Junior & Young Writers: Week 2 [Wild Words] – Tree Tales

Hi Writers,

Welcome back to those of you who were with Artful Scribe last year, and to those who, like myself, are new, a very warm welcome. This week, Antosh kindly stepped in as lead facilitator, and he and I got to meet two wonderfully creative groups.

Junior Writers

We started with a warm-up exercise using the theme of 'Tree Tales' and tried to find inspiration in nature to describe our weeks. We had a couple of boring weeks described as grass and even as a dead bush. Some more fun weeks were described as a colourful tree and a field of roses. One week was very busy, like a blossom tree filled with blossom flowers, and another week was pretty normal, just like an oak tree. Poppies were popular, representing two rather different weeks: one fun week and another week with a funeral.

After some creative stretching, during which we transformed from trees to octopi to ants and even worms, we read two poems, 'Trees' by Mark Haddon and 'The Trees' by Philip Larkin. Taking inspiration from the poems, the group designed their own trees and wrote a story of origin for their clever creations.

Our forest was unique, with a tree of doom Hamish created and accompanied by a foreboding acrostic featuring a very frightful wedgie anvil factory. We had Henry’s super-tree grown from a super-seed that came head-to-head with Baddie Bob. Also in this forest was Jeremy Jerald, who had a glorious golden tree trunk and an equally wonderful rhyming poem created by Elsie. Noah's tree resulted from a lightning-struck seed that produced a lightning tree, which he explained was protected by a dragon statue that would come to life and protect the tree. Indie also had a dragon who was a little confused as to what it was doing at the top of her tree, and she recited a magical poem about the changing seasons. Only visible by its foliage, Evan's ‘Invisitree’ resulted from a glitch when a Minecraft player cut down a tree. Henry's adventure-filled tree house was bustling, featuring Gru from Despicable Me, Kung Fu Panda, Pikachu, a game of football, Captain Underpants, and many more! Juno's tree had a lone tiger in it, and once the tiger reached the top, their perspective and how they could see things changed.

The Seasons

by Indy

A single leaf fell before me.

I walked forward expecting nothing

but then something happened.

All of the leaves fell.

I gracefully walked through them.

Day after day, seasons changing.

Young Writers

We started by describing our weeks using nature, with a sprout, a 'skanky smelling' corpse flower and a yew tree with snapped branches used to describe two not-so-great weeks and a rose to describe a week with both good and bad bits.

We then went around the room and discussed what kind of writing we like to do. I was very excited to hear that Ava and Catherine like fantasy, Sonny and Daisy enjoy descriptive writing, and Berry likes narratives of all kinds.

To help us warm up and get comfortable sharing our writing, we played a game of consequences, where we each wrote a line of a poem, then folded the page and passed the page on. The following person could only see the line written before them and had to write a line in response. Once everyone's pieces of paper had been handed around and everyone had contributed, we unfolded our creations. Some of the finished poems managed to keep with a theme and worked quite well, whereas others had some amusing inconsistencies!

Here are some of those poems:

Last year is dead,
they seem to say,
their greenness,
a kind of grief.
Twisting
through the night,
they see everything.
They are as old
as time itself.
We’re coming for you,
they say
in ancient voices.

I stand in a graveyard.
A warning wind
draws me into temptation.
I give myself to its wilderness.
Free of roots and untamed,
a feather in a storm,
I am taken in harsh gales
and thrown to the unknown.

Finally, we focused on writing a story that explored any of the following:

Two opposing characters who want different things.
What the woods contained.
Crossing the threshold from ordinary into the woods.

Catherine shared a dark, descriptive story that engaged the senses and ended with a cliffhanger. Berry also wrote a dark tale with a cliffhanger with two captivating characters. Sonny, starting with some onomatopoeia, introduced us to relatable characters with realistic dialogue and gave us a behind-the-scenes look at his plan.

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Junior & Young Writers: Week 2 [Wild Words] – Tree Tales