Everyone has a story to tell; each one of us writes poetry – some, without even realising. That stream of consciousness that runs in our veins? It’s poetry waiting to be written. We believe in the power of words, and that power is what urged us set up PoetsIN.
It’s because of those inner streams, that we are bringing you all a regular interview feature, Writer Profiles. An interview with a writer. Some you’ll know, some you won’t. Some you’ll be getting to know soon. This week it’s the marvellous Paul/Pablo Meccano.
Sit back, grab yourself a cuppa, and feast your eyes on this week’s writer profile.
Who are you and what do you do?
My name is Paul Meccano I’m 46, a writer, sculptor and designer. Having hung up my toolbox, for now, I tend towards writing.
What is your relationship with words and how has that evolved?
I was born dyslexic, I still have trouble with smelling now. It crushed me as a child and later on as a teen, it crushed me in my early adult life although thankfully making and designing took over. Designing allowed me to use capital letters and minimal wording to describe my designs, the visual and material reality requiring much less written fluff, generally.
Throughout the early years however, although crushed I certainly felt, words periodically fell from my mouth, they found space upon the page; void of commas, grammar, rules! I was writing poetry, at times on mass, often deep and searching, rarely making sense but always, always making me feel better.
As time went by, with the help of spellcheck and a growing business that required my written input, I broke through a confidence barrier and put my mind to correcting my dyslexia utilising poetry and a need to earn a crust as my tools. I wrote letters to private and corporate clients and grew a business inclusive of its complete marketing requirements. I learned where school could not teach, I excelled where I expected to fail and created a successful business.
Having handed over that business I have found the need to express myself and listen. Listening is filling me up, and having found friends in words, I now express freely.
I’ve always loved Science Fiction
I’ve always loved Science Fiction, I philosophise and pontificate, poke and prod at story, love to lift a leaf from dewy ground with a word upon the wind and will most certainly cry when words move me.
Words for me still form themselves in ways that require a spellcheck and these days that spell check is me but with the gratefully received help of the odd editor. When my life goes together in an order that makes me grimace I now, through the tools that writing and coaching has given me, I can correct it alone although with the help of my life editing friends.
How long have you been writing, what is your favourite style of writing and why?
I’ve been writing on and off since I was around eighteen, however, with conviction, for just over 1 year. I think my average is around a thousand words a day now, most of which are still under my personal scrutiny, under lock and key, in first draft novel form.
I love Science Fiction of most sub genres, fiction of any type has a chance. I’m happy reading non-fiction too, although mostly to aid my own tuition. Essentially, I love writing Sci-Fi-cyberpunk and even space opera, it allows escape, to space, beyond ( buzz lightyear moment). Mostly it allows me a healthy space in which to contextualise my ideas on how we might live, how me may react, how, perhaps, we can make a better world in the face of unrelenting nonsense. I wanted to say bollocks but didn’t.
I love writing Sci-Fi-cyberpunk
Many of us within this group have experienced times where writing has helped us overcome times of pain, describe the first time you realised the true power of words.
The poem below helped me to understand the disconnect from my family, especially the lack of accessible love. It came at a time when I felt a hole, perhaps the need for a partner. It was a dark time for me but as you may tell, lightened with hope in poem.
The Ocean of love
By Pablo age twenty point one
If love was an ocean I’d buy a small boat
set out upon it just sit there and float
ride with the waves no oars to assist
and flow with the currents of love into bliss
put my hand in the water feel the warmth on my skin
and hold myself back ‘cause I’d want to jump in
If your love was an ocean I’d put up a sign
by the edge of the water the deep blue divine
The words in its boarders would read out quite clear
take care of this ocean please don’t litter here
Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Many writers love to read. What is your favourite book and why?
Robert M Persig- Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, followed by the lessor known – Lilla. his second book is a hard read yet stunning and important in my eyes.
I read this when I was in my thirties and it had a lasting impact. I had known depression and hardship, had already spent my time in ashes. This first book is a harrowing yet enlightening tale of a journey made by a father and his son on motorbike along with friends of the father. The father is in the throes of a slow and crippling mental breakdown and is himself narrating a story of his earlier alternate consciousness, this other, named by himself as Phaedrus. The story is told almost as a cantation (a singing) that invites the reader to live in the depths of the writer’s characters and feel the depth of Phaedrus’s enquiry into the meaning of quality.
