us, faced with ten or fifteen minutes of time in a waiting room or meeting room, allow ourselves to be distracted by a slab of glowing glass, rather than letting our minds wander for a while? We must check our email inboxes, our calendars, perhaps our Twitter or Instagram. We must keep in touch at all times with what is going on.

Or perhaps not.

Perhaps by letting ourselves off the hook, allowing ourselves to switch off from the 24/7, always-on world, we’ll get in touch with something else again, something much more urgent and important.

Let go, invite in

Happy New Year - if indeed this is your personal new year.
For many people around the world, it’s just another day in another week, and therefore probably a good time to remember how arbitrary this marking of new beginnings actually is.

But if, like me, you have been spending time over the past few days reflecting on the year gone by and the year ahead, here’s a very simple idea that I’ve been playing with.

What will you let go of in the coming days, weeks and months in order to simplify or make space?

It’s all too easy at this time of year to feel that we should be setting goals, doing new stuff, doing more. But it’s magical thinking to pretend that we can shoehorn new things into a life that already feels as if it’s straining at the seams. I have noticed, over the past year, that it’s more helpful for me to think first about what I can actually let go of or stop doing.

What is no longer helpful to me? What is a drain on my time? What could I actually say ‘no’ to or find easier ways to take care of?

Once I’ve done that, it feels much more realistic to ask myself what new thing I can start doing to honour what I want to invite in or celebrate or achieve in my life.

For writers and makers of all kinds, time is probably the single most precious resource we have. If you’re thinking about focusing on your writing or nurturing your creative work over the coming months, what can you let go of in order to make space for that on a regular basis?

What might you be able to ask for help with. I personally find this one really scary. Ask for help? But I’m trying it. I think it might get easier with practice.

One thing out. One thing in. Perhaps it doesn’t need to be more complicated than this.

The ‘year ahead spread’ and a writing ritual

My annual New Year’s Eve/ Day threshold ritual, this year augmented by this new deck, a Christmas present from my sister.

This is the ‘year ahead spread’. In case you’re not familiar with card spreads, the idea here is very simple. You draw a card for each month of the year to come and then add in a card at the centre to serve as an overall theme.

I particularly like the idea that this spread envisions the year as circular rather than linear.

My love affair with tarot and oracle cards spans three decades now. I have a small collection of treasured decks and I’d love to create one myself one day.

I think everyone who loves tarot has their own special relationship with the cards. For me, they are like portals or doorways into my subconscious. They work like small poems. They operate through metaphor and symbol - colour, shape, personal association - a little like dreams.

I often use them as a way into my writing. I pull a card and keep it on my desk for the day. I also love to use them as prompts in my writing groups and classes.

The way I use them in this annual threshold ritual is to take the card for the month - or the card for the overall theme - and free write around it.

Here is some free writing I did around an image of the moon, rather than a card. There’s something about writing in circles or spirals that I find very helpful. There is something very rhythmic about turning the page in a circle as I write. It seems to help me bypass over-thinking.

And here’s my year ahead spread from 2022. You can find #yearaheadspread over on Instagram.

If you liked this blog post, you might like my free letter.

Write your dreams down

In this in-between time between Christmas and New Year, I always feel more able to rest. It feels like I have ‘permission’ to ‘indulge’ in sleep as something good - rather than something necessary that I have to try to squeeze in between all the other stuff of life.

This no doubt says a lot about me. This past year, I’ve come to recognise, more and more, that I really do need to make more space for sleep in my life. Also rest. Real rest.

I’ve been in menopause for eighteen months now (with very challenging perimenopausal symptoms for around two years before that). This coupled with working and home-schooling through the pandemic helped me to begin thinking more about the politics of rest. I’ve just spent a Christmas book voucher on this book by the brilliant Trish Hersey, founder of The Nap Ministry.

So perhaps because I’m trying to cocoon in hibernatory mode, I’ve found myself dreaming more vividly. And I’ve started writing my dreams down in my notebook every morning.

I’ve always been fascinated by dreams. My second novel begins with a search for a ‘book of dreams’ and is woven through with ideas about dream alchemy and dream interpretation.

I’ve tried writing down my dreams before, but never for any consistent period of time. I tend to wake up after a restless night with my head full of all the things I need to get done that day. My old thinking went something like: Can I really justify using precious time to grab my notebook right away? (Lately, I’ve begun to notice more and more of these kinds of thoughts.)

In fact, writing down the dreams has taken much less time than I’d anticipated. Having set the intention to do this, I’ve also noticed that it seems to help me to remember those wisps of dreams before they slip away. I begin the day in a different space - perhaps a little more connected with my self, somehow?

I’ve started sharing my dream notebook pages here. If you’d like to join me, I’m using #writeyourdreamsdown

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Starting a new notebook

I’ve just cracked open a new notebook, fresh for a period of much longed-for time to write and create.

(And hoping I’m not tempting Fate here.)

