Rocket yourself back into the past: Go WWOOFing to research your next historical novel!
Rocket
yourself back into the past: Go WWOOFing to research your next historical
novel!
Out-of-the-Box Solution...................................... 1
How It Works........................................................... 2
Other sample experiences.................................. 5
Writing schedule:................................................. 14
But . . ......................................................................... 14
Other Organizations............................................ 15
by Christa Bedwin
I have been writer
and editor for twenty years.
[Aside: I now write time-travel romance/adventures with my characters exploring various cool time periods and places in the past, mostly but not completely in Europe. At the moment I'm working on a novella placed in Enlightenment-Era Edinburgh and a longer novel that's a sequel to Caterina's Renaissance, wherein the villainess from that book goes through fire to arrive in early medieval Cornwall (then known as Dumnonia). I'm loving the post-Roman, pre-Christian era there.]
[Aside: I now write time-travel romance/adventures with my characters exploring various cool time periods and places in the past, mostly but not completely in Europe. At the moment I'm working on a novella placed in Enlightenment-Era Edinburgh and a longer novel that's a sequel to Caterina's Renaissance, wherein the villainess from that book goes through fire to arrive in early medieval Cornwall (then known as Dumnonia). I'm loving the post-Roman, pre-Christian era there.]
Even ten years ago I realized a big problem with our job as writers –
too much time with the bum in the chair just isn’t healthy. An editing
colleague died of an aneurysm at her desk, working on a late deadline, and I
vowed to make my health a priority. (Sometimes I do better, sometimes I do
worse, but the intention is always there!)
As a single mom, though, budget matters. I
pulled years of working all night on editing deadlines to make ends meet and
feed my son and I. On top of this, I really wanted to homeschool my son when he
reached his early teens… how to break out of the loop and feed my writer’s soul
at the same time?
Out-of-the-Box Solution
Enter WWOOFing, stage left. Fitness, budget, historical
research, and teenager management all solved at once.
Here’s a picture of my hands after I’d washed them as well as I could, on our second week. No
callouses yet, but at least you can see I was getting time outside! My hands
were dry and cracked and I was happier than I had been in years.
WWOOF is a worldwide organization of organic farmers who
welcome volunteers. Depending on who you talk to, it stands for Willing Workers
on Organic Farms, World-Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms, or maybe Weekend
Warriors on Organic Farms (this last one hints at local opportunities – you can
find incredible adventures and inspirational exercise outside your daily box,
right on your own doorstep).
How It Works
You sleep and eat for free in exchange for usually about a
half a day’s labour – that leaves you the afternoons and a couple of days off
per week to write, tour the area, get to know other WWOOFers, or just nap. On
top of this, WWOOF is an organization of people who are committed to teaching
others organic farming technologies, and, you
guessed it, history writers – a lot of these techniques mean returning to the
past.
That’s not to say it’s the easy life – it’s work, and the
living conditions are often primitive, but it’s work that is so worth doing,
satisfying, great exercise, and for learning about things your historical
characters might do in their daily lives, the experience is second to none.
WWOOF hosts take the time to do things right. You’ll meet
artisans, committed organic warriors, builders, doers, growers, musicians, teachers…
so many wonderful people. Real characters – strong and admirable people who
you’ll find yourself modelling your characters after. Here are some WWOOF
farmers learning about old methods of making charcoal in a burner through the
Shropshire & Edges Permaculture Network.
I met one woman on an ancient island who had an unlimited
heart and space for adding wwoofers to her table and her home and finding us
work in her garden. She was passionate about passing on organic living and
growing methods, and ancient ways of life, from learning to use the willow
trees and harvest their long, supple whip branches with the seasons, to how to
use the compost from the composting toilets. She was by no means wealthy in
terms of money, but she is one of the wealthiest people I have ever met in
terms of endless resourcefulness and a thriving belief there was enough for
everyone, with a little creativity. Her methods ranged from collecting food
that grocery stores threw away to feed her animals to trading services with
other islanders and both constantly giving and receiving. Surely this is how
the ancients lived in survival economies.
