Three for Friday
Ways to use a letter and overheard phrases become a poetry journal
Even if few of us actually sit down to write a letter to a friend and post it in the old-fashioned way the letter can still be a template for expression in the privacy of your journal or writer’s notebook as Sylvia Plath and Anne Lamott demonstrate.
Olivia Mulligan’s poems offer a new way to use random daily experience as a writing prompt.
Do share any examples that you like of journals or letters turned to creative account.
Well, okay, not strictly a story but an example of a writer using her journal to flex her compositional muscles. This comes from Sylvia Plath’s ‘Cambridge Notes, February 1956’ as published in Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (1977).
A very different young poet, Olivia Mulligan, began her career by pinning poems on her gate during Covid. She provided an email address to invite feedback and in that way found company during isolation.
In the introduction to her second book 10:37 (2022) she says:
Each day at 10:37 am, I wrote down what I heard. I did this project in secret for 70 days. Why? I wanted to create a different kind of experiment to document my life’s surroundings. I came up with the idea for the project at 10:37 am and so it felt right to stick to this time each day. I wanted to capture the weird, the wonderful and the extraordinary in the ordinary. Each day was the same thing, the same world, but a different feeling. The snippets of the world at 10:37 am are the titles of each poem.
Here is Anne Lamott’s advice to writers on using letters to overcome a block, taken from her book Bird By Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994):