It was fantastic to be able to go into my local school, Bedlington Academy, on World Book Day. Lots of activities celebrating all things books were happening throughout the day, and I was tasked with working with a group of Y8 students who love creative writing. The brief was to let rip and have some fun with words. We had paper, card, pens, ideas, enthusiasm, and I had a plan. And it was just like Leonard Bernstein said: to achieve great things in life, two things are necessary: 1 a plan 2 not quite enough time. We had one hour, so the conditions were perfect. We’ll let you be the judge of how it went.
We used my poem Packing for the Future as inspiration. Here it is:
The students noticed straight away that the different characters in the poem have different ideas about what the future is going to be like; what they’re packing gives away their vision. They, too, had lots of ideas, including lots of worries. Everyone expected the future to be challenging and to have its difficulties, and lots thought it would probably be dangerous. And we were full of ideas about how we could ready ourselves for what’s coming.
Some people used lists, some diagrams. Some illustrated their work beautifully, some wrote poems – some even rhymed! One person wrote the start of what could be a really exciting story. Some people packed for practicality, some for comfort and wellbeing. Lots clearly have good survival knowledge!
Oddly we began by being pretty anxious about the future, but once we’d virtually packed our virtual bags we all felt better able to square up to whatever is heading our way.
We put our work into its own special bag – Bag to the Future – and made what might be the world’s first ever bag book (there are, of course, lots of book bags). This will live happily in school, ready to be picked up and carried whenever it’s needed.
Here is our work. Mine, of course, wasn’t written on the afternoon itself, but beforehand, so it’s a bit longer and more polished than some of the others. I did write it out again specially for the bag book, but I didn’t count on the ink from the pens bleeding through the card, which just goes to show you can’t prepare for everything! I haven’t re-done it, though. I like a palimpsest (one of my favourite words, it means a manuscript on which two or more successive texts have been written, each one being erased to make room for the next (Collins online dictionary) and this accident makes my poem nearly a sort-of palimpsest.
