TELL ME THIS
The First Six Questions
Hello, folks. It's Monday, and I am working from my sofa instead of my desk. The cat is sitting behind my head, and I have some good ambient television on, and an objectively enormous jar of iced Lipton yellow label tea I steeped overnight in the fridge, so let's think a bit about making work, and about how this segment of the newsletter is going to pan out. This creative writing class element of the project will normally be for subscribers only, but because we're getting started off, I reckoned I'd send it out to everyone. Also - hey, welcome. There's a fair few more of you than I expected, and I'm really grateful you're here. Thanks for coming along.
I've been thinking a lot about how to start this distance creative writing class (which is what I'm calling it until I work out something better!) element of the newsletter in a way that might work for all different kinds of writers: diarists, journallers, poets, nonfic heads and fiction heads, so consider this format malleable, likely to change. It won't look like this every time I send one out, but it will always look like a set of questions for you to answer, or approach, or simply respond to. I have historically exhausted so much of the love I feel for writing my putting myself into tight spaces - so take this in mind when you have a read of these prompts, and the pieces I found that inspired them - there is no incorrect way to get the work out. Answer one, answer two, answer all six if you like. Read the poems/pieces I offer in conjunction with the questions, and go do your own thing. Just take what is inside your head and move it, through your hands, onto paper. Or your notes app. Or whatever works for you.
Can I give you something to warm up with, before we go? I love this tiny exercise, by Lynda Barry - a cartoonist and creative who I look up to an enormous amount. If you're using paper and pens to write, then you should have those tools at hand, and they're all you need. I first read about this technique in her book about teaching creative practice, Syllabus, but this instructional snippet is taken from a piece of work she made for the New Yorker.
The tight spiral and the drift are a kind of a tiny meditation, I think. My notebooks are full of weird shapes I draw to try and center myself. So, next, I'd like to show you two things I found on Tiktok. I know, I know. But trust me.
Here are some screenshots, and the users I took them from. The last thing is the audio recording, by Lucille, of the poem.
Here is the audio from the original video, if you'd like to listen. I truly loved this poem, and sent the screenshot above to several friends, and it resonated deeply with me in the way I think many great poems do: like a magic trick, which at once reveals something about being alive, and changes things, too. I'd ask for you to forgive the screenshots, but I really do find a lot of poets, and poetry on social media, either via the poet or via someone else reading the poet (as is the case here). I also like the scrappiness of screenshots, the unevenness: like I said in the first newsletter, they feel like shards of the world, to me. Anyway, look, here is a gorgeous wee reading of the poem, above.
All of this considered, here are six questions, for you.
Before I go, two things. If you, like me, are a person who makes zines, or are interested in maybe trying a new format for creativity in the new year, can I recommend playing around with The Electric Zine Maker? The reason I ask six questions in my prompts is that the eight page zine (folded from a single A4 page) has six interior pages: and thus, if you answer each question, you have the makings of a tiny personal zine. It is my favourite program, and is free or pay what you want.
The last things is just what Big Mo has been doing while I've been collating the images and things I've used to build this little prompt set off my phone and into my inbox. I said this would come with pictures of the animals, and I meant it.
Thanks for being here, folks. One more of these before the end of the month, for subscribers, and one more normal newsletter, too. We're aiming for frequency, practice, some kind of commitment to something bigger than the ephemera of social media (while incorporating the digital ephemera of social media, obviously).
If this is useful for you, or you find yourself writing, and feel like sharing it online, give me a tag wherever you post it, I'd love to see what you make. If you feel like giving the newsletter a share, that would be big good vibes, too - sometimes I've got no idea how to find more readers, and word of mouth, as we know, is the real power of the internet.
Sending you good vibes this icy Monday, friends. We're a just about a third of January down, spring is on the way. Next time you like someone's sweater, tell them.
<3
griff