My Poetry: You

               

You rushed early into this world

eager to see what it was all about

locked your eyes on mine

and didn’t look away.

Then I knew. Knew

That it is possible for a heart to grow,

like cells building new life.

You take your time, assessing,

finding your place. Charming strangers

with your smile. Absorb the world

from my shoulder. Thank me

when I chase away the night-time

monsters. Take little imp as a compliment!

You share, without hesitation,

your treasures  -  your opinion,

and the mysteriously melted chocolate-buttons

smeared across your hands. 

If only time didn’t rush

if only it would be more sharing         

if it would

     trickle

just a little. Not a lot to ask.

(Written in the early 80's)

Amazon Creative Writing Guides

Denise Howie World Famous in B.C. 

My Poetry: This Boy

This Boy 

This boy trains worms;

Chases geese, not seeing the danger;

Shakes his head that we don’t know they are only laughing.

Strides the mountain path, self-peeled stick in hand.

This boy wanders;

Digs in the rocks by the loch  

on his own and wonders what the fuss is about.

Makes dandelion-chains because no one else does.

This boy. This boy;

before he could talk, grasped my hands

and we laughed and couldn’t stop, at something

or nothing.  How can it be that someday this boy…

This boy will be a man?

(Written in the early 80's)

Amazon Creative Writing Guides

Denise Howie World Famous in B.C. 

Prince Dhruva, Aged Five, Sees Eye To Eye with God

He stood in that one place

in the forest, on one leg.

Wild pigs foraged his shadow.

He stood, gown as white

as the chunam of palace walls,

like a painting of the women

who danced for the courtiers,

struck in a pose of the nautch.

As he stood in that place

in a clearing by a brook

and saw slender branches

bend beneath the kingfisher,

the child stilled his chest

until a breath spanned a day.

Through the cramp,

he saw the feeding doe start

as hoopoe dipped curved beaks.

As infant bones set,

he saw the giant Chinar tree

trap snow in outstretched arms.

Through splayed toes green shoots

spread, embracing, winding

tethering - he soared in the wake

of the crows who followed

bears for pickings, saw a beetle grasp its prey,

a tiger groom her young, finite forest on finite land.

Saw the world cupped in the palm of Krsna,

saw his own heart, and looked eye to eye with God.

And the child knew that he was blessed,

for if he followed this austerity

with celibacy, piety,

equanimity and charity, he might

perhaps, atone past-life sin.

And as the child was carried from the forest

he tried not to remember the despair

he had witnessed when he looked

into the eyes of God.

Amazon Creative Writing Guides

Denise Howie World Famous in B.C. 

Nature's reading room

As a child I gravitated to reading outside. I like to think that it was because I was imaginative and adventurous but I suspect that it was more likely related to the fact that I had a plethora of younger siblings.

If you haven't sat under a weeping willow and read your favourite author - go - go do it now. (Take a flashlight if the sun's clocked-off for the day.) Not just any weeping willow mind; the tips of the branches have to sweep to the ground like a Victorian skirt, so that the little beggars (be they siblings, kids or colleagues) can't find you.

As a young teen I graduated to the sturdy upper limbs of elm and oak trees. Fields of wild flowers were good too, as long as I had a rock or a tree trunk to lean against. My friends and I had a library in a forest. We enveloped books in waterproof waxed bread-wrappers and stashed them in the cubbies created by tree roots, and met every day to read, using the mossy rocks as seats and tables. I suspect that a number of books remain hidden on that forest floor all these years later. 

You know how people tend to have their own perspective of their environment depending on their jobs or interests? On a drive through Saskatchewan, for example, an Australian rancher friend pointed out coyotes lurking in ditches, a camouflaged deer in a field and bear cubs clambering up a tree trunk. My regular drive transformed from a pleasant enough journey to a National Geographic Special because my companion was tuned into what interested him. Another buddy worked with power lines; not just poles and wires it turns out. Oh no. Much more than that. Miles and miles and miles of much more than that.  

It's the same with me. Even now the landscape around me is mapped out into reading nooks; that cosy patch of grass by the river bank, the inviting crook of a tree branch, a wooden pier dappled by sunlight.

The weeping willow is still my all-time favourite but the nearest one is three streets away and apparently they "find it a bit weird for a grown woman to camp out on our lawn," so for that particular experience I make do with my comfortable bed. The lamp casts a gentle circle of light, and except for the cat on my shoulder and the dog draped across my feet, it's almost like the real deal. Without the ants.  


Amazon Creative Writing Guides
Denise Howie World Famous in B.C.

A Gem of a Writing Job

(Originally published in 2014. )

Photo by Mary Whittaker 

Back in the 80’s with a handful of magazine stories to my pen-name I dreamed of being a newspaper journalist; not so much a reporter who is generally limited to facts, but a journalist who would cast a light on the lives of local artists and characters who were lost in the shadows of Thatcherism and MTV.

 Looking back, I have realised that dream…minus the British Press Awards… 

 Much of my current writing life is devoted to a local ‘Little Engine that Could’ The One Person Project: A small group in my hometown who harness the goodwill and skills of communities in the region to take realistic steps towards helping a community in Tanzania to become self-sustaining.  In-line with my goals I have also written articles about Okanagan writers, artists and businesses and was thrilled to be asked to provide the web content for Tourism Summerland earlier this year.

 I also had the good fortune of personally and professionally connecting with artist Karen Griggs who fashioned her passion for jewelry and love of community into an innovative award-winning business. Bead Trails is a marketing success-story that promotes Okanagan businesses and communities by providing a fun scavenger hunt where tourists and locals alike explore the Okanagan Valley in search of elegant and funky beads to create a meaningful memory bracelet.

 I look forward to writing the upcoming Bead Trail newsletters and blogs but to be honest, providing web & brochure copy, press releases and articles for Bead Trails has been a tough gig. Imagine having to spend your days visiting Okanagan wineries, galleries and artists, browsing book shops and boutiques and stopping off for a coffee and cupcake.

 But I guess that’s the price you have to pay if you want to do right by your community!

The creativity (and science) of habit

You’re struggling to finish that novel, you know you have a box-office hit hiding out in your head, there’s a poem teasing at your brain – if only you had time to write!  If truth be told, however busy we are, most of us do have the time – the problem is we don’t have the habit.

Habit; It’s the buzz-word for success. You will see the word linked with everything from exercise & diet to getting a promotion. And for good reason – habits really do rewire your brain. It generally takes around 28 days. So if you want to change something in your life or add an element to it – do it for a month.

There is a science behind the theory and the best example comes from NASA. In the early days of the space program, NASA designed an experiment to determine the physiological and psychological effects of the spatial disorientation the astronauts would experience in the weightless environment of space. The astronauts were given convex goggles, which they had to wear 24 hours a day for 30 days and nights. The goggles flipped everything in their field of vision 180 degrees, which meant they saw everything upside down.  As you can imagine, this made life extremely difficult!

But then on the 26^th day something amazing happened; one of the astronauts found that his vision had turned right-side-up again even though he was still wearing the goggles. Between days 26-30, the same thing happened for each of the remaining astronauts.Their brains had created fresh neural pathways! And of course – it took the same amount of time for their brains to re-adapt to life without the goggles.  Later NASA did the experiment again and had half the astronauts take off their goggles for just 24hrs at day 15. When they put the goggles back on it still took 25 to 30 days for their brains to adjust. So just breaking the continuity of the new habit once, put the astronauts back to square one.

Aristotle said, ‘We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.’

In The Artist’s Way, the seminal book on the subject of creativity, with a focus on establishing habits that open the creative mind, Julia Cameron says ‘The bedrock tool of a creative recovery is a daily practice called Morning Pages.’ The idea being that every morning you hand-write three pages about anything and everything that comes into your mind. The pages don't have to make sense.  You write first thing in the morning as 'You're trying to catch yourself before your ego's defenses are in place.' 

Creating a stream of consciousness every morning sets up the habit of writing and helps to clear the mind and unleash ideas.  

When Stephen King is working on a book (which is most of the time) he writes every day of the year, which he says, '…includes Christmas, the Fourth, and my birthday.'  King finishes a draft within three months but he does point out that by just writing 300 words a day we can complete a novel in a year.

It’s just a matter of getting into the habit.


Amazon Creative Writing Guides

Denise Howie World Famous in B.C.

My Childhood: Fact or Fiction?

Don't decide to base your first novel on your childhood; especially if you lived in six countries and didn’t keep a journal! 

I started writing this book 13 years ago and I’m about three quarters of the way through. I’m not lazy, I have been published many times in the intervening years but the novel always goes on the back burner. Take a guess at what I was working on moments before I distracted myself by opening a fresh page on this blog...

I've always it called it a novel because although based in the facts of a period of my life I have had to make-up conversations and events to fill in the gaps in my memory. After all, the main character (me) is only five-years-old when the story starts! But I really should learn to call it a memoir, as all memoirs are crafted in the same way; the story is the truth of the life being described, but by necessity it cannot all be true. 

My father was in the Royal Air Force; a blessing that meant my childhood was designed for adventure. Another blessing - there are many online groups and forums dedicated to reminiscing about being a services/military child in the 60’s and 70’s so there is an eager market for memoirs such as mine. But of course, this is also a curse. I know how important those experiences are to my fellow brats (an abbreviation of the army term British Regiment Attached Traveler) so I feel it’s my responsibility to be as factually accurate as I can be.

I'm not just describing my life, I'm chronicling a way-of-life; the life of a military child in the 60's. I take comfort in the fact that all any memoirist can do is recount the way in which they interpreted (and now reinterpret) the events and dynamics around them. Even within a family, each player deciphers the same shared-experiences differently. But imagine the pressure of knowing that not only my siblings, but a generation of onetime brats are likely to be questioning my version of events! 

Many of our family photos have been lost, I'm the eldest child and my parents died whilst still in their fifties so I have little to go on. It’s my unreliable memory of the geography of the places that I lived that holds my writing up the most. Even with the advantage of the internet so much time has gone by that I’m now viewing a completely different planet. Frustratingly, old maps do not track my footsteps as the Maurader’s Map does for the characters in Harry Potter. I know that my peers will be forgiving but it will no doubt jar on a reader if I say I turned left to get to the Malay village, when in fact I could only have turned right.  But then again, their retrospective GPS could be as sketchy as mine is. Here’s hoping! 

Needless to say my second book will be an actual novel, set in space, and the main character will keep a journal that she first wrote in when she was five-years-old. Because she's a smarter cookie than I was.