our life, not theirs. your inner monologue has got something to tell you
At the beginning of October, I took part in an online creative writing workshop with Alaura O’Dell, the interdisciplinary writer and performance artist.
Alaura spent ten years performing and travelling the world with the British avant-garde collective, Psychic TV with the late, great Genesis P-Orridge, before shifting her creativity to her own writing. Exile has featured heavily in her life and work.
Here’s what happened in this creative writing experiment…
Safety rules
The workshop was designed to help us extract the memories and stories that have may have held a grip over us and write about these in a stream of consciousness narrative style.
The rules were clear — safety is paramount, no judgement and total confidentiality.
I judge a room quickly. It’s that gut instinct thing. I can’t even participate without feeling comfortable and secure with the room, the people, the space. Staring at faces staring back at me makes me skittish. I never used to be like this.
But I knew a few people in the room well enough to know that they were comrades.
I don’t know what to write
Alaura read a poem by the New York poet and artist, Lorraine Schein, called Rabble Rousing. She asked us to pick out words or a phrase from the poem that spoke to us and then write. Just write a stream of consciousness. Words. Looping thoughts. Wandering mind. Worldview. If the writing stopped, write “I don’t know what to write. I don’t know what to write. I don’t kn….” until the stream returns. Which it (hopefully) will.
For me, it was this phrase:
“Resist Gravity! Uprise Skyward!”
This spoke to me on two levels: firstly, don’t accept the status quo, don’t accept what you get told, question it and resist it if it doesn’t feel right for you; secondly, I imagined the cover of Bob Marley and The Wailers’ final album Uprising: the ultimate protest album.
I DO know what to write
Here’s what I wrote:
“A call to re-evaluate societal norms, accepted ways to behave, accepted logic, accepted science and polemic.
Anarchist living, abandon rules, abandon the capitalist office blocks.
Dispense with hierarchy, with the class system that holds back and discriminates against those that think “differently”, those that want “different things”, those that don’t bow and kiss feet.
Metaphorical gravity, paddling against the flow, resist, be different and create. All creation is valuable. What is value? Who said it’s so? Who makes the definition stick? Is this an elitist plot to revive the opiate of the masses? A soulless soul ruling as an oppressive force dictating to us about how we live our lives.
Our life, not theirs. We are rabble rousers.”
(The words in bold are prompts to help me start writing new stuff. Just take the words or phrase and start writing with whatever comes into my head. See where my mind goes. I could pick other words to use as prompts.)
No rules writing
The experience was pretty mindblowing:
- This was totally different to how I have written before, so I had to get out of my comfort zone quickly.
- The idea was to dig deep to find and extract my emotional and psychological truth. I think this worked, although I didn’t wholly allow the way I wrote to be released from the way I’ve been taught.
- My brain wandered unpredictably from one thought and one word to the next.
- My thoughts were not linear and not always logical or ordered and what I spewed out defied what I had been taught about how to construct and organise “proper” sentences.
- Yet what I spewed does have some semblance to how I like to write nowadays after years of studiously writing those “proper” sentences.
- I downloaded my thoughts as they appeared. But, because I didn’t wholly release myself to the monologue, I think I held myself back.
- What I wrote: I have a tendency to look for messages that have a socio-political angle. Kind of like a slogan. I know I do this.
- Writing (almost) freely with no rules, no framework, no expectations, then reading it out to the others was cleansing.
- Perhaps there is some frustration with myself that I’ve allowed myself to be caught up in a conformist way of living and I’m now catching up for lost time.
Perhaps the resistance that comes across in my writing is the story that my inner monologue needs to tell….
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