Calder Navigation

Clare Shaw

Today on Calder Navigation, we’re delighted to have acclaimed poet, Clare Shaw, with us.

Clare has been featured in numerous anthologies, has four collections published by Bloodaxe, has written and presented for BBC Radio 3 and 4, and they also lead workshops for Wordsworth Grassmere, the Royal Literary Fund, and the Arvon Foundation.

Beyond poetry, Clare is dedicated to using writing for social change, leading projects across the UK and engaging communities through creative initiatives.

Join us as we explore Clare’s inspiring journey, their belief in the revolutionary power of language, and their love of moss, slugs and snails! Clare also shares some wonderful practical tips on how to begin your poetry writing journey. Grab a pen and paper and join us.

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About Clare Shaw

Clare Shaw (they/them) has four poetry collections with Bloodaxe. Their latest collection Towards a General Theory of Love (2022) is a poetic interrogation of love and its absence: it won a Northern Writer’s Award, and was a Poetry Society Book of the Year 2022. Clare lectures at the University of Huddersfield, and is a regular tutor for Wordsworth Grasmere, the Royal Literary Fund and the Arvon Foundation.

Clare is widely published in anthologies, most recently Faber’s 100 Queer Poems (2022) and the National Trust’s Nature Poems (2023). They have written and presented for BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4, and they collaborate with artists and academics across multiple genres. In 2022, Clare wrote the libretto for the opera Daylighting which premiered at the Royal Academy for Music and was shortlisted for an Ivor Novello Award, 2022.

With a background in mental health and education, Clare is a keen advocate for writing as a tool of social and personal change, and as a National Project Lead for the Royal Literary Fund, they established writing projects in workplaces and communities across the UK.

Clare was the resident poet for Lancashire Wildlife Trust in 2021 and continues to use poetry to engage communities with wildlife and ecology. In collaboration with the novelist Winnie M Li, Clare was the recipient of a Royal Society of Literature Literature Matters Award, creating workshops and a free online resource for survivors of trauma, available via this link: http://clearlines.org.uk/our-free-creative-writing-guide-for-survivors-available-here/



Transcript

[00:00:02] – Samantha

Welcome back to Calder Navigation, where each episode serves as a compass guiding you through the vibrant tapestry of Calderdale. I’m Samantha McCormick, your host and artistic director of Curious Motion. I’m delighted to present Season 2 as part of our Culturedale Commission, celebrating Calderdale’s rich cultural heritage during the year of culture.

 

[00:00:24] – Samantha

In this season, we continue to champion the voices of our remarkable neighbours, celebrating their resilience, diversity, and the shared experiences that bind us together. From intimate conversations to profound revelations, each episode is an invitation to connect, reflect, and celebrate the human experience. Season 2 of Calder Navigation is not just a podcast. It’s a celebration of community, culture, and the enduring spirit of Calderdale. Join us as we delve into the heart and soul of our community, exploring the myriad of stories that shape our shared experience.

 

[00:01:07] – Samantha

Today, we’re delighted to have Clare Shaw with us. Clare is an acclaimed poet with four collections published by Bloodaxe, including the award-winning ‘Towards a General Theory of Love’ in 2022. They lecture at the University of Huddersfield and lead workshops for Wordsworth Grassmere, the Royal Literary Fund, and the Arvon Foundation. Clare’s has been featured in numerous anthologies, and they have written and presented for BBC Radio 3 and 4.

 

[00:01:36] – Samantha

Beyond poetry, Clare is dedicated to using writing for social change, leading projects across the UK and engaging communities through creative initiatives. Join us as we explore Clare’s inspiring journey and their belief in the revolutionary power of language.

 

[00:02:00] – Samantha

Welcome, Clare. Thank you very much for having a chat with me.

 

[00:02:05] – Clare

It’s a pleasure.

 

[00:02:06] – Samantha

So could you give us a little overview to get going with of your work and what led you to it?

