TToT: Yearnings of the Heart and Soul – Seriously? #10Thankful

Red or blue? Coke or Pepsi? Apple or Android?

What a week. Ruined colours for me forever.

Okay, not really, but my examples do showcase our differences and what separates us, the teams we often feel we’re on and the people we most closely identify with, as opposed to those other people. I wanted to cry all week, but couldn’t quite get the tears to come. So I play this song.

By now, we all know who the next guy in charge of the US is going to be, and he’s eating that worldwide attention up like we all knew he would. Then Leonard Cohen died. People say these things are final and we must get over it, well that first one, and so I can’t simply listen to a song like Don’t Worry, Be Happy and accept the way things in the world seem to be going. I am afraid of that and I’m afraid I can’t.

Saturday Night Live found the best way to help out the grieving Americans and to pay tribute to a favourite poet/artist at the same time.

Then there is this song which comes from the “This American Life” series:

Seriously?

I was afraid of where this election was leading and this song is the perfect mixture of intense jazz, sad realism, lyrics that make me want to cry and cry out because I don’t know what has gotten into the US and not just them. I am critical but I know that if it were happening here in Canada, I wouldn’t want to be forgotten and forsaken. I would want help in understanding and whatever else and these things tend to spread eventually anyway and already seem to be doing just that. My knowledge of history has me rooted in fear and apprehension, but thankful to be Canadian at this time. I feel powerless amongst my existing and somewhat even more clearly defined thankfuls.

I’m thankful for the chance to express my thoughts and distract myself with a task during the night of the US election.

We thought we would do a before/after, from our Canadian perspective. Our hope was to focus on a lot of tough issues discussed and a few laughs thrown in there from time to time also, to try and lighten the mood a little wherever possible, but I haven’t been laughing for a while, not about this stuff.

It didn’t look good to me, not from the start, and in that case I did not relish being right with my instincts. We recorded a bit during the night, as the results came in and again the next day, once the results had time to sink in somewhat.

Bad dream or a sign that the end is near? Yes, either way, I had a sound effect for the occasion. If you aren’t sick of hearing about it in a few weeks, our podcast and the third episode should be available on iTunes. After all, we wouldn’t want to forget this event would we? Well, now we have it recorded forever.

I’m thankful the election is over.

I did feel relieved. It was painful and surreal. Now those long months are behind us and the nightmare of the next four years is just beginning.

I’m thankful for The Paris Climate Agreement, a step in the right direction.

So many countries have gone together on this. Who knows what will happen going forward, but I am proud Canada is represented and hopefully doing our part.

And then there’s the setting aside of ocean reserves, with the three oceans Canada exists within and the work President Obama has done. Oil spills, like the one on Canada’s west coast recently, these can do a lot of damage, and hopefully Prime Minister Justin Trudeau understands this. I am proud to be flanked by the three, Pacific, Arctic, and Atlantic.

Whether it’s the ocean in the northern hemisphere or the opposite pole, down at the bottom of the world, I hope we realize how valuable it all is.

I’m thankful that my family reads my blog as much as they can.

And they put up with me and some of the things I say here.

They never quite know what to expect I’m sure and, truthfully, neither do I most times when I sit down to write.

They are incredibly supportive and I can say the things I want to say, though I hope I never hurt any of them too much in the process. I am lucky to be able to speak my mind, as I do appreciate at this time of year.

I’m thankful that I discover new and different music through the music expert in my life.

My brother is the music guy and he has so so many internet radio stations and is always playing something new and different to my ear. This one was just the kind of fast tempo I needed to perk up my spirits. I hadn’t heard anything quite like it.

I’m thankful for strong women who are fighting for women and minorities, even as I feel the bleakness of powerful forces out there.

What Hillary Clinton’s Fans Love About Her

So many wanted to see a female president and a secret Facebook group for her popped up and certainly left a mark.

Then there are wonderful women like this one.

She is a strong woman too and she is leaving her own mark, on me certainly.

