I have the opportunity to take an idea that began two years ago and develop it into a possible poetry and photography installation, around my obsession with the Thames Estuary. I have no idea whether it is viable or not and whether it is going to be accepted, but honestly it doesn’t matter because the simple action of creation is all I need. If the people making the offer turn me down I will just work out another way to make it happen. It is not the idea that I love, but the journey to make it real and tangible. This idea took form because of a series of unrelated conversations and a sizeable stroke of luck. I think the best ideas are the ones that sneak up on us and swallow us completely.
I agree with you about the journey to make it real and tangible. For me, many of my scribbled notes and practice poems are seeds. I keep them in one word doc and use them as inspiration. Often one grows into a completely different "plant" than expected if they are left for a while to germinate. Or their structure changes or they never come to fruition. It's fun.
Hi Juliet - yes, I've started doing the one word doc now and going back to it when I have a commission, or something I need to write. It's a lot easier than starting with nothing! I love that idea of them growing into a completely different plant :)
Hi Juliet, it’s lovely to have found you again and massive congratulations on having found a publisher for your project, which I am very much looking forward to reading on release, having heard so much about it’s creation last year.
I am going back to my seed store this year with increasing frequency. It has become a very fruitful side project :D
I love your description of the sky woman Kim! She stands and walks off the page, she seems so real. I’m glad your poem is becoming a short story. I’ve been doing the opposite. I wrote a short story 3 years ago and have been trying to turn into poems. I seem to overlap and write the same idea in different ways. None of them capture it yet. That whole idea that poets write the same poem over and over is true in this case! The poems I love best come out of the air, unbidden. Like the sky woman.
Hi Anna - I think for me it is also about thinking what is either form going to do to support the content I'm writing - the form of the poem was not allowing me to find out who the sky-woman was and why she'd suddenly appeared - it wasn't enough for her to be a kind of moment in time, so I had to write it as a story. I've never gone the other way though - from story to poem, perhaps I should try that next!
Robin Wall Kimmerer writes beautifully about the Skywoman story in Braiding Sweetgrass. I sometimes think ideas need a gestation period. A bit like doing a crossword: you are stuck for an answer, give up, butbwhen you return a couple of days later, the answer pings into your mind. While our ideas wander around our brains they seem to pick up other thoughts. Perhaps ideas have tentacles, tapping into memories, experiences and emotions.
Wow. I love the two voices and the difference in them and their characters. I love how you've shown that through the way you write their voices.
I think the poems I'm writing for my PhD are the culmination of at least 15 years of work. The idea of a conversation that comes from the past and into the future
Love it! 💚Only this week I was skimming folders and found a draft from 2015! It’s now a fully fledged short story. Must find more and let them fly. (Likely loads more still nest bound on the hard drive)
Enjoyed reading this - thanks Kim. Certainly some poems are meant to be prose and vv. I once wrote a whole novel, took years, then read Bernadine Evaristo's The Emperor's Babe (novel in verse) and suddenly the voices in one strand of my novel burst into life in verse. My book, 'Artemis, the People's Priestess', is the result - a dramatic 'myth-interpretation' of the sibling rivalry of Artemis and Apollo. I'm determined my current wip remains a novel though! (BTW am still setting up my substack - hope it will go live this week!)
Hi Cora - thanks for reading - I love that moment when reading what someone else has done unlocks something in our own writing and makes it, as you say 'burst into life'. Best of luck with the ongoing novel!
A joy to read this and your process this morning. I've been working on a seed that started five years ago during the Pandemic but felt too dark and obvious. A line in it would keep coming back to me randomly and never went away, like an ear worm. I figured this meant that it was something worth going back to. Good to hear that you post drafts and scribbles online then take them down to work on them. I do this sometimes but feel I shouldn't for some reason. This gives it the ok. 👍
Hi Candi - I post things on my personal FB page which is not public for a few days and then take it down. I've never had any mags or anything complain. I think if I posted it here for example, it would probably count as published and I wouldn't then send it out to a magazine or competition.
Re the ear worm, I think those lines that stay with us are absolutely important and are trying to tell us something!
I got a ripple of magic reading this - both from meeting the sky woman and the sense of possibility. My notes app often shows me random jottings from years ago which are occasionally brilliant and often baffling. Skewed MH means my imagination is not a safe space at the moment so I find these pops of thought from years ago spark a different direction.
Hi Kathryn - thanks for this! I've never thought of using the notes app, but what a wonderful way of capturing fleeting thoughts and making them, well, less fleeting. Thank you for sharing this workaround :)
Great blog Kim. Recently I’ve been doing some writing using 3 sources: automatic writing, a journal entry and then I’ll search through old notebooks to find the right vibe or theme. I tend to repeat the same themes in my writing. Your story sounds awesome, can’t wait to read the finished version. Big love ❤️❤️🤗🤗
Hi Ann - ah fabulous, love the idea of combining different approaches as well. And I repeat the same themes as well - but I think circularity is ok, definitely our brains telling us we haven't learnt/found out what we need to yet, so keep digging!
