Axel Forrester's Blog
August 15, 2022
BLOG on web
Hello,
If you want to read more blog posts, please visit:
axelforrester.com
I prefer to put images along with my posts and my website is the best place to see it. Also, you can sign up to my newsletter and get news and stories.
Thanks,
Axel
If you want to read more blog posts, please visit:
axelforrester.com
I prefer to put images along with my posts and my website is the best place to see it. Also, you can sign up to my newsletter and get news and stories.
Thanks,
Axel
July 13th Supermoon
July 2022
I was awakened by words. Usually, it’s images that pull me awake, on the screen of my mind–the leftovers of a dream. But this time it was words. Whole sentences were floating past me, and I knew I had to catch them. I got out of bed, and step by step, felt my way along the wood floor to my desk. It was still dark, so I knew it was the middle of the night. No signs of morning light coming through the curtains, but there was, framed by the window, a blazing full moon.
Sitting down in my chair, I decided against turning on the light. I didn’t want it to chase the words away. There was the time on my laptop, 2:43. I pulled my notebook toward me on the desk and opened it to a blank page, grabbed a pen and started writing:
Something has happened, announcing itself in my mind and waking me up. Something that wasn’t supposed to be. The stars have stubbornly misaligned, and while the odds are reconfiguring, all bets are off. This thing wants an intro, a drum roll, a riff, because it’s here baby. It’s here!
I had no idea what this meant, but it was down on paper now, so I stood up to go back to bed. I’d think about it tomorrow. I had one more look at that glorious moon and took a picture of it with my phone before returning to my sleep.
It was a few days later that I found out that on the early morning of July 14,th when I had been at my desk, at 2:38 in the morning, just five minutes before I wrote down the time, the Perigee Supermoon, reached its brightest point. Astrology calls this moon an awakening that celebrates a balance between the forces of Cancer and Capricorn. Cancer values private life, the need for home and domesticity, a looking inward. Capricorn leans toward public life, career, and engagement in the world. This is a new unity then, a collaboration instead of a struggle between opposites. These things had been at odds in me for a long time, but recently, I’d noticed something had shifted. Maybe this was it.
Having taken the very public step to publish my book, A Cornish Odyssey, independently, I’ve made a start to find readers. Writing is done privately, in my writing place, at home, and feels very personal. Publishing is engaging with the world and while this has been a step that feels risky, it also feels empowering. I also feel grateful to my readers, and to all those who have helped in this process. It continues to unfold. I’m learning and growing. Thank you Supermoon, for marking the occasion of this balance of inside and outside, of home and the world. It’s here, baby. It’s here.
I was awakened by words. Usually, it’s images that pull me awake, on the screen of my mind–the leftovers of a dream. But this time it was words. Whole sentences were floating past me, and I knew I had to catch them. I got out of bed, and step by step, felt my way along the wood floor to my desk. It was still dark, so I knew it was the middle of the night. No signs of morning light coming through the curtains, but there was, framed by the window, a blazing full moon.
Sitting down in my chair, I decided against turning on the light. I didn’t want it to chase the words away. There was the time on my laptop, 2:43. I pulled my notebook toward me on the desk and opened it to a blank page, grabbed a pen and started writing:
Something has happened, announcing itself in my mind and waking me up. Something that wasn’t supposed to be. The stars have stubbornly misaligned, and while the odds are reconfiguring, all bets are off. This thing wants an intro, a drum roll, a riff, because it’s here baby. It’s here!
I had no idea what this meant, but it was down on paper now, so I stood up to go back to bed. I’d think about it tomorrow. I had one more look at that glorious moon and took a picture of it with my phone before returning to my sleep.
It was a few days later that I found out that on the early morning of July 14,th when I had been at my desk, at 2:38 in the morning, just five minutes before I wrote down the time, the Perigee Supermoon, reached its brightest point. Astrology calls this moon an awakening that celebrates a balance between the forces of Cancer and Capricorn. Cancer values private life, the need for home and domesticity, a looking inward. Capricorn leans toward public life, career, and engagement in the world. This is a new unity then, a collaboration instead of a struggle between opposites. These things had been at odds in me for a long time, but recently, I’d noticed something had shifted. Maybe this was it.
Having taken the very public step to publish my book, A Cornish Odyssey, independently, I’ve made a start to find readers. Writing is done privately, in my writing place, at home, and feels very personal. Publishing is engaging with the world and while this has been a step that feels risky, it also feels empowering. I also feel grateful to my readers, and to all those who have helped in this process. It continues to unfold. I’m learning and growing. Thank you Supermoon, for marking the occasion of this balance of inside and outside, of home and the world. It’s here, baby. It’s here.
July 8, 2022
Found Mask
Found Mask
You can see pictures of the mask on:
www.axelforrester.com
or instagram@axel_forrester
It was sitting on a table in the window of a dusty shop among stacks of old paintings. Someone had collected a lot of art in there and like many of the shops on King’s Road, it was
a private collection, parts of which were sometimes for sale. These shops were open when the spirit moved the owners. This one was here today sitting outside enjoying the sun. A tall woman in an orange dress, she had a matching sunhat and long hair. She was chatting with someone. When she finished her conversation and looked over at me, I asked if I might see the little black mask in the window. It was no bigger than my hand and a snake was coming out of the mouth.
The owner of the shop said she would try to reach it for me, as if she were a pearl diver, taking a deep breath to go into the sea and look for treasure. This was not the first shop on this street that was so packed with stuff that no one could walk in. It was a charmingly, or alarmingly, laid-back way to do business. She stepped inside the door and began moving paintings aside to get to the table. I watched from outside the window as she balanced one painting against another. It felt like I was watching a mechanical claw inside a fun house machine, reaching for a small prize. All the tension was there. Will I get the prize? Or not? It was hard to see if she would be able to do it, there was so much stuff leaning against various other things. There was another small mask, red, on the table too. She picked it up and looked at me. Would I be interested in this one? If so, her work would be done. I shook my head. No. I wanted the black one with the snake coming from the mouth. I’d never seen one like it before and it intrigued me.
