December
Nourishment for the final month of the year
My social media feeds are brimming with posts about “how to get through winter”. I’ll be honest, I’ve never really considered winter as something to be “got through”. This may be because I can feel as utterly desolate on a bright sunny day as I can on a gloomy winter one (cheers weird waiting for diagnosis depressive illness) but I like to think it’s for more cheery reasons. Aside from the scurry of Christmas, I love the hug winding down of winter. The garden needs little attention beyond a tidy and a check to see if my geraniums have survived. Food is cooked long and slow, evenings are snug and low key, even my clothes demand a gentle awareness. It’s hard to be dynamic in a woollen jumper.
Outside the balance shifts too. The birds grow closer, weather dictates our days in a different way, giving an excuse to stay in rather than thwarting plans. I enjoy winter, and find it is over so very quickly – the first tips of iris reticulata will be showing in less than a month’s time.
I’ve set aside this winter as a time to nourish myself as a writer too. Having spent the year working on two small themed collections (I do struggle with the throwaway feel of the word pamphlet) I feel I’ve been living very much in the past, reworking old poems, revisiting old themes. I’m proud of both of these books, yet feel as though I’ve achieved nothing – they are in the limbo of publisher land, awaiting the yay or nay. There is nothing more to be done at this stage (although I am still working on both in preparation for resubmission!) but what I realise I need is to return to writing for the joy of it, to the nice stage of just making something and seeing how it turns out.
The bedrock of this nourishment is reading, of course. I have three new books to enjoy, Blackbird Singing at Dusk by Wendy Pratt, The Taste of Rain by Cherry Doyle and These are her thoughts as she falls by Louise Longson. I read poetry slowly, noticing details the way I notice tiny changes in my garden. I also love to have structure and a sense of discipline in my reading and to this end have undertaken a Writing Advent project. This is a super simple thing, whereby I read and write around a hundred words in response to what I’ve read. I’m late starting, which doesn’t matter a jot, but I’m already feeling the benefit of having a focus that forces me stop, read and write even if it’s just for half an hour. As well as reading, I’ve attended a couple of online book launches, and short workshops. My goal for next year is to be more present in the poetry world – a consequence of grief and general terror of other humans is that I do tend to hide away and I’m realising that nourishment comes from interaction with others as much as it does from books.
This week has also seen the tenth anniversary of the death of my brother. Grief from suicide is described as complicated grief, by dint of the fact that it brings so many emotions around why, what if, what could have been done – it’s not that the loss itself is more acute but the circumstances around the loss muddy the path of grief and healing. To mark this anniversary I made a recording of one of my favourite poems from Dust – I don’t honestly know why, but it’s been heartening to have so much care as a result. Grief becomes less acute over time, but the questions and wonderings never really go.
I feel peaceful about this final month of the year (along with a certain amount of trepidation – something bad always seems to happen in December but let’s hold on to the peace while it lasts) I have vague plans about what I want to change next year, ideas about how I can gain more joy from my writing and a real understanding of what I can achieve if I give myself permission to truly focus on my work. I also have an enormous amount of fairy lights to twinkle through the darkest days.
Find out more about Dust and buy one of the few remaining copies here