The Muse Calls at Midnight
Red Sky at Night, Writer’s Delight…
Often I am wakened from deepest sleep by a figure sitting beside me on my bed. Watching. Waiting.
Every time I do not expect it and wake with a scream.
Tonight the figure did not disappear when I opened my eyes fully. A small feverish girl crawled into bed beside me and I gather flannels and painkillers – her and me – mine with caffeine, I can’t find any without – and cuddles. After this blood red sky earlier in the evening, a blood red half moon in the window caught my eye, signalling to me that the muse was here too as it slipped beneath the horizon in its burnt umber beauty.
Lamplight, moonlight, dark night torch bright
The muse does not keep office hours
Birth and death can mess up carefully made plans
Sickness does not make an appointment
Creativity, sex and healing
Tend to occur in the halflight, the edge spaces
So began my midnight encounter with the muse: over four hours of frenzied writing – nine sides and a hand in total, sentence by fully formed sentence in my phone light – falling fresh from the tongue of the muse in my head, echoing round my head until once again I picked up the pen, the phone and paper and wrote her dictations. Prose-poems direct from source, the vertebrae of my next book, forming metaphor by metaphor in front of my eyes.
People often ask me how I write… if I can run a class… this is my process, these midnight booty calls with the muse… and daytime wranglings with structure and flow. I could not run a class in this! Could I? {Seems like I could – the next night I visioned a 4 week writing adventure: Your Authentic Voice – starting May 6th}
Time after time I thanked her, and told her we would continue tomorrow. But she was insistent. Words like honey dripping from her unstoppably open thighs. How the hours flew.
At one point, hoping it would bring an end to the glory, which I knew would be regrettable by morning time editing and school-readying standards, I noted some utterances on my hand. Notes to self. Written on the body. Becoming my own body of work. Thinking this change of medium might staunch the flow… as you can see it did not.
I have a deal with this voice that when it calls I write, I show up and play my part, getting its words onto paper for you, for me.
Its parting words at gone 5am – Your voice is calling you home to embody it.
