Skip to main content

Those small stones...

... not the forgotten ones I find in the corners of coat pockets or the ones I collect on solitary walks (along with tufts of sheep wool and pieces of driftwood) but the ones I've written during January for the last two years. The ones that Fiona and Kaspa, from Writing Our Way Home encourage everyone to write: read about the project here.

You can read the small stones I wrote in January 2011 on the NaSmaStoMo link above (National Small Stones Month). January 2012's daily observations, dreams, memories and captured moments are here.

I don't plan to do anything with these when I first write them. They are writing practice: free of judgement, editing or plans to publish although some of them do find their way out of this blog record and onto the pages of journals or into a potential MSS. But it's the spontaneous writing within a disciplined structure of 31 days that's the most rewarding and enjoyable aspect of this project: the sense of freedom I feel to write anything.

My grandaughter used to stay a lot with me when she was younger. 'I can do anything I like when I stay at your house,' she once said to me. Hang on... strict bath-times and bed-times, meal-times always at the table, no TV in the morning. Are you mixing me up with someome else?! But she obviously felt completely free within those boundaries. That's how I feel during Fiona and Kaspa's January writing challenges.

year end
the grass crisp
with frost



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Consolidation & Simplification

Since January 2020 all my work - haiku writing, poetry, prose, imaginative and non-fiction writing - has been posted on my website   Lynne Rees .  Please feel free to share anything from this archive, or my main site, but I'd be grateful if you could credit me as the writer and link back to the source.  Thank you šŸ™ Lynne 

haiku: a poetry of absence or an absence of poetry?

The following paper was presented at the PALA (Poetics and Linguistics Association) 2015 Conference at Canterbury University, Kent, UK on 16th July 2015.  Abstract: HAIKU: A POETRY OF ABSENCE OR AN ABSENCE OF POETRY? Minimalism in Contemporary English Language Haiku The popular perception of haiku as three lines of 5, 7 and 5 syllables persists in the mainstream poetry world and beyond as if nothing has changed since the first Western translators counted the onji, or sounds, in traditional Japanese haiku and created that misconstrued but enduring template fleshy enough to support a traditional English syntax. And while putting flesh on bones might be a useful metaphor for the construction of formal and free verse, contemporary English language haiku practice is often more akin to the trimming and polishing of bones to create a form where point of view, adjectives and even verbs may be dispensed with entirely.  This 30 minute presentation will analyse exampl...