creative writing /

Walking with Words

We have had all weathers at West Norwood Cemetery in the last month. Lashing rain soaking our pages, washing away pencil jottings, deep delightful dappled shade, uplifting wind filling hearts and skirts, scalding heat slowing us down. My four week creative walking and writing course is nearly over. One participant said, “I was so excited it was going to last four weeks, now I feel greedy and I want to go on and on.”
         The course has combined walking and writing, wandering and wondering. I wanted the course to be a way of opening to the imagination and the world of stories that is both outside and inside.
    “A walk is only a step away from a story and every path tells,” writes Robert MacFarlane in his multi-layered ‘The Old Ways – a journey on foot’. I wanted participants to observe, collect, imagine and create their own stories through walking.

I divided the cemetery into four sections, four walks, each on a different theme: the senses; beauty; time and trees, and the final walk – then and now. The walks were inspired by different areas in the cemetery. The theme of beauty linked to the Greek influence in the cemetery, from the many gothic graves referencing ancient Greek architecture, to the Hellenic Enclosure bought by Greeks in 1842 for Orthodox burials, with its own chapel, St Stephens, a mini acropolis, recently restored. We explored ancient Greek ideas about beauty, and Plato’s description of beauty as a ladder to immortality, that climbs from physical beauty, through “the great mass of mortal rubbish” to “beauty itself” where “beholder and beheld become one.” ‘The Symposium’.

I led the group down secret paths, passed: tombs of tumbled stones; carved women draped with stone cloth; squirrels sculpted and real; stone angels; green flash of parakeets; curling carved ivy; stone roses; bunches of carved lily of the valley; a lone fox who knows all secrets paths; stone birds; stone vases; stone masks, even a stone lamb. And some stones carved to look like metal, others carved to look like monuments from neolithic times, or obelisks from the future. There really are stories in every step and I wanted participants to “bodily enter a story by walking it” as Rebecca Solnit writes in her wide-ranging inspirational ‘Wanderlust – a history of walking’. And so we walked our stories, as one participant said, “a profound experience, the sensory walk in the rain, then translating it to page was soothing and enriching.”

Looking for stories everywhere is just a state of mind, and I wanted to give participants some keys to do this, through: observation; listening; collecting images; finding found words along the way; picking up fragments of text from graves; catching fleeting thoughts and memories triggered by strange architecture hidden among brambles, daisies and deep trees. I wanted them to listen out for stories, feelings, tangents, that pop up inside us all, and jot them down. Practicing catching the first idea, before it has gone, before it vanishes and other thoughts creep in, is always the best in my experience! Many participants had not done anything like this before and did not think of themselves as writers or storytellers. But with a few keys, they soon were connected to their imaginations, and moving, powerful, beautiful words flowed out. One participant wrote about the process, “such bright sun into decay – a great foray into the cemetery’s secret treasure – undergrowth, memory…”

Robert MacFarlane writes that a path leads “onwards in space but also backwards in time.” And walking the paths we imagined them arranged back in 1837, and then we slipped backwards to the meadows sweeping up the hill, and before that to the dense, mysterious Great North Wood that covered parts of south east London. Some 13 majestic oak trees in the cemetery are more than 500 years old and were part of that old wood. Solnit says that humans are words that walk. Walking corresponds to language, walking is a language, and in Walking with words we have walked our talk. “Exploring the world is one of the best ways of exploring the mind and walking travels both terrains” says Rebecca Solnit. I have written my own song to West Norwood Cemetery and will post it another time.

The lush, hidden nature along the paths has restored us all. A participant wrote, “the path is full of life, invigorating the soul.” The cemetery is peaceful and rejuvenating, calming and energising, this place of death is so alive, so very alive.

Thankyou to Teresa Donoghue and West Norwood Cemetery and Thriving Norwood for funding this course so it could be free for participants, and for allowing me to be so inventive, daring and supporting me to create and lead it.

creative writing /

Tales from the Treasure Trove

Tales from the Treasure Trove – creative writing with The Cuming Collection
June 6 2026, 11.00am – 1.00pm
Southwark Heritage Centre and Walworth Library, 145-147 Walworth Road London SE17 1RW

Objects are alive! They hold secrets of people and places, take you to other worlds, reveal histories and cultures, are containers for memories and emotions. And they can be a way into the imagination. I am leading a creative writing workshop inspired by objects from the Cuming Collection. I will guide participants with playful and flowing creative prompts and tasks to explore the collection at Walworth Road Library. Judy Aitken, the Curator of the Cuming Collection, will talk to us about the collection and bring some rare treasures from the storeroom for participants to look at closely and even touch!

Objects are powerful! They help us ask who made them, how and why. A tiny object can tell us about climate and landscape, migration and social structures. I have been working with objects in galleries and museums for many years, creating stories that bring objects to life through narrative performance. I see my role as guide to the imagination, taking the audience inside an object to reveal hidden worlds of culture, history and myth. My aim is to help the audience see through the object – to the imagination of the people who created it.

