A Writing Advent

12 windows into winter, inspired by Ruth Allen

I set myself a challenge to write 1000 words a day in November, on or around my developing memoir project, and I completed it. It was joyous, challenging, nourishing and exhausting. I feel like it’s given me a real boost and helped me push through my tendency towards procrastination and perfectionism.

30k hath November…

30/30: crossing the finish line!

I knew that I wanted to keep writing regularly after the challenge was over, but I also knew that I would need to slow down, to take a break of some kind. Largely to give myself a little distance from the flood of words that poured out of me and were published here last month, so I can come back to them with fresh eyes and start picking out the jewels and polishing some of the duller pebbles.

Ruth Allen

’s writing advent came along at exactly the right time. She is reading a chapter of a book for each day in Advent (1-24 December) and writing a short piece in response to it. She invited readers to join her in their own writing advent, and I felt an immediate full body YES. A way to continue my daily writing practice, with a smaller word count (Ruth suggests 100 words a day as “a window-sized fragment”) on a different topic - it was exactly what I was looking for.

Creating a Writing Advent

I’ve ummed and ahhed about whether to publish any of the words I’ve written as part of this writing advent. They are unpolished fragments, and more experimental than the pieces I wrote in November. But, in a spirit of playfulness and experimentation, I’ve decided to go for it. My Substack is still finding its feet, trying out different ways of being and doing, but most of all I want it to be a place where I can write aloud. This is another way of doing that.

The book I’ve chosen to read and respond to this month is Winter: an anthology for the changing seasons, edited by Melissa Harrison (who writes on Substack at Witness Marks). I’m reading through it in order, stopping each day when I find a piece that pulls at me and writing 100(ish) words in response. Here’s the first half of my writing advent, days 1-12, lightly edited to give a snippet of each day’s words.

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Day 1

Beech trees are my favourite. The burnt rusty orange crackle of their fallen leaves underfoot in late autumn. I once wrote a poem about my mother as a grove of beech trees, or about a grove of beech trees as my mother (are these the same thing or not?). What I meant is that standing in a grove of beech trees, I feel held. It’s a similar feeling to standing in a cathedral, the soaring pillars or trunks reaching up to the sky, but warmer. More maternal. A cathedral lifts my spirit up, a grove of beech trees cradles my body.

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Day 2

Winter storms. Inland, they seem to press down upon me, pin me in place to the landscape. They must be endured, weathered. On the coast, when I’m out in a storm I feel like I become part of it. Swept up by the wind and made wild. The air feels alive, catching at scarves and hoods, pushing me faster down the hill, playful. The waves are playing too, leaping the boundary of the promenade wall to reach their fingers across the road, leaving seaweed and pebbles behind. We join the game, creeping forward to the edge of the prom and then darting back again, out of reach of the next wave. The seagulls hang suspended in the air above us, wings beating furiously but motionless, making no headway.

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Day 3

The hare crossing the farmyard as I looked out of the kitchen window on the day we scattered Mum’s ashes. I don’t think it even saw me, but it has loomed large in my mind, in my imagination ever since. An omen, a symbol of many different things - only some of which I can put into words. Hares have been special ever since. A connection to Mum, somehow part of both the ordinary everyday world and another world, one only glimpsed through threshold moments like that one. A world where a woman might turn into a hare, or back again.

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Day 4

I feel a sense of dread as we barrel towards the winter, an embodied remembering of how long it lasts, of how cold and dark it is. A nostalgia for the days of summer when I can just pull on some shoes and leave the house, rather than the ritual adding of jumper, coat, hat, warm socks, warm boots that is required in winter mornings. But I also love the clear, crisp air of winter, the quality of the light on these short winter days. The skeleton tree branches dark against the pale blue sky. Everything is stripped back to the bones. For me, winter is the season of air.

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Day 5

“Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city.”

