Herbert L. Colston, London Independent Story Prize 2024 Anthology Finalist, 'Past Sense'

London Independent Story Prize 2024 Anthology Finalist, 'Past Sense', Herbert L. Colston

- Can you please tell us about you and your daily life?

My day job involves conducting research and teaching courses on figurative language (my specialty) and linguistics in general—I am a university professor in a linguistics department, although my Ph.D. was in Psychology.  This of course involves publishing research papers on my research.  In my spare time I’m an amateur artist in a number of physical mediums (e.g., painting, sculpture, bas reliefs, etc.—I like to work with unusual materials like upcycled odds and ends and hardware store material).  Lately I feed my creativity addiction by creating poetry, mostly of a visual variety that incorporates shaped texts, imagery, photography, etc.   

- When and how did you get into writing?

I first discovered I love writing during a long weekend in college where I had to complete a lengthy paper for an English composition class.  By a fluke, my three roommates were away that weekend so I had my apartment to myself.  I didn’t shower.  I hardly slept.  The place was a sty, with cola cans, take-away cartons, and cigarette butts everywhere.  I just paced and thought and took notes and keyed-in paragraphs and then revised over and over… the usual game.  I kept at this for four days.  But I saw my spiraling ideas taking shape in the paper and just loved how that worked—how composition turned chaotic cognition into ordered prose.  From that point forward I knew I needed a career that would let me write.

My academic writing has appeared in a number of journals and edited books in psychology and linguistics.  I co-edit a book series with John Benjamins called Figurative Thought and Language.  I have written or co-written three books, with the latest being How Language Makes Meaning:  Embodiment and Conjoined Antonymy (Cambridge University Press).  I also began writing poetry in 2020.  It started as just a new artistic medium to explore, that would involve much less time than my physical works (you just sit and write, no brushes to clean or scraps to sweep up…).  But it quickly morphed into a form of therapy.  I estimate I’ve written around two thousand works.  I only recently have tried publishing some of it.  These works have appeared in The Banyan Review and Door = Jar.

- How often do you write? Do you have a writing routine? And what inspires you to write?

I write all the time as part of my job.  Messaging, letters, all sorts of documents involving work, grant applications, etc.  I write my academic papers based on whenever some bit of research is completed and I can find the time to write up the results for publication.  Books I write typically over summer breaks and at other gaps in my work schedule.  Poetry I write nearly daily.  My latest picture poems are often pretty short, so I can at times make several in one day.  I like to write them in the evenings as a means of washing away the anxieties of the day.

Academic inspiration comes from the joy of discovery—figuring out some new twist to our emerging explanations of how people use and comprehend figurative language and then wanting to share that with other scholars and students and the general public.  Artistic inspiration can come from practically anything.  I once wrote a picture poem about a bowl of tomatoes.  But I especially like the “happy accidents”, a la Bob Ross, I find on occasion in my poetry—where I’ll complete a poem and then suddenly realize some other entire layer or tangent of meaning that arises from the work, but that I in no way had in my conscious mind when making the piece.

- How does it feel to have your work recognised?

It always feels great to get something published.  But with the academic work it has become a bit more routine, given this is something I’m supposed to do for my job.  But it is still very satisfying to share findings from my research.  But I get an enormous thrill when a poem gets published.  I’ve said publicly that I can often say more in a short poem than I can in an entire academic paper.  But the poetry publishing world is a bit different from the academic one, and I’m fairly new to it.

- What's the best and most challenging thing about writing Poetry? 

The best moments are the happy accidents in the creation of my poetry.  And I also love going back and re-reading my older picture poems (some that I even forgot that I wrote).  I know they’re my own, but some of them can really send tingles up my spine.  I’m not sure why that is, but it is just the honest truth.  The biggest challenge is publication.  I’ve been doing academic publishing my entire career, from both the writer’s side and on the business end (e.g., reviewing, editing, etc.), so I feel I know how that business works. But the poetry publication process is relatively new territory for me.

-  How did you develop the idea for your LISP-selected story? Is there a story behind your story? And, how long have you been working on it?

Past Sense came together pretty fast.  And I don’t recall having anything in mind before starting it.  This was an idea that sort of just emerged in the very process of writing.  But it was informed by my knowledge of psychology, and how sensation & perception work.  Many of my works emerge like this.  I just start stirring something around and an idea begins to grow from there. 

- Can you please give us a few tips about writing Poetry?

I could offer a ton of tips about academic writing—I have done so much of it and have learned many lessons along the way.  For the poetry writing, though, I don’t feel I can say much because I’m not even sure how I do it.  Sometimes there’s a bit of a preconceived idea in mind, sometimes not.  What helps me though is that much of my later work is inspired by some kind of photograph, either of my own or one from a scholar/artist friend with whom I often collaborate, Carina Rasse.  These “co-poems” are really interesting as they blend two artist’s ideas.  But there is no one way that these works come about other than my just looking at the photo, playing around with some kind of idea that emerges, and then building forth from that once a kernel has formed.  So I suppose that is advice of a sort, after all—just dabble and see what happens.