On the rails

 

For the past few days now I have been traveling by train from the UK to Naples, Italy in preparation for the month that I will spend at The Museum of Loss and Renewal. The journey has involved time with a close friend, lots of walking and discussion about what has brought me to this place, ready to embark on a new creative and research project, and as I had hoped, lots of delicious food to ready the body-as-palette / palate for new experiences. 

As well as sending some recent work to the museum's curators, I was asked to produce a statement of what I 'may do' with my time while there. As well as walking, breathing, and spending time learning about and from the place where I will be, my aims are to focus on the gestational thinking / writing for a new creative nonfiction project that I have been waiting to work on for some time now.

What I 'may do':

My work reveals its form as I begin to write and the writing from my new creative nonfiction project is appearing as a poetry / prose hybrid laced with sequences and haibun. It may be travel-memoir or even part family biography. It plays with questions such as: What does it mean to be from / of a place? and What does it mean to belong? Its language is of botany, sculpture, music, and landscape. I have been inspired by Elizabeth-Jane Burnett’s approach to questioning her place in the world in her book The Grassling, as well as Betsy Warland and M.C. Richards’s work with breath and centering.