Category Archives: The Writer’s Life

Things To Throw Away – A Poem And Its Deconstruction

Posted on June 16, 2015 | 3 comments

This started as a poem on twitter and I thought I wanted to expand on the idea a little as a practice exercise.

Things to Throw Away:
the shaggy toothbrush
the unworn shirt
the leftovers
the poetry I wrote as a child
the fear I cannot do this

When I came to expand it, I saw the completeness of it; adding to it would be padding out the original idea, hastily written as it was.

Instead, let me explain why I chose the images and the final line. As an English teacher, this is what I get my students to do: deconstruct a text to see how the components fit together. Therefore it behoves me to do it to my own work, to understand what I am doing and why; to make conscious the unconscious.

I chose the images as concrete ones, specific items the reader would recognise, an item they could visualise in their own house. Each item contains the principle that they have been held on to for too long, or has outlived its usefulness.

I am known to hang on to toothbrushes for longer than is recommended, and it’s not a big effort to get a new one, but there’s a comfort in what is known. I could replace the shaggy toothbrush image with that of holey underpants for more of a giggle.

The image of the unworn shirt suggests an item that we hold on to because it was a gift, or it was something we want to fit into, but it’s another delusion of ourselves.

Leftovers in my fridge are either consumed immediately or linger like a lost soul, discovered when there is a culture of organisms breeding. Why do we do it? Neglect? Forgetfulness? Apathy? 

Bad emo poetry; we all have to start somewhere as writers. I still have notebooks I wrote in as a teenager and I recognise the child that I was. Nostalgia holds very tightly onto objects of significance and is afraid to relinquish them.

The final line was always designed to be a twist, a shift from the concrete to the metaphysical and emotional. For me, a poem about emotions needs to be grounded in physical objects, a concrete image. It can also be done with clever similes or metaphors but I prefer physical descriptions (perhaps a weakness to strengthen – to think more poetically).

It’s about letting go, releasing yourself and being free of objects, memories or emotions that restrict your development. Would it help you to know it’s autobiographical?

There you have it. A poem and its deconstruction. If you disagree, have at it in the comments.

Thanks for reading.

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Creative Boundaries

Posted on June 15, 2015 | Leave a comment

A comment made on one of my recent posts made me consider how I consider the idea of boundaries.

The theme of boundaries has been pushing my creative buttons… I have been thinking about all kinds of boundaries and barriers from the physical to the psychological and emotional. Are they a challenge to be met and breached, or a restriction to prevent us from moving on?

How do people define boundaries? The common thinking is, I believe, that boundaries are restrictive and a construction to keep people held in certain behaviours or status. In the words of Talking Heads, “Don’t fence me in.” Hence the need to express freedom, to rebel, to become an individual. Which makes me think of Monty Python.

“You’re all individuals,” says Brian.

“Yes, we’re all individuals,” parrots the crowd.

“I’m not,” says one intelligent individual.

Or in the epitome of 1950s rebellious expression, “Rebel Without A Cause.”

“What are you rebelling against?”

“What have you got?” says James Dean.

In regards to boundaries I’ve never thought of them as an either/or proposition. For me they are both a restriction and as a challenge to be met.

Boundaries act as a restriction, a defining marker point. Think of the fence that delineates your property from the neighbour’s. Therefore boundaries in this sense serve as a means of knowing the limitations and confinements of who we are. They provide a definition, a discipline, providing a sense of safety and comfort.

Boundaries also act as a challenge to be met. Once we understand why the boundaries are put in place, and how we operate within them, can we transgress or expand them. We can push the limits, positively and negatively, to expand on our own sense of self.

The creative person needs both sets of boundaries.

Boundaries are the ways we learn, learning and knowing the rules, history and traditions of our chosen creative field. Only then can the boundaries be transgressed, challenged and extended. 

The boundaries imposed upon us (physical, psychological, emotional, mental, spiritual) and the boundaries we impose upon ourselves are the topic for another post.

Boundaries define who we are, what characteristics we want to keep as permanent territorial markers in our lives and ones we want to challenge and extend.

