A new poem

~ bardofupton ~ Leave a comment

This is a new poem.

some poems strike like lightning
straight onto the page
some poems trickle like drops of water
slowly filling the paper
some poems are made word by word
like building a wall of letters
some poems blaze fleetingly through the mind
leaving you groping for their beauty
some poems reveal themselves shyly
blossoming over time

i’ve written them all
the easy the simple the time-consuming
the painfully extracted and the meticulously crafted
have all flowed – eventually – from my pen
and this one embodies them all

© bardofupton 2019

Reading project, week ending 6 Jan 2019

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What have I read this week?

F, M or Other: Quarrels with the Gender Binary

This is an anthology of works by various authors relating to gender. They span a range of different types: fiction, essays, poems, comics, but they are all interrogating gender and/or gender roles. I enjoyed this – I found it interesting and thought-provoking.

Hole by Ellie Kendrick

I saw a performance of this last week and bought a copy of the text. I have to say I enjoyed the text more than the play: it seemed more complex and richer.

Penric and the Shaman by Lois McMaster Bujold

This is a novella set in the same world as The Curse of Chalion. It is the second in a series about a sorcerer named Penric and the demon who gives him his powers, Desdemona. I really enjoyed it, and will definitely read the rest of the series.

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

This is a novel. It is told alternately by three different women, Rachel, Megan and Anna. It’s one of those unreliable narrator novels, and I didn’t like it because it was so obvious that things were being hidden, purely for the sake of a reveal at the end.

Winged Magic by Mary H Herbert

This is a fantasy novel. It’s the last of a series. It revolves around a sorceress and healer who is kidnapped in order to help an evil man take the throne of a neighbouring kingdom. It wasn’t bad, although I could have done without the whole “you will be my bride” part of the plot.

© bardofupton 2019

A new poem

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This was inspired by the fog, or at least it started out that way.

adrift in mist
floating in fog
i feel suspended in time
out of place
positively unmoored
or unmoored positively
open to possibilities, time and space
luminous and emergent
lucid and incandescent
metamorphosing second by second
from one self to another
and yet the same
dissolving and reconstituting
i create myself by an act of will
embodying my identity
i become, i am, i was, i will be
my many sides fit together into the puzzle of myself
i coalesce
and step forth
reborn remade
into myself

© bardofupton 2019

Poetry review: introduction

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This is going to be a fortnightly feature wherein I review a poem, the idea being to get me reading more poetry. I’m going to focus on professionally-published work. Rather than choose an author, I’m going to start by choosing a poem at random from one of the anthologies I have: hopefully this will mean reading some things I wouldn’t necessarily choose myself.

As I’m a bit of a geek, I’m going to use a random number generator to choose my poem: I will choose a number between the first and last page of the anthology, and read the poem on that page. The only exceptions will be if it happens to be a poem I’ve already discussed in my Favourite Poems or Reading Project series, or if it ends up being a repeat.

© bardofupton 2019

Non-binary and disabled

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This piece was previously published in September 2018 in the Disgender zine – you can see the zine here, and I encourage you to check it out. There’s lots of cool stuff in it, all themed around being trans/non-binary and disabled/chronically ill.

Becoming (realising I was) non-binary was a lifetime’s process, of fighting a femaleness (femininity) that never belonged to me; of hating the breasts and periods that life burdened me with; of not knowing who I was, what I was, only what I wasn’t, a confusion made worse by growing up in a place and time that barely acknowledged the L and G of LGBT+ (never mind the rest), and so left me bereft of words, of a name for my being, stranding me in a place of “well, female I guess, if I have to choose (but why do I have to choose?)” that never felt right or true; of always wondering why I wasn’t like everyone else, why calling myself female was unsettling, but calling myself male was definitely wrong.

Becoming disabled has been half a lifetime’s process, of injury and illness, of pain and cumulative slow failure of my body’s systems, and yet, I can love my non-binary disabled body in a way I never could love my abled, presumed female body; I can revel in what it can do, appreciate my non-binary self for what it is. Weirdly, it’s illness that taught me to love my body, to appreciate being alive – and it’s illness that finally gave me both the courage and the words to call myself both non-binary and disabled. After years of thinking (insisting) I wasn’t disabled enough to claim that as an identity (because I can x, because I can’t y, because I’m not z) I got cancer, and it was weirdly revelatory in some ways. I had to think about death, and about how having cancer means always having to think about cancer, at least a little bit, even though I’m now in remission, and I thought about what I wanted the rest of my life (however short or long) to look like. And the biggest part of that was I wanted the rest of my life to be mine, to stop being afraid of what people might think of me, and claim myself. And I looked at the mix of physical issues I have and thought, yeah, I’m disabled. I need to own it. I walk with a fucking stick, clearly I’m disabled. Being able to sometimes do without the stick doesn’t make me not disabled, any more than wearing a skirt makes me female. And it was having a mastectomy that made me realise that it’s not that I’m a woman who’s bad at being female, it’s that I’m not a woman at all – which was a deeply and profoundly liberating experience.

