Writing My Self

Alan Maley, UK

Alan Maley has been involved with ELT for over 50 years. He has lived and worked in 10 countries worldwide, including China and India. He is a prolific author. He is a founder member of the Creativity Group (The C group). In 2012 he was given the ELTons Lifetime Achievement Award. He is a regular contributor to HLT Mag. E-mail: yelamoo@yahoo.co.uk

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Abstract
Introduction
Why do I write?
How do I write?
What stops me from writing?
What can we do about it?
What kinds of text do I write?
What are the things I like to write about?
Final reflections
References

Abstract

I shall begin by attempting to chart my history as a writer. I shall go on to discuss the following questions; Why do I write? How do I write? What stops me from writing? What kind of texts do I write? What do I write about? The answers to these questions will form the basis for an assessment of the way writing has helped me to find myself (my self) both professionally and personally over the course of the last 50 years , and the way in which it has become an essential part of who I am.

Introduction

We all have our preferred ways of engaging with our lived experience. Some do it through the medium of paint or plastic art, others through music or drama or dance, others through photography, others through cooking or gardening, others through religion,…. In my case, writing is the preferred option. Yet when I try to recall how I got so enmeshed with writing as a way of perceiving and making sense of the world, I fail to find a distinct point at which I became ‘a writer’. It just seems to have crept up on me. Like Topsie, it ‘just growed and growed’. I did very little writing as a child except what the school required. I was certainly not one of those precocious children who win writing competitions and school prizes. At secondary school I did once edit a class magazine but that was hardly a major work of the imagination. Like many adolescents, I also recall writing some poetry, though this embarrassing juvenilia hardly counts. It surprises me now that I did not write when I was exposed to ‘stimulating’ situations during my National Service and at University, where I had plenty of material during the vacations, including working in an orthopaedic ward at a large hospital, and working down a gold mine in South Africa… but none of this pricked me into writing creatively, though I did keep a journal of my South African adventures at the height of the apartheid regime. Certainly the experience of writing a post-graduate dissertation on an obscure African lingua franca can hardly have woken the passion for writing I subsequently felt. Maybe, like so many other people, I felt that writers were a special club, which I was not a member of.

In fact, my first real writing was done in Ghana when an educational publisher approached me and a colleague to write a book of guided dialogues. (Maley & Newberry, 1970) Following this I wrote a small collection of short playlets based on the Ananse stories of West Africa. (Maley, 1972) I also wrote poems and jingles for kids in some series for Ghana Radio. I wrote a few personal poems during my 5 years in Ghana – but very few. But this writing could only be described as creative in the sense of ingenious. It did not speak to my real self. My next job was in Italy, where I wrote almost nothing of any description, except a language course which fizzled out before publication.

It was only in Paris, where I lived for over 6 years, that I began to write professional books in any serious way. This was an exciting time for my profession (Applied Linguistics and Language Teaching) and I was lucky to be in on the ground floor, with an editor in Cambridge, Adrian du Plessis, wholly sympathetic to the innovative titles we proposed, and a co-author, Alan Duff, with remarkable creative energy and imagination. This was an exhilarating chapter in my professional writing life, and I am eternally grateful for it. But still I wrote almost no fiction, though I began to experiment with various forms of poetry.

It was only when I was working in China and India that I began to engage with poetry in a more intense way. I wrote a series of books in India for elementary school kids with poetry as the core – and I wrote most of the poems myself. (Maley, 1990) I also started to run creative writing workshops.

The professional writing still had the upper hand, with numerous reviews, articles and books, and a whole series of books for teachers which I edited. The way into fiction for me came through a commission to write two collections of short stories for Penguin English, (Maley, 1995, 1997) So when the Cambridge English Readers series was started by Philip Prowse, I was encouraged to write four ‘novels’ for that. (Maley, 1998, 2004, 2009, 2011).

While in Singapore, I began to write haikus on a regular basis and joined the British Haiku Society. Seeing the world through ‘haiku moments’ soon became a regular part of my daily practice. But it was when I was in Thailand that I took the plunge by setting up an MA module on Creative Writing. The students were all from Asian countries, and produced work of great interest and quality. And having to run a course of this kind made me inquire more deeply into the whole creative writing process.

