inside the word we are stuck. The meaning of any word, after all, is in the hearing of the hearer and no longer inside the pages of the dictionary, useful as it still is. So many of them have myriad understandings, and not just that; they have historical or familial understandings and in those back-stony places, they settle and fix. It is not surprising that children with no clue of what they say, spout the words of some parent. Could be good. Could be not. I’ve witnessed much from the mouths of children in both places and just knew the words were not birthed, but learned. I’ve met it in the mouths of women and men at corners, at traffic lights, at intersections, at T junctions, at any place of transition when the triggers trigger and the historical bungees snap. It is like spit, or an unthinking response to a difficult question or challenge. I thinks me.

When I write I traverse wordage, skidding over what I have learned (endlessly) about the language of poetry and prose, established by the acknowledged writers of the time, that is/was to say men, and into the fighterly fight for freedom of lingual Speke, irrespective of education, situation or sexual orientation. Words themselves can become ‘stuck’. What is and what is not acceptable for the time can shackle at best, imprison at worst, can become the voice of change whether in subject matter or in what has been dictionary-fixed. Writers fought to be seen and heard and have done so for a very long time. Still do. New pens, new colours, new races, all with powerful voices can now be heard through their writing. Their freeflow of wordage can now arrive into our bookshops. We buy, we relate, we ‘wow’ their courage. But, if we ourselves had met them in the troubled streets of their time, or watched them as they scribed in the cold candlelight of a single room, playing with new phrasing, uncomfortable revelations or the re-shaping of old words, would we have recognised them at all, acknowledged them as ‘acceptable’, on our way to dinner with those who stood steadfast in the current judgement? These time warp vagrants lived inside the word until they refused to for one more minute and that alone could send us running for the shelter of what we knew was Right and Proper, the safe ground. Even inner doubts and wonderments can be quashed decidedly, as we all know.

However, outside the word is a place of new freedom. It also offers a freedom from labelling and without any details given here, there are way too many of them labels. Born, as they are, from old beliefs, old conditioning with its many accompanying and confusing fears, we are now, if we are brave enough, loosed from those chains. Writers turn and twist words, alter the sense of sentences, morph nouns into verbs, into doing words as opposed to settled fat facts. And the best of this is that anyone can write. At no other time in our history has such freedom been offered, never mind afforded or celebrated. However, and there is always one of those, in order to write and to write well, it is not enough to just want to. Before I wrote my book I knew it, taking two writing courses, one with the Open University and one at a writer retreat. Those two words and together create an oxymoron, by the way. Writers do not retreat. Just saying.

The process of writerly training is essential. To learn the disciplines, not of limitation but of a deeper understanding of wordage, of expansive thought, of distilling said thoughts and of creating rhythm, phrasing, and to show but not to tell, all these are essential tools (toolage?). Ok, my online dictionary argued with that one. I won the fight. Writing tutors in this age, this time of emerging from Covid lockdown isolation only to find it is back bigtime, know their stuff. We are different peoples now. We, I am hoping, live alongside each other in respect and acceptance. It is time, HIGH TIME, that we left our oldness behind, those beliefs that kept us home when all we wanted to do was go dancing with the gay guys, the gay girls, those who made life fun no matter the daily troubles they encountered. They and many others who don’t want labels but might need them now, just to be seen. Can we not see them? Yes we can.

Every voice matters, every story is important. Writers, you writer, please write. Do your training, study, yes, but do not hide behind I Can’t Write. You can. Speak. Break down the label barriers. Push through the permission judges and run. We need you, you who have experienced a load of horrible since lockdowns and beyond. You, who have the courage to live outside of the word. We are all waiting……