 

[00:02:12] – Clare

Oh, it’s impossible for me to separate out all the different kinds of work that I do. So I am a writer, but I’m also a teacher, and that kind of feels like it’s just part of the same bundle. I primarily write poetry, so I’m just finishing off my fifth collection of poetry, but I also write other stuff as well. I write stories and articles and essays. When you’re writing poetry, it’s almost impossible to make a living out of selling poetry books, even if you’re really really famous and successful. They’re not like novels. You don’t make lots of money out of it. So most poets also have to make a living doing other stuff. And I make my living teaching poetry, poetry writing, creative writing. Before I became a full-time writer, I worked as a mental health trainer, and I still do a little bit of that work as well. And sometimes the work that I do kind of brings all of that stuff together. So writing poetry, supporting other people to write poetry, and doing stuff that’s about understanding mental health and kind of supporting mental wellbeing as well.

 

[00:03:28] – Samantha

Brilliant. Yeah, because I was I’m going to ask, mental health is a big theme across your work and is something when we were chatting before recording a little while ago, you were saying that you were really interested in that place where the arts and words and writing and creativity meets mental health. I just wondered if you could tell us a little bit more about that.

 

[00:03:51] – Clare

Well, I think initially that was born in my own life and my own needs. So I’ve really struggled with my mental health from childhood, really, and particularly as a young adult. But I continue to have to work very carefully at taking care of my mental health. And for me, writing has been a hugely important way of, I think, first of all, just expressing myself, like finding a language to express some of the things that I feel really deeply or some of the experiences that I’ve had that have felt really complicated. And creative writing feels like a really useful way of finding words for experiences and feelings that are hard to express otherwise. And I think that’s really important to me because until I could express them, I felt like I was on my own with them. And I think feeling on your own with difficult feelings and difficult experiences just makes them feel 10 times worse, 100 times worse. So that’s been the first thing that’s been really important about creative writing is being able to make connections with other people, but also to give me a way of understanding myself and give me a way of understanding the world around me, being able to find the words for what’s going on or how other people behave.

 

[00:05:32] – Clare

It doesn’t just help me to express myself to other people. It helps me to create a shape for the world that I can hold more comfortably. And also, you know, when I write, I just feel a bit happier, a bit more satisfied. If I spend 10, 20 minutes writing, at the end of it, there was a blank page, and at the end of it, there’s a page that’s full of words. And it feels like having made something. It’s not like knitting, it’s not like making something out of clay. But what you make with words on a page to me, feels like almost as much of an object as a vase or a jumper might feel to someone else.

 

[00:06:22] – Samantha

Yeah. There’s really something special about creating something from nothing in a way.

 

[00:06:28] – Clare

Yeah, exactly. I love that. I love that feeling when I’m working with other people and we’re working in a group, and I might set a little five minute exercise, and we all set to-, I always write with people. And there’s maybe 15 people in the room, and within five minutes, there’s 15 little poems or 15 little stories. And there weren’t five minutes before. And it feels like being present at a nest full of chicks hatching or something. You know, and who cares if they come to nothing? Who cares if you don’t publish them in a book or kind of develop them into plays or novels or something grand? It’s like you’ve made something. And I just-, you know, even thinking about that makes me smile because it feels like a little light switching on.

 

[00:07:20] – Samantha

Yeah, I love that. And I love how you said who cares if you don’t do anything grandiose with it. It’s so important that I think a lot of the time in the arts, particularly, we see, say the general public, we see the end result a lot, don’t we? And that is wonderful. But the process that we’ve gone on to get to that point is, in my opinion, sometimes more important.

 

[00:07:47] – Clare

Oh, my God, definitely.

 

[00:07:48] – Samantha

Not to diminish at all that end performance or sharing or publishing or whatever it is. But there is so much going on just in the moment, just in those five minutes of writing those words.

