Last Thursday I had a lovely chat with Linden McMahon, Engagement Producer at The Albany, Deptford. Linden has also worked on the Festival of Creative Ageing, which funded part of the last Jam&Jam event, and they worked on a collaborative project funded by the Live Art Development Agency last summer, in Bethnal Green Nature Reserve and other garden spaces around the Bethnal Green part of Tower Hamlets. There were so many threads that came out of our conversation and I’m really grateful it happened – I found it all so thought-provoking! I’ve pretty much just typed up our chat as it happened, because I didn’t want Linden’s voice to get lost. There’s also a link to a lovely recipe-poem at the end!
So I’m a poet and a writer, I’m writing stories now in a way I wasn’t before, which is interesting. I’ve also done Nature Connection Facilitation, and I’m currently training in The Work That Reconnects. The Work That Reconnects is not quite a Buddhist practice but it’s very in the Buddhist tradition. So the idea is to face our difficult feelings about what’s going on in the world head on, rather than pushing them away, being numb or being unrealistically hopeful… and saying that actually, this is really hard, and the fact that it’s hard is because we care, so what can we do about that?
I’ve been increasingly doing stuff around creativity and nature and how we perceive our relationship to the natural world, and I have a really wonderful collaboration with someone who works at Bethnal Green Nature Reserve. We got a commission and some extra funding and we ran a bunch of different workshops for people in the community. We were like, what stories do you want to tell about the different spaces in Bethnal Green? So there’s the nature reserve and then there’s also all these beautiful little gardens where people basically grow vegetables. There’s a really big Bengali community there so we learned all about Bengali gourds, some of them are incredible, just enormous by the end of the summer, just hanging there and you’re like, how is that even staying up? It’s incredible! We did a treasure trail through all of the different gardens, so we had stories we’d made and people could follow them through the trail. Most people didn’t do the whole trail, interestingly. But they went to a workshop or an event in one of the gardens, or they went round a few of them, so that was really interesting. That was the hardest I’ve ever worked in my life! It was so good, it was honestly the best project I’ve ever done.
Me: Do you think arts-based practices help with our climate crisis overwhelm?
Yes, I really think it does. The reason why I started doing creative writing in nature was because it felt like I was seeing all my friends just being either completely numb or completely panicked, and I was like, I think something else needs to happen here. And the arts can help you to navigate stuff in your life, so I started doing nature stuff in the workshops that I was running, because it helps us connect with nature which has a million benefits anyway in terms of not panicking, in terms of waking up a little bit to what’s going on, or even just a sense of belonging which just shores you up, and then you can see the world in a better way. Yeah, so there’s lots of benefits, and a lot of what you do in Nature Connection is very similar to what you do in Creative Writing. So there’s lots of using all your senses, being very present, all those things are things that you need to be a writer and it just fits really easily, so I just started bringing those things in because it felt like something I could offer to help try to solve the crisis. And I think that’s what the arts can offer, different ways of seeing that, imagining that.
I think it’s important that my practice is arts-based because I don’t know how to do anything else! I mean it is important obviously but I think it’s also that thing about what have you got to offer? And I don’t want to be just another body on a protest, or somebody doing a job that doesn’t utilise my skills because that’s not the most efficient way of doing things or solving problems, so what I can offer is a creative approach to things, and when it comes to thinking about what it is that I want to offer to the world, that’s why it’s important that it’s arts-based. Because that’s what I can offer, and I want to use those skills.
I believe the arts can offer something that nothing else can around changing the story. Changing the stories that we tell about ourselves and the world is just so important for changing the future. Because if we can’t imagine it then we can’t make it happen. And I think that telling different stories and supporting other people to tell different stories is really important to me. I’m trying to learn to tell different stories myself, but I also really want to help other people to do that.
Me: So the idea with Jam and Jam is how we can use preserving, cultures of preservation as a means of facilitating inter-cultural and inter-faith connections. And I guess within that comes things like obviously community building, resilience, nature connection. What kinds of connections and intersections does what you’ve done on the nature reserve and things… what connections does that encompass?
There was so much about connections on the gardens project. We wanted to capture everything that we did in that project, so there’s a book we made, and reflections from us at the end as well. What we said about that project is that we failed at community engagement but we did really well at community collaboration. So we didn’t get hundreds of people coming to things but we did work deeply with people, so we were working with people who’ve gardened in the same place for like ten years, and you know when you get one person who’s just like the glue of the community because they just like hold everything together? That person was incredible. And part of why we did it was that Hari really wanted to have more connections with the nature reserve and the local community as well, even though it was commissioned by someone else, we were like, we can do both. So it was commissioned by the Live Art Development Agency, LADA, and they wanted more links as well. It was all about connections, they were like, this is a relatively new space they’d only been there a couple of years and they were like we really want to make sure they’re not just being like a random arts organisation that’s parachuted in, they really wanted to make connections with the local community.
