PIGEONS and DICKENS

Mario Petrucci: residency at the Charles Dickens Museum

Abstract.  Using his commission at the Dickens Museum as a lens, Mario Petrucci sorts and shares his long experience of the opportunities and pitfalls of residencies. He provocatively suggests a positive interpretation of cultural ‘junk’, preparing us for innovative exercises that utilise museum artefacts to maximum effect for writing and education. He uncovers the constraints residencies sometimes impose on creative activity, examining how these might shape the activity and also how they can be turned to advantage. Emphasising the skills a commissioned writer requires for deep work, Petrucci encourages open writing methodologies that centre on process, including intelligently productive responses to ‘difficulty’ that achieve lasting rewards.     [Text only included here; see web page for figures.]

‘It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see’  Henry David Thoreau

Charles Dickens moved into 48 Doughty Street in London in March/April 1837 with his wife Catherine and their first child Charles Culliford Boz, living there until December 1839, during which time his daughters Mary and Kate Macready were born. Here, Dickens really made his name, finishing Pickwick Papers and beginning Barnaby Rudge, delivering much of Oliver Twist, all of Nicholas Nickleby and Sketches of Young Gentlemen, and editing (as ‘Boz’) Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi (the famous clown). The house now stands as the Charles Dickens Museum (Figure 1), remarkable for its state of preservation and its atmospheric artefacts, portraits and rooms – not least Catherine’s gold and turquoise engagement ring, and the back bedroom where (it’s believed) Dickens’s beloved sister-in-law Mary Hogarth died, immortalised in his writings through the death of Little Nell.

Thomas Alva Edison tells us: ‘To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk’. We’re somewhat prejudiced against that ‘j’ word for old rope, now further burdened by its modern associations with unwanted post and the excesses of e-mail. I sense, though, that what Edison meant by junk isn’t useless rubbish but a large reservoir of interesting, ‘random’ objects – what one used to find lying around in research labs perhaps, or (in the context of this NAWE Writing on Location commission) that rich diversity of things writers brought or drew into their purlieu. There is often an irrepressible aspect of autobiography, I feel, in the accumulated form of those objects, which were used in (and later came to represent) a lived-in life. They can become a focal point for our inventiveness, and that of all students, young or old. When it comes to creative writing, then, it might sometimes be helpful to see museums and significant archives not so much as reliquaries of valuable objects, but as well-organised and intelligently heightened, stimulating collections of ‘junk’. I know the latter perception can easily be misunderstood by students and prospective museum hosts; but isn’t it possible that the imaginative worldview of a young writer might respond more strongly to it? And if any student appears (for whatever reason, on a given day) short on imagination, can’t we at least allow for the possibility that Edison’s junk and imagination aren’t independent variables? That is, the imagination isn’t something that simply operates on its junk; rather, if you’re surrounded with enough fantastic stuff marshalled around resonant activities, then the imagination bit is more likely to happen.

Thankfully, there was no misunderstanding of my notion of creative junk on that eerily quiet, snowbound evening in early December 2010. I trialled two creative writing exercises in the project’s first CPD event, which were intended to make maximum use of the museum’s rich physical environment. The museum’s chosen theme was Dickens and the Gothic, exploring his intense literary attention to mortality and the moment of death. My writing element was to provide engagement, contrast and relief via an imaginative use of artefacts, with a particular focus (a modest nod to Gothicism) on the famous painting, Dickens’s Dream (Figure 2). These two exercises were carried forward (with refinements) to form the backbone of a more complete set of writing activities produced as a ‘written resource’ – an A4 handout – made available to the museum for future school visits (Figure 3). This final resource was put to the test at a second CPD evening in March 2011, in which an additional concern was to investigate the links between Dickens and Hardy (hence the third activity, Bit by Bit).

