facts – don't confuse the narrator

fill in the details

I wrote yesterday in “monsters and fairies” about stories that parents tell to their children about events that happen in the children’s lives before they are really old enough to form personal memories. Those stories can take on a life of their own and become formative parts of the child’s story.

There are other personal stories that parents tell their children, of course, including ones they recall about their own childhoods. And then there’s a step further back along the chain to the stories that our parents were told about their early childhoods by their own parents.
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(not) a singer in a rock-and-roll band

I’m really not one for enforced fun, but this past week I attended a couple of training days where there were ice-breaker activities before several of the sessions.

On the first day we had to arrange ourselves according to how many letters we had in our names – a fairly innocuous activity that was presumably meant to make everyone introduce themselves. In fact it resulted in pained expressions and much counting on fingers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the polysyllabic Italian lady ended up at the far end.
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irrelevant facts

In yesterday’s post, I touched on how the natural world is changing and how, while words I learned as a child are being lost from children’s vocabularies, there will presumably be a need for new words for the invasive species that are making their way to the UK common.

This got me thinking about how so much of what I learned in school has been superseded.
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facing up to fiction

Several lists of “rules for poetry” have been doing the rounds this week, perhaps in response to these 25 rules for editing poems from Rob Mackenzie for Magma Poetry.

It’s hard to disagree with anything Mackenzie says, particularly as the list is followed by the rider “good poets are always ready to break rules whenever a poem demands it.”

That said, the “rule” that caught my eye was:

15. Consider the poem’s “truth”. Not the literal facts (although those may be important at times) but the emotional resonance. Is the emotion genuine or just received wisdom?

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