I am delighted to be the producer of Our Garden – Sacred Spaces of Balsall Heath, a project in which we are making a beautiful map showing Balsall Heath as a place of trees, bees, and blue and green spaces rather than roads. We have three brilliant artists –Shaheen Ahmed, Rachel Pilkington and Dave Gray – a great project manager in Abbas Shah and a steering group made up of representatives from two mosques and a church.
It was my idea.
For almost ten years I have been fantasising about creating an artists’ map showing the waterways and wildlife of Birmingham, so that, even in the UK’s second city, we can imagine ourselves as people of nature.
Through gathering together project partners in the form of the United Church of St Paul’s, the Hazrat Sultan Bahu Trust and the Al-Abbas Islamic Centre, all in Balsall Heath, we became a Creative City Project generously funded by Birmingham City Council programmed by the Birmingham 2022 Festival.
Now we are forming relationships, praying together under stars, planting fruit trees and planning to make beautiful art.
I didn’t start my professional creative life as a producer. I started out writing books. I was aged 21, straight from university when I wrote Fat is a Spiritual Issue, followed a decade later by Memories of Bliss.
With both books, I remember the point at which I sent them off to their publishers, a point at which nobody else had read them in their entirety apart from me. Writing books was a solitary activity. I discussed the content with others, but nobody read what I had written, commented on it or steered me along the way.
In writing, there was an intimacy between me and the page. It was a place through which I grafted and despaired and became. When I finally got to the point where I could say: “So THAT’s what I needed to write,” it was as much of a surprise to me as it was to anyone else. The great river of creativity had carried me to a place that had been hidden even from me.
Having done that twice, the day came when a publisher said: “What do you want to write next? I don’t mind what it is. Tell us what you want to write and we’ll publish it.” It was an enviable offer by any standards and yet, for reasons that alluded me at the time, I found myself thinking: “Nah…”
Looking back, I can say I stopped writing books.
That brings me to today and Our Garden – Sacred Spaces of Balsall Heath. Unlike my books, which were written entirely by me, this is a project I couldn’t possibly do by myself. And that is the very thing that touches me. I go out of the room to make tea and when I come back the artists are talking about the nature map and making it their own. The project manager is forming relationships in ways that I couldn’t. The Chamberlain Highbury Trust gives us fruit trees. The mosques are inviting us to Iftars I hadn’t imagined. It’s humbling. It fills me with gratitude. It’s where I want to be.
At the same time, I am working on UNBOXED: Creativity in the UK, a celebration of creativity taking place in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales during the summer of 2022. In the interests of simplicity, it calls itself a celebration of creativity, but it’s actually a particular kind of creativity that it’s celebrating – not personal self-expression but creative collaboration. It’s about what happens when you bring together people form science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics; what happens when you bring established organisations together with emerging artists. It’s about our creativity and its power to change the world.
I am excited by this because this is the kind of creativity I want to experience in my life right now.
Am I saying that I will never write a book again? Of course not. Anything might happen. I can only go with the flow of the river of creativity and be surprised at where it takes me. I’m not into goals, aims and predictions.
But I AM saying that, when I was in young, I was very concerned with the question of what I was doing with my life. It was a question that had an urgency that drove me. Today it’s not even a question that interests me. “What are we doing together?” That’s the question that drives me now.
]]>Written in lockdown from the spring equinox (79 deaths) to the summer solstice (128 deaths)
The summer house in our garden has become my writing place. At one time, I used to write in the study, our converted loft, but not anymore. The coronavirus lockdown means school is no longer a place but a series of emails. Consequently, the loft has been taken over. It has become the classroom and music room (and place for the Xbox, natch) while I have moved to the wooden shed at the bottom of the garden.
As I sit in my summer house, the blackbirds and wood pigeons are singing. I can hear children playing from somewhere in the mid-distance – between number 56 and 68, I would guess. Sometimes I hear a violin from number 72. Weeks ago, there would have been ambulance sirens, but those come less often now. I look back at our terraced house, through the fruit trees, over my son’s goal post and the homes of our neighbours snuggled down the street.