 

[00:07:59] – Clare

It brings to mind, I think, the most beautiful-, oh, God, I’ve had so many beautiful experiences of that. But I’m thinking of the Writers Refuge Group. We were writing in the Lake District, courtesy of a lovely group of Quakers. And we were all set out in the sun in the gardens of this beautiful place in the Lakes. And we’d all written, you know, again, just very simple simply for 5, 10 minutes, and we were reading our work out. And there was people from all around the world sharing these experiences about their childhoods. And I can still kind of see the number of stories and images that conjured up. And there was people talking about growing up in England. There was people talking about growing up in Botswana or Somalia. And it just felt like what else could have conjured up this experience so beautifully and quickly and in such a held and gentle way, you know, enabling people to talk about what their lives were and what they hope for them to be.

 

[00:09:20] – Clare

And although I work very, very hard at my writing, and I’m just about to finish off my fifth book, that’s all that I’m aiming at, really, is that experience of going, this is how I see the world, this is the stories that I’ve lived or the stories that I imagine, and I want to share them with you, and I hope that you like them. So when you’re together doing that with people in a room, you get it immediately. When you’re publishing it in a book, you have to work really hard to make it work.

 

[00:09:55] – Samantha

Yeah, and I suppose you’re not going to witness it when your book is out there, you just-, yeah, I suppose you will in some ways, but not in that immediate way.

 

[00:10:03] – Clare

Yeah, it’s lovely when you hear back from people, and I do-, I’m one of the poets who does really love to read and share work because that’s kind of the point. I do write to share with other people. That’s not the point for every writer, but it is the point for me.

 

[00:10:23] – Samantha

And how about landscape? I know that-, I mean, obviously, being in Calderdale, we have this beautiful, gorgeous natural environment that we can draw lots of things from. But I know landscape alongside everything you’ve just said is another key thread. How does that feature?

 

[00:10:42] – Clare

Oh, my God. It’s almost everything. So I grew up in Burnley and I lived in Liverpool for 10 years, and then I moved to the Calder Valley, which was always a place that I loved to visit when I was growing up in Burnley. And yeah, place is a really big feature in my writing, whether it’s Burnley or Liverpool or here. And I deliberately live up on the hills above Hebden Bridge because I’m just mad about the moors. And I’ve been mad about the moors since I was a little kid. But as I get older, and I’m 51 now, I think that that mad passion that I had for the moors and for Pendle and for wild hilly places just gets more and more grounded, and it gets deeper and deeper. So it’s grounded in more and more knowledge, and I guess grounded in more and more action or activism, if you like.

 

[00:11:48] – Clare

The reason that I love place and landscape in writing is because, particularly living in the UK, there’s very few landscapes that aren’t-, I don’t think there’s any landscapes that aren’t shaped by humans. And we love human traces in the landscapes. Our moors are completely human created. They were created several thousand years ago when we chopped down the tree And I could talk for hours about that.

 

[00:12:19] – Clare

So I love that the landscape speaks to us about that meeting place between nature and geology and history and us and our predecessors and who we are now and who we’re going to be. It all comes to life in place. It all comes to life in the shape of a hill or what a wall looks like. And I love the way, you know, I love expressions like more than human, or to talk about creatures, or to talk about wildlife. I love the way that they are so other. They’re just a place where our imagination can go absolutely bonkers, but they’re also a place where we can learn so much about what it is to be alive, and we can learn so much about how we might be alive.

 

[00:13:14] – Clare

So for example, you know, I talked about having lots of mental health struggles. I spent most of my 20s in psychiatric hospital in Liverpool, which was not fun. Up here in the Calder Valley, I’m just plucking out of the air, I work very hard at the moment on restoring a little woodland which has been completely trashed. And I love the way that when we restore nature, we restore ourselves. And there’s just these perfect echoes in what goes on outside of us in the landscape and what goes on inside of us. The way that moss works, I’m mad about moss, the way that moss invites us to look really, really closely, you know, wherever we are, even if we’re in the middle of a big concrete city landscape, there’s always moss, there’s always lichen, there’s always wildlife that you can see. And when you look at things at the micro level and when you look at things at a macro level, there’s always stories, and there’s always a resonance for ourselves within those stories. Yeah, I’ll stop speaking because I’m so passionate about this. I could talk for hours.

