The Writing Circle

It seems we are called, of late, to self-reflection. The Vocal challenges on offer at present have created, for me, a kind of momentum. A natural progression perhaps, from reflecting on the work of others, through the impact of others’ work on our own lives, into consideration of what drives us to create our own work, and how that evolves. We each have our own reasons for being here, sharing pieces of ourselves. And I think mine become clear as I reflect on my writing journey.

I am here, largely, for the challenges. And I will tell you why. I am busy. I go to work, I look after my kids, whose neurodiversity brings extra challenges on top of the energy depleting work of parenthood. I try to move my body enough, but it is not enough. I try to keep my home sanitary, sometimes barely. I try to do all the things, including keeping my own head above water, though sometimes I dip under. I am busy, and I am stressed. I recognised, a wee while ago, that in all of this, my creative outlets were minimal, and that self-care might look like stirring up that stagnating pool and picking up a pen again. Metaphorically.

I failed.

I failed repeatedly. Despite good intentions, despite high hopes, despite, even, new stationary. And then I stumbled across Vocal. I don’t recall quite how I stumbled across Vocal, but the stumbling proved fortuitous for me. Because here were regular challenges – scaffolding, with deadlines. Prompts to get me started, and a glorious variety to keep me challenged and trying something new. And a community of people I would never have to face over coffee after showing them my poetry.

And I started to write. And this is meaningful to me why? Everyone here knows why, though the why might vary. That’s what we have in common, that the why is there at all. For me, I started to reclaim something that was mine when I was fewer things, to fewer people, and thus more wholly my own.

I started writing before my first decade was out. My early works were, if I say so myself, unlikely masterpieces from the pen of a young child. This is largely because they were works of staggering plagiarism. I re-wrote, with gusto, The Hobbit, Watership Down, and a series of books about a girl and her horse I do not even recall the title of. Immersed in the writing, I was aware that I had perhaps been inspired by other writers before me, but it was only on reading back that I was able to recognise that changing the proper nouns in a piece was not sufficient to claim originality. Never the less, I kept writing, and I improved. I attribute that improvement entirely to the fact that I also kept reading, but learnt the difference between inspiration and imitation.

The first piece, then, that I remember writing, that was markedly, assuredly, my own, I remember because it won a challenge. Not here, obviously. No one had the internet back then. It was early 1991, and my school ran a writing competition, and I won it. And I won it after being called into the headmistresses office and accused of cheating. I won it after my parents had been called, to assure the school they had not helped me (and they had not helped me). I won it fair and square, and possibly only because I used the word “opalescent”. This, according to the headmistress, is an advanced word for a child just turned 13.

I recall writing the piece, sat at a fold out table, lamplit against the dark fourth floor window, in the one room all four of us, my mum, dad, brother and I, were sharing. Foam mattresses filled the floor at my feet, and London’s lights dotted the dark beyond. We had recently moved back to the UK, I had recently started my 11th school, as well as my periods, and I was not, as you may imagine, entirely thriving socially. My piece was not a story at all. It was an emotional outpouring. It was a tale of literal escape, a fleeing through the changing landscape. The beginning was that I began, the middle was that I ran, and the end was that I ended. Nothing else happened. Except for me, this had been an exercise in doing on the page what I needed to, and could not, do in real life. My physical body had sat still, but my heart had raced with my pen, and with each imagined step I had laid my jumbled cacophony of feelings out along a track that I was tracing on paper. Not only that, but in situating my flight in the natural world, I had lent the acceptance of the indifferent landscape to my feelings, and had framed them in beauty. I felt better for it. Exorcised. Able, afterwards, to step back, the observing self, and recognise the storm without being buffeted by it so much.

I went on writing through my teens. It was useful to me, yes, but it also became a source of gratification. Humans seem to share a drive to express. We paint and sculpt, we move and make music, and we develop language. Then we make drawn symbols to represent the vocal symbols that weren’t enough. We yearn to express. Perhaps driven by an ever-present consciousness of our own aloneness, we are frantic and perpetual in offering some piece of ourselves to someone else, in taking in the pieces offered by others. As I passed through adolescence, my writing changed. It became less a vehicle for exorcism and more a means of experimentation. That observing self became less absorbed with how things do feel, and more concerned with how things might feel. And then, “how might I respond in that circumstance” started to become “how might someone else, with these other experiences, respond in that circumstance?” Inevitably, though, those pieces of me were infused through every piece. We are magnificent in our capacity to imagine the world through the lens of another life. But that imagining is always filtered through our own lives.

When I was 17, I wrote a piece through the lens of a character in a book we were studying at school. It was a homework task, but I will not exclude it from this account on that basis - I have, it seems, always valued boundaries to play within. I wrote my piece, on paper, as was still the norm, and on the day of handing it in, I was horrified to hear our teacher say that she would pick some of us to read our work. I avoided her gaze like the shrinking violet I have bloomed into, but her gaze fell on me nonetheless. Head bowed, cheeks crimson, I read my piece, a first person perspective tale of a woman staring down the barrel of a gun, clutching her young child to her. At the end of my reading, I looked up and my world pivoted. The room was arranged with desks in a squared ring, and so, at every angle all about me, I saw faces, turned towards me, fixed on mine, in absolute silence. I might even have found use for the word agape here. I had, by evoking with my words an experience with sufficient emotional intensity, silenced a room full of 17 year olds. It was mortifying. And one of the greatest heartbeat moments of my life.

It passed, of course, and at 18, I largely stopped writing. I grew up, just as Peter Pan feared. And yet, here I am again, reclaiming my creativity, offering up a piece of me.