Street View – A Creative Writing Workshop and Walk

On Saturday 24 October I’ll be leading a creative writing workshop as part of Sheffield’s Off the Shelf Festival of Words. The first half of the event will be a leisurely stroll around Sheffield’s Cultural Industries Quarter, looking for the city’s hidden stories and foraging for words and images in these relatively quiet city streets. The second half will be a writing workshop where we’ll use the material gathered on the walk in a number of stimulating writing exercises.
But there are deeper connections between writing and walking than just gathering material. In Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit claims:
‘While walking, the body and mind can work together, so that thinking becomes almost a physical, rhythmic act’.
Many writers have been avid walkers and it seems there may be something about finding a rhythm in walking that aids the composition of verse. In 1861 Henry David Thoreau wrote an essay entitled ‘Walking’, ruminating on his passion and including this telling anecdote about Wordsworth’s habits:
‘When a traveler asked Wordsworth’s servant to show him her master’s study, she answered, “Here is his library, but his study is out of doors.”’
Other writers partial to epic rambles include French thinker Rousseau (author of Reveries of the Solitary Walker), Victorian art critic John Ruskin, Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Dickens and Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, who only took up his notebook and pen towards the end of the composition process, preferring to pace the streets and compose in his head, the only outer sign of composition being his moving lips.
The term ‘psychogeography’ (which brings together ‘psychology’ and ‘geography’) has been used in connection with a range of approaches to walking and writing, often focusing on a heightened awareness of urban surroundings and a consideration of the way one is affected by one’s environment. The term ‘psychogeographer’ has been applied retrospectively to writers such as William Blake and Thomas De Quincey, and more recently it has been associated with Iain Sinclair, Peter Ackroyd and OCA tutor and poet Matthew Clegg.
There’s a huge amount of literature about walking, dating back to Chaucer’s tales of pilgrims on their way to Canterbury and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Joshua Ferris’s The Unnamed. But for many writers, walking can be as much about covering inner terrain as it is about exploring the landscape around them. We are familiar with the idea of going for a walk to ‘clear one’s head’, and many writers recommend walking as a way of working through creative problems – giving your body something to do can allow the mind to wander and come up with unexpected ideas and connections. And I’ll be hoping for the unexpected on our walk and workshop in Sheffield next Saturday!
The Street View Writers’ Walk and Workshop takes place on Sat 24 October from 2-4pm, meeting in The Showroom Bar, Paternoster Row, which is just a few minutes’ walk from Sheffield railway station. The workshop is suitable for writers at all levels: beginners are especially welcome. If you’d like to join us, please go to the Off the Shelf website to book a place. Tickets are £8/£6. Remember to bring your notebook!
Image: Flickr (Creative Commons licence) and is Copyright © Photomiqs – Anders Eriksson.