Over the October half term, sixteen girls from Year 8 to Year 12 spent five days in the beautiful Shropshire countryside at ‘Look Back in Anger’ playwright John Osbourne’s former home, The Hurst. The house, now an Arvon centre, has a large sitting room filled with novels and sofas, a workroom housing a specially made huge, wooden round table and countless poetry books, a large dining room and kitchen, and ensuite rooms. Our tutors were the multi-award-winning children’s novelist Liz Hyder, poet, playwright and broadcaster, Luke Wright, and Kinshasa-born, British-French poet, writer and educator, JJ Bola.

The workshops were excellent: together, the students created a (very good!) Netflix series, then developed the characters more fully themselves, and came up with an excellent storyline and plot. They wrote poems, considered structure and stakes, wrote entirely in alliteration and had useful one to one tutorials. They walked to Clun, the local town, luckily on the one day of fine weather, and were tested in their resilience and adaptability with kitchen dramas, local insects, and cooking and washing up in teams.  It was, as always, a wonderful and inspiring week.

Here are Kayla in Year 11’s thoughts on her first Arvon experience: “I am so grateful for the opportunity of going on the Arvon Creative Writing Retreat. I enjoyed the week because I was able to set aside time to just focus on writing and creativity. For an aspiring astrophysicist, I was humbled at how I was equally brought to appreciate nature at its best. Amongst the many activities that we participated in during this trip, I appreciated the walk in nature. I took one of my favourite photos and looking back l noticed that l was surrounded by different aspects of nature with the blue sky, a beaming sun, clouds, bright green leafy trees, grass, soil and obviously the invisible wind passing by, as well as human input within nature giving a sense of direction depicted by a sign to Clun. I would like to thank Ms Shevah and Ms Smyth for spending the past week looking after and guiding me and the other students on this trip, which was important to develop our creative writing.”

Ms Shevah, Director of Literacy & Oracy