When she finally was able to reach the little black mask, she grabbed it and carried it by the string on the back, gingerly making her way back between paintings again until she reached the front door of the shop and came out into the sun, placing it in my waiting hands. I could feel a thick layer of dust on it.
‘It’s old, I think. I got it a long time ago.’ That was the extent of the backstory.
She told me the price and I paid it. I loved the layers of paint. The whole thing was carved in wood and then painted. The snake was also made from a curved piece of wood fitted into the mask. We agreed it could have come from Mexico. Best guess.
As I took it home on the bus I was thinking about the symbolism of snakes in art, in dreams, in stories. It seemed like an intriguing symbol for telling lies, or stories, or fiction-something that comes out in words from a writer’s mouth. Imagining a ceremonial use for the mask, I thought it might have been painted black as a way of having the face disappear in darkness allowing the snake to be prominent, a character in a play. Or it might have been a morality tale–one shouldn’t speak lies. But a friend reminded me that snakes also represent healing and wisdom. A snake wrapped around wood or a tree is the symbol of medical practice. So, the mask is ambiguous. Perhaps like the writer. Plato called art lies because art represents reality but is not itself reality. But art and literature can show us the deepest truths.
I like this mask perhaps because it also makes me think about the personality or identity of the writer who is hidden, wearing a mask, performing a role. What comes from the writer’s mouth–the words, are the thing. Colourful. Lies or truth–escape or healing–entertainment or art. Words should be the focus of our attention, not the writer, who is covered by a black mask.
You can see pictures of the mask on:
www.axelforrester.com
or instagram@axel_forrester
It was sitting on a table in the window of a dusty shop among stacks of old paintings. Someone had collected a lot of art in there and like many of the shops on King’s Road, it was
a private collection, parts of which were sometimes for sale. These shops were open when the spirit moved the owners. This one was here today sitting outside enjoying the sun. A tall woman in an orange dress, she had a matching sunhat and long hair. She was chatting with someone. When she finished her conversation and looked over at me, I asked if I might see the little black mask in the window. It was no bigger than my hand and a snake was coming out of the mouth.
The owner of the shop said she would try to reach it for me, as if she were a pearl diver, taking a deep breath to go into the sea and look for treasure. This was not the first shop on this street that was so packed with stuff that no one could walk in. It was a charmingly, or alarmingly, laid-back way to do business. She stepped inside the door and began moving paintings aside to get to the table. I watched from outside the window as she balanced one painting against another. It felt like I was watching a mechanical claw inside a fun house machine, reaching for a small prize. All the tension was there. Will I get the prize? Or not? It was hard to see if she would be able to do it, there was so much stuff leaning against various other things. There was another small mask, red, on the table too. She picked it up and looked at me. Would I be interested in this one? If so, her work would be done. I shook my head. No. I wanted the black one with the snake coming from the mouth. I’d never seen one like it before and it intrigued me.
When she finally was able to reach the little black mask, she grabbed it and carried it by the string on the back, gingerly making her way back between paintings again until she reached the front door of the shop and came out into the sun, placing it in my waiting hands. I could feel a thick layer of dust on it.
‘It’s old, I think. I got it a long time ago.’ That was the extent of the backstory.
She told me the price and I paid it. I loved the layers of paint. The whole thing was carved in wood and then painted. The snake was also made from a curved piece of wood fitted into the mask. We agreed it could have come from Mexico. Best guess.
As I took it home on the bus I was thinking about the symbolism of snakes in art, in dreams, in stories. It seemed like an intriguing symbol for telling lies, or stories, or fiction-something that comes out in words from a writer’s mouth. Imagining a ceremonial use for the mask, I thought it might have been painted black as a way of having the face disappear in darkness allowing the snake to be prominent, a character in a play. Or it might have been a morality tale–one shouldn’t speak lies. But a friend reminded me that snakes also represent healing and wisdom. A snake wrapped around wood or a tree is the symbol of medical practice. So, the mask is ambiguous. Perhaps like the writer. Plato called art lies because art represents reality but is not itself reality. But art and literature can show us the deepest truths.
I like this mask perhaps because it also makes me think about the personality or identity of the writer who is hidden, wearing a mask, performing a role. What comes from the writer’s mouth–the words, are the thing. Colourful. Lies or truth–escape or healing–entertainment or art. Words should be the focus of our attention, not the writer, who is covered by a black mask.
June 24, 2022
24June22ItStartedWithADream
It started with a dream. I was taking a train to get somewhere. It was a building, in the middle of nowhere. Inside the building were tables and on the tables were many beautiful hand-made things. Hand-painted plates. Coloured glass beads. Swirled stitching on pillows. Wonderful things for the home. Then I saw quilts stacked on tables. I walked over and unfolded them and had a look. There were scenes of jungles with exotic plants, leaves, vines and flowers. There were snakes and tigers, bright coloured fruit and golden suns. There were all kinds of things I'd never seen on quilts before. My eyes blinked. They opened and closed. Opened and closed, as if I was drinking in these quilts. I couldn't get enough of them. Each one was a revelation to me. Each one was singing to me.
When I woke up, I still carried the dream with me in my body. The feelings were there coursing through my bloodstream. There was profound joy, a feeling of having witnessed a miracle, like a sunset, or the stars, and being grateful, but at the same time, bereft. The dream was over. Past. Gone. There was no such place. No such thing as these wondrous quilts, except in my memory.
