Foreword

Foreword

This year’s collaboration has been entirely online – indeed, John Sparks hit on the idea early that we should make a virtue of this likely necessity. In the first session, all the Desborough boys were tuning in from their homes, but I had the Radley contingent corralled together in my classroom. This didn’t really work, so for the remaining three, everyone was tuning in on their own device from different locations. We hope that this has meant that boys have had to keep the skills going of meeting new people online and striking up relationships in a virtual format. Partly because travel is often tricky at the times of day we want to do these exchanges, we are planning to keep a virtual element for next year’s exchange as well.

Four times this last academic year, a group of selected Shells from Radley College have met a similar group of Year 9s from Desborough College to write together. This Creative Writing Exchange is a small thread in the wide-ranging tapestry of collaboration between the two schools, and exchange happens at every level: boy, teacher, leadership, governance. You will notice from the contents page that many of these pieces have a single author. The sessions were so designed that even where the product is individual, the process has been collaborative. Indeed, there were a few moments where boys from the two schools were having such a good time with each other that the writing fell by the wayside for a bit, even in the virtual format – in some ways, there could be no higher triumph.

You will notice similar styles of piece cropping up in this (roughly alphabetical) anthology. In the first session of the year, I asked the boys to write different sections of a modern version of The Canterbury Tales. Partly due to some of the text disappearing, partly due to the difficulty of genuine collaboration in a still-new medium, none of these ranked as the greatest hit of a participant! In another session, turning to prose, I asked them to craft a 100-word reflection on the theme of Youth. In the first of Lauren’s two sessions, she asked them to write a speech as a politician or similar about returning to normal life after lockdown. Finally, returning to fiction, they were asked to write a description of a lighthouse scene either turning from calm to stormy or the reverse.

Thanks are due to many. At Radley, to John Sparks who runs the Radley-Desborough partnership with vigour and generosity and to Alex Nash, Head of English, who has supported this venture as part of a renaissance of creative writing in the department. At Desborough, Lauren Humphreys, my opposite number, who has helped this collaboration go from strength to strength. Final thanks are to the boys, who engaged with this all with terrific good humour. One innovation for this year is the hyperlinks to some recordings of the poems (recorded by the boys themselves) that you will find at the bottom of some pages. Immediately below this foreword is a ‘trailer’ featuring some snippets put together by Alastair Vaan at Radley – my huge thanks to him for getting the gist of my very vague description and running with it!

As Radley looks to broaden its Partnerships work beyond Desborough, I am proud that this exchange (this was its third iteration) is now a solid part of the furniture, and that perhaps some aspects of what we do might provide, if not a model, at least a ‘what works well’ for other projects.

JASS, June 2021

TRAILER: https://vimeo.com/568864094/0239438100