Uncategorized

Quiet loud quiet

November 18, 2018 — Leave a comment

Any time the season changes we remember, because we can see, how things that were hidden can be revealed and how many ways we can change and be changed. Maybe it’s completely normal, for example, to have had languages that your tongue can’t speak any more, to have lost accents and memories, to move without conscious effort from one code to another.

image of hampstead heath in autumn

At some point in childhood it made sense to become invisible by fitting in: even as your sister convinced her playground colleagues that we had our own lion back home; or, having been born and initially raised in Broad Hull, to have said of you, ‘she can’t do an English accent.’

I miss the dust devil audience for We Are Dey Champions. I miss the kreosote ginnel to Oldfleet. But they are there in each question that begins, ‘Are you’ or ‘Where’.

Look, it’s the same for us all.

I still drop my hs when I can.

I put them back in if it’s going to help.

Within you there is another you, and within her another invisible her, and so on, and on, forever.

Sites.

August 19, 2018 — 1 Comment

I’ve been thinking about the places where experience, the history of our experiences, sits within our bodies.

In the hips, so that a yoga stretch can make memories surface.

In the spine, so that something unresolved can make you unable to unfurl.

ceiling light

In the centre of your chest, where your heart is, even though it’s just a pump, proven quite easily so by a simple test. Just a pump that we can feel sink when we hear bad news, or that grows heavy with sorrow. What’s happening inside? Does your blood get thicker so it can’t move so well? That this amazing muscle suddenly adds fibres to itself and fits and starts and murmurs?

We might not have souls that mimic our bodies, pinned like a paper clothes pattern to our edges. Our consciousness could be in our hearts, though the neurons in our brains do the work. And these places in our bodies, these repositories, are they like rock pools washed in and out by a tide? Filled now by a wave of consciousness, and left with the sandy residue of a past.

What anemones flower in those places in the dark of the middle of the night?

What can be re-opened. What can’t be lost.

I’ve been thinking about changing the title of my book in progress from ‘outrigger’ to something about a house of many rooms, after a bible note I heard at a friend’s funeral this week gone. This life is only one of those rooms. Imagine if we could open the doors and walk between each one.

We could say see you, instead of goodbye.

Asking

March 1, 2016 — 1 Comment

It’s an ‘Ask’. It’s what you write so that someone says ‘Yes.’

Proposals I’ve written in my dance heritage job sometimes don’t have a strong enough ask, or clear enough. They don’t help someone see why they should care, never mind give money or other kinds of support. It’s a skill to figure out what sort of Ask leads to getting what you need. I’ve been improving. Sometimes the swell of support has even breached its banks and I flip like fish unrivered until I get my regain my bearings.

What inspires a bound from No to Yes?

This week gone I’ve had to think of different ways to ask for a work trip abroad, to write a job description and, most difficult of all, I’ve had to think of a way to ask an agent whose client list I adore, ‘Will you read my work? Will you please?’

I went to the 2016 Curtis Brown and Conville and Walsh Discovery Day at Foyles, first page of Outrigger curled in my bag and a 30 second pitch memorised. Amelie* and I had the same time slot. We met first for lunch to calm ourselves down. We talked about work, about career moves, about trying to live in London when you’re not an oligarch. Becalmed we went to Foyles. Too calm. We were convinced that we were early when in fact we were about to be late, oops.

Foyles is a beautiful bookstore. We queued in its well dazzled by books. I was holding it together. Then I was shown to my agent, turns out she is my dream agent, ahhahaha yikes. And she asks me to pitch my book and my memory slips away, and I somehow reel it back and I am floundering but she likes my page and she says, ‘Send it to me.’

I can’t ask for more than this.

 

*(superstar writer you’ll read a lot about one day)