Breaking out and away

I’m grateful for my day job with my Schubis, the young people I work with at uni. As one was going on maternity leave, we decided to do
something creative together. So off we went for a session at Made By You. My Schubis decorated mugs and a piggy bank (which was really an owl), a jug and a bowl. I painted a tortoise. A good friend has a sister who collects them, and he is at his wits’ end to find something she doesn’t have. Well, the tortoise is one of a kind for her collection. (I picked it up today and it’s magnificent, isn’t it?)

My day job allows me to be independent and lets me write how and what I like, and do what I want to do. Like on Bloomsday, when I went to hear Nino aus Wien and Nathalie Ofenböck do a Trieste take in English on James Joyce – Nino even pronounced “Dubliners” the way Dubliners would. (Kidneys were cooking and absinthe was also at the ready.) Then they presented a couple of their own literary creations and some music from Nino. The small house was packed. We were about 50 people. All this was preceded by a performance in honour of Joyce’s daughter who was a dancer. Going by the performance, it seems she was also quite mad. Nino, Nathalie and the kidneys, though, really made a super evening. Talk about cross-pollinating!

And then there was an email from performance poet extraordinaire, Neil McCarthy, to tell me about an acting workshop. I signed up, thinking it might come in handy for writing. But now it will be for performing as I’ve also been invited to be part of a poetry slam/battle to raise funds for Nepal in a gallery called Improper Walls, if I understood at all, so elated was I. I just love the name of the gallery.

Anyway, the acting workshop is on 29 June at Vienna Skills Smiths, and while signing up I thought I might offer to share what I know on flash fiction, but for any sort of writing in any language. And so my workshop will be early September, and it will be affordable for participants. What impressed me about Vienna Skills Smiths is the passion of this young startup – they also just got a prize in Berlin. Passion makes possible!

Oh, and then a dear friend emailed to ask if I would say some fun words in German to introduce her art group, bunt g’mixt, at their vernissage on 6  October. Of course, I said, yes!

Yes, I’m all over the place, but I like it that way. It feeds my writing, which is not under any pressure to feed me.

Reflections on this, and a number of recent rejections, how I don’t want to be put into any box, not even later, have freed me to yet again rethink my opus, mix forms of memoir and fiction, be episodic – it comes to me naturally – be true to myself. I am very excited about breaking out, and away, from the constraints of what others expect. I want to start all over again. Start a new page. Onwards!