Welcome back to A Writing Life, and to the fourth of six guest articles from long-time 26 member Anita Holford. Each month, we invite her to share stories from her writing life, reflecting on what it means to live as a writer today.
This afternoon, as I write this, the sun has inched through the clouds, and the birds seem to be urging it on – there’s been such beautiful birdsong this spring. I desperately want to pause and breathe in this moment, but I typically have too many tabs open. Literally and metaphorically. You’ll know the feeling, I’m sure. Given that I promised last month to share more about what’s going on in my current writing life, that feels like a truthful place to begin.
Currently, and for decades now, I’ve been what I generally describe as a ‘communications practitioner and copywriter’, largely in music and the arts for education, wellbeing and social justice. In recent years, I’ve also added fundraiser, mentor and evaluator to my skillset. When people ask me what I do, they often ask, ‘Do you do marketing then?’ or ‘Do you write books?’ I’ve even been asked over the years whether I’m a music publisher, music promoter, TV presenter, or even a therapist (and none are that far from the truth).
That’s probably because I’ve created an Anita-shaped freelance business that’s sometimes hard to describe, because I don’t fit into a traditional role. As a writer, you’ll understand that writing is never just one thing: it could be storytelling, tone of voice, brand copywriting, writing for digital and SEO … And when you add in these other ‘things’, it can seem like a strange hotchpotch of services. My main skillset, I guess, is advocacy, or writing for change. As it says on my website: I help people to communicate their value and impact, and win hearts and minds.
So to bring you right up to date, this week I’ve been writing about: the impact of an arts and mental health programme for an evaluation report; a project which is researching and developing a hip hop-based immersive game for a funding application; what artists think of an artist residency project in a gallery and museum; and stories and writing guidance for the rebrand and new website for an international development agency (more on that next month).
Talk about too many tabs open. I wouldn’t change it for the world, and yet, as I’ve mentioned, the reason why I offered to pick up Rob’s baton for this column is that I wanted to force myself to think about my writing life, and where I want to take my own creativity. I’ve been writing for a purpose, to advocate for other people’s creativity and creative visions, for thirty five years now. I’ve squeezed some time for my own creativity (thank you, 26, for allowing my ‘infrequent but enthusiastic participation’), but I always feel I’m short-changing myself, and not being a very active 26 member.
I guess tensions like this are among the things that make creative working lives interesting. As John Simmons says (and I’m sure you must be bored by now of hearing us all quote this back to you, John): constraints liberate.
So thank goodness for 26, those creative projects and their constraints. The most recent project I was part of was 26 Neurodiversity – fifteen writers exploring what it means to be neurodivergent, each through a 62-word poem. I was part of the team that put it together, as well as contributing a piece of my own.
My poem emerged from a series of WhatsApp and real-time conversations with my daughter, who is dyslexic and autistic. I asked questions and she sent reflections. The writing followed the thinking – or rather, the writing was the thinking. It also made me reflect on the precise, careful use of language: the difference between ‘neurodiverse’ (which applies to us all) and ‘neurodivergent’ (which applies to a specific group of people who experience discrimination because of how their brains differ from the majority). As Dennis Potter said, “The trouble with words is that you never know whose mouths they have been in.” As we all know, getting those words right matters – even more so now that AI is one of those mouths.
Being a writer has taught me to ask good questions and listen carefully to the answers – which may be why I’ve found myself expanding into both mentoring and evaluation. It’s evaluation that gives me the more interesting creative tension to wrestle with. One of the current tensions I’m living with in my working life is being both an evaluator and a communications practitioner/advocate. Evaluation is meant to be about learning, about understanding value and impact – not about making the case to persuade funders.
This fits well with my writing instincts which are often framed by the questions ‘who was it for, why did it matter, what was it that mattered, and what can we learn?’. But at that point I have to be careful to quieten my communications and advocacy skills and impulses, which otherwise would take me into the territory of framing and messaging, influencing and persuasion.
It’s a nice conflict to have. And as I like thinking, it gives me many more tabs to open. I write to think – I wonder if you do too?
So perhaps all of my work IS a creative act, if creativity is about curiosity, persistence, collaboration, discipline and imagination (the creative habits of mind). It’s only imagination – the free-range kind that doesn’t have a purpose or a deadline – that I keep meaning to give more time to.
I guess that’s still the tab I haven’t quite managed to open – yet.
Anita
If you’d like to know more about Anita’s writing life, explore her website or connect on LinkedIn.