How I like to go with the flow, says Ian McMillan

At the community centre we sat around a table and I gave out the pencils, saying something about new pencils for new poems. Then somebody pointed out that the pencils hadn’t been sharpened which meant that they were just sticks. It started to feel as though the flow had not really got going, had been halted in its tracks. Luckily Resourceful Bob, as I call him, had brought along not one but two pencil sharpeners and he passed them round and we sharpened our writing implements.

As the gentle sound of sharpening filled the room, I read out a poem by the late York-based poet Pete Morgan called ‘An Apple Peel Alphabet’ which was based on that old folk tale that if you peeled an apple the shape the peel made might just show you the initials of the person you were going to marry. I was thinking that maybe we’d write something about apples, maybe that was the flow we’d go with. After all, it’s been a great year for apples.

Somebody said ‘I bet you could make letters of the alphabet from pencil sharpener shavings’ and she held up one that looked like a curling W, and suddenly the flow began and we started to go with it. I got a bit of paper and we laid the shavings on it; they looked like a work of art or a piece of sculpture, especially with the aforementioned autumn sun dancing through the windows. We photographed the shavings on the paper and, on a whim I tweeted the photograph. I asked my followers to think of a title for the work of art we’d made. Now we were going with the flow; I like opening up a writing workshop in a room to the world of social media because it means that our poems and our art and our ideas can flow across the world and people in their houses or offices can feel like part of our creative protest. One tweeter gave us a name for our new art movement: shavism. The titles they came up with were impressive too: Sharpened perspective. Pencil Peelings. Wood like 2B a poetic alphabet. Shave and sound.

The flow flowed and the words kept coming. At the end of the workshop everyone said how much they’d enjoyed it and I felt like we’d achieved a lot even though I’d not planned anything. And when I put my coat on to go home, I found the leaves I’d picked up: ah well, they could be next week’s flow!