Benefits to giving up writing letters to the papers

​Gained about 40% in mental bandwidth and relaxation. Will only write what I really want to write, for myself.  I’ve slowed down.  A long soak in a hot bath reading an entire New Yorker article on mornings when I would have been furiously writing letters on my laptop last year. Bliss. More poetry being read and written.  Dreaming.  Respecting the value of my own space. Generating from within rather than reacting to without.  Economies of downsizing: the printed papers for my archive, on a quick calculation, come in at around eighty-nine published last year which cost me a couple of hundred Euro to buy.   While some were printed in more than one paper my average hit (known as a ‘land’ in the trade) was close to one a week.  I wasn’t being paid for providing my opinion to editors. But landing on the platform was how I scored.  My drug of choice.

​© Alison Hackett posted 3 March 2020