Today is the first installment of ‘The Creative Life’
Kate Larsen is Director of Writers Victoria but she is also known by her writing name ‘Katie Keys’. It’s the name I first knew her by, due in most part to the #tinylittlepoems hashtag she created and has used daily for over five years.
Her decision to tweet a poem a day was made as a means to jump start a creative discipline . “There are a lot of poets who use Twitter who will say ‘I’ve written a new poem, go to my website to see’ and there’s a link, but because I love using Twitter (and I’m lazy) I don’t often click on those links,” she says.
“I am at my most prolific when I’m observing other people being creative and so I started turning up to events – seeing how other people speak or perform really inspires me. I write longhand either immediate poems or a list of words, phrases or ideas to come back to later. Ideally always longhand, scribble and scribble every draft. I do sometimes tweet poems straight away, but that is rare for me. I do still have an editing process.”
The past twelve months have seen a distinct shift in how Larsen approaches her ongoing project.
“Although I think my daily tweet poems will continue – I need that as my creative outlet – 2013 was the first year I was paid to be a poet. So now I’ve done paid residencies I’ve had to stop giving poems away for free. The other events I attend I can no longer tweet; I might do one or two, but never as many as I write because that has become a product that people are buying and I think that has its lifetime. Australia has a relatively small population with only so many festivals and they’re not all going to want to have the same person doing the same thing. So I think I could do three within the space of a year and see what happens after that. “
Larsen remains philosophical and optimistic about the potential for creative work online: “My practise and this form are perfectly matched. And would these poems have another home in an already difficult commercial market? They already tread that line between perceived as being ‘published’”. She was particularly impressed with Teju Cole speaking at the 2013 Edinburgh World Writers Conference. “It was one of the first conversations I’ve seen in a public forum where the social media discussion was not about whether it is good/bad. He referred to twitter as a continuous first person plural narrative, so we’re all writing stories into the world at the same time, and he talked about the power of social media as a creative frontier.”
I remember talking to Kate at the 2012 Emerging Writers Festival. I was sitting at the reception/ticket desk and saw her on the other side of the foyer. I waved her over and asked a question I’d been wanting to for ages.
“Hey, would you mind if did some poetry tweets and hashtagged them #tinylittlepoem?” I asked.
She laughed and said, “Of course!”
I like to ask these things because I know people can get very territorial about hashtags. I only ended up doing one or two, but Kate has always been generous about its use. By doing so, I think it has fostered not only a sense of community but of experimentation. My #miscpoetry project was born out of that ethos; it’s a fruitful place, creatively speaking.
Do you follow the work of any digital writers or artists?
Image sources: EWF on Flickr and Writers Victoria
