Running Up That Hill

As part of our Employability programme, we offer travelling scholarships to our award holders to enable them to see the world and build their skills and CVs.  This autumn two scholars attended the ‘Haven for Stories’ writers’ retreat in Umbria.  Here, one of them, Tim Kerr reflects on what he discovered.

The sun shone brightly on our final day in Umbria, piercing the Ryanair windows on the Saturday morning flight. It had rained most of the week of course, but I still squeezed in runs up and down the deserted Umbrian paths, looking over valleys bathed in mist and fog, occasional castle brick or terracotta roof poking through. The roaring wood fires and dark espressos on my return to Villa Pia would warm me back up, but the mist on the landscape would remain, symbolic of my state of writing.

I used to write more, in times where my experiences seemed more relevant, with something new to be unearthed by the process. I wrote when I was in prison. I wrote when I was released from prison. I wrote traipsing between the probation office and the DWP. Then, later on, as life settled, writing took a backseat to increasing work and further study. But like backseat drivers do, it nagged, and prompted me to apply to go on this writing retreat advertised in the Longford Trust’s Bulletin. It wanted to drown out the other backseat driver, the one who doubts.

Writer’s block

So now, I’m here, the week I’d been looking forward to for months: a retreat, away from work and with a stable internet connection. I thought I’d be free to write thousands of words a day, setting habits to make productivity gurus insist I take breather. But I couldn’t. Sure, I was sleep deprived. Stanstead was grey even under dawn light. But now I was faced with everything I’d wanted to write over the years, and struggled to pluck the most salient idea to commit to paper.

Movement, I’ve found, helps organise thoughts. And as the tutors, Alice, Elise, and Toby, explained on our first night, the writing is usually done in all the spaces where we aren’t scribing or typing. So, during a walk on the second day, through steps and jumps over puddles and branches, I discussed with Toby Bayesian statistics, medical negligence, and also my improbable and surprising life thus far. Ever the story teller, he talked about applying narrative structure to my experiences. We settled on me being arrested as the inciting incident to begin my story.

The feel of the foam mattress

Sat in the library of Villa Pia that evening, overlooking those misty hills, I tried writing about the night I got arrested: the feel of the foam mattress, the noises in the other cells, the thoughts juddering through my mind. But I was just directing words towards a memory I was no longer interested in.

I explained this to Alice in our tutorial the next day. And I came to the realisation that the point of this retreat, ‘Haven for Stories’, was not to write but to discover. Havens offer the protection to be open, and admit my utter boredom in writing about prison and drugs, the stuff I thought others wanted to read. Instead, I vowed to lean into a deep unknown: my father, who died when I was eleven, and who I know so little about. I committed to blogging this journey, as a regular writing practice, with Alice showing me the best platforms to use.

In a workshop the next day with Elise, I delved into my father as a character. Through writing exercises, I put myself in his shoes, and lived his formative years, imagining the things I never got to ask him. In a tutorial later we discussed how to research someone, including researching the places that shaped them. My trips to his birthplace, Glasgow, were mentally booked. Sadly, my knackered imagination was unable to visualise any airline besides Ryanair.

Deep and layered like lasagne

Over the week I was subsumed into Italian villa culture, thanks to Morag Cleland’s excellent staff at Villa Pia. The conversations I had with the other writers on the retreat were deep and layered, like the lasagne we had on Wednesday, which, incidentally, I learned does not have to have a tomato sauce within it. It’s just an arrangement of pasta. You can put what you like in there.

I could delve into the lives of others, and reciprocate, only possible through staying put, not reaching for my phone, persevering through every variety of carbohydrate as I slowly lost my obsession with productivity. Handy, as the sleep deprivation continued, half a tray of tiramisu at 10pm fully reflected by my mediocre Garmin sleep score.

Near the end of the week, I ran up to the highest point in the region. It was so misty I couldn’t see more than a few paces ahead of me. There was no view at the top, just turf churned up by tractor wheels. I ran back down, below the mist, and caught up with Toby again that afternoon. We now had a beginning, a structure, people and places to research. The fog was clearing. A parallel tale of my father and me. I didn’t need good writing habits, I now had motivation.

Reading aloud

On the final night, I read the work I’d developed throughout the week to the group. The other inciting incident in my life, the moment my father died, in 500 or so words. I felt privileged that I had a had an audience, and equally privileged that I could hear and be part of their work, too. Whilst writing is a solitary pursuit, the life that creates it is a team sport. I left Villa Pia with people to keep in touch with, on similar journeys, writing buddies, accountability, and maybe the odd person who will read my languid blogs.

I brought the sun home with me, and took it with me on my usual Sunday run around Hampstead Heath, the paths busy with people, priorities, dogs and prams. But the ascent of Parliament Hill was the easiest it’s ever been, my legs strong from the Umbrian valleys. I arrived at the crest, the view over the city clearer than usual. No mist, no fog, I could see where I was going. The rest of the journey would be downhill.

Our thanks to the Henry Oldfield Trust, to Villa Pia’s owner Morag Cleland, and to the writing tutors Tobias Jones, Elise Valmorbida and Alice Vincent for making our Travelling Scholarships to attend A Haven For Stories possible.