The first day I left the house as a newly-identified non-binary person I felt like I owned the world. All the anxiety of a lifetime of faking femaleness fell away from me, and I felt free. I felt like my body finally belonged to me and I could stop caring what other people thought of me; like I could look at myself and not see a failed woman, but see someone who was living on their own terms, someone who belonged not to the world, but to themself – someone who could build their identity from the ground up without any shoulds from society (how to dress, how to act, how to be), someone who could create their own norms – someone who wasn’t an imposter, but who belonged. Someone who could wear a dress if they wanted, or not – but either way it didn’t define them; someone who could be themself, whoever that might be. Someone who is (finally) happy to be themself.

© bardofupton 2019

2019

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Happy new calendar year, for those of you on the Gregorian calendar!

And happy random day for the rest of you!

It seemed like an appropriate time to review what’s been going on with the blog, and maybe make some plans for this year.

I relaunched the blog on 2 July 2018, and I’ve written 82 blog posts since then, not including this one. That’s about 13-14 a month, or 3-4 a week, which I think is pretty good going – at least for me with my track record of abandoning things.

I started and have managed to continue my reading project, and have made a good start on the writing project. The favourite poems posts have been on a bit of a hiatus, but I hope to have some more of those later this year. Aside from that, I have a photography series of posts I’d like to do, but I need to actually take the photos!

There will also be some more of my longer, rambling identity or cancer-related posts, and I definitely intend to continue the Inkwarriors series. And there’ll be poetry, of course.

So I hope 2019 will be an interesting year on the blog.

© bardofupton 2019

Writing project, December 2018

~ bardofupton ~ 2 Comments

This month’s word is unicorn, meaning “a mythical creature resembling a horse, with a single horn in the center of its forehead”.

——————

Everyone knew there were no more unicorns. The last known unicorn had died in a zoo, in 2025. No wild unicorns had been seen for decades before that, despite extensive searches.

And yet, the rumours persisted.

T was convinced they were true. He spent hours scouring all corners of the Internet, following up leads in obscure forums and repeatedly viewing blurry videos which claimed to show unicorns. He even met furtive strangers in dingy pubs to get his hands on hardcopy evidence. He’d plotted alleged sightings on maps, and was saving up to visit the area where the most encounters had been reported. He was not the most prolific poster on the unicorn forums, but he was one of the most persistent.

T knew that if there were still unicorns, he would find them. How could he let all that beauty, that wondrous power, remain hidden? It never occurred to him that the unicorns, if they existed, might have their own ideas about that. There were those who felt that if there were unicorns still, they should be allowed to live in peace, and PowrCorn882 was one of them. They would often argue for hours online with T, trying to change his mind. It never worked; both of them always ended up more entrenched than ever in their original positions.

Although the search for unicorns was the driving passion of T’s life, he still had a day job, doing data entry for a widget manufacturer. It wasn’t exciting, but the pay and hours were reasonable. He had just finished his shift and was on his way home when a van pulled up ahead of him and several masked people piled out. They grabbed him by the arms and hustled him into the vehicle where they blindfolded and tied him up.

T was so surprised he didn’t even struggle. Secretly, he was thrilled. He’d read about this kind of thing happening to other people, but he’d never expected to be on the receiving end himself. He regarded it as vindication, really – if he wasn’t on to something, they wouldn’t have kidnapped him, right? He hoped he was going to meet someone high up in the conspiracy, and not just henchpeople.

As a result of this thought process, T was surprisingly chipper when he was dragged from the van and into a small room. He was pushed into a chair and then the blindfold was removed. T blinked a few times, his eyes adjusting to the light. He was sitting at a table, with a masked figure seated across from him.

“You have to stop trying to find unicorns,” the figure said.

“You’ve proved me right,” T replied. “I must be on to something or I wouldn’t be here.”

The figure sighed. “I thought you’d say that, but I wanted to give you the chance.

“I’ll never stop now,” T replied.

“As you wish,” the figure replied. They gestured to the people who had brought T in, and two of them stepped forward, grabbing T’s arms and dragging him to his feet.

