Moniack Mhor Creative Writing Centre was the venue of the
second day of the weekend writing course.
It might have been just fifteen miles away from
Inverness, but a look at the milometer in the car shows I travelled a lot
further than that! The AA route I
printed off did not stand up to the challenge.
The promised thirty minutes turned into an hour and a half. The final left turn, right turn and left turn
took me deep into the hills but not to my destination. Had I been following me in an unmarked police
car, for whatever reason, I would have been suspicious of my intentions. There are a lot of big houses up in them
there hills. I could have been casing
the joints.
I was actually on the right road at one point. Had I just kept going I would have reached
Moniack Mhor. Instead, convinced I was
on the wrong road, I turned around and headed back down the hill.
A local hotel had vaguely heard of the place but no one
knew where it was. The postcode given apparently
covered a very large area – not a mere single street. The man behind the desk kindly lent me his
phone and I called the centre for help.
I had thought of abandoning the course. I had enjoyed the previous day and perhaps
anything else might have been an anti-climax.
Arriving an hour late I missed the first writing exercise
– a filling in the blanks affair with creative responses. They had just moved on to look at nature poems
from famous poets. I scored brownie
points by noticing an unusual rhyming scheme that might otherwise have gone
unnoticed – AABA – BBCB – CCDC- DDED- and so on.
There was an interesting youtube clip of a man reading a
poem with something claiming to be music in the background. It was sound and there was rhythm and there
were different notes – but it lacked any kind of tunefulness or harmony. It did little to add to the poem. One woman sitting at the end of the table
snorted not just at the music but at the poem itself. It required a lot of work from the reader to
make sense of it. It involved an
abandoned township and a lot of trees and some girls – but I think the girls
weren’t real and the trees were some kind of metaphor – or not.
We were then left to our own devices for an hour or so to
write from our forest day ramble.
There were individual tutorials available with the course
leader. I had made up my mind that I
wasn’t going to go. I am not so bold as
to suppose that I know everything about poetry writing or that now I have a
poetry book out there I don’t need expert help.
It was just that I had come to the weekend from a very bad end of week. I was barely holding things together although
the forest walks had done much to restore me.
Poetry is the one thing that, right now, I do well. I didn’t want anyone bursting that bubble. I know that friends and family like the
poetry I write and they say it’s good, but there is always that question
hovering in the background about whether it really is good. An expert in the field might think it’s not
so good.
Well, despite my intentions, my curiosity got the better
of me. I wanted to know what the expert
might say. I had written three poems and
handed them over for comment. The first
two passed muster – a line deleted from the first was all he suggested. He talked about redundant words and I had a
whole redundant line!
The third poem was dissected. The stresses on certain words were on the
wrong syllable. I had gone out of my way
to avoid clichés – but he said my alternative to a cliché was worse than the cliché
itself. The last line had too many
syllables but he couldn’t see how I could maintain the powerful thought by
using a different line. I had “set myself
a mountain to climb” and he looked forward to seeing the re-worked poem. He also suggested something longer than the four
lines.
It was a really painless tutorial. He didn’t talk down to me. It went really well and I was glad that I
went.
The final summing up was for us all to read the pieces of
work. There was the option to stay
quiet. I had spent most of the writing
time doing another poem, focussing on the forest walk and including trees and
moss and stuff. I had poured over a thesaurus
but ached for a rhyming dictionary instead.
I just did my best. In this day
and age of free verse, I sometimes think that rhyming poetry can be snorted at. I thought about not sharing it because the
rhymes were too obvious and simple. I
wasn’t prepared for the reaction. They
loved it. Names of other poets were
thrown about the room and my poem, apparently, held its own with them all. How encouraging is that?
I don’t write this to blow a trumpet and say that I am a
great poet – but to say that the whole weekend did so much to restore what had
been damaged earlier on in the week. God
had known, long before the weekend was organised and I had signed up, that I
needed to be there. Thursday and Friday
were very hard days for me. The rubber
hit the road – and the road, a metaphorical one, was sprinkled with nails – and
the rubber shredded. Grim days they were
and only two of them, thankfully. I knew
that I would recover, but felt disinclined to assess the damage and think about
repairs.
Everything got fixed over the weekend – the forest walk
on the Saturday and the focussed writing and the tutorial on the Sunday. I have come away with a deep down confidence
about my writing and a renewed confidence in myself.
