Whipple Creative Writing Workshop Contributions

Here are some further contributions from workshop participants…

From Immy, aged 10, the youngest participant in our Creative Writing Workshop.

Immy bravely serenaded us with a lovely song about the ship-shaped sundial, and then impressed us further by reading us a story, ‘The Globe of Puzzles,’ about the jigsaw-puzzle globe. Her contributions are below.

Thank you, Immy!

  

The Sundial Song

I’ve felt the summer sun

Felt the leaves a falling

Seen the world in winter

Seen the darkest night

I’ve been everywhere on the earth but not in Heaven

 

 

The Globe of Puzzles

by Immy age 10

A boy called Joe who was 8 years old walked down an abandoned mine tunnel.  He walked down the tunnel and found a dead end; he saw on a rock shelf a globe that was made of lots of pieces to put together.  He was amazed by the varied colours and the great countries that covered the earth, so he put it together and a voice said in his head how to live forever…….

 

 

From a few of our (adult) participants:

Alex wrote about the ship-shaped sundial as well. I especially love how Alex read about the history of the sundial on the website and worked that into the poem, whilst also taking an imaginative leap from that information into the unknown:

  

Samuel’s sixteenth ship sundial

The man took the ship in the palm of his hand

A beam of light fell on the brassy shape

Telling the time, spelling the state of the day.

Almost 450 year ago Samuel Fox took up his

Instruments, finely sharp and carefully kept

And engraved his initials SF on his sixteenth ship sundial

Ordered by a doctor in Plymouth who wished

He’d gone to sea as a boy.

Who lived in a tall house on the Hoe looking south

Who liked to use arithmetic to sharpen his wits

Who walked with a limp,

Who coughed on damp days.

He would need spectacles to see the fine lines

That Samuel engraved in his workshop in Greenwich

Watched by his apprentice Tom.

The doctor would keep his sundial in a velvet bag

Drawn up by a silken cord. Kept in the third drawer down

On the left of his desk looking out over the water.

Each of Samuel’s ship sundials was slightly different

This one – a chubby shape, with a stocky mast –

Would sail through centuries, lost in a sea of

Where next, what next?

Snug in its high and dry, safe and sound place.

 

 

Here is a piece from Simon, who wrote about the puzzle globe (and also gave excellently evocative readings of this and our gold coin example):

  

The world puzzle

The world was split: brutally, along lines of latitude and radii that ran through the Earth’s core. It lay, set out, upon the table, a dissected planet. The divisions ran sharply across continents and oceans,  cuts of a geometrical sphere that ignored geography and tore over the structures of the Earth’s surface. 

Somehow, gradually, the detail began to creep inside. Line-tendrils from the surface began to snake into the interior, crawling across the blank surfaces of the raw partitions.  Slowly, with muted colours resembling those of lichen, the confusions of the surface crept into the Earth’s interior. A great elephant appeared at the Earth’s core. From America, a vast tree grew into the interior, and on it sat a Native American, talking to a monkey. Last of all, the writing appeared, fitting between the spidery pictures and explaining them. The barren Earth was filled with vegetation, people, and descriptions; the puzzle had solved itself.

 

 

Thank you everyone for your contributions! Most impressive!