This is my place. And it has changed during lockdown. Our road now has a WhatsApp group which means I know food has been collected from our doorsteps and taken to the foodbank. Shopping has been dropped off at the homes of the sick. Plants have been shared and libraries of books have been left on the little brick walls outside our houses. Now, when I look down our street, I don’t just see a row of terraced houses, I see kindness.
This is my place and I notice that, in many ways, my place has shrunk. I used to think of Kings Heath, with it rows of terraced houses and useful shops, as the outer edge of the neighbouring suburb of Moseley, where my son went to school and whose U15s cricket team I manage. There was never a day when I didn’t go into Moseley and so I felt as though I lived in Moseley/Kings Heath. But those days seem a long time ago and Moseley seems like somewhere else. My place is smaller now.
Even the High Street seems some distance away. I’m sure Asda, Smith’s and Wilko are still there, but I haven’t walked eastward and seen them for weeks. Each day in lockdown, I have walked west. I have taken my sadness, my peace, my worry or my joy to the trees; to Kings Heath Park with the oaks and poplars and silver birch. And I have walked down the lane, scented with cow parsley, to the neighboring park of Highbury. I have seen it change from the pink of April to the blue of May and the yellow of June. I have found an avenue lined with lime trees, like a nave in nature’s cathedral. Each day I have walked down that aisle saying Mary Oliver’s words “I am a bride married to amazement” in renewed wonder at the beauty just yards from my door.
So now, as I sit in my summer house, I no longer imagine my home as a place near the number 50 bus stop. My home is in a village on the edge of a meadow. It’s down from the wood, across the way from the pond where ducklings hatch and marsh irises bloom.
Church as place
Church used to be a place. We have all known since Sunday school that the church is the people, not the building. But the fact that the people only ever met in a building meant the whenever we talked about “going to church” we meant going to that place with a steeple or a bell. Not anymore. Our building opens once a week on a Thursday for the food bank. Otherwise, those that can – which I’m painfully aware isn’t everyone – meet through Zoom.
To my surprise, it works. In amongst the glitches and freezes and struggles with mute, we manage to pray. We can’t sing together. Even saying the grace together is tricky. Yet somehow that doesn’t detract from the simple experience of being a people together in prayer.
In many ways being released of “place” has made thing easier. For the past four years or so, we haven’t had a regular vicar, so we have exhausted ourselves either finding a stand-in priest (so we can have communion) or devising a service ourselves as the next best thing. Without a place, we can’t meet for communion anyway – so that sorts out the need for a priest at a stroke.
It sorts out another problem too. We are actually two churches that came together because the church can no longer afford to have a priest in every parish. The two congregations have tried to hold joint services but in practice, because the services have been in either one building or the other, one congregation has always been host and the other guest. By removing “place” we have been able to meet for the first time on equal terms.
All of which makes me wonder if we’d be better off without a building. Can we be a people without a place?
There are no easy answers to that one. The community has been formed through place – through the parishes and the buildings that stand proudly in each one. At the start of lockdown, I drove down to our church building in Balsall Heath with a boot load of food for the foodbank. There was Ivor tending the garden, Ann at the door with her apron on and Theo, my Godson, loading a trolley with food. How I had missed them! I missed them because they are amongst those who can’t join us on Zoom. I missed those ways of being together that are about tea and welcome rather than words. I missed the place because that’s where we feed the hungry, say farewell to the souls of the departed and share the seasons of our lives through song.
If we want to do those things – which we do – then having a place helps. But in the effort to maintain a place, with the history of expectation that goes with it, we lose our simplicity. Instead of serving us, our buildings become heavy weights of policy, finance and quotes for leaking roofs. I have no idea when we will return to our place or how I will feel when that happens, but I guess it won’t be like sinking back into a comfy chair. The affection for the organ, the sanctuary and bread and wine upon the altar, will be underpinned by a disturbing question. In holding onto our place, have we lost something more precious along the way?
