It’s always an experience to return to the ‘writing outside’ group on the edge where North Norfolk meets the North Sea, buffered by both salt and freshwater marshes and the banks that try to keep the two apart. It’s always a different experience, each time, to walk those places and the hills and woods above them. It’s a pleasure to reconnect with people that I have grown to love, like and respect over the course of the last few years, and to meet newcomers to this fluid gathering. It’s a joy to walk out into this countryside, be it up onto the fields, or out into the marshes, or along the banks to the sea. To be honest it is also sometimes other emotions entirely that surface, but that is part of the point of being open to what is there to be observed, on the inside as well as the out.
It is also always a writerly challenge when you go back again and again. What will I find to say today? Do I really have anything unsaid, that is worth saying? And if not, will I be brave enough to say it anyway?
Answers: something, not necessarily, and yes.
I call this a ‘group’ – technically, it isn’t. Technically, it is a series of writing workshops. But so many of us come back season after season, one upon the other, or with breaks in between, that it has
become more than that. It has become a gathering. A congregation. For me, originally, I think it was a place of both refuge and exploration. I don’t actually remember signing up for my first season or how I came to do so. I do remember how nervous I was. Even now, several years in, I have moments of what on earth am I doing with these people – they all know so much more than I do – I am so far out of my depth here.
And I am. Out of my depth.
But I’m still swimming, and still loving it. I’m still held by this ocean of knowledge and skill and trust. I'm still held by the waves of vulnerability that has people opening up in ways they may never have thought they would.
It is a different experience every season, every year. No day is ever the same. No walk is ever the same. The weather is different, both external and internal. The environment, both external and internal, bears the marks of whatever has happened in the intervening time.
The biggest learning, and probably still the biggest challenge, is to just let what is arrive on the page, unfiltered.
Maybe we will want to tidy it up afterwards. Maybe we will want to deconstruct it and use parts of it in different ways. Maybe we will want to throw some of it away. I am not one who keeps all of my notebooks. My journals, yes – I have all 64 of those so far – but the field books, the on-the-hoof scribble-spaces, no. Those I mine as far as I can, and then I shut them down. Good ideas will resurface in better shape.
What matters first and foremost, always, is to get the raw, unfiltered, idea, reflection, emotion, story, vision, whatever it is, down on the page where we can look at it.
One of the truly beautiful things about going back to Cley is hearing people read their in-the-field (literally) work-in-progress. Some are read without preface. Some are read with detailed explanation. Many are read with a caveat of I don’tknow where this is going…or I’ve only got scraps… or these are fragments that I’m thinking might become [whatever they think it might
become]. Some of what we hear out on the beach, or beside a hide, or in a wood, are finished pieces that rest as they stand, others get re-worked, and in my own case at least, others prove to be merely springboards into something else. Some of it we later get to hear in finished form. Some of it no doubt needs longer gestation. And maybe re-planting elsewhere.
But all of it starts with simply being open to what is. What actually is, not the filtered, beautiful, natural, reserve version of what we want to see, but the reality.
So on this returning day, the 30th April 2024, my notes went something like this….
Skylark song: disturbed by gossip.
Eye drawn to water – the pools are more full than I have ever seen them. On this first truly bright day of Spring, at this end of Spring, this Beltane eve, they attract my heart as well as my eye.
I’m trying not to be irritated by people chattering.
“We should go and look at some waders.”
Yes! Please do!
Jets fly over. Roaring.
Loud laughter competes for volume.
Avocets rise in defence against the Harrier.
Peace is out there in the pools, between the reeds.
Grace is in a flock swooping to the rise and settle, while the harrier stays high.
Walking along the path between the road and the reeds, there is a weaving of warbles and engine noise.
I watch a mating flight of geese.
The sea has disappeared behind a raised horizon of reed and shingle bank.
An egret, beautiful snow white, a newcomer, becoming common.
The grey heron stands, poses, showing us his best sides, then lifts to make a long low reconnaissance, finds nothing of interest, and settles to wait again.
The air is full of insects. Thunder flies and large black long-legged things.
I write the words: expansive, diminishing.
I note that the cattle lows carry on the wind. And from somewhere a strangled-cat howls…I’m later told it’s a peacock. Or maybe a ring-tone.
The shingle bank is stretching its fingers into the marsh. I don’t know if it is encroaching or protecting. A hand-in-help or strangulation. I should read more, learn more, know more. But I don’t.
The sea is gentle on the sand. Waves that have outrun the storms whisper of tomorrows. The sea speaks of ancient memory and all the unborn dreams.
How many drops make an ocean? How strong a pull is needed to make a wave? Do we realise that each wave is both a beginning and an ending, with so short a pause between the gathering and the dispersing?
The sea beyond the tiny breakers undulates – as if some deep-living creature is digesting, or slowly awakening.
My notes say nothing of the poem I would eventually write of this day, because what I wrote wasn’t really about this day, but what I wrote couldn’t have been written without this day, without this day having been exactly what it was. In fact, two poems came out of this day, out of the end of this day…they came of sitting quietly on the beach and letting whatever the under-work of writing is,
work its way beneath my consciousness, while I just sat on the shingle, with my eyes closed, listening to a tired sea.
