The PoArtMo Anthology Series: Focus on Marjolein Rotsteeg

Hello everyone!

Welcome to our PoArtMo Anthology Series, which celebrates the artists whose work appears in The Auroras & Blossoms PoArtMo Anthology: Volume 5.

Today’s guest is Marjolein Rotsteeg, one of our favorite contributors. She sent us another batch of lovely stories and poetry, including haiku. In this post, she tells us about her most inspiring moment.

School was just a stone’s throw away from where I lived. Literally. It was across the street, right opposite our house. From our living-room window, I could observe what was happening in the downstairs classrooms, like watching a silent movie. And I did. Every day. I can’t have been any older than three.

I couldn’t wait until my fourth birthday, the day I was finally allowed to start school.

To me, school was where magic happened. Not only would I get to be with other children, but I would also learn things I was so eager to learn. First of all reading. Books have been like magnets for me as long as I can remember. On opening them, I entered another world. Unfortunately, I could not make sense of the printed black signs myself. I needed one of my parents, my favourite aunt or my grandmother to decipher them for me.

From a social point of view, school was a disappointment. I got bullied, almost from day one. Also physically. However, my bullies never succeeded in spoiling my appetite for learning. Being able to read myself after some time, was my lifeline. For my birthday, I would usually ask for books. Later, I started borrowing books from the public library. I would return them in a matter of days, having read them all, much to the surprise of the librarians.

Then came writing. In the beginning, it was just the technique of holding a pen and learning to ‘draw’ the signs called letters. Letters became words became sentences…

Suddenly, I realised, I had to write. As a creative form of expression, that is. I wanted, no, I had to tell stories. I had enough in my language toolkit to get started.

On Wednesday afternoons, when there was no school, rather than playing in the street and getting called names or even getting beaten up, I stayed in and invented stories, often inspired by pictures of animals. Inside my head, I saw fragments of film. The animals came alive in my mind. I could both see them and the world through their eyes. I knew what their lives were like. I felt their joy and pain. Three of those short stories I still have.

At age nine I wrote a poem about my pony. It was an ode to Girl. It even got published. In retrospect, getting published was – and still is – the icing on the cake of the writing process. When writing, my thoughts often drift back to that moment when I realised that not only I couldn’t write technically and that I had a vivid imagination – an important tool for writers –, but also that writing was a basic need for me.

Bio:

Writer and poet Marjolein Rotsteeg writes in English, Dutch and French. Nature, people and animals keep inspiring her. Her work has been published in The Auroras & Blossoms PoArtMo Anthology: Volume 4, The Auroras & Blossoms Haiku Anthology: Volume 1, haikuNetra and other (online) magazines. Her haiku have received honorable mentions in Japan and Poland.

Website: https://substack.com/@marjoleinrotsteeg

Marjolein, thank you for supporting Auroras & Blossoms! We know that people will love your work as much as we do!