I don't keep a journal. I have in the past...a long, long time ago. But today I went to Creative Journaling, a workshop run by author Simmone Howell and poet Lisa D'Onofrio in Daylesford. The workshop was designed to shake your writing up; what I hadn't banked on was that it would shake my mind up too. Six hours passed in about ten minutes.
One of the exercises was about possibilities that can be kickstarted by ephemera. We dipped for old postcards, scraps of writing, cut-out pictures of retro-glamour women. I chose: 'Perhaps they could find new happiness in the New World.' Brilliant in my post-Patrick Ness phase. This is what I wrote:
Her hands were thinner now
Three weeks until entry
Silver packages of food
I can't, she said
I can't eat.
This again.
Galaxies have grown in her eyes
And settled like scales on the ship walls
A fish flying through space
A woman shrinking with hope
It was so nice to write something that wasn't my novel. I never do that. Every spare writing second is spent in an exploding city. I loved being in a spaceship instead.
They're running another one in September—so worth going to.
