WHEN NEEDS BE
A blue-ink ballpoint and an upside-down, back-to-front notebook is a great reminder as to how much energy I spend getting things “right.” As if anything falling outside my obsessive aesthetic vision just won’t cut it.
It was the day after our arrived in Mousehole that I gasped at the realisation that my linen-covered – by me, of course – journal and my tiny black Montblanc fountain pen with its wide nib and black ink was sitting back home in my garden shed. Sakes-a-lordy.
Of course, every writer has their little superstitions and rituals; the desk facing out a window to the world or, facing a wall in order to look inward. The desk laid out just so. The designated hours of work – a personal choice: morning, afternoon, wee hours of the night. For me, a cup of coffee, for some a stiff drink and a ciggie. Beyond my understanding is the choice to have music playing.
All these little parameters of “must haves,” like so much in life, have their pro’s and con’s. Obviously, when all is in the required order there is a sense of comfort and, for some, the belief that the muse will visit, which makes the days when she stays away just about unbearable.
I remember the day that these must-have’s went out the window. I was in the middle of writing a short story the content of which became so unbearably disturbing that I couldn’t be alone with it. So, I took myself off to a busy garden café in the West Village where the only remaining table was in the middle of some 30 chattering, imbibing customers totally oblivious to the fate of a young boy who’d just been hurled out of a window. There, in the comfort of strangers, I was able to write the rest of the story.
Perhaps my favourite motto is: Where there’s a will there’s a way. I think of the prolific, primitive artist, Bill Traynor, an African American, who after he was emancipated began drawing in his mid 80’s. His ‘studio’ was any available shop doorway. His canvas any discarded piece of wood or cardboard he could salvage. His was literally “outsider” art.
Many years ago, on a month-long retreat to my beloved Cornwall, the studio I thought I’d rented for 2 months, fell through. Staying in an old, converted sail loft overlooking the sea its thick stone walls provided me with a deep window ledge approximately 2’x2’ on which I made 42, 6’x8’ watercolours. On returning to the States, I had them cheaply framed and threw myself an opening one Sunday afternoon during which I sold 40 pieces, the profits of which paid for my Cornish retreat.
So, here I am, 40 years later, sitting on a Cornish terrace overlooking the sea, musing in blue ink on cheap paper which brings to mind another wonderful saying: Necessity is the mother of invention.
Here’s poem I wrote a few weeks ago:
With love,
Maggie
