2010 July | Sleep is for the Weak

Writing Workshop: Sisterhood

Posted by Josie on Jul 29, 2010 in Creative Writing, Writing, Writing Workshop | 27 comments

Welcome back to your Writing Workshop.

At the bottom of this post you’ll find the widget to link up your posts. It’s open till Sunday so don’t worry if you haven’t had chance to join in just yet – there’s lots more time.

I’ve chosen prompt number one – write a post celebrating sisterhood.

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For my beautiful sister in the dollhouse.

I wonder what you see,
when you look at us?
Two women drowning in a sea of coffee cups and chaos.
Our earnest conversation punctuated with
exasperated sighs and shouts,
crisps and crumbs in aromatic air and hair.

I wonder if you listen to our whispered woes
and see the looks that pass between our tired eyes.
Our hands may well be wiping mouths and soothing brows,
but if you watch you may well see
their briefest squeeze
and something unsaid hang there in the space between.

I wonder if you squint and tilt your head a bit you’ll see
our twenty shared years fall like crayons to the floor
to leave two pale, determined, smiling girls,
still too thin and loud and free of mind,
our arms wrapped tight around each other’s fragile hearts.
Not letting go.

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So now it’s your turn. What prompt did you choose?

1. Write a post celebrating sisterhood: a friend, a blood-sister, or someone that feels like one.
- Inspired by English Mum’s beautiful post on love, sisterhood and friendship. Go read and take up her pledge.

2. “Why I want a ………..” – fill in the blank!
- Inspired by Two Become Four who was lusting after a new iPhone last week.

3. All’s well that ends well. Tell us about a difficult journey that ended with a positive resolution..
- Inspired by Little Mummy Erica’s moving story of her relationship with her Dad.

4. Tell me your worst habit(s).
- Inspired by Keep Calm and Eat Cake who’s been trying to break some of hers this week.

And finally, the last prompt is just one word. This should allow you a bit more creative freedom if you feel like taking the safety harness that particular week.

5. Found
- Inspired by Deer Baby’s post Finders Keepers

Leave your name and the URL to your post in the MckLinky below (the URL should be to your post not just to your blog) and leave me a comment to let me know you’ve taken part. If you have the time it would be great if you could try and read and comment on at least two other entries. And be kind! It’s supposed to be a bit of fun – we’re not looking for the next Booker Prize winner here.

If you haven’t had chance to respond yet, then you’ve still got till Sunday to enter your link! Or just wait till next week, when there’ll be five brand new prompts to get you thinking.

This Writing Workshop is brought to you in association with Mama Kat’s Losin’ It – who’s lovely author came up with the concept and runs her own workshop over in the U.S.

Dusk

Posted by Josie on Jul 28, 2010 in Photography | 34 comments

It’s been an odd couple of weeks. Such a relentless ride of highs and lows.

It’s tough when your main form of personal expression, of release, is so public because it means that inevitably, when things happen in your life you can’t talk about you end up feeling stifled.

I have a lot going on just now. Some of it is intensely positive, exciting, inspiring, yes. But some of it not so, quite the opposite in fact. And I’m not really in a position to be able to talk about either one, not yet anyway.

It’s hard catapulting between these two worlds. Simultaneously flying and being pushed to the ground with the weight of so much stress. I feel quite dizzy with it. It is taking all my energy to keep upright and as such I feel a little dis-attached just now. Suspended between two extremes, barely moving in either direction. Limbo. Waiting for something to change but I don’t really know what. It’s a strange feeling.

After an intensely creative and productive month my work has all but dried up. I’m struggling to concentrate, struggling to ENGAGE. My words don’t flow, my fingers and my eyes don’t cooperative, my brain feels leaden and heavy. That vein of creative, pulsing energy is shut up tight to me. I know that this is normal, that natural lulls are part of the process but I find it so frustrating. It is against my nature to be still, to be made to stop. I fight it with all my might. It seems like all I can do just now is get through the day and juggle its demands and that has never been enough for me. I thrive on more, more, MORE. Making do is not very me.

Last night I went for a walk with my camera. Wanting to get out, to spend time in nature and take pictures is usually a good first sign that I’m moving back into a period of productivity and creative expression again so I was glad of that. I’m not a religious person, as you know, but my local cemetery is one of my favourite places to be. There is something about the centuries of meaning and the quiet peace of so many dead people that I love.

I watched the sun set and the light fade.

And I felt hope and I felt peace. I felt right.

Somewhere deep in my bones and my blood, I feel like the wheel is turning. Slowly picking up speed again.The feeling of being so STUCK will not last because nothing is more certain than the fact that everything changes. Everything IS changing. And I need to be ready

Maybe I need to embrace the dusk, in all its beauty and darkness. Because it’s a point of stillness before a new day and it holds with it all the promise of a new dawn.

