Karma and Dough Balls
No-one tell me poetry is useless
I am OLD. My birthday this year ends in zero. I was born in Washington D.C. because Dad was working on America’s fledgling space programme. Yes, it was rocket science. I attended John F. Kennedy’s funeral as a seven-month foetus, inside my weeping mother.
You never know how long you’ve got to dance, or how many more times you’ll see old friends, so at the start of the year, I made a foolish decision. Let’s have the party of all parties, even though half the department where I’ve taught creative writing for the last ten years is being made redundant this summer. It won’t be me, will it. It will never be me. Hell, if it is me, I’m gonna need a big party.
Not just a night either. You know how it is when you have one night. You’re inviting a bunch of people, most of whom live all over the place, you’ve not seen them for ages, you rush around saying hi, you dance, you drink, and it’s over. Just a bunch of clearing up to do. Unless you’ve hired somewhere. Let’s hire somewhere. And let’s make it more than a night. Like so many stags and hens and weddings these days, let’s expand it into a weekend. A party weekend. In the woods.
I kinda forgot I am crap at organising things. I’m not a big planner. I’m a last-minute kinda gal (thanks, ADHD, love the hyperfocus, but could you give me less chaos?). Plus, this whole weekend thing wasn’t cheap. I was going to have to ask my guests to pay for the accommodation. And asking people for money is not my forte. Actually, asking people for anything is not my forte; a painful history of childhood refusals, plus the Rejection Sensitive part of my neurodiversity, makes asking people to do things for me such a trauma-laced concept that it triggers fight-flight-freeze. This manifests as … well you can guess. The only way this party is happening at all is due to my 20-year-old daughter sitting me down in front of my laptop and saying soothing words while I have a little weep. Then she coaches me step by step through the next most urgent tasks. But some key stuff is as yet undone, and the party’s next month.
And of course, if you have been following along, I’m now A Full-Time Writer so the expense of this Party-More-Appropriate-to-A-Wealthy-Successful-or-at-least-Employed-Person-What-Was-I-Thinking??? is looking even more Eek! Had I booked a food concession for the Saturday night back in January when I first did derisory and inconclusive research, I expect I would have garnered a bunch of reasonable quotes. But now the choice is a South African menu of no personal relevance and entirely unsuitable for the under 20s, or a mobile pizza oven whose quote would require me to sell my car.
Luckily, I got a brilliant idea. Hire a pizza oven. DIY. I’m very fond of DIY. Here’s a properly cost-effective way of putting pizza inside my guests; lots of different base and topping choices for vegans, veggies, meaties, and gluten-frees. One of my sons is a chef who left the pressure of Michelin-star kitchens to become an electrician, and a couple of summers ago, during the pivot, ran a pizza oven on the beach. I asked his thoughts on pizza oven hire and he not only gave advice but volunteered to put on the apron.
Then I realised that for only a few tenners more than the hire fee, you can buy a portable pizza oven. I have a grown family who love pizza and are generally only tempted to come and hang out with me if I’m feeding them, so this seemed an obvious choice.
Meanwhile, July has exploded into the highest level of Personal Development Training I have never had to pay for. Actually, I am kinda paying, but indirectly. There’s nothing like finding out, the day you come back from holiday, that you’re losing your much-loved job (your only reliable income) *and* that you’re being sued. *
BONUS EXPANSION OPPORTUNITY! Time to be a bigger person because You Are Not Your Job and also You Are Stronger Than You Think. And when I first received this double EXPANSION OPPORTUNITY on the 1st of the month I couldn’t even go there because I hadn’t yet written (due to having to apply for my own job before I went on leave) the conference paper I was delivering on the 12th, plus there was my husband to support, because of the imminent funeral of his father on the 9th. More pressure flooded in until finally, this week, I could do nothing but feel the full force of it; the visceral panic that meant my brain started blue-screening like it was running Crowdstrike, and to function at all, I had to write out lists with the tiniests of steps, such as
open Outlook
find the email
read the first sentence
Somewhere in the midst of all this, partly as a component of my ‘flight’ response, and prompted by a small discount, I managed to buy the pizza oven and some dough balls.
More than 20 years ago, an Arts Council-funded project put poets into schools in ‘difficult’ catchment areas. I was paid to run creative writing workshops in four secondary schools in Eastbourne. The teenagers who attended them weren’t easy. Some were explosively angry. Some were withdrawn and depressed. The workshops took all the energy I had, and sometimes on the way home, I would cry with exhaustion. I remember feeling that it was almost insulting to be offering these kids poetry, when what they really needed was much more practical.
One of the other key features of ADHD is Emotional Hyperarousal. I didn’t know I was ADHD then; I assumed I was just a bit of a mess. But hypersensitivty made those workshops doubly hard. I did them to keep the roof over my family’s head; homemade pizza in our mouths. Of course, I hoped they might be of use to the kids I was teaching, at least one or two of them; expressing yourself can be therapeutic. But I really wasn’t sure. Then, ten years ago, I landed tenure at Goldsmiths, and largely put school workshops behind me.
