Does anyone else’s brain still stubbornly file things according to academic years? I guess as a parent to two school age children that the summer holidays are still the break point of the year where things dramatically change pace. Anyway, it feels timely to do a bit of reflecting on what feels like a bit of a turning point year.
This time last year, I had just finished my 4 year stint as a town councillor. It was a job I enjoyed and was good at, but I could see how I was continuously getting wrapped up in more and more volunteering opportunities. Despite having the intention for all of my adult life to prioritise my writing more, I was still finding so many ways to productively procrastinate from this task. The decision not to stand for re-election was a deliberate way of shifting the focus of my time towards my creative career.
After I put this website together, I spent last summer looking at networking opportunities around me. I went to Folio Creative network events in the New Forest. I reached out to Artfulscribe, SPUDworks and Culture in Common. I attended and performed at Moving Voices open mic nights. In general, all of these were positive experiences that made me feel much more part of the creative community. Even for someone as introverted and socially awkward as me, there’s a power and ease that comes with just being a familiar face. Those with better social skills will seek you out in those big free-for-all networking events if you just turn up enough. And one of those chats led to me running a workshop for ArtsWork at a youth centre in Totton, which was a great learning curve if nothing else – I know a lot about what I’d try to do differently next time in that sort of setting.
I will credit myself with emailing out to people directly. I had an idea to host a besea.n event for ESEA heritage month. It was really a bit too late to get anything going for 2023, but it was a great starting point for conversations. In particular, my chat with Matt from Artfulscribe, was incredibly worthwhile. It’s just wonderful when you meet people who really want to understand how you work, what you want to work on, what empowerment opportunities might be useful to you. A one-hour conversation with him really changed the course of my year.
Matt suggested that I apply to Write Beyond Borders, a scheme which I hadn’t heard of. This transnational writing development programme aimed to bring South Asian writers and diaspora writers together, providing one-on-one mentorship and a series of 12 masterclasses by 12 different professional authors. After I got over my mixed-race anxiety, I applied and was accepted into the programme. Which just felt phenomenal really. It was another affirmation of this path I had set myself on for the year.
Being part of Write Beyond Borders did trigger a fair amount of imposter syndrome. But the masterclasses ended up being an exercise in affirmation. It felt like a reset to my brain back to University days, and with the delight that I could very much keep up.
The support of a mentor who was just there to support me in what I most wanted to achieve was such a game-changer. I’m so used to fitting myself into existing tick boxes, and it made me think about my goals in a very different way. I had been cautiously tip-toeing around building up my regular writing habits. The big goal was to be a novelist, but that felt like too big a leap by myself. I planned to do an apprenticeship phase where I worked on my poetry, then short stories, then a novella, before embarking on a novel (building trust in myself by finishing things). There was solid logic around those steps, but it was a fear-based logic. With the support of my mentor Aiysha Jahan, I felt like it was going to be possible for me to learn how to write a novel and achieve the momentum to finish it. What pops into my head is that scene from the first episode of Scrubs where Turk is grabbing the giant needle and telling JD, ‘Learn by doing. Learn by doing’. It’s funny really that writing a novel feels so scary to my brain when I haven’t even got the risk of stomach fluid spurting out like a mini sprinkler. But writing out of your comfort zone is vulnerability, and that’s a mode that I’m (ironically) working on getting more comfortable with.
In January, I had the absolute delight of being invited to do a 20 minute reading of my poetry for Placeholder Poetry. This was brilliant, it really stretched my performing muscles in a different way, and gave me a prompt to finish a piece I’d had in my head for several years. Because Wire Wool events were hosting, they were holding a fundraiser raffle that I was asked to contribute a prize to and I ended up making a poetry zine of my readings that night which was tremendously fun. I called the collection ‘This is What Healing Feels Like’. And that kind of says it all really. A small collection of poems that started life in the depths of postnatal depression being transformed into artwork and now living in someone else's home. I also had some lovely feedback that evening from people connecting with the poems. I feel very grateful for the experience, and also very proud of the work. For someone who never considered themselves a poet, I worked really very hard on understanding the form more deeply and crafting a selection of poems that I felt really conveyed something.