I’m thankful for those who fought, though I do find it difficult to wrestle with my conflicted feelings on war and everything that goes along with it.

Leonard Cohen recites “In Flanders Fields'”

Instead of sharing one of his songs, I thought this might be better.

It’s one of my favourite poems, though the subject matter is one I struggle to understand.

I’m thankful for beautiful TToT bloggers and their messages of hope and peace.

Bluebell Sounds,
which sound divine.

Just Remember This,
a kiss is just a kiss.

Cruising Through,
most of us just doing the best we can do, but with lovely memories and photos in this case.

I’m thankful for the peek into the rest of the world from a story I’ve loved since childhood.

‘there’s always more to the story’

This song is for you Clark and for Almira.

I’m thankful for more comedy to keep me smiling.

I love Vince and Jimmy.

I was escaping into some Lord of the Rings movies to distract myself from the things I fear, but the similarities to the power men crave and the ring, a physical symbol of that greed, it was all too obvious. But there is hope amongst the uncertainty.

And so I am determined to end this post on a positive note, among all the bad news, the protests going on around the US, and my spot, from where I sit, feeling helpless, here in Canada.

What are the things that bring us together? These are the things we have in common.

If we cut our fingers, we all bleed.

The Elsewhere Region, #SoCS

The group ranged from ages twenty to seventy years. Mention of a CBC radio program about a battle of the generations, baby boomers vs the millennials. This is a place to feel safe, a non-judgment zone, but one

view

won’t necessarily be the same as any other in this room. Age and generation gap, these are just two reasons why.

As with life, in all areas, no matter which generation we’re in, out in the wider world there is plenty of judgment. This world is full of it, which is why this room serves such a useful purpose. It’s not easy putting oneself out there. Reading back to the group helps immeasurably.

Social awkwardness threatens to pull down into the depths of an abyss of social anxiety. It taunts and teases, trying to usher its person away and keep up streams of negative talk. You may have guessed it’s me, that person.

These views and voices echo around inside an otherwise sensible brain.

One viewpoint, in this room, is just as valid as any other. The people gathered around this conference table, in a library, in a town many have heard of, only by its famous shared name, one which any baby boomer should know well enough.

It’s important to listen to the poems of the baby boomer, as well as the somewhat hastily recited stories of the opposite generation, seated across the table. Stories are read, yes, but before, during, and after the stories, there are viewpoints to absorb. There are multiple lives lived and experiences of hardship or hard work or hardly anyone to listen at all. It all comes back to the writing here though. The listening and the writing.

Writing is where view takes shape, in this scenario, as story. It is disguised by made-up characters and varied storytelling styles, but the views are there, if you take the time to look for them. When is a story just a story anyway?

I listen to so many viewpoints in the media and I then repeat to myself how vital it has been for me to take a break this week. On the world stage, there are just too many views to ever possibly take any of them seriously, when often they feel utterly ridiculous. So hard to believe you’re hearing what your ears and your brain find they have to work with.

But then there’s that elsewhere region, where the ridiculous is encouraged, if not in made-up rhetoric than in fiction, but these days it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference either way, any way at all.

Stories need to continue to be told, in such safe places, places where I choose to return time and time again.

I can not say just how much I am learning about the actual act of writing, though each time I receive a comment from one of them I learn to look at a situation in a different way, but I am sharing a laugh and my view with the laughter and views of the other writers/readers.

I grab hold of all that tension in the form of my own social awkwardness and I turn it into the knowledge that my views are just as valid as the next person’s. I sit back while they share something of themselves, okay with the idea that I can share something of myself too.

I’m in yet one more place where my own viewpoint is likely to be miles from that of the person sitting at the other end of the table. I listen then, to that viewpoint from opposite myself, and I let it all just sink in. What brought them to the conclusions they’ve arrived at? How can I possibly hope to understand? Are we more similar than we are different?

The night before and it’s ONLY millennials here. No baby boomers to be found.

