A small harvest

During lockdown, we had a go at growing various fruit and veg. Strawberry plants came from our local budget supermarket. Peas, carrots, lettuce, rocket, spinach and courgette seeds were posted to the children from their grandparents in Devon. Some potatoes that had grown eyes at the bottom of the bag got planted out. Apple and lemon pips were planted and there is now a miniature orchard in the garden and a porch filled with lemon 'trees'.

In due time, we reaped our harvest: a handful of peas, nine tiny carrots, fifteen mini potatoes, and one knobbly strawberry salvaged from the family of woodlice that got the rest of the crop. The courgette plant got infested with flea beetles (although it did yield a solitary marrow, after we'd abandoned it to its fate). The lettuce, rocket and spinach grew well, but were situated under a tree branch that served as a long-drop toilet for our local pigeon colony.

It was the first harvest for our children, and although it was small, it was a real joy in an otherwise fairly bleak season.

Which makes it a convenient analogy for my writing....

Over the summer, I was very grateful to have been selected for the MumWrite development course (see my post about it here). As a result, I got some new writing done and started submitting work again. This month, I have a crop of publications to share with the world. Like the children's harvest, it is small, but it is an encouragement for me to keep going, and hopefully it will also bring a bit of joy to anyone who comes across the poems. Here are some links:

My poem 'dream' is in issue #3 of -algia.

Two poems, 'Selfharm/Selfcare' and 'Twitter-light' on the Selcouth Station website.

My poem 'Headspace [no vacancies]' is in issue #69 of streetcake magazine.

I also have another poem 'The truth about sea glass' posted on the Places of Poetry map (a sea-quel, if you will, to the poem about Seaham, 'Sea Glass', that I posted there last year).

While all these small fruits have been emerging, we have been cocooned back in isolation as cases of covid have cropped up at school, so there hasn't been much writing going on (by me, at least - the 5 year old has written a lot of painstakingly slow sentences about seasons). Hopefully there will be more time for writing and submitting again soon!

 

The award goes to...

Recently, I attended an online workshop on Resilience for writers. Part of the process of submitting writing for publication is rejection. So far this year, I have received 23 rejections and 5 acceptances. Learning to deal with rejection, and retaining a sense of confidence in your abilities, is one of the most important skills that a writer can learn. 

One of the activities we did for the Resilience workshop was to write an acceptance speech, imagining that we were receiving an award for things we have achieved so far in life. This was hard for most of us, with the ever-present spectre of Imposter Syndrome lurking amongst the gallery of our pixelated faces. Some of us wrote with a mixture of self-deprecation and sarcastic humour. Most of us weren't brave enough to read out what we'd written (myself included). I wonder if this would have been the same in a mixed group - ours was all women, all mums.

In the confidence-building spirit of the workshop, I'm sharing the acceptance speech that I wrote here (and I would strongly recommend this exercise to anyone else!):

Thank you so much for this prize, but what is it for? What have I done that is so great? What are my achievements, what could fill the rapidly expanding white space on my CV?

Ok, well, I have given birth. Twice. I know nobody usually gets a prize for that, but really, everyone should. It's not called labour for nothing. It's unbelievable, really, that we don't talk about it all the time. The truly heroic, superhuman act that our bodies performed. The emotions. The hormones. The pain. Why do we ever shut up about it? How often do we thank our own mothers for going through all that for us? But no, don't worry, I won't go all Sharon Olds on you, I won't embarrass my pre-motherhood squeamish self with details of tearing body parts, projectile bodily fluids...

What else? I have potty-trained two children. (Sorry, it got back to bodily fluids pretty quickly there...) That achievement marks the membership of a select club. 'Potty-training' sounds fairly innocuous - easy even - to the uninitiated. Those who've been there know the truth. The same applies to many newly discovered parenting terms: 'cluster-feed', 'baby blues', 'threenager'.

What else in my life counts as an achievement? A PhD, I suppose. Although it still feels like an indulgence at best (a failure at worst). But I completed it. I earned the title, and I may yet come to be known by it again.

