Behind the Words: April

Part journal, part trivia, part self-initiated interview revealing (almost) all my secrets.

Welcome to the monthly share - where I give you a peek behind the last page, for whatever that's worth.

If you don’t want spoilers, you can click on the titles to jump to the writing, then come back and get all the behind-the-scenes goodness.

Dreamscapes:

Happy Ghosts

This is a dreamscape written for a dear friend. Am I unreasonably happy that the theme of it seems to revolve around ghosts? Of course. Do I have much to say about it other than that? Nope! I love the place this dreamscape brings me. I love to think about the ghosts that haunt our shores.

Poetry:

Reiz Sen Senos Laikos

The title is roughly how one would say "Once Upon a Time" in Latvian. It means "Once long ago in times long gone." I stumbled on this phrase accidentally and it felt very important. There was some lovely kismet in it, since there's a book of Latvian fairy and folk tales on my bedside table. I've been desperate to connect with this portion of my ancestry since losing my Grandfather, my last connection to Latvia.

I started this poem with that Latvian phrase and mashed it up against another fairytale phrase ("all of this has happened before, and it will happen again" - 5 points if you know where it’s from) out of curiosity. But holding my ancestry next to these words that made me think about the cyclical nature of our lives, I was driven straight toward my childhood.

And my Grandfather was a central figure there. Our relationship was complicated. It could fill a book all on its own, so I will digress here. But if you're wondering who the "he" in this poem is, it's my Grandfather. I spent some time looking through the windows of my childhood memories, looking for him, and writing down what I saw for this poem. There is a great deal we had in common.

The cat pictured on the thumbnail for this post is “Kitty” as my Grandfather named her. We inherited the little old lady when he passed, and loved her mightily.

The River’s Offer

This piece came during a fit of inspiration in the winter after my mother passed. It started with the image of punching through thin ice covering a stream, and the rest coalesced when I followed that line of thought to see where it would take me. In a way, it was born similarly to my dreamscapes. Close my eyes, see what I see, stream of consciousness.