Milla van der Have

So... back in the day (and that day seems ages ago) I worked on the first draft of my novel using a method of my own making: scrummy writing. Since a novel is a huge pile of work, huge enough to take your breath away, I decided I needed to find a way to focus. Enter scrummy writing, which was based half-and-half on the agile scrum method used for software development. My chapters were sprints, the scenes user stories and so forth. I even wrote a couple of blogs about my scrum

"We are not afraid of night, Nor days of gloom, Nor darkness– Being walkers with the sun and morning." From 'Walkers with the dawn' by Langston Hughes I think about the world a lot these days. I mean, what the hell? The news has become a long litany of place names: Orlando, Baghdad, Dallas, Istanbul, Nice. The list is endless. I'm sure I could post the same poem week after week, over and over. For we seem to live in the exact times Yeats described in his 'The Second Coming':

we should be careful Of each other, we should be kind While there is still time. From 'The Mower' by Philip Larkin These are the last lines of a poem that has a hedgehog dying in a mower. I couldn't bear to post more of it. I just hate it when animals die, even fictional ones. (There's a story, my grandfather told me once, in which he and I walk on the streets of Rotterdam. I imagine us holding hands, though the story doesn't say so. I am six year old and I ask him: "Grandpa,

"Do not believe that the aged believe. Any more than the young, the safe. I cannot foretell my conclusion. Just that increasingly, my body is parts: the hand in its dappled glove-work of skin, the ribcage, the knee. And what of the self, progenitor of the naming? " From 'An Old Woman's Meditation' by Linda Bierds. So I take my weeks with a grain of salt. Sometimes I just need a while to find a lead into the right poem or the right thing to say. And sometimes it's so busy poet