 

[00:14:25] – Samantha

Oh, I don’t mind. It’s really beautiful and how interconnected everything is. But what you said about being alive, I think that’s the bit that really personally resonates with me about what it means to be alive, what it is to be alive, and living a life where you can feel like you’re alive. Yeah, it’s really-, it’s hard to put into words that, isn’t it? Because that’s a big thing and quite personal for every person. But I can see where you’re coming from in that sense of the landscape and place can give us, and we can connect with it, and it can give us that kind of deeper understanding or experience of what that is.

 

[00:15:12] – Clare

And it’s easy to-, I live here now. I’m very privileged to look out onto the moors. But wherever we are, we haven’t always lived in beautiful places, wherever we are, there’s ground beneath our feet, there’s sky above our heads, there’s creepy crawlies, there’s these overlooked and undervalued creatures like slugs and snails. Slugs are so fascinating creatures that survive by making themselves disgusting. That’s absolutely fascinating. And if you look at them under a torch and see their little eyes and their little mouths, there is always something to look at, and there’s always something to wonder at. And I’ve had a number of bereavements this year, and it’s been a very tough year. And I’ve had friends who I love very much who were-, I’m thinking about one particular poet, Kathryn Bevis, who writes so beautifully about place and nature and talking to her while she was in the hospice and the world was still available to her there. All that we need is bird song or the ability to look at a fern or-, it’s always there. And that, to me, is so incredibly comforting. It’s always there.

 

[00:16:44] – Samantha

Yeah, it really is.

 

[00:16:46] – Clare

But having said that, you know, we can’t take it for granted. I live on the moors, and I’m fighting really hard at the moment to protect the moors, their big proposal to build an immense wind farm. Obviously, I’m not daft. I support renewable energy, but the peat bogs of these moors is not the right place. It’s completely counterproductive to locate them here. Without going on a big political rant, what I’m working very hard to do at the moment is using art and literature just to help people to understand that the moors of the Calder Valley are this incredibly precious resource. It’s really easy, and I know because I’ve done it, just to drive through them or get the bus through or the train through and think they’re like wasteland, these big bleak flat lands. But they’re the UK’s Amazon rainforest. They’re our carbon store. And if you get down on your hands and knees on a moor or on a bog, and you just look closely, you don’t have to move. There’s a whole forest of life waiting for you there. And I think that art can be such a brilliant place for inviting people just to stop and look a little bit more closely, not to travel through.

 

[00:18:09] – Samantha

Definitely. Avoid those kind of everyday assumptions we all make. All of us do it because we’re busy or we live in a world that does draw us away from a lot of that, doesn’t it? But I love what you just said there about you don’t even have to go anywhere. That one spot will show you. It’s not this huge expedition, it’s this-, any spot, anywhere.

 

[00:18:32] – Clare

Where you’re sat right now, you can find-, I remember even being on a hospital ward where you actually don’t have any windows and you can’t see out, but there’s still pictures. And the reason that we surround ourselves with pictures of wildlife is because that is where we find ourselves. Even on Arndale centres, they’ll be like plastic grass and plastic flowers. That’s because it is so important to us, you know, it goes right to the core of us, and it is always there. And really easy to get distracted. Everybody knows that. Your phones are fascinating. Telly’s-, I love telly. I love my phone. I’m always on it. And there’s so much more attention grabbing. But that’s what I love about the landscape round us is it just says, just work a little bit harder, just look a little bit closer, and it is all right there all the time.

 

[00:19:29] – Samantha

Yeah. Wow. So what does it mean for you to be able to use your skills as a writer and a poet to help all of us connect with that and the other things you’ve spoken about? What does that feel like? And kind of in an ideal world? What are your hopes for it, I suppose, is what I’m asking.

 

[00:19:54] – Clare

Oh, God, that’s a really big question.

 

[00:19:57] – Samantha

Yes.

