Spent a little bit of time this evening adding some blackout poetry to my scrapbook. Clippings courtesy of old Writers Magazine issues, word-twisting by me.
Also, here is the front cover of my scrapbook – isn’t it gorgeous?
Author: writersamr (Page 18 of 45)
This is a quick note about how I tried not to let a bad memory ruin my morning. One of my work colleagues became a dad yesterday, which meant that this morning people in the office were talking about birth, labour, c-sections and epidurals. I sat listening while working (it’s a small office, it’s impossible not to listen), until the bit about the epidural, at which point I grabbed my headphones, went to YouTube and clicked on the first music video I saw. Which, usefully, was Slipknot, but anything would have worked to drown out what they were saying.
This is a guest blog post by Sheryl Chan from A Chronic Voice. Read on to find out why you should write your way through chronic illness, and discover more about Sheryl below!
Why Write?
Blogging about chronic illnesses can be hard work. For some, the exposure of their privacy or the intimacy of the topics can be a
deterrent. Others struggle with expressing their thoughts, or posting content on a regular basis. Vicious, unconstructive trolls who don’t even bother reading are an energy drain. Usually, it is a combination of all of these factors. So why do we even bother?
I have three poems in Bindweed Magazine! The poems are on the website right now and they will be in the print version of the magazine in October. You can read them here!
Two of these poems are about my brother and the middle one is about me and my parents trying to distract ourselves from my illness back in the day. So they are really important to me and I’m quite proud of them, so I’m very happy to have them published!
A bit of time travelling this morning – this is the first poem I had published in a literary magazine. It was published in Obsessed With Pipework, a Flarestack publication, in 2006 when I was 18. Before that, I also had poems published in two anthologies (in 2004 and 2005, so at the age of 16 and 17), but this was my first magazine publication. I actually submitted a longer version of this poem, but the editor decided he liked the firs three lines and asked if he could just publish those. I still remember the full poem off by heart:
I think I feel self-conscious because I’m quiet. It’s not that I’m quiet because I’m anxious – my quietness is making me anxious. I am socially awkward because I am socially awkward. My very nature is doing this to me. What a riveting cycle.
I worry that when I’m quiet people will think I am boring and won’t want to hang around with me anymore. I don’t have any past experience to base this on except for one thing someone said about me and a friend parroted back to me when we were about seventeen. Yet it still makes me paranoid. So, that’s my personal discovery for the day, what was yours? Hopefully something a bit nicer.
I am officially seven years cancer-free tomorrow (as far as I know) and yes, I’m still harping on about it.
I had a dream I was at
an indoor market on a Thursday
night with my parents, not our
usual haunt but it was a
special marketplace selling
only old Beano and Dandy annuals.
Likely my parents and I were looking for
different things. I have trouble seeing
past the differences
most times
I was looking for my past
but maybe we were also all
looking for him
among those
dog-eared, yellowing pages with
crumbling spines like tree bark. I awoke
in a world where the inherited annuals I once had
are now long gone – to a charity shop, or
to collectors, or to children who already have or
soon will successfully reached adulthood, I hope.
If I get to bed late tonight it’s because I’m sat watching the one Linkin Park gig I went to on YouTube in its entirety.
It was Projekt Revolution in 2008 at Milton Keynes Bowl, and for some reason we were sat right up on the hill, not in the crowd where I have been for all my other gigs. It was the Jay Z era and he made an appearance, but I wasn’t interested in him. Another friend of mine was there with some other friends – he was closer, but he got hit on the head by a flying bottle near the beginning of their set and spent the rest of the night in the medical tent with a concussion.
This week I was honoured to be able to guest blog over at A Chronic Voice! My post talks about the different identities that may be associated with us after a cancer diagnosis, and whether illness forms part of our identity. You can check it out here: Does Illness Form Part of Your Identity? As always, thanks for reading and let me know what you think!
