Octochaetus multiporus, a bioluminescent earthworm.
It’s National Poetry Day, and after my glowing garden find earlier in the week, I couldn’t resist a little poem inspired by sparkly worms.
Bioluminescence
Be
Like fireflies winking on summer nights,
Like fungi on rotting logs,
Like glowworms dangling from cave walls,
Like drifts of sparkling plankton washed up on the shore.
Bio life
Luminescent shining
A shining life.
Shine.
And so it begins…
It’s been nearly a week since my last blog post, but I have a good excuse—I’ve been working very hard, and have just finished the first draft of The Dragon Defence League, book 3 in my Dragon Slayer series.
Spring has crept into my office, though, in spite of my focus on writing. Over the weekend, I started my first seeds for the season: peppers, eggplants, herbs, brassicas, onions, lettuce and spinach. I’ve been writing in a greenhouse the past two days, with the smell of moist potting mix mixing with the smell of my morning coffee.
Next week I’ll add another batch of seeds to the office, and before long I’ll be hauling newly-sprouted seedlings out to the greenhouse. And not long after that, those seedlings will be ready to set out in the garden.
So much excitement in spring! And now a new book to nurture along with the plants!
I’ve written and discarded half a dozen blog posts over the past week. Nothing seems to be quite right. Out of ideas, I resorted to the book of 500 writing prompts I created for my daughter. A random stab at the non-fiction section of the book brought me to the question: What objects tell the story of your life?
I tried to encapsulate everything in four objects:
The fiddle: made by a neighbour in Panama, given to me for my birthday by my husband. The fiddle not only tells the story of our years living and working among the incredible, resourceful people of Panama, but also tells the story of my lifelong interest in learning to play the violin…an interest which always ended up being pushed aside for other interests. Because I’m interested in learning so many things, there simply aren’t enough hours in the day.
The beetle puppet represents my insatiable curiosity about arthropods, and how that curiosity has bled into my other interests. Peanut butter jars full of bugs on my dresser when I was a kid led to the entomology degree, which led to teaching about insects at Penn State University, and then starting the Bugmobile. And the puppet is only one of many insect-themed and inspired artistic projects I’ve done over the years, as art and science mingle in my brain.
The gardening gloves speak of my weeding addiction and my love of growing food. The gloves are never more than a month or two old, because I wear through them in that time. I think that says it all about gardening for me.
The rock represents adventure, the natural world, and the wild places I have visited and lived in. Like me, the rock has traveled far and has been changed by the stresses it has experienced along the way.
Tickets have just gone on sale for Wham Bam Author Jam on 24 November in Christchurch. Lots of authors, and lots of books–what more can you want? It’s a great chance to meet NZ authors (and a few from farther afield), buy their books, and support the Mental Health Foundation of New Zealand at the same time.
Be sure to stop by my table and say hello!
I sit down at my desk and breathe a sigh of relief. It’s quiet here, in my office. Not like the noisy library where I worked yesterday.
But, no, that’s not true. I hear the roar of the surf in the distance. The trickle of the artificial stream in the garden overlays the sound of the ocean. When I step to the office door, a goat greets me with a maa. Starlings mutter in the treetops, magpies warble on the fenceposts, and a fantail chitters in the shed. A plover’s percussive call is underlain by the chirping of a thousand crickets.
The neighbour rumbles past in his tractor, carrying a bale of silage. I can hear his son in the paddock shouting and whistling at his five barking sheep dogs.
It is far from quiet.
And yet …
Somehow, the sounds here caress my thoughts, rather than intruding upon them like the horrible Muzak from the library cafe, or the screams of tired children, or the drone of the automatic returns machine—please place the item on the trolly.
The fantail flits in and out of the story I’m writing without knocking over my coffee. The goats and sheep graze beside me without barging across the keyboard. The crickets keep to the grass. The tractor rumbles along without leaving tire tracks on my manuscript. The ocean doesn’t even wet my toes.
But somehow, I’m certain these sounds end up in my stories, caught up in the weave of plot and characters. The fantail is there, in the flick of a character’s fingers. The ocean is the relentless sound of the plot line. The tractor is the rumble of disaster bearing down on my protagonist. The goats’ deep maa is the voice of wisdom, and the crickets’ chirping lightens the mood.
I could have posted a blog yesterday, but only from here, where there was cellphone reception. You’ll excuse me if I decided to enjoy the view instead of write a blog post.
It’s not that I didn’t write. My daughter and I, out for two days of hiking, stopped a couple of times on our way to sit and write. Sometimes I gave us a challenge, sometimes we just wrote.
I can’t say that anything I penned in the past two days is great literature, but I did smile as I wrote this Ode to a Fern, which was our first challenge. True to our writing styles, my daughter’s poem was deep and insightful, mine silly doggerel. Here it is, to lighten your day …
O filmy fern
All wet with dew
With fronds so thin
They are see-through.
You could adorn
A lady’s hat
A leafy veil
Fine to look at.
Or perhaps a curtain
You could be
Your gauzy fronds
Flapping free.
O filmy fern
These aren’t for you
To your wild self
You must be true.
Inhabit damp footpaths
Dimly lit
The forest floor
Is where you fit.
Spent some time at ‘our’ beach today, watching waves, birds, dolphins. Here are a few little poems I wrote there:
Terns wheel and bob
Above each dolphin
Like balloons on a string.
****
Wave rises, crests
Wind blows foam back
Like errant strands of hair.
****
The hiss-swoosh of wave
And rolling pebbles
Rounds all edges.
****
Shag arcs and dips its head.
The body follows
And is gone.
Te Kōrero Ahi Kā: to speak of the home fires burning is newly released. This anthology of speculative short stories showcases some fabulous New Zealand writers … and me, too! Thirty-two great stories inside one awesome cover.
Tree fern laced sky;
Feathered frond umbrella
Sheds no rain.
Pohutukawa–
Pollen-tipped pompom brings
Holiday cheer.
For those of you interested in the dragon fauna of New Zealand, here’s a short documentary on one of the less well-known species.
Robinne Weiss 