Work as place
For the past 18 months, I have felt ambivalent about my place of work – London. I work for ScreenSkills, an organisation with goals dear to my heart, not least because it opens up careers in the screen industries to those who have been excluded in the past.
Even so, on my train rides down to London, I would look back with nostalgia at my home city of Birmingham. I would remember the days when I worked in the West Midlands as a journalist, combing through the region and crafting its stories. I would look wistfully on the days when I was an ambassador for Birmingham’s beautiful library, worked alongside the Grand Union Canal, or listened to the waves of protestors from an office in Victoria Square. I mourned the sense of belonging I had enjoyed through working in the heart of Birmingham for more than two decades.
For the past three months, I have imagined the city centre as still. I have assumed that stillness was either eerie or tranquil, depending on your point of view. I have imagined a thick quiet in the air where once there was the clacking of heels crisscrossing Pigeon Park and dodgem-style bumps of shoppers in the Bull Ring. (Like, I said, I’m guessing). In a way, there’s nothing for me to mourn anymore, because that hubbub of activity to which I once belonged, is no longer there. ScreenSkills, too, is of no fixed abode. We have a conceptual abode – a memory, an address that’s listed on Google and with the Charity Commission. But the daily reality is that we’re a community of people united by cloud, through purpose, not place.
In many ways, I like work better. We have an all-staff meeting each Friday, over Zoom, where we play games and hang out in breakout rooms. I no longer feel like a person commuting in from the regions but an equal member of the team. We ask the question: “Do we even need a place?” (No answers yet.) And while we’re asking that, I know that Birmingham-based businesses are asking the same.
So what happens when work is about purpose not place? What happens to cities where that work once took place? Will those who worked in offices ever return? And if we won’t, what will happen to our city centres? Will they become places of leisure more than industry? A place we go to change buses, try on clothes and go to the theatre, rather than hang out with colleagues in the nine to five? And if that happens, what will happen to the buildings? What will happen to the coffee houses that service them? If council meetings no longer need a council chamber, will there still be protests in Victoria Square?
As I reflect upon this, my picture of a city starts to change. Once if you named a place like, “Birmingham” or “Manchester” I would picture the centre with suburbs around it. Now, when I imagine Birmingham, I begin to think of a series or neighborhoods, linked like a web rather than connecting to a place with middle. And where once I used to think of goods and services as “made in Birmingham”, now I picture their origin in homes – homes that could be anywhere. With some sadness, I see my city as its residential streets rather than the industry that was once at its core.
Place and belonging
And so, as I sit in my place at the bottom of the garden, watching the spring equinox slowly turning into the summer solstice, I notice that my inner world is turning as the places turn around me.
Places are guardians of our memories. They are our photograph albums, the soundtracks of our lives. When our places change, our connection changes with them. Being displaced has changed my imagination around my home, my church and my Birmingham and so my sense of belonging is changing too.
Some of those changes are sweet, like the fur lining of a winter coat. Others are quite disturbing. Comfortable or not, there is nothing to be done, except resist the temptation to hold onto the old ways of belonging or grasp prematurely for new ones. The old places and my attachments to them must fall away. The new belongings will come. They will come. They will surely come. I learnt this from the trees.
Birmingham Rep will be the venue for Fertility Fest – the first event of its kind in the UK. Produced by Jessica Hepburn and Gabby Vautier, it will bring together 20 writers, visual artists, theatre-makers, film-directors and composers alongside some of the country’s foremost fertility experts.
We will be talking about, and sharing art around, the diagnosis of infertility, IVF, donation, surrogacy, the male experience, egg freezing, involuntary childlessness and alternative routes to parenthood.
I will be crying
I will be there (speaking at 11.30am). I think it’s highly unlikely I will manage to be there without crying. (I say that to prepare myself as much as anybody else.)
Other people might want to talk about the effects of fertility science on future generations and how far as a society are we prepared to go in our pursuit of parenthood. I want to be there because I want to stand in the same space as people whose deep longing to have children remains unfulfilled. Grieving is inevitable. There is no escaping that. But whatever else we feel, we do not need to feel alone.