Eventually, just before leaving Bangkok, my Burmese colleague Tan Bee Tin suggested we run a workshop for colleagues around the region. This evolved into the Asian Teacher Writers’ Group. From 2003 to 2015, we ran at least one workshop each year in different countries in Asia – and each time we published an edited selection of our writings. (Maley & Mukundan, 2005-2011). The process of sharing and encouraging others to write has been a key stimulus for me to write more myself.

I continue to write professional material but my heart is in poetry, which I find more absorbing and rewarding the longer I practice it. Yet I still hesitate to call myself a poet. I consider myself simply as someone who writes poetry.

Why do I write?

People often ask me why I write, what I get out of writing, what the point of it is. The answer is complex, and ultimately unanswerable in general terms. My reasons for writing are mine: there is no reason for them to apply to other people. But here are five reasons to think about:

1. Writing of all kinds, but particularly creative writing, helps me to give shape to the ‘booming, buzzing confusion’ in my brain. Our heads are full of racing thoughts and impressions, all jostling for our attention. Many of them are confused and fleeting. We hop from one to another in a fever of distraction. When I write, I find I can momentarily still the tumult, and bring some order and harmony to this unstructured, unruly torrent of activity in my brain. Writing is ‘the still point of the turning world.’
2. Writing requires me to sharpen my observation of the world and everything in it. In the bustle of everyday life, we cease to notice the world around us. We are so preoccupied with the doings of our busy schedules that we forget how to pay attention – real attention – to what is around us. Writing helps me to restore the sharpness of my senses, and rediscover the wonder in the ‘thinginess’ of things – the ‘qualia’, people, words, landscapes, trees, birds, events.
3. When writing, I often find that I am discovering new and unexpected connections between things and ideas. We live our lives through metaphors, and writing helps to refresh the wellsprings of metaphor. Many of the things that bubble to the surface are the product of the unconscious or sub-conscious mind, others are memories and dreams, fragments of conversations, flashes of visual incidents. These connections feed into the writing, but new connections also arise from the act of writing itself.
4. When I write creatively, I am forced to draw upon the whole range of language available to me. I stretch my language resources to their extreme limits. I am constantly testing the fabric of the language that I am weaving to see whether its patterns fit my intentions, and whether it has the tensile strength to bear my messages. I may put familiar language to innovative uses or even coin new words or usages. What this process helps me avoid is the tired and flaccid shorthand of much everyday usage. It keeps my language fresh and growing.
5. The overall effect of writing in this way is to provoke a heightened state of alertness, a sense of being more alive, more aware of myself, of others and of the world around me. I would not call this happiness – writing is a hard and sometimes painful pursuit – but I would rather feel fully alive like this than semi-comatose and compliant, which has become the default position for large parts of the population. The fictional society depicted in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World has come perilously close to being realised.

How do I write?

The short answer is – with great difficulty! Though I have spent most of my adult, professional life writing, it does not get any easier with time. Writing is tough and painful. To quote Colum McCann, ‘Most poems don’t come like a burning bush or a pillar of light. They are worked and worried into being. But when they finally emerge they should have the appearance of absolute ease. Poets are much like dancers who ruin their ankles for the sake of a moment’s beauty in the air.’ (in Holden and Holden, 2014: 222). Or as Fred Astaire remarked,'If it doesn't look easy, you're not working hard enough.' The reward comes in those rare moments of total absorption in the writing, when I lose all sense of time – lost in the ‘Flow’ experience.

What helps to get me going? Deadlines certainly do! As the fateful day closes in, I am forced to get myself together, clear my thoughts, and just get down to it. All the distractions I subconsciously use to stop myself from doing the writing melt away as the heat of the deadline approaches.

I also find it easier to write in certain environments. I like to write in my ‘study’ – a rather small and cluttered space – a familiar place like a dog’s basket, where I can turn round and round and settle into a comfortable position. There, I am surrounded by my books, pictures, photographs and nick-knacks. It looks a mess but I know where everything is, and can lay my hand on a book or article I need almost blindfold.

But I also sometimes get good ideas in coffee bars and restaurants while I am away travelling, or on trains and aeroplanes and airport lounges, or out walking. That’s a powerful reason for always keeping a notebook to hand. I rarely write anything complete in places like this but the notes are an invaluable resource for later.

