and the speck of my heart.

We live by the sea. (Well, technically the River Clyde. But the sea sounds nicer.) The ever-changing view from our window, the seagulls, the sound of the waves hitting the rocks if you listen closely. The thought of moving into the city (something that seems inevitable in the next year or so) is mildly heart-breaking. Even though I have to leave at some point, I can’t imagine not living here. The city just seems so soulless in comparison.

That being said – living near the sea means being very far away from everything and everyone else. Or so it can seem at times. It means trains that only run once in a blue moon, and stop running much too early in the evening. It means an hour-long commute, both ways, to get into Glasgow and the office where I study. And it’s the same for my Mum, who works just outside of the city.

Three days of the week, I ride in the car with her most of the way there, and recently we’ve started a small morning reading practice: to welcome in the day, to wake ourselves up. It’s a long journey, but it passes quickly when we’re reading. Once we’ve been driving for a while and the stickiness of toothpaste-breath has worn off, I’ll pull out her well-worn book of Celtic Daily Prayers (‘open our eyes ... open our hearts’) and read a little aloud from there.

And then we’ll read a poem.

At the moment, we’re working our way through Mary Oliver’s collection ‘West Wind’ (a poetry collection that you should buy. As the Library Journal wrote on the back cover: ‘From the chaos of the world, [Oliver’s] poems distill what it means to be human and what is worthwhile about life’. If anyone ever writes something like that about my writing, I will kiss them. #youvebeenwarned)

Poetry is really something that needs to be read aloud. And shared. When I read it into myself, I tend to go too quickly and miss things. So it’s been lovely to read them with her. We go through the whole poem a few times to catch onto the rhythm, letting the words soak in before pausing over lines we like and talking about what the poem might mean, or what it reminds us of. I thought I’d share one with you – a prose poem – that I liked. Read it a few times. Whisper it aloud to hear the sound of it. Even if you don’t fully know what it means, just let the words be. Here it is: 

♥ 

Read it again. Slower. And then pause, lingering over a line or a phrase or a word that stands out.

(What it makes me think of is the Sublime, that idea that was big among the Romantic poets. Shelly and Wordsworth and Keats and so on. That feeling that there's something more than the visible tangible touchable world. Something unknowable, both beautiful and terrifying. Something powerful and huge and dangerously close. Something inexplicable. Something that might be, maybe, God.)

where the buttons go.

Buttons are always falling off of me. I’m always losing them. They are always losing me. Sometimes they dangle for weeks – hanging off my coat like a wobbling tooth until I tug. Snap. And all that’s left is the thread. Sometimes they disappear without saying goodbye. Ping. Pop. Rattle. Bounce. Rolling down pavements, down the gutter. Down and down. Never to be seen again.

There’s a place underground where the buttons go. Buttons and socks and kirbies and rings and keys and shoes and tights and teeth. And that red Polly Pocket I lost when I was five. And the words I forgot in the middle of talking. All the things that I’ve lost. Marbles and dice. And watches and pens and letters and names and needles and doodles and Monopoly houses. And all of those photographs that were wiped from the computer. Quite without warning. Just one day: deleted. The three of us shivering in the pool in the summer. Emilie hopping in the garden, bare feet. That one of me, twelve, in Budapest heat, so small, smiling under the willow tree’s sway. Gone. Gone. Not a pixel left over.

All the things that I’ve lost. All my vests. Those addresses. The person I was until something else happened. The person I thought I was likely to be. All my chewing-gum packets, and hair bands, and scotch tape. The minutes I’ve spent on trains that aren’t moving. The minutes I’ve spent squeezing spots by the sink. All the minutes I’ve spent on the bus, in a queue, on my phone, by the mirror. Or just waiting for someone. All that waiting. And waiting. All the thoughts in my head that I didn’t write down.

That’s where the buttons go. Or so I imagine. They're all there, underground, where the lost things live.

