DAY 3: A PROMPT BY POLLY ATKIN

WRITING PROMPTS TO SUPPORT CHILDREN IN GAZA

UNICEF reports that in Gaza, “hundreds of thousands of children and families are caught in a catastrophic situation” and that, as of November 2nd 2023, over 3500 children have been killed and more than 7000 have been injured “due to unrelenting attacks”, while a thousand others are missing. Outlining the charity’s Appeal for Children in Gaza, UNICEF spokesman James Elder explains: “Gaza has become a graveyard for thousands of children. It’s a living hell for everyone else.” Elder has also called for “children held hostage in Gaza [to] be immediately reunited with their families and loved ones”. Recent updates state that “hundreds of thousands of children … remain trapped in a war zone with little or no access to food, water, electricity, medicine or medical care”.

For the duration of NaNoWriMo 2023, we will be posting a writing prompt every day and in doing so, we encourage our community to donate to charities providing medical aid to children in desperate need in this unprecedented crisis. These prompts have been created by writers from Wales or with a connection to Wales and its magazines and presses. The prompts are on all kinds of subjects, but many are related to anti-violence and the work of empathy, and they are offered with the simple hope that they might encourage people to donate in support of medical aid in Gaza. We include a list of suggested charities to donate to below, highlighting the Appeal for Children in Gaza.

UNICEF “continues to call for an immediate ceasefire as 1.1 million people — nearly half of them children — in northern Gaza have been warned to move out of the way of a widescale military assault, but with nowhere safe for them to go”. Elder concludes: “The humanitarian situation has reached lethal lows, and yet all reports point to further attacks. Compassion – and international law – must prevail.”

Please see the list of suggested charities at the end of the post. A new prompt will be posted until at least the end of November 2023. Today’s is from Polly Atkin who “writes and talks about various aspects of living with chronic illness, including disability and the environment, living in a rural place and as a disabled person, access to nature and access to the arts”.

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DAY 3: POLLY ATKIN

Gardens of the bodymind

Dorothy Wordsworth became ill later in her life and often could not leave her room. She loved plants, animals and birds and was happiest when she could spend time in the garden in her wheelchair, but when she couldn’t be outside, she found ways to bring the garden into her room – literally, in plant pots, and robins that nested above her bed – and in her imagination, in writing.

The plants and flowers she can access from her room become so important to her. She writes in her journal about a sycamore tree she can see from her bed: ‘there is a round-headed Besom left on the Sycamore & a forlorn almost horizontal Branch neither of which, when I lie on my Bed I would part with for £20’. (14^th June 1834)

Dorothy wrote a series of poems she called ‘sick-bed consolations’, the most famous of which is ‘Thoughts on my sick-bed’, which she wrote in the spring of 1832 when she couldn’t yet get outside into the garden at all. It tries to reconcile her feelings of missing the outdoors with this experience of bringing the plants in. In the poem, she tells us she doesn’t need to travel in her body, because she can do it in her thoughts instead. It begins with bringing flowers into her room but ends with the garden of the house she lives in, then the local hills, then the river Wye many miles away, all being folded into her room. Writing the poem becomes a way to preserve that feeling of joy the flowers give her – a bit like taking a photo or pressing flowers might do.

Making your own:

Begin with the space where you spend most time or feel most confined.

If you wanted to transform this room into an ideal garden, what would you bring into it? You can choose a different kind of ideal space if the idea of a garden doesn’t appeal to you – choose your favourite, or one you are drawn to – it can be any kind of space you want to spend time in.

What distant things, place and people would you fold into it?

What do you miss? What brings you comfort or joy? Bring those into the space.

Can one object act as a kind of portal or tractor beam to anchor or bring in the others, like the flowers do for Dorothy?

Let your imagination run wild – it’s your garden of the bodymind – you can bring anything into it you like. It doesn’t have to be ‘possible’ in any way, it just has to matter to you.

Remember to put yourself in this space – how does it feel to be there? What do the things you have brought into it offer you? What do you offer them?

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Please consider donating to a charity providing medical aid in Gaza. We recommend UNICEF’s Appeal for Children in Gaza, but other charities include:

Medical Aid for Palestinians

Palestine Children’s Relief Fund

The World Food Programme

Doctors Without Borders