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12 January 2025

Posted by Alice Flynn

We're Building A Town!

Today we started a new semester in our online group Writing for Page and Stage and we’re building a town, no planning permission needed!


After getting to know each other a little bit and sharing what everyone would like to gain from the coming creative term ahead, we began exploring landscape.


We started by looking at where ideas come from, what Triggering Towns exist within us – after Richard Hugo’s chapter, Assumptions, in his text on writing: The Triggering Town. Through reading the assumptions Richard makes about an imagined town, people shared they were excited by the wildly contradictory assumptions that seemed to exist at the same time. People noted the micro and macro details that helped build a wider sense of a very real (imagined) town. Members of our group also noted how certain assumptions speak to the divide between the inner life and the outer life, that no-one can know who we really are, and sometimes we are masking. As the assumptions continued, we noted a voice beginning to develop – a sense of the town as a character.


Bearing our discoveries in mind, we wrote to describe either our current inner landscapes, or the landscape where our ideas arose from: be that a serene green field or a grey construction site, as one participant wrote about. In describing our inner landscapes, and sharing our favourite lines from our work, we started to notice the details that intrigued us, what aspects created a greater sense of atmosphere or drew us in. 


Next, we listed the services we would need in a town: from sanitation and bin collection through to the corner shop and an arts centre. We listed our own favourite and least favourite buildings and places such as the town hall, the GP surgeries or the beach!


We each picked a building from our group list and wrote a description of it from the outside and then, the inside. Some of us named the building. Some of the group wrote pieces that reflected how the townspeople felt about the building, some buildings had history, some needed some work, other buildings were spaces of solace, or even the magical. Some building had an attitude and strong sense of character and voice themselves.


We have begun to upload our pieces to our group padlet, so that we can get a sense of the town we are beginning to co-create together…and what drama might unfold there in the coming months…

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