I am part of a poetry group and due to Coronavirus we have had to cancel meeting up but we have continued via email. So instead of meeting up yesterday, one of the group sent round a prompt for us. She asked us to take a poem and write a response to it.
I thought it appropriate to start with Poems for a World Gone to Shit and found In Preparation for the End Times by Francine Elena.
In Preparation for the End Times – my response
In preparation for the end times I plan to build a time capsule, think of it as a future curation, a warning styled as a museum.
Walls will be lined with loo rolls, antibac will flow from taps. Everything in the kitchen will be pasta, the table and chairs as well.
Half read books and unstarted projects will be piled up on the floor.
A stack of unused face masks will be built up like a house of cards.
Boxes of gloves will fill the bath and bottles of water will form the sides of an isolation pod.
In a display marked “Well, it can’t hurt…” will sit cures next to their fake news headlines;
“cocaine snorted sterilizes nostrils”
“drinking cow piss will wash out the virus”
“eat more garlic to wipe out the toxins”
And as you leave you’ll pass through a bleach shower
and maybe just for good measure be asked to drink some too.
There was a storm once
– long forgotten –
when Night threw flames
and set the galaxy spinning.
Here you’ll find Her eyes.
Scratch at constellations
until stars fall
to sand; this petrified
lightning is Her wrath.
Look for old stone stacks,
moss covered, lining paths
that are not passed.
Fight the brackish tentacles and thorns.
Release her Scold’s Bridle
and unsilence Her tongue.
Find the place where the tide
rips over scorched limestone
and quartz.
Buried below is Her heart
pressed to coal
over lifetimes.
Listen for the
shrieks of foxes fighting
and the night splitting scream
as an owl releases its prophecy.
This is Her song.
Hold a hurricane
in the cup of your hands.
This is Her.
To love Her
is to offer your heart
to smouldering ashes,
knowingly.
To resurrect Her
is to summon
the souls of the women
who were wronged.
Each issue of Mslexia ends with an interview with a writer, journalist, poet etc. The prompts take a standard format and I thought it would be interesting to ponder my own answers…
The Table
An awful metal and plastic trolley that screams disability. Chosen because it can be moved easily, it can be easily reached without having to stretch and it does have a lot of space on it. Books also litter my bed. And everywhere in my flat, you can stretch you arm out and grab a book. I find it very comforting to be surrounded by books.
The Costume
Comfy pjs. Soft, stretchy bottoms and a t shirt. Preferably enough like lounge wear that I can get away with wearing when I leave the house.
The Method
Because of my disability, I read most of my books on my tablet and like to have both the audio and kindle versions so I can move between them as my health dictates. I have a foam triangle covered in non-slip netting that I use to prop up my tablet or book so I don’t have to bend my neck too much. In the past I’d have been laying on my side, propping up the book on a bear.
The Books…
Right now. I always have many books on the go… The main fiction book right now is Owlknight by Mercades Lackey, the last of a trilogy which makes me sad as I really like the characters. That said, there are other books set in the same world so I have more to move onto. There’s also Lady Killers by Tori Telfer and Stiff by Mary Roach.
Couldn’t put down. Pretty much anything by Robin Hobb definitely applies here. I also devoured Lucy Cookes’ Unexpected Truth About Animals over the summer. As a child, everything in my local library was unputdownable and included sweet valley books, Enid Blyton, Helen Forrester, E. B. Nesbitt and so many other books… Reaktion books are really interesting as well.
Gathering dust. I have so many books that many are literally gathering dust. Metaphorically, if I’m struggling with a book, I’ll leave it a while and return to it when I’m in a different mood. If I try this a few times and get nowhere, I’ll give it to a charity shop. Life is too short for bad books. My disability already reduces how much I can read so I’m not inclined to waste that on books I’m not enjoying…
Changed my life. This is a really tough question! I’d probably have to say all of them, but especially the books I read as a child and teenager. They gave me a way to escape, they showed me what was possible, they gave me friends and they inspired me. The Tamora Pierce books were very memorable and stood up to being read as an adult. They are an interesting take on gender and a recent twitter thread highlighted them as one of few books that mentioned periods… And on that note, there were also the Judy Blume books…
So I’ve had a busy few months and whilst I’m pleased I’ve still been blogging, my nature and writing project has been paused. A combination of going to Stanmore for three weeks, resting and recovering, and also getting used to having a lot more care. With this in mind, I put my nature and writing project on hold – it had a summer holiday!
This means I will start getting back into it now that the summer holidays are over and the school year has begun again! Expect more tarot and animal spirit posts as well as I’m planning – long term – to work through all my animal allies cards, my animal totem tarot cards with a focus on the animals. I’m also planning – very long term – to work through all the tarot cards, having been inspired when I started with the ten of swords.
There are so many directions to take the nature and writing in and I think this is partly why I’ve not done much recently. I was really clear about the different topics for the different months and now I’ve covered a lot of these, or at least touched the surface of them, and I don’t know whether I want to return to a topic or go with a new one! So many choices and so little restrictions! I think that’s why I’ve been doing the tarot and animal allies posts because then I’m not having to decide what to focus in on!
