👩🎤 Signal & Spark — September edition
Hello dear Joy Risers,
Welcome to Signal & Spark, your monthly free dispatch of The Joy Rise. Thank you, as ever, for being here.
⚡️ Signal: News from my world
Here’s what’s bringing joy to my writing world this month:
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✨ Spark: inspiration from the wider one
This month’s spark: I wrote a poem for the first time in years. Inspired by the creativity of my dear friend and wonderful writer, Beth Kempton.
I noticed Beth’s invitation to write and share tiny poems online, thought how glorious, then kept scrolling, unaware it had ignited something in me.
The spark came later, while I was up to my eyeballs in dust and grot, scrubbing my Manchester writing office clean, after eight months away.
Unusually for me, I didn't just notice the flicker of an idea sparking in my heart, I let myself tend it: I stopped cleaning, sat down, and allowed myself to write whatever came to mind (not something that I do often when I’m novel-writing, as I am now).
I looked at what I’d written, moved things around a bit because my sentences didn’t make sense (they never do when they first come barrelling at me)… and then… I realised I’d written a poem. I was genuinely astonished. And later discovered that August is Poetry Month in Australia, which made my poem, and the little electric shocks that writing it gave me, feel like even more like a contribution to something bigger than me.
Peeled by Holly Ringland I peel the ripe, purple-green fig, cut it open, soft, sweet colour spilling from its heart at my kitchen counter. All of us - counter, fig, glinting knife, past self, present self - gather around the cutting board, drenched in strange northern sun. Strange because it’s rare here, to be this bright and warm. Strange because sixteen Augusts ago I arrived in this cold, northern red-brick city alone, bewildered - almost disbelieving that there might ever be a place in the sun for me. Now: Here I am. In Manchester. Eating a ripe fig on a warm Friday. Soaking the northern light into my skin.
The hinge of the poem was a micro-moment that happened at my kitchen counter a couple of weeks ago: I sliced a fresh fig open, noticing how the sunlight spilled across it.
A memory stirred, of the punnet of fresh figs I bought at a Soho market on a sunny London day in August sixteen years ago when I first came to England.
My stomach filled with emotion butterflies, remembering how utterly impossible yet painfully hopeful everything felt then.
I didn’t expect the moment or memory would become a poem I’d later write between the vacuum, Dettol spray and my cleaning rags.
It reminded me that the point isn’t that this poem is groundbreaking or destined for status or greatness.
The point is that I wrote poetry. Something I truly haven’t done in a decade or more. And, in the process, I felt a starburst of joy and wonder. Which has stayed with me since.
It also reminded me of novelist and poet Louise Erdrich’s words from her poem Advice to Myself #2: RESISTANCE:
Resist loss of the miraculous
by lowering your standards
for what constitutes a miracle.
It is all a fucking miracle.
Even a small act of creation, like a poem about a fig that’s not at all about a fig, which appears in the middle of grubby cleaning, is a reminder that creativity isn’t something we have only when everything’s ideal and aligned.
Our imaginations are always with us, in us, quietly waiting for us to notice a flare of light, quietly waiting for us allow ourselves to tend to those sparks inside us… to make something from nothing. What a fucking miracle.
I’ve promised myself that next time my imagination sends me a spark with its invitation, I’ll accept it. And find the courage to share it. Creativity is human-made magic. We need it and each other, more than ever in our lives.
Maybe you’d like to join me? Have you noticed and tended a spark in your heart lately?
💡 What if?
What if you noticed and tended a small spark today? A sound, a fragment of memory, a tiny observation… and your creative response to it. Write it, sketch it, hum it, or simply sit with it and daydream. What if you let it lead you… right now?
💌 I’d love to know if this sparks anything for you. Please reply below if you feel like sharing.
If you enjoy noticing and tending the creative sparks in your heart, 🧡 NOTES TO SELF and 💚 THE WORK OF WONDER are designed to do just that.
This is one of three issues of The Joy Rise that I write and share each month.
Paid subscribers also receive:
🧡 NOTES to SELF
A voice memo from the heart for the month ahead.
A short podcast + transcript of reflective notes, including sparks for your journal and ideas to begin each month - like a choose your own adventure map, inwards.
💚 THE WORK of WONDER
Tools and prompts to support your creative life.
A post exploring an obstacle to creating, offering sparks for ways to respond, reconnect with imagination and make what matters, including a downloadable PDF to work with.
🪩 Thank you
Thank you for being part of this community. Whether you’re reading on a free or paid subscription, your presence is what keeps this disco ball glittering.
With a light left on,
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Redeem this special offer for yourself or gift a subscription to someone else:
Love your poem so much 💙 but mostly I love that you stopped and wrote it down Xx
Yes, I loved these tiny poem prompts from Beth. Your poem is great and such figgy fun. I always think of Jacobs Fig Rolls, which I love, even though I live in a country where figs grow wild ';)
You know I never read poetry but love it when Beth does this. I'm totally rubbish at it but have done most of the summer prompts and put them in each of the prompts comments section. Most of mine are taken from my memories or photos I've taken too. I get creative prompts and ideas when I'm zoned out cleaning, gardening, showering or dropping off to sleep but rarely stop to record them. I must do that. Anyway, I have subscribed and thank you for the amazingly generous offer. 🙏🏼