After a week of heat, autumn rain has hit my little corner of Finland this morning, so I'm soaking up tea and writing since I couldn't manage to sleep in. Back to school blues. I'm happy to be back to work, love meeting the kids again, but miss the slow starts to the day and the empty calendar.
This last weekend I downloaded all my posts on this blog to a Word file. Yes, I was procrastinating writing poetry, we won't go into that.
It got me thinking about how much I write about my life and my swirling thoughts. I keep a journal, not every day, but regularly. I write in this blog, I've kept various blogs over the years. I've been in online forums where I've posted regularly in a daily update thread. I've even come across a gardening journal I kept for a few years of what I planted, what the weather was like. I obviously have an obsession to chronicle my life.
Over the years I have downloaded all this online journalling and have so many files. I could stitch them together to get an interesting view of the past twenty years of my life, from a writing point of view, as a mother (from parenting boards) and just about life in general. It would be reams and reams of words though, this blog alone takes over two hundred A4 pages.
Twenty years of blogs, 40 years of journals and over 30 years of poems. Which all basically add up to my life story. I can't imagine what I could do with it.
A friend recently wrote a memoir, a non-fiction meditation on her life. I say recently, but she obviously spent years writing it. I'll review it below. I can't imagine writing a memoir. I wouldn't know what angle to take or what theme to spin around. I have done lots of things, lived in some interesting places, lived through 50 years of events, I even taught a writing your life course for a couple of years and I'm no stranger to exposing my life through my poems, but I wouldn't know where to begin. What makes our lives interesting to others? What obsession can we share?
Or have I already begun? I'm tempted to start bringing together the different pieces year by year, to see what I was doing and where I was mentally. It would be a huge job, a distraction.
In my early journals, I didn't write about what was going on in the world. I was a teenager and was more focussed on what was going on in my own little bubble. I doubt that would have much of a wider appeal. Things get more interesting as I get older and better at writing, go to university, to Scotland, become an adult, enter a relationship and have children. Though I occasionally look over the parapet, I still focus on my own internal world, worries and dramas. And none of it is too dramatic, maybe not enough to write a memoir.
So I'll probably just keep writing, an archive of my life to leave behind. I'm sure it'll give my kids a laugh. Maybe it'll end up in a museum of Generation X - following my journey from eight tracks to X.com and beyond.
A quick review of Storm Pegs by Jen Hadfield as I've just finished it. I've mentioned here before that I'm not good with non-fiction. I try to read it but always leave the text unsatisfied. That sense of trying to make meaning of the randomness of our life, to wrap things together, not with a neat bow, but into a useful bundle of sticks often feels forced to me which is probably why I couldn't write one.
Storm Pegs follows the poet's life in Shetland as she tries to discover 'where am I?' As to be imagined, it's full of poetic wonderings at the Shetland landscape and sea, travels to different corners and islands, learning about the language, the culture and people. It's lush with details and unravellings.
Jen Hadfield fights against the idea that Shetland is isolated or remote and draws beautiful connections between the community, her neighbours and the creative scene in Shetland. But there is a sense that she's quite comfortable in being hunkered down in her caravan, strapped down against the elements and prefers that edge-of-the-world feeling, that the sparse spaces and distance are something she craves.
She doesn't try to show us how we should live, where to take your next holiday or how to find the poetic in your daily lives. This is the smallest glimpse of what her Shetland life is, make your own conclusions.
Jen is an amazing poet, with an eye for the small awkward details of the world, so I knew the writing would be exquisite. From her poetry, I knew she would draw me into the Shetland culture and wade through its language, scooping up glimmering fragments as she does glowing algae. I wasn't disappointed.
She also gives us a hint of the day-to-day, making a life where she has no history, where she can write her own story as Poet as a neighbour calls her. It's not always simple, of course, but she finds patterns of beauty in even cutting open worms when she needs a non-poetic job to pay the bills. It was lovely to wrap myself in her world for a short time and it left me wanting more. Maybe Jen should start a blog, lol. I wish her the best of luck in the next stage of her adventure.
Enjoy your weekend.