My current life is one of small victories. I got the fence painted. I mowed the lawn. I dried two loads on the washing line despite the plummeting temperatures outside. I tried a new food with the allergy child, and he was ok. I was ok. I got the school uniforms ready for the start of term. I read this week that my work as a mother and home organiser is to carry the mental load for the family. I know where everyone's socks and warm jumpers are kept, and how much chocolate spread is left in the jar. I know the different settings on the washing machine, when to order the repeat prescriptions, who had the blue cup, what time the post arrives. I can carry this load and cope with its demands. And coping is not just surviving, it's winning.

And I write. And other people read it and are touched by what I write. I can produce something unique, necessary. I can connect with someone across the ocean. I can communicate. I must be a writer - I've had more rejections than acceptances. That's the ticket to joining the writing community, isn't it? But I have had those few precious pieces accepted. I am quietly proud of them, but still feel weird sharing them. Especially outside my little community of writers. It will be even stranger when those pieces about people I know get published, and read by the people they're about. How will my kids feel seeing themselves in print? What about my parents?

One grounding factor is that my five year old's writing career is accelerating faster than my own. Every time I tweet something he's said about writing, I get more likes and follows than for any of my own witticisms. He also has more notebooks on the go than me, more stories written and shared with the family. I seem to have birthed a writer, a little well of creativity and ideas. And that's also a pretty great achievement.

ToddlerChef, the remix

Nearly a year ago, I posted a poem called Toddlerchef on this blog. I had sent it off to a food-themed competition and got nowhere with it. I posted it assuming that it was not going to be publishable anywhere else.

But...

It has been accepted, with a few revisions, by Lighten Up Online, and you can read it here.

This also gives me a chance to recommend Lighten Up Online as a great place to find entertaining light verse, which is much harder to do well than you might imagine.

Community

For a long time, probably ever since I finished my MA 12 years ago, I have been longing to be part of a creative writing community. It is pretty hard to write in isolation. It's also pretty hard for someone with increasing social anxiety, long emerged from the student-bubble, now firmly ensconced in a stay-at-home-mum-bubble, to pluck up to courage to venture out to meet groups of strangers, especially ones who might ask you to read out the poem you've just made up.

A few years ago, I joined Twitter. The impulse was not, admittedly, a literary one - I wanted to get a refund from a rather large company. Twitter worked in that instance. In the time since, it has presented me with quite a few good writing tips and contacts. Helpful as this has been, I have still not felt 'part' of a writing community.

Now in lockdown, much of life seems to have moved online. There have been online literary festivals, online writing retreats, online book launches... Still, I did not feel able to access much of this. As many of us have now discovered, attending an event on Zoom can create anxiety for even the most extrovert person. So, I was stuck: desperately desiring community, yet not sure how I'd ever find it, especially while locked down.

Two things have happened, for which I am extremely grateful. And for which I should also credit Twitter, without which I wouldn't have heard of them.

The first. Michael Loveday, a writer and writing mentor, picked up on the fact that many writers seemed to be finding it hard to get any writing done amidst the global pandemic. He set up a free online course “Unlocked in Lockdown: Slouch to 5k (for writers)”. For the first couple of hundred people to respond, there was a chance to join a Facebook group. Suddenly, I found myself on a writing course, and in a virtual community, where I am taken seriously as a writer (alongside other people I recognise from Twitter as 'proper' writers). I'm halfway through the course, and I've begun my first piece of creative nonfiction writing, which is about my Great-Gran's experience of raising young children during the German Occupation of Guernsey during WW2. I'll blog about this soon.

The second. I saw a tweet about a free online course called MumWrite, and thought I'd register my interest. I was asked to complete an application, and I realised that this was quite a serious undertaking. The last few things I've applied for, or submitted to, have not lead anywhere, so I was trying to prepare myself for a polite 'no'... but thankfully I was selected. It's a development course funded by Arts Council England, for mums who 'write experimental short fiction or poetry, or would like to write more experimentally'. I'm firmly in the second group currently, but in a couple of months will have moved into the first. And, there will be publication opportunities...

So, unlikely as it sounds, one of the things lockdown has brought me is community.

First Fruits

My last post was back in January. That afternoon, as well as blogging about not giving up, I also submitted some poems to a couple of online publications. The very next day, I was astonished to see that one of the editors I'd emailed had already replied, and had offered to publish two of the five poems I'd sent. This was hugely encouraging, and statistically unlikely (I've only had one other thing accepted - with suggestions for improvement - since then).

