Secondary English teacher and NWP South Downs group convener Theresa Gooda reflects on her writing journey from childhood to teacher.
Like many English teachers, I’d always enjoyed writing as a child, and I was a prolific and enthusiastic producer of texts. I kept a diary, wrote play scripts that were tortuously rehearsed with siblings, and probably even more tortuously watched by elderly relatives. I think the first thing I ever said I wanted to ‘be’ was an author.
Through adolescence I wrote terrible poetry, terribly earnestly. At university I wrote and reviewed for the student magazine, and achieved my first published pieces.
And then came the relentless business of surviving my PGCE. Only ‘academic’ writing for assignments happened that year. Even the diary writing stopped. And the first few years of teaching were so hard - there was no time to write anything other than lesson plans. All that writing stopped. And I didn’t even notice it had stopped.
Not only had I forgotten about writing for an audience, I’d stopped doing the more important thing – writing for me. I made students write all the time, but under what I now see were slightly ridiculous conditions - and I didn’t ‘share’ the writing process with them. Instead I imposed rigid frameworks and grids and mnemonics about writing.
What I’d forgotten about - because I wasn’t doing it - was the complexity of writing. I’d forgotten the way it pulled at me, and how it had helped me negotiate things about the world I hadn’t fully understood, even in the bad poetry. Perhaps especially in the bad poetry.
Because I wasn’t writing myself, my writing classroom was restricted to convention, rather than energised by insight and reflected experience.
And then, one Saturday morning, I wandered into a bit of free CPD at the British Library and all that changed. I’d never really heard of NWP., but the idea of a writing workshop had tugged at me.
The first little writing exercise that Simon Wrigley suggested was deceptively simple: a version of writing history that you can find in the Remembering area of the website. We were asked to write down five moments when the act of writing had felt important in some way.
We shared our lists with somebody nearby. I began talking to a teacher next to me that I’d never met before, and the hall erupted as people shared their writing moments - with wonder if my case. We paused again for more writing: this time to freewrite about one of those moments and tell its story, whatever delight or injustice or fear or sadness it provoked then and now.
What we found, certainly what I found, was that these moments all packed a pretty hefty emotional punch. There was some very raw writing, some things that I hadn’t thought about for years. Outrage at my mother looking through my diary. Letters to a first love. Shame at my early plagiarism. Pride in that published piece.
I noticed then that they were a long time in the past, all of them. And yet each retained an emotional punch that provided a timely reminder about the power of writing. A power that doesn’t lie in a framework or grid or mnemonic, but in the act of writing from the inside out. It was a lesson that I have never forgotten and one that I transferred immediately to my classroom, where I became like Keats’ spider, spinning ‘from his own inwards his own airy citadel’.