 

[00:20:00] – Clare

Because it kind of goes to the core of who you are as a person, isn’t it, and why you’re doing what you doing and why you are as you are.

 

[00:20:06] – Samantha

Yeah, I think particularly a lot in the arts, and obviously I’m in the arts, so I can only really speak from that experience. But a lot of us are in there because it is part of deeply who we are. Yeah.

 

[00:20:17] – Clare

You know, I’ve lived for decades with psychiatric diagnosis, and more recently, I’ve come to the diagnosis of ADHD, and that’s helped me to make sense of some of who I am. And within that, I’ve heard a lot of people talk about having a strong sense of social justice. Now, whether that’s to do with my neurology or whether that’s to do with the fact that I grew up with a lot of unfairness. You know, I was treated unfairly by people at home and strangers. And I know how damaging an impact that can have on a person. I’m 51 now and I still live-, I still have profound difficulties with life that are based in some of the very traumatic experiences I had as a child. And it’s very hard for me to conceive of not wanting to fix that. I want to make it better.

 

[00:21:19] – Clare

Maybe I’m partly doing that for me and to make it better for the kid that I was. But it makes it-, living in a world where unfair things still happen to people, and still could happen to me, I think would feel awful if I wasn’t doing something to make things fairer. It just feels like a really basic, sensible thing to do. I can’t imagine not doing it. So it’s something about responding to the negative, so trying to make things fairer when they’re not fair for lots of reasons, of trauma, abuse, racism, homophobia, poverty, all of those injustices, environmental degradation. I can do something about this. I actually really can do something, but also because it brings me joy.

 

[00:22:16] – Clare

I just feel better when I’m working with-, and I often do work with groups of people who I share some of those experiences with them of feeling very marginalised or having experienced trauma or just having gone through rough times. And I can’t cook very well. I’m not a builder. I don’t do plumbing. I don’t know how to knit, but I can write, and I can show people how to write. I believe that teaching is an art in itself, and I can immediately see the light in people’s faces burning brighter, and that makes me really happy. It just makes me happy, so I want to do it.

 

[00:23:09] – Samantha

Yeah. And it’s great to just be like, this makes me really happy, and it’s making a difference and embracing that.

 

[00:23:18] – Clare

It’s brilliant, isn’t it?

 

[00:23:19] – Samantha

Yeah, it is brilliant.

 

[00:23:22] – Clare

And also because there’s a bit of my head that just loves logic and structure. And I love the way that writing can help provide that. So, you know, a lot of the work that I do is very creative. But I also-, you know, I worked for a number of years in Huddersfield, working with people around functional writing skills, like how to write reports or emails or essays and case studies. I still do a little bit of that. And there’s this immediate reward. I was never taught, this is what a sentence is, or this is how you, I don’t know, use semicolons or-, and when you can explain that to people in really simple terms, and again, you see that little light go on, it just feels like, I can’t fix poverty. There’s a limit to what I can do to make things better, but I just watched somebody understand for the first time how to use apostrophes. It’s a flipping brilliant feeling. It really is.

 

[00:24:28] – Samantha

Yeah. I love that. And the joy comes from all of those things. It’s not about hierarchies of achievement or anything like that, is it? It’s just about that real support for another person.

 

[00:24:43] – Clare

Yeah, yeah, and also just that satisfaction of, although it’s only words on a page, seeing the words on a page kind of do the best that they can. It’s a satisfying experience. And I think any, you know any craftsperson, again, back to knitting, which I am hopeless at, a great knitter will probably understand exactly what I mean when they can fix where somebody else has not been able to cast off right, and they’ve managed to fix it for them. It’s just satisfying to mend stuff and improve stuff and polish stuff. I like it.

 

[00:25:25] – Samantha

Yeah, I think it connects us all, that sort of feeling of supporting another person or having somebody help you. There’s something really important in that.