Maybe atrophy and retreat and disengagement are ok just now because I know soon I will be thrown back into that current again. The one that makes me feel alive. And I will need all my energy and all my reserves because it looks like it’s going to be one hell of a ride.

This post was written for week 21 of Tara’s Gallery.

The theme this week was ‘Nature’.

Writing Workshop #32 – Sisterhood, bad habits and all’s well that ends well.

Posted by Josie on Jul 26, 2010 in Writing, Writing Prompts | 2 comments

Welcome back to your weekly Writing Workshop! (VERY late up today – hectic day!)

For any newbies (and it’s never to late to join in), here’s how it works: I’m going to give you 5 writing/blogging prompts. Pick one, pick two, or do them all if you’re really keen – it’s up to you. How you respond is your choice. You could share a real-life story, or make one up. You could write a poem or just free-write without thinking too hard and see what happens. It can be funny; it can be serious; it can be emotional. It can be whatever you want it to be. The only rule is to enjoy writing your post and get something out of the process.

Prompts each week take their inspiration from blogs, current affairs, daily life, or just whatever everyone happened to be talking about that week. If you’d like to suggest a prompt for a future workshop then send me an email or catch me on Twitter – I would love to hear your ideas.

And remember! We’re not looking for perfection here! Just have a go! The best way to get better at writing is PRACTISE. All the best writers aren’t afraid to write badly. So turn your inner-critic off for a while and just see what words come out.

Here’s this week’s prompts!

2. “Why I want a ………..” – fill in the blank!
- Inspired by Two Become Four who was lusting after a new iPhone last week.

3. All’s well that ends well. Tell us about a difficult journey that ended with a positive resolution..
- Inspired by Little Mummy Erica’s moving story of her relationship with her Dad.

4. Tell me your worst habit(s).
- Inspired by Keep Calm and Eat Cake who’s been trying to break some of hers this week.

And finally, the last prompt is just one word. This should allow you a bit more creative freedom if you feel like taking the safety harness that particular week.

5. Found
- Inspired by Deer Baby’s post Finders Keepers

Now here’s what you have to do. Write your post and publish it on your blog between now and THURSDAY. On Thursday come back and use the widget that will be up to paste in the URL of your post to share. Then take some time to read some of the other entries and leave some comment love! We’re not here to critique – just to have fun and support each other in our writing experiments. So be kind please. Anyone who would like to submit something via email, or even anonymously will be more than welcome to do so. I’ll post them on the site here and include the link in Thursday’s round-up.

Feel free to use the Workshop badge on your blog or as part of your post if you like. Code is here:

Note: I’m told Blogger does something a bit funny with the code so you’ll need to copy and paste it and then retype the quotation marks (“) as Blogger changes them for some reason.

See you Thursday then!

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This Writing Workshop is brought to you in association with Mama Kat’s Losin’ It – who’s lovely author came up with the concept and runs her own worksho

Writing Workshop: Remembering

Posted by Josie on Jul 22, 2010 in Writing, Writing Workshop | 16 comments

Welcome back to your Writing Workshop.

At the bottom of this post you’ll find the widget to link up your posts. I hope you found a good prompt to work with and are pleased with what your writing conjured up for you this week. I always think writing is a little like magic, it’s no wonder it was controlled by the priests and holy people of the world for so long. Anyway.

I’ve chosen prompt number four – memories of my childhood.

Now, I’m cheating a little bit as this is actually a post I wrote last September, just before I started the Writing Workshop. It was one of the first creative pieces I shared on here, so I thought I’d reproduce for you today. Reading it back it still encapsulates so many memories for me. Writing it was very, very powerful, transporting me right back…

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I am 6 or 7. Sitting on the top step of the stairs in the dark when I should be in bed asleep. Listening to the murmer of my parents conversations, the hum of the television, the sounds from the kitchen as they boil the kettle or tidy up. Sounds of home, of safety and familiarity. I inch down, silently, one step at a time, wanting to get closer to that feeling.

I am 16. I am lying in bed listening to the rain hammer on the flat roof of my bedroom. I’ve decided I want to be an interior designer and mum and dad have given me free reign to decorate my room however I like. I often dream of a beach-hut hideaway so have crafted my room to make me feel like I’m by the sea. Holiday beach scavenges gift driftwood shelves, twisted sea-smoothed branches and endless stones and shells with which I fill my space. I’ve painted my favourite quotes from books and poems that I love straight onto the walls in meticulous, curving script. Tea lights twinkle – I must remember to blow them out before I fall asleep. I lie under the sail canapy I have hung over my bed, drifting on a sea of dreams. The world feels huge and full of possibility.

I am 9 or 10. The passageway down the side of the house is my own secret hideaway. In the hollowed out centre of the big shrubs that grow against the fence I have made my den. I can smell the damp earth, the peeling paint on the fence panels, and feel the rough prickle of the branches as I push my way through. There is a tin there, hidden under the foliage, full of secret things. In it is a piece of paper with the name of the boy I like at school. I haven’t told a soul, not even my best friend. I hope my brother hasn’t found it.

