Holding our breaths
How will the world look tomorrow?
Today is election day in America, and it feels hard to think about much of anything else.
There is something so surreal in how a single tick on a ballot translates, bit by bit, into terrifyingly divergent futures.
This wonderful poem, “Voting as a Fire Extinguisher” by Kyle Tran Myhre has been making the rounds on my social media.
Here’s hoping we can put out the flames.
What’s new
A poem for election day: Holding Our Breaths
A poem I wrote yesterday, inspired by an email from my water company: Drought
Finally published: Odds and Ends 9 - interesting things I stumbled across in December 2020
A seasonal throwback
It was three years ago, whilst recuperating from chemotherapy for the first time that I rediscovered poetry as a writer.
I had loved writing poems as a child, but when my homework load grew as a tween/teen, the mental time and space required for poetry seemed to evaporate.
This was the second poem I wrote on what feels like the start of my proper journey as a poet.
This wasn’t my first adult poem. I had written one some weeks before, but thought it might be a fluke. This was the poem that showed me that it wasn’t.
I was trying to write a blog post talking about the magic of Autumn and how it looked to me after what it had been through, but I couldn’t make it work.
The ideas insisted on coming out as a poem instead. This became Autumn Is My Favourite Time Of Year, She Said.
It is quite special to me, because this marked a new chapter in my writing journey. And it is nice to think about beautiful things in the midst of the other chaos in the world.
How It’s Going
I have good news! Amidst the normal health ups and downs, I got some lovely news.
A play that I wrote, Society of Dogs, made the longlist of the Bruntwood Prize, the biggest playwriting competition in the UK. I feel in many ways my creative work has been on hold for the past few years, so this was a wonderful surprise! (Maybe next time around I can creep my way up to the shortlist?)
Good Art Friends
I still find myself rereading this on a semi-regular basis: An Oral History of the Making of Hamlet by Daniel Pollack-Pelzner. On top of bring a brilliant thinker of all things theatre, he is also a person of great integrity who stood up to some serious abuses of power within academia. He and his work unquestionably deserve to be celebrated.
Playwright Paul Sirett recently released his book A Playwright’s Manifesto. He is one of the most gifted teachers of playwriting I’ve had the privilege to encounter, and I can’t wait to read it.
I recently met poet Alex Corrin-Tachibana in a workshop, and attended the online reading to mark the publication of her first collection Sing Me Down From The Dark. The poems are beautiful explorations of the decade she spent living in Japan.
Sending lots of love and good wishes to everyone who needs it right now.
For now,
Alli