Women Of Letters

I was recently asked to come speak, or rather read, at one of the excellent 'Women Of Letters' events, the last of 2012 in fact.
These curated open letter reading afternoons are an ode to the lost or dying art of letter writing, created and hosted by the wonderful and inspiring Marieke Hardy and Michaela McGuire. I was absolutely chuffed to be asked to come and contribute my letter with November's theme being- 'A letter to that which I yearn for'..  What a topic!

I was quite overwhelmed as it's such an open and complex question.
What DO I yearn for, what DON'T I yearn for? What IS yearning anyway?
Is it like longing, or different?
(my own personal theory was that yearning was more about something you crave which you haven't yet had, and longing is more the missing and desiring of something that you have had and have lost.. Webster's dictionary informs me they are pretty much one and the same.
Okay, glad we got that cleared up)

With a bamboozling array of 'things I yearn for' on my mind, I did my best to sift through the dross and get to the meat of it. I toyed with going for more humorous, contained or light angles, like the perfect dress/song/recipe etc. but found I couldn't tease them out into full blown heart felt missives. I guess I thought, here is an opportunity to investigate and share what's really going on in my head and heart of late, the changes I've been through and revelations I've had in the shadowy, sticky, sometimes tricky realm of yearning.

Posted in the next post is what I came up with... A letter to my creativity. And it's freedom.
It's a bit of an emotional spiel. I honestly didn't give myself enough time to refine it much, so it's not my finest piece of writing or even orating as I was for some reason nervous as hell on the day.. bizarre considering I do things akin to this for a living.
Patting a duck before hand helped calm me down though (Women Of Letters raises money for Edgar's Mission, an animal welfare charity. The lovely calming, charming duck came along as a representative)

Huge thanks to Marieke, Michaela and my fellow women of letters- Linda Bull, Nelly Thomas, Dani Valent and Alex Schepsi. All women and letters were amazing. I felt honored to be sandwiched among them.
There was both laughter (Nelly, with the hilarious verbal paying out of her crap-tastic first boss 'Dwayne', 20 years after the fact) and tears (Linda, a love letter to her father, all that he represents and her desire to be more like him. Just mention the word 'father' or 'dad' to a room full of women and we all seemed to start welling up, for our own varying reasons)

It was a great experience and it gave me a chance to explore and publicly re-commit to an old friend of mine.