my mission

I am currently reading War & Peace, my favourite book changes between Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, and if I could belong to any poetic movement, it would either be the formal verse Romantics (think Coleridge, Tennyson, Keats) or the free-verse Americans (a la Whitman and Plath). This is all to say, I’m vitamin D deficient. 

It’s often thought that great writers are always by their pen. The ink flows and the writer chases, as if their ideas were the waterfall and the author a limitless river pushing all the ideas off the edge to collect into a deep pool of coherent thought. But, at the risk of extending a weak metaphor, you need momentum to make the river run.  

I didn’t think it took courage and pain to be a great writer. But then I graduated from my degree and realised that without the captive audience of a tutor, I was an indulgent coward. I don’t think I have ever written without a deadline. 

At my graduation I was photographed holding a piece of paper in a plastic sleeve next to a tired academic who didn’t smile, and I realised that unless I found the force to move the river myself, nothing would flow again. 

I like reading great books that strum on the english language and play notes I’ve never heard. I want to read articles that reframe runways as art shows explaining how designers are creating a new grammar of femininity. I enjoy theories that sharpen my words like weapons and reveal how the tricks of politics are performed. I love great writing and I want to be a great writer. 

I can only hope the path to becoming one is scabbed over with extremely derivative reviews, confusing articles, and overly cliched poems and stories. 

My goal is to do a Masters overseas, work freelance while travelling the world, and maybe, if I have enough courage, write my own films or novels. Will that happen? I guess you’ll have to follow to find out. 

If you would like to know who I am, I’m a graduate, I’m generally anxious, I hate a lot of what I write, I doubt almost everything I do, and I feel totally unworthy of any attention I might ever receive. But far more interesting is who I am trying to be: someone brave, someone who doesn’t fear the intellectual burden of writing, someone who uses the word ‘peroration’ flawlessly, and someone who is always by her pen. 

So damn it, let me contribute a verse.