These are stories about our own and our society’s mental health. But I love them because they lean toward solution, in self and it is in the round.
Sum up yourself in a haiku or micropoem.
Expect, where cracks appear
The light screaming, fighting through
See among, between me or you
And I’ll meet and greet the same
We all have moments where we truly connect with words we read. What quote inspires you the most.
“I see myself in mind of legend and in body of truth. Now point me to where I may be of use.”
Why?
If I may be so bold, this is my own quote, inspired of recent life.
How dare I. I will elaborate.
My very recent recognition is that my real use, to society, has come at great cost and will be lost at great cost also. Why is this inspirational to you? It may not be, but to me it is. If I cannot be inspired by the greatest truth of my life, even knowing that in jumping over the next precipice I will arrive at yet another crossroads with my next answer never leading me to as greater an understanding, then I have little use in this world. This knowledge is of now in my life, will be fleeting and is more important than me.
I am a borrowed great, a borrowed beauty and a borrowed self. I was given by my mother and father and raised by all that surrounds me in life. Without which I am nothing. I have found a way to give that energy back through gift and toil and the balance will always be so. I was never greater than when first born and never will be than when buried.
I hope dearly that I may gift myself by giving to others.
Describe your writing process.
Structured to a fault and yet so unstructured I see hope.
Like most things it changes, This I embrace because it is very much the same for life. I tend to scratch out an idea that comes to me, try to find the meaning in it as I would a poem. Once I see the need for it, I can write the journey. I love a plot twist or an unexpected addition to a piece of fiction and can tie myself in knots once engaged in wrestling with the plot.
Writing for me is give and take, the universe gives and I take. One day I’ll interpret it properly.
Writer’s block, real or a myth?
I’m sure It’s fear. Let me state ( just for the record on the record) that this is not my final answer but one still in the editing phase. I don’t know but thinking about it blocks me.
It does feel like a block sometimes but as with my wife, when its important the words seem to just find my ear.
Is it the fear of spending time and it being of no use in the end? Maybe. I find that if I start typing, the sentence forms, mostly without me trying, then a paragraph, then a whole page. I’m not saying it’s great but it’s definitely not a block. Also, I tend to have a few things on the go. If I can’t think of anything to write, I think I may take up another hobby.
What is your favourite word?
It’s still Wobble.
Wobble
Finish this sentence: “Words are the epitome of…”
potentially charged and unarranged communication.
What’s next for you?
I’m looking to complete my ever-growing list of novels that are all in different states of completion, get them out there, you know, like doves. Or is it racing pigeons; destined to hang about, outside of second-hand bookstores; tagged but not going home.
Alongside this and probably more important in the long run, I have a need to bring my ideas on continued tribal connection to life. This is essentially a study that may show that tribal connections are still present and that in realigning with them (whilst utilising technology) we me may be able to form sustainable communities that are both manageable, healthy and give us the connection to each other that our societies are crying out for.
I’ve recently connected to legend through a great mentor and coach Jonathan Wilkinson (Primal Happiness). His knowledge and connection through extremely old Legends along with understanding in the lost male transition from boy through to man is astounding and something that will undoubtedly feed into my work from here. He has helped me heal and break well.
I will be noisy upon launch, hold your ears
Do you have any social media or presence online that you’d like to share?
At present, no, however I am setting up site and social pages by which to launch my ideas and connect. I will be noisy upon launch, hold your ears and ready your “accept cookie” button lest I be lost.
Here’s a small character extract from a current WIP Sci-Fi crime novel.
Cathton, the character below, is the equivalent of a corporate salesman working guns and communication. He works for the last corporate structure on earth in 2120, a forceful social movement called Tella. He is being contacted by a force much bigger, more enlightened than him, and is fully aware that the consequences of either answering, or not, are going to be harsh.
Ointment and the Fly
The pressure I feel buffets around me like a gale tripping from the backwash of a jet engine, that of an iron blaster, fuel raged, maybe though, just from the whip of a fabric cloth.
I am the fly, I say to myself, the fly, drawn to an ointment far too sweet for my taste. I reside, mostly without living, on and around the boundary, the boundary of that which draws me, the same one that also repels, all within a puff of constant knowing. I know this, have felt it. I breath the truth of my incarceration like the enlightened smell the rose of their past. The followers that is, of Essence.
