Hi, I’m Renée.
Zen and the art of Medium Maintainance . . .
I might have no idea what the message is, or why I think I have one at all, but there is is; the common conundrum of trying to make sense of this idea of ‘purpose’.
The essential question I ask myself of late is “what am I doing and why?”
Why Medium ?
Now that I know I am ‘in step and in tune’ with something cosmic, some intangible comeclean-hither zeitgeist here on Medium, as mediums go, I am still on training wheels. As regards this platform as the suggested medium for writing, and all the curses that it entails, well, I am still a little at sixes and sevens about having chosen it. I am being forced to decide what it is I want.
The brevity of my presence here on Medium has been an eye-opener. Firstly it has offered me an opportunity to gauge the question of ‘identity’ with respect to me-myself-and-i as a Wordsmith.
So, first. I am here to claim my name (in part at least). Being addressed as LA or Literary Alchemist is to carry a weight of pretentious anonymity for which I really care not one jot. So, Hi. I am Renée. The joke’s on me really since it is not really a name at all, in its French meaning of ‘reborn’, but there you go.
I am not interested in being an anonymous presence or to wallow in my own writerly-worthiness as an abstraction.
I joined because I want to explore actual contact, discussion, argument and intelligent perspective. I’ve always preferred knowing something about people who read my work and having something worthwhile, tangible and invested in that writer-reader dynamic, than opting for the blind anonymity of a unknowable readership kept at bay by publicists and publishers.
I love collaborations and why really join a platform such as this if you’re not willing to stand up and be counted for who you are? I don’t disparage those who choose to not fully disclose or don’t lay bare every inch of themselves, which in itself is not necessarily
Now to cobwebs and any remaining loitering suspicion; here I am. I am a poet, reluctant novelist and publisher of a fledgling independent press. My life, private and professional is an array of implausible experiences and achievements that have shaped me as a woman, mother, wife, friend and mentor and lifelong free agent.
I chose Medium because I don’t want a website any more. I don’t blog. I write old fashioned essays. I had a poetry site for a while and it mushroomed to the point of my having eleven different sites. Impossible.
I have two sites now:
Rare Swan Press. http://rareswan.ch.
And an ongoing project with American artist Jerry Shawback
of image and text, emotion and metaphor through collaborative improvisation. Please browse at you leisure and invite…theshawbackredemptions.wordpress.com
Publishing
I’ve been writing since the age of thirteen. I have five published poetry collections;
Sexions, Selections from Life & Love featuring Hottentot Venus, commissioned in 2005 by the then Jacobyte Books Select Six editor Sam Smith. (out of print).
Falling Slowly, a chapbook published by erbacce press in 2012 was written after several years as a recluse following the suicide of my closest friend, two days after her son’s eleventh birthday. This is momentarily out of print too as I pulled it from the publisher.
I have two collections of short poems published on the ether books app for download;
My most recent collaboration launched Rare Swan Press a year ago.
Mario Susko invited me to co-write 20/20, a celebration of life, family and love in a time of war and exile.
Generously permitted to use original work by renowned photographer Steve McCurry for the cover, I found myself writing and creating RareSwan Press’s first book.
I wished to put my own name on the line in publishing this collection. At a time when yet more war and violence tears a country to shreds on our doorstep, I wanted 20/20 to be a witness to how it could so easily be one of us — not just some arbitrary them.
Mario Susko and I, like so many, are the products of two very different ideological wars. We both live and work effectively in exile, especially in the political contexts of our previous lives.
20/20 is an intimate and deeply personal story of two very different poets, each of whom were privileged to walk away from their respective war zones.
We live, working with memory to fight forgetting, so as to remind ourselves, no one lives immune to battlefields or the scars they leave within, but as much, to pay tribute to the lives and people who shaped the joy, the laughter and without whom, there’d be no memory to speak of.
I joined Medium not to publish a collation of my ideas and share my art under a cloak of anonymity. I am simply showing up for work.
so anyone who cares to check:
on Twitter Literati Magazine @ThePoetryTree / @RareSwanPress.
I am starting up a version of Literati Magazine here on Medium. Please feel free to start a conversation, or ask any questions.
Good to be here.
As ever, R
