From the archive: The Fire

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In the winter this house is heated solely by a wood-burning stove. It’s fairly labour intensive to chop logs.  

And it takes commitment to keep bringing them in, to keep the fire burning through the day. But I love it. We have something alive, something wild at the centre of our world. It hisses and cracks and roars just like any other wild thing. The Beech wood, with its silvery snakeskin bark, lights easily and sizzles. The Oak, its raised bark like the tyre of a four-wheel drive truck, is frustrating slow to catch. But once it does it smolders enduringly, with an intense heat.

Like anything wild, you have to create a relationship with it, rather than impose your hurried ways upon it.

In the mornings if I’m anxious, or impatient, it never catches. If I bring patience to the task it’s ablaze in an instant. There’s a real art to fire lighting. Logs need the friction with other logs to burn, but there has to be enough air between the wood for them to breathe.

At first glance the flames have the delicacy of silk, and it’s alluring. But I know better. Their licking tongue is always hungry. The memory of the terrible smell of burnt hair and skin pricks sharp in my mind.

During the day, whenever I take a break from writing, and come down from my cold office, the fire is waiting. The orange flames endlessly shape-shifting remind me of my potential for creativity.

Some days my body has rigidified into the question mark shape of the anguished writer too long at her desk. Then, those flames laugh at the inflexibility of my body, and my words. They tickle and taunt me. It shifts me from my petty concerns.

On the worst writing days I’m thickheaded and wobbly-limbed. Then they seduce me back to life, stroking my face and my back. Painfully wonderful. They know that I’ll never write well with that tension in my mind and body. After these encounters, I go back to my desk with their enchanting laughter ringing in my ears.

Back in my cold office, I ask myself: how can I lay my words side by side so that they have space to breathe, but are close enough for their friction to make my stories blaze? How can my words form shapes as endlessly varied as flames? How can I release the energy contained in those words, but not be burnt in the process, or smother them for fear of the heat?

The Weekly Prompt

Observe a fire. Write about the shapes you see flickering in the flames. First, describe it using as wide a variety of verbs as possible. Then, relax your eyes a little. Now, what do you see? Let your imagination blaze.

First Published March 18th 2013

A Writer's Process: John Porter

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Walking to my studio in the Leighton Artists’ Colony just before dawn, I mentally pen a haiku;

 

Gravel dark and wet
Shines at first light as I walk
Easy under foot
 

A mist lingering from damp snow overnight creeps through half perceived trees.  The few amber lights along the path are just enough to show the way through the pines.  I imagine deer lying nearby in long brown grass beneath the trees, but the dim illumination does not reveal their location.

 In the bright circle of the Valentine Studio porch light, a young man unexpectedly appears and slouches past with a large portfolio tucked under his arm.  He looks up momentarily with a sad, tired expression that seems to say;  'That was my last night spent on the drawings … now I'm leaving but wish I had more time.’  

But I am just arriving to work for a month.   I turn right down the little track that leads to the bottom of a small ravine where my studio Evamy awaits.  I set down my computer case on the porch.  It makes a soft thump on the old boards. 

In the darkness, I search for the key in jacket pockets before remembering that it is carefully zipped safe in the inside pocket.  Fishing it out, I fiddle with the handle lock, before feeling it relent and the door opens towards me, sticking slightly on the jam just as it did three years ago when last I opened it.  

Switching on the light, a warm interior welcomes me back.  I cannot resist saying aloud; ‘Hello Evamy ’ as if addressing an old friend or lover.  I make a quick inspection.  Two computer chairs are neatly placed at either end of the long desk surface.   A lounge chair extends beneath shelves with clean glasses, a Banff Centre mug and a box tea bags left by the last occupant.   Nothing has changed, except perhaps. me. 

This is where I wrote my first book.  It success renewed my life and connected me with so many different people.  

My main job is no longer as a business advisor to small engineering companies.  I am now a writer.

I extract a tea bag from the box and fill the kettle, putting the carton of milk in the small fridge beneath the sink.     Multi reflections of my presence move hither and thither in the studios many windows.  They are still dark mirrors before the dawn.  In an hour they will be windows again, revealing the woods beyond and hopefully an old friend.  I recall an earlier haiku;

 

We work together
You store pine cones for winter
I fill a blank page
 

No more excuses.  With tea made, I sit down and turn on the computer.  While it fires up, I extract the first of hundreds of poems which need to be polished and brought into the light. 

A Storyteller's Process: How Nature Supports Me

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I am familiar with the creative release that a good walk can provide.

It’s one of the most well known inspirational activities, along with having a bath. There’s something about the inwardness they induce, along with the mechanical process of habit, that allows my mind to wander, sometimes along the most fantastical loops and avenues of imagination. Often work that was stuck can come dramatically unstuck, or a new idea can come seemingly from nowhere.

Walking in nature adds another dimension. Not only can I commune with myself in imaginative ways, but in doing so can find myself immersed in the vastly elemental, or the intricately particular, enraptured by the beauty of colour, movement or sound, or plunged into battle with weather, rocks and other natural obstacles.

I can identify, in my mind, with anything from an ear of corn, or a woodlouse to a buzzard or oak tree or – if I’m so lucky – stag. I can engage with all the symbolism and dreamscapes drawn from the natural in art and writing.

I can connect to the past and future beyond human measures of time, or find myself at one with the present moment in all its unfolding complexity and richness.

For me there are a couple of particularly productive places to wander, where I will always regret it if I have forgotten to take a notebook to write down my thoughts.

I’m extraordinarily lucky to live by the sea, giving me rugged inland landscape as well as beaches, horizons, and that extraordinary west coast light that has inspired painters and sculptors as well as writers.

A couple of years ago, the shoreline and the rhythm of the ocean were inspiring my thinking. Presently it is a particular sub-tropical garden that was once a monastery vineyard and looks over the coast to a view of St Michael’s Mount. The seascape is breathtaking, but no more so than looking closely at the plants growing there, at their fractal geometric patterns, their dramatic colour and shape, at the way they filter light, their natural cycles of rebirth and decay or the sound of the stream mingled with the soughing of the majestic summer trees.

Sometimes I sit in a gardener’s hut, making stream-of-consciousness notes, channeling myself into an almost visionary state.

At other times, as on my last visit, I flop onto the grass, thinking my mind is empty and exhausted, only to roll over, see the swallows zipping across the space in predatory arcs, and suddenly find my brain is embarking on a poem.

It doesn’t always produce a finished piece of work – though many of my favourite completed poems have come from walks there – but this particular garden, with its sights, sounds, smells, textures, layered symbols of birth, fertility, death and renewal, never fails to inspire me.