Creative writing

Fortnightly Story: Tango

~ Libby Sommer ~ 2 Comments
a man and a woman giving a tango performance
Credit: Creative Commons Images

 Tango is a passionate dance.  A conversation between two people in which they can express every musical mood through steps and improvised movement.  (Source Unknown)

1.

Just before nine o’clock in the evening, Sofya gets out of her car and looks up at the sky.  She has sensed a shift in the weather.  There is another breath of wind, a whispering in the air, but the clouds are stagnant against the dark night.  She turns and moves downhill towards the club, ejecting the chewing gum out of her mouth with a loud splat into the bushes, feels the first drops of rain on her bare arms.  She passes the public phone box where frangipanis lie on the grass, picks one up, sniffs at it, throws it back, then quickly enters the club.  Continue reading →

I Am Not the Stories I Tell

~ Libby Sommer ~ 19 Comments

Creative Commons picture

Sometimes when people read my stories they assume those stories are me.  They are not me, even if I write in the first person.  They were my thoughts and feelings at the time I wrote them.  But every minute we are all changing.  There is a great freedom in this.  At any time we can let go of our old selves and start again.  This is the writing process.  Instead of blocking us, it gives us permission to move on.  Just like in a progressive ballroom dance:  you give your undivided attention to your partner—keep eye contact for the time you are dancing together—but then you move on to the next person in the circle. Continue reading →

Fortnightly Story: The New Baby

~ Libby Sommer ~ 4 Comments

new born baby asleep in white cot

 

‘Being a parent is harder than being a Prime Minister,’ said British Prime Minister Tony Blair.  His 16 year old son had just been arrested after being found lying drunk on the footpath in London’s West End.

In the second month after the baby was born Kate came out to meet her mother wiping her hands on her grey tracksuit pants.  Kate’s hair was tied back off her face revealing tiny white milk spots above her cheeks.  Anny told her that already she looked so slim and good.  Kate ran her hand over her rounded stomach, arched her back and stuck her belly out at her mother.

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Turning Towards the Inner Critic

~ Libby Sommer ~ 24 Comments

book cover: Mindfulness

It is essential to separate the creator and the editor, or inner critic when you practice writing, so that the creator has plenty of room to breathe, experiment, and tell it like it really is.  If the inner critic is being too much of a problem and you can’t distinguish it from your authentic writing voice, sit down whenever you find it necessary to have some distance from it and put down on paper what the critic is saying, put a spotlight on the words—“You have nothing original to say, what made you think you could write anything anyone would want to read, your writing is crap, you’re a loser, I’m humiliated, you write a load of rubbish, your work is pathetic, and your grammar stinks …”  On and on it goes!

Say to yourself, It’s OK to feel this.  It’s OK to be open to this.

You can learn to cultivate compassion for yourself  during this internal process by practicing Mindfulness Meditation.  Sit up straight, close your eyes, bring your awareness to your inner experience.  Now,  redirect your attention to the physical sensations of the breath in the abdomen … expanding as the breath comes in … and falling back as the breath goes out.  Use each breath to anchor yourself in the present.   Continue, concentrating on the breath for several minutes.  Now, expand your field of awareness to include the words of the inner critic.  Turn your attention to where in your body you feel the unpleasant thoughts, so you can attend, moment by moment, to the physical reactions to your thoughts.

 “Stay with the bodily sensations, accepting them, letting them be, exploring them without judgment as best you can.”—Mindfulness, Mark Williams and Danny Penman.

Every time you realise that you’re judging yourself, that realisation in itself is an indicator that you’re becoming more aware.

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May-Ling

~ Libby Sommer ~ 14 Comments
picture of table and chair with vase of flowers collage
Artwork by Natasha Sommer 2008

May-Ling calls out to me as I get out of the car.  She is fourteen months old and her sweet voice bounces out through the screen door where she is standing and out on to the street in North Ryde where her Chinese grandparents live.  I climb over the small white iron gate that leads to the front door.  Every week she waits for my arrival after Playschool has finished on television.  May-Ling has soft chubby legs and tiny artistic fingers.  Her hands are so well co-ordinated that now she is able to grasp a spoon and feed herself.  She has almond shaped brown eyes and very white teeth that you get to see very often because she laughs so much.   In her pink and white gingham floppy hat that she wears to the park, she looks even cuter.  What a cutie, say people on the street when I take her out for a walk in the stroller.  What a cutie.

I am the apprentice grandmother.  The Chinese grandmother shows me what to do.  She might correct my nappy changing skills, show me that I have done the nappy up too tight, that I need to be able to slip my hand in between the nappy and May-Ling’s fat tummy.  Or she might show me how I need to rock May-Ling back and forth and pat her gently on the bottom so she’ll fall asleep in my arms before putting her into the cot.

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The Creative Process

~ Libby Sommer ~ 4 Comments

Vivian Gornick's book, The Situation and the Story

At a literary lunch this week I overheard someone say:  ‘The thing to do is put the idea in your subconscious.  Your brain will do the work.’

 

The thing is, it takes time for our experience to make its way through our consciousness.  For example, it is hard to write about a journey while you are still in the midst of the adventure.  We have no distance from what is happening to us.  The only things we seem to be able to say are ‘having a great time’, ‘the weather is good’, ‘wish you were here’.  It is also hard to write about a place we just moved to, we haven’t absorbed it yet.  We don’t really know where we are, even if we can walk to the train station without losing our way.  We haven’t experienced three scorching summers in this country or seen the dolphins migrating south along the  coast in the winter.

