Ali
Twitter: @ali_norrish Website: alinorrish.co.uk
The question I came with: How can I write Rilke? What is my creative practice? The question I leave with: How can I access deep freedom? How can I go on a villa holiday?
How would you sum up your Makers Marathon in 3 words? Choices are abundant. How would you define making? For me, making has meant a chance to say there is something I have inside me to feel or say that is worthy of expression. Making feels so outside of the realm of daily economic life and trying to keep your head above the water. It feels like coming home to being human, first and foremost. Making helps you create energy, even out of exhaustion.
Tell us about something you’ve made. I came to the marathon hoping to write a memoir or narrative experience that had come to me, called ‘Rilke’. I’ve written a tiny draft of Rilke. But it also feels like claiming the right to memoir is the bigger action of reclaiming our lives. It’s about giving yourself the right to see meaning in your experience - which is inherently of worth because it is a human life. I love this quote about what memoir invites us to do: ‘The good memoirist doesn’t diminish her terror or excitement or hurt or bliss. She puts a magnifying glass to it’; she writes about ‘an ordinary existence... with profound insight’.
Activity: Minimum Viable Memoir Memoirs enable us to examine and articulate the memorable moments and events of our lives.1 Ali’s meet-up had us writing in response to different prompts to help us work out how we want to construct a narrative about our life. You will need: • Notebook and pen • An object or image to respond to
Memoir prompts
Claiming tenderness feels in tension with the world of work and running out of resources - for me, these feel brutal, but I want them to feel human, because we all deserve it. I’ve also made a website and tried to define my ‘creative practice’, and left a job of five years, making a commitment to changing. My new website proclaims that I’m an economic relationship designer. I’m still not certain what this means, but it feels like an act of bringing together the things in tension and asking: How can we still expect more of our lives, despite what making ends meet does to us?
Start with your foundation image*
What words are important in your life? You might weave your memoir from these Or you could start from an event, theme or insight, or the present moment
A second big meaning of making for me is around decisions and change. I’ve needed to ask myself how I can allow ‘way to lead on to way’ (Robert Frost), make the decisions, and go through the doors that life is asking of me.
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What have you learned from the process?
What advice would you give to someone who wants to connect with their inner maker?
That I can be reflective and poetic still. This part of me has not been burnt out by economics and logistics - it’s still in me, deep at my core, scorched but only ready to grow up and out again, like something after a forest fire. That I am willing and want to slow down and look intensely and closely at things around me, and that I might even like my inner voice and want to validate it by sharing how I think.
To let go of having to make sense of everything, and to commit to finishing something at the time you started it, rather than saying I will finish it later. It’s ok for something to be done, but not perfect. Are there even 10% of us who are not starting from the point of burnout? We need to fail, flail and fully experience our endless free goes - to claim the right to live as who we already are and make our own mistakes.
Describe a time or image that comes to you. It can be from the present, an object you look at often; or can be from the deep past.
I am surrounded by…
When I think of it I feel… I love this image’s… Write about the sensory qualities of your image or object
Life is…
What is your overriding emotion? How does that emotion feel in your body?
I am always…
(list nouns)
(list adjectives/ describing words or feelings)
Event sentence starters:
Theme or insight sentence starter:
Present moment sentence starter:
The first time I knew that…. I was...
It’s so hard to write right now. My body is...
At the start of the pandemic, I..
Help! What’s a memoir? ‘Memoir is a democratic form. Anyone who’s lived can write one.’ - Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir -
‘The good memoirist doesn’t diminish her terror or excitement or hurt or bliss. She puts a magnifying glass to it…’ 2 "There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you." - Maya Angelou
(list verbs or actions ending in -ing)
* Virginia Woolf felt that every writer, every person, has a ‘foundation image’, an image which lies at the core of their memories or experience as a person and on which their ‘soul stands’. Woolf’s was lying down as a child, watching the wooden ball at the bottom of the pull of a blind, while the sun played over the wooden floor. Right now, mine is the memory of holding a warm stone in my hand on a beach. 1 - https://www.gold.ac.uk/short-courses/memoir-life-writing/ 2- https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/best-memoirsautobiographies-biographies.html 25