I helped another woman in the mountains of Abruzzo who was
the same way. She had hardly any money, but she is one of the richest people I
have ever met! She had a house on a hill and food growing. People were
constantly giving her things – in fact, it was a friend of hers who had sent me
along to help – and she was just as quickly giving things away. Everything from
food, to clothes, to building materials and furniture… and of course, Italian
food. It was there that I had my first taste of carob pods, harvested straight
from the tree and dried to keep year-round… now, definitely one of my favourite
foods and one that I ate throughout our subsequent Italian and Croatian
travels. If you ever get a chance, you must try them. They’re divine. Here’s
what they look like straight from the tree. YUM.
You’ll also meet wwoofer host pets – helpful dogs and fierce
cuddly cats. Fluffy sheep and friendly horses. Irascible goats and curious
pigs. Sweet poetry-singing chickens who help you with the weeding. All of these
little people add so much flavour and sweetness to romance stories, woven in as
comic relief or simple emotional sweetness. [Aside I’ve learned, if you make the pet a dragon, they can help
solve a lot of plot problems too! But chickens, the dragon’s close relative,
are also a sweet and delicious addition to a day of weeding the garden or as an
emotional support. Alan Bradley gave Flavia de Luce Esmeralda the chicken for a
pet.]
By the way, many of us writers need our
cats, and would not travel long without them. No worries. You can bring your pets wwoofing to many
farms. Here are our two cats, totally blissed out in the sunshine and warmth in
a Victorian-era glass house. To answer what you’re thinking, the cats quickly
adapted to the travel and to meeting and negotiating relationships with the
other pets at our various destinations. The grey one you see here always tends
to fatten herself up when there are dogs around. When we stay places with no
dogs, she slims down! But she’s definitely the clan defender. In this photo,
the cats are fifteen and eight years old, and the older black one still, at
seventeen, behaves like a kitten when there are new adventures to be had –
especially if it’s a new barn full of mice! Travel and exercise are good for
writers’ cats, too.
WWOOF hosts also tend to be the people who keep heritage
breeds – one of my favourite discoveries in recent years are adorable little
Ouessant sheep. The lambs are literally cat-sized. (You can say it – I’m thinking it! Squeee!)
They originally come from a French island off the coast of
Brittany called Ouessant island, and the story is that the menfolk were often
away fishing, and so the women enjoyed having these smaller sheep, since they
had to do all the work.
(If you’d like to learn more about these adorable sheep, I
poached these two photos from the following web page:
Soon after I discovered Ouessant sheep, I rhapsodized about
them in a chat with my favourite textile historian https://woollyhistoryofbritain.wordpress.com/
and her first reaction was that the black colour of those sheep would have been
considered quite valuable in Medieval times, as black dye was formidably
expensive in the past, but many people wanted black clothing.
Then, in a future historical farm detail, an old sheep
farmer somewhere in my travels (I really can’t remember where or when, but I
remember the man!) explained to me that if you want to keep the sheep as black
as possible, you need to give them little blankets or keep them indoors, as
they tend to bleach out in the sun.
Yes, I might have learned all those details on the Internet…
but the story and the characters in your head develop so much more when you’ve
had an opportunity to feed the sheep, participate in the spinning, speak to the
people who are raising the animals, living the life, really doing the things
that people did in the past.
There are WWOOF organizations in most countries of the world,
and you can join any one you like for a small annual fee and surf their
listings of farmers looking for help. Just go looking on the internet and
you’ll find wwoof.us, wwoof.ca, wwoof.fr, wwoof.it, etc.
Other sample experiences
Other recent but very historical learning experiences that
I’ve had recently with WWOOF hosts (and this isn’t all, but there’s only so
much room on this page…)
·
Making
French goat cheese the same way it’s been done for centuries– incredibly
simple, and incredibly delicious! Summertime entertainment on this French
island includes storytelling evenings on a Saturday in the barn, all the adults
and kids on haybales and quilts and the stories (in French) the same as they’ve
been for generations. I still play Breton music at the pub with the farmer that
taught me the cheesemaking at the pub, most Sundays. He also kindly organized
for my son to spend a day with the local vet (as that’s my son’s career
aspiration). Volunteering just gets you “in” on experience you never even know
about as a hotel-staying tourist.
·
Helping
to restore an Irish castle – I absolutely loved limewashing the walls, the
way humans have been doing to our homes for twelve
thousand years or so! For a day or
two I got to work with a young Michelangelo-grade attractive charming Italian
man who would answer the deepest of philosophical questions really, really slowly,
but so sweetly – he admitted that I got a lot more work than he did by the end
of the day, but it was all so fun.