Oh, what exactly do I know of the musician I heard perform live the night before? What’s revealed through their music? Do lyrics tell the real story of that lived experience, by any stretch of the imagination? Mine stretches to find common ground, as this night I am the oldest person here, at thirty-two, most likely.

The view from this room, from this plush chair I’ve staked out for myself, as a way to avoid the unknowns of leaving its safety, will this mean the night was a lost cause? Do secret locations, first times experiencing musical shows like this, do the many bodies moving about in this tight space of a bachelor apartment, does it all help my placement in or out of the elsewhere region?

I want to open up. I start and stop and start again. Some things aren’t to be missed and the lack of regret for missing them is enough of a victory for the night, for the week. Yet, going forward I must require even more of myself.

The view from here is one of low vision, hardly any at all, which makes that social awkwardness seem, at some moments, to be insurmountable. It’s not, and there’s a way of putting it in its proper perspective, but it makes me tired. Very tired. Oh so mentally and emotionally spent.

Sometimes it makes me want to speak my truth, in one long and meandering sentence, which becomes stream of consciousness writing gone wild, with no end in sight.

If I feel that heavy social awkwardness threatening to pull me under once more, I repeat to myself all the comforting things I can, which today I’m choosing to explain by my unique position in a place I now lovingly like to call “the elsewhere region,” and I tell myself I can come back from that place or I can find peace in it, if need be.

Just Jot It January: Circles, Spirals, and Song Lyrics #JusJoJan #SoCS

What a morning I had.

This is one of those mornings I am afraid to venture out into the world. It would be so easy to stay in bed and to not go out there, to hide away from other people and meaningful experiences possibly had.

What if I embarrass myself? What if I get lost? What if…what if…what if…

I have been reading this Canadian writer’s blog and her writing for a while now:

http://carriesnyder.com/

Last year I wanted to finally attend one of her author readings:

How I Celebrated World Book Day 2015

I wanted to meet her in person and to put a voice to the words I’d become so accustomed to reading.

This time I had the chance to learn from her by taking one of her workshops. I jumped at this chance frankly. Carrie Snyder is a writer who uses powerful images and all the best words to express so much of what life is all about. I wanted to get to know a fellow Canadian, someone who has had some success as a writer, but who was still fairly local. She doesn’t live all that far from me really.

She doesn’t call what this morning was a writing workshop. She says she prefers to look at it as a creativity workshop, using writing as the medium.

The room is fairly full, when we all make it into a conference room of an office building, the second floor of a building in the downtown area, above a fancy restaurant that doesn’t open until noon. Now that I know where to go, through the door in the entrance way and up a double flight of stairs, in through another door – I think I can relatively confidently find it on my own next time.

The number attending is more than a dozen. It was icy on the roads early this morning, but we all made it. I bring my laptop because I can’t find my cord to my braille display. This means I won’t be able to read back what I write today to the room, but it’s better than nothing.

Some days I don’t have it all figured out. There are those days where being visually impaired (blind), well it just sucks!

I want to be spontaneous and a discoverer of my inner thoughts, my deep well of creativity I want to tap. I want to be able to walk into that room with a beautiful notebook and a pen. I want to write by hand, as messy and unreadable as that might make me, but I can’t.

All that talk about accepting life and how it is is all well and good, but today I wish I could be without this limitation on my senses.

Of course, writing is all about the senses. I have my others.

I need a spot in the room near a electrical outlet. I come early so I can set up. The room begins to fill, as steadily other people who have signed up start arriving.

Carrie hasn’t forgotten my name since we met last year and with all the times I have commented on her blog since then.

😉

There is one large conference table in the room and another table set against the wall. I sit by the wall, in the corner. It is going to be a bit crowded around the table, we discover, but that means it is me and one guy of the two guys who are in attendance, who sit at the table separate from the main one.

Why is it two guys to a dozen women at this creativity workshop? Don’t guys like to write?

I feel a bit out of place, being separate from most of the others. I am just glad the chairs are those office chairs on wheels, which allows me to turn to face everyone.