- Book tickets for Birmingham’s Fertility Fest, which includes a performance of The Quiet House by Gareth Farr.
- Book tickets for London’s Fertility Fest on Saturday, 11 June 2016.
Day 26
One day I shall look back at this time
At the waiting
And the counting
And the bleeding
And the longing
The trying
And the not-trying
The loving
And forgiving
And I will say that it made sense.
I know the time will come again
When my womb will be holding
The secret hope,
The possibility of miracle;
Origins so awesome
That only God can know.
But today my vulva
Is tender-lipped
Heralding blood.
And today is the day
I have to live
Right now
Learning to embrace
My own body and grieving dreams
With the fierce
Unconditional
Over-whelming
Mother’s love
That is present
That is ready
That is now.
Jo Ind
]]>When they see the work I actually do, they say: “But you’re so much MORE than a writer”. So what do people think being a writer is? And how can I find a better way of explaining what it is that I do? (All the photographs above were taken of me at work as a writer – a long time ago.)
So what is a writer?
There are, of course, all kinds of writers – poets, novelists, copywriters, journalists, diaryists, playwrights. I can’t claim to speak for them all. All I can say is that, for me, this is what being a writer means.
A writer is a listener
The kind of writing I do is rooted in journalism. Whether I’m writing a book, a company brochure or the content of a website, I’m creating a story out of what people have told me. So writing involves listening. And I mean really careful listening – listening in such a way that you get right to the heart of the person or the situation you’re writing about.
A writer is a thinker
Writing is hard because it involves thinking in a more precise way than we do in conversation. When we put something down in words, we have to use the fine motor movements of the brain. We haven’t really understood something until we have written it down. Thinking that deeply and clearly is a process we tend to avoid because it’s difficult – I know I do anyway.
A writer is a changer
Writing is not a neutral activity. It changes things. Listening to people is powerful. Analysing and synthesising a situation through writing it down causes people to understand it – and therefore experience it – in a new way. That can be transformative.
So what is a writer?
A writer is a listener, a thinker and a transformer of people and situations. But I can’t say all that, when people ask me, can I?
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The tale is set in the future. In the world that Michele Guinness creates, The Church of England admits women to the episcopacy in 2014 (I wish). Vicky Burnham-Woods becomes Bishop of Larchester in 2016 and Archbishop of Canterbury in 2020.
Vicky is charismatic, successful in growing churches and deeply committed to bringing the church back into the heart of the community. She is thoroughly committed to defending the poor and not afraid to fight the government on social justice and welfare reform.
Interestingly, the prime minister at the time of Vicky’s appointment is a gay man but Vicky, despite being radical as far a social justice is concerned, is conservative around marriage and not sympathetic to clergy wanting to conduct gay marriages. This wins her some enemies. She has enemies in other places too.
As the novel unfurls, it becomes clear that somebody is trying to undo her. Press photographers have an uncanny knack of knowing exactly where she is, even in her most private moments. Tit bits of her past are leaked to the press in an attempt to undermine her.
Who is it that is doing this? Is it one of her friends? Is it a member of her staff? Are they working with the prime minister? Or with those bishops who were utterly opposed to her appointment on the grounds of her sex?
It’s a great story – or at least it should be.
The problem with Archbishop is that it isn’t the page-turner that it could have been. I confess to having found it grindingly slow – all 543 pages of it. It’s very well researched but it isn’t well enough written. The characterisation is poor, the dialogue unbelievable and the story-telling somewhat cumbersome.
Let’s start with the research. Guinness clearly knows and understands the Anglican church. The historical references are accurate, the way in which the media behaves is convincing and the window into the NHS (Vicky’s husband, Tom, is a surgeon) is well portrayed.
I would love to say the skulduggery she describes could never happen amongst a community of Christians – but alas I know better. There are many of us who are very familiar with that being nice to your face whist stabbing you in the back. Guinness gets the Church of England and portrays it very well.