I used to write all my first drafts by hand, using a favourite pen but, increasingly, I find I can compose directly on to my computer. It is easier to edit this way but the disadvantage is that I do not have my earlier drafts to refer back to. But for poems, I still prefer to use a pen and paper. There is something unique about the physical contact of the pen with the paper, a direct connection between eye, brain, hand and paper. And I tend to use scrap paper, partly to save the trees but also perhaps because it makes it easier for me to throw things away and start again.

I am a morning person, and usually get started about 7am. I often have ideas which came to me during the night. I need to get these down before they are lost in the whirring, buzzing busy-ness of the day. When I am in a ‘flow’ state, I can work right through the day, though I tend to avoid writing at night. Normally, I give myself plenty of breaks: coming back to something after a brief rest often helps me to move on.

I get my ideas from a whole range of sources. I walk every day near a lake and a river, and ideas often float to the surface unbidden. I spend a lot of time thinking back on people and places I have known, and experiences I have had. I try to see the world around me fresh and newly-minted, which helps me make new connections and combinations. I also get ideas from my own reading. I read a lot, and promiscuously, and I am convinced that this also fuels new connections.

If I get a block, as everyone does from time to time, the best thing is to switch activities – have a coffee, go for a long walk, call a friend, read something completely different, watch a mindless programme on TV…anything to change gear for a while.

When I have written a first draft, I tend to put it aside for a day or two, then come back to it. For one thing, this helps me to notice obvious, glaring faults. And as I re-read, I often find I am also re-writing, sometimes finding a completely new angle or direction. Writing for me is a messy process, and I have to remind myself that this is Good! It needs to be messy!

I also believe in showing what I have written to people whose judgement I trust, even if this is sometimes uncomfortable. But a second opinion is always valuable – it is easier to see what is wrong in someone else’s writing than in one’s own.

What stops me from writing?

There is certainly no shortage of things that come between me and the act of making marks on paper. Perhaps readers will recognise some of them as true for them too. That should be a consolation – for all of us.

1. Distraction
   
   By this, I mean real distraction (not procrastination). All too often there are competing demands for my attention: doing my tax returns, cooking dinner, finishing a report to meet a deadline, preparing Power Point slides for a lecture, making medical or dental appointments, wasting time on line to get a good deal on an air ticket, helping a friend with a problem, and many more. All of these things always take longer than we expect. And somehow, the immediate demand always takes priority over the important piece of creative writing we planned to do.
2. Procrastination
   
   This is one of the most lethal obstructions to my writing. Perhaps I have thought about what I want to write, I even have some notes and jottings. I have cleared a morning, or an evening, or even a few days to get on with my writing. But somehow, I find myself checking the e-mails or following up a reference that interested me, or making a phone call to my sister to ask how her husband is. And then, suddenly it’s 11 o’clock, so I go to make a cup of coffee. While I am doing that, I start to read something interesting in the newspaper. By now, it’s 12.30 and time for lunch. Goodbye writing for this morning. And the most frustrating thing is that I am aware that I am indulging in avoidance behaviour, yet I go on doing it! There is a wonderful poem, Procrastination, translated from the Portuguese of Fernando Pessoa. I recommend people to read it when they are procrastinating. (www.goodreads.com/quotes/6746941-procrastination-the-day-after-tomorrow-yes-only-the-day-after)
3. No time
   
   This is the classic excuse we all make when there is something slightly uncomfortable to be done. ‘I’m just too busy. I never have time for writing…etc.’ Of course, it is a pathetic, rubbish excuse. I have just as much time as anyone else – 24 hours a day of it, to be precise. So it’s not that I don’t have time: it’s just that I don’t use the time I have in the right way. And I kick myself for it! Every time. And then I make the same excuse next time…
4. No ideas / writer’s block
   
   It happens sometimes that I feel I have nothing to write about. Nothing comes to my mind, or nothing that anyone would be interested in. My mind is a blank. I get frustrated. I feel miserable. I wonder if I will ever find anything to write about ever again. The world is black and hopeless. I feel wretched and depressed at my inadequacy – and that makes things worse.
5. Self-doubt, insecurity, fear
   
   ‘I am my own worst enemy. I usually beat myself.’ (Gallwey, 1974). It is that hypercritical, judgemental self that sits on my shoulder and tells me I will never write anything worth reading which saps my will to write. Like many other people, I feel unable to expose my self, fearing that my writing will not be good enough, that people will criticise or ridicule it, that it is worthless. All these feelings combine to switch off the creative current and condemn me to silence.
6. Perfectionism
   
   Or perhaps more accurately, a false sense of perfectionism. I often feel that I cannot possibly write to the standard I imagine is required. I envisage the disapproving faces of those to whom it is addressed as they turn up their noses at it. So, because I cannot produce the perfect masterwork, I produce nothing at all. Stupid really, isn’t it? What I have to convince myself is that my best will be good enough. And then do the best I can possibly do.

