Leanne Margaret

There's nothing like a shiny new project to fire me up, and you're looking at the header design for my new newsletter. Every day I brace myself, ready to trawl through my email inbox – hoping to delete as many as possible, knowing that each one has the potential to leech away my writing time. Is it an introvert thing that I find it so difficult? I want to spend my days escaping into books, poems and manuscripts. Didn't I escape the admin when I fled my last office job? Nope, admin is everywhere. So the last thing I want to do is fill up people's inboxes with: more things to tick off, more things to read, more things to do, more things to manage, more. And yet I have. The first edition went out in summer. I'm entertaining the idea that perhaps not everyone is as overwhelmed with their to-do lists as I am. And another idea I'm willing to consider, is that people have just as much work to do as I do – in all likelihood much, much more – but they're just not let

Anyone who has written a book knows, it can take years. The gratification is so delayed that sometimes the end goal seems too far away to possibly reach. During my early book writing years, I applied intense focus to get the work done. It worked for me, and I self-published two books in three years. But my third book has been more painstaking. I've been 'focussing' on it for almost five years. If I didn't have something else to do, I'd go mad. So three years ago, I set a smaller goal. I joined Writers Victoria , and decided I'd like to be published in their member magazine, The Victorian Writer. I didn't send a hundred submissions, as I didn't really have the time away from book writing to create new pieces of work. So I watched and waited for the right theme. Eventually a theme popped up that reflected a moment in my already written memoir draft. After five years of working on the memoir, it was time to start making the memoir work for me. It was only 1

The Poetic Portraits Project  Poetry Anthology It was the easiest pitch I've ever made. I was invited to write a short sentence that encapsulates how I feel about ageing. Now I could have gone two ways. Eighteen months prior, I had been diagnosed  with osteoarthritis of one kneecap, and a cyst inside the other one. So on a physical  level, suddenly age was catching up with me for the first time. My dance teaching career was over, and I was still struggling with knee rehab. But rather than  hobbling out a pitch about disintegration,  I focussed on what I perceived to be the meaning of my ailment. For many years, I'd struggled to juggle dance with writing, and the knee diagnosis freed me from that struggle; allowing my writing to take centre stage – finally. So my pitch was simple: I'm just about to peak!  It worked. I got in. Successful applicants were invited to attend a full-day poetry workshop at Yarra Ranges Civic Centre, where we would produce pieces of poetry for a pro

Quite simply, tarot is a mirror in which to view yourself objectively. The elemental and archetypal symbols conveyed by the tarot, mirror different dimensions of our lives. They are also a teaching tool, to convey esoteric principles that have been known to mystical scholars for thousands of years. They mirror great cosmic cycles that govern life on Earth, as well as personal cycles of growth and renewal – enjoyed and endured by each of us.  Old-time tarologists weren't spruiking personal growth. Their knowledge of the cycles of life was viewed in a more limited way – as fortune telling. But they still conveyed something mystical to ordinary minds.  These days, a wide variety of people use tarot in a number of ways: Reflecting on daily events Drawing a card at the end of each day can help you to reflect on the day's events, as well as tackle any problem solving required. They are the mirror into which you can clearly see what is dominating your thoughts. Those thoughts will app

Erupting from between the cracks in my book writing routine, poems come like feelings: hot blasts and inspired renderings, exploding during times of peak emotion. For me, this is why I swiftly file each poem away, to get on the with intensity of the inspiring event. Life dramas stack up. Poems stack up. And the years pass. Suddenly, thirty-five years have passed, since I dropped tears on my first poem – scrawled onto school issued looseleaf paper, and neatly typed up for a typing assignment. My teen grief flowed out of me in effortless rhyme, the only poem I ever memorised. Like that first broken-hearted composition, as I felt my feelings, poems continued to arise in my mind. I began to think in rhyme! From time to time, I'd send one away to a poetry competition. In my early twenties, I even paid twenty-five dollars to have one published in an anthology. But so little did I value the place I had paid for, that I didn't even keep the anthology! During my mid-twenties, I got my f

Do you have doubts about your writing? I know about doubt, too.  Who am I to teach writing? I don't have a university degree. My books are self-published. Grammar isn't my strength. I can't say much about style or quality. I'm only an emerging writer. These are the things I told myself when someone suggested I teach a writing workshop, following the sudden end to my dance career.  But a doorway opened in my mind. So the next time I sat in front of my computer for another online course, I watched the presenter and thought to myself, I can do this . I thought to myself, I might not be able to teach the craft of writing, but I can get writers writing . I know how to open creative pathways, and plumb the depths of the archetypal world within us. I can do this because of my training in intuitive development. Back when I was writing my first courses in tarot and intuitive development, I realised I was teaching people how to look at symbols and write or speak about them. Just