I grew up Mormon. I quilted whenever I was asked to join a quilting circle, which was often. I enjoyed doing it. It was nice being helpful and being given something to do with my hands as I listened to the other women talk and gossip. It was one of the few times I had the feeling of belonging. But when I left the Mormon church, I left quilting behind me. I had never made a quilt of my own. My mother and sister made quilts for me. I had them in my home and admired them for their intricacy and design. Even my brother-in-law was a quilter. But it never occurred to me to make one on my own. I didn’t have such talents. I had short fingers. Clumsy. I could draw, but I couldn’t quilt very well. Not on my own.
After this dream, all these years later, I wanted to try. It was 2021 and we were just coming out of the second lockdown. I had been suffering from anxiety. Stress eczema. My skin would blossom in purple sores for no reason. Well, I knew the most likely reasons. I had some health issues. But I didn’t want to think about them. I did a lot of drawings and watched many YouTube videos on how to applique' and do big stitch quilting. That looked possible to me. I got a few books. Yes. It wouldn’t take forever. Big stitch seemed the way to go. My mind came up with a comet. It was a symbol, of course. Of living life fully and courageously. And I had just decided to self-publish a book too. Like everyone, I was reshuffling my priorities. Now. Live now. Don’t wait. Then I decided I needed to find my local sewing shop, which is called a haberdashery here in England. Love that word. Fills your mouth.
I found Jacobs. When I opened the door I discovered a shop that gave me the same feeling as my dream the minute I walked in. Shiny objects. Bright colours. Textures. A feast for the eyes. I stepped up to the nice-looking lady at the counter. Her name was Sammy and her dark eyes were kind. I explained my project, even the dream, and she nodded and smiled. She looked excited about it.
On Youtube, I discovered a large number of Mormons explaining to the world how to quilt. When I mentioned in the shop that I came from Mormon stock, I had the feeling of being an Instant Celebrity. People craned their necks to turn and stare at me. I wasn’t just a strange American anymore. In the haberdashery, I was someone with quilting in my blood.
I started collecting fabric samples like someone possessed. That’s when I stopped feeling like an imposter. I was well and truly hooked. Eventually, I decided the other side of the quilt was going to be a very crude solar system. In space. On a black background.
I was in a pop-up fabric shop, buying more samples when I got to chatting with a woman about what I was trying to do. 'Oh, you must be an artist,’ she said. ‘You work from your head. You don't use a pattern.' I didn’t admit that it never occurred to me to follow a pattern. I didn’t see one anywhere for what I wanted to do. I just wanted to do it. Freestyle. A bit like my drumming.
Quilting has had many benefits for me. It’s helped my skin calm down. It allows me to PROCESS things differently. And I love it as a metaphor for writing novels. Stitch by stitch. Word by word. Section by section. Page by page. I sometimes have to take out huge sections and start again, other times I find a way to make something work, but I never know exactly how it will end.
I enjoy working without a pattern and having the freedom to make something real that once was an echo of a dream. Yes, it is crude. Calling it primitive is a kindness, but it stands for trying something new, reclaiming my Mormon heritage and making something that I can look at and see the progress. I’m sure this has something to do with learning to let go of perfection too, with enjoying the making of something and publishing it, releasing it into the world even if it won’t ever be perfect. It’s part of a larger process of communicating with oneself and with others and with our dreams.
I’d like to thank Ellen Kochanski, a dear friend of many years, for reconnecting with me. She’s the one who inspired this blog post. I have enjoyed catching up with her and marvelling at her website, her artworks, her projects, her teaching and her many accomplishments.
https://ellenkochansky.com/
You can see pictures of my quilt on my website-www.axelforrester.com
under blog.
Thanks for reading,
Axel Forrester
When I woke up, I still carried the dream with me in my body. The feelings were there coursing through my bloodstream. There was profound joy, a feeling of having witnessed a miracle, like a sunset, or the stars, and being grateful, but at the same time, bereft. The dream was over. Past. Gone. There was no such place. No such thing as these wondrous quilts, except in my memory.
I grew up Mormon. I quilted whenever I was asked to join a quilting circle, which was often. I enjoyed doing it. It was nice being helpful and being given something to do with my hands as I listened to the other women talk and gossip. It was one of the few times I had the feeling of belonging. But when I left the Mormon church, I left quilting behind me. I had never made a quilt of my own. My mother and sister made quilts for me. I had them in my home and admired them for their intricacy and design. Even my brother-in-law was a quilter. But it never occurred to me to make one on my own. I didn’t have such talents. I had short fingers. Clumsy. I could draw, but I couldn’t quilt very well. Not on my own.
After this dream, all these years later, I wanted to try. It was 2021 and we were just coming out of the second lockdown. I had been suffering from anxiety. Stress eczema. My skin would blossom in purple sores for no reason. Well, I knew the most likely reasons. I had some health issues. But I didn’t want to think about them. I did a lot of drawings and watched many YouTube videos on how to applique' and do big stitch quilting. That looked possible to me. I got a few books. Yes. It wouldn’t take forever. Big stitch seemed the way to go. My mind came up with a comet. It was a symbol, of course. Of living life fully and courageously. And I had just decided to self-publish a book too. Like everyone, I was reshuffling my priorities. Now. Live now. Don’t wait. Then I decided I needed to find my local sewing shop, which is called a haberdashery here in England. Love that word. Fills your mouth.
I found Jacobs. When I opened the door I discovered a shop that gave me the same feeling as my dream the minute I walked in. Shiny objects. Bright colours. Textures. A feast for the eyes. I stepped up to the nice-looking lady at the counter. Her name was Sammy and her dark eyes were kind. I explained my project, even the dream, and she nodded and smiled. She looked excited about it.
