Home - Round 2

On Saturday 24th June we continued to explore home through creative writing with our Junior and Young Writers at MAST in Southampton’s cultural quarter.

It was a bustling day of activity, as What’s Next Southampton, a free festival for young people and their families, took over the area. Alongside our own artistic practice, the festival brought people together for writing for wellbeing, African drumming, and music from local artists hosted by SoCo Music Project.

In MAST’s Barova Room, we busied ourselves with our continuing approach to writing about home. To get started, we invited the Junior and Young Writers to pen an acrostic poem. There was lots of enthusiasm, as the groups were already familiar with the form and were keen to take part. We also invited the Junior Writers to draw maps of their homes as an opportunity for them to flex their artistic muscles.

Starting with Home as the foundation for our poems, we then asked the group to think of a word relating to the theme that could form the base of something new. The group had fun listening to each other’s work and guessing the words they had sprung from. The overwhelming feeling was one of joy; this community had positive, heartening things to say about home and the sentiment ‘every day is a good day’ struck a chord for all.

During the session, we read Home Defined by Charles Swain as a framework for writing. We took a line each and read aloud to the group, then discussed our favourite parts and enquired about meanings. It was a great way of expanding our vocabulary and enhancing our knowledge of the world of words.

To finish, we took the pattern of the poem and wrote our own version as a group, taking the first line of each section to create something new. We read it out and celebrated what we made as one. We heard that ‘home is where we forge ourselves’ and the fantastic ‘home is not just a mass of materials, make sure to clean and repair’.

With our Young Writers, we split the session into two sections. In the first we read Home Is So Sad by Philip Larkin and underlined the lines we liked. One person read the whole poem, and others joined in on the sections they enjoyed. This created a powerful echo of language, a mini performance of our own.

As a group, we talked about our trepidation of sharing our writing. We agreed that it can be frightening, but that our community is a safe space, free from judgement. Knowing this, we continued to read from our notebooks and celebrate each other.

It was really interesting to see how different the Young Writers’ approach was to the theme. They wrote as though they were home themselves, personified bricks and mortar, and delivered beautiful poetry at the end of this exploration. The wonderful statement ‘I’m sure they’ll come running back to me’ had us all giggling, and ‘they took a sack of memories but left me behind’ moved the room. We had houses looking for their owners, welcoming new ones, and reflecting on the past.

To end the day, we made our way to MAST’s Studio 2 to enjoy Theatre for Life’s Your Brain Explained. We learned about language-processing, the creative side of the mind, and enjoyed the participatory nature of the performance.

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Home - Round 2