Yesterday was one of the hardest days I’ve had in a decade. Half the defamation lawyers in London are on holiday. The clock was ticking. And at 2 pm, I had to attend a webinar with ACAS as part of the redundancy process. Emotions were… let’s say, being managed as best I could.
At 8am I’d received an email from the pizza oven company (a small British start-up in the north of England) saying they were very sorry, but due to a glut of orders (the summer finally tiring of its impression of winter), the delivery times were longer than the website said. From my phone, I’d replied ‘No worries. I’m glad you’re doing so well.’
At 10am there was a follow-up. I’m not usually in my emails at this time of the morning; mornings are for writing. But yesterday, I was emailing lawyers, trying to find one who was neither on holiday nor going to cost me a literal arm and leg. And into my inbox popped another email from the pizza oven company, asking was I, by any chance, Ros Barber the writer and poet, because they had met me ‘in another life’.
As you will know, writers are very excited to be acknowledged by anyone. Like my dog when someone opens the fridge and removes the cheese box, 99% of writers will stop whatever they’re doing at the smallest sniff of recognition, and appear by some type of teleportation to sit at Recognition’s elbow, eyes passively asking ‘Am I a good girl/boy/magnificent ball-catcher?’ The idea that a Customer Experience Manager in Stockport might know of me was sufficiently interesting that for a moment I forgot all about being sued to say ‘Yes, I am. Where did we meet?’
Friend, can you guess? She had been one of those unhappy Eastbourne teenagers. She remembered me because I had been “a big inspiration and coached me through a very difficult time.” It had been an instrumental experience. She expressed her warm thanks, and ended her email,
“I think you deserve some free dough balls...”
That was it. I blubbed.
Life is extraordinary. There you are in a perfect shitstorm of High Level Personal Growth Training and with exquisite timing, when you’re struggling to hold it all together, you get this gentle message from the universe that says yes, you have value, and yes, despite all the things you’ve got wrong, you’ve done good.
+++ Please press the heart to help other people find and enjoy this piece +++
Since last week I have:
Done no writing at all, except to lawyers
Recorded some video content about my poem ‘Material’ with the educational company Massolit
Seen (at a discount) the incredible Denise Gough in People, Places and Things. Like I needed more emotional wringing out!
Over to you
Have you ever had a perfectly timed karmic return?
Are you a disastrous party planner?
Anything else you want to share?
Despite being rubbish at asking people for money I will just mention that anyone who takes out a yearly paid subscription before the end of the month gets a free signed copy of my poetry collection Material plus a random poetry collection from my Goldsmiths office OR, if you hate poetry, a signed copy of one of my novels. Those who have already signed up, thank you, I will be posting out next week when my brain is not a bin fire!
*Obviously I can’t say anything about this at the moment, so don't ask me!
Imagine the immensity of the impression you must have made to elicit that response. This resonated so deep. I’m also a 1964 babe and I have taught at many levels (infant to PhD supervision) since 1989. I was described by a colleague in youth justice education (she didn’t know I could hear) as “great, but she really believes she can save them all”. I had this one young man, 15, family all gone, so much trauma. He would sneer and deride me like an old whiner uncle. He learned how to ping me - ‘you’ll never get me, Miss. I don’t wanna education.’ He turned over a desk one day, with such aggression that the screws dragged him away, shouting, “you’re a waste of my time, Miss.” I never saw him again. Until 2014. 22 years. A police officer broke up a scuffle that occurred near us at the football, driven by clashing cultures of the kids involved. He was from the specialist ethnic youth squad, a sergeant. He was so calm, firm and clear with these boys, who looked like him, and who softened in his presence. He’d travelled to the places from which these kids hail, to learn about their trauma, as part of diversity policing development. I smiled at him, thanked him, I had the that moment: do I know you? We walked on to the stadium exit. He caught up. He said, “you did get me after all, Miss”. He showed me his stripes, and the picture in his wallet of his exquisite wife, and little son and daughter. No adult arrests, let alone convictions. He said, “I love my job. I learned very young” he said, and winked, “you have to never give up on any kid, ever.” You mean, you have to believe you can reach anyone and never stop trying. The point for me is, if we get these experiences as you described, the sheer weight of significance means, there’s a lot of iceberg below that we can’t see. The research shows that in the 1970s unemployment and job losses, it wasn’t just the retraining the Mechanics’ Institutes offered in the North that gave hope and promise, but the literature and poetry classes. Ex-miners and factory workers told researchers, all was despair, but I could go to this class on Shakespeare for free. The teacher made it so clear. Or, the ones who found out they too could write poems. I can just imagine those kids, then, in the poetry workshops, finding you so fascinating. I really believe Substack is a new form of this. I’m in rural Australia, on a very wet Saturday morning. And here I am, learning from and resonating with, you. It’s such a source of deep, real hope. 🙏❤️🔥 Happy pizza.
I punched the air after this. Lovely turn of events. Now I really want some pizza.