Carrie speaks very softly, but she is full of creativity and ideas. She has experience, not only as a writer, but teaching creative writing courses. That is how most writers make a living to supplement their own writing.

There are short introductions (surprising how many around this table don’t consider themselves a writer) and she reads us poems, one to start the morning off, the other left until the very end. These poems are meant to get us thinking and to open our minds up. This is not a critique group. We are just supposed to write, to not think too much, and to turn off our inner critics. I could definitely use some practice with this particular skill.

She tells us to write a list of ten cars or other vehicles we have known, have been in during our lives, something with a memory attached. I don’t know enough of how cars are spelled, different kinds, and I worry someone will read and see this. I need to stop being afraid of criticism. That’s not what today is about.

We have seven minutes for each chapter, she is calling them. She will be timing us. We must build on the car list. We must write, using our five senses, and dig deep into a memory or develop the writing from there.

There is no right or wrong here. I can’t do this incorrectly. I don’t know still, if fiction is my speed, so I will write. Mostly it’s memoir that comes from the typing I am doing in rapid succession.

I end up writing about my family’s old blue van, the one we drove to Florida in when I was in the second grade. I write about the bed on the floor, where the middle seat normally was. My mom made it, so we could sleep while we drove, but this is unheard of, considering modern safety requirements.

By Chapter Six I have traveled to Florida, told of how my mom’s map was sucked out the front window, how we visited Disney, and finally arriving at my favourite Sea World. I explain, from a child’s point of view, what I thought of the whales, but with a bit of my adult perspective on marine animals in captivity.

My dream was to have a killer whale as a pet, in a tank in my big back yard, at my house. Eight-year-old me starts to realize this will never happen.

They are to start a new page with the sound of the timer, at the end of every seven minutes. I hear the flipping of notebook pages, but all I can do is hit enter and go down a line or two.

She tells them to draw a spiral in between each. I don’t quite know what this would look like anymore, but I try to picture it as I hear their pens scribbling away. Carrie loves creativity, and is incorporating a tiny bit of art into the exercise. I miss art.

We all go around and read one of the chapters we’ve written. We aren’t to offer any comments or suggestions, but instead just thank the writer/reader for what they’ve just shared with us. I listen to all the different stories and bits of people’s lives, as it could be truth or fiction they are speaking. No rules, but Carrie did read a few rules about there being no rules. Go figure.

🙂

The two hours flies by. I am last. Carrie asks another woman, sitting nearby me, if she might read my chapter. She reads it well. I worry she won’t be able to read, that I’ve made many mistakes, but of course my computer would have already caught those. I am happy with how my writing sounds read aloud back to me and to the rest of this room. I haven’t always been able to say that about my writing. She reads the part where I included the first song lyrics that came to my mind, as we were all instructed to do. Somehow this fits in with the rest of the story we’ve written.

(See my About Me page for the lyrics of the song I thought of.)

I loved it. Even though I felt separate, like I often do in the world, and even being unable to write by hand – the morning was a success because I made the effort and had the experience. I wanted to learn from Carrie and I did.

Words. Glorious words.

#SoCS

For Stream of Consciousness Saturday,

Linda debates what she should write about, from a quiet hotel room, all by herself:

Just Jot It January 16th – What #SoCS

This is also another

#JusJoJan post,

the rules of which can be found

HERE.

2015 October Platform Challenge: Day Eighteen Crickets, #platchal

I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date.

Wait!

Oh, I mean that I’m late to the party for the

2015 October Platform Challenge: Day Eighteen

Or am I early? Or a little more than just a little late?This whole October challenge is feeling a little like I’m trapped in Wonderland, especially since being asked to write these poems.

In the above daily prompt I think I read something about crickets, so I will go with it.

I don’t really know what’s going on, am hardly even fully taking part in this challenge, but Writer’s Digest always seemed like a website, as a writer, that I should check out. Not sure what any of it means, but I couldn’t resist the challenge I suppose.

Any challenge that has me writing poetry is definitely living up to its name.

