Writing as reconciliation

Earlier we published reflections on the CAIF visit to Dresden. These included a contribution from Lisa Hagan, Head of English at Lyng Hall school. Later, we were able to catch up with Lisa to talk about some pieces she had written during her trip grouped together under the title of ‘The Creative Fragments of an Anniversary’. Our conversation covered not just these ‘creative fragments’ but her interest in reading as well as writing and how she promotes writing among her students. We include the fragments as an attachment at the foot of the interview.

Why did you become interested in Dresden?

Last October I met the poet Emilie Lauren Jones who went to Dresden as part of the writing exchange. She later ran a poetry workshop with some of my students in the Methodist Hall. She shared some of her photos of the Frauenkirche, and she spoke about her poetry. She also introduced the concept of reverse poetry. This is the idea of putting back together something that has been broken. 

The poetry was inspiring and it captivated myself and my students, so when I was presented with the opportunity to visit Dresden through CAIF, I wanted to go…. it seemed like a worthwhile use of my time to deepen my understanding of both the city, and the poetry around reconciliation. 

You mentioned the idea of reverse poetry, could you tell me what that is?

Well, it has many meanings but learning from Emilie Lauren Jones, we were taking a historical event, like the Dresden bombings, and playing with time. So read one way a person is being taken from their home, from another they are returned. It is a way of taking moments in the past that are filled with pain and trauma and talking about them in a way that heals. To rebuild spaces that were once broken in order to forge new connections of friendship.

Listening to you, one of the things strikes me is that a lot of people who go into teaching sometimes lose that close interest in the subject itself. They get overwhelmed by the day to day job of teaching. However you’ve not lost your interest in reading and writing and I wonder why is writing so important for you?

Well, I began as a reader…books always fascinated me, and that has not gone away. And it does not matter how much my world has changed, I will still happily immerse myself in a book and travel to other worlds… Over time, I developed as a reader and I could see how books offer ways for people to understand events and offer ways to heal… and that was when my writing journey really took off.  I lost my dad in 2011, it was writing, and writing poetry specifically, that helped me process what had happened, so my writing journals began at that time. And that was the only way I could try to process my feelings and reconcile my mind to what had happened. Yes, that was the beginning of the journey really. 

Thank you and sorry, it’s a difficult question really, but what goes on in your head when you start to write a piece?

My students ask me this all the time … the best way to describe it is that I am a stream of consciousness writer. I don’t necessarily set it all out in advance before I write. For me, the root of writing is about the emotion…get the emotion down first. Okay, this is easier for me as I’ve read so widely and when writing it seems an obvious thing to do. Words are just my way of processing the day to day. One of my past mentors was Beth Kempton.  She calls the process of getting it down on the page as spilling… you spill it out without worrying about the audience. The crafting comes later. It is just the way I’ve grown as a writer and the model I’ve used in the classroom to help remove the barriers to writing that young people have. There’s not a pre-ordained way about how you should write, but just go with the spirit or whatever it is and see what you get. 

So your messages just go on and do it?

Yes I think so. I do believe everyone can write because writing is a mirror on how you see the world and if you can talk you can write, something that Pie Corbett expands upon in his books.  I think there’s a myth around what good writing is, and this creates a barrier to getting the words on paper. We have categorised certain authors as being the best, and of course their work is timeless, but this creates an idea of writing as being this very refined space that only some people can aspire to.  I think that’s a mistake because writing is something about how you live your life and that’s an invitation to anybody.

Do your students pick up the invitation? 

Yes they all have reading journals so they’re encouraged to respond to what they’ve read or experienced. In the corner of the classroom, there is a writing board where they can pin their work, and get feedback. So much writing in the classroom can be about meeting assessment criteria for this exam boards or that test, so it is important to give them free spaces too for writing or reading for its own sake. For them to become crafters.

It’s interesting that you see writing and reading so integrated.

Yes I think so and we try to frame the lessons in that way. I think when you’re reading literature, you’re reading as a writer and you’re learning what is possible. Somebody said there can be no original writing  as everything has already been written about, but I don’t believe that is true. Everything has been written about from particular perspectives but not from your perspective. 

The pieces you’ve included for us concern your trip to Dresden one of the triggers is the posters which you saw in the main square could you tell us something about that?

So, for me, Holocaust remembrance has been important…an academic passion of mine for a very long time. When I was 17, I met Kitty Hart-Moxon, who survived Auschwitz, and for me that changed everything I had thought about the world.  I started to see narratives as ways which could heal and this stayed with me. Over time, I’ve learnt different ways to humanise the narrative of the Holocaust and for me that poster exhibition was incredibly powerful. You looked at the faces of the individuals, you could see the pain and melancholy but also expressions of resilience and determination to survive. And remember that all this was taking place in the heart of a space, which was sacred, outside the Frauenkirche. 

These people are present both in the way they present themselves and in the ways they are standing there in a country that once wanted them to be gone. And so that of itself is an incredibly powerful act of resistance. And I had not actually noticed this component, but a friend on the trip, pointed it out to me, and once I saw it, I could not unsee it. She spoke of the target in the eyes. It’s that sense of needing to look someone in the eye, looking at them at them as a target and then looking at them as a human being. There is always something about the eyes. People often say the eyes are a window on the soul. I think when you look closely into somebody’s eyes, you can see what they feel and have experienced in a way that you don’t get when you see the full body of the person. You look into the very essence of humanity, which is a soul, and a spirit but maybe you also see man’s greatest source of darkness, which is the mechanisation of violence.

We need to constantly humanise the victims in genocide because I think sometimes when there are big traumas and catastrophes it all becomes this homogenous mass, and we forget the individual threads of the tapestry, we do not truly understand the individual underneath.

I also see in your pieces that fire is an important idea for you. 

Yes, I think it is, and was prominent in the course I did last month with Beth Kempton which was called ‘Ink and Flame.’ Through time, fire has been used in many different ways. You can take it back to Prometheus, stealing fire from the Gods and giving it to man and paying the price for doing so. But for me I link fire with the idea of God himself. In the story of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit is shown by “tongues of fire” so in that sense, the fire carries the idea of resurrection of your spiritual self. And then obviously  in secular culture you also have an idea of fire offering heat and being there for you  at birth and through life.

Thanks for this. Can I ask if you want to work on the poems we have attached more… are they ever finished? 

Poems I consider to always be in evolution. At the point of writing they reflected my feelings in the moment. But once you are back from a trip, and start to process, you filter the experience through a different lens. These retrospective reflections can encourage you to reshape the poem so that it reflects both the immediate experience and the impact of that in your journey.

And do you have any future plans? 

I established a partnership with a school in Dresden, well two schools, and so we are in conversations at the moment about what our partnership might look like. We have each selected our classes to twin with and we are just focusing on what narratives and stories we’re going to share. We are potentially looking at Lois Lowry’s ‘The Giver’ and how we can create a virtual exchange about this book, in the first instance. This will lead to young people sharing their own stories with one another and getting an understanding of how their cities have been shaped by history and we hope over time this exchange will be in person. One of the teachers in one of these partner schools will be joining us in November for the anniversary of the Coventry Blitz so we hope to find a space for her to meet my students in the way I was able to meet her students.

Is there anything you’d like to add about writing?

Well, I think my message would be the process of writing can be a process of healing. It’s been my constant companion in my journey – something for me that eventually evolved into a novel. Writing it was a process of reconciliation. I hope that people reading my book will feel some of what I felt when I wrote it and experience their own form of healing. 

I think that writing is such a powerful bridge between us and will help young people understand movements in their own countries and to enable them to articulate their own values in 2025.