A few months ago, I found some things I wrote years ago. Among the stories and poetry hid my statement of poetics. As a requirement for one class, we needed to construct a formal (maybe semi-formal, we were all creative writers) statement of our values as integrated into our writing. That’s the simple definition. A statement needs to include your desire for your writing, your intention.
I resisted this assignment. It’s rather challenging to label yourself, pin your writing down. However, I knew I had to do it for myself – to discover what it was I believed of my creative abilities.
One of the things from that statement stuck with me, even when I thought I’d lost it.
“If left to my own devices, I would hermatize.
I would be the strange lady in the old shanty down the street
who wanders her Munster-looking yard by moonight kicking at sticks,
overturning last fall’s leaves in search of new ideas or an old peace of mine.”
Of course, it was not my intention to hermatize; it’s a part of my personality to want to be left alone to write.
What it reminds me of is Virginia Woolf’s proclamation in A Room of One’s Own in which she surmises, we need a room of our own in which to think, write, create.
That was written 90 years ago, but the statement is truer than ever.
Given social media, television, cell phones, kids, work, responsibility and life, we are 
more distracted than ever! Many of us writers need to actively seek out a quiet space where we will not be hunted down and found out.
And we need to learn to pry ourselves away from those other things which are so important to us – kids, family, work – to form a little space for ourselves.
My intention for 2019 is to seek out that space and to carve out some time for myself to write.
Happy New Year, writers.
What is your intention for 2019?
Noreen Lace 
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