Pedlar Press

A new chapbook of poems now available in a limited edition. LEARNING TO CRAWL (and other poems), Beth Follett.

https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/1576133889/beth-follett-learning-to-crawl-and-other?

I’ll be reading from the chapbook on Wednesday 6 December 2023, from 7 to 8PM, at The Battery Café in St John’s NL.

Namaste.

Writing a novel is rife with potential for confusion, discomfort, humiliation, confronting your own shadow.

If you’ve been avoiding starting a novel you deeply want to write, that avoidance is actually a really smart move. In your resistance, you’re accurately sensing the very real emotional, mental, psychological (sometimes even physical) challenges ahead. Maybe you also recognize the violence that must be done to your shimmering novel idea in order to wrestle it into tangible form.

Your resistance is your mind working to protect you from what may lie in that unknown space of the blank page. It’s smart to not write your novel.

The problem, of course, is if you really do want to write it. You might be keeping yourself safe by not beginning, but you might also be missing the rewards on the other side of that discomfort and uncertainty.

The joy of creative flow. The fulfilment of a dream. A deep sense of purpose, alignment, and connection. A completed novel—your completed novel, populated with your characters and their fully realized journey.

HEIDI REIMER

You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where your are is where you are not.

*

—from TS Eliot, Four Quartets

AS YOU PASSED ME

 

on the Casa Loma path, lobelia in bloom,

things I’d talked over with my analyst

sang in my mind. You’d been dead six years,

 

why lift the veil for me just then? Yesterday I posted

your 1942 photo booth picture, and Stan wrote,

Playboy. Another shared the post. You were Dad,

 

Dad who let me drag him by his hand from front door

to kitchen where not one but two kittens nestled

in the warmth of the stove, the winter cold

 

releasing from the wool of your overcoat. This may

be my first memory. I was three, you were thirtynine,

unhappiness at a job eating you.

 

He had your gait, he wore a suit, and as he passed

he smiled, then looks at me, and says, Hello,

John-Prine-like: Hello in there. Hello.

 

Gretchen gave me a handful of Doris’s ashes,

put them in a vintage diner maple syrup dispenser,

wrapped it in one of Doris’s scarves. I set it on

 

my dresser. One night before bed her muffled voice

crying, Help! And what about the Brazilian spoon

lying on the kitchen table, which as I enter

 

to make my first cappuccino of that day

announces unmistakably, Your beloved is coming.

Or the shaman stone from Chile, one among

 

six round stones in my bowl, but the only

one Michael picks up, to comment, Why is there a star

roughly engraved here? I think you’d understand

 

why I don’t dismiss these events, but neither do I claim

to know what brings the mysteries to our doors,

or why we suddenly see out of blind living.

 

I cannot answer (Phyllis Webb), only ask. In-fighting

over who the Makers are eat me. Flee the power,

go instead where there is no place that does not see you

 

no matter how dialogic, no matter how accommodating,

flying in the face of the ointments. Hello brave

failure, another kind of place says, here comes your own

 

true love across the 11:11 auspices that bind you

to your dead. Hello in there. Hello

from here. Hello.

I follow UK ARTIST Rachel Singleton.

I respond to strong shapes, particularly circles.

*

https://rachaelsingleton.com/

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