Viva Lewes Issue 117 June 2016

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