I will go with the vowels: E and I and maybe even a Y…yeah, the poem hasn’t started yet.

🙂

Now. Here goes nothing.

***

Cricket, IE Cheep Cheep Cheep

Chirping while I sleep sleep sleep.

Listen, I Might creep creep creep

My feet find me there with little cricket

I step slightly, lightly

See me step lightly

Pity is the ticket.

Cheep-ee, cheep-eee, cheep-ee ee.

***

Wow! What in the world was that?

I’m glad to say, all vowels are up for grabs once again, as you can see from this final sentence.

Any Gilmore Girls fans want to take a guess where Brewer must have gotten this particular prompt?

😉

Or is this just me?

One Last Kiss

You put everything into love and into a relationship, another person (good or bad).

This is what it’s like to be in love.

But what about when that love comes to an end?

Then come the questions…

Do you miss me?
At what point did you realize us was not something you wanted anymore?
Was I a bad girlfriend?

http://elitedaily.com/dating/what-i-would-ask-my-ex/1093489/

There are a lot of irrational thoughts. I had them. I desperately needed a way to make me feel like the thoughts I was having weren’t completely crazy.

I needed to write this story (although based on true events, turned into a work of fiction from my own imagination).

I was going through an incredibly difficult breakup at the time I started writing. My story became the one thing I found, to help me deal with how my relationship came to an end, but also the exact thing to help lift me up and out of the fog and the pain. It became an exercise in much-needed catharsis.

ONE LAST KISS

***

We are very proud of Hazel’s first anthology, and a lot of that is down to your powerful and beautifully wrought stories. Reading through them was a privilege and clearly many of you have researched or the issues have touched you in some way.

The anthology is full of experience, sensitivity and most of all hope.

Little Bird Publishing House
London

www.littlebirdpublishinghouse.com

giveaway

http://katiemjohn.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-conversation-with-author-hazel.html

buy links

UK

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B011LW085W?*Version*=1&*entries*=0

USA

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B011LW085W?*Version*=1&*entries*=0

BLURB

A moving, inspiring and hopeful collection of women’s voices.

“We will rise from the ruins of our broken dreams and stand tall.”
(Angela A. Fardellone)

An anthology of fiction about moving on and standing tall after experiences of emotional and physical abuse. Stories about women searching for freedom, recovery and love.

In this collection of stories, Hazel Robinson, author of ‘Something Missing’ has brought together some of the best emerging voices in the Romance genre to create a collection of stories that are both emotional and inspiring. A collection of stories written by women for women in order to explore the ideas of self-discovery, rebirth and finding love and hope after periods of darkness.

Interwoven into these stories are poems that offer beauty and reconciliation.

***
http://romanceanthologieshfbooks.blogspot.co.uk/

I am incredibly grateful to Hazel. She not only had the idea to pursue the anthology, but she took a chance on my story, allowing it to be a part of this collection of women’s narratives on love, loss, and rebirth.

https://www.facebook.com/thesecondchancesanthology

Thank you to her and to Little Bird Publishing House over in London, England.

Letting go isn’t easy. In fact, it’s downright hard to do – hardest thing I’ve ever done.

One year later and I hope time has healed and provided me with some much-needed perspective.

Next week I will write more on my thought process for One Last Kiss, why I needed to write it when and how I did, and the universal questions I still continue to ask.

How I Celebrated World Book Day 2015

What was I doing here?

It felt like a strange fish-out-of-water state to be in, but there I was.

I’ve already jammed so much into less than a week over this first week of March: a visit to Ottawa, seeing my aunt in her new home, and last night I visited Lucinda House.

I have wanted to write about all these things and more, but it all feels like too much for me to focus in on any of it.

My original statement today applies to all of these, but I must find a way to narrow it down somehow here tonight.

And so, as I asked myself once more, for the umpteenth time in less than a week:

What am I doing here?

I realized, so many times since March began that I have been weighed down by discomfort, but often the most important and valuable experiences in life will do this.

