Not the Monday Poetry Train...

"We write to taste life twice,

in the moment and in retrospection" – Anais Nin

I have always been an avid reader, reading all of the 1st and 2nd year school readers before the end of first semester, my first year of school, and my teacher suggested to my mother that I join the junior library, something to which I am forever thankful as it opened me up to the world… literally. Even then I loved fiction… the stuff of imagination.

And I have written stuff and nonsense almost since I was first able to form letters and words. Usually, some fantastical story, with a wry twist in the tail that had a character that closely resembled me. There are some examples floating around the house somewhere, I should find them and relook at them. They are probably awful, but I suspect they are not that much different in style to how I write now, even though the subject matter was I hope, very different!

As a young child, I used to make up skits, that I would bully coerce my friends into performing around the neighbourhood, a fledgling Jo March... who I dreamed of growing up to be, sitting in my garret, with ink stained fingers, writing books and plays about her life and the people in it.

I thought about being a journalist in my final years of high school, which I would have been terrible at, I now realise. But it seemed to be a career that would allow me to write. And I started a Professional Writing and Editing course, six years ago, that I quit after completing two subjects, partly because my father became ill, but mostly, as I didn't care for the rules, and being told how and what to write.

There are lots of incomplete stories I’ve started over the years, with a female protagonist, who is an awful lot like me, but with all the rough bits smoothed away. She is prettier, and funnier, and taller… as I told the Nature Boy today, what’s the point of writing fiction, if you can’t embellish on it… but these women, these versions of me, still struggle to be heard, and understood and loved.

I wonder if the reason why these stories are unfinished, is because my own story is… I don’t know what the ending will be yet… so how can I write of endings for them, my better halves.

None of these tales have been shared with anyone… they sit, in notebooks and on loose sheets of paper shoved into drawers that are rarely opened.

"The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say,
but what we are unable to say" – Anais Nin

My friend, Nature Boy, is a constant source of encouragement, by providing a willing, and sometimes not so willing ear and eye for my stuff and nonsense… laughing at my whimsy, and empathising with my woes…he makes me smile, and think and ponder…probably cause he’s so generous with his praise and tells me often how much I make him smile, and think and ponder…

He has an interesting and engaging writing style of his own, though he’d be unlikely to ever admit that he is a writer and storyteller, he has the whole self-effacing, modest shtick down to a fine art, which in itself makes me smile…

We are very different. It’s why I enjoy our written stoushes so much. He, with his neat, tidy but incredibly evocative words that convey such a strong sense of feeling, and place and time, and his total disdain for capital letters, conjunctions and punctuation battling my dense, verbose, fanciful waffling, I’m the girl who uses capital letters, and full punctuation in my text messages.

A recent example of the Short Response King took me immediately to every grungy laundrette that I’ve ever been in, which is why I praised him in my comments on Rhian’s Monday Poetry Train yesterday.

"laundrette…washing clothes…old mags… last weeks Herald Sun… disgruntled student… a hair in the washing machine… not mine... cute blond traveller… what am I doing here…(Nature Boy, 2007)

And in asking permission to include the above on my blog his email response below had me spitting coffee out all over the keyboard.

all good
short responses rock
look out gore vidal
I rock
look out Tolstoy
you rock (Nature Boy, 2007)

What a goof! Everyone knows if they’re going to compare me to anyone it should be (fill in the blanks)…though that might be a less than subtle crack about my verbal diarrhoea…

It is because of him, that I started this blog in the first place, and in the short time I have been writing here, I’ve hit the publish button 69 times.

Some of those times I’ve published meme’s, silly quizzes and more recently my unconscious mutterings and Thursday Thirteen, but the majority of times I’ve hit that button I’ve been sharing some aspect of my life.

In my first blog, I talked about taking baby steps into sharing my thoughts with the wider world, and I’ve certainly done that, to the shock/horror amazement of some of my other friends in RL.

And it is through this process that I have realised that I too have a voice, and a style, that is uniquely my own… that I am a writer, a storyteller…and always have been…it is just that now the planets seem to be aligned, and for any number of reasons I am gaining confidence in speaking and sharing my voice with others.

Well… a little bit… the reason I started to write this post is despite a yearning to do so, and cajoling and pleading from Rhian, I have found endless excuses to prevent me from posting something for her Monday Poetry Train.

I’ve enjoyed reading all of the other contributions, trying to get my mind to grapple with the subtle and not so subtle imagery conveyed with their poems and prose… but I have yet to be able to post something of my own… and I’m left wondering why.

Is it because my stories, my fiction, really is not so much fiction at all… but is about me, my dreams, my thoughts, my wants and needs. And while I can share some of this, as I blog away contentedly on my own, I’m not yet ready to put these out there. To deliberately post something, with a flourish, of here it is, read me, hate me, enjoy me, condemn me, love me…

Though I’m tempted…sigh…

"I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in the ordinary world as ordinary women. To enter ordinary relationships. I want ecstasy. I am a neurotic -- in the sense that I live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself." Anais Nin