Animal Allies wise, I have the following to look into:
Bighorn sheep
Boar
Canary
Coyote
Mountain Lion
Opossum
Rat
Skunk
Squirrel
Turkey
As well as looking forward, I wanted to look back. I’ve been retired for over two years now and whilst I retired in May 2016, it was the September when things finally started to fall into place so I could have a life. I decided that September 16-17 would be a bit of a ‘gap year’ for me. I was overwhelmed at retiring, at having lots of things I wanted to do with my life and unsure what and how much I could actually do if I wasn’t destroying myself working. It felt like there were so many directions I could go in and yet I didn’t want to commit to just one. In the end, the gap year involved a good mix of things; art, Saturday classes at the university, writing and reading. It was January 2017 when I started on my animal spirit posts and it was from there than I formed my nature and writing project.
I had a feeling before but now I know for certain that I am a lot happier when I have projects like these which are long term but with smaller short term chunks (the entire deck of oracle cards but also each individual post).
I have also finally found the kind of writing that comes naturally to me at this stage in my life. As a child I wrote a lot of stories and created magazines and newspapers for fun. As a teenager I wrote an awful lot of (probably quite awful) poetry. I was a prolific poet and it just streamed out of me without much thought or effort. As an adult I have tried to recreate the stories and the poetry but its felt forced and definitely didn’t flow as it once did. This year whilst I was reading and writing and learning, I came across the term creative non fiction and it felt like a validation that my posts about animals, about nature, are creative and they do count as creative writing. Because they are non fiction I had essentially dismissed the creativity in them. And because they weren’t in a voiceless, facts only style I had dismissed them as non fiction. It wasn’t until I found the term creative non fiction that I was able to figure out what my writing is and from there I can learn more about the style and how to improve and explore different techniques.
There have of course been lots of other realisations and discoveries in the past year of my nature and writing project but the thing I am most proud of is that despite having 6 months of being incredibly ill, I didn’t give up. I had to change goal posts and I had to instil patience in myself because I wasn’t physically able to do what I wanted. I also had to spend my energy fighting for help when I wanted to be doing my nature and writing project instead. But despite this, since I started it last September, I have written over 165,000 words and 186 blog posts. I have carefully researched the topics I talk about and have done some really interesting reading and watching of documentaries to fuel what I am writing about. For a year which involved six months of starvation (literally… I couldn’t swallow much food…), I’m pretty proud of myself.
I couldn’t possibly chose a favourite topic or post but the one I find myself telling people about more than any others is the post I did in October about the very real and very serious cases of animals in court on trial. If you read nothing else I’ve written (except obviously some of this post to reach the link…), read that.
Illustration from Chambers Book of Days depicting a sow and her piglets being tried for the murder of a child. The trial allegedly took place in 1457, the mother being found guilty and the piglets acquitted.
Having got back into reading following my stays in hospital, I’m back to collecting titbits about nature writing including hints about what makes for successful pieces. By this I mean writers and readers sharing their ideas rather than what I am gleaming from my own reading and writing.
Robert MacFarlane as always have excellent things to say on the topic. In An Antidote to Indifference, he writes about the resplendent array of reading we have available to us today. That “a twenty-first-century culture of nature has sprung up, born of anxiety and anger, but passionate and progressive in its temperament.” He quotes Ali Smith as saying “the place where the natural world meets the arts is a fruitful, fertile place for both” and goes on to tell us how powerful writing can change the reader, and through the reader, the community. It can help shape our relationship with the natural world, and with place, instilling in us a consciousness and conscience about both.
“The best of this recent writing is ethically alert, theoretically literate and hyper-wary of the seductions and corruptions of the pastoral. It is sensitive to the dark histories of landscape, and to the structures of ownership and capital that organise – though do not wholly produce – our relations with the natural world.” – Robert MacFarlane
This leaves the potential nature writer facing a challenge of Everest proportions, seemingly as difficult as plunging to the floor of the Mariana Trench. But he also cites Alice Oswald as saying that poetry can save the planet by “putting our inner worlds in contact with the outer world”. A much more handle-able task, one we can turn in our palms and caress with our fingers. More like a beautifully cut, lovingly polished gem than a conquered mountain. No less difficult but not quite so overwhelming, keeping Oswald’s words in mind we can make the first move, rather than standing paralysed by the trial, or trail, ahead of us.
When I was reading about the Canal Laureate, I came across some advice from Jo Bell:
“The most important thing is to look at it with your own eyes, not those of previous poets. Sit or walk by the canal and really pay attention. Use the five senses – what can you hear, smell, see, touch and even taste? What are the nearby buildings or trees like? Be specific – if you can see a bird, tell us what sort of bird it is. If you can see a building, is it concrete, brick or stone? Details help your reader to share in what you are seeing.”
This is excellent advice, known by most writers, but not always followed. I have an exercise where I split the page into five and in each bit I make notes about different senses; what I hear, smell, taste, touch, and see. Whilst I will never have much under smell (I have a terrible sense of smell), I will at least remember to think about it when I’m taking notes. Similarly with taste, on the whole we don’t literally taste nature, but it brings in different metaphors and helps you see things in a more holistic way.
