Month: April 2016

poetry

I should smile

pataitcheson22
forest-trees-snow
image: pixabay

 

 

You’re warm, I know that much.

A hood snug over your ears, fur framing your face.

I taught you how to stitch the skins,

Keep howling winds at bay.

Trudging through snow, we leave the forest behind us.

 

Remember those dark and desperate nights

Red eyes, hot breath, razor teeth stalking

Fleeing in hope of safety.

But we escaped, we found the path again

Walked on together.

 

Remember those mornings

Dew wet grass and the world silent.

Huffing out a clouded breath, and standing

Empty-bellied, clear-eyed and wondering

At the new dawn.

 

Remember those drowsy golden days

Nectar drunk bees around your head.

Cast down amid ripeness

And laughing at clouds drifting by.

A happiness, a moment.

 

And I remember those purple nights

Star jewelled sky, bright planets and the moon above.

We lay and watched the universe turn.

No three dog nights for us

When we had each other.

 

You’ve learned, I know that much.

A bag of tools, a store of knowledge

A piece of my heart, yet here our story ends.

Is this love’s prize, to stand at this divergence

Tear blind, recalling all our journeys?

 

I should let you go

I should seek new paths

I should remember and forget

I should smile.

 

blog, writing process

Hidden in plain sight

pataitcheson22

hidden face_b&w

I wrote a short story, and now I’m afraid to publish it.

Not because the subject matter is risqué or difficult, or it’s no good. I think it’s a great piece; honest and true. And that’s the problem. It is too honest, too raw, and reading it over feels like dissecting a part of my heart and leaving it open for anyone to see.

Writing is often confessional, but this piece was not meant to be. I wrote it for a competition, and I missed the deadline, but anyway. I draw on lots of sources for characters and stories, both internal and external, in order to create something new from those bits and pieces. How could I be happy to send this off to be judged, but hesitate to post it on my own media?

The difference is anonymity.

It is too close to home, too close to uncomfortable truths. I usually bury those truths within the lie of fiction, but here they are all too visible to anyone who knows much about me. I’m not sure I can expose so much tender flesh.

The dilemma we face as artists is the need to be authentic, to bleed onto the page, while retaining  emotional integrity. If we put all of our selves on the page, will there be anything left for us? Still, I feel that changing the particular details of this fictionalised tale would sap its emotional punch.

Perhaps the cloak of a pseudonym would give me the confidence to lay the personal bare. Yet another mask to wear online, trying to remember which bits of me hide behind which constructed façade.

I want my stories to be strong. But I don’t want to have to write them with my own blood.

And so this piece will sit on my hard drive for a while, till I can find a third way. Or until I find my courage.

blog, writing process

An unbroken chain

pataitcheson22

Linking the past, present and future

DSC_0051

What links the past, present and future?

How do we maintain a sense of self, when our bodies constantly change, our memories shift and evolve, and no dissection can reveal a core of selfhood anywhere in the brain?

Without getting into deep philosophical waters, I find myself pondering this question. I look at my novel, started two years ago, and it feels like the work of another hand and brain entirely. Which in a way it is, since I am not the person I was, nor the writer who wrote those words. The ideas belong to a different me.

I know more than I did, but if I were to change all those words it would be like trying to erase the past, retouching an old photograph to be more than it was.

We collect images to hold on to memories, and writers collect their old words. When we look them over they may seem familiar or alien, but they are/were us. Candid, polished, ugly or beautiful, they remind us where we have been and perhaps inspire us to keep moving forward.

It is comforting to examine souvenirs, but eventually we have to put them down and return to now. An artist must forge the next link, create the next work.

Each work helps to make sense of all that has gone before, and shows us how far we have come.

Uncategorized

NaNoWri – no

pataitcheson22
DSC_0179
Hemerocallis

Are you doing Camp NaNoWriMo?  I thought about it.

I am definitely not.

I wrote here about my November 2015 experience. Although there is a certain freedom in being able to set my own goal for April, there is still the constraint of meeting it. And right now my  life has no space for another daily demand, another must-do, on top of all the other things over which I have little or no control.

(I think it unlikely that I will step up in November this year, but hey, let’s wait and see.)

If you are participating, good for you and I hope you reach your goal. I will continue with some other stuff; my commitment to regular blog posts, attending and writing for my writers’ group, writing short stories, entering competitions, querying my first novel and maybe even working on the sequel, remains solid. Oh. Oh.

When I put it like that, added to my day job and the rest, maybe it is just as well I don’t take on any more. I can jettison my guilt.

creative writing

Tell me a story

pataitcheson22

book_butterflies

 

Tell me a story. Give me tales of a thousand nights, warm scented breeze on my skin, sand in my shoes. Take me to the farthest pole, blue-green fire dancing in the sky, breath clouding in crisp night air.

Tell me a story. Let me taste salt sea tang while sun beats down on wooden decks. Show me dolphins, flying fish, whales breaching white-topped waves. Let me glimpse bright eyed merpeople watching deep under the surface, waiting.

Tell me a story. Carry me on red and silver rockets to vast silent space stations where the stars never go out. Show me galaxies born from cosmic dust. Bring whispers from strange aliens and stranger, once-human creatures.

Tell me a story. Lead me up the mountain, rocks skittering away under exhausted feet, lungs screaming for oxygen. Describe that joyful promised land seen only from the summit, take me there on wings of faith.

Expand my horizons. Play my emotions. Cloak mindless chatter, soothe unthinking wounds, only with words. Let me shed this skin, be someone else, somewhere else, sometime else. Give me distance, just for a while. Let me lose and maybe find myself.

Tell me a story.