She said, I said I love Margaret Atwood. She is one of those writers whose words ruthlessly wrap around me the moment I turn the first page and plummet my mind and body deep down into the darkness of the world she imagines so that, as she suggests, we might “bring something back out to…
Author: insister_xz0h57
Fashion advice from Jeanette Winterson
Today I REAL-ly did wear a second-hand taffeta green dress I bought from Vinnies to work. On the way from the carpark to a room of my own on the sixth floor, my silver sandals REAL-ly did start to break. I REAL-ly did take a pair of scissors and cut off the loose straps –…
Remember, love
A terzanelle for Lynette Love. It’s a word I hear my Mum say a lot. “Hi Beth, how are you love?”, she asks when she picks up the phone with a soft tone that makes me think and wonder that maybe she is smiling. “That’s good love”, she says as she listens to my latest…
Villanelle: Fixing freedom in five tercets and a quatrain
In love with words and poetry; it’s a matter of life and death A word is dead When it is said, Some say. I say it just Begins to live That day. Emily Dickinson Photo: “Emily Dickinson’s white dress“ Ursula K. Le Guin insister-ed that “love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it…
The monster within revisited: A villanelle
At 2:18am At 2:18am the world and her heart are ever so dark, thoughts circling like a hungry pack of wolves, “Fancy a dance with death?” she hears the night remark. The wind grazes her with its teeth and taunts her, while her sister in the room next door snores and slumbers with…
Shelving stories, storying shelves
Shelves hold things … Ursula K. Le Guin maintained that words and books “hold things” and bear meaning – just like a medicine bundle, together “holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.” Wandering through the lowly lit stacks of secondhand books in Archives Fine Books in Charlotte Street on…
She decided to resist and insistered on structure
When women speak truly they speak subversively — they can’t help it: if you’re underneath, if you’re kept down, you break out, you subvert. Ursula K. Le Guin, Bryn Mawr College commencement speech, 1986, published in the essay collection Dancing At The Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places, 1989. Ursula K. Le…
In homage to Mary Shelley
Writing: In love with theory, words and language
Some of my most loved Ursula Le Guin words features the word love. “Love”, she writes in The lathe of heaven, “doesn’t just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new”. Trying to decide on the cover for my new book, these words kept returning…
Writing, life: In secret whispers
Writing, life: In secret whispers She writes in secret whispers Speaking herself as heroine of her own story The diary holds the key to free her soul Her friend listens intently as she scribes Today I did this, tomorrow I will do that She writes in secret whispers She promises herself more than a fairy…