Firstly I’d like to thank Jackie at http://tobreatheistowrite.com/ for inviting me to participate in the blog tour. Check out her blog its pretty cool.
I remember I was writing while in high school and then into my College years I wrote and was published in a few journals and anthologies.
I have to admit I have never written to be published but rather for a specific audience I perceived at the time.
As a result a lot of my work I have written I have put aside once it had served its purpose and moved on to a new project.
I taught for 39 years in a variety of high schools and at each one I wrote for specific students and purposes. In some I wrote musicals, as there was a need for them in those environments. These I wrote in the late 1980’s at a school where the student population responded to my work and we had a production team that responded my ideas.
When I moved to my last school there was a need for another type of writing.
As I taught drama in the senior school and as drama as a subject was new to the curriculum and as it is a practical subject students are required to perform some individual project, one option being performance.
To cater for this option I wrote a lot of performance pieces, some I have on my blog. Many were written for specific students in collaboration with them and that in itself was a great process to be part of.
At one point I did have a collection in book form, sold a few but gave most away. I have been pleased over the years to go to a few schools and see my work being performed and in pleasing ways as students took ownership of the script and adapted it to suit their needs and that was always the purpose of my writing to present a script they could edit for their own requirements.
In later years I re wrote a play I had written in 1992 for a 2012 audience, a Theatre in Education piece about anorexia. Then in my final teaching year I did a production on ‘Living with Lady Macbeth’ with a lot of me in it as I added a few characters and changed the script a little to suit the needs of my then students.
In WP I have tried a number of different styles and writing in a variety of ways, to the point where I have several blogs, which have served different purposes for me.
I have written in collaboration with a few bloggers and that is always an experience one such collaboration on my blog ‘The Cat People of Kagir.’
What am I working on now?
My writing tends to be day to day. I respond to prompts as I find they give me a direction and an audience. I have ambitions to complete a collaboration, which has been going on for some time. It will be good to see where this one goes.
As my writing tends to be in response to stimuli I can’t say have anything I am writing at this particular time.
I find the prompts I do vary in the tasks they set. I have moved away from the set stimuli as I found there was a sameness in those prompts. I am finding the worded prompts are offering me the most opportunity to explore my writing abilities.
How does my work differ from others?
My first answer was that I am me and therefore it’s different. But I try a lot of different styles and ways of writing. To me the writing process is about exploring and discovering within myself ideas and word structures that make my work unique.
I am not afraid to stretch boundaries and I often write pieces which have an element of truth about them to the point where people comment as if I am talking about reality whereas in fact I may be discussing several realities within my work.
I like to write poetry as I find that offers me the opportunity to be succinct, to find meaning in the least number of words.
I also enjoy prose as that style suits some prompts better but I can easily go between the two.
Why do I write what I do?
I always have the attitude that my posts are about exploring an idea. It is sometimes an idea with the structure of a set form, like haibun/haiku structures.
For me writing is about self-expression and it’s a way of sharing with my readers my world, my perceptions of it and the unique nature that is often the Australian psyche.
I often know who my audience is and I write knowing those people will read my work.
In some cases I have found myself working hard on a post as I have seen the entries for a particular prompt and know the writers are all very good so I have felt a sense of intimidation in submitting my work. I think that has been good for me too as I have thought a lot about what I am writing and been critical of the words I put down. I think like so many writers the urge to write better and develop my skills is a life long pursuit.
4 How does my writing process work?
Writing has always been a process for me. I know I have to get an idea down. Just write the thing and then go back later and edit.
Often an idea is nothing more than an idea. I am not sure where I am going with it and then I let my muse dictate the direction I will go in.
I am often able to sum up quickly if I think an idea is working. Many times I have stopped where I was and re written and in some cases changed from a prose approach to a verse form.
Once I am happy with the written piece in that it tells the tale I want to tell I will go back an edit. I like this process as it makes me look at each word and ask myself is that what I want to say there. Often I re write lines, change words, use the thesaurus as I don’t like to use the same word twice especially in poems. It’s a great process and it works for me. I used it all the time when I was working with performance scripts, using a smart board enabled the performer to see their script, have their hands free and for us to change there and then the script as we thought it was needed.
I often find having another set of eyes to read my work often solves the problem of missing typos and syntax errors.
I would like to introduce Oliana from http://tracesofthesoul.wordpress.com/
Oliana has generously offered to assist me in this blog tour by providing me with a bio of her blog history and persona.
Thank you, Michael, for the invite to talk a little about me. I have always enjoyed making up stories since I was a little girl. Now that would be…a long time ago. My mother would listen to my drawn out stories and I found she had such patience listening to me. In grade school my sister and I would write plays and those poor students were our minions. Fortunately they seemed to have fun. I wrote poetry and essays briefly in high school and that was it until now. Well except for journaling now and then but that’s not the same, right? I give a name to my journal…always have. It’s feels like someone is listening who actually cares. In this blog it’s Dear Emma.
A few years ago I started up a blog at blog.spot to write about mental health and various “life” issues that seemed important to me. It’s a blog where I get on my soapbox and just talk about various issues on stigma related to mental health, sexism, racism and any phobias and “isms” I could think of. After getting a few “likes”, I realized someone was actually reading my posts!
After 10+ years of single life I decided to dip my toes in the sea of love…well, not hot stuff like Pacino’s movie but you know what I mean. And I thought it would be fun to share my experiences in a fun way. And so I started this blog here at http://tracesofthesoul.wordpress.com. I found that at Traces I could also vent, get things off my chest…so I write under a pseudonym, it seems to make sense. My first comment on a dating post, the blogger suggested I consider writing a book about this. That totally floored me. Here I was just having fun but in no way feeling I could write for public reading! What started out to just have fun, laugh at myself a bit in my on-line dating experience ended up falling in love with my muse. Yes, I discovered I liked writing short stories, short stories under “memoirs” and even dabbled in poetry last year and found I truly enjoy it…A LOT!
I still work fulltime as a youth counsellor (which explains some of my poetry on youths and child abuse) and every spare time I get, I do write and try to read some amazing creative posts of follow bloggers here. I love this community at WordPress. I have many bloggers/writers to thank for their encouragement and influence in the past year. Michael is a gifted writer and I was humbled when he started reading some of my posts.
I write about love, family, especially my mom whom I love very much who suffers from dementia; I love to take photographs of street art, the amazing sky and my beautiful city of Montreal. Granted they are amateur for sure and taken most times with my humble Samsung Note I.
Here are some links to some posts I’ve written to allow you to take a glimpse of “moi”.
http://tracesofthesoul.wordpress.com/2014/05/14/who-am-i-but-me/
http://tracesofthesoul.wordpress.com/2014/05/11/dear-emma-haibun/
So there you have it a little look into me.
Thank you for reading.
Morpethroad 