 

[00:25:34] – Clare

And it’s about the fact that, you know, in writing, there’s so many stages of the process, and it can look like, you know, there’s just words on a page. It’s all the same thing. You write. But actually, you know, particularly with creative writing, there’s, I don’t know, I’ll conjure up a figure. You know, there’s five or six stages because you’ve got that initial kind of splurge where you just get it down on the page, and then you’ve got the next stage where you kind of go, Is it any good? Is there anything I can do with this?

 

[00:26:03] – Clare

And then you’re sort of moulding it, a bit like a sculptor might start to kind of try and find the shape of something. And then the next stage is like, trimming it down. And then the next stage is showing it to other people and going, is it any good? And then the next stage is working on that feedback. And then the final stage is the final polish of shifting this word and this punctuation mark. And I like all of those stages because some of them are really creative, and they can even be a bit painful. You know, if you’re writing about a painful experience, you have to push into those painful feelings sometimes. You’re under no obligation to hurt yourself in writing, but sometimes it feels good to do that. But right up to that very final stage where you’re purely just using your intellect and your knowledge of what’s a noun, where the full stops go, all of those stages feel kind of satisfying to me. It’s like cooking. It has a million stages, doesn’t it? It doesn’t all happen in one big blast.

 

[00:27:07] – Samantha

Yeah. And I imagine you learn something every time you do them as well, because every single process is different, isn’t it? You never repeat the same.

 

[00:27:16] – Clare

Yeah, you hope to. You hope to. And it’ll be the same with dance for you, won’t it? I feel like every now and again, I go, God, I really need to mix this up. I’m a bit bored with what I’m doing now.

 

[00:27:27] – Samantha

Yeah, of course.

 

[00:27:28] – Clare

And at the moment, I’m hugely excited by poetry that uses lots of different shapes and lots of different forms. I used to think that form in poetry meant you’re either writing a sonnet or a limerick or a villanelle or any of these kind of forms that were invented hundreds of years ago. But now I think form is everything. So it might be if you’re writing a poem about a swan, you write in the shape of a swan. But it might also be that if you’re writing a poem about a swan, you write it with a swan’s feather, or you write with words that sound like the motion of a swan as it glides across the water, or you might go, actually, a swan lives in water, so I’m going to write my poem on shiny silver paper to emulate water or-, so I really, in recent years, I’ve moved a lot more to-, we can really mix it up with poetry. It doesn’t just have to be writing words on a page in little blocks. We can do all sorts of stuff with poetry that is dead exciting, that uses colour and shape and movement, as well as paper and a pen. We don’t have to limit ourselves.

 

[00:28:48] – Samantha

Yeah, that’s such a good reminder because it’s very easy to limit yourself with what we’ve been told, what we’ve seen before, what’s kind of-, all the boxes that we can put things in, all of that stuff. And it’s quite liberating to be like, actually, hang on a minute. Don’t have to do that.

 

[00:29:04] – Clare

Can do anything. I’ve got a mate who makes zines. She’s a brilliant zine maker. And the more we chat, the more we go-, and the zines are like little handmade books that-, anybody can make zines, and you use pictures, and you can use pullouts, and you can-, you can do anything with the zine. It really is a very free form. And the more we talk, the more we learn from each other that we’re both basically doing the same thing. And I think that’s true of a lot of art at its core. We’re doing the same thing. They’re like a tree trunk. You know, at the furthest reach, the branches are a long way from each other. But where they started off is, you know, it’s the same root, it’s the same source. And dancers and poets are doing the same thing at its root, and we can still learn from each other about what we’re doing.

 

[00:30:06] – Samantha

Yeah, that’s so true. It’s what you said right at the beginning about how your writing helps you make sense of yourself, really. I think all of the arts is there to do that for us, but also for all of us as humans to try and make sense of what it is to be a human, which is a very complex and never-ending kind of thing, isn’t it?

