Life on the Edge - Vulnerability as a Writer #reblog
#reblog from 2015
This week has been an interesting one in my writing journey when it comes to poetry. It's been a roller coaster of sorts. It started with an email from my mentor, poet Janet Charman. She wrote of my latest poem:
"This poem, for me, is currently teasingly compressed. It’s like I’ve been given a beautifully figured paper wrapped around a mysterious package which absolutely defeats my capacity to open it."
I was struck by this statement for a number of reasons. Firstly, it made me question my inbuilt bent toward keeping an air of mystery (in my life and in my work) and secondly because the poem was about that very thing. It was about what I was concealing and how I was going about it.
For me, this poem represents the start of my ability to write about a deeply personal and painful experience. For a year and half, my poet friends had been badgering me to write about it, but my answer was always the same and it started with an F word and ending in "off". I resisted for a long time.
So even though it is obscure, it is me taking a step toward articulating my own narrative on my experience and confronting the emotions I have been afraid of facing. Not an easy journey, but a necessary one.
I read one of the newer series poems at the Dan O'Connell Hotel (a regular reading I attend) today. I was buoyed by a conversation with my friend Christine over coffee, who allowed me to tell her my story, before I got to the point of sharing the poem.
And here's what's vital - if you want to read something like that, you need to surround yourself with safe people, who believe in you and who cheer you on. I felt like it was safe to take that step. I went outside. I had a cup of tea. I cried. And I survived. It was nerve wracking, but now it's done.
Making art is a vulnerable act when it is authentic and comes from a sincere place. It is confronting and uncomfortable and reveals more about our inner worlds than we often realise. But what spurs me on to continue is knowing that to someone, somewhere, my story is important and might even whisper to them, you're not alone.
