Writing process tag

Maria Jaztrzebska, a poet I admire very much, asked me to join a blog tour thing, answering a few questions about my writing, so here you go!

1) What am I working on?

At the moment I'm mostly concentrating on writing group pieces for SmutsKultur, the performance poetry group I'm part of. Our latest commission is to perform at the opening of a new library in Gothenburg - in connection to a lunch beat disco. So I'm trying to polish my lines about disco anxiety ... not being able to dance well, not having anyone to dance with etc.

2) How does my work differ from others of its genre?

Well, I started to grow tired of the Poetry Slam format and asked a few other poets if they wanted to start a group and they all said yes. It's not that common to write poems together and I find it both challenging and rewarding. When a poem is finished we've kind of forgotten who wrote what: if you get stuck it's great to have the support from the others. We allow ourselves to be as crazy as we want to be and have a lot of fun.

3) Why do I write what I do?

I love hearing poetry out loud! I love playing with the spoken word, how you can transform a line from the page to the stage and make sense of it through your voice and gestures. Sometimes I enjoy moving commas around and thinking about line breaks, but it gives me a real buzz to communicate in real time and then the pauses might be entirely different to what I wrote.

4) How does your writing process work?

When SmutsKultur write together we often decide on a theme, brainstorm a bit around it and then we go home and write individually in a shared document. After that we meet up and try to build bridges between the different parts we've written. Sometimes we have to add a lot, other times it's just a matter of moving things around. 

The next writer of the blog tour will hopefully be writer, poet and novelist Morgan C Nichols

Staring out of the Window is also Work

Writers tend to spend a lot of time staring out of the window. What is not so widely known, is that this is part of the writing process and therefore it can be called work.

I find it very hard to write in rooms with no or very small windows. If I write in a cafe or a pub I usually choose a window seat.

Something is happening when you stare, I believe. Your thoughts reorganise themselves. One morning this week I spontaneously popped into the Medusa Bar in Preston Street for a cup of green tea (miraculously making it last for an hour and a half). In my bag I had a few sheets of poems in progress that I'd printed out. Staring at the street, staring at the sheets things started to happen, and I scribbled frenetically in the margins, making up new lines, crossing bad ones out and moving a few words around. I'd had an idea for a very long time, but didn't get anywhere with it - now I ended up with three different poems on the same theme (compliments).

I am in need of different views now and again, so it's good that Brighton & Hove have an abundance of bars, pubs and cafes. And when I do my Swenglish project I'll have a different view every week, unless someone puts me up in their basement or even worse wardrobe! (The view in the picture belongs to one of the people I'm going to stay with.)