Indeed, one of the features of the novel that hindered my enjoyment was the very accuracy with which the church was portrayed. It was so depressing. Who would want to spend their leisure time filling their head with the machinations of the Anglican church? Not me.
So full marks to Guinness on research. Few could have done it better.
Unimpressive characterisation
The characterisation is less impressive. It would be unfair to say that Vicky is a caricature – she is far more than that – but the way she is depicted is a little “thin” nonetheless. I would have hoped that an Archbishop of Canterbury would have had a richer and deeper inner life than Vicky appears to have. In the very last scene, Vicky and Tom whisper their marriage vows to each other before falling asleep. Vicky seems too twee, too emotionally immature, to have reached the highest ecclesiastical office. I never quite believed in her enough to care greatly about what happened.
Which brings me to the story-telling. The narrative is developed through back-story. The novel starts in 2019 with the Crown Nominations Commission discussing who to put forward for the post of Archbishop of Canterbury. From there, there is a flipping to and fro between what is happening in the present and the events of the past, helpfully indicated with subheadings: February 2020, 2006, 2020, 1983 and so on.
I didn’t find this confusing – but for those who do, there is a chronology in the form of Vicky’s CV at the back (don’t wait until you get to the end to find it) – but I did find it tedious. I reached the point where I just wanted to skip the back-story and wished Guinness had done the same.
Covering too many bases
I think Guinness is attempting to cover too many bases in this novel. There is nothing wrong with a slow story – nothing at all. If a novel has got beautifully portrayed characters that seem more real than your own flesh and blood, it doesn’t if they don’t get anywhere very fast.
Guinness starts many of the chapters with a quote from the German theologian, Jurgen Moltmann, who is Vicky’s seminal theologian. A different kind of novel, would be one in which the theology of Moltmann is integrated into the tale, making it into a fiction that illuminates theology and vice versa. Again, if a novel like that was done sufficiently well, the speed at which the story unravels would not important.
But I don’t think Guinness is displaying the skills, in this text, to write a novel that can afford to be slow. She is probably a very good writer of non-fiction but a mediocre writer of novels. (It’s the weakness of the dialogue gives that brings me to that conclusion.) In which case, she needs to keep the reader interested by spinning a great yarn. And she could do that. The plot is great. If she had just made a decision to tell the story twice as fast, I might have enjoyed it.
- This review first appeared in Third Way magazine.
Just look in my loft. There are boxes packed with all the pages I have written.
Look on Amazon. You can find my books there.
Look at my home. Apart from gifts, everything I own has been paid for through my hours of labour putting one word in front of the other.
I am a writer – it must be true.
So why is it that all these years (decades), there is nothing that is as hard as writing? All the other things – training adults, filing my accounts, managing a team, teaching children, making websites – none of that is as difficult as the blank page,
the empty brain,
the silent room.
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I found the film a little disappointing because so much of it was about the politics and practicalities around women as artists. These are important issues for sure, but they aren’t the questions that I’m asking at the moment.
- It’s often said that being a mother is creative and of course it is. But the whirlwind energy required to care for a child feels very different from the deep uninterrupted concentration required to make art. In what ways is the creativity of motherhood similar to that of the creativity of the artist and in what ways is it different?
- I think I have found that being a mother has changed my impulse to make music but not affected my desire to write. Has anybody else noticed a change in their urges since becoming a mother?
- For me creativity involves connecting with the inner child and letting her come out to play. How does caring for my flesh-and-angel child affect my relationship with my inner child and therefore with my creativity?
- The film addressed the issue of artists needing to give themselves permission to take the time to withdraw into the solitude necessary for certain types of creative activity. This is undoubtedly an issue. But there is another dimension to that withdrawal. How do we detach ourselves emotionally from our children in order to create? (How do I put to one side Arch’s tears when I banish him from the room so that I can write?)
I’d love to hear from other mothers if their creativity has been affected through having a child. Top tips on how to manage are always welcome.
The purpose of writing is to make a difference. If words don’t make a difference to the author, then why should they have an effect upon anybody else?
It is now almost a year since I have been working for NHS local, a digital service for the NHS in the West Midlands.