Like most writers and creatives, I have a cupboard full of notebooks because keeping a notebook has been a lifelong practice. There are few things as full of promise as smoothing back the cover of a brand new notebook. This summer, mine is this Moleskine. I chose it because it has a whopping 400 pages - plenty to keep me going through July and August.

Like most writers, I am very particular about my notebooks. To be honest, I fell out of love with Moleskine for a few years because I find that the paper, whilst deliciously smooth and the distinctive creamy colour that we all associate with Moleskine, is also a little too thin for me. I don’t like show-through. For a while, I experimented with these from Leuchtturm. The paper is so good, but they are pricey, especially when you go through as many notebooks as I tend to do, and I’m really not a fan of a hard cover. (However, if you like numbered pages, this might be the notebook for you .)

I then stumbled across these by Clairefontaine, the company that supplies the paper for Leuchtturm. They are so much cheaper and generally very good if you like to write with fountain pen or brush pen, or paint with watercolour, or glue things into your notebook. The paper is beautiful and really holds up.

Over the years, I’ve also flirted with dot grid paper, but I’ve concluded that the paper just has to be plain for me. And I can’t abide writing on lined paper.

My other requirement is that the covers of my notebooks are as plain as possible. Perhaps this is a hangover from all those childhood Christmases when kind relatives would buy Sophie-the-budding-writer the most exquisite journals with embellished covers. They would sit on my desk untouched because I could never bring myself to sully their perfection with my messy, unedited words. No, my notebook needs to be a place where I can think out loud, scribble, experiment; a space that can safely contain my unedited self.

I’m in awe of Austin Kleon’s three-notebook system. Inspired by Kleon (because which creative person isn’t?) I did once try to keep a small logbook alongside my notebook - but my mind and my life just don’t work in this way and everything just ended up in the one bigger book.

Something I do have in common with Kleon’s process, though, is that I have a ritual for beginning a new notebook. I like to decide upon something or someone to serve as the notebook’s presiding spirit or inspiration. This summer, it’s a little owl. Owls have always felt significant to me (maybe because of the associations with my name) and I bought this stamp fifteen years ago in Vancouver. It’s made from a design by the artist Ryan Cranmer.

close-up image of printed owl stamp by artist Ryan Cranmer

I often copy out a piece of text or a poem that I’d like to adopt as my guide. Here’s Mary Oliver’s poem ‘In Blackwater Woods’ from Devotion, the new Selected, published at the end of last year.

Image of poem copied into notebook and Mary Oliver’s Devotions.

I also lit my candles and did a reading from the beautiful The Wild Unknown Archetypes deck by Kim Krans.

Notebook sketch of card reading and round cards from The Wild Unknown Archetype deck.

Of course, the most important thing about a notebook for any writer is to use it.

I’m quietly excited at the prospect of a summer of writing and dreaming.

On the value of not throwing your work away

I’m not much of a hoarder. I like to declutter, keep things organised. I binge watched Marie Kondo’s Netflix series and nodded along as she introduced her clients to the transformative power of tidying things up and throwing things out.

But over the last few months, I’ve come to realise that there is value in keeping writing: old first drafts and redrafts, half-finished ideas, notebooks and scrapbooks. My Mum recently gave me all the schoolbooks and snippets of writing she’d saved, beginning when I was younger than my daughter is now. There is something so valuable about looking at this child version of my writer self; something I could never have predicted when I was shown this same stuff in my early twenties. Back then, I cringed at the teen diaries composed in painstaking calligraphy and in a voice that is more Charlotte Bronte than lonely kid growing up in a post-industrial Northern town.

But lately, I’ve been looking back at all these old diaries and notebooks and scraps of paper and I’m so grateful to my Mum for never throwing them out. I feel newly compassionate towards this half-formed, fragile, younger me, already trying to make sense of her life by writing things down. I’ve started to realise that we just can’t know in advance what from our work will be important to us in the future.

This has started me thinking that, in an age of screens, it’s too easy to throw things away. (I had a blog that I’d kept for six years but abandoned completely in 2012, for example.)

In fact, as we write into digital space, it’s actually really hard to hold onto things. Unless we’re very disciplined about version control, we often edit until there’s no remaining trace of our messy first drafts.

I wonder if the writers of our current age will be able to gift their draft manuscripts to Harvard or Oxford in the future? Will scholars and readers be able to study the many versions of a poem or the gradual progress of a novel in manuscript, and see the visible evidence of the writer crafting the work?

And so perhaps notebooks are more important than they’ve ever been. Start them. Keep them - in a box or a cupboard. Even if you don’t revisit them for years, one day they’ll become your treasure.

Using writing as a way to calm anxiety

People often ask me if there are some simple writing techniques that they can begin to use to calm anxiety?

I have two suggestions that can help you to get started, which involve taking two slightly different approaches. I’d recommend experimenting with each of them to find what works best for you.

I don’t believe that there is ever a magical ‘one size fits all’ approach to using writing for your wellbeing. But over time - and often a surprisingly short period of time - you can get a feel for what is most helpful for you in your current circumstances.