We were preparing some of the old stables
for a Buddhist retreat group from France’s Plum Village that would be coming to
stay at the farm. We were so inspired and deliciously well-fed at that WWOOFing
place that all of us volunteers showed up to work on our day off to help meet
the deadline. Not at all because we had to, but just for the joy of meeting the
goal and in respect for the owner and the crew… and because we were having so
much fun despite the hard work, I guess!
[As a side note to learning about characters,
when wwoofers are not well-fed, or
feel less well-loved or appreciated, the amount of work they/we get done really
drops off. It is not any bad intention of the volunteers, but I saw it happen
in several different situations, and was clearly just a function of human
nature. Doesn’t that explain so much about poverty through history, and why
certain real and fictional characters have behaved the way they have? These
lessons, absorbed through your daily meals and conversations, settle so much
more deeply into your writer’s psyche than simply reading about them in history
books.]
My son had an opportunity to help
repair and restore ancient farmhouse windows and to enjoy the company of good
working men (any other single moms in the room will understand how valuable and
irreplaceable this is) and to study their Irish accents (in other words, try to
keep up and understand anything they were saying!). He’s turning into quite a
comedian, my son, and the sense of fun and good “craic” he had with that Irish
crew sure set a tone for our travels, and our humour and jokes often roll back
to the sort of way we learned of talking there. Just being there, at the
castle, part of the crew, interacting with people while we worked with them,
was invaluable for his development as a characterful teen. And of course we
have a whole new perspective on Irish characters and Irish speech!
Here’s an example of some
language problems we had with a friendly local who tried to speak to us in the
pub one day. I understood that he was being friendly, but I couldn’t figure out
why he thought we were just like two horses in a garden. Was that some Irish
idiom? What did it mean? I asked around, but nobody seemed to know.
We were all in the pub a few days
later and had the following exchange. You can see not just the fun trickiness
of understanding a new language and culture, but also the poetry and play of
Irish thought and conversation. No wonder Ireland’s full of writers!
My son also got to learn Buddhist philosophy from the Lord
of the manor while helping him to prepare incredibly delicious and varied
vegetarian lunches in the manor house kitchen (that’s right – he was chopping
vegetables and preparing meals in a centuries-old stone-floored,
wooden-countered kitchen, while I was outside working in an enormous, equally
ancient high-walled garden). Here’s a picture of the garden. Conrad restored it
from a bramble patch, but a hundred and two hundred years ago, it had twelve
gardeners growing food for a huge number of people. There are also orchard
trees inside the wall. (The wall is mainly to keep out rabbits – important to
keep the doors closed!)
My twelve-year-old son wasn’t too sure what to make of
Conrad’s lectures on Buddhist philosophy and Buddhist ways of life, but we had
great talks about those ideas gleaned over vegetables while we were weeding the
garden or walking to town in the afternoons. Now, two years on, some of those
ideas have definitely helped to form his framework of understanding of people
in the world.
And for me, the writer, I have another inspirational,
generous, sexy, mysterious, can-do-anything,
can-manage-employing-dozens-of-people, is-an-artist-and-invested-in-inspiring
others, hero to model some future fictional hero from.
And we definitely grew a root there in Ireland, too. Someone
asked me about “putting down roots” once on our travels, and I realize that
rather than loosen any of the strength of our root to home, living for a little
while and getting completely stuck into the soil of various places has allowed
us to put down more roots, giving the trees of our life more stability. We definitely
feel a root of home there at Creagh Castle – a place where we have experiences
and people we love and miss. A community
we could go back to, roll up at the pub, and be greeted with open arms.
They say that you should write what you know. You should
write about your home. That’s definitely easier. But writers may be surprised
to learn just how quickly you can sink into what may have seemed a foreign
place, to start with. To understand and play with the language and the humour.
To contemplate the lives of those who have lived and do live there. To feel,
really feel, the atmosphere of a place in the bricks and mortar and stone and
trees and soil.
By the way… if we ever doubted the rumour we heard in the
local pub that our host was related to English royalty, the truth of it is
proven to us over and over as we see his face on many portraits from centuries
past in museums from Scotland to France.
