I’m just back from Aracena, an hour’s drive from Seville. I spent the last week running a Dark Angels writing course with my friend Andy. This annual week at a finca in the sierra has become a highlight of my year. On the taxi drive home from the airport, I was making plans for 2020. …
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Stumbling outside my comfort zone
At just about every workshop I lead there’s a point where the participants move outside of their comfort zones. Sometimes they boldly leap across the line that separates where they feel safe from where they don’t. Other times it’s a more tentative shuffle. It always happens on a Dark Angels course. But it happens too …
What matters? What is trivial?
Why are we put into this life? What really matters? This from EF Schumacher.
What is your job, writer?
What is your job as a writer? Perhaps not this from Dinty Moore. But what then? Whatever it is, it will involve imagination and understanding.
Recording things as they are
Thinking about the relationship between imagination, creativity and the impulse to document. Not sure what i think yet. It’s complex. But thinking about it. From Stuart Franklin, The Documentary Impulse
What is writing poetry?
Patterns, connections, community, beauty, fishing… What is writing poetry? Sandford Lyne, Writing poetry from the inside out
Is your bucket a colander?
Drop a bucket down the well. See what you can pull up. But don’t get stuck at the bottom of the well. And make sure your bucket isn’t a colander. From Writing Poems by Peter Sansom
What you are trying is impossible
It is impossible to combine work and motherhood. But poetry starts from impossibility. An Alice Oswald interview. Cut out of The Guardian and glued into a notebook. As I would say more generally, constraints liberate. Given your impossible limitations – of time, form, talent – do what is possible.
Each moment is a leap forwards.
One of the good things about getting older is that your kids are old enough to choose amazing Father’s Day gifts. It’s time to step recklessly into the book I have not yet written. From the White Book, by Han Kang. Thanks Evie.
Is it any wonder we become discouraged?
Writing is hard work. The task is seemingly impossible. When you don’t know how to start, just start. When you don’t know how to continue, just continue. As Rebecca McClanahan says, reach for your journal. Writing is easy.