The damn light blinks in front of me, I’ve watched it blinking in the dark. It blinks into existence as I lay awake. It’s still early, the light of the day as usual just an ebb of photons, the rush of which unreturned, like a legend of old, unread.
Who would dare!
I palm the blinking Tella device, its body clasping my hand as an old friend, the smooth fold-ruffled faux-leather brushing against the soft skin of my thumbs lower clasp. I feel the comfort like a finger and thumb rubbing dust before a print lays bare the story of my ancient family’s incarceration under duress. I am truly jailed as they.
Grating, click, click, click. Over and over, slow and resounding, I run my nail over my thumb’s extremity, back and forth, one, two, three, three, two, one, back and forth, thinking. The rough dry grip of my fingers once released and spread open, fissure deep, dry. It, my thumb as the other, hasn’t felt the touch of oil for as long as my mind having felt calm in truth. Click, click, click. Click, click, click. Soft under gloved social-device, bare everywhere…everywhere else.
The image of the fly runs over and over like a film reel on repeat, a short one, Fuck…fuck, fuck, fuuuuuck, Clatter bang and Crack! It’s the noise I want to shatter, this quiet, that outside of my mind in this room, that outside of my inner… Ha, ha, haaaaaa…I almost said control!
I kick another stack, stack on stack, each one tumbling, quiet. A parallel subterfuge, a rouse it seems by the organic towers of bioengineered armory, clever tech stifling the sound as an infiltration of enemy force breaks their ground. For me an inability to adapt, in the moment of my unexpected rage. Rage! Rage!!! I feel lost…Loss. Why won’t they crash when I kick them! Make a sound!
The light continues to blink on my palmed device. I breath deep, again…smelling my incarceration on the air.
We are all but only in the throes of expression. After all, I have expressed. A while ago I was heard.
The quiet continues to ravage my ears, the blink, blink, blink my eyes.
Blink, blink my eyes.
Huge thanks to Paul/Pablo, who you’ll find in our Facebook Group if you’re a member. If not, search PoetsIN (all one word) and request to join.
If you would like to feature in a Writer profile, or indeed if you would like to submit your own blog piece on writing, mental health, wellbeing or anything relevant then get in touch at paul@poetsin.com
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Everyone has a story to tell; each one of us writes poetry – some, without even realising. That stream of consciousness that runs in our veins? It’s poetry waiting to be written. We believe in the power of words, and that power is what urged us set up PoetsIN.
It’s because of those inner streams, that we are bringing you all a regular interview feature, Writer Profiles. An interview with a writer. Some you’ll know, some you won’t. Some you’ll be getting to know soon. This week it’s the marvellous Paul/Pablo Meccano.
Sit back, grab yourself a cuppa, and feast your eyes on this week’s writer profile.
Who are you and what do you do?
My name is Paul Meccano I’m 46, a writer, sculptor and designer. Having hung up my toolbox, for now, I tend towards writing.
What is your relationship with words and how has that evolved?
I was born dyslexic, I still have trouble with smelling now. It crushed me as a child and later on as a teen, it crushed me in my early adult life although thankfully making and designing took over. Designing allowed me to use capital letters and minimal wording to describe my designs, the visual and material reality requiring much less written fluff, generally.
Throughout the early years however, although crushed I certainly felt, words periodically fell from my mouth, they found space upon the page; void of commas, grammar, rules! I was writing poetry, at times on mass, often deep and searching, rarely making sense but always, always making me feel better.
As time went by, with the help of spellcheck and a growing business that required my written input, I broke through a confidence barrier and put my mind to correcting my dyslexia utilising poetry and a need to earn a crust as my tools. I wrote letters to private and corporate clients and grew a business inclusive of its complete marketing requirements. I learned where school could not teach, I excelled where I expected to fail and created a successful business.
Having handed over that business I have found the need to express myself and listen. Listening is filling me up, and having found friends in words, I now express freely.
I’ve always loved Science Fiction
I’ve always loved Science Fiction, I philosophise and pontificate, poke and prod at story, love to lift a leaf from dewy ground with a word upon the wind and will most certainly cry when words move me.
Words for me still form themselves in ways that require a spellcheck and these days that spell check is me but with the gratefully received help of the odd editor. When my life goes together in an order that makes me grimace I now, through the tools that writing and coaching has given me, I can correct it alone although with the help of my life editing friends.