Our
room at that farm was in the old dairy, used for centuries to milk cows and
keep cheese (delicious Irish cheddar!) and milk – and yes, it was exactly as
cold as a fridge in there, except when we had the fire going. We had glorious
French doors onto a balcony overlooking a river valley that was just absolutely
painted with flowers that spring. Across the valley was another large manor
farm with ancient buildings, which led me to dream of relations between the
people living on those adjacent hills over time. Did they love, or hate, each
other? Both manors had been there for centuries, so I suppose they’d been
through their cycles of both those options, through the generations.
We
didn’t have a car at the time, and that meant that we walked the mile or two to
the pub in the village, often – an excellent opportunity to feel history in a
way you never do when you go everywhere on wheels. In most periods in the past,
most people walked. If you want to write
the past, do that. We did. We walked ancient roads through enchanted
flower-strewn forests and through muddy farm fields. This – really, no joke – was the walk to town.
And
here’s a little stream we cross on that road, with holly and ivy actually
growing together – something I had never seen before, growing up in the Rockies as I did.
It
wasn’t even until we were leaving that I heard there was an ancient ring fort
buried in the forest at the bottom of the drive. It was so commonplace to the
people living there that they hadn’t thought to mention it.
At
the bottom of the drive (this painting of the drive is by the castle’s owner,
Conrad Frankel), there is a creaky old castle gate, and a real gate house (we
met a man who was born and raised in that gate house on the way home from town
one day, and in the course of our month there, we met his brother, too!).
· Bottling apple cider made with apples from
the farmer’s own orchard in Cornwall, and then using the natural yeast from
the bottom of the carboys to patiently make absolutely delicious sourdough
bread that week in our own wwoofer kitchen. Dave, pictured here, from Cotna Eco
Retreat, and who is a sourdough expert as well as a cider expert, tells me that
in the past, people made sourdough starter for bread just using the natural
yeast found on the apple skins. All it takes is a little feeding and patience.
·
While he was teaching me to prune the apple
trees, I could hear the medieval church bells ringing from the church in the
village just down the valley (you get a good view of the church from the horse
field). That farmer also took me on a walk all around the neighbourhood (by
which I mean the various fields and vales, with very few houses left), showing
me homes that had been abandoned and telling me why that had happened for each.
Showing me ancient footpaths that led straight to the church steeple – which we
now couldn’t see over the trees, but you would have been able to see it a
hundred and two hundred years ago. On that walk, he educated me about how in
the past, when rural Cornwall was more densely populated than now, people made
much more optimal use of the field areas than they do now, and in the hedges,
there were not just hedgehogs, but all kinds of birds, all the trees that
yielded firewood, the bushes that yielded the berries…
I’m using knowledge gleaned
during that visit to now write about my hero building his best friend an
extension to his wattle-and-daub hut in post-Roman, Pre-Christian 5th
Century Cornwall.
·
Sara, pictured here with Dave, also had so many
good stories to tell. She has a glorious yoga studio on the property, and,
actually, her tale of her romance with Dave (they met in India) is something worth
hearing. Something that gave me hope for my own romantic future…
·
Want to bottle wine the traditional way in a
little stone backroom of an ancient farmhouse? I did that in Tuscany, and
helped weed tomato fields with the same farmer with glorious views of the
ancient Neolithic settlement and ancient pope’s hideaway town of Orvieto. That
host was also an incredible historical resource when I later e-mailed him to
ask details about things I wanted my characters to do in his neighbourhood in
Renaissance times, adding a wealth of detail about neighbourhood relations and
inter-town arguments and battles that happened back in the day that I never
would have gleaned online (as most of it would be in Italian).
·
In Sicily, I helped a Sicilian stonemason build
a wall out of very heavy (pessandra!) rocks (pietri) for a few days. Working
with someone is a great way to work on a language, too. Being surrounded by hot
white limestone really got me into the Italian mood. Then I went along to the
coast of Sicily, slept in my tent with my cats by the sea, toured Ragusa
province’s incredible Baroque towns, and finished writing my latest novel in
cafés no more than 20 steps from the sea, where the coffees were excellent,
Italian, and 80 cents.
There was also a 17th-century Scottish castle
with views from my room to the sea that were like paintings, and a 16th-century
Irish farmhouse lovingly rebuilt by a fascinating romantic figure named Aidan.
