October 2020 – Katie Hale

Right now, I’m in Ireland. (I’m not, but let’s use our imaginations, shall we?)

It’s October 2020. Coronavirus has never hit, and life on our little globe is carrying on pretty much as expected. Which means that, right now, I’m in County Mayo. Or, more accurately, I’m making my way home from County Mayo, having just spent two weeks staying in Heinrich Böll Cottage on Achill Island. I’ve probably spent a lot of mornings walking along a blustery beach, feeling the salt air whipping against my face, and thinking about my novel. Which, given that this is an alternative 2020 where I the novel didn’t get blocked by the stresses of lockdown, I’m probably part way through a second or even third draft of. In the evenings, I’ve been curling up by the fire and reading voraciously (that part, at least, remains the same), and in this beautiful corner of Ireland, my writing has felt so alive.

Notebook, pen, laptop and coffee mug on a kitchen table

Step out of this fantasy world for a moment, and it all looks rather different. In the current & difficult freelance climate, I’ve been doing a lot of admin, and submitting a lot of applications which I know in advance are going to have very long odds of me actually getting. I’ve been planning a new project (which is exciting, but also admin-heavy). I’ve had a lot of emails.

All this is great, in that it’s work, and a constant stream of work feels even more vital than usual right now. But it did put paid to my visions of myself writing, reading, and wandering along the beach on Achill Island: that perfect marrying of nature & creativity, with none of the buzzes and pings of normal life getting in the way.

So I decided to create something of a residency for myself at home. Every day that I should have been in residence at Heinrich Böll Cottage, I gave myself a writing exercise. Nothing fancy – just good old material-generating prompts. The sorts of exercises you’d do in a creative writing workshop to get the ideas flowing and push past those nagging internal voices & creative blockages. Some of them I chose from books by other writers, and a couple were exercises of my own.

Did they lead to anything? A couple did. One or two ended up accidentally combining, so I’d written one thing that spanned multiple exercises. A lot of them produced a few pages in my notebook, which I’m pretty sure will just fall by the wayside. But that’s ok. If anything, it’s sort of the point, like warming up for a race. Nobody’s going to give you a medal for stretching your calf muscles, but just try running that marathon if you haven’t.

Looking for some writing prompts to kick-start your own ideas? Click through to the following tweet, to follow the full 2-week thread of them:

Today should have been the start of a 2-week residency at Heinrich Böll Cottage in Ireland – so I’m going to give myself a digital at-home residency instead: a #writing exercise every day for the duration. And a new notebook to fill with them! Feel free to follow along. #THREAD pic.twitter.com/WdP6BKYFBn
— Katie Hale (@halekatie) October 3, 2020

So was this series of exercises as good as a residency?

Honest answer: no, absolutely not. Which is nothing to do with the quality of the exercises – as I say, I wrote some things from them which surprised me, and which resulted in me combining things that hadn’t occurred to me before. But it does have everything to do with how I had to fit them into everyday life.

I’ve already mentioned the admin and the emails – but it’s also all the other things, like laundry and housework. The things that become a bit more suspended during a residency.

It turns out that I work best in blocks. (A fortnight of solid admin. A month of writing. 3 days of spring-cleaning the house.) I like the focus that comes from only having to focus on one type of work, rather than having to constantly switch up my way of thinking. I think this is why I’ve found residencies to work so well for me. It’s an opportunity to switch on my out-of-office, and to only focus on one thing. The question now is: how do I do the same during the time of coronavirus, when switching on the out-of-office is less of an option?

I still haven’t quite figured out the answer to this, but I feel as though I’m getting there. Maybe it’s just about shifting priorities, rather than blocking out whole chunks of time. Either way, this fortnight of writing exercises felt like a good way to start.

I’m still not sure how we got here. The leaves are turning, and all the summer plants in my garden have started dying back. There’s a chill in the air when I walk up onto the fell, which itself is paling, losing some of its green summer lustre. The nights are drawing close up against the living room window.

