I’ve started the new year with some reminiscence work with people at day centres in Wells-next-the-Sea and Fakenham. As always, the stories I hear are inspiring and humbling. They make me think that we complain far too much about the little niggles of life. These women and men endured the war, worked long hours in domestic service or on the land, and brought up families at a time when money for essentials was in short supply. Hats off to them.
I’m reading at Wivenhoe on 28 April (details on Home Page) and have a few more readings pencilled in. More on those when they’re confirmed.
I’m running a memoir writing course in Burnham Market over four fortnightly workshops over the next two months. This course is fully booked, but if you’d like me to run one for you on any aspect of writing memoirs, fiction or poetry, please email me on Caroline.Gilfillan@btinternet.com
This autumn I’ll be running a workshop on writing ghost and historical stories as part of the COAST Cromer and Sheringham Arts Festival on October 31st from 10.00 a.m. to 3.00 pm at Cromer Museum. The festival itself is a joy, so do check it out.
Last summer I was commissioned to write a poem for Art Alive in Churches. I visited the church of St Michael and All Angels at Barton Turf, to draw inspiration from one of the best preserved medieval rood screens in the country, and wrote the poem (below) to celebrate the painter of the angels depicted on the screens. It was exhibited, beside photographs of the rood screen and paintings by Maz Jackson at the Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist this autumn. I hope to work with Art Alive again this summer.
Poem commissioned for Art Alive 2011
The Painter of the Angels at Barton Turf
Long hours I worked, late into nights
when the milk of the moon lit my hand.
I had a team of painters with me –
bright-eyed youngsters and solid men
calm and capable with their brushes –
but it was my hand that drew the lines
that coaxed the nine orders of angels
into this church set in rippling fields.
One day, it seemed, the angels were empty
shapes; the next dawn they’d arrived
with a whisper of feathers, a hiss of silk,
on the good, strong feet I’d drawn for them.
They came clothed in scarlet feathers,
white ermine, rose damask,
smelling faintly of incense and lilies,
of palm branches and ringing steel:
Seraphim, burning red with love;
golden Cherubim, all-seeing;
green-winged Thrones, Dominions,
blue Virtues; devil-scourging Powers;
Principalities, Archangels in armour,
and Angels guarding naked souls.
All this was eight centuries ago.
but still they glow in dappled light,
listening to prayers, readings and song,
and rooks and sparrows taking flight.
Caroline Gilfillan