On Youtube, I discovered a large number of Mormons explaining to the world how to quilt. When I mentioned in the shop that I came from Mormon stock, I had the feeling of being an Instant Celebrity. People craned their necks to turn and stare at me. I wasn’t just a strange American anymore. In the haberdashery, I was someone with quilting in my blood.
I started collecting fabric samples like someone possessed. That’s when I stopped feeling like an imposter. I was well and truly hooked. Eventually, I decided the other side of the quilt was going to be a very crude solar system. In space. On a black background.
I was in a pop-up fabric shop, buying more samples when I got to chatting with a woman about what I was trying to do. 'Oh, you must be an artist,’ she said. ‘You work from your head. You don't use a pattern.' I didn’t admit that it never occurred to me to follow a pattern. I didn’t see one anywhere for what I wanted to do. I just wanted to do it. Freestyle. A bit like my drumming.
Quilting has had many benefits for me. It’s helped my skin calm down. It allows me to PROCESS things differently. And I love it as a metaphor for writing novels. Stitch by stitch. Word by word. Section by section. Page by page. I sometimes have to take out huge sections and start again, other times I find a way to make something work, but I never know exactly how it will end.
I enjoy working without a pattern and having the freedom to make something real that once was an echo of a dream. Yes, it is crude. Calling it primitive is a kindness, but it stands for trying something new, reclaiming my Mormon heritage and making something that I can look at and see the progress. I’m sure this has something to do with learning to let go of perfection too, with enjoying the making of something and publishing it, releasing it into the world even if it won’t ever be perfect. It’s part of a larger process of communicating with oneself and with others and with our dreams.
I’d like to thank Ellen Kochanski, a dear friend of many years, for reconnecting with me. She’s the one who inspired this blog post. I have enjoyed catching up with her and marvelling at her website, her artworks, her projects, her teaching and her many accomplishments.
https://ellenkochansky.com/
You can see pictures of my quilt on my website-www.axelforrester.com
under blog.
Thanks for reading,
Axel Forrester
June 22, 2022
22June22 Write What You Know
Write What You Know
I will never forget my first-grade teacher. Her name was Miss Benveniste. She was the prettiest teacher in the school and looked like Jackie Kennedy with her twinkly black eyes and short nose. She wore elegant sleeveless dresses that came just above her knees. I liked the way she crossed her ankles when she sat down and how her voice was clear and strong when she taught us songs like Row Row Row Your Boat and This Old Man Came Rolling Home. I wanted to be just like Miss Benveniste, and I prayed every night that she would like me.
One day Miss Benveniste moved my desk to the front of the class. That’s when I knew God had answered my prayers. I reasoned that this was evidence. Miss Benveniste liked me best. I didn’t realise it was because I had recently had a hearing test and didn’t hear well. She was very nice to me and let me clean the erasers after school and sharpen the pencils. The other girls didn’t want to play with me anymore. I heard them say, Teacher’s Pet and they made angry faces at me. I didn’t let them see, but what they said made me smile inside. I was Teacher’s Pet.
One day, Miss Benveniste said we were going to write a story of our very own. I was excited because I had a lot of practice telling stories to my three younger sisters. Miss Benveniste passed out the lined paper and as soon as I got mine I knew what I would write about. I remembered the little girl from China who was on the cover of a magazine at my house. It had a yellow cover. I wrote my story about her and her little dog and how she played with her friends in the streets of China and wore funny clothes.
Miss Benveniste told me to stay after school that day. I was a little scared, but also excited. I thought she was going to tell me how much she liked my story. But once all the other kids were gone, she came over to me and made a sad face. You didn’t listen, she said. I told you. You must write what you know.
She sighed. You have never been to China, have you? I shook my head. I was six years old. I had never been anywhere. You can’t write about China. You don’t know it. I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to look at her. I could only feel my little heart breaking. Miss Benveniste didn’t like me anymore. She hated my story. She hated me. My face was hot. All I wanted was to go home. I didn’t hear anything she said to me after that. When she finally dismissed me, I picked up my things and ran all the way home.
I went to my bedroom, which I shared with my three sisters, and took out the stories I’d written from under my bed. They were about pirates and princesses, fairies, and goblins. I looked at them with a new sense of shame. I knew Miss Benveniste wouldn’t like these either. I was about to throw them away, but something stopped me. I liked these places and I liked being able to take myself there with words. Like magic. No. I wasn’t going to give them up because of Miss Benveniste. I like them more than I liked her. I decided to keep my stories but not show them to anyone else. From then on, they would be just for me.
Despite the writing lesson, I continued to worship Miss Benveniste, though the volume of my adoration was turned down a few notches. The seasons passed. I continued playing school with my sisters who were entertained for hours as I gave them lessons. It wasn’t too surprising that I became a teacher, like so many of the women in our family.
It was only when I was nearing retirement that I decided to properly learn the craft of writing. When I was in a writing class I heard those words again, write what you know, and I laughed out loud. The words brought me right back to that first-grade classroom. Was Miss Benveniste right all along? Well. Yes and no. Of course, it helps to write what you know, but it’s a mistake to take that literally and only write from your own experience. There are plenty of writers who start with what they don’t know. I’m one of those. I write historical fiction. Researching what I don’t know is half the enjoyment of writing for me.
What we know as writers is quite a lot–like how to use our emotional memory to help us describe what a character might be feeling. We haven’t forgotten how to use our imagination, which is a skill that’s already highly developed when we are children. We have storytelling in our DNA, but as a trained writer, I now have tools that can help me write to communicate.
I can now look back on this memory of my first writing lesson with some compassion for the teacher who was quite young herself when she became my role model. She cared enough to deliver what she thought was an important lesson in writing to a small group of six-year-olds. I can see now that she took her job very seriously and took us seriously too. She wanted to give us an established truth of writing.
