Something to Write Home About
The September 2026 calendar page with one of my new cyanotype images
Some weekends I think I have nothing to write about in my blog. I find myself at a loss for words. It usually happens just before I open the computer, then I start typing and the words miraculously appear. It’s the same in the studio. I can walk through the door totally uninspired, wondering how I ever created anything in the first place.
That’s when I turn around and head to the kitchen for a restorative cup of tea or if its early in the morning, coffee. Carrying the mug back into the studio, sipping the warm beverage that asks nothing of me other than to drink it and enjoy the experience, somehow relaxes those self critical thoughts that loom large. Then I can begin to create anything really.
I realise I have written a lot over the years about the process of writing and creating. This week I received my book from the USA post, A Year of Sundays 2024, a record of all my blogposts I wrote last year. It has inspired me to work backwards and I am now in the process of compiling my 2023 blog book and after that, the 2022 version as well.
These books and my 2026 calendars that arrived last week, remind me that amidst all the self doubts about my creative output, I turn up regularly to the writing process or studio creating even when I feel there is nothing to ‘write home about’.
In all my writings and image making I return to the same themes over and over again. Much of my thinking and making is about process. There are blogposts titled Why Create (from 2021) and Why Write (from 2023). There are blog posts about travel, two even with the same title Wayfarers All, inspired by The Wind in the Willows.
Having small personal projects such as the blogpost book and the calendars takes the pressure off creating for an audience. It’s only me and a few friends and family members who get the calendar at Christmas. Nowdays everyone uses calendars on their phone (me included) but I still like turning over each page and seeing a new picture to start the month (with a pinch and a punch).
If I decide I no longer need to pay the subscription for a www presence, especially now the US dollar to Australian dollar conversions are so expensive, then all my blogposts created on this website account will be lost. I guess I am looking to the future and archiving my work now, while I have the time and energy.
I found a letter from my father in a forgotten folder the other day. It was about the weather, the dog’s antics, burning the leaves in the incinerator; the everyday events in his life that he wrote to me about when I had left home on my first job. It was nothing to write home about and yet it was something, a connection from that time that has survived through the forty years since he wrote it. The process of living, a creative activity in itself.
My Year of Sundays 2024 book open to March and my imminent Japan trip
