Sea Sessions: Live Writing at Godrevy Lighthouse

This week our writer-in-residence Wyl Menmuir took a group of writing students to create work and develop ideas on the cliffs and beach at Godrevy lighthouse.  

Clinging to pens and pencils and braving the elements, the students enjoyed the spectacular view and sightings of the local seals, while having the opportunity to develop their own writing with Wyl’s guidance and passion. Wyl shared with students his own writing processes and whetted their appetite for words with snippets of readings from literature, which he delivered on the cliffs to be swept away almost simultaneously by the wind. 

“The students’ task was to consider detail, uniqueness, and to consider how their own created characters would interact with this environment: to put them in the lighthouse, on a boat out to sea, in the waves.”

Wyl encouraged the students to encapsulate the environment in their writing. Their descriptions were to be bounded and embedded in the environs: it is this place, and only this one, about which they could be writing. The students' task was to consider detail, uniqueness, and to consider how their own created characters would interact with this environment: to put them in the lighthouse, on a boat out to sea, in the waves.

The workshop ended in the café, with reflective conversation over warming hot chocolate, before the students returned to campus with the smell of Cornish sea air still fresh on their clothes.

---