Enchanted Utterances by Julie Ward

We are a small but eclectic group of writers and storytellers with a curiosity about how we might apply our practice to working with people with learning difficulties. I have been asked to lead the group which places me in the position of ‘the expert’, but I need to be honest here and say that I never feel that I know everything there is to know. Rather I have been privileged in the past to have had experiences which have led me to trust my intuition and sense of playfulness, experiences which appealed to my belief in equality of opportunity for everyone no matter what their ability/disability.

I begin the session by making a group poem. Today, His Holiness, the Pope, is here to address the masses! I am worried that the controversy of his visit will queer my pitch, will affect the process of our collective poem-making. In the end, I decide to go for it with no holds barred, using the statement ‘He’s coming!’ as a starting point, because, I reason, this is what I would do if I was working with any client group.

As expected, the theme provokes a lot of powerful feelings. The poem is full of questions and exclamations but it is also full of contradictions, misunderstandings and inspirational misspellings which could take us in more interesting directions if we so wished! We spend a lot of time deconstructing the process. I explain that everyone comes into a group setting with the concerns of the moment, no matter who they are, so getting this stuff out into the open and down onto paper at the beginning of the session can clear the way for other work as well as offering possibilities for unexpected future developments. I try to explain how a collection of random statements on a flip chart might be edited into a more crafted work through discussion, pointing out unconscious literary gifts such as alliteration, imagery, metaphor, repetition and stylistic ‘accidents’. We develop a few of these ‘gifts’ consciously together as I want my processes to be transparent, useful and transferable for the participants.

In my second exercise I want the group simply to concentrate on the process of utterance, how words are formed and given life through breath. I ask everyone to focus on their breathing and in turn to make a sound or word as they exhale. This is writing and participation stripped down to its barest bones. The exercise is designed to make us all aware of our own and each other’s aliveness and how sounds/words can be offered up to the group as literary content. To be a writer is to be enchanted with words, the sound of them as well as the shape of them on the page and the sense that they might make when strung together.

Next I ask people to think about food, a theme which is often important for the client group, either because they have little control over this area of their lives or because, like the rest of us, they have strong likes and dislikes. Next to breathing, eating is one of the most important bodily functions we have and it begins to connect with other areas of our lives, with our growing up, our cultural and family traditions, our institutions and most importantly our emotions. I give out paper plates and ask people to imagine what meal they would be if they were not a person but food instead. We write these on the paper plates and I keep them for later.

It is time for an exercise in pairs. I ask each pair to find a quiet, comfortable space in the building and to take turns observing the other doing absolutely nothing for a short period of time. I ask that each observer write down everything that happens during this process. We regroup and read out the observations. They are, as I expected, exquisite homages to each individual, peppered with reflective references that the process itself has provoked. Of course, even the most still and immobile amongst us has made their individual presence felt through the smallest things; their breathing, eye movements, involuntary sounds, restlessness; their thoughts and feelings finding expression in their facial muscles and so on.

I explain how I used this kind of intense and detailed patient practice when working with children with profound disabilities during my residency with the Children’s Services Department of Hull and East Riding NHS PCT almost a decade ago. Confronted with a set of twins who had been rendered almost immobile by a series of multiple strokes I did not know what to do other than try to get to know them through proximity and close observation. Once I overcame my fear of the medical setting and my own sense of inadequacy I got to know the teenagers well enough to write about them, using my observations to give them a humanity that medicalisation could not. My sequences of poems were later shown to the mother who affirmed my observations as correct interpretations of her boys’ personalities. She was moved to tears that a complete outsider could still see the real people behind the condition. At the time I felt as if I was taking a huge professional risk, an arrogant leap in the dark, but my intuition paid off. I advise my participants and you, the reader, to trust your instincts as I did.

All day I am trying to manage the dynamics in the room by alternating group work with individual and paired work. I now suggest a visual art activity which I would normally do with painting materials but today I have brought pastels to use instead. We choose two emotions, happiness and anger, and agree to limit the colours we use for each. Then we simply make random marks on two sheets of paper in response to the chosen emotion. When we have finished we gather round each artwork and talk about what we can see in the coloured markings. Powerful images have emerged and I explain how this can be a starting point for writing with the client group and give an example of a project I did which progressed from painting colours to song-writing and recording.

I want to do an activity about clothes and although I have brought a few odd items of clothing with me I opt in the end to use empty clothes’ hangers, asking participants to respond to the words, “At the stroke of midnight I shall be wearing...” The results are wonderful – witty, moving, eccentric, revealing, fantastical and completely compelling. Clothes are another enduring human.

Next we do a quick activity on the theme of ‘gifts’ using fancy party bags and pretty packaging I have brought. Each participant is asked to think of a person they would like to give a gift to and to write about this, putting their words in an appropriate gift bag. The participants have become more and more revealing of themselves and their world throughout the day and this continues into the final activity where I ask everyone to gather around a table on which I have set out a paper tablecloth and plastic champagne glasses. The paper plates are here too, adding to the sense of accumulated creative industry. I ask everyone to respond to the phrase, “I am sitting at the table because...” and, as I hoped, the participants begin feverishly scrawling all over the tablecloth and inscribing the plastic glasses with ‘Sharpie’ pens. They write from a range of perspectives, professional, personal, real and imagined. It is a suitably eclectic and celebratory end to the day.

Julie Ward is a drama worker, writer, editor, storyteller, performer, director, workshop facilitator, trainer and event animateur. She is the founder/director of Jack Drum Arts, a workers co-operative based in County Durham since 1986. Her first professional job as a writer was a Yorkshire Arts funded residency at the Swarthmore Education Centre in Leeds in 1987, working with people with learning disabilities. More recently she has been a writer in residence for the National Year of Reading in Sunderland, for the Children’s Services of Hull and East Riding Health Authority and for Good for the Soul.