Hurray! A beautifully sunny day, and it’s Saturday, so I don’t have to go to work and can take advantage of the unaccustomed warmth and relax in the garden, listening to the blackbird belting out its song from the chimney pot behind my head. Bliss!

(The rest of this post might make more sense if you read the ones below, first)

Winning that competition had been an amazing boost to my confidence after all those years of rejections. Did this mean that I could be justified in calling myself a poet? Whether it did or not, it made no difference to the amount of courage I had to summon up when I visited my first ever writing group. It was even more daunting than my trip to Lumb Bank. Everyone there would be a stranger, and unless I chose, I’d never see any of them again after the end of the course. (I’m still in touch with people from that group)

What was particularly scary about the idea of this first writing group was the fact that it was so close to home. Oh my god, I might even bump into someone I knew, and expose my lack of talent and inability to read aloud without my voice quivering and flapping like wind through a line of washing. As it turned out, there was someone I knew, but she, and every one of the other twelve or so present was welcoming and very encouraging about my work.

After a few visits, I began to see that though it had been a good place to start, it fulfilled only one of the two-fold commitment of Adult Basic Education: to offer maximum challenge and maximum support (not always an easy balance to achieve) . Everyone was kind, but I knew that I needed more challenge if I was going to develop my work. Praise needed to be tempered with incisive critique.

Having scoured the local papers and libraries for more information, I located a group called Cannon Poets on the other side of the city. Here, I found what I was looking for: an open-to-all meeting place for poets and would-be-poets. The small workshop groups that formed after the main meeting almost invariably contained at least one or two men or women who were further along the road of experience and skills in creating and critiquing poetry.

Sometimes the feedback came as a rather bitter pill, particularly when I’d brought a poem that I’d felt had been honed to perfection, only to realise that what I was being told was true – there was still more work to be done before I’d got it to the stage where it was actually saying to others as well as myself, what I’d wanted it to say, rather than what, from my exclusive viewpoint I’d thought it was saying superbly.

I’d already discovered that the passage of a few weeks was usually a sound critic - (what a disappointment it was to take a cherished creation from a drawer where it had been left to ‘prove’ itself, and to find, instead of a nicely risen, nourishing object, a few dull stanzas lying flat on their face). No, to be fair to myself – there were sometimes a few real nuggets in there, but they’d been smothered by over-explaining, rather than being trusted to speak for themselves.

(This post might make more sense if you read the ones below, first)

I’ve already had my main holiday abroad this year (the inspiring poetry course in Spain at Almaserra Vella, run by Penelope Shuttle, but the weather then was cold and wet, so I’m hoping to get some proper sunshine in August during my summer break from my job with the Birmingham Adult Education Service.

This August, it’ll be thirteen years since that poetry course at Arvon’s Lumb Bank Centre in Yorkshire. Joining that course was far more daunting than floating around in the sky, firmly linked to a boat in the coastal waters of Gran Canaria. It was also a more significant stepping stone into the future I wanted: being a writer. It’s amazing to think how far I’ve got with my writing since that particular turning point in my life.

I’d been dabbling in poetry during the previous years, when my job took up more and more of my free time. Not that poetry can easily be squeezed in to a brief half hour, here and there, but it was something that helped to satisfy that creative itch, and is still a significant part of my writing life.

Various friends and family members had said, ‘That’s really good.’ But then they would, wouldn’t they? I knew I needed to brace myself for something more objective from someone with more experience and knowledge of the craft of poetry.

The workshops, run by Joan Poulson and John Lyons were an inspiration, but I always dreaded the time when we were expected to subject our half-finished creations to the comments from the tutors and the group. It was fascinating to hear the contributions from all the others and I’d marvel at the standard of these offerings. I found it very enlightening to see how the tutors focussed in on the best parts, and explained what they felt had worked well, and why, with suggestions on how the piece might be further developed.

My life-changing moment came with my one-to-one appointment with Joan. She looked through the poems I’d brought with me and seemed to consider some of them worthy of publication. I’d known nothing about the various small poetry presses and she suggested a few that I might try.

One of these, Envoi, was running a competition, with a deadline that October. That was my very first success with poetry. My poem, Something Like a Stone won first prize – a cheque for £100 !

Anyone who’s ever written poetry or fiction can imagine the size of the smile on my face for hours after receiving this news.

