Bewilderbliss and now on to other things

Bewilderbliss issue #2 is out now, after a lot of work, so now I'll be free to get back to the rest of my life. At the moment that seems to include being dragged by Lucy into falling in love with the L-Word, struggling to write my novel (took me all morning to do 1000 words, though I feel that they were good) and finally getting to do the felting to go into the John Rylands Deansgate giftshop.

I'm really pleased with how Bewilderbliss is going, issue #2 is turning out to be even better and more popular than issue #1. I even got to do an interview with Jackie Kay, who was great - really supportive of the project, she not only did the interview, but she set the theme of the issue and put a poem into it.

I think that now I just want to get away for a while, at the moment there's always some e-mail to write or more usually something to feel guilty for not having got done yet. I think that soon I will go spend some time in a caravan in the woods and take nothing but a pen and paper, and books obviously, because other people write better than me. I have just started Deliverance and it is really good, but I think I'll have to get it done before I go to the woods, since I dont want a repeat of the fear I had last time when I was there and read The Road. I think that when you stay alone in a field enclosed by woods where nobody can hear you scream, you really dont want to read anything scary.

PS to the last post

The last item on the list should have been:

I have also been finishing my story for the next Bewilderbliss. It's inspired by my work with the archives, and since I had to write something as a product of that work as part of the internship, I was killing two birds with one stone.


As an aside, I like proverbs with animals in, they feel older and somehow truer than any others. Two birds with one stone is good. As is 'a bird in the hand is better than two in the bush'. They have one with an identical meaning in Madagascar, which translates as 'you can't catch two rabbits'. It obviously means that you can't catch two rabbits at the same time, and it's somehow better than the bird one. It feels more earthy and real, birds in hands and bushes seems a little too poetic by comparison.

Catching up

The internship is over.....sort of. I have to go back into the library some time this week to finish cataloguing the last box I was working on. Then I will have done all the letters and magazines from the 50s to the 70s. And there is it, this complete phase of life that can only be glimpsed on the page. The letters are like butterflies pinned in a display case - merely specimens, only those few fragile samples that have been caught and kept.

Soon, the whole thing will go full circle and I will be inside the story. I'm going to Elaine's book launch, and the invitation will go into the special bottom drawer that forms my archive of sorts.

And I'm writing a piece, or maybe a couple of small pieces, inspired by the archiving to go into my magazine, Bewilderbliss.


This post is all very disconnected. I've spent the last few days catching up on things I'd let slide while I was finishing my masters essay and doing the internship. I've even squeezed in a bit of felting to make a commissioned piece for somebody and a scarf for a friend. Now I feel like I just want to sleep for a few days.

But I can't. I feel like I'm making progress with the novel after it had been lost for a while. I've got out several hefty books on Madagascar from the library so I can get totally immersed back into the subject.

The only problem as far as that goes is that the books I ordered last week have arrived (the Bananas anthology and the Tsvetayeva-Pasternak-Rilke letters that I mentioned here). They're very distracting and the summer sun is calling for me to sit in it and read by its warm light.


Finally, I'm sure I've mentioned it before, but I have to point to Max Dunbar's blog. It is always interesting and hugely varied and even when I've got no time at all it somehow manages to suck me in.