Nylon sculpture by Rosa Verloop
If I were made of Play-Doh
I’d peel off my flesh –
an easy efacement
of all those minor imperfections
which combine to disgust
like finding a hair in nougat
I’d roll them together –
a smooth ball of muscle, fat and skin
spiked with fingernails and teeth
and re-sculpt to my liking
Pushing my thumbs into the pliant mass –
keeping the basic armature
of bones, dreams and intellect
But smoothing plastically away
my accumulated patina.
Time pulled and squeezed
As pliable –
As vulnerable as lead
Hammered out
A paper thin sounding board
Molecules – moments
Holding hands, tendons stretched
A membrane easily pierced
Sick Child
Late Train
Immovable deadline
Punch through –
And we scramble
Compromise
To repatch the tattered flapping edges.
Copyright Kasia James 2014
One of the greatest challenges I seem to face as a writer is managing transitions. As I work and have a toddler, my ‘spare’ time is intensely, painfully precious, and the pressure to use it fruitfully is keen. However, my frustration is that my creativity doesn’t seem to want to work like that. It is a lazy beast, and doesn’t respond well to whipping. In fact, it flips its top lip and sneers at the concept. It needs time to lumber thoughtfully into it’s stride, and I just don’t have that luxury. We need to go from 0 to 60 in under an hour.
My beast may look a little like this, but he is elusive… Image by Sargon the Dark at DeviantArt
I feel like when those opportunities to write do come along, I should be sitting down and pounding out as many hundred words as I can, but somehow mundane things keep getting in the way.
Following a terrific suggestion from readers of this blog, I carry a little notebook with me at all times, and that has been wonderful for poetry and jotting down ideas as they occur. That little notebook is like the slice of ‘me’ that remains just ‘me’, without any other hats heavy with responsibility. However, ideas are building up in there without the time to bring them to their full dreadful glory.
Any other suggestions as to how to manage these transitions better? To go from ‘worker’ to ‘Mum’ to ‘Writer’ in the blink of en eye?
Some possibly useful links I’ve found:
You may not be able to force creativity, but you can certainly invite it.
Hi! It seems like ages since I last posted. That’s partly because life is, as ever, a merry-go-round that’s spinning slightly too fast for comfort. Partly because I’ve been feeling just a tiny bit cynical about the cyber-spin of social media: the flash card life of Twitter, Facebook and even this blog. I’m sure I’ll dive in again soon as whole-heartedly as ever, but for now here’s a few lines I penned on the subject.
Strut upon the stage
of social media
An electronic confection
as flimsy and addictive
as spun sugar.
.
Masked and blinded
shout into the darkness
Here is my soul
but not my real face –
Desperate for approval
.
Cyber cocooned
the intangible audience
Each one misled
A galaxy of unfound stars
Wit and thought pulped –
by repetition.
I don’t normally write about my private life on here, (other than my private creative endeavors of course), but this week is different. This week my child had gastroenteritis serious enough to get us admitted to hospital.
He is starting to turn the corner, I hope, but it has really brought home to me some truths about being a mother like a snowball to the face.
Firstly, there is nothing more important than your child, especially when they are sick. I love my partner dearly, and so I almost hesitate to type that, but being an adult he can look after himself, rationalise things, and he can seek help and resources outside me. My bub, especially as he can’t speak more than a few words, is entirely dependent on us to help him. We are his entire world. Sometimes all you can do is cuddle him. My professional work and my creative work, come so far down the list of priorities in comparison that they don’t even rate a number on the list.
The other thing is that gender equality and that delicate balance we weave as joint partners in bringing up this little person go completely out the window. My child is no respecter of politics, or even other people’s feelings. All week he has pushed his father away (and is grandfather is out of the question), because he needs ME. Intensely, 24 hours, and in close contact at all times. It’s been hard on my partner to be left feeling second best, especially as they have such fun when he is well.
Someone at my work recently suggested that a colleague who was going on maternity leave at the end of the month would have a lovely relaxing time when the baby comes, reading books and putting her feet up. I confess that I did have to pipe up and put him straight – about the intensity of the relationship – about how it is hard to explain what you do all day, but your days are completely full – about how my child was so demanding when he was tiny that I lost weight as I had no chance to eat.
One of our reviewers (Ella Dee) for ‘The Milk of Female Kindness’ said that as she is not a mother, reading the book was like reading science fiction, the worlds of mothers’ real and honest experiences were so different from her own. I can completely agree with that. I don’t think you can have any real idea of the intensity of the relationship until you are caught up in its whirlwind.
Hopefully this particular whirlwind will set us down somewhere a little sunnier and calmer soon.
As I have mentioned previously on this blog, some mornings I leave ridiculously early to go work on the train, and for some reason this seems to result in little haikus popping into my head. Maybe it’s having an empty stomach, or just seeing the sun come up over the city, but I think I’m coming to quite enjoy these relatively quiet moments in a busy day.
Here’s a few more for you to take or leave as you will.
Faces downturned
A seething speeding capsule
Passions on their laps
Balloons in the dawn
Pinned improbably still
Hanging like dark stars
Cold sky fire
Charcoals graceful branches
Before speeding train
Possum on the wire
Racing electricity
Towards morning star
Blur of morning fog
Jealously hoards the light
A soft eraser
New colour and form
Scribbles bloom on railway walls
Illegible fame
I’ve been getting up ridiculously early to get to work lately. Here are some of the words which have spilled out of my addled brain in those dark hours.
Black dawn silhouettes
The hoot of a waiting train
Square of lilac sky
.