There were other homeschooling families, musical geniuses, donkeys and gardens
and milennia-old-towns torn by war and communism… and so many characters to
meet… but I have to stop some time! I will write here again, so if there is
something specific you’d like to know about please ask me. J
Hopefully I have inspired you to give this type of
historical adventure a try yourself. If you’d like to chat more about it, please
find me through my website, www.christabedwin.com
or on Facebook or LinkedIn (as Christa Bedwin).
Writing schedule:
A key to successful wwoofing is that you have to roll with
the situation. You may not have the freedom to dictate your schedule all the
time… and actually, I have found that this requirement to simply accept
circumstances and do what you are asked to do is probably one of the most relaxing and rejuvenating states of
being for the mind. It just takes the stress away from thinking all the time,
and really gives you time to just be,
to soak in the beauty of nature and the quirkiness of people, to relax our
modern stressed minds, and to ponder and dream about plots and characters and
settings and ideas.
As I mentioned with Sicily, when I first rolled up there, I
didn’t really have any plans aside from enjoying some time in that place,
meeting people, and helping to weed gardens or build walls or whatever
presented itself. I just let myself unwind.
Then, when I did go to the seaside, 27,000 words finished my
novel in a mere four days! Though I hadn’t really seemed to be working on my
novel while I built walls or marvelled at Baroque architecture or tried to talk
to the Sicilian neighbours about their milk cows that they’re driving back and
forth from barn to pasture the same way Sicilian peasants have done for
centuries, my head, peaced out and content in a historical way of living,
gentle, with a rhythm instead of a schedule, as people lived in the past,
delivered the words when the time opened up to do so.
But . . .
But I.. have kids… don’t speak the language… travel with my
pets… don’t have a vehicle… have a disability… whatever your “but” reason is
for not getting out there, rethink it.
If you don’t really want to, if it’s not
your bag, fine. I understand that this kind of opportunity is not for everybody.
However, if you are feeling the pull, if you would really
like to try, then don’t swallow any idea of “I can’t.” You can. Just as we all
have different life circumstances, so too do wwoof hosts. There are wwoof hosts
with children, who accept pets, who eat special diets, who speak English and
Japanese and Esperanto… everything. The essential core of the program is that
they can use your help to accomplish their work, and they are keen to teach
you. As long as there is willingness, generosity, and good will on both sides,
many hurdles can be surmounted.
That’s really the message of this blog post: just relax into
the history. Go find the people of this world who are preserving and living the
past, and help them do what they do. Get your hands dirty with it. Help build.
Help grow.
In exchange for your willing labour with fascinating
projects, you will receive a wealth of experiential knowledge and colour for
your historical writing that is unmatched by anything you can beg, buy, or
steal anywhere else.
Other Organizations
You can get involved in real projects through other
organizations and initiatives, too, of course.
Eco-retreats where
you get involved:
Cotna eco-retreat, with Sara and Dave above, is just one of
many ecoretreats that takes paying guests as well as volunteers. cotna.co.uk.
These exist all over the world – wherever you want to find your history!
Historical reconstruction projects to get involved with. Here are
some examples of organizations:
· https://digventures.com DigVentures do crowd-funded
archaeology where you can buy a day/weekend/week's experience digging,
cleaning, documenting finds, etc.
·
Britain’s National Trust offers many
historical volunteer projects.
·
If you speak French, you can volunteer to
actually help rebuild a 13th-century castle in France with only
medieval tools and methods https://www.guedelon.fr/en/how-can-i-participate_95.html
Eco and animal rescue voluntourism
is also growing – be a part of elephant
sanctuaries in Asia, scientific studies of koalas in Australia, or
turtle breeding in the Galapagos. That’s not as historical, of course, but
maybe it ties into your novel about the love between two servants of a
maharaja…
I'd love to hear from you! I am at ChristaBedwin at gmail, on LinkedIn, and on Facebook.
Caterina's Renaissance is in the "On the Horizon" Boxed set available on my Amazon author page: https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B079Q97VZV
Web page: www.christabedwin.com
I'd love to hear from you! I am at ChristaBedwin at gmail, on LinkedIn, and on Facebook.
Caterina's Renaissance is in the "On the Horizon" Boxed set available on my Amazon author page: https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B079Q97VZV
Web page: www.christabedwin.com
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