Category: writing

There’s a little moment in writing that falls in the space between the gathering of ideas (and the subsequent brain dump of those ideas), and the start of the actual writing. In that space, I always feel like I’m in complete control of both the process and the project. It’s like the say in the classics

I know exactly what I want to say … all I have to do is write it.

I think it’s lucky that I do have this little space where I believe all this. If I truly remembered how hard that next stage is–the stage where I have to start forming the thoughts and ideas into coherent sentences–then nothing would ever get started.

*“Well,” said Pooh, “what I like best,” and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn’t know what it was called.”

I’m enrolled in the Royal School of Needlework certificate of embroidery, mostly because I wanted to get more into their teachings on blackwork embroidery. I started with the self-paced course, which I finished during my long, slow recovery from my first bout of covid in 2022. I stitched the puffin.

I loved the intricacy and detail of it, but also its order and symmetry (that’s what I love about knitting too). For someone who doesn’t excel at maths, I have a deep love for counting (here’s a whole lot more maths than I could ever make sense of). But I was especially drawn to the shaded techniques the Royal School of Needlework have been developing and promoting. I did a bit of reading and researching, but I felt like it was something I needed to be taught rather than something I would be able to instinctively learn.

As is my way, I got a bit too drawn into the idea of mastering it, to the extent that this time last year I was enrolled in the certificate of visual arts at the Adelaide Central School of Art.

I’ve been looking around for some inspiration and ideas from previous or current students, especially the ones working on the blackwork unit. It’s brought home to me, how much richer the internet was in the days of blogging, especially now that instagram has evolved into whatever instagram is these days. There are some posts on instagram and on pinterest, but I’m finding instagram especially hard to search and filter these days (why, why, why did instagram have to take away the ‘most recent’ tab from the searches). Anyway, no use complaining about what isn’t, because instagram isn’t there to help us find beautiful things, it’s there to help people sell stuff to us.

If you’ve come to this while you were looking for blackwork embroidery, here’s some links to some of the instagram accounts and other more in-depth blog posts I’ve found.

Given that she quite literally wrote the book on it, it isn’t surprising that Jen Goodwin probably has the most to look at it in both quantity and quality. Her instagram feed is gorgeous and her shop is one of the few places to sell shaded blackwork kits.

Christina MacDonald (@stinamacdo) has many beautiful examples of blackwork on her insta feed

Alex at Elara Embroidery has so far finished the crewelwork module, and the blackwork module with good overview posts at different stages.

I can’t work out what this person’s name is, but she finished the module in 2018 and has a good number of update posts on her blog.

It’s an old blog, but here’s someone getting started on teaching themselves shaded blackwork techniques.

The String or Nothing blog has a bunch of posts and resources on blackwork all linked on this comprehensive page. It’s not dedicated to shaded blackwork which is my main fixation at the moment, but if you’re getting started on blackwork, you’ll definitely find something here.

I’ll add more as I come across them.

The first truly hot day of the year. By which I mean it’s a hot day that followed another hot day so cumulatively it feels like summer. I’ve got the Christmas lights on now, and I sat up late last night, lying on the couch looking at them reflecting off the windows and the glass in the doors. I’ve been rewatching The Detectorists and it’s making me melancholy. In a good way. The theme song is perhaps the most pitch perfect theme song of any television series ever.

I went into the market today for lunch with one of my children. It was buzzing, but in a languid way. The way that November Fridays do. It made me sink even further into November. Lots of good things happened, but the best part was getting out of the car, seeing the carpark flooded with tradies, all laughing and yelling. It had just hit 37.5 on the building site. Anything over 37 means tools down. Their glee gave perfect Friday afternoon vibes.

For years–years and years–I’ve been working to establish rhythms and routines. I’ve been writing it on every plan I’ve ever made (which is a lot, given that I make annual plans almost weekly). But of course you can’t create rhythms and routines, they create themselves. I’ve been reminded of that this October and November. As the first year since 2018 that I haven’t been trying to get together a new show for the next year’s fringe there’s been a freedom I wasn’t expecting. I keep looking around me, trying to understand what this feeling is, but it’s the feeling of not having a new show to create. And it’s left my body and my brain with all sorts of space, and time and energy to think about what comes next. Except that today it’s too hot to think.

I subscribe to the substack newsletter, Embedded, because it describes itself as ‘your essential guide to what’s good on the internet.’ And each week (I think each week, maybe each fortnight, but very regularly anyway) it includes a piece about someone who is chronically online. They don’t exactly describe it as ‘chronically online’ but I can’t be bothered going to to find out the exact words they use and for all in tents and porpoises it’s what they mean.

Anyhoo, I subscribed to it because I thought it might help me better understand what happens and what is happening on the internet. I think it might help me to make sense of things. And it sort of did in a somewhat paradoxical way.