In the words or Inigo Montoya, “Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.”

1. Boundaries give us defined parameters when we first learn a creative art.

2. Those boundaries are a means of helping us learn and define our craft, to begin to excel at it, to find our voice.

3. When we are comfortable we can begin to push and extend the boundaries, comfortable in our sense of self and our art.

What are your thoughts? Are boundaries a help or a hindrance to your developing creativity?

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Absence – A Poem

Posted on June 6, 2015 | 2 comments

It’s been a week of rediscovering micropoetry, using the boundaries and confines of 140 characters on Twitter.

This poem was inspired by a comment from Australian author, James Bradley, on depression. His comment also inspired an idea for a short story I have written down and filed away for further development. Right now it’s on the compost heap, fed with scraps of thought until I see what sprouts.

Absence

Absence grows like a shadow
lengthening with the sun
and turns light to darkness
to fill the space
retreating at its turn
never disappearing

On reflection on the type of poetry I write, focused on the little things of the everyday, I resist the urge to use simile. Metaphor, or sustained metaphor, feels less jarring than the input of a simile. However for this one the imagery required the simile to set up the remainder of the poem and the final line. 

Looking at it now, I could replace the first line with a metaphor, “Absence is a shadow,” and I feel it works better, making the link to the imagery cleaner and less like a teacher demonstration. 

The other issue is the use of “its” (line 5) as it is unclear what is the subject of the preposition. I know “its” refers to the sun but that may be unclear to the reader and you want the imagery and lines to stand for itself, not require the reader to unpack the grammar to find out what is truly meant.

So, an edited version.

Absence is a shadow
lengthening with the sun
turns light to darkness
to fill the space
retreating at the turn
never disappearing

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Slogans for Poetry – A Poem

Posted on June 5, 2015 | 2 comments

This excerpt was the inspiration for another twitter poem. 

Tomorrowland, directed by Brad Bird, was a box office disappointment and has been poorly received by critics. It has a 49% on Rotten Tomatoes. A. O. Scott of the New York Times wrote that the film, “searching for incitements to dream, finds slogans and mistakes them for poetry.”
The full article is here on Buzzfeed.

our poetic voice
of heart’s passion
mind’s emotion
is reduced to
soundbite
slogan
sycophancy
slowing the heart
until the pulse
peters
out

To be honest, I’m not happy with the result because A. O. Scott says it so much better. There’s such poetry in his statement that my attempt to remix his words into something new seems feeble.

It’s a sentiment I like and one I will return to after it has composted in my head for a while longer.

What do you think of it? In the words of Count Rugen, “Remember, this is for posterity, so please, be honest.”

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The Death of Youth – A Poem

Posted on June 4, 2015 | 2 comments

The Death of Youth

This then,
is the death of youth:
the blunt pencil
the dried out pen
the paper, crumpled
and tossed into the bin
untouched

I love twitter as a forum for having conversations, speaking my mind on something and using it as a boundary when writing poetry. It is similar in scope to Post It Note Poetry where the size of the Post It Note defines the length of the poem.

Twitter’s limitation of 140 characters means brevity is the essence of the writing. Make a statement, make it clearly and let it go.

This poem was inspired by another poem I read on twitter and gave me the opening two lines. My mind was asking the question, “What signifies the end of youth?” It echoes a line from my favourite novel, “Maestro” by Peter Goldsworthy, where the narrator, Paul Crabbe says that the end of childhood is when one becomes aware of it.

As a creative person, it was the idea of the death of creativity that connected me with the death of youth. Thus the last image of the untouched piece of paper, unsullied by the first explorations of creativity, or that time in our life when we are told to put away “childish things” that signals the death of youth. 

We can have a child-like enthusiasm for creativity and not lose the spark, and develop a creative maturity so that we do not mourn the death of the thing we love.

 

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Practice Pages – Music To Die By

Posted on June 1, 2015 | Leave a comment

This Practice Page was inspired by a line in a text I was reading (I wish I wrote down what it was – it may have been an article I was reading online). The line that sparked the thought forms the title, Music to Die By.