***

On World Book Day, 2015, I sat in an old house, now a part of a university, but in the moment it almost felt like I was transported back one hundred years.

Just being in an old house like that, surrounded by a room full of mostly women and reading to each other…

Wrong or right, I pictured the one scene from Gone with the Wind, where the ladies are tensely awaiting the return of their men.

The husbands were off, somewhere, taking justice into their own hands to defend their women.

As they were doing this, to make things safer, the ladies sat with their knitting as one proceeded to read aloud to the group.

Yes, the strangest thoughts come into my mind at the oddest of moments.

Yes, I can admit that, but being that yesterday was World Book Day and Sunday is International Women’s Day I had both books and women’s issues on my mind.

Of course, there were a few guys in the room this time, which made them the minority in my particular case.

Recently, I heard there was going to be a reading going on from a blogger I follow. I have been trying to read more Canadian and local literature lately. This particular blogger and writer does readings around the area and I wanted to show my support to her, to thank a female writer of books, something and someone I greatly admire.

I have been reading her blog for a while now, but I wanted to have the chance to put a voice to the words, an actual voice to the writer’s voice I have come to know so well on her website.

The evening started off on, what I can admit wasn’t the best note when I showed up in the middle of her reading. Not a great first impression to put forth toward someone I admire for the work she does.

I know what it must be like to be in the middle of speaking about that kind of hard work, a person’s life’s work and one’s passion and to have people walk in right in the midst of that.

I apologized upon meeting her, at the end of the evening, for doing this. She was quite gracious about it, but I made sure to let her know I did not intend to be at all disrespectful. I wanted her to know how much I really did want to hear her read from her newest novel, to meet her after reading so much about her life all these months.

She was great and she even made sure to signed one of her books for me: just one Carrie to another Kerry.

🙂

I am not a people person. I am not naturally outgoing and felt awkward all evening. This started, after walking in and hoping to be quiet while removing all winter items of clothing and taking a seat in the room, trying hard to disrupt the reading in progress as little as humanly possible.

I had been dealing with my issues with being arround old buildings all week long, facing them head-on.

First, through spending time in secondhand stores and old jails in Ottawa…to this particular evening, in an old house.

I could hear the age of the house I was in with every creek the floors made under my own feet and under the feet of the authors who shared their readings throughout the night.

I heard the floorboards make that signature creaky old house noise with every side-step each speaker took while standing at the front of the room.

I felt out of place. This was mostly a university setting, on a campus, attended overall by professors and literature students.

The professors were older and the students were younger. I did not feel like I belonged there; hovering, by myself, somewhere in between these two demographics.

As I stood in the kitchen, I felt a little less awkward getting a drink and some fruit because I had a brief break from having to feel like I fit in with those of academia out in the other room.

Suddenly, one of the only few guys in attendance spoke up to a few early-twenty-something female students. Apparently I wasn’t quite as alone as I’d first thought.

There was a hint of flirting I detected in his voice and also a hint of his own awkwardness, as he spoke to these young women. He was a poet, yet not a university student like they were. He clearly loved literature, or he wouldn’t have been there at all, but in his voice and in the words he spoke was obvious his own feelings that I too had been feeling.

Apparently, we all had our own version of the fish-out-of-water feeling going on.

I didn’t want to feel any pretension or any inadequacy. I didn’t want to feel like the act of writing and sharing that writing with others, female or not, was at all frivolous or pretentious.

I didn’t want to feel like it could have been one hundred years ago: either because of what women chose to do back then was treated less than at that time or even still today, in my own mind. I wanted to feel like what I was doing was worthwhile.

So why then did I feel like I was having to justify my own reasons for being there to myself or to some unnamed observer?

As I listened to others read aloud to the group I thought about my own writing and that need to write I feel pressing on my soul, stronger and stronger all the time.