What can we do about it?

There is no secret formula for getting over the obstructions standing in the way of our writing creatively. But here are a few ideas, none of them new:

1. Do nothing.
   
   I have learned to wait. Things may look bad today. By tomorrow they may have changed for the better. I realise that I cannot force myself to create something original if the moment is not right. While I am waiting, I know that a lot is going on in my subconscious mind, and that, in its good time, it will come bubbling to the surface. I know that I have to trust the process and let it take its course. So I let it marinate and ferment.
2. Go for a walk.
   
   If I try to unblock by focussing on the writing, the block often gets worse. The harder I push, the harder it pushes back. Sometimes it helps just to get out of the house and do something physical that has no connection with thinking or writing. I prefer to go for long walks by the lake or the river. Others might prefer gardening, or fishing, or swimming … or sky diving, or even shopping! Anything will do as long as it takes your mind off what is bothering it. There is now abundant evidence that physical exercise, especially walking, enhances brain function. (Ratey & Hagerman, 2008).
3. Read.
   
   I often just pick up a book at random, and start to read it. Any book will do. Just reading words someone else has written helps me get into the flow of my own writing. We tend to unconsciously accumulate a lot of skill and know-how about writing from the residue of our own reading. And when I read in this random sort of way, I nearly always end up with some new ideas sparked by what I have read. At the very least, it helps me to take my mind off the problem. Some people (including me) will also watch a film in much the same way.
4. Talk to someone.
   
   Sometimes I find it helps to talk (or e-mail) about the problem with someone I know well. Very often, they will find good things in my writing which I had failed to notice. Or they may spot flaws which I had missed. (We are always better at seeing other people’s flaws than our own!) Or sometimes it is just good to unload our frustration into a sympathetic ear. But beware! It is all too easy to talk about what you are going to write, and all the bright ideas connected with it. If you are not careful, this becomes a substitute for the actual writing. Don’t forget that what writers do is to write, not just talk about writing. I remind myself that I write with my pen, not with my tongue.
5. Kick-start the writing.
   
   Sometimes I find it helps to force myself to write something…anything, just to get the wheels turning again. I might just pick a theme word and do some free-writing based on it, without stopping to think or to correct. Other times I might take a writing exercise and do that. For example, I might write down all the words that rhyme with a word, like ‘nice’, then write a poem using as many as possible as end rhymes. Or I might take a text from a foreign language I know well, and translate it. You might compare this kind of thing with going to the gym. The writing you do may not be spectacular but it will have helped you re-start your dynamo and toned up your writing muscles.
6. Be kind to yourself.
   
   When I am stuck in my writing, it is all too easy to beat myself over the head – to blame myself for not being able to do it, to feel guilty and useless and sorry for myself. But if I allow myself to feel this way, it makes things worse, not better. We all need to be compassionate towards our own failings. I remind myself that it is not a sin if I can’t write today. No one will punish me – except myself. So what’s the point of making myself miserable for something so relatively unimportant? It’s better to forget about it, open a bottle of good wine, and enjoy the moment!

What kinds of text do I write?

My professional writing continues, although I am retired. I am in the fortunate position not to need a job, yet to have work when I want it. Sometimes I wonder how I ever had the time to work at a job!

The main text-types I write are book reviews, articles for journals and magazines, chapters in professional books and methodology books for teachers. I also continue to do a lot of editing of books comprised of chapters by several hands, and of creative texts written by the Asia Teacher Writers’ Group, which I worked with for nearly 15 years.

I have always found writing reviews extremely difficult. The need somehow to give a fair yet critical impression of someone else’s work is incredibly demanding, especially when I am working within a strict word limit. I owe it to the author to do justice to her ideas, and I owe my readers an honest and illuminating account of the book. I sometimes think I am an idiot to go on doing this. One reason I persist is that, in order to write a good review, I must have really read the book carefully myself. I read a lot but it is only when I have to write a review that I pay a book the full attention it deserves. Another is that the discipline of writing within such tight limits pays off for my other writing too. What is more, I still enjoy sharing the books I read with others – and reviews are one of the best ways I know of doing this.

