Ali Black

Hope is a foundation and continued source of sustenance in our lives. But it is often locked, as during our recent COVID-19 lockdowns and the many wars and destructions preceding and succeeding it, such as in Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan, among others. Unlocking Hopes: A Book of Poems brings together more than a hundred poets from around the world to help us not only unlock hope but also cultivate it with our sadhana, songs, and struggles for new worlds of beauty, dignity, and dialogue. It also invites us to realize that hope is a muscle, and we need to exercise it so it does not wither. There are key practices in maintaining hope: forest walking, being with friends, singing and dancing, meditating, participating in social, cultural, political, and spiritual movements, and looking up at the stars at night. Reading poetry is a hope-full practice. It nourishes the soul when so much in the world seems hopeless. Poets work on hope, seeing the writing and sharing of poetry as a calling to hope in dark times and against the odds. Yet, the work is what we need to do to keep our futures open and alive to our spiritual calling to be better tomorrow than we can manage today. This book contains hopeful poetry. Something for every day and also something for the times when things seem hopeless. Carry it with you, keep it close. It will enkindle sparks of fire, love, and hope. [Book Synopsis]

Hope is a foundation and continued source of sustenance in our lives. But it is often locked, as during our recent COVID-19 lockdowns and the many wars and destructions preceding and succeeding it, such as in Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan, among others. Unlocking Hopes: A Book of Poems brings together more than a hundred poets from around the world to help us not only unlock hope but also cultivate it with our sadhana, songs, and struggles for new worlds of beauty, dignity, and dialogue. It also invites us to realize that hope is a muscle, and we need to exercise it so it does not wither. There are key practices in maintaining hope: forest walking, being with friends, singing and dancing, meditating, participating in social, cultural, political, and spiritual movements, and looking up at the stars at night. Reading poetry is a hope-full practice. It nourishes the soul when so much in the world seems hopeless. Poets work on hope, seeing the writing and sharing of poetry as a calling to hope in dark times and against the odds. Yet, the work is what we need to do to keep our futures open and alive to our spiritual calling to be better tomorrow than we can manage today. This book contains hopeful poetry. Something for every day and also something for the times when things seem hopeless. Carry it with you, keep it close. It will enkindle sparks of fire, love, and hope. [Book Synopsis]

This creative work is a personal response to difficult events. The matter of this work concerns the nature and processes of writing about universal themes of love and loss. It explores 'Life Writing in Troubled Times' through processes of storying an intimate and foundational relationship - a relationship which continues to have an active presence in my world and inner life. I am mourning my mother. She has been gone twelve years. Venturing into history, into what this amazing woman gave and has given to me, and as a way of mediating emotional pain, I play with concepts and expressions of time, while excavating deeper stories and past-present-future relationships. For me, and for my mother, writing has had an important role to play in processing life events and the human condition, in processing moments-years-decades of loss …and love. My mother's own writing has supported a process of witnessing her life and lived experiences. It has offered a 'protective workspace' for my own contemplation and writing, magnifying my awareness of relationships and enabling a 'being with' and a 'writing together' even though she is no longer here (Walsh and Bai 2015: 26). Writing this piece sustains my connection to her in her absence. It offers a place to dwell amongst generational and everyday stories, the fragments that are known, read, or overheard. And, it creates new spaces - authentic, honouring, embodied, and generative spaces - enabling mourning, connection, responding and becoming.

Research background
Life narrative authors explore and respond to personally, culturally and politically difficult events and contexts. Time to remember: A portrait of my mother is an original autoethnographic creative work that addresses universal themes of love and loss and offers a creative and writerly response to my mother’s lived experience and to my own mourning processes. The expressive approach taken in this work is authentic, embodied, and generative for me as writer, researcher and daughter.

Research contribution
This story, narrated in non-chronological fragments, expands understanding of a woman’s rural life in a particular historical time and how significant medical problems can create secondary and generational trauma. Specific to its context, and universal in its themes, this work explores the complexity of intimate relationships and topics of grief, loss and transition. It demonstrates how creative writing of intimate relationships supports multifaceted meaning-making and expression of relational, embodied, and emotional experiences in ways that deepen understanding of trauma without further contributing to it.

Research significance
Re-narratised fragments of my parents’ difficult lives and deaths have been published in Qualitative Inquiry (Henderson and Black 2018) and Life Writing (Black 2017). A version of this script ‘Troubling time: writing my mother’s life and death’ was presented at the 2017 International Auto/Biography Association: Asia-Pacific Chapter conference. This work extends the significance of these contributions. The exegetical deliberations contained in such works are useful to fellow researchers engaging with life writing and creative writing as research.