 

[00:30:29] – Clare

It is. It’s very complex and it’s never-ending, but it’s also really simple, and it’s here and now at the same time. There’s a beautiful poem, I sound like I’m obsessed with slugs and snails, which is probably about right. It’s a beautiful poem by a woman called Aracelis Girmay, and it’s about a little snail, and it’s a tiny poem. I mean, God, I think it’s about 10 words, and it just ends with, “I lived here. Thank you.” And she’s kind of making the point that-, I think it’s that, I may have misquoted, that the snail’s trail is its way of saying, I lived here once.

 

[00:31:16] – Samantha

Yeah.

 

[00:31:17] – Clare

Thank you. And you know, ultimately, a lot of our writing is just doing that. This is who I am. This is who I am today. That’s all.

 

[00:31:28] – Samantha

That’s it.

 

[00:31:28] – Clare

That’s all it has to be. And that can be as complex as we want it to be or just as simple and beautiful as we want it to be. This is all I am. And actually, I think when people are reassured of that when they’re writing, if you look out of the window right now and go, you know, what can I see? I’m looking out at my landscape, and anybody who’s listening can do that right now. Look out of a window if you’ve got one, or imagine a window if you haven’t. What can I see? I can see clouds, I can see sky, I can see green trees, I can see high kind of dry yellow grass, I can see a big hedge.

 

[00:32:08] – Clare

And you could do something really simple, like, I am. I am the big blue sky. I am the enormous white clouds. I’m a green tree. I’m dry grass. I’m the long road going over the moors. And you begin to find a resonance for yourself in that. And again, you can flipping analyse those as much as you want. What is the metaphor of the road going over the moors? You know, that is my lonely soul and my search for-, or you can go, yeah, I’m the big blue sky. I’m happy. That’s who I am right now. Or I’m a dark cloud. Yeah, maybe I am sad right now. So yeah, simple and complicated at the same time.

 

[00:32:48] – Samantha

I really like that because I think for anybody, including myself, actually, I haven’t done a lot of writing in a creative way, particularly. And you can get bogged down in the kind of-, oh, I’ve got to go into this really deep, when actually, just like you said, you don’t have to, and that’s just as brilliant.

 

[00:33:10] – Clare

Do you know what? You could just start right now. And some of the techniques that you use in mental health for grounding yourself, like, when I use the word I suffer, it sounds a bit cliché, but I think anxiety is suffering. I have really high levels of anxiety. So you know, I do use techniques like grounding with variable success. And five things that I can hear, four things that I can see, three things that I can feel, two things that I can taste, one thing that I can smell. Those things that we might do for grounding are also brilliant writing exercises.

 

[00:33:46] – Samantha

Yeah, great tip.

 

[00:33:47] – Clare

And you can do it for two minutes, two minutes. And when you’ve written down five things that I can hear, four things that I-, you have these beautiful things on your page, and that’s all that writing is. It’s just noticing what’s going on outside you. It’s noticing what’s going on inside you, and it’s writing it down. And then you can do that clever tricks like write, I am, at the start of it. And you’ll suddenly find that you’re creating a landscape poem. Bob’s your uncle.

 

[00:34:18] – Samantha

Amazing. I’m going to do that. I love that.

 

[00:34:21] – Clare

Seriously, try it.

 

[00:34:22] – Samantha

Yeah, I will.

 

[00:34:22] – Clare

Seriously, it’s two minutes.

 

[00:34:24] – Samantha

Brilliant.

 

[00:34:25] – Clare

You can do that. Or here’s another one that you could try. Write down a list of favourites. So write down your favourite place. Write down your favourite journey. Write down-, like, my favourite journey is driving to the lakes. I always smile when I see the mountains. My favourite place is probably Loughrigg Tarn at the moment near Ambleside. You know, I think straight away of the reeds, and I think of swimming in it. Write down your favourite time of the day. I really love either last thing at night. I was out looking at the stars last night, hoping to see a shooting star, and the wind was all warm, and it was just me up on the hill looking up at the sky. Write down your favourite food. I love cheesy chips. Just write down a list of favourites, maybe favourite song, piece of music, maybe favourite colour. Brilliant. Everybody likes writing about their favourites. I love hearing about people’s favourites. It’s one of my favourite things to do.

