The No Idea Garden of Remembrance

The most popular steamboat spot for writers now is the No Idea Garden of Remembrance. It's an oversized lot. Every writer thinks it is his or hers exclusively, and none of their guests have known it before. The host forgets how they came to know about the garden in the first place, or that among the invited are other writers too.

People who live on the periphery of writers get to know it well. Each mound, every name, the patterns on the concrete steps. But to say this is a familiar ground was almost always detrimental (writers as such frail creatures). They ooh and aah, to the writers’ salvation. This is how muses hustle.

Some wannabe writers and muses hang about the garden for the chance of bumping into lone writers who may be in need of expression, an ear into which to pour out their loss of writerly vigour or a too-long unproductive streak. It is this infertility that takes the writers, both published and self-published, back to the garden every time, expecting it to be a riveting and inspiring place, just like some yesterdays ago.

In their grief, the writers, of course, do not realise the standstill, looking around them at one slain darling after another, one corpse of a story saved for next time after the next, hungry for produce. After all ideas, ideas spark ideas, do they not?

The guests, on the other hand, know better. They realise full well how long this garden episode has been. It might be years until the host remembers to let go and finally get another piece of writing going.

It does not matter. Life here is regularly new. Sometimes they go there for barbecues. Until some writer says, ‘I miss having steamboats’. The supporters smile, praise and stew pots of encouragement. Words, words and more words. The writers take all of them in, vaping hot, eating all they can.

This piece was originally published in Poetry & Miscellany