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| The Rotunda at The Origins Centre, home of Metta.magazine and The Rotunda Writers' Garden |
The program was a residential experience for year 9 students from Melbourne. Students would move into a small cluster of houses two blocks from the main street and live there for eight weeks. We hoped that while they were there they would learn skills that would set them up both for life and for their future studies. Subjects had titles like “Community Living”, “Food Planning”, “House Meeting”, “Self”, “Environmental Sustainability” and “Community Service”. There was no “English” or “Maths”, although they did have to write essays for their Clunes Project and they did have to manage their budget. It was (and still is, I’m sure) a great program. Naturally, it kept me very busy.
As part of their Clunes Projects and Community Service activities, the students form the program I was teaching at regularly became involved with some of the local primary schools. One of the teachers who I worked with had kids who went to Clunes Primary School. So, gradually, I got some sense of the town and the kids that were living there. Some were amazing. Some had parents who couldn’t read, who didn’t know anything about dental hygiene and couldn’t afford clean uniforms. So there were some kids who didn’t always get breakfast before turning up and they, as you’d expect, struggled.
At the same time, I was kind of thinking I could write a
little bit because I’d just had a play that was based on a novel I’d written
win a competition and be produced in Melbourne by an amazingly talented cast
and crew.
At about the same time, Clunes as a town was making a name
for itself as host of a festival of reading called “Back to Booktown”. For a
tiny town, Clunes has a lot of bookshops. It has so many, in fact, that it has
managed to be the first town in the southern hemisphere to be recognised as an
official “Booktown”. Go ahead: look it up.
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| Clunes' main street, wide enough for horse drawn carts during the gold rush and to be a set for Mad Max and Ned Kelly. |
The people who run Booktown rented and opened their own
bookshop and staffed it every day, seven days a week, with the support of
volunteers. It was a great little space and, eventually, they even opened a
second bookshop, also with the support of volunteers.
So what?
Finally, I saw a talk on TED.com that got me really thinking
about how all these things go together. Dave Eggers, a successful author from
San Francisco, gave a talk about a program where writers occupy a space which
is otherwise just sitting there, open to the public (like the back of a shop).
In that space they basically hang out and do their own writing unless local
kids come in. If local kids come in, they get free mentoring in the art of
writing (and thinking and spelling) from someone who thinks about these things
a lot. The basic aim is simply to give kids one solid hour of focused
attention.
According to Eggers, studies have shown that students rarely
get even this much focused, one-on-one, personal attention each week, or each month, at school. So if this kind of attention isn’t
happening at home, then it simply isn’t happening. And not everyone’s parents
are writers, or would-be-writers, or just people who really care about writing.
That’s cool. Maybe they’re awesome at science, engineering, geography, farming,
rock climbing, horse-riding, cooking, art, music or maths. But if you want to
be good at English, or even just able to read and write well enough to get by,
you want to be around people who really get into it.
That’s what I find about writers and editors. It doesn’t
really matter if you’re a grade 4 student trying to write “What I did on my
holidays” or someone doing final edits on the next Pulp Fiction, they all find
the process of writing pretty exciting. To explain why, here’s a definition of
what I think writing is: (breathe in now) it is ‘trying to get the right words
out of your head and onto the page in the right order so that the story you’re
trying to tell gets understood by the person you’re trying to tell it to’
(whew!). That’s an art and a craft and a way of connecting two people, or a
million people. It can lead almost anywhere. It can get you a job, it can make
you laugh, it can be more intimate than almost anything else, and it can help
change the direction of the world. Somebody writes all those words actors say, all the speeches
politicians give, all the stuff in magazines and newspapers. All the laws and
all the facebook messages that might one day change them: they’re all written
down. It’s powerful stuff.
So it seemed that all the ingredients were there:
motivation, inspiration, a space, a need, a person… and yet it never happened.
I just didn’t have the time. I was already running myself too thin just trying
to run the programs I was already running. It was this fact of life as a
teacher – that of being too busy – that led Eggers to start the program in the
first place, so I couldn’t feel too bad. But I was disappointed.
In the middle of last year I and my partner Lily (an editor
and yoga teacher, among other things) left Clunes to go travelling. We wound
our way around the place and eventually ended up at The Origins Centre, in
Balingup, WA. Again, I find myself with an opportunity. The Rotunda is a
beautiful and under-used space. The Centre itself is a beautiful space which
encourages a kind of mindful respect which I think adds a special dimension to
Eggers’ original idea. I still have the inspiration and motivation to offer
this kind of support to anyone who wants it. And now, finally, I (and Lily, and
whoever else wants to volunteer) have the time.
Age 5+
Tues and Thurs, 4-6pm
In the Rotunda | The Origins Centre
153-157 Jayes Rd Balingup | Ph. 9764 1109
As Eggers says, “the secret to saving the world is
homework.”
