Creative Toolbox is an exciting youth creative wellbeing programme for young people from across Dumfries & Galloway dealing with low self-esteem, low confidence and/or poor mental health.
The Creative Toolbox programme was launched at a special event in April 2024, and aims to boost creativity, expand horizons and provide a gateway to further creative opportunities for young people.
Georgia Blue, our Youth Creative Wellbeing lead, has shared an update on how the programme has been progressing over the Autumn as the participants move on to the Graduate programme.
In September we kicked off our Graduate programme which offers our participants the chance to stay with us for longer to further their skills, upscale their ambitions and continue building upon their social connections. This is split into three strands; Creative Ambition, Creative Enterprise and Creativity in the Community.
For our Creative Ambition strand, we have partnered with The Stove on their exciting Creative Caerlaverock project. At every session we worked with the themes; The Spirit, The Storm, The Supper and The Siege. We have organised creative writing, sound production and recording and music improv workshops planned, read on to find out more about each session.
Our first session was led by Calum Walker and Martin O’Neill who took us sound foraging throughout the castle grounds. We were very lucky to get a dry and sunny, albeit chilly, day to explore the picturesque Caerlaverock Castle and its surroundings. Armed with our microphones and headphones, we investigated the area, our footsteps walking the same grounds Robert the Bruce did as he fought to keep it a Scottish stronghold.
As interesting as the history of this castle is, we focused on capturing the sounds of the present. Birdsong, stones plopping into a well, the flapping of a Swan’s wing, echoing voices up a spiral staircase, graveled footsteps, squelchy footsteps, children laughing. It was a very peaceful exercise, and a chance to slow down and really listen to the sounds within our world.
We were joined by author, Karen Campbell, and Spoken Word Poet, Katie Ailes, on an initial zoom who led us through some introductory writing exercises. The group created name poems, reflecting who they are. This was a great tool to find out more about the group, who can sometimes find speaking directly about themselves a little daunting. We then took to freewriting, an exercise that inspires creative thinking, prompted by questions. Katie led this exercise and got us thinking about our senses and personifying the castle and how it would feel. For example, “what can you smell in the castle?”, “What has the castle heard?” etc.
We then had two separate in-person workshops held at The Stove Cafe. Karen led the first, and got the group thinking about the structure of story by playing a circle game. We each went round the circle to tell a line of a story on the spot, which was really fun, but definitely tested our listening and improv skills! We then thought back to our time at Caerlaverock Castle, placing ourselves in a specific spot, using our foraged sounds to help immerse us back to this place. Combining these sounds with our imagination we created short stories of what could happen in these locations.
Karen then led us through another exercise which got us thinking about the themes as people. I chose ‘The Storm’ and named it ThunderElla. (we didn’t have long to name the characters, so please don’t judge by name picking skills!) By naming these themes as characters, it freed us up to think of their feelings, relationships etc. It was a really interesting day, that garnered lots of writing material.
The group really got into the groove of writing and I was, again, so impressed at their use of language in their pieces.
The next week we were joined by Katie Ailes and Kevin McLean from I Am Loud Poets. We explored the difference between poetry and performance poetry, and then Kevin performed his own poem that he had written about Love. It was a beautiful piece, performed just as well, but showed how much gestures, tone of voice, pauses, breath and emotion can change the impact spoken word poetry has over reading poetry on a page.
We again, thought back to Caerlaverock Castle, using images as a reminder, to list descriptive, sensory, and emotional words and phrases. We then took it a step further to write sentences and paragraphs incorporating these words but focusing on our senses again; taste, smell, sound, touch and sight and writing about how each of these senses would feel/be in the castle. Once this was completed, Katie got us to “Pan for Gold”, which means to highlight key words, phrases, or lines that stood out to us. It was a great way to read over our work and find bits that we liked and were proud of. The gold we found we then structured into a poem, adding any flourishing’s to emphasise certain bits. The way both Katie and Kevin broke this process down was done in such an accessible and fun way that allowed all of us to write a poem. Something some of us found a difficult prospect at the beginning of the session.
In the afternoon we looked at how these could be performed. How to work a mic, how to show confidence (even if you’re not necessarily feeling it inside) and how to use your body and voice to engage in the piece. Some of us then took used this advice to perform our poems to the rest of the group. I was really proud of Kayla for getting up and performing. Kayla has been a peer mentor this year and has really pushed themself to try all of the activities and has been a great example for the rest of the group, always encouraging and showing support to everyone. I think we all need our own personal Kayla in our lives!
Find out what we do with our poems and stories in Part Two of this blog…
Free Writing
I free write in my personal practice and find it a very therapeutic exercise and a great way to empty a busy brain. It also helps to stop your inner critic interfering as the main point is to keep writing no matter what. Don’t edit, don’t scribble out, just let your hand flow across the page. It can reveal new ideas or thoughts as you allow your stream of consciousness to take over without worrying or applying pressure on yourself. It can also be used to dump the contents of your brain on to a page, sometimes reading this back can help you make sense of what’s actually going on up there…Or is that just me?
If you would like to practice this at home, it’s super easy, and all you need is a pen and paper. Please try not to use a laptop or other device as this restricts your flow.
How do you do it?
- Find a comfortable position.
- Choose a set time. Start with 5 minutes a day for a week. Increase to 10, 15 and so on. Could you do an hour of freewriting?
- Always keep writing, your hand should be continuously moving.
- Don’t cross anything out. This exercise is about writing not editing. Even if you write something you didn’t mean to, leave it there. “Mistakes” are allowed.
- Don’t worry about spelling, grammar and punctuation. This is not a spelling test. As long as the essence of your writing is understandable to you, that’s all that matters.
- Lose control. Don’t think, just allow yourself to write.
You may want to choose a prompt to help kickstart you. This could be a particular memory, a dream, your favourite film, a person you look up to or something visual like an image in a newspaper.
You can try playing background music. Note how, or if, different genres of music influence what you write.
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