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Dispelling a Myth about your Muse: are you ready to show up?
Like many of you, I sat down as the year ended and thought about the changes and intentions I’d bring to the new year. One of those intentions was to write more poetry.
Now, I haven’t written poetry in a long time, at least not on a regular basis since I was a pimply teenager. I used to love poetry and wrote regularly for the high-school newspaper. Later, I combined my love of poetry and folk music and had a go at writing songs. When Chuck G, the most popular boy in our class, agreed to sing one of my songs (“The Ballad of Lambert Jones”) in a class performance, I was chuffed. I was going to be the next Bob Dylan.
Except that I didn’t.
As much as I had desired to be a writer, I also needed to make money and get away from home. The next few years saw me working in a mine, a series of factories, and hitchhiking around Europe and North America. I carried a journal and when the mood struck me, I wrote in it. A snatch of a song here and there.
As happens with many of us wannabe writers, life’s many other attractions got in the way. I became a counsellor working with adolescents in care and later a teacher, a career that took me into my 50s before I succumbed to a mid-life crisis and embarked on an itinerant life as a storyteller. Some would argue that I would have been…