But I’m also impressed by my six-year-old self, and that I didn’t give up on my writing just because a teacher didn’t like it. My younger self instinctively protected the simple joy of writing and subverted the authority that might have stamped it out. I’m glad I continued to write, that I went sideways and found a way to keep doing it. This is an effective strategy for writing too, approaching a difficult topic from another angle, like a crab or a spider.
We were both right. I may not have known China back then, but I knew I had something important in the act of writing, and that someday it would take me to places where my heart longed to go. This was what I knew then and what I know now.
I did get to China, many years later, on an educational tour with other teachers from around the world. We were there for three weeks, in Beijing, and touring the Yunnan province. There were many surprising things. It changed my perspective on everything. China is so vast and so rich in culture and history, with so many layers of experiences, it is hard to imagine anyone could ever really know it completely. One day on this trip, as I turned a corner, I saw a young girl with a little dog playing in the street with her friends and I smiled because it was exactly the way I had imagined it as a little girl.
I’m glad I didn’t give up writing because of what I didn’t know and that I kept faith with my future self as a writer, by protecting my practice. Learning requires seeking out and finding good teachers, but the most important voice to listen to is our own.
I will never forget my first-grade teacher. Her name was Miss Benveniste. She was the prettiest teacher in the school and looked like Jackie Kennedy with her twinkly black eyes and short nose. She wore elegant sleeveless dresses that came just above her knees. I liked the way she crossed her ankles when she sat down and how her voice was clear and strong when she taught us songs like Row Row Row Your Boat and This Old Man Came Rolling Home. I wanted to be just like Miss Benveniste, and I prayed every night that she would like me.
One day Miss Benveniste moved my desk to the front of the class. That’s when I knew God had answered my prayers. I reasoned that this was evidence. Miss Benveniste liked me best. I didn’t realise it was because I had recently had a hearing test and didn’t hear well. She was very nice to me and let me clean the erasers after school and sharpen the pencils. The other girls didn’t want to play with me anymore. I heard them say, Teacher’s Pet and they made angry faces at me. I didn’t let them see, but what they said made me smile inside. I was Teacher’s Pet.
One day, Miss Benveniste said we were going to write a story of our very own. I was excited because I had a lot of practice telling stories to my three younger sisters. Miss Benveniste passed out the lined paper and as soon as I got mine I knew what I would write about. I remembered the little girl from China who was on the cover of a magazine at my house. It had a yellow cover. I wrote my story about her and her little dog and how she played with her friends in the streets of China and wore funny clothes.
Miss Benveniste told me to stay after school that day. I was a little scared, but also excited. I thought she was going to tell me how much she liked my story. But once all the other kids were gone, she came over to me and made a sad face. You didn’t listen, she said. I told you. You must write what you know.
She sighed. You have never been to China, have you? I shook my head. I was six years old. I had never been anywhere. You can’t write about China. You don’t know it. I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to look at her. I could only feel my little heart breaking. Miss Benveniste didn’t like me anymore. She hated my story. She hated me. My face was hot. All I wanted was to go home. I didn’t hear anything she said to me after that. When she finally dismissed me, I picked up my things and ran all the way home.
I went to my bedroom, which I shared with my three sisters, and took out the stories I’d written from under my bed. They were about pirates and princesses, fairies, and goblins. I looked at them with a new sense of shame. I knew Miss Benveniste wouldn’t like these either. I was about to throw them away, but something stopped me. I liked these places and I liked being able to take myself there with words. Like magic. No. I wasn’t going to give them up because of Miss Benveniste. I like them more than I liked her. I decided to keep my stories but not show them to anyone else. From then on, they would be just for me.
Despite the writing lesson, I continued to worship Miss Benveniste, though the volume of my adoration was turned down a few notches. The seasons passed. I continued playing school with my sisters who were entertained for hours as I gave them lessons. It wasn’t too surprising that I became a teacher, like so many of the women in our family.
It was only when I was nearing retirement that I decided to properly learn the craft of writing. When I was in a writing class I heard those words again, write what you know, and I laughed out loud. The words brought me right back to that first-grade classroom. Was Miss Benveniste right all along? Well. Yes and no. Of course, it helps to write what you know, but it’s a mistake to take that literally and only write from your own experience. There are plenty of writers who start with what they don’t know. I’m one of those. I write historical fiction. Researching what I don’t know is half the enjoyment of writing for me.
What we know as writers is quite a lot–like how to use our emotional memory to help us describe what a character might be feeling. We haven’t forgotten how to use our imagination, which is a skill that’s already highly developed when we are children. We have storytelling in our DNA, but as a trained writer, I now have tools that can help me write to communicate.
I can now look back on this memory of my first writing lesson with some compassion for the teacher who was quite young herself when she became my role model. She cared enough to deliver what she thought was an important lesson in writing to a small group of six-year-olds. I can see now that she took her job very seriously and took us seriously too. She wanted to give us an established truth of writing.
But I’m also impressed by my six-year-old self, and that I didn’t give up on my writing just because a teacher didn’t like it. My younger self instinctively protected the simple joy of writing and subverted the authority that might have stamped it out. I’m glad I continued to write, that I went sideways and found a way to keep doing it. This is an effective strategy for writing too, approaching a difficult topic from another angle, like a crab or a spider.
We were both right. I may not have known China back then, but I knew I had something important in the act of writing, and that someday it would take me to places where my heart longed to go. This was what I knew then and what I know now.
I did get to China, many years later, on an educational tour with other teachers from around the world. We were there for three weeks, in Beijing, and touring the Yunnan province. There were many surprising things. It changed my perspective on everything. China is so vast and so rich in culture and history, with so many layers of experiences, it is hard to imagine anyone could ever really know it completely. One day on this trip, as I turned a corner, I saw a young girl with a little dog playing in the street with her friends and I smiled because it was exactly the way I had imagined it as a little girl.
