I’m writing to you from my summer home in New England. As a retired college professor, summer is my favorite time. It always represented freedom to me.
I love fresh vegetables, beautiful flowers, farmer’s markets and stands, swimming in cool lakes.
But my favorite thing to do is to go to a local bookstore that’s located in an old mill with a stream running by it. I feel like my creativity flows more easily with the flowing stream. I knew a playwright who would stand in the stream and write with a pen and paper to get the creativity flowing?
Now that summer is coming to an end, I will look for new inspirations for my writing. What do you do for inspiration?
I will be blogging regularly one Thursdays again, with announcements, as they happen, on Tuesdays. Follow me here on WordPress.
Weather can be a major factor in a story or poem. If you look out your window, you can be inspired. I live in Western Massachusetts, where they say “If you don’t like the weather, just wait.” It changes rapidly from beautiful sunny days, to mist, to rain, to snow, sometimes in the same day. I usually spend some time in Costa Rica in the winter, where I am now, where there are many ecosystems in a little country, including temperate, dry, tropical, sub-tropical. There is a dry and a rainy season, and the winds, called Papagayo, blow across the Cordillera del Talamanca.
Think of all the climates in novels. British author J. Ballard in The Wind from Nowhere, creates a dystopia in which hurricane-force winds dominate the climate. Mother of Storms by John Barnes describes a catastrophic weather change caused by a nuclear explosion. Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, where the world is divided into gated communities and pleeblands where the working class lives in unsafe, populous and polluted communities. Weather in a book an be a plot motivator or scene setter.
And where would we be without nature poems. Think of William Wordsworth, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,”
I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o’er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
March has brought unusually beautiful weather Costa Rica, with sunny skies, and wind blowing cooling breezes through the mountains. I hear the Northeast has been engaged in “glorious spring” with temperatures largely in the 60’s Fahrenheit.
Storms really are unpredictable. They can add an interesting plot twist to a novel, or line to a poem. And they can move from dangerous, unpredictable weather, to rainbows and sunshine. How does this affect your plot?
In my latest book of poetry, Touch My Head Softly, the story involves my lover who had dementia. While I see an “unrelenting grey,” my partner, in his altered state, sees “white lilies surviving frost.”
I’ve canoed and hiked in beautiful places all over the Northeast this fall. The nature sustains me. Writing sustains me. I have a new book, Touch My Head Softly, which will be out from Finishing Line Press in early 2021.
Now that I have infinite time to write and blog, I find myself resisting the urge and cooking and wiping things down as we’re told to do a hundred times a day. How do others feel about blogging?
For those of you who actually follow Groundhog’s Day, it has never made sense to me. If the groundhog sees his shadow, we have six more weeks of winter. If he doesn’t we don’t. If he sees his shadow, doesn’t that mean it’s sunny and warm and we should have less winter? Any thoughts?
Eileen P. Kennedy Author 