Denise Nadeau
Excerpts from Day-to-day Life
samedi 13 janvier 2018
samedi 9 septembre 2017
A poem
You are the one who opens up roads
explores new avenues
sprinkles words of love
along the way
you find the lost children
Text: Denise Nadeau
Photo: Alyson Wolens Slutzky
Translation from French to English: Colin R. Brady
Réalisation: Anna Asche
Calendar : Redbubble
https://www.redbubble.com/fr/people/goddess-inc/calendars/23582271-light-musings?c=436129-calendars-2017&p=calendar&ref=work_collections_grid
jeudi 4 février 2016
Fortunately there's childhood
Fortunately
there’s childhood
that
persists in being reborn
in begging
for its pittance
joys, verbs
that whet the
appetite
to play,
laugh, dance,
sing,
shout, draw
The child as a physical being who sings 20 Christmas
carols in the middle of January because he doesn’t know that the holidays are
over and that there’s been trouble in the world.
The child symbolic of dreams, he can represent,
among other things, the start of something, the project, the first steps of a
book, of a sculpture, of a painting, that doesn’t yet know the problems
afflicting humanity, the difficulties with which it’s confronted.
The inner child and his daily bread, his fears,
his anger, his heartaches, his always
and his nevers,
his enthusiasm and his great disappointments.
Sometimes we have to go back through childhood,
see it in a different way, redefine ourselves, so as to sketch out solutions or
walk along creative avenues.
© Denise Nadeau
Translation from French to English: Colin Brady
lundi 21 septembre 2015
Author and authority
For a long
time, my manuscripts remained in my drawer, awaiting an authority that would
consider them sufficiently good to be printed. Why? Because I kept them secret.
Before I had ever submitted them to an editor, I imagined this “authority”
would certainly refuse my texts, so I condemned them to silence in advance. And
yet, author and authority come from the same
Latin word auctor which has many meanings, including “that
which makes something grow; founder, creator, instigator and… authority.” Thus,
was I the authority?
Yes, it is I,
the author, who decides what is worthy or not, what will be shown, shared or
not. I give myself this approval, this imprimatur that I formerly sought
outside myself, because I am the one who sows a seed on the paper, who grows
words, paragraphs, books. To create is to accept that the course of the writing
is not known in advance, since it is not copied from any other; it is entirely
new. Ah, and I forgot, auctor also means "one who
approves." I would say I approve.
lundi 20 juillet 2015
Dream and Haiku
At Easter,
at some point during a family gathering, I found myself sitting with four of my
sisters-in-law. I don’t know how we got to talking about our dreams. One of
them asked me if I still wrote mine down. Yes, of course, I’ve been noting them
for many years. This practice has evolved over time, but it’s still just as
important. My sisters-in-law were clearly interested in the subject and
suggested I write an article about it in my blog. So here’s the story of a
little dream that could have gone unnoticed but instead produced unexpected
results.
Dream.
May 2012. I was with a few people, I don’t really know who, I don’t
really know where, and one of these people suggested I write a haiku rather
than a narrative text. I responded that that was a good idea, and that it
should appeal to the young people the text in question was intended for.
My second
children’s novel, La fille des pour
toujours, had come out in March. So there were “young people” in the
picture, not to mention my children to whom the dream might be referring.
Despite
these leads, and although that same evening and over the following weeks I
wrote some haiku, I didn’t really follow up on that dream. In fact, it remained
there, unfinished, noted in my journal, nothing more, until I opened my new
Facebook page in late November. My dream then came back to me. I began writing
more haiku that I published on my author page and then shared on my personal
page. I had hoped to attract young people to that latter page, which was
basically devoted to promoting my children’s novel.
That didn’t
work at all. The young people didn’t show up. However, I
had a lot of fun coming up with these haiku. I felt alive, joyful, as I created
them and I didn’t feel like stopping. So I kept making them.
By 2013, I
had quite a few of them. I put them together into a collection with other poems
that I already had and then reworked. Then I decided to shape my project into
more of a finished product: I would publish my haiku myself. I got the process
going and this collection, stemming from the dream I’d had in 2012, finally saw
the light of day last summer. I’m very happy with it.
I’ve come
to think that the young people in my dream actually reflected the young person
in me, that part of me who is full of ideas and willingly takes on new projects
without worrying about her age.
Copyright © Denise Nadeau
jeudi 16 juillet 2015
First Steps
The debut
of this blog coincides with the births of my grandchildren and marks a turning
point for me as a writer. These births give me a feeling of delight. Not only
are they full of life, they also steer me toward new learning.
Excerpts
from my journal, no longer locked away in a drawer, are coming out into the
open for a breath of fresh air.
Saying
something for the purpose of sharing is no small task for me. I have to stretch
it out, model it until it rings true, refuse to hide it behind fiction, give it
an easily assimilated, fluid form, then expose it to the eyes of anyone open to
receiving it.
But it
might simply be like holding the hand of a child taking those first steps in
life.
Copyright © Denise Nadeau
Inscription à :
Articles (Atom)