How long have you been writing, what is your favourite style of writing and why?
I’ve been writing on and off since I was around eighteen, however, with conviction, for just over 1 year. I think my average is around a thousand words a day now, most of which are still under my personal scrutiny, under lock and key, in first draft novel form.
I love Science Fiction of most sub genres, fiction of any type has a chance. I’m happy reading non-fiction too, although mostly to aid my own tuition. Essentially, I love writing Sci-Fi-cyberpunk and even space opera, it allows escape, to space, beyond ( buzz lightyear moment). Mostly it allows me a healthy space in which to contextualise my ideas on how we might live, how me may react, how, perhaps, we can make a better world in the face of unrelenting nonsense. I wanted to say bollocks but didn’t.
I love writing Sci-Fi-cyberpunk
Many of us within this group have experienced times where writing has helped us overcome times of pain, describe the first time you realised the true power of words.
The poem below helped me to understand the disconnect from my family, especially the lack of accessible love. It came at a time when I felt a hole, perhaps the need for a partner. It was a dark time for me but as you may tell, lightened with hope in poem.
The Ocean of love
By Pablo age twenty point one
If love was an ocean I’d buy a small boat
set out upon it just sit there and float
ride with the waves no oars to assist
and flow with the currents of love into bliss
put my hand in the water feel the warmth on my skin
and hold myself back ‘cause I’d want to jump in
If your love was an ocean I’d put up a sign
by the edge of the water the deep blue divine
The words in its boarders would read out quite clear
take care of this ocean please don’t litter here
Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Many writers love to read. What is your favourite book and why?
Robert M Persig- Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, followed by the lessor known – Lilla. his second book is a hard read yet stunning and important in my eyes.
I read this when I was in my thirties and it had a lasting impact. I had known depression and hardship, had already spent my time in ashes. This first book is a harrowing yet enlightening tale of a journey made by a father and his son on motorbike along with friends of the father. The father is in the throes of a slow and crippling mental breakdown and is himself narrating a story of his earlier alternate consciousness, this other, named by himself as Phaedrus. The story is told almost as a cantation (a singing) that invites the reader to live in the depths of the writer’s characters and feel the depth of Phaedrus’s enquiry into the meaning of quality.
These are stories about our own and our society’s mental health. But I love them because they lean toward solution, in self and it is in the round.
Sum up yourself in a haiku or micropoem.
We all have moments where we truly connect with words we read. What quote inspires you the most.
“I see myself in mind of legend and in body of truth. Now point me to where I may be of use.”
Why?
If I may be so bold, this is my own quote, inspired of recent life.
How dare I. I will elaborate.
My very recent recognition is that my real use, to society, has come at great cost and will be lost at great cost also. Why is this inspirational to you? It may not be, but to me it is. If I cannot be inspired by the greatest truth of my life, even knowing that in jumping over the next precipice I will arrive at yet another crossroads with my next answer never leading me to as greater an understanding, then I have little use in this world. This knowledge is of now in my life, will be fleeting and is more important than me.
I am a borrowed great, a borrowed beauty and a borrowed self. I was given by my mother and father and raised by all that surrounds me in life. Without which I am nothing. I have found a way to give that energy back through gift and toil and the balance will always be so. I was never greater than when first born and never will be than when buried.
I hope dearly that I may gift myself by giving to others.
Describe your writing process.
Structured to a fault and yet so unstructured I see hope.
Like most things it changes, This I embrace because it is very much the same for life. I tend to scratch out an idea that comes to me, try to find the meaning in it as I would a poem. Once I see the need for it, I can write the journey. I love a plot twist or an unexpected addition to a piece of fiction and can tie myself in knots once engaged in wrestling with the plot.
Writing for me is give and take, the universe gives and I take. One day I’ll interpret it properly.
Writer’s block, real or a myth?
I’m sure It’s fear. Let me state ( just for the record on the record) that this is not my final answer but one still in the editing phase. I don’t know but thinking about it blocks me.
It does feel like a block sometimes but as with my wife, when its important the words seem to just find my ear.
Is it the fear of spending time and it being of no use in the end? Maybe. I find that if I start typing, the sentence forms, mostly without me trying, then a paragraph, then a whole page. I’m not saying it’s great but it’s definitely not a block. Also, I tend to have a few things on the go. If I can’t think of anything to write, I think I may take up another hobby.