When writing professional books and articles, I am passionately committed to writing something that others will want to read. I do not subscribe to the view that the genre constraints of academic writing should be allowed to suppress an individual voice. The kind of desertification of the language which I find all too often in professional publications appals me. I am likewise appalled by bullshit (the term is licensed even by Yale professors (Frankfurt, 2005), so I feel justified in using it!) and the bloated rhetoric of much post-modern academic discourse. So I am committed to writing in an engaging style with a minimum of pretension. When teaching writing to undergraduates in the National University of Singapore I formulated a number of maxims: accuracy, appropriacy, clarity, economy, expressivity and elegance. It is these maxims I try to apply in my own professional writing.

Turning to poetry, I must admit to a love-affair with form. I relish the formal constraints of the villanelle, the haiku, the cinquain, the sonnet and so forth. Form presents a fascinating paradox: the greater the formal constraints, the greater the creative stimulus. Creativity loves constraints. So a lot of the poetry I write is written within a formal framework of rules. This does not guarantee that what I write is any good, of course. It is just as easy to write lousy poetry within a formal set of rules as it is to write rotten free verse. More recently, however, I have begun to experiment with prose poetry and free form verse too, and I hope I am beginning to understand the very real constraints which an absence of formal rules imposes.

In fiction, I prefer the short story, partly for the discipline it requires: I still recall the difficulty I had in distilling a compelling story-line into just 600 words when writing the first Penguin collection. (Maley, 1995). But I have also written four full-length pieces of fiction, and found that engrossing too. What is fascinating is to feel a pre-written outline start to come alive as I write, so that the story and the characters begin to take over. I feel then like a funnel through which the story is telling itself.

What are the things I like to write about?

I think we all tend to write about things we are involved with or feel an instinctive affinity to. Writers have always done this: Jane Austen’s obsession with gentility and the way into marriage, Dickens’ lifelong concern for social equality and the perils of poverty, D.H. Lawrence’s almost pathological fascination with sexuality and the relationships between men and women….and the list goes on.

So what do I like writing about? Looking back, I think there have been a number of quite varied areas of concern in what I write. And I find that I tend to write about different things in poetry than I do in prose.

For example, when I write poetry, I like to write about nature especially – the language of the sky, of clouds, the extraordinary lives of animals, especially birds. (I am exceptionally lucky that I can observe a wide variety of birds from my study window – herons returning to their nests after the long winter, woodpeckers hungry for food in the bark of trees, seagulls swooping overhead, ) And trees and flowers in all their infinite variety. And the changing complexion of landscapes. And the seasons, and what they do to change the landscape and my mood. And of course, there is a rich seam of nature writing in English which I can use for inspiration. Robert Macfarlane’s latest book, Landmarks (2015), is a splendid example of the genre, and an inspired attempt to save the rich vocabulary which has evolved to reflect the particularity of the natural world.

Another topic which recurs a lot in my poems is the memory-scape of childhood. Possibly, our most vivid recollections are the earliest. I think of my parents, of our life in a modest village, of what we did in a world without cars, TV, computers and supermarkets. I think of my childhood in a time of war and post-war austerity. These memories are all the more compelling because I know that those times can never be re-experienced. They are gone for ever – and thus it is all the more important to remember them.

I also enjoy mischievously sending up things in my poems. Sometimes it is through parodies of other people’s poems. Sometimes it is taking some human weakness and exposing it through the poem. Sometimes it is the irresistible urge to write something unconventional or downright rude! (Rhyme and bawdiness are first cousins!)

Inescapable themes in my poems are love and death. What else is there to write about, in a way? First we love, and then we die. End of story. So these twin themes have been the mainstay of poems worldwide since literature first began. That does not change.

In my stories and novels, I like to explore themes which have a real impact on people’s lives: injustice, revenge, envy, corruption, violence, teenage problems, ageing and Alzheimer’s , modern-day slavery…We live in a world of injustice and misery – and such themes must be brought out into the open. Fiction is one way to do that. But my stories are not all gloom and doom, and I like to explore the quirky experiences thrown up by people’s behaviour.

