I feel like a main theme of my life has been the gradual return to creativity that I naively abandoned as a 13 year old girl (more on that later). I think my journey back started around 10 years ago and more often than not has involved me slowly inching my way up the down escalator at rush hour. Sometimes I've skipped all the way to the top, artfully avoiding the flood of people heading in the right direction, only to get distracted and find myself frozen to the spot as the escalator carries me all the way back to the bottom again, travelling backwards all the way. Other times I've doggedly trod water on the bottom step as I aim for the top but manage only to not fall off the bottom. On a few, ever-so-rare, occasions I've scampered up and down the escalator like a giddy fool having the time of my life and enjoying the bemused attention of onlookers. Well I could go on with this escalator analogy all day but eventually my fear of falling over on escalators will rear it's ugly head and I'll be telling you all about my 'being eaten by the teeth at the bottom of the escalator' daydream that I have to supress *every single time* I step onto one ... shudder!
This first survival kit is a place for me to dump all the things that aided me in my creative recovery. I'm not quite sure how I'm going to organise things but I'll start by telling you about the people who have been the hugest influence on me over the past decade and we can go from there. I'll order it alphabetically just so there's some kind of order as I add more and more :-)
Anaïs Nin - On a fateful valentine's day in 1998 my beloved gave me a copy of Delta of Venus. Something about it unlocked a part of me that I had buried deep inside and I started writing poetry again.
Natalie Goldberg - some strange serendipitous path led me to a book stall at the 1998 WOMAD festival ... through my 'all day spent drinking' tipsy state of mind I was somehow drawn to buy a small book called 'Writing Down the Bones' ... reading it was like coming home to me, simply life changing.
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