Creativity – Page 5 – June Paisa Perkins

Uncaging the Bird Story in 8 – (2)

The bird can be so unkind. Pecking the youngest of the family just because he is so loud. The bird does not like competition for it is centre of its own world. This family is its domain. The bird owns the space – and gurgles deeply when it is happy with his power.

The child hides from the bird. It keeps going for his eyes and his toes. He shuts the door to his bedroom and will not come out – not until Mum has told him where the bird is. He is making his own fortress to keep away that bird. He is in the middle of a Hitchcock movie right in his own home.

But then his courage returns and he places the bird on his shoulder and it hops back into the cage. As soon as it is home the boy closes the door.

Where is the mother of the bird. She cannot hear her long gone child. She is somewhere in the trees, or maybe on a roof. She is looking for somewhere to build another nest. She cannot cry for each lost one.

The lost children wandering away from disasters, will they find their parents? Like the lost birds from trees are they somewhere caged in another existence, unaware of who they once were. Will they return home one day?

Lost children find their way into stories, like Peter Pan. Lost children on faraway islands, and adventures, longing for a true mother.

Crocodiles with clocks, tick – tock and pirates. How many kids want to be pirates at parties, to sail on boats, and make people walk the plank. True pirates are scary though. They carry guns and hold up boats. Fantasy pirates are lost souls and cool like Johnny Depp.

The boy wishes he could make the bird maybe disappear. But he knows his older brother loves the bird – and so instead he takes his older brother out to play cricket and leaves the bird in the cage to wait longingly for his master – the older brother.

The bird cannot become human and be a little brother.

Self Reflexive

This piece was inspired by real life a little, our pet bird is crazy! I wanted to change it a bit and think about theme of lost children. I think I can push it a lot further and develop it. I think I could do some research about pirates and children who lose their way home after being swept away in big disasters – but in terms of progressing a plot I am not getting very far but I am exploring themes and that is interesting. I did move from the bird’s perspective to the child he pecks though – and that seemed a very natural story movement.

Cliche Busting

I think the theme of Pirates and lost children and birds can be developed with movie references to make it contemporary and move it away from cliche. It’s a way to make the piece more distinctive. I feel it could do with a lot more work but it’s good to get blog 2 out of 8 done and now a few days break to think what I can do next in this month’s challenge.

For part 1- Uncaging the Bird (1)

(c) June Perkins

Uncaging the Bird Story in 8 – (1)

IMG_20120101_182506 — Based on the Real – Bird Uncaged – June Perkins

The bird listens to the song – is calm and quiet, sometimes it even joins in.

It may sense a prayer – for it is gentle and still.

It sleeps even as the song progresses.

Caged bird – if only it was free, but to be free would be to be a pest, to be hunted, because it doesn’t belong here.

It kills all the natives.

Bird – are you a metaphor for all colonisers everywhere?

Caged, uncaged, let loose, like a kite whose string is cut when it’s up high enough to be free.

If only the bird could go back home. Find somewhere that welcomed it, beyond the shores of here.

Sometimes when the bird is free it pecks the eyes of the youngest – he cries out and so the bird is punished.

But when his master comes home – he who feeds it, advocates for it and reminds his mother she must feed it, and play music to it – the bird is attached to a shoulder where it belongs.

The bird loves them all though, even when he pecks the youngest. He hates toes though.

Toes mean treading on bird when he’s running around out of his cage. He lives for the forage, the chase of the bug – preferring grubs you throw and make look like living worms.

The bird belongs in this family – but are they a cage outside a cage? What is the bird was truly free and back in his homeland?

The question has no real answer because life is what it is and the bird was born in foreign lands and fell from his tree. Now he lives here – and rests in his cage.

To be continued.

Self reflexive

Sometimes I like to write from the environment around me, like writing a storm when one is on, or basing a character upon somebody real. Today I wrote of our family pet bird and his relationship with our family and his environment. My next challenge is to incorporate this into a developing story – and the obvious place to go to after the bird is inside the head of one of his family – but there are less obvious things that could happen – like going to the head of his mother? So until my next blog post in this story I will be thinking and dreaming about what I could write next.

Cliche Busting

An uncaged bird – as freedom is cliche so I have made this that the uncaged bird is less free than the caged because of what waits out there for him. I would have liked to be more humourous but today there is a melancholy tone in my writing, it could just be my choice of metaphor.

(c) June Perkins

Wonder a Day 19: Prose is Walking – Poetry is Dancing PART 1

Hazel chairing a Book Creator’s Circle Meeting

Writers who persevere are a wonder!

