Things caught on

When you used to write every day. When did that stop? You’ve been asleep for so long, with eyes open and limbs moving and brain firing electricity everywhere but onto a blank page. Will January change things? Will the return of the light help? You’ve been feeling like yourself, that hasn’t changed, but the words were afraid and stayed away. No you were afraid and stayed away. After so many years…

Any time the season changes we remember, because we can see, how things that were hidden can be revealed and how many ways we can change and be changed. Maybe it’s completely normal, for example, to have had languages that your tongue can’t speak any more, to have lost accents and memories, to move without conscious effort from one code to another.

At some point in childhood it made sense to…

I’ve been thinking about the places where experience, the history of our experiences, sits within our bodies.

In the hips, so that a yoga stretch can make memories surface.

In the spine, so that something unresolved can make you unable to unfurl.

In the centre of your chest, where your heart is, even though it’s just a pump, proven quite easily so by a simple test. Just a pump that we…

Pick me up and turn me round

  I used to dismantle, remantle, unstock and restock the shelves of a tall wooden, cheap, bookcase every time I moved house. I think I’ve lived in 19 houses or flats, 2 countries, 5 cities. I think I might have got the bookcase when I briefly owned a house, and then when that didn’t really work out, I think what happened was that I…

When I flew to North America the first time I looked out of the plane window down at land brown and vast and felt, for the first time, no connection to what I saw. I was a stranger to it. The school I went to had its own reverend. I think in one of the assemblies that he addressed that he talked about the feeling of coming home when he saw the arch of the Humber Bridge. I sort of knew what he…

[personal blog post] Our Daughters' Daughters Will Adore Us

In 2016 an MP who was a woman was murdered. In 1918 a few women were allowed to vote for the first time in British history. In 2017 a self-confessed molester became the President of the USA, and another in the closet molester of women began a man-slide down from grace, pulling Oz’s curtain with his fall, so that many other men with their trousers down were revealed. This year we were made to…

Enjoy that winning feeling [blog post]

I started to go through the papers and books and folders and bags of stuff kept in corners and in piles and on chairs and behind the doors. I want to move house so I’m cleaning house. I found things out about my past. I found how much I was paid in my first career-type job, which was surprising because in my memory I’d been paid more than that. I found what I was paid for the next three jobs. The…

The maker of miniatures (writing blog)

I went to see the Basquiat exhibition at the Barbican. I don’t have anything clever to say about it. It made me think again about identity and who we think we are, or might be, or become. It seems to me that Basquiat was between more worlds than only being the black artist in the white scene, homeless to famous, private school to sleeping on a bench, between languages, between forms of…

Shared Ownership, story blog post.

This rewrite I’ll break the back of, at the cost of thousands of words of the old version of the book. Probably about 40,000 words. They weren’t, or aren’t, bad words. It’s not their fault, but they don’t work together, not as a whole. The great white whale of the novel is being gutted, with the blubber cut away. Some of the waste words I’ll put up on this blog now and then, so that they have…

Brian Eno is good to write to. I spent a lot of the year so far being scared of the re-write of Patience’s narrative. A new job has given me back some of the space in my mind, and a new perspective. The story I’m writing is now more complicated, but it’s also more human now, and more honest. I set myself a task in the July Camp Nanowrimo: to write 30,000 words this month. I think I’ll mange…

Take a breath, 2017. (blog post)

Between watching video clips online of Barak Obama and Joe Biden, and crying a little bit as a result, I’ve been thinking about What Next for my own Stuff. Last year, the infamous 2016, I became even worse at my work-life-other things balancing conundrum. But: I had some really nice feedback from a few literary agents about the Patience and Bridget book. I think I have figured out, finally, what…

Nice pipes Tamika. Writing blog.

The book I’m writing (very slowly as it is becoming quite personal) now has snuck its way into the first person plural. I loved Eugenides’ Virgin Suicides written in the ‘we’ and ‘us’ voice but I dunno if I’ll be able to pull it off. My work practice is sneaking into my writing too. I’m writing and talking a lot about movement, memory, the performed and the moment of disappearance in the live. D…

Sundays/ laziness

Time seems to move so slowly on Sundays, and at the same time it has that urgency, that sense that Monday is about to happen and that this laziness will not stand. So when you’re hungover, like I am now, with a work-writing and self-writing to do list as long as it ever is that’s when the self recrimination really sticks in your ribs. Coulda woulda shoulda.   I know I’ll get it all done,…

What I'm learning (blog post)

My work life is tsunami at the moment. It’s fun, though. I went to Atlanta, Georgia, to talk about the dance archive at a conference held at Coca Cola. All of the drinks there were Coca Cola brand. There were vending machines in every doorway and corridor. You didn’t need to put any money in them. You could get fizzy drinks from all over the world (made by Coke). All of the attendees were buzzing…

Tentacles (writing workshops) #blog #amwriting #amediting #imeanwaswritingwaseditingsheesh

You know that feeling when you have worked on a story so much that it is now lifeless, and you think, ‘Did it ever live?’. It’s like, it’s like, it’s like when a fisherman pulls an octopus out of the crystal Mediterranean and takes it to shore and beats it on a rock until it’s dead and what was jewel-like in the water is now jelly on land and what was beauty is now death and what had potential is…

Asking. #discoveryday @foyles @cbcreative @conville_walsh

It’s an ‘Ask’. It’s what you write so that someone says ‘Yes.’ Proposals I’ve written in my dance heritage job sometimes don’t have a strong enough ask, or clear enough. They don’t help someone see why they should care, never mind give money or other kinds of support. It’s a skill to figure out what sort of Ask leads to getting what you need. I’ve been improving. Sometimes the swell of support…

2016: Ima let me finish

Hello everyone. Happy new year to you all, peace and long life, health prosperity and joy. I began this blog in 2012 when I moved to London in order to start concentrating on my writing. It’s been amazing, and a big help in focussing me, making me brave enough to share my writing exercises and in generating stories that I can use to submit to places. Now I’m ready to move on to whatever is next…