“Wait!” T cried. “Don’t I get to know who you are, or your plans, or anything?”

“It’s not a movie, T, it’s real life. I’m not going to monologue. You had a chance, you chose not to take it.”

T stared angrily at the figure as he was dragged away.

“Who are you?” he shouted. “At least tell me that much!”

The figure shook their head, standing up and walking away from T. They vanished through a door on the opposite side of the room.

T was dragged out another door, along a featureless corridor, down several dimly-lit flights of steps, along another corridor with rough-hewn stone walls, and into a small cell. He was dropped unceremoniously on a small bed. His captors cut his bonds and left the room, locking the door behind them. T stood up and rushed to the door.

“You’re just going to leave me here?” T asked incredulously, peering out through the slot in the door.

“Yup. You’ll be fed regularly.”

“Yeah, we’re not animals.”

The two exchanged a glance, laughing.

“But… But…” T stammered.

“You’re going to die here,” the first explained. “That’s the end of your story.”

They strode away, laughing. T let go of the bars and slid down, burying his face in his hands. So this was how it ended. He hadn’t seen that coming. The rest of his life, in this tiny cell.

“And I never even got to see a unicorn,” he sighed.

© bardofupton 2018

Reading project, week ending 30 Dec 2018

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What have I read this week?

Strange Weather by Joe Hill

This is a collection of four novellas. I quite enjoyed the first and last, really disliked the second, and didn’t like the third much either. I wouldn’t recommend this.

A Man of Shadows by Jeff Noon

This is a SF novel about a man called Nyquist who is a private detective. He lives in Dayzone, a city where it is always light, and he has taken a case searching for a girl called Eleanor Bale. I found this slow going, but eventually managed to get into it. I found the idea more interesting than the execution, to be perfectly honest.

Unlocked: An Oral History of Haden’s Syndrome by John Scalzi

This is an SF novella set in the same universe as Lock In. It’s exactly what it says: an accompanying book to the rest of the series. I enjoyed it, but I don’t know how interesting someone who hadn’t read any of the books would find it.

The Dispatcher by John Scalzi

This is a SF novella. It’s quite noir-ish, which I enjoyed. It was a great fun read – I really liked it.

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

This is a children’s book about a boy called Bod who grows up in a graveyard raised by ghosts. I really enjoyed it.

The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror by Daniel Mallory Ortberg

This is a collection of short stories. They are inspired by or retold versions of fairy tales and myths. I enjoyed them, but some of them are definitely horrifying.

© bardofupton 2018

Why pronouns matter

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So, my thoughts on the pronoun thing.

I use they/them as my pronouns, rather than she/her or he/him. And yes, that is singular they. The usage is precisely the same as more traditional pronouns:

  • This is Pete. He is late.
  • This is Paula. She is early.
  • This is Pen. They are on time.

Very simple, right?

Some people have multiple sets of pronouns that they use, some people use gendered pronouns, some people like neopronouns; that’s all fine – but I use singular they, and I want that to be respected.

Why does it matter? It matters because if you are deliberately using the wrong pronouns for me, you’re doing a number of things simultaneously:

  • You’re saying that you think you know my gender better than I do myself
  • You’re saying that you don’t care about making me feel safe, welcome or respected
  • You’re saying that I don’t matter enough to you for you to respect my request for you to use the right pronouns
  • You’re (maybe) saying that you care more about using “correct” grammar than about making me unhappy

Now, you might not intend to do any of those things, but those are the things that you’re conveying to me when you use the wrong pronouns.

I don’t expect anyone to get it right 100% of the time – I still make mistakes myself – but if I’ve told you my pronouns, I expect you to try and remember to use them. It’s exactly the same as trying to remember your friends’ preferred nicknames, or dietary requirements, or any other information that you remember about people you know. It’s a basic courtesy that you should give other people, and it’s one that I try to give everyone around me. All I’m asking is that you do the same.

© bardofupton 2018

Reading project, week ending 23 Dec 2018

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What have I read this week?

Wolf In White Van by John Darnielle

This is a novel about a young man called Sean who suffers a serious injury to his face. He retreats into a fictional world called Trace Italian, which he turns into a game. It’s by the same author as Universal Harvester, and I didn’t really like this one either. It just didn’t work for me.

The Boy on the Bridge by M R Carey

This is a post-apocalyptic novel set in the same world as The Girl With All The Gifts. It follows the members of a scientific expedition seeking a cure for the zombie plague. I quite enjoyed this one, although not as much as The Girl With All The Gifts.

© bardofupton 2018