Partnering with Arvon

The bespoke round table in the workshop room at The Hurst, the John Osborne Arvon Writing House

It's always good to have diverse income streams, and we are pretty excited by our latest one: selling books to participants at a local writing retreat. The Hurst is 'angry young man' 1960s playwright John Osborne's former house, and these days it is run by the Arvon Foundation, a national charity that runs writing courses, both online and in person, from its three houses. Their Shropshire house is near to us and hosts up to 16 writers most weeks, learning writing skills from two professional writers and one guest writer on a variety of subjects, including fiction, memoir, nature writing, crime, poetry, scripts and more. We have started a weekly trip over to the house to supply them with books written by the tutors for them to buy, and then collect signed copies to stock in the shop. This means that participants can have a personalised memento of their retreat experience, and we are getting a steady stream of more interesting and unusual contemporary books to keep our customers interested. This is a great arrangement, and we are touched at how supportive the writers are of independent bookshops.

For those who don't know, Arvon was started nearly 60 years ago by two young poets who were disillusioned with the way creative writing was taught in schools. They believed that, rather than just learning things by rote, everyone is creative, and the best people to help you create your own work are those who have more experience of your craft, those who have faced some of the same challenges and might have ideas to share to help you along your own journey. They took a group of teenagers out to a house in the wilds of Devon for a week where they wrote together and ate together and tried out their way of doing things, inviting their friend Ted Hughes to come and read some poems as a guest halfway through, and the organisation has never looked back, hosting thousands of people over the years for a week-long residential format that hasn't changed much since that first week all those years ago. Since the pandemic they have added online courses for those who can't or don't want to do a whole week away from home, and their cohort of tutors grows and changes, but is always interesting.

Both Polly and I are writers in our own time, when we are not selling words written by other people in the shop. Polly is currently working on at least two writing projects of her own, and in the past I have been Vice Chair of the Camden Poets, and am currently faffing around with a book idea that I really should get on with, so supporting a writing retreat is right up our street, and for me, Arvon feels like a home away from home in many ways, so this new connection is lovely for us both.

I have known Arvon in a personal capacity for nearly 20 years, since I did my first Arvon retreat in poetry at their Devon house, taught by Roger McGough and Julia Copus. Roger was a bit too famous to be a great tutor, ruining the dynamic with his mere presence as people squabbled to sit next to him at dinner, and too busy trying to edit his own book to want to spend lots of time with his fans, but Julia was a great counterpoint, a beautiful poet and a thoughtful tutor, and I learnt a lot from them. They showed me that it is often not the most well-known writer that makes the best tutor, but actually someone who not only writes well but teaches well, a different skill and a special one. The format of the week was as it is now, pretty much unchanged since the beginning, with group workshops led by the tutors each morning, individual writing time and tutorials in the afternoons, and then shared readings or free time in the evenings.

The Devon house, Totleigh Barton, is charming, an ancient white-washed farmhouse with a thatched roof nestled in a hollow on the Devon moors, reached along a long unpaved track through fields of cows. The house has low ceilings, dark wonky creaky doors and a flagstone floor in the dining room where you sit at a huge old wooden table with benches to write every morning. At the time you could still share a bedroom as a cheaper residential option, and I will never forget the surprise of seeing my roommate, a middle aged woman and a complete stranger, wandering around our room naked from the off. Since then people in general have got more fussy about sharing space and you don't share bedrooms at Arvon any more, or indeed even bathrooms these days, but at the time it was just how it was, and part of the experience, along with the erratic plumbing, the call of pheasants and the one shared computer that everyone needed to print with ready for the shared readings on a Friday night. Most of the group got pretty drunk in the evenings and stayed up talking into the small hours, especially because at the time rural internet was awful or non-existent, and phone reception was patchy at best; something that has changed over time, particularly since the pandemic. These days people mostly seem to disappear to their rooms to stream things on the internet after dinner, very quiet and abstemious (and slightly disappointing?), we are all exhausted by groups these days.