My brief description, above, of the house and the content of the themed writing events demands an initial observation. In many residencies, the arriving writer may face a complex mosaic of expectations (contractual obligations; the desire for suitable themes that reflect wider institutional concerns and pressures; etc.) and constraints (availability of funding/ support/ resources; spatial considerations; health and safety; etc.). At the Dickens Museum, for instance, the narrow hallways and general lack of open space determined the ‘shape’ of the activities: plenary sessions sandwiching student dispersal. These various restrictions, both stated and implied, can complicate any open approach to the project envisaged by the writer, who might secretly be disappointed by the trammels. The solution, as in writing itself, is to find ways to be excited and inspired by the constraints. Nevertheless, it’s understandable to sometimes feel, having read and re-read all the contractual notes and initial correspondence for a residency, that one is gearing up for a very public game of 3D chess when perhaps, privately, you’d rather be kicking a tennis ball against an alley wall.

The many stories colleagues share over conference drinks convince me that my own view of residencies isn’t unusual in the following regard (and this is no back door to self-praise): that the panoply of people/ project skills required to deliver a writing or educational project successfully (not all of which are on show in, say, the culminating public activity of a resident writer trying to stimulate a roomful of tired teachers/ students at the end of what may have been, for them, a long week) ought really to raise freelance writers automatically to the level of Arts Executives, if not full-blown UN ambassadors. As for the creative adaptability required across (or even within) projects, that can be off the scale. My recent residency at Southwell Workhouse, with its intensely bald rooms containing very few documents, offered an utterly different set of writing challenges to the Dickens Museum, which bristles with writings and artefacts. In short, such projects – for me – haven’t provided places where a writer could hide, and no residency I’ve held has been a sinecure. I wouldn’t have it any other way – I think!

With all that in mind, a great deal depends on gaining early clarity and insight concerning not only the detailed aims of the project (and the various forces driving it forward in the first place) but also the personalities and experience of the protagonists. That’s why it’s crucial to establish, as soon as possible, a strong – or at least workable – rapport with the project coordinator at the institution, and with the commissioning agency, to quickly agree a resentment-free set of goals and necessary compromises for the work. In those opening (sometimes tremulous) days of a residency, I keep reminding myself that I need to understand the hopes and difficulties of the person(s) at the coalface of the organisation as much as the opportunities the site affords for the educational/ writing activity itself. The quid pro quo is that if the coordinator finds in you an ally and resource, a tuned-in human presence, then they’re much more likely to get fully behind what you’re doing and facilitate the necessary elbowroom for your ideas. And knowing just how much play there really is in a residency – what degree of freedom you genuinely have – takes a critical step towards success. Any pigeons of misconception or confusion almost always come home to roost.

An example of one of those pigeons was my initial infatuation with the gorgeous archive of illustrations held at the museum. I got excited about an idea for students to ‘Spot the Difference’ between Dickens’s textual description of given scenes and the corresponding Cruikshank illustrations. This offered a terrific incentive, I felt, for students to read the text closely and then to engage with it through these ‘new’ objects which had appeared mysteriously, imaginatively, from outside the text. From a creative writing angle, alone, it was perfect. However, on close re-reading of the project aims, and with a gentle shove from my coordinator (Sue Walker), I realised that my brainchild wasn’t ideally placed for our agreed idea that we should focus – firmly, primarily – on activities that benefit uniquely from being conducted in situ. Sue, quite rightly, was far more keen to develop resources pertinent to school visits than to provide activities that could just as easily be done online or in the classroom. The drawings were part of the museum’s archive, sure; but they wouldn’t be available to visitors in the public space. I’d been reminded that one’s excitements, however intensely felt, can become double-edged (or even slightly defeating) in a given context.

Moving on, much might be said about setting up writing activities to avoid prescriptively ‘joining the dots’. I was looking to involve visitors with the museum, returning them to their study of Dickens renewed and invigorated. The aim was to engage and motivate, to make personal, rather than to get them to ‘write about’ items in the house that happened to carry some obvious relation to the syllabus. The idea was to amplify Dickens, in an experiential way, via the resonator of his house. In any case, I generally favour the creation of open writing structures, where staff and students are guided into witnessing the writing process (and its plural opportunities) as they progress through the exercise. Some of this, inevitably, will be off-script, relying on the facilitator’s interjections and nudges, those moments that crop up in any exercise where a contribution from a participant can be reflected back into the group as a process insight. That kind of thing (and the facilitator’s alertness to it) can’t easily be incorporated in a handout (or syllabus) and we have to accept that however good our follow-up is, however imaginative and professional the concrete resources we leave behind, there’s just no substitute for an experienced and sensitive writer-facilitator working face to face with participants. The ‘hard copy’ is important for dissemination, yes; but it can never contain or codify all the instinct and magic of human educative interaction.

