On the Road
A British woman who is homeless, but has been blogging about her experiences, has now got a book contract. Here’s the BBC report on the homeless writer. Below is an excerpt from the writer’s recent reflections on the book deal:
Sorry, didn’t mean to drag it out — just wasn’t sure what I could and couldn’t say, and had to wait to ask somebody. Although it was good for me to hold it close for a while, just let it settle in me for a bit. I did already say it though: my news was a book deal — I AM HAVING A BOOK PUBLISHED - hooray! I’m celebrating a bit prematurely though, because haven’t got the thing written yet, but after what I’ve been through with all this, feels like that might be the easy bit. Sitting at a table after a warm, scented bath, Beethoven on in the background, a glass of something in one hand, my pen in the other hovering over all those pristine, blank sheets of paper. Writing a book can’t be that difficult;-)
And anyway, all those sheets of paper won’t really be blank. Because for months, being here among all these trees, staring up and through them night after night, watching their leaves fall and new ones grow back, their branches snap off in high winds, and stripped clean of bark in rainstorms, laying like bones on the ground around them — night after night I told bits of my story to them. Sometimes talking aloud, sometimes staring it into them - all the things I couldn’t tell anyone else, all the things my hunched-up spirit was tired of. Trees absorb pain, and some of these will one day be felled and made into paper, and I have this feeling that if I stare really hard into those empty sheets of white paper once I begin to write, I’ll probably see my story already there, like a watermark on their blank surfaces.
I bet Margaret Thatcher is murmuring over her sherry that if every homeless person could just dust off their slothfulness and be enterprising for a change, everyone in the world would have contracts, or at least a lease on a warm and well-lit, semi-detached home.
Yes, perhaps if people would dust off their slothfullness, and stop being so enterprising, seeing how cheap they can get people to do their labor, so they garner a nice profit to be able to afford Sherry, gold, diamonds, and such, there might be less poverty and less homeless. But selfish greed is the rule, not the exception. The returning Iraqi war Vet, minus a limb or two, might also dust off his (or her) slothful ways, then mentally ill as well. Wonder how enterprising you would be, if you lost your home due to a tsunami, hurricane, earthquake (Insurance will not pay, you see, might seriously cut down on profit, and nice paychecks). If your company (that is if you have to work for a living, not born rich) went bankrupt, downsized, outsourced, restructered you out of a job. Ah, too bad there is no Karma or God, than we’d see, eh?
Comment by mary — May 29, 2006 @ 5:35 pm