At a recent conference for writers who work in education, we were given some stimuli and asked either to write inspired by them or to devise how we might use them in a creative writing class. I attempted to do both at once.
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Anything would do. Anything to get them writing. A writer can write about anything and they must learn that too.
He pondered the usual questions. “Where do you get your ideas from?” and “What do you do if you don’t know what to write?” Today he had no answer to either.
He must go now. The traffic would be gridlocked soon and he had a class at ten. What to give them? What to give them?
The post dropped on the mat. A postcard from Mimi. Bougainvillea around a Spanish villa. A clichéd postcard. Clichéd, just like their relationship really.
Some lines of verse shot through his mind, coming he could no longer remember where from.
“Oh Lady of the carmine verandas,
Oh Lady of the canes.” *
He would give them those words and he would give them that picture.
He slammed the door and locked it, then eased his car off the drive into the lanes of traffic still managing to speed towards the Rainy City and he thought of how the sun shone on a Caribbean island and on a Mediterranean coast. How soon he would be with his students in the sixties built glass box, with the wind and rain lashing and drowning out his words and how they would be transported to where the Bougainvillea grew.
He now knew why Mimi was drying out in the Spanish sun and he was fighting the traffic in rainy City. Above all, Ernest Scrivener realised why he loved his job.
* From a poem by Maggie Harris.
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