I have been handling the words and video on the site for long enough to ask myself the question: “What difference has this content made to my life?”
As it happens it has made a difference in so many ways I will need to write not just one post, but a series to explain it all. This is the first.
I no longer weigh myself
I used to find it so disheartening to find that the more I worked out, the more I weighed.
“Muscle weighs more than fat,” my friends would tell me, as I noted that I had lost two inches from waist and gained seven kgs.
I know, I know – or at least I did at one level.
And yet the NHS continues to use the bloody body mass index (BMI) as a way of assessing if someone is obese, even though the index does not measure if the weight is due to muscle or fat.
It’s very difficult to really believe that weighing yourself is a waste of time, when our national institution responsible for health asks you to step on the scales in an attempt to assess your risk of high blood pressure, heart disease and cancer.
“Bog off” to scales and the body mass index
Thanks to NHS local, I can now say: “Bog off” to my scales and to the body mass index. The service has made a film of two women, of similar height, both classed as overweight in BMI terms. The women were put through a body volume index (BVI) scanner that can distinguish between muscle and fat at Heartlands Hospital in Birmingham. Despite being a similar height and weight, the scanner found one woman was healthy and the other needed to lose some fat.
At last, I can fully believe what my friends and Phil, my highly-toned and clincially obese (in BMI terms) personal trainer is telling me. “Muscle weighs more than fat.” It really does. Thank you, Dr Asad Rahim, from Heartlands Hospital.
As for you, scales. “Bye bye.” I measure my waist and that’s all.
]]>That’s it, I’ve said it.
I was leading a workshop for Birmingham Book Festival last weekend called Finding Your Blogging Voice. One of the first things we did was brainstorm our reasons for blogging. Between us we said:
- to have a voice
- to showcase work
- to create an archive of material
- to explain a business
- to connect with people
- to improve SEO.
I was leading the workshop and so I forgot to say that, though I do indeed get all those benefits from blogging, my number one reason for going tap, tap, tap is because I enjoy it.
There are all sorts of different pleasures, of course.
Blogging isn’t like sex
The pleasure of blogging isn’t like that of sex or swimming or lying on the sofa with a glass of wine. It’s more like the pleasure of making a photo album – but using word-pictures rather than images.
And, as I said when I created this website, it’s like the pleasure of having my own room and getting it just how I want – my own little bit of cyberpace where I can play and muse and hang out with my friends.
In her seminal post What We’re Doing When We Blog, Meg Hourian talks about the anatomy of a post and the communication evolution etc. It’s all good stuff.
But she doesn’t say: “Having fun.” That’s what I’m doing when I blog and the day it stops being enjoyable, is the day I’ll stop blogging.
]]>Who thought of that phrase?
It makes it sound as though the only things we need are to earn a living and spend time with our families. The implication is that so long as we’ve risen to the challenge of getting work and childcare covered, we’re sorted.
Well, I’ve got news – we’re not.
I need solitude
I have another need and that need is for solitude. I’ll say it again, but louder: “SOLITUDE.”
I need time to be alone/pray/write. (I use forward slashes rather than commas because I’m not sure if they are different things.)
It is that need for solitude that too often goes unrecognised and therefore gets squeezed and therefore needs naming in capital letters.
Earlier this year I agreed to give a talk on revelation, identity and social media at the Greenbelt Festival. I rashly took this on in January when I had just taken redundancy and therefore anticipated I might be twiddling my thumbs around the August Bank Holiday (ho, ho).
What difference three days makes
As a result I have had to clear the time (three whole days so far) to be by myself and do a bit of reading and thinking and praying and writing – whatever name you give to what I do in my study.
Do you know? It has made me feel so good…. I was able to pay attention to random thoughts that had surfaced and been left hanging around like odd socks for far too many years. I felt peaceful, deeper, ‘gathered-in.’
I must do this more often. I WILL do it more often. Prayer/writing/solitude might not get named in “having it all” features in glossy magazines but I’m naming it and I’m doing it now.
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