I have been working with The British Museum for many years. And in 2010 they commissioned me to write and perform six interlinked stories for their exhibition ‘A History of the World in 100 Objects’. The stories were told in cliff-hanging instalments over a whole year. I time travelled across six objects, from the delicate carving on a mammoth tusk of two reindeer swimming dated to 13,000 BCE, to a throne of weapons made in 2002 from decommissioned weapons collected after the devastating civil war in Mozambique. Audiences returned to different galleries and objects over the year to hear the next instalment. Time passed from hunter-gatherer society to the modern world, the making of objects connecting us to our distant ancestors, who like us created objects to express who they were, to wonder about existence, transmit meanings and change things.

Objects are mysterious! Join Judy and I with The Cuming Collection to uncover hidden histories. We will get you looking at objects in detail, and guided by inspiring prompts you will create poems based on hand-written labels, find a memory inside a teacup, imagine the owner of a giant key, dream over a map! You will explore ways to combine fact and fiction, delve into social history and play with sheer invention. Tales from the Treasure Trove is based on real life objects but takes you into a world of imagination!
The workshop is free but you need to book here!

creative writing /

Making the Mighty Goddess

The Mighty Goddess is a collection of 52 goddess myths from around the world written by me, Sally Pomme Clayton, with 52 papercuts created by artist and poet Sophie Herxheimer. My 40 year career as a writer and storyteller has focused on female protagonists and goddesses. And over that time Sophie and I have collaborated on creating several children’s books together. The first book we made was Tales of Amazing Maidens (Orchard Books 1995). We loved this book, it was unique and there really was nothing else like it at the time. It mixed stories of bold heroines with powerful goddesses. It was funny and moving. But the book did not get much attention or the publicity it deserved, and sadly it disappeared.

Our love for those fairytales, myths and female characters did not vanish. They lived on through the many live performances I created, through Sophie’s paintings and poems, and through several other books we made together. But now, after many years we have created our first book for adults and returned to the subject we both love so much. Along with 50 other goddess myths, The Mighty Goddess revisits two of the myths from Tales of Amazing Maidens – the myths of Alaskan goddess Sedna and Japanese goddess Amaterasu. But this latest collection is for adults, and the stories and images have not been censored or tamed. In this collection we have been freed to respond to all aspects of  the goddess myths: lust and greed; rape and rage; death and destruction; jealousy and murder; desire and love; transformation and rebirth. In those two myths in particular, Sedna violently looses her fingers and thumbs so that they can become all the sea creatures. And Amaterasu is tricked by laughter, created as a dancer reveals her vulva!

In The Mighty Goddess myth and art combine. Poetic language conjures each goddess and narrative, while giving space to Sophie’s paper cuts. Her playful images juxtapose the ordinary and the fabulous. The paper cuts truly are illustrations for adults. They are like icons that punctuate the drama of the myths, giving space in turn to the reader – a moment to pause, to dream, to think. I have taken my own journey through the myths and have placed the goddess at the centre of each story, not at the side or lost at the end where she often can be. I sometimes chose to leave out male characters or reduce their roles significantly – there are plenty of collections where you can find their stories! I tried to find, inhabit and give voice to each goddess. By telling the myths from the point of view of the goddess I discovered new emotions, meanings and metaphoric realities. Courage, power, determination and rage are emotions that repeatedly appeared in the goddess myths. I think the goddess’s rage is often ignored, but I found it to be a motivating force! Rage powers: Demeter’s search for her daughter; volcano Goddess Pele’s flowing lava; Freyja’s band of Valkyries; Diana’s desire to protect her female companions; Ereshkigal’s loneliness, and Lilith’s righteous fury.

The goddess appears in multiple forms and narratives across the world and there are  countless goddess myths, this collection is my selection from that vast source. I chose to define the goddess as a supreme deity who is or was worshipped, who appears as female, both male and female, or transcends gender. Writing the book over three years many of the same archetypal images kept recurring. Some of the images, characters and narrative events are impossibly strange, funny and surreal. And I found it thrilling that constant mythic sparks flashed between distant geographies and continents, languages and cultures. Goddesses Amaterasu, Wuriunpranilli and Saule appear as the sun, travelling across the sky to bring us light, descending into the underworld at the end of the day. The very body of goddesses Cybele, Pachamama, Pele, Asase Yaa and Tiamat become the earth itself. Goddesses Anahita, Ilmater, Oshun and Saraswati are linked to rain and water. While goddesses of death, Cihuacóatl, Hine-nui-te-pō and Asase Yaa draw humans back inside their womb at the end of life, the birth canal becoming a tomb, where you can be reborn.

Storytellers have always made and remade myths anew for each contemporary audience. Myths are always in the process of becoming. But in this collection I have attempted to balance my own exploration and discovery with respect for the narratives we have inherited from our ancestors. These myths link us to our past, to the dreams and terrors, wisdom and hope of those who came before us. I want to keep their unfathomable visions alive. The Mighty Goddess is both a legacy to a life of living with, loving and performing these myths, and to the immeasurable value of  those who kept the myths alive for thousands of years. I hope the book allows the mysterious images and narratives to reverberate with each other, revealing our shared cultural roots and deep collective preoccupations. And that our words and images give space for other worlds and possibilities, and your own dreams, to come into existence.