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LITERATURE<br />
Talent Pool<br />
Tanya Shadrick, long-hand writer<br />
Tanya Shadrick does a lot of writing. If you went<br />
to the Pells last year, chances are you saw her<br />
there, on the terrace overlooking the deep end of<br />
the pool, pen in hand. This year she’ll be back,<br />
and in an official capacity: she’s been made the<br />
swimming pool’s Writer in Residence.<br />
“Three years ago I got a terrible pain in my<br />
back,” she tells me, over a coffee in the <strong>Lewes</strong><br />
Arms, explaining how her strange lifestyle came<br />
about. “I had to give up my job, at the university,<br />
which I loved.” She couldn’t sit – it was too<br />
painful, “so I had to walk around all the time. By<br />
the summer it got a bit better, so I started going<br />
to the Pells.” She took up swimming lessons, and<br />
when she wasn’t swimming, she started writing.<br />
Though she has to fit this passion within the<br />
strictures of being a mum-of-two, she’s hardly<br />
stopped since.<br />
“I live on Bradford Road and I was upset when<br />
someone vandalised a tree on Baxter’s Field,” she<br />
continues, charting the development of her writing<br />
career. “As a reaction to that, I wrote about it,<br />
mostly sitting in the Grange Gardens. It became<br />
my first published piece.”<br />
She shows me one of her notebooks, filled with<br />
her careful handwriting: half joined up, the small<br />
words sitting neatly on the lines of the notepaper.<br />
But what will she write about all summer? “The<br />
here and now of the pool. Memories, reflections.<br />
I won’t be disturbing anyone’s peace, but I will<br />
invite pool-goers to come talk if what I’m doing<br />
interests them. Most people find the spectacle of<br />
writing in longhand intriguing - it provokes all<br />
sorts of surprising stories. So I’ll be a collector of<br />
tales as much writer of them.”<br />
She will have plenty of paper for all these stories.<br />
Tanya has a 50-yard long Japanese-style scroll<br />
- the length of the pool - as her central project.<br />
“I hope to manage 35 laps by September: a mile<br />
of longhand and a novel-length piece of writing.<br />
It’s title is Wild Patience because I’m wanting to<br />
explore ideas about joy got from routine and<br />
repetition, which writing and swimming share.”<br />
The idea isn’t to publish the final version, but to<br />
display it as an artefact, perhaps on the walls of<br />
the pool. In fact it’s tempting to see the scroll as<br />
much performance art as literary endeavour, and<br />
it’s no surprise that Tanya finds inspiration in the<br />
place-based work of two artists who live locally,<br />
David Nash and Peter Messer. “Can writing in<br />
the open, at this scale, be art too?” she muses. “If<br />
there is genuine absorption and enquiry into what<br />
is being enacted then I think it takes on meanings<br />
wider than just the words, yes.”<br />
Alex Leith<br />
Tanya will be sharing ways for others to get<br />
involved in her residency - by writing and reading<br />
about life in the water and out of doors - on her<br />
Lap/Lines blog at tanyashadrick.com<br />
Photo by Alex Leith<br />
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