Helen Lehndorf

Tag: creativity

  • My ‘Verb Home-based Writers Residency’ begins this week

    Above: my big old monster of a desk.

    I bought my monster desk from the Wellington Central Salvation Army op-shop in 1999 – the year I was studying creative writing full-time.

    I think at the time I felt I needed a serious desk to be a serious writer.

    When I got it home, it had old papers in the drawers from the Ministry of Education so I guess that’s where it spent the first part of it’s working life?

    It’s huge and heavy and more than once when we’ve moved house we’ve had to take doors off their hinges to get it inside.

    It’s heavy and daft…and I still love it, twenty-five years on.

    *

    I share this picture of my home working space because for the next three weeks, I’m one of two inaugural Verb Home-Based Writing Residents!

    Having begun my home-based residency, I want to publicly applaud Verb for their forward-thinking, compassion and generosity in establishing this (sadly) unique opportunity for writers who have circumstances which make applying for away-from-home artist residencies from challenging to impossible.

    When I first saw the advertisement for the home-based residency, I felt so very moved and so happy for our NZ writing community. I know so many writers for whom travelling to writing opportunities is outside what is possible in their lives.

    This home-based residency acknowledges and honours the unique challenges of disability, of care work and of care load.

    More than anything else, it gives visibility to a strata of creatives who often feel invisible, unseen and unsupported. I know that while I have done my very best to keep my creative work alive it has often felt like swimming upstream of the demands of my life.

    (Btw, If you don’t know me well enough to know what my circumstances are, I have an adult son (he’s 20) with autism and I am his main carer. I do my writing work around his care.)

    I also wish to thank Verb for generously deciding to award two residencies in this inaugural year. They advertised for one and after considering the applications, awarded two. How marvellous, hey?

    My fellow ‘at-home’ resident is the brilliant Henrietta Bollinger. Do go and read Henrietta’s book. It’s smart, fierce and very funny.

    So here I sit, at home at the monster desk as usual…but with the warmest feeling of support, visibility and with large swells of gratitude.

    Thank you so much, Verb.

  • 52 and still stumbling over the ‘A’ word…

    (Above: journal word cards I make for my workshops.)

    Over the weekend, I was at a beach-side retreat for women so I was meeting some new people. I had just taught a journaling workshop (if you’re reading the blog because of foraging…you might not know my second book was about the practice of keeping a journal and I teach journal workshops) and a new acquaintance asked if I were an artist.

    I made some digressive, stumbling reply about how I loved to ‘mess about’ with art, had a visual element to my journal practice, love to play with art materials…mumble mumble… but ‘no, I am not a ‘proper’ artist.’

    My friend C, who was standing there, who is a visual artist, has been to art school, etc, interjected and said,

    ‘Helen, you are an artist. You are. You spend a lot of time doing art. You’re an artist!’

    I thanked her…the conversation moved on…but it left me reflecting.

    (Above: Mixed-media chamomile from a botanical sketchbook I’ve been working on.)

    I have taught creative writing for most of my working life (at university) and there I was, encouraging my undergrads to claim the ‘W’ word, ‘writer’ for themselves.

    ‘If you are passionate about writing, you spend your time writing, you are a writer!’ I said to them. I meant it, too. I felt there was power in the claiming of the word for themselves.

    And yet…and yet…here I am, old enough to know better, and still wiggling around doing the same thing for myself in another creative discipline. I studied creative writing at university and spend a great deal of time writing so it feels simple to claim ‘writer’ for myself. I still wobble around with claiming ‘artist’.

    Aren’t our brains fascinating, and odd, and annoying?

    (Above: Mixed-media red clover from a botanical sketchbook I’ve been working on.)

    I think part of it is where a passion intersects with an audience, or with capitalism. I find it easy to claim ‘writer’ because I have published things and had an audience respond to them. My words have earned me (a little!) money. I have been successful in selling books.

    (Above: art manifesto in the making. Sketchbook notes.)

    My art is mostly in the vein of play, experimentation and enjoyment of the creative process. I have exhibited art work and sold a few things. When my children were small, I supplemented my income with making self-designed and drafted textile crafts and paper goods. I love taking photographs. I feel I have a good visual eye.

    So how is it, I can, for years, have encouraged students to claim ‘writer’ for themselves and yet fail to take my own advice in another discipline?

    Do you have a creative practice noun -artist, writer, musician, singer, potter?-…..you yearn to claim and inhabit but struggle with? I’d love to hear about your blocks or advice for overcoming this odd phenomena.

    Love, Helen, (confident writer, tenuous artist.)