Last Saturday was the first of five creative writing sessions at Cranmer House in Canterbury. I’d met a few of the residents before, but it’s always exciting going into somewhere to meet a new group of people.
The residents had previously been working towards building a
scarecrow for the Scarecrow trail at the Westgate Gardens, and they had created
one on the theme of ‘Hopping Mad’ about the hop picking that happened locally.
I decided it would be fun to link on to this for my first session with them.
We read poems about Hop Picking and also one written from a
scarecrow’s point of view. The group spent some time imagining what it would be
like to be a scarecrow and writing their own version of this poem. One writer
told us how he thought his scarecrow would want to go for a pint!
This segued nicely into us reading a wonderful poem called ‘Get
Drunk’ by Charles Baudelaire – after all, no workshop with the theme of ‘Hop
Tales’ would be complete without talking about beer. After hearing about
getting drunk, we wrote a group poem called ‘When I was naughty’ which had
residents telling tales about punching brothers, stealing apples and cheating
at exams!
All in all it was a great fun session full of recitations
from Mary, wonderful poetry reading from Joan, fantastic cake baked by Fay’s
mum and tea. What more could we ask for? I’m looking forward to the next one on
29 October on the theme of ‘Home’.
