I’ve written little while immersed in the world of self-publishing. Even my journal has gaping, week-long lapses between short terse entries. As Poems from the Chatterbox reveals, I write to relieve pain, often. My writing, as my editor pointed out to me, is scriptotherapy.
So, in periods between emotional tooth extraction or fog-blind confusion, I rarely write. After all, happy songs are insipid, are they not? (See: Paul McCartney)
The Advice says, however, upon self-publication, my fans and readers will clamour for more. (They will? Fabulous!) And, the Advice says I better have something in the works, or I will lose self-pub momentum.
It does seem silly to say, sorry, I’ve nothing else for you. You’ll have to wait until the next bastard comes along and rips up my life; or until I begin excavation of another of my character defects, examining the shards and fragments of its sordid origin.
I wasn’t awake nights worrying about the Advice, and I don’t know why, but one morning in the bathtub (where I do my best meditation) an instruction came to me. Write poems about your grandmother, it said. Really? Granny? She’s rather boring, isn’t she?
As I turned the idea over in my mind ideas for poems broke off like sparks from a rusty blade against a grind stone.
And so, days later, I pick up my pen, and using a book she purchased in Stratford-Upon-Avon in 1972 for inspiration, I begin the poems. I really know very little about Granny, but my imagination does. I am writing my grandmother to life in me.