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Entries in Dylan Thomas (3)

Tuesday
Dec242013

What is your launch pad?

By the time Christmas Day arrives, I will have listened to A Child’s Christmas in Wales, read by Dylan Thomas (accept no substitutes!), several times. Chances are that Patrick Stewart reading A Christmas Carol will also have played more than once, along with all of my favourite carols.

Word Count: 334                                              Reading time: 1-2 minutes

These stories and music are part of annual rituals that have been in my blood for as long as I can remember. As a child I unquestioningly accepted them as part of the greater Christian teaching, an obligatory part of the WASP culture in which I grew up. Better informed now, I know that many of my adored seasonal traditions predate Christ.

Irish Celts have marked the shortest day of the year at Newgrange for over 5,000 years. Likewise the Druids started observing winter solstice at Stonehenge and the Neolithic Scots at Maeshowe thousands of years before Christ was born. As nights lengthened, Ancient Romans honoured the god Saturn with twelve days of feasting and gift-giving in the festival of Saturnalia. Before the Christian church integrated local customs, Pagans welcomed the sun’s rebirth by decorating with evergreen and holly boughs and toasting spiced cider.

Cultures are grounded in tradition, to comfort people with something solid and certain when life is inherently chaotic and messy. That’s why I love this time of year: it beguiles me into thinking that life has a few mooring points, a place where I can pull in for safe harbour and predictable patterns. It’s there I find renewal, the chance to catch my breath if only for a few minutes, before launching again into the pandemonium of real life.

While I am comforted by the singing of familiar songs and the soft glow in the fireplace, I remind myself not to be lulled into complacency. As Jiddu Krishnamurti said, Tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure it is in decay.

Where do you go to restore your creative energy? How do you avoid letting your sanctuary become your prison?

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Photo from iStock: Stonehenge Silhouetted by urbancow

Thursday
Sep272012

Jump!

 

Word count: 361                     Reading time: 1-2 minutes

Kingsley Amis said of Dylan Thomas: “A pernicious figure, one who has helped to get Wales and Welsh poetry a bad name…and done lasting harm to both.”

Paul Theroux reviewed Erica Jong’s novel Fear of Flying in a similar tone: “This crappy novel, misusing vulgarity to the point where it becomes purely foolish, picturing women as a hapless organ animated by the simplest ridicule, and devaluing imagination in every line…represents everything that is to be loathed in American fiction today.”

That’s the thing about writing – no matter how good you are, someone will disapprove and will not mind broadcasting their contempt. It’s very much a leap of faith to work and hope that someone, some day, somewhere, will eventually value what has taken you months or years to produce. 

When you decide to write, you have to grow a thick hide so that people’s thoughtless comments don’t stop you in your tracks. I gave one of my first short stories to an online critique group and an American writer replied, in clearly challenging tones, that he’d never heard of the bird called a crimson rosella. Because that one detail was inauthentic to him, he took it as grounds to tear apart the rest of the work. I shrank at his criticism – for a little while. Then I quit the group and continued writing for the benefit of one close friend and my darling husband. Nervously I sent the next two stories to a competition where they received minor awards. The point is, if I hadn’t been resilient and just a little bit brave, I might have stopped writing altogether.

Imagine if Dylan Thomas had let Amis’s criticism stop him or if Jong had tossed writing because of Theroux’s fine sensibilities. Maybe you’re the next literary sensation but how will you know if you don’t just jump in and do it?  And keep doing it…

Soren Kierkegaard said, “To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose one’s life.”

Do unkind comments from any of your early readers haunt you still? What helps you dare to continue?

***

Photos by: Oleg Kozlov (above) & Kafusfoto

Friday
Dec232011

Tell me a story

Word count: 290         Reading time: 2 mins.

Christmas! Does any other holiday inspire so many stories? If you live in the Western world it’s hard to be untouched by the manic net of this season. What a rich opportunity for writers.

We could start with the ancient stories, the Christian ones that blended with existing pagan myths. These tales could be retold. There are many websites that provide different versions of the evolution of modern traditions and all of them are open to interpretation and flights of fancy. (the real origin of Christmas).

Stories might come to us come from the shimmering pages of the recent past. If you think that a holiday recollection is bound to be prosaic then maybe Dylan Thomas reading A Child's Christmas in Wales will change your mind.

Contemporary stories might float past us, muffled by the ringing of bells or the impatient growl of traffic. This week the crowds jostled me into two people who were speaking quietly. I caught partial sentences. He: “No one should complain about death.” She, with strong feeling: “Not in the morgue!” I’ll never know what came before or after that intriguing exchange so I may just have to invent it.

Maybe your Christmas story is one of exclusion because of faith. Maybe you have no family or no friends with whom to celebrate, so yours is an orphan’s tale. Maybe the conflict of Christmases past makes you shun the holiday: another starting point for a story.

If Christmas dinner is ruined or you’re snowed in for forty-eight straight hours without power, will those events inspire a future scene in your work? Can you turn this year’s roses and thorns into fine tension?

Enjoy the holiday but don’t forget your notebook.