I’m glad I didn’t give up writing because of what I didn’t know and that I kept faith with my future self as a writer, by protecting my practice. Learning requires seeking out and finding good teachers, but the most important voice to listen to is our own.
June 10, 2022
What Drives You?
What drives you? What compels you as a writer? What drives me is a need to communicate. And what feeds this drive is curiosity. Does what I write, say something to me? Does it say something to you too?
I’ve always made stories. Sometimes unclear, unfinished stories. Pieces and parts. The longer I am around, the more context I find for them. They all seem to be part of a larger story. A human story. Yet, they are particular to my life, and I am equally driven to find the people who would recognise these stories as belonging to them too.
When I was nine my mother asked me to write a note to the milkman about what we needed for the next few days. I took the job very seriously, listening closely as she dictated. Whole milk. Swiss cheese. Half and half. I didn’t know what some of these terms meant but liked the mystery of them. Half what and half what? Wasn’t all milk whole milk? And what about chocolate milk? She always said no.
I wanted this job–being a scribe to my mother, making demands on paper that caused food to appear on our back doorstep later that morning. She passed me the back of a used envelope to write on and I took a pencil and made bold letters.
Looking it over, I wasn’t satisfied. I felt compelled to make it personal. I didn’t know our milkman’s name but decided to make him dashing.
Dear Green Hornet,
please leave
4 bottles of whole milk
1 Swiss cheese
1 Pint half and half
Yours Truly,
Scarlet O’Hara.
I rolled it up and slipped it into an empty bottle, set it on the back porch in the wire basket and went off to school. All that day I tried to imagine what our milkman thought of my note.
When I got home I found the items in the refrigerator. My heart sank a little, but really, what did I expect? He left us what was on the note. We carried on like this, twice a week–me, expressing our dairy needs, only barely covering up my longing for something romantic while trying to make the list a compelling read. He was polite. He left what we asked for. I tried to tell myself this was just a job like any other–like ironing my father’s shirts, doing the dishes or babysitting. Still, I wanted to make each note different and exciting. I worked at it. Without much in the way of return. But one day there was a note on the back of an envelope, sitting on the kitchen table in a bold, mannish hand.
Dear Miss O’Hara,
I’m out of half and half today. I hope
You will accept this chocolate ice cream as
A substitution.
Your Pal,
The Green Lantern
My mother came into the kitchen folding her arms and batting her eyelashes at me.
‘Can I have some ice cream?’ I asked, putting the note in my pocket.
‘Yes, you may, Scarlett. But watch what you say to our milkman.’
That was the beginning of a years-long correspondence that kept me racing home from school on Tuesdays and Fridays to see if there was a response from the Green Lantern. He became fond of using dairy puns and ‘ha ha’ when he liked one of my jokes. We kept it up until my family moved away when I was a teenager. It was a heartbreak that I could explain to no one. I still have one of Green Lantern’s notes. It thrilled me back then to have a mysterious stranger respond to my writing. It still does. I recognise this has something to do with what drives me to write, but that’s not all of it. It matters to me that I’m discovering something of myself in the writing too. This is WHY I do it. And I know this is my writing life, but there is something more, the other half of it. Finding readers. The artist Marcel Duchamp argued that both the artist and the viewer are necessary for the completion of a work of art. This feels true for writers too. I want the circuit of communication to be complete.
It's a lonely business to write. I’ve been doing it for years and the statistics are grim. When you are finally ready, when you’ve had lots of training and written several novels, you are faced with a daunting wall before you. An agent gets 30,000 manuscripts a year and might take 1 of them, starting down a long road, which also takes years, to get published. Agents will tell you exactly what they are looking for, what genres, and what tropes and you see this is a formula they’ve learned for selling books. Yet they also want an ‘original voice.’ Whether they decide to read a few pages of your novel or not depends on if they like your email that day. Or, more likely, if their assistant likes it that day.
This process feels like I’m auditioning for the musical CATS. Pitch, please. High step here (synopsis), the splits over there(query letter). If you are over forty, forget it. If you are not ‘other enough’ or ‘too other,’ they don’t want you either. They’ve got the formula. They know the drill–what retreats you should have gone to, what awards you should have by now, what’s hot right now and what’s already past. I’ve got a master’s degree in Creative Writing from the University of Edinburgh, and thirteen years of experience with awards, but I’ve only been able to get one agent to look at my manuscript and six months later they said no thanks. That’s one shot at an agent reading some of my writing, after years of sending it out. Most agents don’t even want you to attach samples anymore. If they like the email, they’ll ask for more. They are triaging all the people who want to be writers like they’re the NHS. It’s a long wait.
Three months ago, I decided to look into self-publishing. I’m not wealthy. I could not afford a vanity press and they seemed awful and slimy to me. I did a lot of looking around and found Joanna Penn who has written many wonderful books about Independent author publishing.
Joanna Penn has been the new voice in my head, speaking with kindness and wisdom. She is also a fiction writer, a very successful one. This path has already been empowering for me. It makes sense. Writing fiction is a specific skill set that takes time to learn but so does selling fiction and finding the right readers. I understand it can’t happen fast. There is much to learn, and I need to find the right kind of help, but it is out there. If I keep at it, there will be progress and I’ll find my readers. Joanna Penn gives me hope.
Since starting this journey, I have published my novella, A Cornish Odyssey, on Amazon and other platforms and my book launch will be in Hastings at the Hastings Bookshop on the 29th of June. People in eleven countries are reading it right now. It is getting positive reviews in the USA and UK. And…(drum roll here) I had a 30-minute interview with BBC Cornwall about my novella! www.axelforrester.com
But that’s a story for the next blog. Thanks for reading this.