Let me offer, though, a couple of examples of how that ‘process insight’ can at least be partly hardwired into an exercise. In Watch that Title! (Figure 3), the group begins by creating a list of abstracts, particularly emotions they’ve felt that very day: boredom, curiosity, fear, tiredness, friendship, etc. (A variation on this would be to ask for emotions they’d associate with situations or characters in any Dickens text they’re studying.) You can add on some ‘bigger’ themes as well: love, death, life, history, and so on. Next, you send them off to each find an object, anywhere in the house, that catches their eye (Figure 4). It has to be something simple: an inkwell, a jacket button, a ring (not anything like a room, person or museum display, having too many, or complex, parts). They then create a list of straightforward statements about their object, in short, punchy lines. Nothing poetic – include the obvious, the down-to-earth – that’s key! Reconvening, they read these out loud (an invaluable dimension to writing workshops), with the reassurance that it’s fine for their lists to be mostly functional and uninteresting – in fact, that’s part of the plan. Example:

‘The Desktop // It is brown./ You can see how it grew./ It has abrupt edges./ If you scratch it, it’ll cost you.‘

Then comes the switch. They cross out the title (the name of their chosen object) and replace it with one of the emotions/ abstracts brainstormed earlier. So you get results like this:

‘Jealousy // It is brown./ You can see how it grew./ It has abrupt edges./ If you scratch it, it’ll cost you.‘

… or these (from participants at the Dickens Museum):

‘Love has a downturned gaze./ Its mouth is hidden./ It catches the light.’ 

‘Death// It is High Victorian./ It is expensive./ It is very heavy./ It is, however, useful.’

The epiphany of that humble title change is wonderful to watch. It can spread through the room like a chuckle. With one swift stroke, all that patent or banal content is transmuted into a potential source of fascinating, strange, provoking, energised ideas. You’ll sometimes get a strong line or image, just like that (‘Death: I am a conjuror of ghosts‘). And all you did was to alter one word (or noun phrase): namely, the title!

I do my best to let the impact and miraculousness of that transformation really sink in. The mere feeling of it (or the memory of that feeling) can be a vital part of believing (sometimes much later) that you can write. So, I don’t let the activity move, too quickly, into discussions regarding how we might edit the piece, through a rearrangement of lines for better effect, and so on. Moreover, I used to be curious, as a facilitator, as to what their starting objects had been. Teachers and students usually are, that’s for sure. I now resist that temptation in myself – and try to help them to resist it too. For all the fun of finding out, wanting to know what the thing ‘really is’ can undermine the deeper purposes of the exercise. Answering the riddle, as it were, misses the point. What the activity actually (and more rewardingly) points to is a profound level of connection between all things, real and abstract. For that very reason, I often ask for participants to share anything in the transformed poem that they might describe as ‘rubbish’ (i.e., lines that are seemingly meaningless with the new title). These often turn out, in discussion, to be good junk. In fact, with a little imagination, what were thought ‘dud’ lines can become some of the most productive starting points for unusual new ideas. For example, the cryptic ‘Love// Has four tiny holes in it for cotton thread’ could develop (say) into a way of describing someone’s adoption of an orphan, which begins as something tricky and easily dropped, needing care, attentiveness and minute skill, where their boon is a beautiful (and useful?) addition to the garment of family life… though they might also draw their own blood in attempting the task.

Watch that Title!, as much as any exercise I’ve devised, highlights – with great immediacy – the importance of context and perspective in writing. It brings the Thoreau quote firmly back to mind, stimulating fresh ways of seeing, even for those who regard poetry and image-making as quite beyond them. It also imitates the action of metaphor, indeed enacts it, by enabling one thing to speak about another it isn’t normally related to. By building this process into the activity so that it all happens in plain view – and in a direct, appealing, often liberating way – a powerful pedagogic effect can be achieved. The focus on a physical artefact helps to keep the content mostly concrete and accessible, and the rapidity with which the process can be repeated makes it easy to ‘repair’ situations where the first stab has generated little of interest for a particular student. One can also spool in a large number of different effects extremely quickly. Several teachers thought that this exercise would be beneficial for students who struggle with the creative process. I’ve certainly found it to be a precious tool with those who feel blocked when it comes to writing a poem – well, I’ve yet to encounter anyone who can’t eventually generate a few simple statements about a familiar object! And the activity lends itself naturally to any museum space containing a good spread of artefacts. Even the most pragmatic item can generate excitement through this approach, thus adding creative value to the artefact stock.