Christmas morning. Endless Christmas mornings. The rule is not to wake mum and dad before 7am. It is early but I am awake. I stick out a probing foot to prod the sack of presents at the foot of my bed and get that familiar rush of excitement and anticipation. There’s no way I’m going back to sleep now. I sneak into my brother’s room with my duvet wrapped around me and there he waits, equally awake and wide-eyed. We put our sacks of presents by the door and try not to look at them, filling the time till the promised hour playing games and talking in urgent whispers, muffling our giggles through our fingers.

Long summers in the garden. The paddling pool and water-fights with empty washing up bottles. Being given my own little patch of earth to plant seeds and forget-me-nots in. The heat of the greenhouse and the smell of the not-quite-ripe tomatoes and the compost heap. Swirling my fingers in the jelly soup of the frogspawn and watching the tadpoles in the pond grow legs and loose their tails. A plant by the Buddleia which was always, unexpectedly, covered in ladybirds. Writing in chalk on the patio slabs. Worrying that the initials marked in the cement by the previous owners meant that one of them was buried there. My shrine under the apple tree to Tabby, my cat, with the stone I had painted with her name on and jam-jars full of faded flowers and green water.

I am 19. It is September 11th 2001. I have come home from college and fallen asleep in a haze of fatigue. My Fibromyalgia is beginning to worsen although I don’t know this yet or what is wrong with me, only that I am tired and I hurt. My brother wakes me. Something has happened he says. We sit together and watch the TV in silence, shock and horror. I can’t believe what I am seeing. I cry but I can’t look away. Ant comes over after work and the three of sit and watch the same clips repeated over and over. Time stops. Pain and fatigue is forgotten. All I can feel is their pain, their loss. I do not sleep that night.

I am 7. We are sat eating tea. My brother will not eat his food. He is chewing the same mouthful of meat over and over until it is grey, tasteless ball that he cannot swallow. Mum is cross, “Just swallow it!” she says in her best pretend ’I’m not cross’ voice. But she is cross, and we both know it. She tries to get David take sips of water but still he will not swallow his food. He cries and has to spit it out. We have been here many, many times before. I kick my legs under the chair and feel smug that I am not the one being told off. We finish at last andI recite by rote “Thank-you-mummy-for-my-dinner-please-may-I-get-down” in one long drawn-out breath.

It is raining and the water is dripping through the bay window. We spring to action with tea-towels and margarine tubs to catch the drips. Christmas Cacti adorn the window sill. I have an overwhelming urge to twist off the tops, and draw smiley faces in the square panes of the window. Both are expressively forbidden. But thinking about it makes my fingers twitch.

We have been playing out in the snow and have come inside damp and rosy cheeked and smiling. I sit in front of the fire to thaw out. I can’t feel my finger tips and my ears buzz with cold. I rest the edges of my double-socked feet on the marble surround. Getting as close as I can without burning. A black and white ceramic cat shares the fireplace with me. When it’s my turn to dust I am extra careful with it, scared I will break it and get in trouble. It has yellow, glass eyes.

It is Sunday afternoon and I sit and doze on the sofa. Dad has the cricket on and the soft lull of the commentary makes me sleepy. I am full of dinner and memories of Sunday school.

I am 19. The contents of my room are packed into boxes and are being put in the removal van, ready to be unpacked in my new room at my mum’s partner’s huge and beautiful house. I sit and say goodbye. Dad hasn’t lived here for two years and somehow that makes it easier. This house isn’t home anymore – I am ready to say goodbye. But still the tears come as a thousand memories tumble forward.

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So now it’s your turn. What prompt did you choose?

1. Disaster! Tell us when a a best laid plan went spectacularly wrong…
- Inspired by my lovely friend Rachael over at Tales from the Village and her cake wrecks.

2. “I have a ……….. and I’m not afraid to use it”. Fill in the blank!
- Inspired by Tara over at Sticky Finger’s latest post about cooking with children.

3. What last made you cry?
- Inspired by Annie over at Incessant Ramblings’ emotional experience at her daughter’s school last week.

4. Share a powerful memory, or memories, from your childhood. Close your eyes and try to conjure it up as vividly as you can and share it descriptively with us. If it’s a painful memory, let the remembering be a healing release for you.
- Inspired by Slummy Single Mummy who has been using writing exercises to remember.

And finally, the last prompt is just one word. This should allow you a bit more creative freedom if you feel like taking the safety harness that particular week.

5. Storm
- Inspired by Sandrine’s haunting workshop post last week… Twilight Zone

If you haven’t had chance to respond yet, then you’ve still got till Sunday to enter your link! Or just wait till next week, when there’ll be five brand new prompts to get you thinking.

This Writing Workshop is brought to you in association with Mama Kat’s Losin’ It – who’s lovely author came up with the concept and runs her own workshop over in the U.S.