Oh, it’s all flaws and problems but I like the idea of simply throwing words down on paper to explore an idea; try to excise the cliches and boring prose with something different. I find the same phrases or half-sentences popping up in my writing like dandelions, spreading their seed when I fart and sowing a new crop of half-arsed sentences.

Therefore, the practice pages are a good way to expunge tired expressions from my writing and find new images and constructions. And, yes, this is all just practice and in no way should be considered ‘art.’

Music To Die By

The funeral march, never heard by your own ears, is a cadence of steps bearing the weight of the coffin with you inside it. The missed step and misstep, Perhaps the last thing you heard was the shufflely slap of slippers in the hallway, the click of the bathroom light and stop/start splash of urination.

You have a set list of songs you’d like played at your funeral; even one or two put on there as an ‘up yours’ to certain family members. But if there was one song to play, that best encapsulated who you are, and who you were, what would it be? The sentiment of a song, meaningless to everyone else but you, and you can’t hear it.

While mulling it over, there are playbacks of other songs: the frenetic two-beat of punk, a stuttering motorcycle of attempted rebellion until the motor smooths out and rebellion is understood as a revolution of the mind, not the clothing.

Or the rushed climax of lovers as the radio plays some innocuous pop song in the background, a soundtrack gouged in wax and on each subsequent listen the memory replaces the physical engagement until the only thing left is chemical memory and the desire of what it represented.

This then, is the purest music: the silence between heartbeats until at last, the needle of the record lifts, pauses, returns to the carriage and with the final click, the revolutions cease.

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Practice Pages – The Disappearance of Noise

Posted on May 25, 2015 | 2 comments

As drills are to an athlete, or scales to a musician, practice paragraphs are to a writer.
Here’s a little sample of an idea I foraged from my notebook.
Feel free to remix it in the comments section.

The Disappearance of Noise

All of the clocks of my childhood are silenced into obscurity:

– the bedside alarm clocks in my grandparents’ bedroom, wound at the back

– the grandfather clock in the hall where time always seemed to move slower as I watched the pendulum arc back and forth, slicing the moment, shaving it second by second. The inscription, tempus fugit, the first Latin I learned, and didn’t understand the irony until I stood thirty years in the future.

– the clock on the mantle in Nanna and Grandpa’s house was more hurried, urgent, pacing the time to meet appointments, chiming the quarter hour in mimicry of Big Ben.

All of these sounds, the midnight soundtrack to treading the hallway carpet barefoot, its texture a fresh cut lawn, skipping to the cold tiles of the bathroom. And back again.

Now I lie awake and listen, in between the passing of cars at two o’clock in the morning, for the ticking of my watch. I know it’s battery operated, no longer the wind up mechanism of the watch of my youth. Finding it wound down to silence, bringing it back to life, then placing it to my ear to hear the cogs pushing and pulling.

It was the mechanical rhythm, a lullaby of space. The tut-tutting of disapproval for wasted time, the snap of Lego connecting and the skipping of Nan’s knitting needles.

The digital age has created silence.

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Creativity is a Team Sport

Posted on May 18, 2015 | 2 comments

I like when ideas about creativity surprise me from random sources; when an idea is sparked by an non-fiction article, paragraph of fiction, line of poetry, a photograph, an emotion ignited by the news or the delicious consumption of a six-pack of doughnuts.

Recently I was reading an article, “5 Practices We Need Back In Our Lives,” and one section on mutual encouragement stood out. Here is the relevant section (my emphases):

Mutual Encouragement

As a kid, I played a lot of sports. Although I enjoyed the competition, I mostly loved being on a team and working toward a larger purpose. In that context, every teammate becomes a cheerleader. There’s nothing quite like the energy created by mutual encouragement. It lifts spirits and helps everyone perform at their highest level.

Why, I wonder, does this type of encouragement fade as we grow older? Instead of cheerleaders, we become critics of one another. Perhaps it’s because we’re no longer on a team—at least that’s how we choose to see it. Instead, it’s us versus the world.

