I have had the pleasure to present a poem of mine on my first ever open mic event in Sutton. It was a fantastic, inclusive event and every reading was supporting the work of Sutton Women’s Centre. Looking forward to be doing same performances in London in the near future.
“Redolence is a captivatingly illustrated collection of poetry that explores the complex feelings of nostalgia; the bittersweet lamentation and grief for the lost places of the past. Through candid reflection, these poems give insight into a range of reminiscent feelings, past hopes and the continuous practice of self-reinvention that were the mainstream experiences of the author’s first decade in the United Kingdom. In this beautifully designed mix of poems and illustrations, appreciation and gratefulness also shines through towards individuals who have made a significant impact on the author’s life in her search of true belonging.”
It is an unusual practice to write your own blurb to the back of your book to encourage your audience to read your writing – yet I still think that only the author can persuasively promote a highly personal written, breathing world that encapsulates their complex emotional landscape. With this experimental mindset, I have embarked on the journey to write my own, expressive summary at the back of my booklet to highlight the overarching theme of the 12 poems that I cherry-picked for this compelling project.
There are 2 main themes in my pitch that forms the essence of this booklet. The mainstream emotion of this short poem compilation is revolving around melancholic nostalgia of past memories and the basic need to find true belonging after leaving behind the previous decade’s major milestones. The collection also functions as a heartfelt expression of gratitude towards certain individuals in my life who have made a significant contribution to who I am today – without them, I would not have the opportunity to write about all these past experiences that formed me to the core and supported me to develop a more realistic mindset that I am deeply thankful for.
Each writing has a corresponding illustration attached to it that was designed with the purpose of creating a visual representation of the written world I have tried to build into every poem with vivid and picturesque metaphors and alliterations. All of the illustrations maintain visual consistency throughout the booklet, enhancing the theme of each poem with the same style and shade.
As the majority of these writings in this booklet have been submitted to prestigious poetry competitions that are still ongoing, the first print set is purely reserved for family and friends until I know whether I am a winner on any of these competitions. My goal then is to send these booklets to literary magazines as an introductory tool of my work with the hope of getting them published to a wider audience.
Talking about appreciation as one of the themes of this poetry collection, I am very grateful to Lisa Phillips (Instagram @lisabuzzdesign) for the creative collaboration who has brought this booklet to life with the wonderful design.
“…the act of sorrowful rumination over the relatively recent past, makes my world a bitter but also an enlivening place, as my latent creativity appeared prominently on the vast, promising horizon, enchanted by this burning heartache.”
As 2025 is just around the corner, I can’t help thinking about all of the blessings I have encountered in my path this past year and about the lessons I learnt through several setbacks and challenges. I am not going to detail every single achievements and milestones of my goals here, will solely be concentrating on the creative aspects of the year below.
The quote I started this reflection with is from a poem of mine I have written a few weeks ago, so it is relatively fresh. The reason why I have chosen this piece of writing in the beginning of this blog post is because it has a powerful message that I feel strongly about: even the most challenging situation can have a silver lining and may function as a catalyst for further personal development. Sometimes, it is extremely difficult to see clear benefits of a harsh life experience, but if we keep an open mind, if we let ourselves to freely reflect back on an event from a healthy distance, we can discover tremendous positives in the situation and some may even become a blessing in disguise.
This is the year’s biggest lesson I learnt through a personal experience involving letting someone go who was part of my life for more than a decade: the process was quite difficult but it fuelled my creativity to the highest possible level I have ever functioned at. This inspired me to take a leap of faith and experiment with the English language first time in my life as a foreigner with writing poems about the process of letting my past go. This practice has resulted in several great writings that allowed me to apply to prestiges poetry competitions this year. I have also bought the domain for outsidethebud, and started writing regularly again here which makes me very hopeful again of my creative future.
And what I am going to bring with myself to 2025? I am currently working with a designer on a short poetry booklet design for the poems I have written this year out of the process of letting my past go. I am keen to maintain this creative practice in the upcoming year with actively working on new writings and continuing the applications to poetry competitions.
If you have the desire to play with words and create precious written worlds with your imaginative mind, this post is definitely for you.
Everybody has a story to tell and I firmly believe that we are all able to facilitate the creative artists within ourselves. I would like to share some basic tips that can help you unlock your full potential in terms of creative writing.
1. Read, read, read…
Reading different type of books and blogs that are closely related to your interests are beneficial in the path towards creativity. In addition, exploring the secret tips from professional writers are an indispensable part of this process.
As far as I am concerned, I used to ignore other authors’ writings in my native language because I always felt that I unintentionally lose my own voice and I was desperately trying to maintain my own style and create a distinctive emotional brand.
But the book about Creativity written by a Hungarian professor, Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, emphasizes the fact that your first step towards creativity is to learn the basics in an effective way then spice it up with your own, genuine ideas in order to create something innovative. Most importantly, reading professional writings helps to learn more complicated sentence structures that could be a beneficial practice and helps to be seen more professional.
2. Be inspired…
In order to be creative in our writing endeavours, we need constant inspiration. Everybody is different in terms of needs, but it is our individual interest to discover what really makes our creative juices flowing. Whether it is an interesting book, a professional conference, an art exhibition or just simply a long walk in the forest, it is of paramount importance to be aware of what activities are able to facilitate the creative activity of our subconscious mind. Exposing ourselves to these inspiring activities regularly will help to find and open the doors of our hidden creativity.