So it was all about connecting different people, different spaces, different groups, in ways they maybe might not have done otherwise. And in some ways it worked and in some ways it didn’t. I think part of it was literally joining up the spaces. That was really powerful. We gave people a map and they could walk between the spaces. It gave people a sense of the spaces not being separate in a sense, even though they were used by quite different people. And I think that didn’t make everything completely connected, but for a minute that was a thing that connected everything, and we were able to work with people really collaboratively to make that happen. There are things I wish we’d done differently. The problem with arts funding is that you have to have a fully-formed project to apply for funding, but actually what we really needed to do was talk to everybody about what they wanted to do. So it started off as a poetry thing and everybody was like ‘ugh poetry’ because that’s how it works, because school ruins it for everyone, and then we made it into a story-making workshop. We just broadened it right out, and that was much better. But the best thing to do would have been to talk to everybody for ages first and be like well what do you want to do, we’ve got some money to get an artist, what kind of artist do you want? And maybe they wanted a filmmaker. That was really hard, and like, that’s putting myself out of a job. But I think ultimately that’s how you have to do it, you have to talk to people right at the start. And that’s what my job is here. For the Festival of Creative Ageing, my job was to make sure that we were doing what the community wanted rather than what the artists wanted. So I was running these grants and one of the criteria was that it had to be led by an older people’s group, not an artist, and lots of artists found that really confusing. They were like ‘but I’ve got this idea’ and I was like, ‘well, do the older people want to do your idea? That’s what I need to know.’ Rather than it just being a case of ‘oh I want to do this thing, give me some older people.’ Because then people don’t like it, they don’t care. You have to involve people right from the start and be like ‘what do you actually want?’ Because that’s how you make connections. Rather than being like ‘engage with my project!’
It’s a gift for somebody to come and engage with your project, and I think some people are a bit like ‘oh, if more people would just engage’… It’s patronising, do you know what I mean? To think of it as ‘engagement’ is actually quite patronising. My title is ‘Engagement Producer’ but I like to think of it as collaboration. Engagement is the language, and I think what you make of that is up to whoever’s doing the job. I think of it as not just parachuting in and telling people to come to a thing. That’s marketing. And marketing’s also important, but engagement is a different job.
Me: Do you think preserving is still relevant today, and is it relevant to you?
YES! I have sometimes made jam. I don’t grow the right things to make jam. I made pickled beetroots last year. I grew some beetroots even though I don’t like beetroot – I just had some seeds and I didn’t want them to go to waste! And then I had to give them all away because I still don’t like them even when they’re pickled! But it’s fun to grow a new thing. So I think preserving is super-relevant. I grew up in a house where my mum had an allotment, and she grows far more than she could possibly eat at any one time. My mum’s been in permaculture for twenty years on this stretch of land for like twenty years and she grows so much more than she knows what to do with! Now she’s retired she’s making enormous quantities of jam, specifically jam. Every time I go I leave with a jar of jam, I haven’t had to buy jam in years! And actually a lot of my friends have done various types of preserving. There’s actually a lot of fermenting going on
Me: Oh ha, yes, there’s definitely a bit of a youth fermenting subculture. What a bizarre three words to put together.
There’s definitely something that’s happening. I don’t want to speculate particularly about why it’s happening, but I often see people making preserves to give as gifts. It’s like a way we show love for each other is giving each other things that we’ve made, and often that seems to be food.
I preserve when I’ve got too much of something, so I had a huge marmalade kick because I just had so many oranges from the veg box that I just had to make marmalade. Foraging is more and more popular. I mean… I live in a particular bubble. But it feels relevant because our food systems don’t feel very secure, and I think being able to collect and grow and make stuff is more and more important because everything feels precarious. I think that’s why so many people are learning herbal medicine right now.
Me: Yep. I’m quite interested in that idea of connecting with skills from the past borne out of an anxiety about the future.
Yeah that’s interesting I hadn’t thought it if that way.
Me: Because both of my grandmothers made jam. My boyfriends mum made jam, but I only ever thought of making jam when I spent a year of buying nothing new. I had to make every gift. I have a massive family and that was when preserving was like ‘HeyO, I’m cheap and I’m quick’. But I was really like ‘it’s gonna be really difficult, it’s like a science, the jam might not set.’ But it’s really not, you throw it all in and boil it up and that’s it.
Yeah I also really enjoy making elderflower cordial. There’s something really delightful about making it that feels like a really connected thing for me to do and I’ve done it for years and years, and it’s something that I always do. And then later there’s elderberry syrup. And elderberry and crab apple jam. I have a poem about that actually. It’s about how foraging can help you to feel less depressed basically.
Links:
Linden’s poem: http://blog.littleredtarot.com/coven-verse-a-recipe/
One for the Cupboard 