I have made it to the venerable age of 43 years old without having read any Charles Dickens novels. And yet these lines from Bleak House are immediately familiar. I also love his description of “implacable November weather”. Because the weather in November can be exactly that - cold and great and bleak and giving no fucks, you take it or you leave it. Or at least, the type of weather that we think of as typical of November - I have known weather in November that has been the soft warm glory of late autumn, or the sparkling magical morning of the first snow.

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Day 6

Insects in winter. Invisible, hibernating but still here: sleeping beauty time travellers. “Millions upon millions of individual insects present all around us in eerily unobtrusive fashion. The winter landscape is not a dead one but a starkly beautiful freeze-frame, life in ultimate slow motion”. The image hooks me in, the idea of life being lived at very different speeds to our own human one - particularly in December, so often a month of frantic activity and forced festive cheer.

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Day 7

Midwinter and midsummer both have that magical sense of the world turns upside down to them. The hours of daylight and darkness aren’t playing by the normal rules. It’s dark, or getting there, by 3pm in December, my thoughts turning to the evening meal and bedtime when there’s still 2 hours of the working day to go. It’s still full daylight at 10:30pm in June, the evening stretching on until I believe it will never be dark again. I am enthralled by the idea of spending a winter - or a summer - in the far north, of fully entering into the season of darkness - or light.

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Day 8

Lapwings have become familiar since we moved to this little village in north-west Durham. Driving over the high moorland road in spring, you can suddenly find yourself surrounded by a cloud of lapwings, all their lop-eared wings beating in time. In springtime, walking or running along the old railway tracks, I watch pairs of lapwings swooping up into the sky, then tumbling down again to disappear into the long grasses. Their electronic car alarm calls rising and falling like their flight. Strangest of all is the car park in Stanley on a winter’s twilight. Watching a huge swinging murmuration of lapwings lift into the sky from the supermarket roof, tilting in the wind before settling down on to the roof again.

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Day 9

The flocking and murmurating that some birds do before roosting for the night reminds me of school playgrounds just after the bell has rung to mark the end of the day. Wheeling, tumbling, crowded chaos - yet no child or bird crashes into any other. They are aware of their place in space, and the places in space of their fellows. There’s a pattern to it, an order, a mathematical formula despite the chaos and noise. Starlings. Jackdaws. Rooks. Lapwings. Seagulls (maybe). Children. Crowds streaming out of a football stadium after a match. The pavements outside an office block at 5pm. Seen from above (or below), it becomes geometric.

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Day 10

So much to agree and disagree with in the piece I read today - it matches my grumbly unsetttled mood. Rocks are “animated and alive”. We can enter into “non-verbal but deep dialogue” with a river, a standing stone, a hillside. But nature is not “benign and beautiful”. Or is not only that. Nature just is. It is benign, it is beautiful, it is destructive, it is terrible. We box the world up into manageable chunks and label those nature, or wildlife. But it’s all nature, in all its complexity and messiness. We can’t just select the bits we want and leave the rest. We are nature too.

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Day 11

“World is crazier and more of it than we think,

Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion

A tangerine and spit the pips and feel

The drunkenness of things being various.”

It’s the point in the year when my thoughts turn to what I want to change in the new year coming. I’m very good at identifying the challenges and less practiced at spotting the successes. I want more of the feeling in this Louis MacNeice poem now, next year, always. The world feels small at the moment: an endless round of packed lunches and emails and grocery shopping and monitoring my children’s screen time and the bad tempers that result. I want more of the craziness and the various and the plurality. I want the time and space to feel it, to embrace it, rather than endlessly turning away back to my to do list.

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Day 12

“Winter feels more ambiguous”. Because there is less - daylight, greenery, warmth - what there is shines the brighter and contains more somehow. More possibilities. It’s easier to believe in ghosts, to believe in magic in the winter. There’s more space to imagine, to dream. Of a world that’s gone or a world that’s yet to be or a world that never was but yet might be. Of laying the foundations to blossom into a new version of yourself come the spring. New Year is a false dawn maybe, but it draws dreaming to it like iron filings.