And yet, somehow, I catch myself thinking it’s still March. Possibly because of the occasion sunny days that squeeze in through the rain. More likely because I feel as though I’ve been in stasis for the past six months.

But September, at least, has felt a bit different. Things have started moving again.

I won’t say things are back to normal, because they’re not, and there isn’t the same level of work as there was before lockdown. But there have been a few projects which have started to come together.

September: A Few Good Things

Contains Strong Language:

Contains Strong Language is the BBC’s poetry festival – this year taking place in Cumbria. Obviously, it was an unusual approach to a festival, made necessary by Covid restrictions. But there was still plenty broadcast over the festival itself, and available online afterwards.

I took part in two events during the festival: one was a panel discussion on Ruskin’s View in Kirkby Lonsdale, and on the commissioned poems that four of us had written about it; and the other was an event called ‘Passing Words’, where a whole range of poets each performed six-minute sets. Both of these were broadcast live online (a strange experience, performing to an auditorium almost entirely devoid of anyone other than the production team), and I think there are plans for the events to be made available again on the website in the coming weeks.

(On top of Contains Strong Languague, there’ve also been a couple of other media bits, too – but more on those in the future! After all, I’ve got to keep some secrets…)

A top secret project:

And speaking of things that are under wraps… This month, I’ve been taking a little bit of a break from my own writing projects, and working on something a little more collaborative. Which has included a fair few Zoom chats, and even a couple of socially-distanced-masked-up-in-person meetings, which has felt very weird after so many months of very little work with organisations, and certainly none in person.

I can’t say too much about it just yet (oh how I love a good secret!) but I can say that it involves myth and mystery and vlogging and celebrating local places and not-at-all-made-up historical facts. And I’m hoping to be able to reveal what it is over the next few weeks!

Getting away from it all:

Honestly, I think what gave me the energy to work on this new project was a change of scene. Like a lot of people, I’ve spend the past six months not going anywhere. I don’t just mean the usual been-working-too-hard-and-need-a-holiday. It’s been stranger than that. More intense. For months, I hadn’t been anywhere other than my own house and garden, the Co-op and post office (each only a mile away), and walks on the fell within a few miles of my own front door. I hadn’t even been into town to do a ‘big shop’, or into the other town to go to the dentist or get the car serviced. None of the little changes of scene that are so normal in most of our lives that we don’t even notice them.

It was partly this feeling of micro-institutionalisation that inspired my Ruskin’s View poem for Contains Strong Language. And it was also what made my trip to Scotland a few weeks ago both unnerving, and also one of the most refreshing things I could possible have done. A change of company, scenery (and stunning scenery at that), and long walks almost every day were exactly what I needed. I barely thought about writing once – though I did manage to find a few moments in the peaceful heather-filled garden to sit and read. In many ways, the trip was a creative cleanse. It left me physically shattered, but full of mental energy and ready to get back to writing.

The Month in Books:

Ever since the start of lockdown, I’ve been struggling to focus on reading. That’s continued this month, but with a strange sort of imbalance. At the start of September, I found reading incredibly difficult. I was reading the proof of Kerri ni Dochartaigh’s Thin Places, which is a phenomenally beautiful and heart-breaking and also hopeful book, but I was aware that I was reading slowly. Part of this was the desire to soak up every gorgeously crafted word on the page, but part of it was also due to something else. A worry, perhaps. That Covid-related anxiety that’s been bubbling under the surface for so many of us for the past six months or more.

Then, suddenly, I came back from my trip to Scotland, and it was as though something clicked. I started to read again – first finishing Thin Places, and then roaring through four subsequent books as though my life depended on it. Not only was I reading, but I had a hunger for other books as well. I’d stopped looking listlessly at my to-read pile, seeing it as a chore to be accomplished; suddenly, it was back to being a shelf of mysteries, each one silently begging to be uncovered.

The following list might not be the longest ‘books I’ve read over the course of an entire month’ list (and, with the possible exception of a novel in verse, there are no poetry collections on there at all), but it represents somthing else: a kind of re-birth; or, more accurately, a re-falling-in-love, and for that reason I’m proud of it.