It’s the dawn
Of a new day
In an old era
In the same old way.
It’s the cycle renewed
Again and again without end
A ceaseless iteration
Of nation against nation
Of despair strangling hope
Shoots of hatred
Tendrils of fear
A choking underbrush
Infesting our gardens of Eden
Who was it said
We must kill, and kill, and kill
Until all are dead
Who would become invasive species?
Whose god roared that battle cry
Under the glaring sun
Denying even the possibility
of innocence
Declaring even the unborn
‘Enemies of our state’
Infected with murderous intent?
Vermin only fit to hate?
Bloodlines.
Worm like veins
Through our sacred soils
Rooting the detritus
That defines us.
Ancient scrolls
And chiseled texts
Implacable as tombstones.
Craig Spence,
August 18, 2024
Author: admin
Off Leash Zone
OFF LEASH ZONE
Lead on! Lead on!
my old, best friend,
beyond the very end
of this leash we both
are tethered to.
Lead on! Lead on!
Even though we do not know,
and dare not say,
exactly where we’re going…
Even though there is no point
within the compass of our ancient souls
to suggest one way or another—
no brilliant star, no station of the sun
for us to fix upon.
Whichever way we face,
that becomes the direction of our knowing.
And yet you pant, and strain,
and snuffle, and sniff,
as if there were some secret
(just around the bend
or crouching under some bush)
that makes sense of it all.
Lead on! Lead on!
Beyond the very edge
of this—our flattened earth—
and be assured, for what it’s worth,
that I must surely follow,
and you are not alone.
Craig Spence
CraigSpenceWriter.ca
A Dream Within a Dream
A DREAM WITHIN A DREAM
By Edgar Allan Poe
Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow —
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand —
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep — while I weep!
O God! Can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?
A wisp of a thing
Oh! How I wish the letters
Of the word
Would dissolve
Into the very thing
How I would delight
In that incandescence,
That essence emerging
In my bleary dawn,
Like souls coalescing
Out of nothingness…
Engendered by the welling sun,
And the risen mist,
And the stilled air that I breathe.
Oh! How I would sigh
And beg the pending breeze
To hold off—just a moment more
And not disturb this glowing dream…
This fantasy that must always be
Precursor to despair.
Craig Spence
Death is not an event; it’s a process
We tend to think of death as a sudden event—the moment we transition from life into… its opposite. In truth, death is a process we stave off every day by living. Which makes life an activity, not a state of being.
If I don’t hunt and eat, I die. If I don’t procreate, my future generations will never be. If I don’t mind my step, I will be killed by a car. Every day we must actively live, or we are likely to meet an untimely end. I must exercise and manage my diet, or my ability to live is compromised—and so it goes.
Death is part of the process of renewal. I, as an individual, make my contribution, then give way as new ideas and modes of living are born. Whole civilizations become artifacts and ultimately particles of dust in the inexhorable cycle of life. Worlds come into and pass out of being.
This perpetual struggle to survive is masked in the comfortable environments of the ‘developed world’. We don’t connect the need to work with the ongoing battle for survival. Ultimately, though, that robs our lives of meaning. We are here to give what we can, while we can.
Life is the convergence of energy, matter, and spirit in conscious, willing being. To me, the best possible life is devoted to bringing joy into the world—as much joy with as much grace as I can muster in my brief span.
ImagiNation
Creative writing takes us places we have never been, invents new worlds, converts ideas and memories into things experienced in the mind’s eye. That’s the first half of the creative cycle; reading is the second. It’s the intent of authors and poets to incite creativity in the minds and hearts of readers.
Creative interaction has always been a driving passion for writers, and—fortunately—we live in an era when that fundamental, almost instinctive urge can be channelled into new formats, reaching new ‘audiences’. We can engage our readers (and listeners) before, during, and after the writing and publication of our ‘books’.
Let me share a couple of examples.
I’m rewriting a story titled Entrapments, which I rediscovered after it had sat on my MS shelf for some years. Right now, I’m getting to know the characters. In the mix: an aging prostitute, a journalist, an art critic, an artist, a petty crook… and so on. I’ll be reaching out online for ‘enactors’—people who have lived those personas or are very familiar with them. I want these contacts to feel engaged in the creative process and to enjoy the experience.
My most recently released novel, The Mural Gazer, was the second I have posted online as a work in progress, inviting readers to join me page by page as the story unfolded. My first online novel, The Boy From Under, is also available online. Both can be purchased in print via my Amazon.com author’s page.
Again, the purpose of creating literature online is to engage readers and writers as early as possible and to invite questions and commentary as the story emerges. Other possibilities and benefits?
- Links can be inserted into an online story as supplementary information and graphics.
- An audio edition of the story can be made available in the same space as the print edition.
- Feedback from readers can be welcomed and responded to.
- Literature can be shared instantly, at a lower price, and with reduced environmental costs.
- Other books on an author’s shelf can be linked seamlessly…
The potential for writers to meet readers via new digital technologies excites me. It’s daunting, too. But in an era when young people in particular are being drawn more and more into the online universe, authors have to establish a niche—let’s call it ImagiNation!
View From Up the Hill
I’m so used
to looking at things,
not into them
that I’m startled when I witness
the space between our molecules of Being
and come to realize:
It’s not empty,
this infinite sky,
this eternal orbiting of day
into night / into dawn /
into the glare of high noon.
I wrote this morning
in my latest revision of a fiction:
She glanced away
then out the window
at the sunrise he’d witnessed earlier;
it had morphed into the blare of morning light
the gorgeous tints of dawn burned off
by the intense rays
of a risen sun.
