What does an ancient Greek fish have in common with a pair of sunglasses washed up on the beach 17 centuries later? The fish rests on a poem by writer Aratus, translated into Latin by Cicero, and it is filled with words taken from another text possibly written by Roman historian Hyginus about the stars, then copied out in the 9th century. Truly a melting pot.
Creating a workshop series is demanding but social distancing and lockdown make things more difficult. Add the restrictions of Zoom and needs of people with learning difficulties living at a residential centre in Surrey, The Grange. I worked with the same centre last year at Wisley RHS Gardens using words on and off the page and for that, I drew on more than a decade of conversations with the inspiring artist Jane Fordham.
Every workshop is different and although I have books full of plans, I had a 16 week programme to write up thematically and practically. I needed to go back in time. At the Public Domain Review I found gold.
It was the Aratea, an extraordinary fusion:
Each page of the Aratea has a poem on the bottom half — written by the 3rd-century BC Greek poet Aratus and translated into Latin by a young Cicero — describing an astronomical constellation. This constellation is then beautifully drawn above the poetry; the drawings however are themselves made up of words taken from Hyginus’ Astronomica.
The Getty Museum's, The Leiden Aratea, Ancient Constellations in a Medieval Manuscript, describes it as a ninth-century copy of an astronomical and meteorological treatise based on the Phaenomena written by Aratus who lived around 315—240/39 B.C.
The sunglasses above came from this year's programme. 
Email discussions between me and Sharron at The Grange have been integral. Sharron's using lightboxes, green screens, film and slo-mo to record creative work and enable it. She reminds me activities need to be collaborative, generate discussion, merge words and images as well as provoke thought.
The process is elastic as this ancient manuscript is elastic in its texts, writers, images and concepts spanning 2,000 years and still exerting influence on the sunglasses, themselves based on a poem by George Mackay Brown.
The twin to this series is a weekly workshop I'm running for Creative Response in Farnham, the town where I grew up. Both are funded by Disability Arts in Surrey under the theme Regrowth and the charity is extending the project further with podcasts I record of writing prompts. My own writing went on the back burner for a few months after A Friable Earth came out at the end of last year. Lockdown coincided with that dry period, augmented by demands of the allotment. Then I deleted my social media accounts and the odd poem began to write itself line by line. I'm writing alongside participants from Creative Response as we smile at each other in rectangles on laptops and tablets. I feel incredibly hopeful, all of a sudden as if the ancestors were looking out for me.
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