I’ve always made stories. Sometimes unclear, unfinished stories. Pieces and parts. The longer I am around, the more context I find for them. They all seem to be part of a larger story. A human story. Yet, they are particular to my life, and I am equally driven to find the people who would recognise these stories as belonging to them too.
When I was nine my mother asked me to write a note to the milkman about what we needed for the next few days. I took the job very seriously, listening closely as she dictated. Whole milk. Swiss cheese. Half and half. I didn’t know what some of these terms meant but liked the mystery of them. Half what and half what? Wasn’t all milk whole milk? And what about chocolate milk? She always said no.
I wanted this job–being a scribe to my mother, making demands on paper that caused food to appear on our back doorstep later that morning. She passed me the back of a used envelope to write on and I took a pencil and made bold letters.
Looking it over, I wasn’t satisfied. I felt compelled to make it personal. I didn’t know our milkman’s name but decided to make him dashing.
Dear Green Hornet,
please leave
4 bottles of whole milk
1 Swiss cheese
1 Pint half and half
Yours Truly,
Scarlet O’Hara.
I rolled it up and slipped it into an empty bottle, set it on the back porch in the wire basket and went off to school. All that day I tried to imagine what our milkman thought of my note.
When I got home I found the items in the refrigerator. My heart sank a little, but really, what did I expect? He left us what was on the note. We carried on like this, twice a week–me, expressing our dairy needs, only barely covering up my longing for something romantic while trying to make the list a compelling read. He was polite. He left what we asked for. I tried to tell myself this was just a job like any other–like ironing my father’s shirts, doing the dishes or babysitting. Still, I wanted to make each note different and exciting. I worked at it. Without much in the way of return. But one day there was a note on the back of an envelope, sitting on the kitchen table in a bold, mannish hand.
Dear Miss O’Hara,
I’m out of half and half today. I hope
You will accept this chocolate ice cream as
A substitution.
Your Pal,
The Green Lantern
My mother came into the kitchen folding her arms and batting her eyelashes at me.
‘Can I have some ice cream?’ I asked, putting the note in my pocket.
‘Yes, you may, Scarlett. But watch what you say to our milkman.’
That was the beginning of a years-long correspondence that kept me racing home from school on Tuesdays and Fridays to see if there was a response from the Green Lantern. He became fond of using dairy puns and ‘ha ha’ when he liked one of my jokes. We kept it up until my family moved away when I was a teenager. It was a heartbreak that I could explain to no one. I still have one of Green Lantern’s notes. It thrilled me back then to have a mysterious stranger respond to my writing. It still does. I recognise this has something to do with what drives me to write, but that’s not all of it. It matters to me that I’m discovering something of myself in the writing too. This is WHY I do it. And I know this is my writing life, but there is something more, the other half of it. Finding readers. The artist Marcel Duchamp argued that both the artist and the viewer are necessary for the completion of a work of art. This feels true for writers too. I want the circuit of communication to be complete.
It's a lonely business to write. I’ve been doing it for years and the statistics are grim. When you are finally ready, when you’ve had lots of training and written several novels, you are faced with a daunting wall before you. An agent gets 30,000 manuscripts a year and might take 1 of them, starting down a long road, which also takes years, to get published. Agents will tell you exactly what they are looking for, what genres, and what tropes and you see this is a formula they’ve learned for selling books. Yet they also want an ‘original voice.’ Whether they decide to read a few pages of your novel or not depends on if they like your email that day. Or, more likely, if their assistant likes it that day.
This process feels like I’m auditioning for the musical CATS. Pitch, please. High step here (synopsis), the splits over there(query letter). If you are over forty, forget it. If you are not ‘other enough’ or ‘too other,’ they don’t want you either. They’ve got the formula. They know the drill–what retreats you should have gone to, what awards you should have by now, what’s hot right now and what’s already past. I’ve got a master’s degree in Creative Writing from the University of Edinburgh, and thirteen years of experience with awards, but I’ve only been able to get one agent to look at my manuscript and six months later they said no thanks. That’s one shot at an agent reading some of my writing, after years of sending it out. Most agents don’t even want you to attach samples anymore. If they like the email, they’ll ask for more. They are triaging all the people who want to be writers like they’re the NHS. It’s a long wait.
Three months ago, I decided to look into self-publishing. I’m not wealthy. I could not afford a vanity press and they seemed awful and slimy to me. I did a lot of looking around and found Joanna Penn who has written many wonderful books about Independent author publishing.
Joanna Penn has been the new voice in my head, speaking with kindness and wisdom. She is also a fiction writer, a very successful one. This path has already been empowering for me. It makes sense. Writing fiction is a specific skill set that takes time to learn but so does selling fiction and finding the right readers. I understand it can’t happen fast. There is much to learn, and I need to find the right kind of help, but it is out there. If I keep at it, there will be progress and I’ll find my readers. Joanna Penn gives me hope.
Since starting this journey, I have published my novella, A Cornish Odyssey, on Amazon and other platforms and my book launch will be in Hastings at the Hastings Bookshop on the 29th of June. People in eleven countries are reading it right now. It is getting positive reviews in the USA and UK. And…(drum roll here) I had a 30-minute interview with BBC Cornwall about my novella! www.axelforrester.com
But that’s a story for the next blog. Thanks for reading this.
June 3, 2022
Hello World / 3 June 22
Hello World,
As a new author on Amazon, particularly a self-published one, I thought it might be interesting to write about this journey. So much is changing about the publishing world and sharing this experience with writers and readers might prove useful now and in the future, or at least a bit entertaining, if I can get enough courage to laugh at the fumbles so far.