3. Have a notebook with you at all times…
As strange as it may sound but my most creative writings were made on trains and buses. The first time when I saw the word ‘Symbiosis’ in an advert from a bus it immediately made me wondered. Unfortunately I didn’t have any paper or journal with me so I had to write my ideas into my phone. Since then I always carry a notebook with myself and pay close attention to my muse whenever she wants to tell me something.
On the other hand, a beautiful journal can help you to feel creative whenever you take a quick look at it. I am really obsessed by colourful and artistic journals so I usually buy new ones.
Lavinia Spalding, the author of Writing Away advises to have a blank journal in order to not feel limited between the lines. It helps you to make drawings and create your own creative world without being restricted.
4. Practice…
In order to find your own voice and distinctive style, you have to stretch yourself and jump out your familiar boundaries. It basically means that you have to try a lot of things so that you can distinguish what is really you. Writing prompts are a good way to practice your skills and explore different styles until you find out your own unique voice.
5. Don’t be afraid of the blank page syndrome…
Chances are that infertile days, weeks, months or years occur without chronicling anything meaningful to the outside, however, it does not mean that there aren’t any ongoing war in the wild woods of the writer’s soul. So my core theory is that a writer’s mind is never empty, it is always observing and analyzing something, it is unstoppable. And the silent periods are indeed an inseparable part of any creative achievement where the purpose of the time is to ripen any meaningful realizations into something innovative.
As the autumn sun entered the lounge of my ground floor flat in one of the nicest Surrey towns I have chosen as my home on my own accord, some memory mosaics from previous autumns reached the horizon of my consciousness creating a bittersweet net-effect on my humble soul. These feelings were not restricted to this seemingly innocent scene alone: hundreds of other random scenarios were contributing to the overflow of these contradictory nostalgic emotions.
The relived former experiences were building up a downright powerful effect on my prevalent self demonstrating a raw and unprocessed baggage I have been silently carrying with myself for a while. Even though I decided I will only fill my life with chansons moving forward, the rumination was so intense when these nuances were evoking a genuinely poignant memory composite out from my brain storage – it always forced me into my highly protected mental cave.
‘Only good people feel guilt’ – I read somewhere and this was my go-to thought whenever I was bogged down in self-deprecating train of thoughts yet this sentence has never made any difference on my perspective of the recent past. Guilt is a powerful feeling that can affect our sensible judgment and I was always famous for not being strong on self-compassion therefore it made a bigger impact on my views. It wasn’t easy to identify these emotions purely as remorse that I felt about leaving something behind, I wished for the past to have less of an overwhelming effect on my present self with reaching a state of peace within my sacred self so one day, I could look back on the past happenings with no deep lamentation which was heavily intoxicating my soul.
I found that creative writing has definitely helped in the process of capturing, analysing and interpreting of my emotions during this distressing time. Writing is something that was my only form of self-expression throughout the years and practised it since childhood not just because this form of creativity has given me a huge amount of pleasure but because it functioned as a healing-therapy that helped structuring my thoughts in a way to understand them better. When I left my home country back in 2012, my mind was fully occupied by the excitement of discovering the world’s rich existence through experiencing a brand new culture – this long awaited adventure was really needed to stimulate my creative side. Whether it’s to express the interesting aspects of a new environment, the culture shock and it’s invisible obstacles or the joyful bacchanal my soul would be dancing when the new impressions are overflowing my senses. These moments, are literally the best raw materials for any creative process and I was aware that these will enrich my life further and provide me a brand new perspective on the world. Writing is my safe haven at all times and it has never disappointed me especially in the uncertain times I experienced on my journey and now in the phase of my life when I needed to re-invent myself. Mashing up disparate notions and producing a distinctive letter concentrate out of my thoughts in an unconventional way always made me the happiest individual on the planet as I only feel really alive when I write. I realised throughout the years that the nostalgic memory nuances are inspiring me the most and I have a natural affinity to use these to create those immersive lyrical soul experiences we human beings can all feel at our core. Although I wasn’t actively writing throughout this last decade, yet there were a few beautifully produced creative writings published on my blog during this time despite all of the harsh realities of finding the immigration dream.
As I embarked on the journey of going deeper into myself with the purpose of conducting a honest self-discovery, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the past’s stability was just a mental ballast that functioned as a source of balance in the stormy waters but at present it was preventing my soul-zeppelin to reach higher landscapes in the world’s rich existence. I have recently read a book about Self-worth that really resonated with my metaphor. It was saying that learning to let go is very similar as riding a bike with training wheels to support our balance. We lean in too much on the support initially, with the sole purpose to feel secure, even what makes us secure is not really serving us. And then, as our self confidence builds, we gradually lean in a little less until we finally reach the point when we no longer need the training wheels. External stability is an addictive illusion – only our internal compass can make us feel totally secure. It took me a while to realise that the time has arrived when I finally need to release this mental ballast and learn to live the rest of my life without it even if stormy waters will affect my sensitive boat again. Best case scenario, I will learn to rely on my inner strength as a static force in a dynamic world in this new chapter with eventually finding my new compass in myself and I will be my best friend and local companion in this unlimited experience-adventure as we call life.
Outside the bud 