Especially in my stories, I like to experiment with all sorts of text types – fairy stories, fables, childhood memories (again), mystery, crime, romance, regret … a whole range of things. The most wonderful thing about all of this is that we never come to an end of things to write about – nor of ways of writing about them.

Final reflections

I count myself extremely lucky to have found a way of engaging with the world through words. Learning who you are is never easy. I have been fortunate in finding a way of writing my way towards understanding – even if understanding the world and one’s place in it is a never-ending search.

As I have suggested above, I cannot track exactly how I have learned things – but I have obviously been influenced by the ideas and people I have met along the way. Partly through the research into Process Writing by Donald Murray (1968, 1998), Peter Elbow (1998a),b), Janet Emig (1977) and others for my Singapore course which alerted me to the way others have gone about understanding and teaching writing Partly through reading inspirational books like Writing Down the Bones (Goldberg, 1986 ), Bird by Bird (Lamott, 1994), The Ode Less Travelled (Fry, 2007), Sing Me the Creation (Matthews, 1994 ), Rose: Where did you get that red? (Koch, 1990) and many others. However, I have to say that I do not believe we can learn to write by reading books about it: the only way to learn how to write is by writing. I also owe an enormous debt to friends colleagues and students for sharing their ideas and their writing with me.

Writing, especially poetry, is now part of me. I could not conceive of not doing it. How else would I retain a modicum of sanity in an ever more incomprehensible world? How else would I be able to apprehend what surrounds me? How else make sense of the interface between the material, external world and the internal world of feelings and spirit?

Alan Maley. 20/07/2017

References

Elbow, Peter. (1998) Writing Without Teachers. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press,

Elbow, Peter. (1998) Writing With Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press,.

Emig, J (1977) Writing as a Mode of Learning College Composition and Communication Vol. 28, No. 2 (May, 1977), pp. 122-128 . National Council of Teachers of English.

Frankfurt, H.G. (2005) On bullshit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press

Fry, S. (2007) The Ode Less Travelled. London: Arrow Books.

Gallwey,W.T. (1974) The Inner Game of Tennis. London: Pan Books.

Goldberg, N. (1986) Writing Down the Bones. Boston & London: Shambhala

Holden, A. & Holden, B. (eds) (2014) Poems that make grown men cry. London & New York: Simon & Schuster.

Koch, K. (1990) Rose: Where did you get that red? New York: Vintage Books.

Lamott, A. (1994) Bird by Bird. New York & San Francisco: Pantheon Books.

Maley , A. & Newberry, R. S. (1970) Guided English Conversations. London: Thomas Nelson.

Maley, A. (1972) The Chief's Counsellors and other plays. Lagos: African Universities Press.

Maley, A. (1990). Living Words: Living Worlds. Books 1~6. Madras: Macmillan, India.

Maley, A. (1995) The Penguin Book of Twelve Very Short Stories. London: Penguin.

Maley, A. (1997) Musical Cheers and other Very Short Stories. London: Penguin

Maley, A. (1998.) He Knows Too Much. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, English Readers.

Maley, A. (2004.) A Tangled Web. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, English Readers.

Maley, A. (2009) The Best of Times? Cambridge: Cambridge Universiry Press, English Readers..

Maley, A (2011) Forget to Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, English Readers.

Maley, A. & Mukundan, J. (eds) (2005-2011). Asian Stories for Young Readers. Petaling Jaya: Pearson Malaysua

Maley, A. & Mukundan, J. (eds) (2005-11) Asian Poems for Young Readers. Petaling Jaya: Pearson, Malaysia.

Matthews, P. (1994) Sing Me the Creation. Stroud:Hawthorn Press.

McCann, C (2014) A Meeting. In Holden & Holden (2014) p 222.

McFarlane, R. (2015) Landmarks. London: Hamish Hamilton.

Murray, D. S. (1968) A Writer Teaches Writing: a Practical Method of Teaching Composition . New York:Houghton Mifflin.

Murray D.S. (1998) Write to Learn. New York: Harcourt Brace.

Ratey, J.J & Hagerman, E. (2008) Spark: The revolutionary new science of exercise and the brain. New York: Little, Brown and Co.

Please check the Creative Methodology for the Classroom course at Pilgrims website.