She also has a great youtube video about permission, not at all related to nature but great for writing and writers:
In writing Nature’s Architect, a book about the return of Beavers to Scotland, Jim Crumley gives us a glimpse into how he writes. Towards the start of the book, he quotes Margiad Evans:
“If you want to write with absolute truth and with the ease pf a natural function, write from your eyes and ears, and your touch, in the very now where you find yourself alive, wherever it may be. Carry your paper and book with your and conceal yourself in the fields. Watch and be in what you see or in what you feel in your brain. There is no substitute even in divine inspiration for the touch of the moment, the touch of the daylight on the dream.”
In his search for beavers, Crumley finds himself in less familiar territories, telling the reader that when this occurs it takes time for him to become accustomed to a place, that he walks slower, listens and looks harder, being still more often and through this he begins to build a familiarity, an intimacy, with the landscape. It is this relationship that allows writers to convey a habitat with such precision, with such knowledge, as though the land or nature herself were a friend they know well.
“The simple way in was to listen. Thirty years of writing about nature for a living have taught me how to put my ear to the ground, especially where there is something quite new afoot… [by experiencing an animal for oneself it] becomes more alive, more vivid, more captivating in the eye of the beholder and in his imagination, and the insights are deeper and truer, when they are gathered in silence and solitude.”
It can be frustrating to read nature writing in which the author has been able to go to far flung, inaccessible places. Places where my bank balance and wheelchair cannot take me. The same is true when I turn to photographers. But the best nature writers and the best photographers can see what is right on their doorstep. It just requires time and effort to built the relationship with your immediate environment, time and effort that most of us forgo as we head out the door, get in the car and travel off to somewhere more traditionally considered nature. I am just as guilty of ignoring the road as I head off to the park. And this is something that I want to work on over the next few months.
Writing about nature from your bed is something that Elisabeth Tova Bailey has done incredibly well and I will be posting about her book, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, very soon.
Mslexia has a regular feature called 100 ways to write a book. They interview a particular female writer and in addition to that, we get an insight into how the author writes. For example, in the Dec/Jan/Feb 17/18 issue, Sarah Perry who wrote The Essex Serpent is interviewed and The Perry Method includes advice such as “If an idea occurs to you that makes your scalp tighten, it’s a sign that it will make a good story”.
In a similar vein, the creative nature writing guide I’ve mentioned also has a section about method. It discusses use of journals, seasonal diaries, jotting down ideas on scraps of paper, dictating notes to a voice recorder, starting at the end, working on multiple projects and so on.
There are so many different ways to write and the important thing is that you find the one that works for you. If you look online or in a bookshop, you’ll see pages and pages dedicated to teaching you how to write. These generally aren’t about technique or style, more often than not they are about getting you to actually put words on paper. And this is what the 100 ways to write a book column tends to be about.
I could not even entertain the idea of telling anyone how to write. I am a retired, disabled, 31 year old woman with no children and no housework. I am in an unusual situation. I have all the time in the world to write but I also have limits imposed by pain and fatigue and brain fog. But over the last year or so I have honed my way of writing.
I know I ebb and flow through the day and I know mornings tend to be the most reliably productive time so I try to make use of this. Your own rhythms will be different to mine but I wanted to share my approach in case any of it is of help. It has also been a helpful exercise in self reflection and I think a good reminder for when writers block strikes!
So, here is The Helen Method:
Write in a personal way, you chat to your reader, you befriend them and in doing so you build a relationship.
Even though you desperately want to write a beautiful novel, you can’t right now. The time may come but today you are a poet and a creative non fiction writer.
Always have word open on your laptop. You have significant hand pain and so you need to type, despite longing to be able to sit with an elegant fountain pen and inspiring notebook.
Write little and often. This helps with pain management but also creativity begets creativity. Writing little and often makes it habit and means you don’t try and hold ideas in your head…
Which is important because your memory is not what it used to be. Keep a notebook at hand and a pen in sight and scribble down words and phrases before they are lost to brain fog. But do not write any more than that by hand, see previous point.
Read lots. Read often. Read variety. Non fiction and fiction. Kindle and audiobooks. Poetry and prose. Magazines and articles.
And once you have devoured the contents of other people’s writings, ruminate. Go quiet. Switch off Netflix and let the information swish around inside you. Feel into it and find the angle, find the hook.
Don’t try and tell the reader everything you know about a subject. Unused facts and details are not wasted. They will be used elsewhere. They helped you to understand. The reader doesn’t need to know everything you know.
Similarly, stay focused. In your excitement about a topic, you are likely to head off on too many tangents and lose the narrative and the reader.
Go back to all those words and phrases and half started poems that you always mean to finish.
Most importantly, write because you enjoy writing. Write for no other reason than it brings you pleasure.
What tips would you include in your writing method?
Illustration from Chambers Book of Days depicting a sow and her piglets being tried for the murder of a child. The trial allegedly took place in 1457, the mother being found guilty and the piglets acquitted.
