wordcurrents’ 11th anniversary

Deadlines are often seen as a scourge: they create stress and are often viewed as unreasonable demands by the poor striving minions who work under them. I know that, because when I was sixteen years old, I faced the deadline of having to produce two columns per week for our local daily newspaper, The Northern Daily News. For five cents per column inch, I stood, Monday and Wednesday evenings after supper, at the big cast-iron Underwood typewriter that stood on my bedroom dresser and pounded out items of interest for my fellow students, for my column, entitled “Collegiate Chatter”. I discovered early on, that the more names I dropped, the greater my readership. I did that for two years until I left for University.

With that experience behind me, I was ready for essay deadlines, which for me, were child’s play, at zero cents per column inch. And, after all, the deadlines were usually about a month apart.

For many years, when I was teaching, I rose at 5:30 AM to write, sadly, without a deadline except for breakfast, when I had to stop, eat, shave and get ready for work.
It was not until I retired in 1993 that I had the wonderful leisure of being able to write during any part of the day, as I pleased.

But I found I was writing all over the place, without much intent, focusing on writing plays. I experienced a turning point when I was invited to become part of the Playwrights Unit in Ottawa at the National Arts Centre, where I was under contract for a year. During that year, I was one of nine playwrights who met with dramaturg Lise Ann Johnson and occasionally Arthur Milner every second Sunday afternoon to share and critique each other’s work.

The experience was exhilarating. I discovered deadlines all over again, and found my writing was blooming.

After that heady experience, which culminated in public staged readings of excerpts from our scripts — by Equity actors, no less — at The Great Canadian Theatre Company and Arts Court, I returned to writing without deadlines, and found myself lamenting the lack thereof.

For number of years I continued writing, but found I was getting nowhere. I needed a deadline, obviously; but until I had an editor or a publisher demanding that I finish work on time, that was not going to happen. I contemplated trying to find an agent who could get me an editor or publisher, but I just did not want to spend the effort doing that, when I could be writing. I faced a paradox: my writing would go nowhere without a deadline, but I was to preoccupied or lazy to do what I need to do to get me a deadline.

Along came blogging. I started reading blogs as they became popular. It took me a few months to realize that I could write a blog, and it could become my deadline if I stated publicly that I had one. So that is what I did. I stated at the top of my blog that I was intending to write a new poem every day.

On Valentine’s Day, 2006, I wrote my first poem for wordcurrents, and posted it here.

I did that, religiously, every day for about three years. I stopped doing that, and turned to novel writing — but that is a different story.

So, here I am, 1148 poems in eleven years later. Scourge? Hardly. Incentive, blessing, even? Most definitely.

About riverwriter

Poet, playwright, duplicate bridge player, website designer, cottager, husband, father, grandfather, former athlete, carpenter, computer helper for my friends, theatre designer, backstage polymath, retired teacher of highschool English, drama, art, a baritone singer in a barbershop quartet, who knows what else? wordcurrents is on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wordcurrents/ Doug also has a Facebook page, "Incognitio", related to his novels.
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