Will this epiphany of the dazzling light
and its glorious host of questions
well once again at at the end of day?
Can the invisible be divisible?
Is it my plight to know?
How many times can we split
the atoms of our truths
before we discover the ultimate germs of
Infinity, Eternity, Omniscience, and Spirit?
Craig Spence
Every picture tells a story
If you are interested in a workshop that engages participants in responsive writing to shared images (photos & paintings), please contact me. More info below…
Every picture tells a story, which makes art a source of inspiration for writers. The same goes for music, dance, and every other art form out there, but the visual arts, especially, are a trove of ideas.
Open up a family photo album and memories are triggered by the images you see. That’s a source for writers whose chosen genre is memoire. But images from other collections can also inspire.
What if your mode is historical fiction? Take a walk around Chemainus and every wall comes to life in your imagination. You can feel yourself being drawn into the large-as-life scenes and back in time—hear sails luffing, wagons clattering, trains chuffing, the rhytmic stroke of paddlers in dugout canoes.
Is there an image that inspires you? Perhaps it’s not even a specific picture, but a sequence made up of many related images, times, and places.
Craig Spence was inspired to write Waking Dream when he saw Diana Durrand’s mixed media piece Be Still and They Will Come, which has been displayed at the Cowichan Valley Performance Centre. Art galleries are great places to go in search of inspiration!
Stories or poems inspired by images aren’t descriptive exercises; they are works of art in their own right, which add a literary dimension to what you are experiencing.
Art, in the deepest sense of the word, is not meant to be ‘looked at’—or read, for that matter; it’s meant to be ‘invoved in’. Looking at a painting, or reading a story, becomes an imaginative act-—it’s participatory. So stories and poems based on imagery are works of art in their own right.
Would you like to participate in a free workshop built around responsive writing to shared images?
Waking Dream
They came to her
in a dream
on paws as soft
as evening light
They huddled in
the contoursof her restless soul
creatures of the land
between day and night
And she lay perfectly
still…
For an eternity…or so it seemed
Aware only of their being
and her delight
She dared not move
or even think…
of stirring…
for if she did
her moment…
she knew…
would take flight.
Craig Spence
Acts of Kindness
Acts of Kindness I have to admit It was kind of strange for me to be hunched at the edge of the lawn like that… On a Wednesday morning After a Tuesday night-before In a neighbourhood where every sunrise-after lulls the Land of Suburbanites Into their becalmed state Of being. Of wakefulness. It should not have surprised me when a Good Samaritan approached His footsteps cause for alarm! I mean, what could I say? “Just a minor heart attack. The merest constriction of the chest A barely measurable acceleration of pulse… No need for an ambulance.” What other excuse could I invent that wouldn’t besmirch my reputation? Why else would I be staring into the dirt, beneath the parted blades of grass As if I could see something down there, couched in layers of smothering soil waiting to be discovered by archeology Even through the final act… The ceaseless progress of decomposition. “You okay?” he said Summoning me to the brink… To my moment of truth… I could not tell a lie… could I? Couldn’t make up something that would make sense of my peculiarities. “Just watching a worm,” I said. “Burrowing into the earth…” “Found him on the sidewalk…” “They always do that when it rains…” He looked at me as if I might have been another species… Or the long-lost member of an extinct tribe. “Feast for the robins.” he might have hinted. And who was I to argue? Playing at God, Absolving myself of the inevitable sins we’re committed to By being alive? CraigSpenceWriter.ca
Inspiration from beginning to end
Inspiration can be shared. This mural, One Feather at a Time, was created by 20 students and staff from South Grenville District High School in Prescott, Ontario.
Inspiration: The Beginning, Middle, and The End
In the Beginning
“The idea that poetry comes from beyond oneself is vital… One doesn’t know what one’s doing and is inspired in that respect… it’s just about allowing a poem to come from wherever it comes from and getting it into the world.”
—Paul Muldoon, winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Moy Sand and Gravel
What does it mean ‘to be inspired’ as a writer or poet?
For me, entire novels sprout suddenly from the fecund soil of experience and imagination. That’s not to say they have revealed even a tiny fraction of what they are going to become, but they unfurl like flowers whose literary DNA infuses the creative process of telling from inception, every word along the way. I am startled and amazed at the things my characters do, and I know I am moving in the right direction when I laugh, or cheer, or moan at their behaviour.
In the Middle
If your idea of inspiration stops at wide-eyed wonder and shouts of Eureka, you will never succeed as a writer. Inspiration drives writers, poets, playwrights, and memoirists from word to word, page to page, episode to episode through a creative feat that can take years to work itself out. Inspiration dances and ballyhoos at the moment of inception, then puts its shoulder to the harness, quietly celebrating each laborious step along the way.
In the End
And when an author types ‘The End’ onto the last page of his manuscript, he’s really saying ‘The beginning’ in several essential ways. It’s time for him to begin a new work—to leave off editing, revising, proofing, and rewriting a story he knows inside-out and move on to another story. It’s not that the current work couldn’t be improved—the process of refining could go on forever. It’s just an admission that “I am done,” to quote Michelangelo from his Sistine Chapel scaffold.
It’s also time for a transition into a new creative phase for the work that’s just been declared completed. It takes most writers years, even decades, to realize that inspiration can’t end once a book has been printed and bound. Literature lives in the minds of readers—or audiences, to use a term more appropriate for our digital era. Books are like children. They have a life of their own once they’re fully fledged, but our responsibility for their success never wavers.
CraigSpenceWriter.ca