Fi Phillips

This month's exercise is one I was set about two decades ago by the wonderful poet and my then writing instructor, Pat Borthwick . Thanks, Pat, for the inspiration. Choose a colour. Make a list of things that you associate with it it. For example, Red - lipstick, blood, silk. Blue - sky, air, calm. White - cloud, age, daisy. As you can see, these can be material things, feelings or concepts. List as many things as you can think of. Now, using your list, all or just some of what you have written, write a short passage. It can be a poem or prose, even dialogue. Here's my green passage: Calm. That's how I felt, breathing in the sweet scent of freshly cut grass, my bare feet damp with the newly released sap as I crossed the lawn. 

Yesterday I wrote an article on my family history blog called Hoarders Anonymous . It talks about how the habit of hoarding has become a negative concept but that to geneaologists, the hoarded clutter of a relative or family can provide a treasure trove of research clues and information. The collected clutter left to me by my parents sits under the stairs until I can free up a cupboard for it all. I've already filled one cupboard with photographs (note to self: must buy photograph albums and put these all in order) but I need more cupboard space for old family bibles, my parents' love letters and documentation that stretches back a number of generations. To this end, I started going through the cupboards in our study. What I found was an interesting mix of craft materials (mainly for the children), the aforementioned photographs, an over abundance of candles (bring on the power cuts - no, don't, please - I need my computer), a graveyard of old gadgets that my husband ha...

Write what you know. That phrase comes up time and time again in creative writing tutorials. For many years I dismissed this piece of advice, not through disrespect but because the story ideas I had required me to write about things I didn't know. I didn't know about living in a Tolkien-esque world. I didn't know about fighting in a battle. I certainly didn't know about grieving the death of a loved one. In my early twenties, I attended a writing class run by a very talented poet called Pat Borthwick . Pat placed great value on life experience and encouraged us to use our memories and every day lives to enrich our writing. Most of my class members were older than me and it seemed at the time that they had so much more 'life' to write from compared to my own twenty or so years. There was a wonderful American lady in her sixties or seventies who had lived in Burma for many years. If I remember rightly, her husband was a diplomat connected with the American Emb...