 

[00:35:28] – Clare

And then you can turn that in a love poem because you can just write, You are at the start of all of those things. So I go, you are Loughrigg Tarn, you are the reeds, you are the time I swam there with my mother, you’re the light on the water, you’re the swans swimming, you are the colour green. You know, you make me think of spring. You are-,

 

[00:35:48] – Samantha

Yeah, wow.

 

[00:35:49] – Clare

It’s as easy as that. Don’t tell anyone because we need to make people think that writing poetry is really difficult.

 

[00:35:57] – Samantha

Yes, we do.

 

[00:35:58] – Clare

Otherwise, I won’t have a job. People will be like, We don’t need teachers. But it is. It’s really simple. You can write about stuff that hurts. Often people want to write about when they lost someone or they had a bereavement. But also writing can make you feel brilliant. If you write down things that you’re grateful for, if you write down your favourites, if you write down happy memories, it can leave you feeling uplifted and comforted at times when you really need it.

 

[00:36:29] – Samantha

Yeah, that’s wonderful. Oh, wow. Thanks, Clare. I’ve got loads of things I’m just going to do for myself now. That was amazing. And I think people listening will find that really insightful and useful, particularly if they’re like me and don’t have a lot of experience in writing.

 

[00:36:45] – Clare

Yeah. And yet you write every single day.

 

[00:36:48] – Samantha

Well, yeah, true.

 

[00:36:49] – Clare

Most of us do, don’t we?

 

[00:36:50] – Samantha

Most of us do. You’re right.

 

[00:36:51] – Clare

And you go, I can’t write. You flaming well can, I’ve just seen you.

 

[00:36:56] – Samantha

You just literally did it.

 

[00:36:58] – Clare

Exactly. You’re writing to me about the fact you can’t write.

 

[00:37:03] – Samantha

You can’t write.

 

[00:37:03] – Clare

It doesn’t make sense. And even if you do struggle for whatever reason to write words on a page, you can dictate into a phone, and it turns it into words. I do that loads. And actually, if that’s the way that you write, it can give a lovely sort of conversational kind of fluidity to your words. It can actually sometimes be nicer when you dictate your words than when you actually write them down. So don’t be scared of doing that either.

 

[00:37:33] – Samantha

Great. Great tips. Thank you. Thank you so much, Clare. It’s been amazing. And thank you for giving us some things we can do that are accessible and exciting and-,

 

[00:37:45] – Clare

Oh, it’s a pleasure. It really is.

 

[00:37:47] – Samantha

Reminding us that these things can-, we can choose how we do these things. The options are endless, really, aren’t they? 

 

[00:37:55] – Clare

Two minutes, five minutes. You feel good afterwards.

 

[00:37:58] – Samantha

Brilliant. I’ll be getting out on a moor at some point definitely, too.

 

[00:38:02] – Clare

Oh, yeah. And if you can’t get out on the moor, you know, just look around. A bit of moss, a bit of lichen. Just look closely. Look up and look bigly.

 

[00:38:12] – Samantha

Love that. Thank you so much.

 

[00:38:15] – Clare

It’s a pleasure. An absolute pleasure. I’ve loved it. Thank you.

 

[00:38:18] – Samantha

Oh, thank you.

 

[00:38:19] – Samantha

It’s time to wrap up another episode of Calder Navigation. And as we do, we want to express our gratitude for joining us on this journey through Calderdale stories. We hope these conversations have moved you and reminded you of the power of human connection.

 

[00:38:38] – Samantha

Calder Navigation is part of the Welland Activator Project, aimed at combating loneliness in Elland and Calderdale. A massive thank you to our funders, Calderdale Council, Culturedale, and Reaching Communities from the National Lottery Community Fund, empowering us to continue our mission of fostering connection and combating loneliness through projects like the Welland Activator. A big thank you to Untold Creative for production support, too. Remember to subscribe to Calder Navigation on your podcast app, share it with others, and please leave us a review. Keep exploring and connecting. Until next time.

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