What I Learnt About Writing from my Camper
By Katrina Dybzynska
It’s not even about the absence of the Internet service, solitude, or lack of distractions. Neither simply about the time, I can measure in sunsets instead of hours.
My old van is small but it can fit lots of stories.
She holds only the bare necessities. I include books in that category. I carry three boxes of books in the storage compartment underneath the foldable bed. I laugh that my fearless Dragonfly makes the biggest library that has ever roamed these dirt roads.
Inside, I scale down, but right outside my doors stretches the endless open space. Cooking one-pot meals on a single hob, in a cubicle which is my kitchen, living room, bathroom, and bedroom at once, I am learning to cut down on what’s not essential. Including in my writing. I keep crossing off objects from my list of things to bring on a trip, and metaphors from my new poem.
Since I can remember, I have been a believer in living on the edge. Now I am also writing on the edge. Sometimes I can park her so close to the cliff that everything I see is space.
I am not facing the blank page but admiring the limitless possibilities of the abyss.
There are landscapes that never leave you. The intersection of green softness and tenderly wild force, which I ask: tell me your unstoppable stories. If won’t listen, blow your salty wind at me. Where I see fight, not union, soak me with your mist.
The heavy, ever-present wind blows away all the dust out of my head. Even the horizon here doesn’t have a chase in it. It is just like another cliff edge, near, but you know you are not meant to jump off.
There’s nowhere to go from here, yet standing on the cliff means freedom. The unrestricted space fills my lungs till it turns into a wild scream. Often, there is not even an echo to respond. And yet, I feel heard. My scream has been accepted with no explanations required, no follow up in which I try to convince you I am all fine, really, it was just a harmless, momentary madness. The coastal landscape is made of sharp but not straight lines. It takes a moment to notice it but I don’t let the mossy padding or misty softness trick me – I know there are rough edges right underneath. That’s how I intend to write, covering the solid rock of the story’s core - what is burning inside me - with a thin layer of images that help you to get rooted in the world I am taking you into.
Writing on the cliff means having a space where I do not have to negotiate my story into narrow lines. Escaping the unnaturally uniform right angles of the city lets me write in more organic shapes: waves, circles, spirals.
While humans drew maps out of fear of the void, I create poems speaking of love for it. I am an explorer of the absences.
What my camper taught me about writing is: Write at the edge. Don’t be scared to look into that abyss. Let the wild scream out. Listen, if the echo responds.
Katrina Dybzynska is an internationally awarded writer published in Ireland, the UK, the US, Australia, Germany, and Poland.
Polish Non-Fiction Institute graduate and BA-MA Researcher for Global Center for Advanced Studies. Her main focus is climate justice, migration, and overpopulation. She is passionate about the narratives of uncivilization, indigenous cosmologies, and decolonization.
Currently, she is working on a book that explores power, resistance, and compliance dynamics.