My name is Rosemary, and I’m writing in Ontario, Canada. Welcome to ‘Writing by Heart’, a space that celebrates creative writing with a focus on poetry, and too a place in which I share verse, updates on projects, my philosophies on writing, and exciting collaborations in the works.
WHY ‘WRITING BY HEART’?
Whether writing fiction or poetry, I often experience episodes in which I’m recording something so familiar, so innate, it’s as if I know it ‘by heart’. Considering the labour writing involves, times like these strike me as beautiful. The more I write, the more this phenomenon occurs, and the more heart-centric the output becomes. While I’ve had websites before — one for a Spanish-language teaching business and another, still operating, for my serial novel The Girl on Harlow Street — the time is right for a space that encompasses the scope of my work, particularly the poetry. And the time is now for an exploration of how one comes to write by heart.
BIO
Rosemary Davison, born in Cambridge, England, is a writer and poet whose work explores themes of memory, identity, and intergenerational connection. She holds a B.A. in English and Hispanic Studies and an M.A. in English literature from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario where she received numerous academic honours including the Wheeler Scholarship, University Scholarship, Prize for Studies in Canadian Literature, the Pilar Martinez Spanish Prize, and the Alexander Travel Scholarship, a scholarship enabling her to study and travel in Mexico.
After earning a B.Ed. in English and Spanish from the University of Toronto, Rosemary ran her own Spanish language business for 25 years before dedicating herself fully to writing in 2019. In the years since, Rosemary has completed The Girl on Harlow Street, a 1200-page serial novel currently in the editing process and has self-published over 300 poems on LinkedIn. Her poem I Will Never Write This Way Again was featured and reviewed by Priya Patel and Ashok Subramanian in Ponder 2023: Annual Collection of Poem Reviews by Ashok Subramanian. Her current project, The Lullaby Fields, is an evolving collection of poems nurturing matrilineal ancestral bonds. The work presents poetry as a timeless meeting place in which foremothers and their female descendants are free to exchange experiences, care for one another, validate each other, and heal.
Rosemary writes all her poems in a meditative state, and as such, considers them to be true collaborations between herself and the people and places surfacing on the page.
PROJECTS
THE GIRL ON HARLOW STREET
First written and published weekly on a website and subsequently for subscribers on Patreon, The Girl on Harlow Street is a 1200-page murder mystery alternating between Victorian and modern-day England. The investigative saga deals with young writer Aubrey Holloway who, fatally haunted by her past, has died, leaving a manuscript in her wake. Phil Owens, the police officer tasked with reading the tome, not only gets closer to discovering the motives behind Aubrey’s death, he comes to realize he may be haunted by the very same past that has destroyed Aubrey. The work is currently in the editing process.
THE LULLABY FIELDS
The Lullaby Fields is a developing collection of poetry and photographs dedicated to ancestral healing. Each poem in the collection is a sacred space in which the female ancestor and her descendant convene and nurture one another. In the haven of poetry, a foremother’s trauma may emerge as contextualization for her descendant’s current sensitivities, emotions, and modus operandi whereas the foremother and descendant’s experiences shared may surface to create transcendental solidarity.
300 POEMS ON LINKEDIN
The LinkedIn poems, all accessible on Rosemary’s LinkedIn page, were published from 2022 to 2024. Often using her own nature photography as the segue into poetry, Rosemary wrote the verses directly into the post space in “real” time with no prior preparation. Written/channeled in a meditative state, the poems are spiritual in nature and embrace themes of interconnection, continuity, growth, and healing.
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Photograph by Francisco Mora, Cornwall, England, 2023
A THOUGHT ON CREATING POETRY
So, how do I do it? In a profound way, perhaps I don’t.
The forest does it. The lake does it. The light on the water does it. The life-force energy around me does it. The reader does it.
I, on the other hand, notice it. I open myself to it. I invite it in. And I voice it.
This is why I’m so passionate about freedom for the creative voice, for artistic expression. Because when that voice is stifled and silenced, it’s not just the artist who is silenced. The prayer, the life-force, the sense of solidarity, the unifying flow, the divine are silenced too.