The next hurdle was to find somewhere to lodge this cheque. I’d decided years earlier to use my maiden name of Coleman for my writing endeavours, rather than my husband’s name that I’d (willingly) taken on at our wedding. I was shocked to find how hard it was to open a building society account in my own, original name. For the first time in my marriage, I felt like ‘goods and chattels’ as I was sent home to fetch my birth and marriage certificates, my passports, and a bill for the water rates that just happened to be in my married name, rather than his.

(This post might make more sense if you read the one below, before you read this)

It was during my teaching experience in Dublin – when I had to help a particularly keen group of sixth form girls to explore the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - that I first realised I was learning as much from my students as they were from me. That’s been the case all through my teaching life, and still is.

One of the things I enjoy about my day-job of working with adults who want to improve their literacy skills, is the way it helps me to see teaching and learning (at any level) as part of the same continuum line.

I love the way subjects and activities and bits of learning come together in the most unexpected ways - there I was last month, in that mountain village in Spain, reflecting on my writing life and wondering what direction it’ll take now, and I pick up that book about the early years of the Arvon Foundation,with its links to the start of my writing life.

I skimmed through enough of that book to see that it says succinctly a lot of what I’ve learned about writing (and life in general) over the intervening decades. One thing The Arvon Foundation seemed to have set out to achieve was to do away with the boundary line between ‘writers’ and ‘people who want to be writers’. The Memoir states that Arvon’s ‘door is open to anyone interested in exploring their gift to write.’

So, who’s to say if another person has a ‘gift to write’ or not? I’m not suggesting that no piece of writing can be judged more effective than another – I do think there are some objective standards that can be used as benchmarks – Mmm… maybe I’m venturing into dodgy territory, here - the word ‘objective’ doesn’t fit comfortably with judgements of creative work – I think it’s virtually impossible to keep subjectivity at bay. But discussions like that could go on forever –

And when I read that sentence again (‘anyone interested in exploring their gift to write’) I realise it’s the individual’s exploration that’s the crucial thing.

I’ve always disliked the phrase ‘wannabee writers’, as if the mere fact of having been published makes some people ‘real writers’ while the huge numbers of un-published writers, (or, worse still in some people’s eyes, self-published writers), aren’t worthy of that name.

As a writer (and even more so after having a novel published) I’ve wondered about what writers themselves count as ‘success’, so I was interested to read John Moat’s chapter on ‘Notes for Course Tutors’. This states that the outcome for the student isn’t the concern of Arvon, or the tutor. The important thing is whether it was what the student wanted to write, and was written in the understanding that ‘everything matters’, be it a distinctive secret journal, or a best-seller.

I like that.

(This post might make more sense if you read the one below, before you read this)

Before I could get round to visiting the library as a first step in finding a creative writing course, I was phoned by the manager of a nearby Adult Education Centre, ‘I found your contact details from the list of English tutors. We’ve got a flourishing creative writing course on Monday evenings, but the tutor has had to pull out, so we need someone to take over for next term….’

After an initial hesitation, I thought, Well, why not be paid as a tutor, instead of forking out money to be taught?

I wasn’t deceiving anyone – I never pretended to be a published writer, and after all, I was a qualified school teacher of English, with a degree in Eng Lit from Trinity College Dublin (for what that was worth!) At school and even at university, I’d learned how to pass exams, but not how to think for myself.

It wasn’t until I’d begun my first job, teaching in a girls’ school in North Dublin – with no time to browse bookshops and libraries for other people’s interpretations of the relevant set books - that I had to use my own brain and think things out for myself.

Even so, the idea of teaching creative writing to mature adults was growing increasingly daunting as November slipped into December. How was I going to plan for a whole term’s worth of relevant instruction? What concrete information could I offer these people that they didn’t already know?

Here’s where John Moat comes in (together with co-author, John Fairfax) – their book The Way to Write was packed with inspiring and practical advice for writers and proved to be the most useful of the books I plundered for ideas on what to teach.

The introductory essay, written by Ted Hughes, was mainly about an organisation that ran residential writing courses. It sounded inspiring, and just what I needed at that time. It was called The Arvon Foundation.

‘One day,’ I promised myself, ‘When the children are old enough, and I’m earning more, I’ll go one of those courses.’

It wasn’t till years later that I managed to do this. As it turned out, that course changed my life.