Two years

Dear me, has it really been that long? Well, not quite, but almost.

The last post here was October 2021. In the interim, I've managed a few posts over at Coastalblog, and I've kept up a diary, but that's been the sum total of my writing. My practice has dwindled to nothing.

Well, not quite nothing; intention, but inaction.

I've kept a diary almost as a trail of breadcrumbs back to the idea of writing as a creative endeavour. Hoping that one day the act of making marks on paper might lead to some synapses firing somewhere. Writing as muscle memory.

I have always been too inconsistent with my writing to consider myself serious about it, over the last couple of years that inconsistency has hardened into a consistent nothing. I could make excuses and say that life has got in the way, but it is also true that I have allowed life to get in the way. It is furthermore true that I have separated writing and life, as though it were not part of it.

But it's still in there somewhere.

Keeping a diary has reminded me that I have always regarded writing as a way of looking at existence. My diary entries are broadly factual, an aide memoire, but every once in a while there is a flash of something other, a brief aside into philosophy, and attempt to raise the day above the quotidian (without fictionalising my own existence, which would defeat the object). Recently, I started titling diary entries, a way of inserting a line I'd heard that day (my favourite so far being the day which featured a trip to Southport, where the daytime karaoke by the Marine Lake ensured that day will always be titled "Little bit of Engelbert there, Ladies and Gentlemen") but also a way of contextualising the day. I realised that this was a creative act, it felt like I'd taken a step back down the road.

A few weeks later I started a file for writing bursts, not much, a few words here and there. This morning, I thought about writing a poem, I wondered if I could. I put a few lines down, I broke it back to basics. I'm not going to put it here. But it felt like another step back. This afternoon, I'm doing this.

These are tentative steps at best, but they are steps nevertheless. For a long while I didn't feel I had anything to say any more. Now I feel I might. We'll see. Either way, it feels good to be back.