Please refer to exhibit A for how I have been feeling recently. Often out of air, but then, randomly, without any predictability, suddenly pumped up for a bit again. Have you not been feeling this way at times too with, you know, the news and, you know, the world and, you know the wildfires? Let me know, and also I’d love to hear how you are processing it.
So my apologies for not sending anything to your inbox for the last two weeks. I tell myself at times where I go quiet - to settle myself - that no one will notice, but that appears to not be the case and for that, I am grateful.
It’s not that I haven’t written to you, it’s just that I abandoned my missives halfway through as aforementioned air was sucked out of the very essence of me again. I’ve written a whole missive on ‘maybe you’re confused because it is confusing’… and a whole other one on how my anger often collapses into hopelessness.
No matter, I am sure they will weave their way into your inboxes in one form or another very soon.
In the meantime, I have things to share.
Like this utterly heart-filling conversation with Mohammed moussa, a journalist and poet from Gaza and founder of Gaza Poets Society who is here on Substack and has just released his latest collection, ‘Where to Lay this Heart’. I helped Moe to edit this book last year and finally and met him in person in January this year at a night of his poetry reading and open mic in London.
In this episode we chat about how poetry became his way of speaking to the world when he was unable to write or speak anything else. We had a lovely time sharing poems, including some from his collection and one of mine which I wrote after our meeting in January.
Listen here
0:00
-1:02:49
Last weekend I was at the Surrey Poet Laureateship Big Poetry Weekend talking about poetry and wellbeing alongside Nia Broomhall and Shaniqua Benjamin. As per usual, I was rubbish a taking photos, but here is one someone sent to me speaking to Kieran Edwards-Hocking about whether poetry can heal.
The lovely thing about being in a room with a bunch of people who are poets or who are interested in poetry is the curiosity of everyone there. People come at poetry from all different avenues, but they often understand it as this thing helps us to connect to our humanity. You have to be interested in the humanity of everyone to be interested in that. So the room is often full of warmth, humour, insight and, happily, sass. What a wonderful combination!
I don’t think I have shared the news that a couple of weeks ago I signed with Rohadi Nagassar for him to be my literary agent. You may recall I was well on the way to publish my book Hulp To Hope a while back so I am so glad to have things developing there again. My problem is I have a gazillion and one ideas and can often communicate them at the rate of a Sydney firework show on New Year’s Eve. That can be fun, but when you are trying to help a reader track through your book, distracting. I’m looking forward to the challenge of editing and curating all that I have so that it floats of the page.
Today I head to Suffolk for Wellness in the Wild. I am speaking this afternoon and tomorrow with my talk Words in the Wilderness. The talk culminates in 5 ideas of how you can use writing if you;ve never talked about feelings. If you’d like the prompts that I am sharing there - you can find them here. If you have a look, let me know which of the 5 prompts you have a go at this week.
I then head on holiday for 10 days with my family to Norway. This is a last hurrah before my 20 year old heads to an internship in Nashville for a year and my middle son heads to university for his first year. In the space of three days we will go from a very busy household of comings and goings to one solitary son left at home.
When I wrote this poem, those days seemed so far away, and yet they approach with ever increasing rapidity. Gulp.
I don’t know it yet:
That THIS
is the last time.
Eye-rolled away
into discarded dust.
I don’t know it yet.
Until,
maybe,
one mundane day of
Nothing Much
we’ll go to the park
and I’ll say,
“Shall I help you?”
And you’ll toss back
‘I can do it’.
A tumble of moments;
of mindless meaning
collecting around me
at break neck speed.
Tricked by a tromp d’oeil of
trickling minutes.
Pleas for
“One minutes peace”
replaced by
hours
of silent rooms.
I don’t know it yet.
I don’t know it yet.
If you're reading this with your own kids still small, or grown, or gone - what's the ordinary moment you didn't know was the last one, until it was?
After our holiday I am at Into The Wild Gathering in West Sussex to do two talks, one the same as in Suffolk and another called Permission to Feel Lonely. This is based on the in person workshop that I run here in Dorking and looks at the different kinds of loneliness we can have and the role that attachment plays in how lonely we are.
So even though I have been quiet, there has been a lot going on!
Next week I’ll be amongst the fjords so may well not manage to check in with my missive. I don’t like scheduling them ahead of time, as these emails are best, I feel, when I’m writing ‘in the moment’. So I won’t make any promises, but if you don’t hear from me, know that I am not ghosting you 😉.
Jacky x
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.