I'm experimenting with something that's in very early draft form. I usually write poetry but this is more nature writing, auto-fiction, memoir. I'm half excited half afraid as it's unknown territory.
Hi Kathryn - that's exciting! I think when I started writing short stories, I felt a great sense of freedom, as if it was ok to write rubbish because I was starting from the beginning but I was a beginner with a whole heap of tools that I knew how to use from poetry - so then I started to feel like a bit of a badass! I hope that happens for you too as you move between those genres/ways of thinking.
Here's a bee that buzzed for about ten years, a tiny piece of workshop flash fiction inspired by a picture, which has now grown to 20% of a novel. The more I write, the more I love it.
Clifftop
‘I don’t see how this is meant to help our marriage.’
He stood still, head bowed after his wife’s remark.
She continued: ‘I mean, it’s very sweet of you to bring me here, but does it really change anything?’
He looked out to sea. It was still covered by cloud: audible, but not yet visible. The sky was changing from orange to yellow in the dawn sunshine. Fresh and salt aromas crossed swords in the morning air. A single gull swept down the cliff side.
‘Nothing really changes here, I suppose.’ He was surprised by his own poeticism, in the circumstances. ‘But what do you want – change, or no change? When we were married, this cliff was here, and we were in love. Now, it’s still here, and we don’t know. Next year, it will be here, whatever we’re doing. Maybe I’ll come again, and do a long walk.’
She didn’t like long walks. She also didn’t much care for this initiative, this ‘I can manage without you’ line. Hitherto, it had been her preserve.
She walked along the line of the fence, each step heavy, as if trying to bed into the firm ground. It was unyielding. She stopped, and looked no place in particular.
She wondered, what kind of long walk lay ahead of her.
I have the opportunity to take an idea that began two years ago and develop it into a possible poetry and photography installation, around my obsession with the Thames Estuary. I have no idea whether it is viable or not and whether it is going to be accepted, but honestly it doesn’t matter because the simple action of creation is all I need. If the people making the offer turn me down I will just work out another way to make it happen. It is not the idea that I love, but the journey to make it real and tangible. This idea took form because of a series of unrelated conversations and a sizeable stroke of luck. I think the best ideas are the ones that sneak up on us and swallow us completely.
Obsession, conversation and luck - perhaps three vital ingredients for an idea to take shape?
I agree with you about the journey to make it real and tangible. For me, many of my scribbled notes and practice poems are seeds. I keep them in one word doc and use them as inspiration. Often one grows into a completely different "plant" than expected if they are left for a while to germinate. Or their structure changes or they never come to fruition. It's fun.
Hi Juliet - yes, I've started doing the one word doc now and going back to it when I have a commission, or something I need to write. It's a lot easier than starting with nothing! I love that idea of them growing into a completely different plant :)
Hi Juliet, it’s lovely to have found you again and massive congratulations on having found a publisher for your project, which I am very much looking forward to reading on release, having heard so much about it’s creation last year.
I am going back to my seed store this year with increasing frequency. It has become a very fruitful side project :D
Oh yes - you do have to be ready to be swallowed, even if you might be regurgitated with another brilliant failure!
I love your description of the sky woman Kim! She stands and walks off the page, she seems so real. I’m glad your poem is becoming a short story. I’ve been doing the opposite. I wrote a short story 3 years ago and have been trying to turn into poems. I seem to overlap and write the same idea in different ways. None of them capture it yet. That whole idea that poets write the same poem over and over is true in this case! The poems I love best come out of the air, unbidden. Like the sky woman.
Hi Anna - I think for me it is also about thinking what is either form going to do to support the content I'm writing - the form of the poem was not allowing me to find out who the sky-woman was and why she'd suddenly appeared - it wasn't enough for her to be a kind of moment in time, so I had to write it as a story. I've never gone the other way though - from story to poem, perhaps I should try that next!
Robin Wall Kimmerer writes beautifully about the Skywoman story in Braiding Sweetgrass. I sometimes think ideas need a gestation period. A bit like doing a crossword: you are stuck for an answer, give up, butbwhen you return a couple of days later, the answer pings into your mind. While our ideas wander around our brains they seem to pick up other thoughts. Perhaps ideas have tentacles, tapping into memories, experiences and emotions.
Hi Jennifer - thanks for this - I didn't know about there was a skywoman story! I will look it up. I love that idea of ideas having tentacles as well!
In Native American mythology Skywoman is the creator. It sounds like you met her. Pretty wow, hey!
Ah this is amazing, but am also slightly worried that it might be appropriative to put her in the story now. I will have a think!
