Sky spaces for writing

I first encountered James Turrell’s sky spaces here in the North, at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. This place has particular significance for me. I grew up running around the wide open spaces and the Henry Moores and the lake, long before there was a visitor’s centre and paths through the fields. My mum was a student here in the 60s, when the space was home to Bretton Hall, a cutting edge training ground for the arts and art education.

In a full-circle moment, I brought my own group of Creative Writing students here when I moved back North after finishing my PhD and beginning a teaching post at the University of Leeds. I took them to write in the sky space that Turrell carved out of an old deer shelter on the estate. It’s a space with a powerful sense of grandeur and ceremony. You enter through a small archway and walk inside the hill, emerging into a chamber filled with sky.

This summer, I took my daughter back there. She immediately loved the feel of the space and we spent a long time just sitting, watching the clouds move across the sky. Even on a dull day, there was so much to notice about the light, which seems to reach down into the chamber. It’s a place where you can slow down and really look. Which, of course, is what writing can be too.

‘We live within this reality we create, and we're quite unaware of how we create the reality. So the work is often a general koan into how we go about forming this world in which we live, in particular with seeing.’ - James Turrell

Last autumn, I was lucky enough to visit two of Turrell’s sky spaces in Arizona: Knight Rise at the Scottsdale Museum of Modern Art and Air Apparent at Arizona State University Campus.

Each was a very different experience. Each was about looking deeply, noticing, becoming more and more aware of my own being as a seeing, looking, listening being.

When we really look, anything can become a sky space – the light glimpsed through tree branches, the moon reflected in a puddle on a city pavement. It’s all good practice for writing.

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Barbara Hepworth’s stone collection

The sculptor, Margaret Hepworth, was born and grew up in my home town, Wakefield, West Yorkshire. I have always been drawn to her beautiful work, which reconnects me with the landscapes of my childhood – the moors, the undulating hills, which have always felt to me like gigantic bodies, holding my own smaller one.

‘I, the sculptor, am the landscape. I am the form and I am the hollow, the thrust and the contour.’

Barbara Hepworth, 1971. A Pictorial Autobiography

On this visit, I was fascinated all over again by Hepworth’s personal collection of pebbles, stones and artefacts. Their influence on her later work is so clear: pebbles ringed with lines; carved and etched figurines; shapes smoothed by weather and time.

‘Many people select a stone or pebble to carry for the day,’ she wrote. ‘The weight and form and texture felt in our hands relates us to the past and gives us a sense of a universal force. The beautifully shaped stone, washed up by the sea, is a symbol of continuity, a silent image of our desire for survival, peace and security.’

Perhaps this is true of a poem or a piece of writing – or even a single word. We carry it with us. We hold it and are simultaneously held by it.

Here are some of the ‘scrying stones’ that I’ve collected over the years, stones worn through by wind and sea, making holes to peer through, into the future and the past, as well as the present moment. Sometimes, I like to hold them when I write.

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Starting a new notebook

I’ve just cracked open a new notebook, fresh for a period of much longed-for time to write and create.

(And hoping I’m not tempting Fate here.)

Like most writers and creatives, I have a cupboard full of notebooks because keeping a notebook has been a lifelong practice. There are few things as full of promise as smoothing back the cover of a brand new notebook. This summer, mine is this Moleskine. I chose it because it has a whopping 400 pages - plenty to keep me going through July and August.

Like most writers, I am very particular about my notebooks. To be honest, I fell out of love with Moleskine for a few years because I find that the paper, whilst deliciously smooth and the distinctive creamy colour that we all associate with Moleskine, is also a little too thin for me. I don’t like show-through. For a while, I experimented with these from Leuchtturm. The paper is so good, but they are pricey, especially when you go through as many notebooks as I tend to do, and I’m really not a fan of a hard cover. (However, if you like numbered pages, this might be the notebook for you .)

I then stumbled across these by Clairefontaine, the company that supplies the paper for Leuchtturm. They are so much cheaper and generally very good if you like to write with fountain pen or brush pen, or paint with watercolour, or glue things into your notebook. The paper is beautiful and really holds up.

Over the years, I’ve also flirted with dot grid paper, but I’ve concluded that the paper just has to be plain for me. And I can’t abide writing on lined paper.

My other requirement is that the covers of my notebooks are as plain as possible. Perhaps this is a hangover from all those childhood Christmases when kind relatives would buy Sophie-the-budding-writer the most exquisite journals with embellished covers. They would sit on my desk untouched because I could never bring myself to sully their perfection with my messy, unedited words. No, my notebook needs to be a place where I can think out loud, scribble, experiment; a space that can safely contain my unedited self.

I’m in awe of Austin Kleon’s three-notebook system. Inspired by Kleon (because which creative person isn’t?) I did once try to keep a small logbook alongside my notebook - but my mind and my life just don’t work in this way and everything just ended up in the one bigger book.

Something I do have in common with Kleon’s process, though, is that I have a ritual for beginning a new notebook. I like to decide upon something or someone to serve as the notebook’s presiding spirit or inspiration. This summer, it’s a little owl. Owls have always felt significant to me (maybe because of the associations with my name) and I bought this stamp fifteen years ago in Vancouver. It’s made from a design by the artist Ryan Cranmer.

close-up image of printed owl stamp by artist Ryan Cranmer

I often copy out a piece of text or a poem that I’d like to adopt as my guide. Here’s Mary Oliver’s poem ‘In Blackwater Woods’ from Devotion, the new Selected, published at the end of last year.

Image of poem copied into notebook and Mary Oliver’s Devotions.

I also lit my candles and did a reading from the beautiful The Wild Unknown Archetypes deck by Kim Krans.

Notebook sketch of card reading and round cards from The Wild Unknown Archetype deck.

Of course, the most important thing about a notebook for any writer is to use it.

I’m quietly excited at the prospect of a summer of writing and dreaming.