My second example is launched via Dickens’s Dream (Figure 2), on view in the museum, depicting Dickens in reverie in his study at Gad’s Hill. Here, participants explore the house in a different way to Watch that Title! This time, they seek characters, snippets of biography, artefacts – anything physical or story-based that they feel is mysterious or in some way enticing. They then place that fragment or object in a dream or a surreal situation: i.e., they let it lead them into a short piece of dream-like writing. This could involve, overtly, as dreams often do, their own associations or memories. Stress that what they write doesn’t have to ‘make sense‘ (feedback on this exercise includes profound pleasure in being able to occupy a dream space where a special or invented language applies, and the delight and disencumbrance of not having to be logical). Once everyone has a starting idea, however rudimentary, regroup for discussion. Some will have generated images or scenes they feel they can follow up straightforwardly; others, however, might have found it a bit more tricky. One teacher, for instance, saw clearly a demented girl ‘in a white chiffon-y dress’ playing a piano with one finger. The image was hugely resonant and atmospheric for him, but he’d no idea where to take it. He was ‘really stuck’ – just the kind of thing a (school) student might say.

Instead of seeing this kind of outcome as a problem, I view it as an essential opportunity – one that needs to be allowed in the exercise, if not subtly engineered. These activities are about process, and getting stuck and unstuck is a key element of writing process. In my opinion, we do a disservice to students by always avoiding ‘stuckedness’ in favour of well-lubricated exercises that present no obstacle in class but leave them unable to get past any block unassisted. Instead, it’s helpful – and often empowering – for students to witness a problem being overcome in real time. Even when the entire ‘ideas flock’ of a class seems grounded, if one snagged notion can be helped to get visibly airborne, the rest often seem to follow. Admittedly, this does require of the facilitator a little trust, experience and nerve. In the above situation, we helped the teacher (and ourselves) to develop his piano image via a series of questions. Does the girl have siblings? Is she an orphan? Who else lives in the house? Who does the piano belong to (not in fact, but in imagination)? What tune is she trying to play, and why? It quickly became apparent to the teacher (and everyone else present) how one could easily flesh out a striking initial scene, using simple questions, into a far more extended piece for the opening of a story, novel or play. Whenever class members encounter blocks of this kind, I encourage the students themselves to chip in with suitable questions, generating a lovely group dynamic that usually clarifies the ‘stuck’ situation, helping the young writer at its core to move it along.

Dickens’s Dream might be seen as occupying the other end of the spectrum of difficulty to Watch that Title! Some students do find it a little demanding to begin with; but, as we’ve just seen, there are ways to assist them in developing the initial stimulus (even a seemingly strange or isolated idea) into a more substantial beginning. There’s plenty of scope, too, for follow-up discussions, including a more general assessment of the qualities and possibilities of surrealism and dream (where else, for example, can you converse with the dead?). Most important of all, however, is how this activity encourages students (and, indeed, teachers) to pluck up the courage to set off for the unknown via a prompt, or priming image, that they haven’t yet fully grasped, rather than an easier destination already clearly mapped out for them. And if that doesn’t reflect one of the deepest, richest aspects of teaching practice – let alone of writing experience and process – I really don’t know what does.
 
‘Everything you can imagine is real’  Picasso

3200 words

[See web page for figures]
Figure 1:  The Charles Dickens Museum

Figure 2:  Dickens’s Dream   Robert W. Buss (1875)  [unfinished painting]   (by kind permission)

Figure 3:  Creative Writing Resource, as delivered

Figure 4:  Writing activities: work in progress!

Figure 5:  Mario Petrucci  credit: Kathryn Faulkner

Published in ‘Writing in Education’ #54 (NAWE, 2011)