1. postcard for twelfth night
Bread is baking in the oven. I’m not the best breadmaker (too imprecise) but I love the process: mixing the simplest ingredients, kneading, setting aside for the first rise, knocking, proving, dusting the flour on top, scoring, placing the loaf in the warming oven. I enjoy that you have to let the dough alone for a while, like the draft of a piece of writing.
It’s the last day and night for our christmas tree, and perhaps the last of our bright-cut winter days. Tomorrow work weighs anchor. I’m still alive to the festive season, dreaming wakefully, thinking on a year of trips and occasions and wild animals spotted from train windows. January looks backwards as well as forwards.
I have a habit of collecting postcards. It’s useful to have a stack I can use to write a card for someone or stick onto the cover of a notebook. Most of them are hoarded and not used. My plan is to write a postcard series for the cherry log this month: short and quick weekly notes with a few pictures. I hope to bring more ease into my creative writing and make it part of my daily life once more.
The timer goes. I remove the bread from the oven, tap the bottom to hear the hollow sound and set it on a wire rack. I try to wait but I’m too impatient to let the bread cool. I carve a slice and the fresh steam rises up.
Untitled (bread board) (c.1980s) by Moira MacGregor, University of Dundee Fine Art Collections
recommended reading:
I’ve been inspired by some writerly encouragement for the new year:
Celine Nguyen’s essay ‘writing is an inherently dignified human activity’ reflects on two years of her newsletter personal canon. It’s full of generous tips and invitations to write and develop your creative and intellectual life without worrying much about being bad, tasteless or ‘performative’.
Elizabeth McCracken’s advice for fiction on the Guardian site: ‘If a page is impossible, try a sentence; if a sentence won’t come, take notes. Writing is a form of thought.’