What is your favourite word?
It’s still Wobble.
Wobble
Finish this sentence: “Words are the epitome of…”
potentially charged and unarranged communication.
What’s next for you?
I’m looking to complete my ever-growing list of novels that are all in different states of completion, get them out there, you know, like doves. Or is it racing pigeons; destined to hang about, outside of second-hand bookstores; tagged but not going home.
Alongside this and probably more important in the long run, I have a need to bring my ideas on continued tribal connection to life. This is essentially a study that may show that tribal connections are still present and that in realigning with them (whilst utilising technology) we me may be able to form sustainable communities that are both manageable, healthy and give us the connection to each other that our societies are crying out for.
I’ve recently connected to legend through a great mentor and coach Jonathan Wilkinson (Primal Happiness). His knowledge and connection through extremely old Legends along with understanding in the lost male transition from boy through to man is astounding and something that will undoubtedly feed into my work from here. He has helped me heal and break well.
I will be noisy upon launch, hold your ears
Do you have any social media or presence online that you’d like to share?
At present, no, however I am setting up site and social pages by which to launch my ideas and connect. I will be noisy upon launch, hold your ears and ready your “accept cookie” button lest I be lost.
Here’s a small character extract from a current WIP Sci-Fi crime novel.
Cathton, the character below, is the equivalent of a corporate salesman working guns and communication. He works for the last corporate structure on earth in 2120, a forceful social movement called Tella. He is being contacted by a force much bigger, more enlightened than him, and is fully aware that the consequences of either answering, or not, are going to be harsh.
Ointment and the Fly
The pressure I feel buffets around me like a gale tripping from the backwash of a jet engine, that of an iron blaster, fuel raged, maybe though, just from the whip of a fabric cloth.
I am the fly, I say to myself, the fly, drawn to an ointment far too sweet for my taste. I reside, mostly without living, on and around the boundary, the boundary of that which draws me, the same one that also repels, all within a puff of constant knowing. I know this, have felt it. I breath the truth of my incarceration like the enlightened smell the rose of their past. The followers that is, of Essence.
The damn light blinks in front of me, I’ve watched it blinking in the dark. It blinks into existence as I lay awake. It’s still early, the light of the day as usual just an ebb of photons, the rush of which unreturned, like a legend of old, unread.
Who would dare!
I palm the blinking Tella device, its body clasping my hand as an old friend, the smooth fold-ruffled faux-leather brushing against the soft skin of my thumbs lower clasp. I feel the comfort like a finger and thumb rubbing dust before a print lays bare the story of my ancient family’s incarceration under duress. I am truly jailed as they.
Grating, click, click, click. Over and over, slow and resounding, I run my nail over my thumb’s extremity, back and forth, one, two, three, three, two, one, back and forth, thinking. The rough dry grip of my fingers once released and spread open, fissure deep, dry. It, my thumb as the other, hasn’t felt the touch of oil for as long as my mind having felt calm in truth. Click, click, click. Click, click, click. Soft under gloved social-device, bare everywhere…everywhere else.
The image of the fly runs over and over like a film reel on repeat, a short one, Fuck…fuck, fuck, fuuuuuck, Clatter bang and Crack! It’s the noise I want to shatter, this quiet, that outside of my mind in this room, that outside of my inner… Ha, ha, haaaaaa…I almost said control!
I kick another stack, stack on stack, each one tumbling, quiet. A parallel subterfuge, a rouse it seems by the organic towers of bioengineered armory, clever tech stifling the sound as an infiltration of enemy force breaks their ground. For me an inability to adapt, in the moment of my unexpected rage. Rage! Rage!!! I feel lost…Loss. Why won’t they crash when I kick them! Make a sound!
The light continues to blink on my palmed device. I breath deep, again…smelling my incarceration on the air.
We are all but only in the throes of expression. After all, I have expressed. A while ago I was heard.
The quiet continues to ravage my ears, the blink, blink, blink my eyes.
Blink, blink my eyes.
Huge thanks to Paul/Pablo, who you’ll find in our Facebook Group if you’re a member. If not, search PoetsIN (all one word) and request to join.
If you would like to feature in a Writer profile, or indeed if you would like to submit your own blog piece on writing, mental health, wellbeing or anything relevant then get in touch at paul@poetsin.com
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