April 2018 – Katie Hale

Spring is here! Well, almost. Sort of. Not really. It came for a little while, and then it went again.

But that’s kind of how I feel about my life as a writer, too. Things come and go: inspiration, motivation, high points, low points, belief in your own creative ability. It’s natural to have a less-than-constant relationship with the work in this way. After all, I think very few people go into work every day with an unstoppable spring in their step – and when you’re a writer you’re digging so deep into your own psyche that it’s natural for the rest of your life to come to bear on your writing, and vice versa.

Certainly that’s the way it’s felt for me this month. There’s been a lot of waiting around for things (responses from submissions etc), and I’ve discovered that I’m not amazing at waiting. I’ve also been focussing a lot on admin, which is great in that it’s necessary, and I love the feeling of ticking it all off the list, but when coupled with a lack of actual writing can feel like a bit of a creative drain. Still, I think it’s no terrible thing to take a brief break from the writing desk, especially after reaching a crucial stage in a big project, and letting the batteries recharge.

And on the flip side, in the outrageously positive column for this month:

I finished Draft 7 of the novel (being snowed in was very useful for this)
Tessa Berring wrote a lovely review of my pamphlet, Breaking the Surface, for The Compass Magazine
I had a wonderful week at StAnza International Poetry Festival

StAnza in particular is something that deserves an extra mention here. I first volunteered as a Participant Liaison Volunteer in 2013, and (with a couple of exceptions due to work commitments) I’ve been going back ever since. The festival has become a sort of poetry family, so it was extra special to be invited to read there this year. Even more special was being invited to read at the Festival Launch Extravaganza on the opening night (alongside such fantastic poets as Michael Symmons Roberts, Rita Ann Higgins & Sinead Morrissey), and to help close the festival as part of the panel that made up the Festival Plenary. It means so much to feel supported and encouraged by an organisation that you’ve respected for so long, and that you came to know during such a seminal part of your development as a writer.

I was also asked to write some of the StAnza in-house blog posts during the festival – I guess I didn’t do too badly at this last year if they saw fit to ask me again. This year I shared the post with Carly Brown, who is another long-standing StAnza volunteer who has performed at the festival.

StAnza blog post #1:
Wine, Words, and a Wonderful Beginning

StAnza blog post #2:
A Coming Together of Voices

The other great thing about festivals is always the way they challenge my creative thinking. At StAnza, I was lucky enough to be asked to read the translations for Maud Vanhauwaert during her performance. I learned quite quickly that this was not going to be a straightforward exercise in alternating between Dutch poems in her voice and English translations in mine. Instead, we spent the hour before the performance coming up with interesting ways of performing alongside one another, of integrating performances so that original and translated text spoke to one another, and occasionally spoke with one another, to create a performance that embraced the many levels of translation rather than simply bowing to its complications. It was also a lot of fun, and reminded me how much I enjoy performing – particularly performing alongside other people. While I may not be creating a multi-player poetry show in the near future, it did make me think in greater depth about my own creative practice, and other ways I could work as a poet, and as a writer more generally.

Watch this space, I guess!

March submission statistics:

In terms of submissions, March has been a bit of a continuation of February. Lots of rejections this month – which I suppose reminds me of why I’m doing this ‘100 submissions’ challenge in the first place: to prove how difficult it is to get along as a writer, and how much stamina you need in order to see those successes trickling in.

With 90% of my feedback being negative this month, it made that one small success event sweeter – especially when it came from such an unexpected source, with a piece of flash fiction being accepted for publication. Flash fiction isn’t exactly my usual genre, either, but it’s always good to broaden your horizons, especially in this case!

So here are my March stats:

Submissions made: 6
Rejections: 9
Successes: 1

Fingers crossed for April…

The month in books:

March has been a strange month for books. For a lot of March, I felt as though I couldn’t really focus on anything. Not because the books weren’t good (they were), but because I think my brain was saturated with words, from filling my every waking moment with poetry at StAnza Poetry Festival, to what felt like the herculean effort of finishing Draft 7 of the novel. So I purged. Effectively I pressed reboot on my brain’s creative systems. I went back to something I loved when I was younger, which didn’t requre my analytical brain to engage with my creative impulses and spark anything new. It was just a case of enjoyment, and letting my mind refresh, before I felt I could move back to things that challenged me / my thinking a little more: