A guest post from our Poet of the Month, Simon Mole.
So my mum has started a creative writing course. I know. If she gets published before me I will never live it down. One of her first bits of homework for this course was to interview somebody about their job. With her being my mum and all, she picked me. The poet.
We were on a train, I was slightly hungover, and grumpier than I might have been. And maybe I had just finished a particularly admin-heavy week but when she asked me for a metaphor to describe my job, this was my response:
“It’s like painting a hard-boiled egg in a playground. But it’s a windy playground full of leaves. And before I can get on with the main bit, actually painting the egg, I have to clear all the leaves. All of them. Sometimes what happens though, is that by the time I finish sweeping, I’m not really in the mood for painting the egg. By that point it just feels like hard work.”
And yes I know I said “it’s like” to begin with, which means strictly speaking it’s a not a metaphor but a simile, but my mum didn’t seem to mind, and that was good enough for me. Since then, I’ve been making a renewed effort to make sure writing and performing are the priority day to day. Sometimes I just leave the leaves untouched for a while. Some of them float off naturally, and the really important ones are still there when the poem is done. It’s important to be organised and on top of things, but there has to be a balance to make it the whole thing feel worthwhile.
With all that in mind, this February is an incredibly exciting month for me. The project I’m working on is a site-specific spoken word theatre show called Indiana Jones and the Extra Chair, the performances of which follow on from a month long residency transforming The Albany cafe… One of those amazing times when the vast majority of my ‘work hours’ are taken up with creative activity itself; writing, rehearsing, being directed, as well as working with some amazing young writers and the Albany cafe staff.
Indiana Jones and the Extra Chair is on at The Albany, 29 February – 2 March. Find out more about the show here or follow @theextrachair on Twitter! You can find out about Simon on his Apples and Snakes profile or MySpace, and you can follow him on Twitter @si_mole.