It’s time to begin encouraging those around us—family, friends, even co-workers. God calls us to “spur one another on toward love and good deeds” (Hebrews 10:24). Practicing this won’t merely lift others’ spirits and improve their performance, it will leave everyone feeling as though they’re on the same team, working toward a common purpose.

So often as creative people we think we are working in isolation (every man is an island when it comes to creative work), disconnected and removed from other creative people. This is especially true of the mythology of writers (of which I am one), that we spend our time locked away in a distant castle/apartment/coffee shop/ball pit at IKEA, removed from the smothering cloying atmosphere of people, suffering for our art.

What are we to do?

A past student of mine was a long distance marathon swimmer. He become the youngest male to swim the English Channel. While it was him in the water for many many hours, he spoke of the team around him who lifted his spirits when he was exhausted, dejected, and wanting to give up.

I feel there has been a shift in thinking and in culture regarding the isolated creator. We are moving towards a group consciousness and collectivisation in support of one another.

Whether this is groups that meet in real life or virtually in online groups and forums, the mutual encouragement gained shows that we are a team working towards a common goal and purpose.

Personally I’d like to see collectives grow organically, places where creatives of all pursuits and passions can meet to create, discuss, encourage, critique, edit, beta, inspire.

Imagine a salon of poets, writers, musicians, artists, dancers, sculptors, IT gamers, apps developers, philosophers, mathematicians, scientists, any type of creative person. A cultural think tank, brains trust, hot house, backyard barbecue  where we all bring a plate of food to share (a very Australian idiom) and get to enjoy each others’ company, ideas and encouragement (sorry to mix metaphors).

At its most basic, creativity is a team sport. We might work in isolation but our success depends on our community and relationships.

Here’s my game plan:

  • Join a team.
  • Create community.
  • Foster relationships.
  • Encourage and equip others.

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The Selfie and Art

Posted on April 20, 2015 | 9 comments
The Selfie Generation and The Misunderstanding of Art
 
While away on holidays the thought of the ubiquitious selfie struck me as an indicative misunderstanding of the way art functions in society.  Without giving it too much thought I put the random thoughts to twitter.Screen Shot 2015-04-16 at 9.37.14 pm

Screen Shot 2015-04-16 at 9.37.25 pm 
There has been commentary on the narcissism of the selfie, and the selfie generation. Self portraits are nothing new in terms of the history of art but the selfie has predominated in a digital age and the shift in societal thinking. It is nothing more than self-aggrandisement.
The selfie misses the vital point of art and its function in society as a whole and the community on a smaller level, leading to this statement:
 
Screen Shot 2015-04-16 at 9.37.35 pm
 
Ultimately I don’t care about the photos of yourself, or of your food, or your beverage, or any other piece of ennui you care to photograph and post on social media. What I do care about is the image you have carefully and thoughtfully constructed in order to tell a story.
It can be a photograph, a drawing, a doodle, a sketch, done with crayons, pencils, textas, salt and pepper, the spilt milk on the table and played with to create a pattern. 
The fact is, the art is deliberate and has a purpose. The fact a company can sell a book of Kim Kardashian selfies says a lot about the disposable artistic culture we live in. We have monetised narcissism which diminishes the value of art as a whole and what people are willing to pay to contribute to a vibrant arts culture. The same thing can be said for reality tv celebrities and their ‘biography.’ It cheapens the literary culture and pushes publishing to look for the next quick cash cow they can milk then slaughter. 
If we want art to have longevity it must have purpose, definition and an audience. A selfie has none of them.
Screen Shot 2015-04-16 at 9.37.44 pm
There is a place for art for the individual and the self. But it is not art to be shared publicly. It can be shared with a few select people but not for the whole community. I don’t show the scraps of sentences found littered in my notebook or my practice pieces to the readers of my blog (unless I am using it to illustrate a point). This is the art for myself. Only when the piece is completed, edited, refined will I show it to my audience. I know what is done for myself and what is done for my audience. 
By all means, take selfies and share them with your audience. Just don’t cal it art.
Screen Shot 2015-04-16 at 9.37.58 pm

 Feel free to disagree with me in the comments; I would like your feedback on this.

