lora stimson {writing}

SUDDENLY JUNE

03.06.12

It's suddenly June. 2 weeks until the festival I help coordinate. 9 weeks until my sister's wedding. 12 weeks until our due date. I have lots to do. However. There is a tension between what I intend to do and what I actually achieve. For example.

What I intended to do: clean the bathroom floor.

What I actually did: created illustrations of my husband's and my face for some artwork I'm making for the baby's room.

Yep.

LEARNING TO LEAD

29.03.12

It's been a while since I wrote. It's been too long really, but I won't unleash a guilty excuse-storm, I will just say that life gets busy and blogs suffer.

This week I have been away on a week long Clore residential, at which me and 24 others are learning to be leaders - or perhaps discovering that we've been leaders all along and leaning to come to terms with it.

Rather than talking about all the mind boggling things I have learned over the week - management styles, personality types, creative development - I have chosen to process all the other, ancillary, peripheral, wonderful things I have discovered. My top 5:

1. That people are generally nice (would like to amend this to *very* nice)

2. That there are people who are paid to sleep at Sellafield (I am going to write a story or poem about this)

3. That playing it safe can sometimes be more of a risk

4. That it takes a lot of practice to be the best version of yourself

5. That ducks can be incredibly noisy at 2.30 in the morning

THINGS I GOOGLED TODAY

04.11.11

james flint

apple pie recipe

couplets

I also googled my own name and found someone in 2005 saying nice things about me. I was excited at first but then a bit depressed, because it was 2005 and no one had responded. And they are still some of my best songs.

So I googled 'laughing cats' to cheer myself up. Try it.

CORNFLAKE GIRL

30.10.11

This is the title of my newest short story. I'm not going to tell you what it's about as it's still a surprise. It didn't start life as a lyric related exersize, it started as a story about cornflakes and then a girl appeared and the title seemed apt. Especially since Tori Amos is one of my favourites. The story, much like a cornflake, is small and sweet and crunchy. I hope to finish it soon and will post an extract on my fiction page. Yum.

SAYING GOODBYE TO MELBOURNE

11.09.11

The Poetry Takeaway is heading for Rose Street Market in Fitzroy. Walking around Fitzroy, we wish we’d spent more time here. Even the florid Victoriana architecture is growing on Luke. It’s full of funky bars and shops selling vintage and handmade things. But, we haven’t got time to stop. We meet Luis and Ashley, who run Overload Poetry Festival and have set up a stall for us. We have a table, pens and paper, a typewriter and a hand-chalked A-frame. The Poetry Takeaway is Tim’s brainchild. It has been across the country and is usually housed in an actual takeaway van. But, the budget wouldn’t allow shipping that over, so this table is our home for the day.

The premise is simple: you order a poem on any subject, go off for around 20 minutes and come back to collect it – for free. It’s a bright sunny day and the market is bristling. The other stalls sell beautiful handmade oddities, the kind of things you can’t justify buying for yourself so you buy for someone as a gift and then regret not keeping for yourself. A girl called Bronwyn is our first customer. Afterwards, she writes a lovely review: http://slamup.blogspot.com/2011/09/i-couldnt-help-it-i-cried-bronwyn.html

That evening, a triple bill at The Wheeler Centre. The crowd are small but appreciative and the poets are sparkling as ever. Afterwards, we gather some poetry friends; our Takeaway mate Ezra Bix, Luis and Ashley from Overload and local poet Geoff Lemon and go to a small, effortlessly cool bar in the city. Hannah, Geoff, Ezra and I quietly read poems into each others ears. Behind the bar a guy from New Jersey plays vinyl.

My hand drawn sign

12.09.11

It’s our last day in Melbourne. We pack our huge suitcases and bundle over to the Wheeler Centre, where we set up camp for the day. I go and meet Paul from Australian Poetry and say hi to Ashley from Overload and Jenny from Melbourne Writers Festival, who are also in the building – exhausted.

We spin through the city streets in a taxi, watching the high risers slope into the distance, and take the freeway to the airport. Twenty four hours later we will be home.

MELBOURNE, AGAIN, 2011

11.09.11

Back in Melbourne I feel as though I’ve returned home. Sydney is big and exciting and anonymous, whilst Melbourne is somewhere between Norwich and San Francisco, I am told. We use our Friday like a Sunday. Hannah roasts a chicken and we sit around most of the day reading, writing, talking. Early evening we head out to Fitzroy Town Hall, where the Overload Poetry Festival is launching. The building lives up to its town hall status; a huge, Victorian-gothic building with high ceilings, chandeliers, wood panelled rooms. The launch goes well but everyone is tired and we’re glad to get back, after the 5am start that morning.

On Saturday we take the tram out to Canning Street. I have found that hotels in Australia are misleading, since they’re nearly always just bars. The Dan O’Connell hotel is a case in point; a pub on a corner in a funky suburb and definitely not a hotel. The gig is really informal. Locals drink at the bar in the same room and to start with the background noise is distracting, depressing. But when Hannah starts, everyone falls silent. This domination is wonderful to watch. Tim’s set has everyone transfixed, and in stitches. The loud people on the table behind us have been won over. Luke ends the evening and afterwards people come to tell the poets how much they liked it. Alongside them, two local poets piqued my interest. Amy Bodossian, a innate performer whose work has flashes of brilliance and Geoff Lemon, who does a really wonderful list poem about Sao Paulo. Geoff Lemon gives us a lift back into the city in his station wagon and we find an expensive Italian restaurant where Luke haggles us free wine and bruscetta. Then it’s time to sleep again.

SYDNEY 2011

07.09.11

In Sydney, I have never been so confused by a bed sheet. I am so tired that for the first two days I don’t even try to see the Opera House. I dream I am in the home of Pippa from Home and Away. I dream I find a bundle of kittens in my back garden in Norwich. They are so tiny that I wonder if they’re actually hamsters. My own cat bats one around as if it were a dried leaf. This is the one I choose to rescue and nurse back to health. At one stage it turns as clear as water and I think to myself, this is like the kind of strange thing that happens in my dreams. I am not yet aware that I am dreaming, which is rare for me.

Last night we had the strangest, prettiest gig ever, in the basement of a huge sandstone building that reminds us of Edinburgh. The Red Room Company uses the space for Clubs and Societies; an eccentric project that revolves around providing space for coin collectors and girls who hate horses and ghost hunters; weird and wonderful clubs and societies. They are a Sydney based poetry project organisation that works with education and delivers poetry projects in a really innovative and interesting way. Their basement room is called the Clubhouse; a chamber of ancient brick. It has been inhabited by an artist in residence and the ceiling is hung with swathes of sheer material and bunches of jasmine, which have died and dried. There are clusters of candle jars in the corner, a bookshelf full of poetry, a fish bowl with a poem slicked to its inside wall. It is like Hannah Walker’s house. We have four audience members; a mother and daughter from Canberra and two guys in their twenties. There are also six people from Red Room and us four poets, so in this tiny space we form a rather lovely crowd. I read too; they made me agree to it whilst tipsy the previous night. I enjoy this immensely. The space is so particular, so delicate and beautiful and unusual that I worry it is only conducive to a particular type of poetry. This is so wrong, the performances are all fantastic and well received. Tim headlines, leaving everyone effervescent afterwards and excited to talk to us all. On the way home we buy sushi and congratulate ourselves.

Today, once I have outwitted my bed sheet, I plan to go and touch the Opera House.