Mmm possibly. Read first chapter of Braiding Sweetgrass. It’s uncanny the similarities.
Wow. I love the two voices and the difference in them and their characters. I love how you've shown that through the way you write their voices.
I think the poems I'm writing for my PhD are the culmination of at least 15 years of work. The idea of a conversation that comes from the past and into the future
Hi Gill - yes, often when someone asks how long did the book take to write or the PhD to complete I want to answer MY WHOLE LIFE lol
Love it! 💚Only this week I was skimming folders and found a draft from 2015! It’s now a fully fledged short story. Must find more and let them fly. (Likely loads more still nest bound on the hard drive)
Enjoyed reading this - thanks Kim. Certainly some poems are meant to be prose and vv. I once wrote a whole novel, took years, then read Bernadine Evaristo's The Emperor's Babe (novel in verse) and suddenly the voices in one strand of my novel burst into life in verse. My book, 'Artemis, the People's Priestess', is the result - a dramatic 'myth-interpretation' of the sibling rivalry of Artemis and Apollo. I'm determined my current wip remains a novel though! (BTW am still setting up my substack - hope it will go live this week!)
Hi Cora - thanks for reading - I love that moment when reading what someone else has done unlocks something in our own writing and makes it, as you say 'burst into life'. Best of luck with the ongoing novel!
A joy to read this and your process this morning. I've been working on a seed that started five years ago during the Pandemic but felt too dark and obvious. A line in it would keep coming back to me randomly and never went away, like an ear worm. I figured this meant that it was something worth going back to. Good to hear that you post drafts and scribbles online then take them down to work on them. I do this sometimes but feel I shouldn't for some reason. This gives it the ok. 👍
Hi Candi - I post things on my personal FB page which is not public for a few days and then take it down. I've never had any mags or anything complain. I think if I posted it here for example, it would probably count as published and I wouldn't then send it out to a magazine or competition.
Re the ear worm, I think those lines that stay with us are absolutely important and are trying to tell us something!
I got a ripple of magic reading this - both from meeting the sky woman and the sense of possibility. My notes app often shows me random jottings from years ago which are occasionally brilliant and often baffling. Skewed MH means my imagination is not a safe space at the moment so I find these pops of thought from years ago spark a different direction.
Hi Kathryn - thanks for this! I've never thought of using the notes app, but what a wonderful way of capturing fleeting thoughts and making them, well, less fleeting. Thank you for sharing this workaround :)
Great blog Kim. Recently I’ve been doing some writing using 3 sources: automatic writing, a journal entry and then I’ll search through old notebooks to find the right vibe or theme. I tend to repeat the same themes in my writing. Your story sounds awesome, can’t wait to read the finished version. Big love ❤️❤️🤗🤗
Hi Ann - ah fabulous, love the idea of combining different approaches as well. And I repeat the same themes as well - but I think circularity is ok, definitely our brains telling us we haven't learnt/found out what we need to yet, so keep digging!
Thank you, I will do, always learning xx
I'm experimenting with something that's in very early draft form. I usually write poetry but this is more nature writing, auto-fiction, memoir. I'm half excited half afraid as it's unknown territory.
Hi Kathryn - that's exciting! I think when I started writing short stories, I felt a great sense of freedom, as if it was ok to write rubbish because I was starting from the beginning but I was a beginner with a whole heap of tools that I knew how to use from poetry - so then I started to feel like a bit of a badass! I hope that happens for you too as you move between those genres/ways of thinking.
The campaign website is www.saverestorewalshawmoor.wordpress.com
Thanks Lydia have just added this in
Here's a bee that buzzed for about ten years, a tiny piece of workshop flash fiction inspired by a picture, which has now grown to 20% of a novel. The more I write, the more I love it.
Clifftop
‘I don’t see how this is meant to help our marriage.’
He stood still, head bowed after his wife’s remark.
She continued: ‘I mean, it’s very sweet of you to bring me here, but does it really change anything?’
He looked out to sea. It was still covered by cloud: audible, but not yet visible. The sky was changing from orange to yellow in the dawn sunshine. Fresh and salt aromas crossed swords in the morning air. A single gull swept down the cliff side.
‘Nothing really changes here, I suppose.’ He was surprised by his own poeticism, in the circumstances. ‘But what do you want – change, or no change? When we were married, this cliff was here, and we were in love. Now, it’s still here, and we don’t know. Next year, it will be here, whatever we’re doing. Maybe I’ll come again, and do a long walk.’
She didn’t like long walks. She also didn’t much care for this initiative, this ‘I can manage without you’ line. Hitherto, it had been her preserve.
She walked along the line of the fence, each step heavy, as if trying to bed into the firm ground. It was unyielding. She stopped, and looked no place in particular.
She wondered, what kind of long walk lay ahead of her.