Glimpsed from a rocking train
Balloons hang improbably
Fire shines within
.
Indigo morning
Cold light pools at the station
Runner shuffles past
.
Hard white stars greet me
the air cools my sandalled feet
Hurrying to work
.
Musselshell sky
Fleeting shadow puppets
Birds in bare branches
I gave my love a poem
on Valentine’s Day
Ignoring the prescriptions
of roses and bears
to write my own
prescription
I wrote it on red paper
Black ink bleeding
My soul laid vulnerable
and exposed
Hoping for his protection
Cradled
I cut a heart in the corner
The scalpel scraping fibres
two voluptuous arcs
The paper tears a little
And I think
How apt.
Today, I’m delighted to be able to host a Guest post by the talented Cheri Roman, fellow blogger at The Brass Rag, and author of ‘Descent’. A lady who understands how hard it is to fulfil that dream…
“How do you come up with all that cool stuff in your novels? Your characters and settings are awesome. When I’m reading your novel, it feels like I’m right there. And your villains…” (shudders delicately) “…super evil.”
This is a portion of the fantasy conversation I’d love to have with a reader someday. It ends with the fan asking for my autograph and assuring me that I deserve a Pulitzer. For writing fantasy genre fiction. Hey, if you’re going to dream, go big or go home, I always say.
My fantasy also includes a secluded writing spot; four clean, white walls and a huge bay window through which I can see little forest creatures cavorting on a wide, green lawn ringed by ancient redwoods. No phone, TV, or (gasp) Facebook. Best of all – hours upon hours of uninterrupted writing time.
But the operative word here is “fantasy.” These are rare scenarios, unless, of course, you are Dean Koontz or Nora Roberts. (Seriously, have you seen their houses?) For many authors, the writing life looks more like this:
Get up at five a.m., go to your day job. Work all day, constantly distracted by story ideas, terrified that they will escape before you can capture them. You steal the odd moment and write on whatever is handy: file folders, notepads, the desk calendar, napkins. Frustration sets in because you end up accidentally filing, covering, losing or throwing the notes away. You consider getting a notes app on your phone, but you worry that your boss will accuse you of making personal calls on company time.
The work day is over; you hurry home. Ideas are still buzzing between your ears as you maneuver through traffic. You arrive home and the kids/spouse/pets need your attention, so you feed and brush everyone and then, finally, the house is quiet and you hurry to your writing space and….your mind goes blank. You fear you’ve used all your creativity just to get through the day. But you power through. You pull out the crumpled napkin, power-gulp an energy drink and you write. Sometime around four a.m. you stumble into bed where your spouse gives you a sleepy side-eye but you are too tired to notice. You fall into the bed, already unconscious. The alarm goes off at five. Time to start over.
Alternately, you save your writing energy for the weekend and your spouse complains that they never see you, because you spend Saturdays and Sundays behind a closed door with this sign on it:
The writing life is challenging whether you work a day job or not. Business, family and writing pull you in opposing directions. Plus, you have to sleep sometime. But for authors, giving up isn’t an option. Not writing causes mental and emotional agita. So you steal the moments and write the words that torment you until you put them on paper. It isn’t easy, but it’s necessary. So do it.
That’s my best advice. Create the space in your life for the passionate art of writing well. Surround yourself with like-minded people who support your efforts and dreams. Explain to your significant other how important writing is. Ask for their support. Be courageous enough to say, “no,” in order to guard your writing time. And write. Every chance you get, consistently, creatively, bravely. Write.
Have you heard of slashies?
It’s a label that is being attached to people who do multiple things, typically actor / writer / dancer / superheroine, etc.
Somehow I’ve managed to become a slashie, and I can tell you, at times that slash feels like a physical one. Personally, I’m a writer/ mother/ landscape architect. But with the writer part, there also comes the baggage of writer / publicist / marketer, which I’m really not all that keen on. There are other slashes I could add, but let’s not go crazy here. Yet. Going crazy might let some of the things I’m balancing topple.
The other day, all my slashes were starting to wear me down a bit, I confess. I think particularly because I have a little one, time out without him is so precious that I feel I have to stuff in something useful. I’m new at this parenting lark, so I guess I’m still trying to find the right balance, but it had gone too far into the “All work and no play makes Jane a dull girl,” territory.
So I chucked it all in, and in my precious free time, ripped into the garden. I pulled out weeds, snapped dead branches, and stuffed them enthusiastically into the green bin. I clipped and pruned and freed poor light starved plants. It was tiring, but so cathartic. At work, I try to remind myself that I need to get up from my computer and go for a walk in the park at lunchtime. It may not be directly productive, but I’ve come to the conclusion that some green time is like sleep.
You need some time out, preferably in nature, to recharge.
It’s actually one of the principles that they use in Bhutan to measure how happy their population is, and they are a country taking happiness seriously, since they use it instead of GDP to see how they are doing as a nation.
My best ideas usually come not when I’m slogging away at my keyboard, but when I’m idle – although sometimes that mental idleness has to be forced upon me, like when walking with my bub in his pusher, or when the trains have been cancelled. I understand that it’s actually a recognised phenomenon, which has something to do with allowing the right brain to have a bit of a kick outside the controlling influence of that stern task-master, the left brain.
So if I have a New Year’s resolution, it’s to give myself the Green Light. ‘Go’ to getting out there: ‘Go’ to a bit more balance: and ‘Go’ to some guilt free idleness. 🙂
Have you resolved to be more idle too? Would love to chat about the idea.
Writer's Block 