I'd even like to reflect a bit on what authors of the past might have thought about having the power in our own hands to bring our writing to readers. Virginia Woolf was self-published, as was Margaret Atwood, Beatrix Potter, Mark Twain and Stephen King. It has already been an amazing education to learn about the process of publication and all the things that go on behind the scenes to bring a book into the world. It is a strange and complex world and I’m very glad to have some helpers, the professionals who work in it.
I have written all my life. I remember writing books and physically putting them together with my younger sisters when I was seven or eight years old. We had an assembly line. I would write the words and draw the pictures, Jeralie would colour them in, and Kathie would staple them. Leslie was a baby, so we couldn’t employ her yet. But she watched. My sisters did a lot of things with me. We had a theatre production company and put on plays using all the neighbourhood kids. We also had treasure hunts, and haunted houses and sold candy door to door. We had a pet funeral service. For 25 cents we would bury your dead turtle, goldfish or mouse in a black matchbox, put it in our red wagon, draped with flowers, and proceed at a respectful pace to the local cemetery, where we would bury the pet with a spoon. I remember we cried for these pets, for free. This was a time when our tv watching was limited to Saturday mornings by my mother. The rest of our days were filled with play and I think that developed the muscles of our imaginations.
As an art and design teacher, I had a chance to work with students on developing their creativity, but also spent every free moment I had on my projects, both art and writing. When I moved to the UK to teach in London, I couldn’t afford to live near the school, but I used my 3 hours a day on the train to write. I also did research on weekends, at libraries, at the National Archives and the British Library as well as museums. I walked a lot, all over London, like Dickens, and all over Twickenham and Eel Pie Island when I was working out my novel which takes place there, called Swan Diaries. I met an old woman, whose name was Pamela. She fed the swans every day, the ones living near Eel Pie Island, on the Thames, and knew every swan for generations. She had kept a swan diary for 38 years. It was meeting Pamela and getting to know her that the idea came to me to write a historical fiction novel about a woman who lived on the Thames feeding the swans for 38 years. I imagined her life marrying her sweetheart, just before World War II, losing him in the war and having him come back to her, many years after the war ended.
I’m still working on this novel. There was another one called Wings, which I’m still working on as well. And there’s a third called Three Steps of the Sun. But it was during the lockdown of 2021, that an experience bubbled up in my memory very strongly. In 2004 I put my finger on a map of England and it landed on Penzance. I decided to hike around Land’s End, on my own, and it turned into a remarkable adventure. Memories of it came to me and I found the map I did with a lot of drawings on it. I decided to take one day out a week from my other writing and try to make a little story out of it. It came out mostly formed and felt uncomplicated, but layered. It reasonably captured my memories. I put it away and went back to my ‘real’ work. When I got Covid in March of 2022, I was so depressed about not being able to get agents to even read my work, that I decided to look into self-publishing. There was a lot to digest.
As a new author on Amazon, particularly a self-published one, I thought it might be interesting to write about this journey. So much is changing about the publishing world and sharing this experience with writers and readers might prove useful now and in the future, or at least a bit entertaining, if I can get enough courage to laugh at the fumbles so far.
I'd even like to reflect a bit on what authors of the past might have thought about having the power in our own hands to bring our writing to readers. Virginia Woolf was self-published, as was Margaret Atwood, Beatrix Potter, Mark Twain and Stephen King. It has already been an amazing education to learn about the process of publication and all the things that go on behind the scenes to bring a book into the world. It is a strange and complex world and I’m very glad to have some helpers, the professionals who work in it.
I have written all my life. I remember writing books and physically putting them together with my younger sisters when I was seven or eight years old. We had an assembly line. I would write the words and draw the pictures, Jeralie would colour them in, and Kathie would staple them. Leslie was a baby, so we couldn’t employ her yet. But she watched. My sisters did a lot of things with me. We had a theatre production company and put on plays using all the neighbourhood kids. We also had treasure hunts, and haunted houses and sold candy door to door. We had a pet funeral service. For 25 cents we would bury your dead turtle, goldfish or mouse in a black matchbox, put it in our red wagon, draped with flowers, and proceed at a respectful pace to the local cemetery, where we would bury the pet with a spoon. I remember we cried for these pets, for free. This was a time when our tv watching was limited to Saturday mornings by my mother. The rest of our days were filled with play and I think that developed the muscles of our imaginations.
As an art and design teacher, I had a chance to work with students on developing their creativity, but also spent every free moment I had on my projects, both art and writing. When I moved to the UK to teach in London, I couldn’t afford to live near the school, but I used my 3 hours a day on the train to write. I also did research on weekends, at libraries, at the National Archives and the British Library as well as museums. I walked a lot, all over London, like Dickens, and all over Twickenham and Eel Pie Island when I was working out my novel which takes place there, called Swan Diaries. I met an old woman, whose name was Pamela. She fed the swans every day, the ones living near Eel Pie Island, on the Thames, and knew every swan for generations. She had kept a swan diary for 38 years. It was meeting Pamela and getting to know her that the idea came to me to write a historical fiction novel about a woman who lived on the Thames feeding the swans for 38 years. I imagined her life marrying her sweetheart, just before World War II, losing him in the war and having him come back to her, many years after the war ended.
I’m still working on this novel. There was another one called Wings, which I’m still working on as well. And there’s a third called Three Steps of the Sun. But it was during the lockdown of 2021, that an experience bubbled up in my memory very strongly. In 2004 I put my finger on a map of England and it landed on Penzance. I decided to hike around Land’s End, on my own, and it turned into a remarkable adventure. Memories of it came to me and I found the map I did with a lot of drawings on it. I decided to take one day out a week from my other writing and try to make a little story out of it. It came out mostly formed and felt uncomplicated, but layered. It reasonably captured my memories. I put it away and went back to my ‘real’ work. When I got Covid in March of 2022, I was so depressed about not being able to get agents to even read my work, that I decided to look into self-publishing. There was a lot to digest.
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