Before How to Cook a Book, my almost monthly food writing retreats, there were others. Podcasters, would-be novelists, poets, they all came to the House of Dreams in East Sussex - still do - for the time to write, the community of writers… and the dreamwriting.
These days, my prompts to accessing the dreams are pretty simple - usually age, and a combination of atmosphere and location. Occasionally I’ll chuck in a grandparent or a mother. There’s usually cake.
15 minutes later, the writers have accessed food memories they didn’t even know they had, and with them, feelings buried so deeply that, once released, could write a whole chapter themselves. They often do.
But with the would-be novelists and poets, we dream together. I take them to a place, as I do the food writers, but then I keep lobbing in the prompts every two minutes or so. As they catch them, their stories bend and turn, until 15-20 minutes later, their words lie on the page in a formation they couldn’t possibly have foreseen.
Antonia Chitty is one of the creative writers who’s written thousands of words in my house over several retreats, and with her permission, here’s one of her dreamwrites. I took her, with her fellow poets and novelists, dreamily, to a flooded field in a North of England winter. I’ve bolded my prompts.
Straws wash against the grass still peeking up from the water. It’s inching higher, land plants still hanging on in the hope that soon the water will recede. An empty rowing boat drifts past, no oars, sides banging up against the flotsam that’s pouring along the line of what used to be the river.
It’s all river now, though, river for miles and miles until it becomes sea.
A shaft of lightning on the horizon is followed by the ominous tones of thunder. The cloud hangs low and grey: this is just a lull in the rain and even as the thunder rumbles again a few drops break the surface of a small, still pool surrounded by hummocks of grass. A tiny fish darts in between the blades of grass, just as good as reeds for hiding from the heron flopping across the sky.
Cormorants are thriving too, plenty of half submerged trees to hang themselves on as they slowly dry: the sun hasn’t emerged from behind the clouds for months,
The people haven’t been here for months either. Everyone who could fled to higher ground, and those who couldn’t are long dead, their bones now part of the silt at the bottom of the endless river.
A gate swings thud, thud, thud against a bank, but its post wobbles with the force of the waves and still it will form just another part of the stream of wood and debris floating out to sea.
The water level isn’t rising as fast as it did at first, but there isn’t enough land left to support the survivors, and every so often a fresh corpse floats past.
Some of the food books I love most are almost pure poetry (Ravinder Bhogal, Caroline Eden for example) and a phrase can sometimes pull together a feeling so raw or so euphoric that it physically winds its author.
It’s not the point of what we do at How to Cook a Book; this is about focussing on what they want to say, to whom and why. But as I ponder on what will fill the space usually filled by
‘s brilliant recipe writing session on the May retreat, I wonder what harm would it be to dream a little dream with me?….