COME WITH US ON A TWO-DAY JOURNEY TO... HOME

What does home mean? How does it feel? Where are we trying to get back to - or away from - through our characters, our memoir selves or our poetic voices? How do we revisit and recreate homes we have known or longed for? And how do we capture the deep feelings stirred up by the very idea of ‘home’?

DAY ONE

Morning session with Alison Chandler

Was it really like that?

We are torn between nostalgia for the familiar, and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known. Carson McCullers.

Ah, home. We know exactly what it means, don’t we? All those tastes and smells and memories… But is this actually nostalgia, based on a longing for something that is no longer there? The Welsh word ‘hiraeth’ encapsulates a yearning for home – but perhaps for an idea of home part-experienced, part-hoped for and part-imagined.

In our opening workshop we’ll interrogate what exactly we mean by ‘home’ and the part it plays in our writing, exploring pre- and post-industrial landscapes, empty buildings and the ghosts that inhabit them, and ideas of ‘regeneration’.

In the afternoon, Kiare will pick up the baton and help us shake answers from our morning questions, making the familiar strange so we can reassess it in our writing.

Afternoon session with Kiare Ladner

Home, strange home…

The more you love a memory, the stronger and the stranger it becomes.
Vladimir Nabokov

Home can be deeply familiar and yet filled with specific strangeness, whether thinking of it in a literal or more abstract sense, in an autobiographical or fictionalised manner.

In this session we will play with Shklovsky’s idea of “making the strange familiar and the familiar strange.” We will look at techniques to help make what is familiar feel fresh on the page. And we will also look at techniques to incorporate the uncanny in a believable way. You may explore this for yourself, or for a character from your own fiction, or you may play with introducing a strange element into a mundane setting. Using exercises, with reference to a few literary examples, you will be encouraged to bring together conscious and subconscious manifestations of how strange, whether darkly or delightfully, home can be.

DAY TWO

Morning session with Paul Lyalls

Why do we leave?

Home originates us, makes us, wakes us, shapes us, activates us, translates us, equates us, collates us, validates us, adulates us, negotiates us, rotates us, mix-tapes us, landscapes us, relates us, articulates us, irates us, agitates us, alienates us, breaks us, earthquakes us and finally escapes us. Once it was all that we need, once it grew us like seed. Once it was the very air that we breathe, so why do we leave? Paul Lyalls

Having turned ideas of ‘home’ upside down and inside out, in today’s session with Paul we’ll ask why we ever wanted to leave home in the first place if it’s so great…

What lures us away? Of course people want their own space, but why do so many of us want a new town, city, country? And when we get there is it what we thought it would be or something else entirely?

Afternoon session with Sita Brahmachari

Re-imagining belonging

The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned. Maya Angelou

For our final session, it’s time to re-imagine ‘home’ with Sita.

Home can be an imagined space, and for many people around the globe, it is just that… a space that exists somewhere between reality, memory and imagination. Sita’s father used to describe the state of being born in one land and building a home and family in another, as being constantly ‘suspended between worlds.’

In this session we will explore what this ache is for each of us and how we can capture a sense of it in our poetry, prose or autobiography.

For visual inspiration, Sita will draw on images from the world of Shaun Tan’s The Arrival (a graphic novel she scripted and co-created for theatre, 2013) that beautifully captures the ache and longing of leaving and arriving that focuses on the domestic and epic with equal weight.

Workshop exercises will also explore significant symbols, objects, colours and music in which we build creative homes as a way of coming home to ourselves. Together we will design moving and quirky dreaming rooms for ourselves or for our characters, doodling, mapping and daydreaming our way home!