The Reluctant Writer
Kratos
is the most resistant person in the reading group. She loves reading and all
her life she has written at school, in exams, in work documents and has been
excellent at it, but now she is unwilling. She has only agreed to write the
diaries in honour of our long standing friendship and mutual respect. However despite being intractable at first
and not writing any entries for the first month, she has begun, and says she
enjoys it and has even agreed to write the education journey.
At book club 3 Kratos talked about the experience
of hearing My Story of Resistance saying she was inspired to take up the pen
and write her own story, her own education journey. Kratos was truculent about
writing, only doing it to ‘please’ me, which is good evidence for the MPhil project
but bad in that she is not doing what she wants to do.
Having known Kratos for a decade I can tell you
that she never ever does anything she doesn’t want to do. Possibly on some
level, she must want to do it, perhaps this is a good time as her children are
grown and she is feeling in a stable place after recent mental health issues.
She talked about her previous conviction that only
in the past ten years she has become combative towards writing, linked in with
her going off sick from work and ultimately not returning - vacating the role
of head of a Sure Start programme at a troubled inner-city Midlands nursery.
She says through the diary and book club she has
re-examined the past, or perhaps examined for the first time as she may not
have been in a good place to examine the past before now. When she looked at
her educational journey she saw that on reflection, it was after leaving home
and starting university that she began her intransigence to writing.
The diary has allowed her space to re-evaluate the
past, put things in perspective understand the chain of events and
psychological blows that led to her avoidance of writing, a hiding from self,
an unwillingness to connect and see. The use of artist texts such as Grayson
Perry’s Portrait of an Artist as a Young
Girl, (2007) a confessional and frank portrayal of Perry’s mixed up, confused
and desperate life at art school; has led to an association with Kratos’ own
experience, a re-connection of herself into the sequence that connect us all. As Jean Houston (1992) suggests looking for the patterns rather than the linear cause and
effect explanations.
Houston, J in Sheldrake, R. McKenna, T., Abraham,
R., (1992) Chaos, Creativity and Cosmic
Consciousness, 2nd edn., Rochester Vermont, Park Street Press.
Perry, G., and Jones, W., (2007) Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl, London,
Vintage Press.
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