white ink

writing as a bodily act

Hi friends,
For those of you new here – you’re so welcome – I’m an Irish writer and tender to many things living at the foothills of the Wicklow mountains in south eastern Ireland. I’m interested in exploring how it feels to write, hold and (m)other on this beautiful, tattered planet right now. Curious? Head to my Welcome Page. To stay up to date with upcoming events, head to my Members Hub.

And scroll down to the end of this post to learn more about some additional offers in and around the upcoming Sitting in the Dark sessions.

Ok, let’s begin.

“I write with the blood that goes to the ends of my fingers, and it is a very sensuous act.”

A.S. Byatt

At the beginning of January I spent a week away on a writer’s residency. It was the first time I have had such an amount of uninterrupted time to write. I had almost nothing else to do. Very few emails to reply to (besides a banking drama of my own making, but we’ll skip over that!), I stayed off social media, I was well fed. It was remarkable.

I spent the week away editing my memoir, which has become more and more a work about the body - the landscape of my body and what it holds and what it has repressed, as well as the body of land on which I live, and what that land, too, holds and has had to hide and contain.

I spent the early mornings before the sun came up over the cold lake, pouring over Frida Kahlo’s self portraits, noticing how she places the inside of herself on the outside, physically and emotionally, for us to see and feel and get to know.

The Two Fridas, 1939. Frida Kahlo.

I spent those early mornings looking at the land-body art of Ana Mendieta, and the works in which she envelopes herself in the land, allows the land to embrace her, covers herself in feathers, flowers, fire.

Ana Mendieta (1948-1985), Untitled: Silueta Series, Mexico From Silueta Works in Mexico, 1973-1977 / 1991. Suite of twelve colour coupler prints. Images from christies.com

I read Hélène Cixous writing about how, in order to write the female subject, women must use the female body as a medium of communication, “must write through their bodies … must invent the … language that will wreck partitions, classes and rhetorics.”

"There is always in her at least a little of that good mother's milk.
She writes in white ink"
- Hélène Cixous

I read

Belinda Vigors

’s powerful book Threatening Women about how the bodies of Irish women have for centuries been contained and incarcerated in and by Irish landscape and architecture.

As the week unfolded I became minutely aware of how my body played such a vital, intimate role in the making of my words. It felt like so much more than head to pen, head to the tap tap tap of the key board. It was a corporeal, visceral experience.

My hips ache so I splay myself on the floor. I sit in a squat to type.
I wake with an ache in my lower back, my belly bloats and fills with air.
I need to move so much, so often.
I stretch and squirm on my yoga mat.
Ear pods in, music blaring, shutters closed, I dance and sway and rave in the late blue afternoon light.
I walk the roads and lane ways around the big country house, the smell of silage in my nostrils, talking the ideas that flow into voice notes.
My head grows stuffy, crowded, sluggish, no matter how many coffees I consume. I need to reset, defuse. Socks off, trousers rolled, into the lake water, silt, swans, the god awful cold shooting up from heels to femur to glute.
Once, the sun low in the afternoon, I swim. The ripples of me travelling out and on across the lake, meeting the swans on the far side, half a kilometre away. No breath, just pain and joy and my head clear once more.
I am thirsty all the time, drinking water, coffee, tea. I need to pee a lot as a result, up down up down every thirty minutes or so, aware, too as I pull up my trousers, of how musty my body smells despite my shower a few hours before. The sitting, the thinking, they make me sweat.
The second shower, then, before dinner, staring for long stretches at the droplets running down the shower door, letting ideas coalesce, turning the water as hot, and then as cold, as I can bear.

In my journal one morning I write:

I write to you from a body. From this female form. Yes, they are words, written down, plucked from my head. But I make these words with and by and through my flesh. My body is making this book.

I’m really curious to hear from all of you -

How do you feel in relation to your body when you write?
What voice does your body have?
Where is your body in the text?

Let me know in the comments below, or hit reply.

By writing her self, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display - the ailing or dead figure, which so often turns out to be the nasty companion, the cause and location of inhibitions. Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write your self. Your body must be heard. Only then will the immense resources of the unconscious spring forth.
- Hélène Cixous

UPCOMING NEWS:
What will you discover in the dark?

We will be gathering for our Sitting in the Dark sessions again from next Friday 3rd. A wonderful opportunity to gift yourself some time to create, to be in a more liminal space, to welcome the words.

All the info you need is here :

come join me to sit and write in the dark

Plus, if you love the idea of setting aside some of this liminal time, but can’t make the Friday slots, stay tuned as I will be sharing how you can hold your own sessions with my support in the coming days!

And finally - I’m going to be taking part in two evening courses in the coming weeks that I hope will expand my thinking even more on ideas around the body in our writing - if you are interested they are:

The Poetics of the Body with Romalyn Ante and Taking up residence again: Writing in, through and of the Body with Polly Atkin, both online at Arvon.

Layla x