♥

This is a piece that came out of a free-writing exercise I gave my students on the last day of class. I like buttons, so I thought, 'Hey, why not? I'll do it too'. The writing prompt (in case you'd like to do also) is pretty much: 'pick a button, look at it, turn it over, think about what it reminds you of, who it might've belonged to, set a timer for 15 minutes, don't plan, just start writing, and writing, and writing until the time runs out. Just see what happens.' Some people wrote stories. Some wrote descriptions. This is (a slightly edited version of) what I came up with. 

My Gran kindly donated the buttons we used in class. We spent the Friday evening before, sifting through her button box, looking for the ones with the most 'story potential'. (Thank you, Grannie-Anne.)

the end of term.

For the past ten Mondays, I’ve been teaching a first year undergrad creative writing class. It’s been amazing, and kind of surreal* ...and that’s the semester finished now. [Insert comment about how quickly time passes]. On the final day of class, none of the students stood on their desks to say ‘O Captain! My Captain!’ (alas). But I quite enjoyed teaching them. Hopefully they learned a few things. 

The class was on the foundations of fiction, so we talked about things like: characters need to want something (that they can’t easily get) in order to be compelling; stories without conflict aren’t really stories; conflict doesn’t necessarily need to be uber-dramatic, sometimes silence says more than shouting. We talked about setting and how to involve the reader in the world of a story by building a strong sense of 'place' (which doesn’t generally mean: write a ginormous paragraph describing the surroundings in precise geographical detail. More often it means: drop in a few ‘telling’ sensory details – the dust specs that catch in the evening light, the peeling paint on the walls of the bedroom, the metallic heart-beat sound a train makes when it’s rumbling over a bridge – and then leave room for the readers’ imagination to fill in the rest).

‘The job of a writer,’ I kept telling them, ‘is to capture (or try to capture) in language what it feels like to be alive. And to do that – you need to practise the art of paying attention.’

Write down the details. Write down the conversations you hear on the street. The strange words people use. The way light hits the trees on your walk home. Work out what that taste in your mouth is when you hear bad news. Write it all down. Pay attention to it all.

Pay attention to your life. Pay attention to your life.

They probably got a bit sick of me saying that. But that – aside from the unglamorous task of sitting down and just getting on with it – is the most important thing a writer can do, I think** (perhaps one of the most important things a person can do). It’s something I’m continually trying to teach myself. I go on about it an awful lot, but I keep forgetting to do it.

 

♥

Footnotes:

*It was surreal because: it was only five years ago that I was a nervous 18-year-old going to my first creative writing workshop, not imagining that a few years later I’d be up the front teaching one. (When you’re quite unambiguously introverted, standing for two hours in front of a group of twenty students every week is a definite leap out of your comfort zone. But a good leap, I think. I would like to keep doing it).

**Probably the first place I came across this idea – that writing is about ‘seeing’ and ‘paying attention’ – was in an essay on writing by Kate DiCamillo which I read over and over as a young teenager. 

‘What I discovered,' DiCamillo writes at one point, ‘is that each time you look at the world and the people in it closely, imaginatively, the effort changes you. The world, under the microscope of your attention, opens up like a beautiful, strange flower and gives itself back to you in ways you could never imagine...’ 

It’s a really beautiful essay – whether you’re a writer or not. You can find it: here. I read it out to the class before they packed up their bags on the last day.)

Pictures are by Clare Elsaesser. You can find her: here.

golden.

Spring is here. It tiptoed into our lives a few weeks ago (bringing opportunities for eating lunch outside, light jackets, walks without-gloves, birdsong, general happy feelings). And then it snowed. And hailed. And rained. And sleeted. And the sky was grey for a long time. And I caught the cold. And moped around Glasgow wearing a blanket-scarf and hiding my cracked-skin-hands deep inside my pockets. But it's come back and it is quite beautifully golden. Spring is here. It's here. And it is most welcome. What are some of the signs of Spring you've been enjoying?

Picture of: me, on Easter Sunday, in our back garden, looking unintentionally bridal... and in need of a hairbrush.

♥

I will return to this little blog. There is much to write. My head is full of words. For now though, here's a song I've been enjoying: Make it Holy by the Staves (featuring Bon Iver).