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who I am and why I blog

~ Libby Sommer ~ 4 Comments

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My name is Libby Sommer and I’m a Sydney writer.  My first book, ‘My Year With Sammy’ was published by Ginninderra Press in December, 2015.  It’s available as a paperback and an eBook.

I started to blog on WordPress in February this year as a way to communicate with other writers and readers and to share some of the things I’ve learnt .  32 of my short fictions have been published in literary journals in Australia and the U.S.  I post one of these stories each fortnight on WordPress.  Every other week  I post something about the writing process.  My tips concentrate on one aspect of the craft of creative writing.

My second book, ‘Tales of the Crystal Ballroom’ has been accepted for publication by Ginninderra Press and will come out later this year, or early next year.  The stories are about some of the characters who dance in a fictional dance hall.  My short story ‘At the Festival’ is published May 2016 in Quadrant.  And I’m proud to say I’ve had a poem accepted for an anthology of Social Justice poems to be published by Ginninderra Press in July 2016 to celebrate their 20 year anniversary.  Sorry for the shameless Self Promotion.

As I live and work alone, blogging is a way for me to connect with a community of like-minded people.  Isolation is the bane of the home office worker.  As a creative person, we need heaps of time and space alone and we work in a room all by ourselves, although my preference is to work with pen and paper in a cafe surrounded by other humans.  We also need stimulation and social interaction.

My children are grown up and lead their own lives.  My life mostly consists of reading and writing, working out at the gym, Yoga, coffees or lunch with friends, spending time with family, movies, long walks in nature, bush dancing (previously Ballroom and Latin American dancing).  It’s a pretty good life, except for that damn problem of isolation.

Work-Out

~ Libby Sommer ~ Leave a comment

books on bedside table in front of painting of vase of flowers

FORTNIGHTLY SHORT STORY

Work-Out by Libby Sommer

first published in Quadrant

 

 

 

 

You run up the stairs to the gym avoiding the women and men from the previous class rushing down the stairs.  Keep to the left.  Give your membership card to the girl at the desk and then in through the turnstile.  Rummage for the $2 coin in your bag that works the locker.  Insert the money, leave the bag, take the towel and the bottle of water and the book to read then up the stairs to the third floor to the exercise bikes all the time hoping there’ll be a reclining bicycle free and not one of those awful uprights that hurt your bum.  Sit on the bike read your book, wipe the sweat off your face, drink from the bottle, look out the window to the workers erecting a block of apartments that are gradually blocking the view of the harbour. Warm up for 60 seconds on a low speed, then 20 minutes at a higher speed and a sixty second cool down.  Then into the main gym for the body power class.  Get a step, four platforms, a rubber mat and a long weights bar.  Two large discs, four small discs.  Stand up the front so you can see yourself in the mirror and in front of the fan.  Fight for this prime position. First the warm up, then legs, lunges, squats, chest, back, shoulders, legs, triceps, biceps, stomach.  Bend from the hips.  Clean and press.  Dead rows.   Wipe the sweat from your face, adjust the bar across your shoulders.  Knees over toes as you squat.  Straight back, stomach in to support the back, shoulders back, head up out of the neck.  Concentrate on the music, the instructor speaking, the fan in front of you.  Watch yourself in the mirror, the women beside you and behind.  Check out how old they are and if their weights are heavier or lighter.  Smell the sweat.  Swallow the water.  A quick stretch between tracks.  Calfs, quads, shoulders and back.  Lie down on the platform for the chest track.  Use your nipples as markers.  Down to the markers, up slowly.  One, two three up and then slowly down.  Vary the rhythm.

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Short Story or Novel

~ Libby Sommer ~ 3 Comments

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Is a novel a short story that keeps going, or, is it a string of stories with connective tissue and padding, or, is it something else?  Essayist Greg Hollingshead believes that the primary difference between the short story and the novel is not length but the larger, more conceptual weight of meaning that the longer narrative must carry on its back from page to page, scene to scene.

“It’s not baggy wordage that causes the diffusiveness of the novel.  It’s this long-distance haul of meaning.”  Greg Hollingshead

There is a widespread conviction among fiction writers that sooner or later one moves on from the short story to the novel.  When John Cheever described himself as the world’s oldest living short story writer, everyone knew what he meant.

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Towards the End

~ Libby Sommer ~ Leave a comment

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He leaned back on the chrome chair, stretched his legs out under the square black table and placed his mobile phone in front of him. He looked over to the counter at the back of the cafe at the cakes and muffins on display and the Italian biscuits in jars. He turned back to the glass windows and wondered if he had the guts to tell her today. He wanted to. By Christ he wanted to. He straightened up, his elbows on the table, his hands clasped together in front of his face. There’d been some good times, that’s for sure. But what the heck. A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.

The sliding glass door clanked open and Anny walked in. He looked over at her, first from the rear as she closed the door and then as she approached, her face flushed, her dark hair flying back from her shoulders. Not bad looking. A bit on the heavy side but not a bad looker all the same. Yes, there’d been some good times. Especially in the sack.

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