Here’s a photo of someone writing in the morning sunshine. It was taken last month at Bore Place, site of our Dark Angels summer residential. If you look closely, and if you know what I look like, you will see that it’s me. Here I am, on a bench, writing. The photo captures a special …
Author Archives: neilsbaker
Why bother with poetry?
There’s a moment in every business writing workshop when the anxiety levels suddenly rise. People wince. Their shoulders hunch up. The sense of terror is palpable. It happens when you mention the idea of writing, or even just reading, some poetry. I call it ‘dropping the P-bomb’. It’s a shame. Poetry shouldn’t be a thing …
Memory and coincidence
Yesterday I wrote something about the Dark Angels course I’ve just led in Aracena, Spain. I mentioned how it had got me thinking about the time, years ago, when I took the course myself, as a student not a tutor. Today, tidying up my study, I pulled a notebook from my shelf at random and …
Life on the other side
I’m just back from Aracena, an hour’s drive from Seville. I spent the last week running a Dark Angels writing course with my friend Andy. This annual week at a finca in the sierra has become a highlight of my year. On the taxi drive home from the airport, I was making plans for 2020. …
Meet the Freaks: writing in response to the work of Diane Arbus
I led a workshop at London’s Hayward Gallery a couple of weeks ago, writing in response to the work of photographer Diane Arbus. Arbus left a career in fashion photography to wander the streets of 1960s NewYork, documenting the lives of oddballs and outsiders, whom she affectionately called ‘freaks’. From Coney Island circus acts and …
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Stumbling outside my comfort zone
At just about every workshop I lead there’s a point where the participants move outside of their comfort zones. Sometimes they boldly leap across the line that separates where they feel safe from where they don’t. Other times it’s a more tentative shuffle. It always happens on a Dark Angels course. But it happens too …
What matters? What is trivial?
Why are we put into this life? What really matters? This from EF Schumacher.
What is your job, writer?
What is your job as a writer? Perhaps not this from Dinty Moore. But what then? Whatever it is, it will involve imagination and understanding.
Recording things as they are
Thinking about the relationship between imagination, creativity and the impulse to document. Not sure what i think yet. It’s complex. But thinking about it. From Stuart Franklin, The Documentary Impulse
What is writing poetry?
Patterns, connections, community, beauty, fishing… What is writing poetry? Sandford Lyne, Writing poetry from the inside out