Placeholder came at really important time in the year for me. My personal life had been rocked by a sudden bereavement, and there were other unrelated things coinciding that were overloading my plate. I had a lot of pressing issues to attend to. I dropped my writing. I got on the brink of a major burn out. Putting together the poetry zine was a tangible thing I could point to as a piece of work I had done to show some progress in spite of everything else that was going on.
Work on my novel had slowed to a crawl at this point. At the point that the bereavement happened, I hadn’t even finished a first draft of chapter one, and I was pretty unhappy with it. As I was writing I was feeling pretty sure that some elements of the main character's tone of voice were off and I wasn’t entirely sure what to try next. I think if I wasn’t part of Write Beyond Borders this may well have turned into a failure for the chart. But luckily, continued encouragement from Aiysha helped me to carry on even if it was in spurts and stops. By the time we came to the official end of Write Beyond Borders I hadn’t even sent a single piece of writing out of the two I was supposed to have sent in that time for feedback. But when it came to the celebration evening I had reworked the start of the chapter to an extent that I was ok sharing it, and the feedback I received there helped give me a bit of faith in my writing skills again. The emotional journey feels like ¾ of the writing journey at least. Your ability to battle self-doubt and any other life demons impacts output like nothing else.
I think some of my major lessons from this year are the importance of writing community and support. This is the ingredient that I’ve been lacking since my time at university, and this is the addition I’ve made this year. Slowly but surely, I’m increasing my network, increasing the strength of the support I have access to.
Another connection I’ve made this year has been with Davina Quinlivan. Davina is a fellow British Burmese author, and I had the joy of reading her book Shalimar and realizing that our specific ethnic backgrounds are incredibly similar. It’s not an experience I’ve ever had, and it’s just amazing to be able to talk to someone who understands certain things about me. There’s a shorthand and resonance I’ve not had before. It’s one of those things where this writing journey has impacted my life way beyond my actual writing. Even outside of the power of writing your stories for yourself, there are so many ways that going on this journey can change your life for the better.
As I approached the summer my nervous system started recovering a bit more. My momentum picked up again with my writing, and now I feel like it’s clicking in a different way to earlier this year. It’s probably the subject for a blog or two by itself. There’s really so much to learn about how you best work. I’m incredibly pleased to be chipping away consistently, and I’m feeling excited again about the project.
A lot of the other things I’ve been doing recently looks ahead to next year. I played a key role in setting up a peer mentoring writing group from our Write Beyond Borders gang. Developing more close relationships and workshopping more of my writing in progress is a definite goal for me for next year. I’ve also applied for grant funding (I made it to the shortlist of the Grand Plan application – top 40 out of 1100 applications which is pretty great), and been thinking some more about workshops again. That networking conversation with Artfulscribe came good again, as they contacted me about doing something for the New Forest Literature Festival which I’m really excited to do. And through Davina I’ve been connected with Paper Nation and been awarded a residency spot with them which is something I am very honored and excited by.
Excited seems to be the key word popping up here. And writing all of this down I’m just floored by how much has changed in the space of a year, the variety of different opportunities that have come my way, and how much the future is opening up. This time a year ago I was writing sporadically by myself and trying to take my editing to the next level. This year I’m connected directly to 3 different organisations, full of opportunities to upskill and grow my practice over the coming year ahead.
It's important to record the journey for myself. To make the progress more visible, and acknowledge the work that’s been done.
Last year it felt a little bit outrageous to title my website author, workshop leader, activist, community artist… now it feels a lot more like I have the receipts, and I’m happy to step more firmly into that intention. To own it. And that mental shift is probably the biggest thing that says turning point to me. From that everything else can come a little more easily.
Commentaires