Two Steps at a Time

This is a guest post that I wrote for when Talking to the Sky was released. Out of the three of them, it took me the longest to write.

It was posted at Alexandra Brown’s blog and I had the honour of being her first guest post. You can read the original post here:

http://www.alexandrabrown.co.uk/2014/03/jamieson/

When I fell ill last year, I was unable to do anything. I wasn’t allowed to read, to write, to watch television. Not that I would have been able to do that anyway. All I could do was sleep. Being unable to write or read nearly killed me. I lived for words in all their different forms.

After two weeks I was able to read again. The first book I read was Cupcakes at Carrington’s by Alexandra Brown. I wanted something light and fluffy to take me away. What I got instead was so much more than that.

Georgie has to deal with a lot more than your traditional chick lit heroine, but what touched me most were Georgie’s losing her mother from MS related illness. At the time, I read as an observer as my brother has MS. I instantly connected with Georgie’s pain and hoped she would be able to let it go.

Alexandra wrote about a topic that isn’t normally covered in chick lit. MS is certainly not  light and fluffy subject matter. However I wish that wasn’t so. The women in chick lit novels are still people and as such, they deal with all kinds of issues. They’re supposed to be real women living normal lives and not everything in life is fluffy and glorious.

Cupcakes at Carrington’s handles the topic of MS so beautifully that it touched me as a reader and as someone who had a brother with the disease. When they finally figured out what was wrong with me and diagnosed me with relapse and remitting Multiple Sclerosis, I read Cupcakes at Carrington’s again and then a third time, this time with knowledge of what I had.

Alexandra has written a series that goes beyond chick lit. It is within the same genre but by telling her stories in a different way, she’s given chick lit a face lift, has given it heart. She’s given it soul.

I was thrilled to be reading again, but there was a block with my writing. I struggled for weeks with the brain fog, the numbness in my head due to the MS. The stories were still there, I just had to find a different way to tell them.

I had once seen a documentary about Marina Abramovic’s performance piece The Artist is Present. In the piece, she sits as herself and says nothing. All she does do is be completely present for every person that sits across from her.

At first, I wondered how this could be considered art but then grew to see how each person was moved by Marina’s presence and she by them. All this was done without saying a word.

All I wanted to do was write. I could only write a few words at first and could stitch those words together into a poem. However, if I was going to write poems, I wanted to do it a bit differently.

You see, first and foremost, I’m a story teller. I tell tales, spin yarns, create myths. For that, there can’t be just my voice. I find poems are a deeply private piece of that writers soul. They are reaching into themselves and pulling up something tangible.

There is a piece of me in everything I write. I’m sure many writers can agree with me on this. There are characters that I’ve created that look like me, some that have my traits, my sense of humour. I usually tell someone that the best way to get to know me is to read something I’ve written. I’m all through out it my stories.

Poems are more personal, however, like a memoir. The writer is laying bare a moment in time, something that touched them. I wanted to tell stories with my poems. The poems contained in Talking to the Sky are very personal and they are an exploration of strength as I went on a journey to find myself again. However, they aren’t just my voice. Like any good story, there are other characters.

I ended up writing down random conversations I had with people or been part of. Other poems expressed conversations I’d wanted to have and things that remained left unsaid. Some were based in fancy and flight. All the poems had one thing in common: they all involved talking in some way.

By writing the poems in this way, I was able to look deeper than just a random moment, I could look at myself, at what I needed to learn. I’m still learning about myself with every poem and every word I put to paper. I’m still writing my own story and I have no idea how it will end but that’s half the fun isn’t it? I can’t wait to see what the next chapter will bring.

The following is a guest post I wrote for author Marie Bilodeau’s blog. She wanted to know about my experiences with writers blog in relation to my Multiple Sclerosis. She’s been kind enough to let me repost it but you can see the original post here:

http://mariebilodeau.blogspot.ca/2014/02/guest-post-writing-past-wall.html

I’ve never had a problem with writer’s block.

Sure, I had the odd time when a story or a character was being stubborn, but I’ve always been able to write. I’ve written over tons of books and I was always writing something. There was always  a story to tell, always words pouring out.

In January 2013, that all changed. I got sick with what was eventually diagnosed as Multiple Sclerosis. I didn’t write anything for almost a month. When I started to get better, I found I couldn’t write.

I would sit at the computer and stare at it. When I put my fingers to the keyboard, I couldn’t get my fingers to hit the right keys. I was stuck. It was as if there was a wall in front of me that I couldn’t see through.

It was the biggest case of writers block that I’d ever experienced. There were all these words inside my head, all these stories waiting to be told. No mater how hard I tried to force them out, they wouldn’t come and I couldn’t get past the wall that was my head.

I’m a writer. Writing is what I do, the air I breathe, the elixir of life. I needed to find a way to write again, I had to.

I decided to try my hand at poetry. I thought that if artists could do performance art that was silent, perhaps I could write something that would use very few words and still hold meaning for me.

I could only type a handful of words at a time – they were all that was allowed past the wall. I figured that I could string enough of them together to make a poem. I could tell stories again; maybe not the types of stories I used to tell, but I would be writing something. That was enough.

It was slow going at first. The first poem I wrote took me a few days to write, but I got it written. I can’t describe what it was like to write that first poem except that it gave me a joy I had never experienced. I was writing again. It didn’t matter that it was only a handful of words at a time. I was writing and that was enough.

It took a while, but as I continued writing my poems, my typing became more precise. I was able to write whole poems instead of a handful of words. They may have taken hours instead of minutes to write, but the words meant more to me; though there were few of them compared to what I normally wrote, they had more depth.

The poems were made from the pieces of the wall, pebbles and stones holding consonants and vowels. As I continued to write poetry, the stones were all used up and the wall came down. I had found a way past the wall. I’ve never been able to regain the speed I used to write at, but the writer’s block had lifted, the wall was gone.

By April, I was able to start working on the novel that I had been working on before the MS hit. I continued with another novel and am now working on another. However, more and more, I’m turning to writing poetry.

They gave me a voice when I didn’t have one and for that I will be eternally grateful.