Professor Patrick McGuinness & Shin-Shin Ngiam tell us about the creative writing course they ran in 2024: Everyday Oxford.
The French writer Maurice Blanchot wrote that ‘The Everyday is where we are first and foremost: at work, at leisure, awake, asleep, in the street, in private existence’. And because of this, it is often difficult to pin down: ‘it escapes’, he writes.
In a place like Oxford, the Everyday and its sibling the Ordinary don’t much feature in official stories of the city. Oxford is all about (we are told) extraordinary places and people, unique buildings, ancient traditions and remarkable tales. Often these stories focus on individuals rather than communities, and many involve great wealth (with care taken not to mention where that wealth comes from…). Just as the postcards of the city focus on particular ‘extraordinary’ views and scenes, so the Oxford we usually see in films, in poems, in novels and on the news has little of the everyday about it. One of the drawbacks of being a global city and an international tourist-destination is that other Oxfords get squeezed out.
But there are other Oxfords – and plenty of them. You won’t see them on postcards or in tourist films, though you might catch a glimpse, in an early Inspector Morse for instance, of the car plant or the ring road, or the Kassam stadium, home to a successful football team with a strong local base, and, on Sundays, host to one of Oxford’s most eye-opening rituals…: the car boot sale.
Another place you’ll catch a glimpse of these other Oxfords is this anthology. It is the result of a collaboration between TORCH, ARK T and Museum Oxford, and brings together work by a number of Oxford residents themed around the idea of ‘Valuing the Everyday’. Our aim was to explore, in weekly writing sessions, elements of our everyday experience here. To write about them was to value them. In our first session, Museum Oxford brought a number of objects for us to look at, talk about and touch. They were at first sight the most ‘Everyday’ of things: a woollen bathing suit, a Morris driving wheel, a theatre programme... We were allowed to touch them – of course we were: they were everyday things! But they all meant something, which is why they were museum-pieces. Why? Because they all led beyond themselves and into stories about Oxford.
The bathing suit reminded us that Oxford was once (and could again be…) a real river city. It reminded us of the city’s historic bathing-places that were clean, free, accessible, and communal. They had poetic names too: Longbridges, Whirley Pool, Footman’s Bath and Tumbling Bay… The driving wheel? It led us into the story of William Morris and his bicycle business that became a car business that became the largest car factory in Europe and changed Oxford forever. But it also reminded us of the promise that cars once represented: escape, freedom, independence; but also fumes, environmental damage, traffic jams. As for the theatre programmes, they were full of names later to become famous (John Gielgud, Peggy Ashcroft, Judi Dench), and also full of adverts for shops and tea rooms long gone but remembered by some of our group.
These ‘ordinary’ and ‘everyday’ things opened Oxford up to us. Our method was use prompts, anecdotes, memories and explore them together. We wrote, we read out our work and commented on it. We gained confidence, encouraged each other, tried new things, new words, new forms of writing each week. But we stayed close to the theme of valuing the everyday: being attentive, careful, noticing, looking and looking and – if necessary – looking again. We even did some group work, with pleasing results.
Our first 5 sessions were in Templars Square shopping centre, or Cowley Centre as it’s known to those who live in that part of Oxford. Ark T’s workshops are in a formerly disused retail unit – a good example of a community organisation reclaiming the space left behind by corporations and sidelined by the dreaming spires narratives of Oxford. Our last session was in Museum Oxford itself, where we were reunited with our objects and were given a tour of the exhibits: an old pub sign testifying to Oxford’s noble brewing history; a brick from the Cuttelsowe walls; recordings and photos of Windrush arrivals. On the museum website, we are invited to send in our thoughts and memories of these items, these images, and people do send them, because Museum Oxford is the city’s museum – the place where the everyday, which is also their everyday, is valued.
We began each session with some mindfulness exercises. This seemed important because it helped participants – at the end of a long day – to cross over into the creative zone in which they’d be spending the next 90 minutes. The aim was to engage all our senses, suspending doubts and distractions, to funnel our creativity but also to be responsive to that of others.
We have hugely enjoyed these sessions, and we ourselves learned a great deal from them. But we’re especially proud to have helped such fine writing reach the page.
