Once Upon a Lockdown Rose: collage work and hybrid writing

I wrote a hybrid piece called ‘Once Upon a Lockdown’ – part poem/prose/diary –  and submitted it to The Great Margin with thanks to a small commission from Paper Nations – which I’ve mentioned before.  ‘Once Upon a Lockdown’ starts in March, when Boris Johnson announced there was going to be a lockdown, and roses were first starting to bud in my garden, and it continues until June when my roses were dying or dead.  Could this be some kind of metaphor? *quizzical face emoji*.

Since submitting, I’ve been using the text from ‘Once Upon a Lockdown’ to make small collage/word&image compositions, one for each segment of the whole sequence.  I shared the first of these pieces on this blog, as well as a standalone collage called ‘I have forgotten your fingertips’ which I also made for the Paper Nations commission. Below are all the compositions I’ve made so far.  When they are finished, I will share all nine pieces.

Rosebud

Unfolding

Pink and Mauve

Dreams

Rose Garden

Other news: This week I’ve left my phone at home for a few days and enjoyed not being in its company.  We spent a beautiful day at the seaside for my daughter’s 21st birthday on Tuesday which was the first day of the most recent heatwave.  The roads weren’t busy at all and there was plenty of social distancing on the beach – unlike subsequent days at the same location which you might have seen alarming pictures of in the media – so we were able to relax as a family with our picnic and swim in the sea.  I am sort of regretting not taking any photos that I could now scroll through – and share with you – but at the time it was refreshingly calming not to be snapping away, replying to messages and generally falling down the rabbit hole of social media and non-stop news.  I swam a bit, walked along the beach a bit, read a lot, talked to the family.  Really enjoying The Gathering by Anne Enright.  I was lucky to find the book in a charity shop earlier this year after hearing a serialisation of one of her other books on the radio and deciding I wanted to read more of this writer.

Very little else to report. Thanks for messages about online readings and events taking place, they all sound marvellous but I’m enjoying being offline at the moment. I still haven’t switched to the WordPress Block Editor and hope I never have to. As always, thanks very much for reading this blog.