Writing Around the Edges
Emma Kernahan on Word Space and the power of community for rural writers
For nearly a year, I’ve been a participant on a brand new development scheme for emerging writers, run by Literature Works. The scheme, Word Space, was set up to nurture and connect emerging talent in the South West - a year long programme of mentoring, workshops and online spaces for writers to support each other and develop their craft.
As I’m here to tell you about Word Space, I should be clear right from the start, that I applied for it entirely as an exercise in proving to myself that I had no business whatsoever in writing, and in that respect it has been a genuinely terrible experience.
I’ll say now that if you’re trying to give up writing for good and go back to a peaceful life free from anything creative, then maybe stop reading now because I don’t recommend this scheme for that like, at all. If you want to quit writing for good, then I’m giving Word Space a maximum of 2/10. This is a one star review.
The whole point of applying was that I knew in my bones wasn’t actually a writer. This is not an exercise in seeking sympathy, but facts are facts: I’m in my forties, I live in a small town in the middle of a county in the middle of not quite the midlands, not quite the Cotswolds, I have children and a busy job. I drive a Ford C Max and my main luxury is a weekly tuna crunch baguette from Greggs. I don’t fit any mould for a phrase like ‘emerging talent’. I had only started writing at all in my late thirties, and like most people who don’t create for a living, but rather around one, my words had only ever scribbled in the margins of other texts. These were the stories already written for me: the tale of the selfless mother who is always ‘present’ at the school gates instead of replying to emails on her phone, the legend of the working woman who never has to stop mid meeting to dose a child with Calpol, the ballad of the supportive partner who also remembers to get a card for the neighbour’s birthday and reply to everyone in 43 different online chats that are all called ‘Drinks soon?’ and are exclusively for women who don’t go out after they’ve taken their bra off at 6pm and have been trying to arrange a night out since 2017, like the WhatsApp equivalent of Waiting for Godot.
Real writers - emerging talent writers - are intellectual heavyweights, poetic souls holding up a mirror to the human condition. I’d watched enough BBC4 to know that they do this in book lined offices, or in bougie cafes with whitewashed walls, or while wandering the streets of London or Manchester being twenty four and staring at rivers. None of the writers I’d read about had spent the pandemic watching Bridgerton on their phone and spending 5 hours a day shouting at children to, for the love of god, flush the loo.
And yet, what prompted me to apply was that it didn’t seem to matter how much I wasn’t a writer, and however much I tried to hide it from my family, my friends and even myself - it was time to admit it to myself: I had a writing problem.
Poems were popping out of me in the queue at Aldi, flash was being scribbled while I chopped onions and stirred spag bols, opening lines floated fully formed into my mind while I bent in the rain with a dog poo bag (and, sometimes, a dog), I wrote satire on my notes app in the car park at the leisure centre and then, at a point of pure exhaustion, I wrote an application to the Word Space mentoring scheme while sitting on the floor of my daughter’s bedroom, somewhere around midnight and just before the deadline. It had to stop. I had to kick the habit. I would not get onto this scheme, and that would be that. It was time, I’d decided, to know - really know - that I should stop writing altogether.
Well, that’s not how it turned out, because this is a scheme that puts faith in people who don’t fit any tired old literary mould, so if you are also thinking of applying then the first thing I’m going to complain about is the support. The only reason I’d ever written anything in the first place was entirely down to the nudging and cheerleading of the writers I knew locally - the team behind Stroud Short Stories, the writing groups they brought me into, the Dialect network: people who saw a woman who was nearly a decade into 5 hours sleep per night and pyjama bottoms as business wear, and - heartlessly - encouraged her to keep spending her evenings writing ridiculous little jokes.
I need you to know that Word Space 100% made this worse. I found myself surrounded by a group of warm, welcoming and absurdly talented people, from small towns all over the South West, places like mine, slap bang in the middle of the edge of things. In our group workshops, they shared the kind of poems and prose that hung with me for days after reading. Words that clung to me all through my day job meetings, like tiny spores about my person, nudging themselves into the fabric of my thoughts. Not only that, but we connected in group chats, egging each other on, telling each other about new writing opportunities. It’s been ridiculous to find myself in their amazing company. Nil points, sorry.
Next, the expert mentoring from an established author. Look, if you want to stop Doing Words then really, this is not helping at all. I’ve had a year of kind, clever, constructive support from an absolute pro, a master of the narrative form. I’d hoped to be told that it was time to put down the story that had been interrupting my thoughts all through the pandemic, to experience the relief of someone saying - mate, what are you doing? You’re a forty two year old mother of two, why are you writing about art theft? The absolute state of your Google search history babes. Time to move on. Instead, it was treated like a Serious Idea and now I have started to actually write it. Not cool.
If you are thinking of applying for Word Space but do not think that you’re a real writer, then there’s another serious side effect I need you to consider: taking yourself seriously.
This is something I’ve managed to avoid successfully *forever.* I am, and I cannot stress this enough, a deeply unserious person. I don’t say this like it’s a bad thing; I’m a support worker navigating the cost-of-living crisis, and believe me when I say that the times we find ourselves in are serious enough. It’s lovely and safe, where I used to be. Until this year writing is something I’d avoided looking at directly, it’s a side hustle, a hobby. It’s just a story, I tell people. Just a little thing. Just a joke. Until now, every sentence I’ve ever written has contained within it the tick tick tick of carefully measured, stolen time. Well, when you are told that what you have to say has value, then it turns out that you stop sneaking the things you want into your pocket, and start smashing and grabbing them right off the wall. If you can write, if you can tell your stories, well - what else can you do? This year I have written more words than I ever have in my life, but one has been removed entirely from my lexicon: that little word, just. I’ve had the brass neck to set up a writing retreat of my very own, a Word Soup gathering for a single day, to write words with friends and raise money for my local community kitchen. I’ve been bold enough to start doing campaigning right out there in my community, where I used to keep my head firmly below the parapet. I’ve applied for residencies, pitched for pieces in national newspapers, taken a chance, put myself out there, made great leaps of faith in my professional life. Now when my family ask what I’m working on and why I’m disappearing off to write all the time, I don’t apologise. ‘It’s my craft’ I hiss, and body block my laptop so they don’t see that all I’ve written in two hours is a list of Premier Inns I want to visit and a joke about Liz Truss.
So, if you’re thinking about applying for Word Space, and you actually don’t think you’re a writer at all and just want to be free from the pressure of having to finally achieve your long held creative ambitions, or take up space in the world, then absolutely do not go for it. Otherwise, you’ve got until the 29th January to procrastinate on social media before applying in a panic about five minutes before the deadline. Consider yourself warned.
About Emma Kernahan
Emma lives in Stroud. At work she writes about the UK government,and in her spare time she writes comedy. She’s been published in places such as the Independent, Yorkshire Bylines, and McSweeney’s. She's won the Gloucestershire Writers Network Prize, the Funny Pearls Short Story Prize and has been shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award.