For the next few days you are going to read a conversation between Hazel Menehira and myself. At the end of these few days I will publish the interview in a full post at Creative Souls Converse. I am glad to add to that blog – a showcase inspiring creative projects and people.

Prose is Walking, Poetry is Dancing – with Hazel Menehira

JUNE: Tell me a bit about yourself Hazel, and why you write?

I know a bit from your profile on BCC and meeting you at Tropical Writers – you have a very warm and engaging personality and a passion for words, but if I met you for the first time how would you introduce yourself?

HAZEL: I’d say Hi…it’s great meeting you…tell me about yourself first…Me? At 78 with 12 books under my belt I have been earning a livelihood from writing and teaching voice and drama all my life.

At 12 years I decided I would be an actress and my wise headmaster at a Hertfordshire Grammar School stated how precarious that profession was and maybe I should pursue journalism. I did both professionally as well as raising a dysfunctional loving family.

JUNE: How has your speech and drama background assisted your composition of poems, you often talk about ‘musicality of flow’, can you explain that?

HAZEL: Poetry has always been meant to be spoken aloud. Studying through years of theoretical and practical diploma examinations and listening to countless performers as a teacher and an examiner for the New Zealand Speech Board I have become aware that a skilful poet (prose writer too) achieves impact not simply through the meaning of words but through the sounds.

By sound I mean not simply using sound techniques like alliteration and onomatopoeia but allowing word sound combination themselves achieve specific effects that enhance and enrich the total meaning.

The study of voice and speech grounded me in the structure and qualities of sounds and its association with music. For example it has helped me appreciate the beauty and flow of long vowel sounds and the verve and crispness of certain consonant sounds.

Great poets like Dylan Thomas bring the magic of music to life in poems so listeners are enthralled.

JUNE: What did you enjoy most about being a journalist – at the Wanganui Chronicle? What were your biggest challenges with some of the stories you might be asked to write?

HAZEL: I enjoyed writing and communicating with so many diverse people I may never have met otherwise.

I was in journalism when it was one of the few professions that women could succeed in.

I learnt from the ground up in day to day hard work slog in practice. ..(not theory) with sub editors and management who knew their stuff, encouraged and mentored my work.

I began with Wanganui Chronicle in the advertising dept…and begged to be a reporter…

I began as a cadet and each year moved up a grade until I was eventually a sub editor, then woman’s editor, then arts editor and finally sometimes set out front pages.

I was also one of three staff on the papers midweek tabloid who wrote the features, took photographs editing it in total.

Biggest challenges: front page fatal smashes and royal visits.. court reports in limited time…starting (then maintaining) several new feature series that I began enthusiastically like ‘They work at Night’ or ‘Bouquet of the Week.”

The hardest part was working nights for morning press and early starts at 6.30 to deal with cable, read, collate and sort priorities.

….To be continued.

Wonder a Day 16: Dance with Life

What inhibits some people from dancing, but makes others unable to live without it?

I love to dance but not in front of people.

I dance with music in my room – secretly.

I dance with words.

Dance is a healer, dance is a revealer of stories.

Dance is a metaphor for joy.

But why does death dance?

Why do heroes dance with death?

Why do some people dance through life, where others plod?

….I might go away secretly and write much more about dance.

Today’s wonder is dance.

(c) June Perkins

Wonder a Day 14: Music

guitar workshop — Son on his way to workshop in Yungaburra

Today is another memory blog, of time at Yungaburra’s music festival. Music is a wonder of our family’s life and this event from two years ago was part of the music journey they will take into their future.

Full of workshops with people like Alesa Lajana, and concerts by people holding the workshops like herself. They did go to a Blues workshop and a song writing one as well, but Alesa’s was memorable because of the way she spoke about music.

Alesa spoke about people taking any path in music as long as the passion continues, by that she meant classical training, or self taught, it’s the daily practice the hones the love of music. It builds the skill of the musician and they take the journey with their instrument.

My youngest son loves the movie August Rush a fairytale about a boy who follows the music and is reunited with lost parents through their mutual love of music. The scene where he encounters a guitar for the first time is one of my boy’s favourite scenes in movies.

yungaburraalesa4 — Alesa Lajana in concert

So there you have it, keep up the practice of whatever you love and have some skill and training in- and you develop in it.

Thanks Alesa too for staying in touch on facebook and the occasional mentoring comment to my sons on their guitar journey.

(c) June Perkins