2022

A new year dawns, and with it I break the pause in my writing which I have consciously kept for a year, during 2021.

There’s not too much I can say about my willful refusal to write publicly for an entire year, except that it was entirely necessary for reasons that are difficult to articulate. Broadly, my silence was an empowered act of asserting my autonomy, in a painfully extended situation which granted few avenues for expression or even a right of reply. 

 

Please read my lengthy silence, then, as an eloquent statement about the impossible circumstances I found myself in during 2021. Certainly it was a difficult year for many people, and the challenges fell thick and fast here. Pandemic, isolation, bereavement, financial scarcity, injury, trauma, boredom. You couldn’t be blamed for immersing yourself in fiction as a means to cope, either reading it or writing it or both. Instead I chose to be buffeted about by the tedium and brutality of the reality that was occuring. Not a pleasant choice, but one that allowed me to remain present to the truth of my own experience, rather than a pleasantly reinvented version or an anaesthetisation by faux creativity. My choice was either foolish, or brave, or possibly both. Either way, I have marked it by carving a yawning chasm of silence that will remain here as a monument to everything else that has been left undone, unfinished, unacknowledged, unrewarded, and most of all, unsaid.  

 

So in this new year, 2022, I am recommencing my writing practice. With that comes a backlog of anticipation, expectation and many opportunities to develop my work according to my own goals, aspirations and directions. I unequivocally assert my rights as the legal owner of my content, past, present and future. And I look forward to opportunities to engage with other writers and creators in a supportive community. It’s a bright new year, and this time I’ll be writing.