What’s your opinion on the selfie as ‘art’? 

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Moving Forward When You’re Stuck Looking Behind You

Posted on March 24, 2015 | 4 comments

How do you move forward creatively when you feel like you’re stuck looking back?

In the last couple of weeks I have been re-reading the collaborative epistolary novel, Post Marked: Piper’s Reach, I wrote with Jodi Cleghorn between January 2012 and April 2013. 

The novel has been thoroughly edited and we are now at the place of writing the synopsis. Late last year we began the process but due to a range of metaphysical circumstances it had been put on hold. 

For me, because I cannot speak on behalf of Jodi, the latter half of last year burned me out creatively. The pressure of my job (high school English teacher) and other external pressures saw me roll into January hoping for a recovery. But it never happened.

Putting this out there and waving it around with abandon: Writing a synopsis sucks.

It’s the Pit Of Despair from The Princess Bride coupled with the Pit of the Almighty Sarlac from Star Wars topped off by The Buzz Cut from Wayne’s World (Boy, it really does suck). As we wrote it, we felt the summary sucking the life away from the narrative we had created.

On top of the synopsis situation, other projects lay scattered like discarded underpants and it was killing me that they were unfinished. My sense of self in regard to my creativity and writing had disintegrated. I doubted my writing skills and wondered if it was worth continuing. Doubt is insidious, and lethal, to a creative life. 

But I am not one to go quietly into the night for a bag of doughnuts and never return. I used February and Post It Note Poetry to begin the rebuilding process. I gave myself permission to put projects on hold, think them through again.

Now that it is March, I returned to the first project on the list: the Post Marked: Piper’s Reach synopsis. I opened up the final document and began reading, familiarising myself with the story again. It was nice to come at it again with new and fresh eyes, delving into other aspects of the characters again and their development, marking up plot points and knowing I’ll probably cry at the end. Again. (And, yes, I did cry).

While doing this I went back to other pieces written in the Piper’s Reach world. The stories precede the events of the novel in that they are about the lives of Jude and Ella-Louise in their youth and in their adult life. They were done as an indulgent exploration of our characters from different perspectives (letters have a very limited frame of reference when writing).

The first is the Christmas Special Jodi and I wrote at the end of 2012. It recounts the events of the Surf Club Christmas party (mentioned in the novel) when Jude and Ella-Louise were in Year 11 (their second last year of high school). It introduces the main characters from a different perspective as each character had the opportunity to speak in their own voice, not limited to the first person recounting of Jude or Ella-Louise. You can read the Christmas Special here.

The second story is from Jodi. “What I Left To Forget” tells the story of Charlotte MacKay and Jake de Britto and is told from the 3rd person, a departure from the narrow focus of a personal letter.

I wrote a companion piece to it, which precedes it chronologically, but was written after a comment I left on Jodi’s blog where I riffed an idea. Jodi dared me to write a romance from the perspective of Jake. The resultant piece was The Photographer’s Concerto.

Any of the pieces can be read without knowledge of Piper’s Reach, and you can read the first letter from Ella-Louise here.

How did this help me move forward? 

Up until the reread, I doubted I could write well again. I hated what scrawl occupied my notebooks. Even when writing Post It Note poetry I felt hesitant and uncertain.

By going back into the past, I could see the progression of my writing skills. What I wrote 3 years ago is still good. Sometimes I wonder if it was really me who wrote the passage. It has been an encouragement to see that I can write. I am proud of those stories, the world that was created. Yes, it’s hard work, but rewarding when you see readers gain a connection. That was one of the most rewarding aspects of writing “Piper’s Reach” and releasing a letter a week to our small, but faithful, following who shared their love of the series and the characters.

Taking pause to reflect has allowed me to refocus my creativity and move forward.

If you’re stuck, unsure of the direction, pause, reflect, give yourself permission to stop for a time and look back as a way of seeing progression. It may help you move forward. 

Are you stuck? Feeling like momentum has stopped? Would looking back work for you to help you move forward?

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