Category: Creativity
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A tidy conservatory . . .
Most of the time it’s a utilitarian usefulness that the space affords us. We never seem to have the time to sit and enjoy, but rather we’re busy in other rooms doing other crucial things. Yesterday I started clearing the staging (it had held the chitting potatoes, for example, and then seed trays) and then…
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The joys of forgetfulness
Remembering is over-rated, while the peace of forgetfulness is too often seen as cause for despair. Our task, in Writers Group this week, is to consider the topic of ‘forgetfulness.’ But to my mind, the stimulus has said everything there is to say about the topic. Except for my own personal revelations, of course. I…
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Oh, joy of genres
Today I’m penning a paean to variety. I’ve written in quite a few genres, in my time, and that’s been a continuing joy. In my childhood, I was intrigued by the rhythm of poetry (thanks Robert Service!). Then as an adolescent I became enamoured with the stylistic strictures of scientific papers. In university I branched…
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Petal confetti, horse-tail alley and a flight of swans
We must be getting fitter; we traversed the circular route around the marsh dyke to the River Ken, and back through the fields to home, in just about an hour of ambling, looking and listening. Along the way we invented descriptive words for the natural sights: a tapestry of stichwort; a serried rank of Jacob’s…
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Rewards of a hillside amble
I was beginning to think that it was nearly impossible to capture, succinctly, something of the intense purplish-blue of the bluebell woods in full bloom. But then the sun, dappling out between huge puffy white clouds, created a sensational spotlight, leaving the bank of bluebells before us in immediate shade. So it was worth the…
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Random blossoms of loveliness
Sometimes the smallest things evoke the greatest joy. I decided to take a quick snapshot this morning of the flowers that bedeck the short board fence around the front garden here in New Galloway. We’ve been admiring the multiplying bloom for days now; the plant seems to be exalted in its presentation of itself. More…
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The joys of language
For reasons that are entirely obscure, I chose to respond to this week’s Writers Group task by composing a poem in the Geordie dialect. Unfortunately, my ears have been corrupted by years of Robbie Burns Nights and Scottish idiomatic turns of phrase, and so my first effort was an unwieldy mishmash of sounds pulled out…
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Joys of the persistently mundane . . .
I look forward to the first of the month rather more eagerly these days than I have in the past. That’s because VisualVerse.org brings out their new visual stimulus on that day, and they’ve been kind to me over the past six months. My little writer’s archive is growing, but more important is the broadening…
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Frankly, the joy of writing
So the new task for Writing Group this coming week is to write something about ‘walls, frontiers, margins.’ Could be poetry, fiction, or even creative non-fiction in the form of memoir. Pace John Irving, who wants us to believe that his creativity is so much more than reality, but I suspect that novels are a…
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Looking ahead . . .
You never really know what’s ahead, but it’s got to be better to be looking forward than to be becalmed with nothing to be stimulated by. I’ve felt too becalmed these last few days, but today I’ll be listening in on a new Writers Group. Got my assignment ready, looked over the submissions from four…
Roads to Joy 