This morning, I was reading a piece titled ‘Close Friends don’t let Close Friends Snitch,’ and it’s about the close friends function on instagram. I was overwhelmed once again by the feeling that I can’t keep up. I can’t keep up with the number of people, I can’t keep up with who I’m supposed to know and who I’m not supposed to know, I can’t keep up with how it works technically, I can’t keep up with how it works socially. I can’t absorb all of the things that all of the people are doing and I don’t know where to put my attention. And all the while, I have this constant, lingering anxiety about my complete inability to have ever properly established a social media presence. And this ongoing thought that I need to somehow work it out. To make it work for me so that my career (finally) takes off.

There is so much discussion at the moment about what is wrong with social media. But the answer is pretty simple in my mind. In the same way we still call our phones ‘phones’ although they have long since stopped acting as phones, we continue to call social media ‘social media’ although it has long since stopped being about our social lives. Once friendship became truly commodified its socialness was doomed.

Just as I was overwhelmed by the sense that I can’t keep up, my mind did a kind thing and said to me, ‘You don’t have to keep up with it, you know.’ And then my mind kindly answered itself by saying, ‘That’s a good point, you really don’t.’

For a while, I’ve been thinking that my substack newsletter might become an all-in-one replacement for my social media and blog. But I’ve been thinking it for years and it’s never worked that way. I think that’s because I’m mindful that a newsletter lands in someone’s inbox. So it needs to be worth those someones’ whiles. It needs to have substance.

I have many thoughts that I’d like to share more publicly than in just one of my many notebooks. Sharing thoughts and ideas always helps those thoughts and ideas grow stronger. But often I know they will never be strong enough to merit someone’s inbox. In a blog post, you’re simply saying it, and if someone wants to stay and listen they can

I keep making notes in the margins ‘this would be a good blog post’, ‘blog?’ So I guess in a way, this is kind of the footnotes to the newsletter. The appendices perhaps.

Truly, I’ve never found anything as perfect as you, my beautiful strange little blog, for the perfect balance of sharing thoughts and keeping them to myself at the same time.

I think I did actually believe myself when I told myself that I’d be finished the first draft of my script by the end of this week. Actually I’m pretty sure I did believe it, even though I have zero evidence of this being even a possibility. Like, have I ever finished anything that quickly before? However, the promise to myself has at least had the effect of spurring me on to work a little faster. So by the end of the week I’ll be closer to finished than I was at the beginning of the week, and I’ll have to be satisfied with that.

If I have one thing I’m going to focus on in this new phase of my working life, it is on working faster. Or it might be more accurate to say that I’m going to focus on completing things more quickly. And the only way to do that is to sit at my desk more often and just blat words onto the page.

Whenever I do sit down and blat things onto the page, I’m satisfied with myself for doing that. But at the same time, I’m grumpy with myself for having spent so much of my life not doing that. I can’t help thinking I’ve got so little to show for my time. Oh, more angst! How surprising.

Despite the angst I also mean it when I say that I am satisfied with myself for how much I’ve been sitting at my desk to get things done. I feel like I’m (re)training myself and finding a new working groove. This is kind of along the lines of ‘better late than never’ but it’s also along the lines of ‘right place, right time.’

I’m also going well on my ‘tidy person’ quest. It takes up a lot of time though, constantly picking up after myself. But it’s always nice to walk into a room and think, ‘oh, this is tidy.’

Nearly time for me to log off, but there’s one other change I think I should mention about myself. I’ve started having large iced lattes instead of small. But I’m also having them skim milk or low fat which is fine when they’re iced, but might not be so great when it’s time to switch back to normal (that is, not iced).

Talk tomorrow! Or the day after, or the day after that or sometime later anyway.

Back to reminding myself that angst is boring and that it’s time to perk myself up and get on with things.

One problem being that I’m not completely sure what this mood is about. I can guess at the usual–what have I done with my life, what am I doing with my life, how could I have wasted so much time–but I feel like I’ve pretty much resolved all that and made peace with where things have landed. Because you have to, don’t you? I think that maybe this is the way I always feel when I first put shows on sale. Extremely out of sorts.

Several days later…

I have come back to the blog, opened the posts tab (rather than just hitting ‘new post’)* and I have totally left that angst behind to the point I’d forgotten that I’m even supposed to be angsting.

Naturally I’m still grumpy and still dissatisfied with my life and still ‘why, why, why’ and ‘what, what, what’, but for the most part I’m feeling reasonably well-balanced. It’s frustrating though, that no matter how many times I remind myself of it, I seem always to forget ‘this too shall pass.’

