Update: We're officially facilitating workshops!
+ "The Child."
Good afternoon to all our lovely subscribers,
Free Fall Write’s newsletter exists to send you our favourite piece of the month, every month, straight to your inbox. Our next full piece will be delivered to you on the 28th of February. We hope you enjoy it! As a brand new business, we also have exciting updates that we want to share with our patrons, friends, and supporters. Don’t worry, we won’t be clogging up your inbox with everything and we’re mindful of your cyberspace; so occasionally you might get an additional letter on top of our favourite monthly pieces.
After a few months of planning, curating, and trialling our free writing workshops we have officially ended the trial period and are producing ticketed events! This is huge for us - for four solid months we’ve been working full time to develop our three core products as a communications agency and (fingers crossed) we’ve nailed this one: facilitating creative writing workshops that can provide a safe space for many demographics to express themselves.
Right now, our workshops are open to all and conducted via zoom. We’re continuously developing our workshops and will always be tailoring them to fit our clients needs. We aim to bring our workshops into schools (working with children from nursery all the way to secondary school), business spaces (for product developers, marketing, and advertising teams as well as within the tech industry), creative community spaces (working with experienced and novice artists), care homes, and plenty more. Our core belief is that your first draft is perfect, and you have the perfect voice to tell your own story.
We have upcoming workshops on the 10th and 17th of March! You can find out more about our workshops and where to sign up for your tickets here.
Here are some words from our trial participants:
It was genuinely an amazing session and I’m super proud of how well it was put together. These are concepts and attitudes I encourage within my own students, but to have to delivered in such a thoughtful and expressive way was lovely.
Genuinely helpful and informative. Excellent hosts, and accessible information.
I enjoyed it a lot, I feel like there was a good amount of writing in the workshop and I will definitely use it to help with my own creative flow.
So if that sounds interesting to you please sign up! Whatever your relationship with writing is, anyone can join and reap the benefits of gentle and collaborative creative spaces. And hey, Zoom fatigue aside, community is essential to us. Get in touch with us if you have any questions. Please do share this among your networks and on your social media stories if you’re able to. We appreciate it.
Thank you for your continuous support. It doesn’t go unnoticed at all. Shout out to you absolute babes. If you read all of that, then you deserve a treat. Here’s a poem that we wrote together last year called The Child.
Climate became a painful word.
She was once a child,
Raised, guided, softened by all that is earthly
And all that is nurtured through water
A combative measure to it’s hurried nature
A force born through marrying fire and air;
A marriage propagated by human greed and revolution
The water had to wait. It wasn’t time to spring from the smooth and hard uterus.
There was still much to be done, more personalities to form.
It wasn’t time for water to start its slow drip down into a gush of energy.
No, the water had to wait for the others.
There is a patience to this game, one that relies on trusting the others,
To show up when the time is right.
Water loves to float,
But to float where there is no one to drink it,
Would have proven too lonely of an existence to water.
So water had to wait.
The earth, the large barren rock, was waiting for something to happen.
Pirouetting on the spot with excitement,
Floating in anticipation for something to happen.
What it was waiting for, it couldn’t say,
The earth had no energy to talk,
Yet it understood its crucial position
In the something that was going to happen
The earth understood it had to be where it was
At this moment,
For something to happen.
The air had no idea that it was waiting at all.
The air hadn’t realised itself, and was still a prop for now,
It hung, still over and on the earth, almost menacing,
An uncanny shadow of movement,
An expectation of a roar,
Lying in wait,
The air has no idea what’s coming to it.
The fire didn’t exist, there was stillness
Until there wasn’t.
For fire remains unlike the others,
With no body or collective realm to its form
No place to call itself from
No place to begin or no place to be found
You’ve gotta want it.
Summon it
It did have places to end, places to breathe and to roam.
It would ignite one day, and learn it loved the air -
Loved with its whole force and reasoning
Loved from the depths of its soul
Yet it wouldn’t be able to tell you why.
Fire needed to be struck, but sadly it’s Romeo, Air
Was unable to cast it into form.
Like lovers do, they romanced
Painting the world with peaks and lows
Which we termed as weather, as seasons we enjoyed
Climate came through patterns and flow
Antithesis to labour: an easy birth.
Climate learnt to run, to walk, to read it’s surrounding
As any child should.
Enshrouding civilizations, kings and revolution
Laying texture between the patience of the trees and sea.
Fire and Air, became burdened with consequence of man
Manipulated by creeds of power and gain
And as any child would, Climate copied.
The world began with an open field
For things to grow, to die, to heal, to fuck.
But the world through all its stages,
Belongs not to the Gods we create or
The Nobel Peace Prize winners we gift
But to the rawness of the elements
The rawness that now sees our world sad
Shrouded in heat we cannot control
Shrouded in predictions of submerged cities.
Shroud us in closed eyes of what is to come, take away
Take it all away today, let us live in safety.
Take away the dried plains, reverse Sahel.
Take away the pain, our selfish wish.
Climate became a painful word.
But Climate is a child,
Raised, guided, softened by all that is earthly
And all that is nurtured through water
A combative measure to it’s hurried nature
A force born through marrying fire and air;
A marriage propagated by human greed and revolution
Now asks for a revolution to disseminate its being.
Shiromi Bedessee and Shirine Shah, November 2020
Additional updates:
Shirine is giving a talk at The London Metropolitan University on the 22nd of January (next week). She’ll be sharing her poetry as part of a final year creative writing module to students, lecturers, and the general public. It’ll be starting at 6.30 and running for an hour. Here’s a zoom link to the talk if anyone would like to join. She’ll be taking questions after discussing the role climate, diaspora, and capitalism plays in her work, as well as sharing her creative journey to becoming a writer.
That’s all from us this week. We look forward to catching up soon.
May the sounds of the rain be a source of calm and stillness,
S
