exercise 1 from "Writing For Your Life" by Deena Metzger

The Journal as a Dialogue with the Self

Write anything for five minutes, it doesn't matter what. Write as if you are walking in an unknown woods, attentive to anything you might see, or poking at an indistinct mass wondering what it is, whether it is alive or dead, whether it will snarl suddenly, turn and bite. Keep writing.

Let the writing feel welcome. Keep writing. Don't look back. Don't edit. Don't think of what it might be, could be. Only welcome it. Make a place for it to be.


1:39 pm

The air next to the left of my desktop computer is filled with trails of blue-grey smoke from a cigarette. Putting it out, the smoke dissipates, and instead the room is now noticeably noisy from the vehicles outside my flat, probably also trailing the air with diesel fumes, but I can only hear them now. I hear them, and feel the heat from the afternoon. I am only wearing a sarong made from a shawl, wrapped up like a halter-neck dress. It still feels hot. I hear the fan whirring next to me but its breath kisses my skin as if I were not in it, so alien I feel from this body. A body that fails me yet and again. Constantly acting up in anxiety, freezing me in place and not allowing me to move to do the things I have to do, like fulfilling my teaching commitments.

worldsuponwords by avalon at 1:35 PM    [ 0 comment | ]