I felt the discomfort of the words Carrie read from the pages of her own novel ring true in my own life. It all felt way too universal, these feelings, as she read a segment where her female protagonist is more than one hundred years old and living in a nursing home. I felt her words touching a nerve still much too raw in my own heart, after visiting a female family member of my own just the other day, currently living in just such a place.

This was perhaps only some fictional character in a book, but it was real to me and those I love, and more than likely to the writer/reader/speaker herself.

I did not get a chance, due to my high level of awkwardness in social settings, to let her know just how much her words had affected me. I don’t think I could have put it into words there and then, even if I’d wanted to. I am barely doing a coherent job of that here and now.

Next, I listened to the way the professor in residence went on to read her poems, which she had turned from academic, scientific journals and articles she’d come across from others, into the most beautiful lyrical, literary writing of her own making.

She had written about the type of symbiotic biological relationships that go on in nature, and something about pollination, the sorts of relationships I’d written about on visiting the creatures at the aquarium that opened in Toronto a few years ago.

Then she read us a poem she’d composed about the way different bee colonies fight for supremacy (not all creatures choosing to live such a symbiotic existence alongside each other.

Finally, I listened to some of her young creative writing students stand up in front of a bunch of strangers and lay it all out there.

They spoke about going out on their own for the first time and about unwanted attention from the opposite sex.

They shared short stories/poems about things I could hardly relate to, such as homelessness and living and surviving out on the streets.

One of the girls had even coined herself:

“the unofficial poet of the bus”,

as the place she’d found time or inspiration to write had been on Greyhound trips.

From the pain of lost love, the pressure to try and live up to society’s pressures and norms, and horrible tales of experiences with crackers and bedbugs…all terribly relatable to me or stuff made up of my worst nightmares.

This was all with such truth and vulnerability that I had to stop myself from physically shifting in my seat with discomfort. It made me really focus on the glaring obviousness of revealing things so real and personal in such a public manner, to a living room full of strangers.

It made me wonder if I could do that. Could I share things just as private and personal? Would I have the same raw nerve and guts?

How much of it was about themselves personally and how much of what they were speaking was about someone else?

I wondered who the one girl was referring to when she spoke of broken promises and one-sided love. Did the person she’d written about know she had done so and was, at that very moment, divulging so many intimate details that likely only the two of them had yet shared?

Then I imagined myself up there and how I would myself handle the nervousness and all those people staring and listening so intently. I could imagine, amongst all that, at the same time a huge rush that must be produced from doing something so freeing and open-ended.

It’s interesting to observe those listening around me in a situation like that. I suppose, to show that they are being heard and have had some kind of a positive effect, some people feel like it is only polite to produce even some small noise of appreciation, a murmur of awareness.

I shifted my eyes and attention: from the one speaking to us all about their writing, around to my fellow listeners, and back again.

I think it’s happening more and more as I feel I have lost more sight, but often, as in cases such as last night, I feel more and more self-conscious about where it is I am looking. It seems like I have less and less to focus my limited vision on.

This simply added to the feeling I often have, again like last night, where I feel both invisible and like I am standing out horribly in a group of people. The only way, I’ve been told I can possibly eliminate this, is to keep repeating this again and again.

I suppose this is why I read and why I write.

This all played back to the fact that I wasn’t sure I belonged there at the author’s readings, or literary evening, or whatever it is you want to call what last night was.

How important was what we were all doing there last night and the work and the time and energy people put into revealing such stories about ourselves?

I wish I could have held off to write all this down until I was certain I could place each point I wanted to make into its proper day’s blog post, with the correct topic, on the appropriate and the best day for each.

However, I waited this long before posting on my blog this week, not because I didn’t have enough things to write about or enough to say, but because I’ve simply found I’ve had too much.

I can always find enough topics to write about, even if I wrote for one hundred World Book Days. The same goes for International Women’s Day a couple days from now.

***

I did find myself sitting in my nephew’s bedroom the other day, watching him pulling his books down and tossing them this way and that as I pondered my relationship with books and why I love them so much.

Then, I thought about the same questions last night as I held my newly signed Carrie Snyder original in my hands all the way home from the reading.