Yesterday I went into art school for my assessment meeting. Which was kind of fun to realise how enormously much my ability to draw has improved. But weirdly, it went so well that it’s making me think twice about continuing. What if my next teacher is not as willing to accept someone who is not here to be any good, merely to learn what she’s not good at? And what if–and this would be the worst–I ended up a with a teacher with all that energy we had in the second-to-last class of the year (and the last class I attended).

I have applied for leave for the first semester which is only sensible as I’ll be busy with fringe shows and it’s too hard to keep up with the work. Getting behind is not only stressful but also means that I can’t learn what I want to learn, because I’m too busy stressing about what I’m not caught up with.

After my assessment, I went into town and met an old blogging friend at the art gallery. She was making a short trip here from Melbourne. How lovely that was. How bloody brilliant. She asked whether they still make you put your work on the wall at the end of the day and talk about it and then other people can talk about it. I said they do indeed. And then we talked about how difficult that process can be. And that made me think even more that I might not be in the right place, because I don’t really need to look at my work in a critical light, in fact it is kind of ridiculous to look at it that way. I’m still at the ‘well that looks recognisably like what you were trying to do’ and I don’t expect that realistically I’ll ever move much past that.

Today I’m going to get out more of the new show, Stitches. I’ve got myself into that messy part where I’m all, ‘what is happening, it was going so well, why am I so useless?’ So it’s time to remind myself that ‘this too shall pass’, but in this case it can only pass if I sit down and do the work. So that’s what I’m off to do.

Talk tomorrow. Or the day after that. Or possibly the day after the day after the day after that.

*one of the rules of this blog is that I’m not allowed to abandon posts entirely, if I come back and there’s one started then I have to finish that instead of starting a new one).

My name shifted up the waitlist and I got a seat at the Dog Eared Readings last night. With Shannon Burns in conversation with J.M. Coetzee it was never going to be anything except extraordinary. Naturally, it left me with that strange dissonance I always experience after such events. On the on hand, exhilaration from being witness to such depth of thought and thinking. On the other, despair. What’s the point of living a writing life when you know you are never going to achieve that level not only of perception but of connection with your readers and audience.

It also reminded me how entrenched I am on the fringes of everything, a result partly of my level of (okay, but not outstanding) talent, partly of being a little bit in a lot of things but not fully immersed in any, partly of being a little bit lazy and not doing enough work, partly of being too shy etceterarrgghhh. Most of the time I’m not only reconciled to my life on the fringes of our arts scenes, but leaning into it. Every now and then, however, I can’t help wishing I were slightly more successful.

No time for self-pity though, because I’m reading an extract of my new show at the SA Playwrights Theatre staged readings this evening and the deadline is, as always, an excellent distraction. I know telling you that I’m reading seems to contradict my previously discussed status of being on the fringe, but the rest of the lineup is a solid range of talent invited to be in curated programs and a list of prizes and none of them will know my work at all.

I do know this all sounds angsty and self-pitying, but it honestly isn’t. Like I say, I’m mostly at peace with who I am and where I’ve ended up. But it’s useful to leave myself little reminders when this feeling sneaks in, so that next time I feel it, I can look back over things, think, ‘oh, that’s right, this again,’ and move on.

What I especially loved about last night was the discussion of class. My own notions of class are ridiculously outdated I know. My sense of connection to my working class background is, by now, highly romanticised. My children would have absolutely no sense of what it means to feel working class. I’m not sure what to do with that knowledge, especially in the context of the referendum result.

I’m going to have leave this here as a placeholder because it’s 2.30 which is the time I promised myself I’d get back to work. But it’s something I’d like to explore in more depth, if I can work out where to start.

After writing about him only two days ago and his influence on my return to my blogging space, I am–at this very minute–listening to Cory Doctorrow talking about his new book on Radio National. Not surprisingly, he sounds exactly like the kind of person you want to listen to. Calm and smart and a little bit funny.

I spent all of yesterday at my desk, moving between this blog, my substack page, my new website, and of course the script that I’m reading from tomorrow night. I also had a bunch of notebooks and journals open in front of me. It sounds like distraction hell, but actually it’s helping me to get all of my many thoughts out of my head and down on the page in a reasonably orderly way. Kind of like when you’re doing a clean-out or moving house or organising the cupboards and you have a bunch of tubs or buckets or boxes and you go through everything one-by-one and throw each thing into whichever bucket they fit and at the end of the day you’ve got a bunch of tubs or buckets or boxes with a group of more-or-less cohesive things.

It was a really rewarding day. Messy, but not overwhelming. And I can see a way forward to getting a bunch of things finished over the next year or so. It’s frustrating of course because its nothing I didn’t already know, and what have I been doing with my time, and I should have finished much more than I have over the years. But here we are and I’m feeling surprising hopeful about how things are going to go over the next little while. (Future me is going to have a good laugh about this one, eh?).

Back to work.