Just write
Peter Elbow’s free writing, Julia Cameron’s morning pages, James Pennebaker’s expressive writing, Natalie Goldberg’s ‘keeping the hand moving’… What all these techniques have in common is that the idea of just writing, without pausing, editing or thinking too much, allowing our thoughts to free flow onto the page, can be beneficial to us.

Some people find it useful to set a timer for ten minutes (sometimes called timed free writing). The morning pages approach advocates writing three pages every morning, right after you wake up. Pennebaker’s expressive writing paradigm - currently the most widely researched approach to writing and wellbeing - typically asks people to write for twenty minutes about something that is troubling them.

What are the positive effects of the ‘just write’ approach for our wellbeing?
The ‘just write’ approach can boost our creativity by helping us to bypass those internal critical voices that can keep us stuck. One theory is that just writing, without over-thinking or editing as we go, can help us to find our ‘flow,’ the term coined by psychologist Cszikszentmihalyi to describe that optimum ‘peak’ state or ‘zone’ in which we are fully absorbed in a task that we love.

Many people also find that writing is a helpful way of processing thoughts, feelings and emotions. As Joan Didion once wrote:

‘I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.’

– Why I Write (New York Times Book Review, 1976)

How does writing achieve these effects?
After many years of research into Pennebaker’s expressive writing, which does appear to show some positive effects across a range of situations and health challenges, we still can’t say with any certainty why just writing - or more specifically, writing for ten or twenty minutes about something that is troubling us - can be so beneficial for some people.

One theory is that expressive writing is effective because of what Pennebaker calls a ‘disinhibition effect.’ This is the idea that holding difficult experiences inside us demands effort and can create stress and overwhelm; and getting them ‘out there ‘ onto the page might bring ease and a sense of release.

This certainly seems to be the case for many people at certain times in their lives.

Is the ‘just write’ approach appropriate for everyone?
One of my own personal concerns about expressive writing is that the effects on people writing about a traumatic or painful experience are not yet very well understood. If you are suffering from the effects of severe trauma or PTSD, for example, revisiting these kinds of experiences through your own writing could revivify them, exacerbating symptoms such as flashbacks. In this situation, it is advisable to work with someone who is experienced enough to help you to select a particular approach to writing, such as a skilled therapist.

In my experience, even when people are not traumatised, they can be surprised and unsettled by what surfaces in their writing. If this happens for you, it’s important to be able to talk to a friend, therapist or someone you can trust. If you’re feeling anxious or upset and you’re not sure exactly why, writing might help you to uncover or identify the source of that anxiety. But it’s important to then have a way of processing that new information and the associated feelings.

Currently, we know that writing can be a very powerful means of nurturing wellbeing, through exploring and gaining new insights into our thoughts, feelings and experience, getting it ‘out there’ and developing confidence in our creativity. But we don’t really have enough information yet about for whom different approaches to writing might be most effective and when; or, more importantly, the situations where writing could actually make people feel worse rather than better.

Some people may find a more structured approach to writing more beneficial, such as writing techniques designed to create helpful distance from difficult experiences and memories.

Experiment with the ‘just write’ approach if:
You feel that you have enough support around you that you can talk through anything that comes up for you in your writing process.

You feel that your notebook or journal is a safe place to vent, or get your feelings of anxiety out onto the page.

When to avoid ‘just writing’ about difficult feelings
If you’re experiencing severe anxiety or feeling very anxious about something in particular, avoid writing about the thing that is troubling you and try writing about something that will distract you from your feelings instead. That way, you may still get all the benefits of finding ‘flow’ and expressing your creativity, without revisiting any difficult memories or events. When you’re feeling anxious, you might find the ‘writing the moment’ exercise below more helpful than ‘just writing.’

Writing the moment
Some people find that the act of writing can help them to slow down, and take some time out from the pressures of every day life. This can have a calming effect. In this sense, writing might act a little like meditation or mindfulness practice.

You might like to try writing about what you see outside your window right now; or what you notice in your room; or the objects that you see on your desk or from the bus on the way to work.

Begin by describing what you see as clearly as you can. Really look. Bring your full attention to the process of noticing and describing.

Again, don’t think about editing as you go. Simply write. This writing is just for you and it really doesn’t matter if you don’t write perfectly formed sentences.

You could experiment with writing about the view from the same window, or the same spot on your walk in the park every day for a week. What changes? What stays the same?

Tips:
If you can, experiment with using a pen and paper rather than a screen.

Set yourself small goals. Write for ten or fifteen minutes at a time, rather than an hour.

Don’t beat yourself up if some days writing feels easier than others. Let the page be your friend rather than yet another critical voice in your head. Remember too that so many of the benefits of writing derive from the process of writing, rather than what you actually write. Let your messy, imperfect, un thought-through writing emerge.

Think about how you can incorporate some free writing into other practices that support your wellbeing, such as breath work, meditation and mindfulness, gentle exercise and yoga.

Sophie Nicholls is a bestselling author, teacher and writing mentor, researching the connections between writing and wellbeing.

She writes a weekly newsletter at: sophienicholls.substack.com