I didn't share the news right away as there was going to be a bit of a wait before the poems appeared online, one in March and one in April. I planned to write accompanying blog posts for each poem when it was published, and was excited to be able to include links to my 'real' poems for the first time.

By the time we were into March, however, the coronavirus pandemic, and the accompanying anxiety surrounding it, made it a bit hard to concentrate on writing. I kept putting off writing the post about the first poem 'The thin silence', and within a fortnight our family went into self-isolation, three days before the whole country entered lockdown. A month later, when 'Cope' made an appearance, I had not only lost the motivation to write, but also the time and opportunity, having now become a homeschooler, as well as losing the writing desk and laptop to the working-from-home husband.

Anyway. Better late than never. You can read the two poems here:

The thin silence

Cope

'The thin silence' is based on a 2019 sermon by David Campbell of the same title, which was about depression, and the experience of the dejected prophet Elijah hearing the still, small voice of God (1 Kings 19:12). This sermon resonated with my mental and emotional state at the time, and my response was the poem.

'Cope' was written about a year earlier, and is also to do with mental health (as the title might suggest). It came out of my strong dislike for the word 'cope'. I've always felt like it was a silly, weak word, especially when used to talk about people who are struggling. 'She's not coping very well', or worse, 'I can't cope', sound like a completely underwhelming way to describe an overwhelmed state of mind. One day I decided to look up the etymology of 'cope', and I was surprised at the depth of meaning that can actually be found in the word. At the end of writing this poem, I had managed to encourage myself that a) I can cope, and b) this is more of an achievement than I had previously thought.

As I write, we are still in lockdown, writing is still a challenge, but I am trying to make it a priority again.

On not giving up

 A friend asked recently how writing is going. The answer is, not well. Although I am gaining more space and freedom in which to write, I rarely get started, and when I do, I hate what I've written. I don't like to read the raw emotion that spills onto the page, yet it feels hypocritical to write with humour, optimism or hope that I don't currently feel.

A few things have prompted me not to give up, however. Last week I saw in my garden a small plant growing in a pot; it was a pot I'd left outside to be re-used, thinking that the seed I'd planted there had died. Yet it grew, without my help, and is beginning to bud. This reminded me of an attempt I'd made at writing a poem about planting this seed. The poem is a re-write of some verses from Habakkuk in the Old Testament, which I have always been drawn to for its bleak, understated sense of optimism. The same day last week, I heard someone read out the same passage from the Bible in a completely unrelated context. And in the last few days, kindness from my family has encouraged me not to give up. So, this post is on not giving up with writing, and it is my attempt at continuing.

(Proof that there is still a bit of hope in me about my writing is that I have a few things that I think might be eventually publishable, which means I can't share them here... however, this is not one of them: due to its lack of actual poetic merit, here's the Habakkuk 'poem'.)

Habakkuk

Though the fig tree should not blossom,

nor fruit be on the vines,

the produce of the olive fail

and the fields yield no food,

the flock be cut off from the fold

and there be no herd in the stalls,

yet…

yet I planted a seed, left it quiet

on a high shelf near the front door,

I try to remember to water it,

check it during my comings and goings,

before I’m called away again.

It has surely been too long now

to expect anything to come of it,

it must have rotted away,

become one with the soil it sat in.

My heart is a well of grief

for the fruit that never came,

and yet…

yet my feet go on trudging,

stumbling on this mountain side.

Remembrance Day

This morning my four year old told me what they'd learned at school about Remembrance Day. I tried to write down word-for-word what he said. My own feelings about Remembrance are hard to express, so I'll offer his words without further comment.

Remembrance Day

Mummy,
there was a rabbit
chasing a butterfly
on the screen at school.
But then there was a
BANG!
BANG!
BANG!
BANG!
And all the loveliness
cracked into pieces,
and that was the day
that I made my toy robot
at wet playtime and now
he's worried at night time
that there will be a war.
But then the screen cracked
into tiny little pieces
and there was a big red poppy
and it was really strong
and it means that there won't be
another naughty war in the world,
Mummy.