I miss sunny mornings in the library when I was a kid, surrounded by the innocence of children’s literature. I sat and held a copy of a Grover storybook for much too much time the other morning and I capped off World Book Day holding a book from a local, Canadian author for my collection, thinking that I may not be able to read print books like I used to as a child, but that on a day like March 5th, they are no less valuable and meaningful to me now than they were to me back then.

Maybe I will find the courage, because that is what it is, to read my stuff in front of a group of my peers some day.

And maybe I will have books of my own to give to someone requesting them, who may just have come out to meet me and to hear my words on a World Book Day in the future, just like I did for Carrie last night.

For more on Carrie Snyder check out her website below:

http://carriesnyder.com

Happy World Book Day and International Women’s Day to you all.

World Poetry Day

There seems to be a day to celebrate everything: from pie to poetry. I like this because it offers many blog writing ideas.
I love poetry, yet I find it difficult to write. I admire so many others who are able to be brief and direct and so beautiful and moving with their poems. I try, but this is less a post about my own poetry as it is about the poems and their poets who inspire and touch me deeply.
***
My previous post was about Ireland and one of the poets I highly admire just so happens to be Irish: and a Nobel Prize winner of literature: William Butler Yeats.
I first learned of him years ago. The Cranberries had a song on my favourite of their albums, No Need To Argue, entitled Yeats’ Grave. In this song Dolores sings out the lyrics of his poem The Lake Isle of Innisfree, with such loveliness and her well-known brand of haunting melody, speaking lines from his poem in between singing. “Had they the courage equal to desire.” I was instantly drawn in and captivated.
Years later and I found myself on a tour bus, traveling all across Ireland. On the second day our lively and always fun tour guide began talking about Yeats, while The Cranberries played on the speaker in the background, as we entered Drumcliffe in County Sligo. I smiled to myself, not really believing where I was lucky enough to be at that moment in time. He said we would be stopping at W. B. Yeats’ grave.
It was a peaceful place. I stood on the grass with my two friends and fellow travellers and marvelled at my surroundings. It was a poem in itself, if I had more of a chance and ability to write one. My friend showed me the plaque and his tombstone. I remembered that Cranberries song and I heard the lyrics playing loudly inside my head. Yeats wrote about Irish mythology and folklore and I could feel all of that swirling around me, there, on that spot.
***
My favourite poem is by the great American poet Robert Frost. I first read it in school and it spoke to me immediately: The Road Not Taken. This poem felt like it had been written specifically for me and my life.
I felt then and do now that my own life has always been one of unpredictability. I have never before taken the obvious path in life and have gone down some pretty unexpected roads. It began in high school. I did not go on to post secondary like my peers. I couldn’t handle what life was supposed to be, so instead I decided to follow my own unique path. I often wonder what my life would have been like, if I had been well enough at the time and able to manage the stress and the pressures. I still don’t know, but the path I chose is mine and only mine.
***
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
***
Frost speaks of a wood and a well trodden path, but mine was my own to tread. His symbolism and imagery spoke to me and I never forgot that.
***
Robert Frost wrote poetry about nature and the natural world, winning him four Pulitzer Prizes. His poem Stopping By Woods On a Snowy Evening was another I read in school, loving the peaceful feeling it gave me. “The woods are lovely, dark, and deep. But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep.” I could feel and smell the snow in those woods, could hear the jangling of the horse’s bell, back in a time, years before I was born.
***
On this World Poetry Day I wanted to salute just a few of the poets I love. I have read a few lately, destined to touch a lot of people. One was just accepted into Wordgathering, a literary magazine for people with disabilities. He writes eloquently about what it feels like to go from living in a visual world to being separated forever from the sighted world. I wish him great success with this poem and his future poetry.
***
Thank you to all the poets out there who make us all feel so strongly about the little moments and the big things, nature and the human condition. I am comforted every day by your words.
What are some of your favourite poems and poets?
poets.org is an excellent resource for poems and poets.