My second Arvon retreat was also at Totleigh Barton and was on memoir writing, this time with husband and wife duo Barry Miles and Rosemary Bailey. Barry wrote biographies of famous people, mostly rock and roll celebrities and beat poets, whereas Rosemary wrote more about their life, including their move to the Pyrenees. This was a really great course, and memoir remains a form I love to read and to write. At the time my friends Olly and Claire were the Directors at Totleigh, and it was fun to look behind the scenes and see where the staff lived and learn more about how the house operated when the guests weren't in situ. They talked about staffing and supply chain challenges in the countryside, working with the other houses to get a balanced selection of the best tutors, and how to look after big old houses on a charity budget. It is an intense job looking after a 24/7 operation, and each house shares a lot with the others about how they manage the operational side of things.

Olly and Clare and I met working at Screen on the Hill cinema in Belsize Park just a couple of years before they worked for Arvon, and at about the time they landed at Totleigh, I moved to manage the Free Word Centre in Farringdon, where, coincidentally, the Arvon Foundation had their new head office. Free Word was a new centre for literature, literacy and free speech and all of the partners were specialists in their field, including Apples and Snakes (spoken word poetry), ARTICLE19 (free speech), Index on Censorship, Booktrust, the Literary Consultancy and English PEN. Arvon HQ staff were part of my regular tenant group, and I got to know the charity in a whole new way, assisting with their fundraisers, helping them with a new programme of short workshops and courses, Arvon in the City, in my venue space downstairs from the office, and answering ongoing emails about the photocopier breaking down and issues with parking bicycles. I often complained in return about their boxes of brochures cluttering up my corridors - a different time, pre-Covid, when they used to produce an annual brochure of all of their courses for the year - a massive endeavour that was always hugely expensive to put together and then almost immediately out of date because a tutor had suddenly got a book tour and had to be replaced in the programme. They don't make a brochure any more. Staff from all of the houses used to gather in London from time to time, and I got to meet them and hear their stories from the houses in Devon, Shropshire and Yorkshire, as well as their cousin house Moniack Mhor in Scotland.

When I moved to Shropshire, one of the first things I did was contact the Hurst house team, at that time located in the stable buildings as John Osborne's widow Helen was still living in the main house, just to say hello and retain the connection. It's hard to find really brilliant cultural centres outside the cities, and I loved knowing that all that excellent writing was going on just down the road from me, it made me feel less like a yokel. A few years later I started working there in a casual capacity, cooking lunches and hosting the writers and guests readings as required. By that point Helen had died and the main house was refurbished to become the residential retreat it is today, nineteen ensuite bedrooms and grand rooms for writing and gathering, the biggest of the houses, with stone walls, high ceilings and stunning views over the Clun valley. The stable building became the Clockhouse, turned into mini-apartments, for self-led retreats, often booked solid by writers needing time and space to complete their books, dissertations, articles and research. Many writers come back every year for a precious tranche of quiet time and space. The gardens are beautiful, filled with vast rhododendrons and azaleas, forests filled with deer and a pond that no one is allowed to swim in for fear that they cut their feet on all the champagne bottles the Osbornes threw into it during parties. Books have been completed there, reputations started, PhDs passed.

Each residential week is different, with the participants creating its own group atmosphere and coming with their own surprises, concerns and energy. This week I have been hosting at the Hurst again (with a side hustle of hey, buy the book! Support the tutors and an independent bookshop!). The writers have been exploring how to write about place in both fiction and non-fiction, and the readings described places as far apart as Lindesfarne and Copenhagen. It is always an honour to sit in on the evening readings, listening to the tutors share their work and talk about their process and my reading list grows every time as I discover new books to explore. I love these conversations, thinking about words, thinking about craft, thinking about topics I haven't contemplated before. Each time I come home inspired, thinking, I must write more, I must make some time for that. And then real life intrudes and the washing up insists and the writing gets pushed aside until the next time, when I think again, I really must pick up that pen again. I guess that is why you need a writing retreat.

Rachel

P.S. You can explore our bookshop.org list celebrating tutors who have taught at the Hurst recently - we promise that they are all great reads, and you will be supporting the work of great writers and independent bookshops buy shopping with them rather than other online sources.