Friday Feature: @PhynneBelle

Well, lovely Prosers; it’s that day of the week again. It’s Friday. Huzzah! So that means that we peek behind the doors of a Proser that we may or may not know. This week we head to the awesome city of San Francisco (my favourite American city – PaulDChambers) to find out all about a lady that lies behind the sobriquet of @PhynneBelle

P: What is your given name and your Proser username?

PH: Hallo Prosers! Some of you may know you me as Trish, but many of you know me by the moniker PhynneBelle. If you're nice, I'll even respond to Fish or Phone Bell.

P: Where do you live?

PH: I have lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, home of the Six Gallery and the Friday Poet's Salon for the past twenty-sixish years.

P: What is your occupation?

PH: I champion the cause of helpless furballs everywhere! I work in general medicine veterinary practice.

P: What is your relationship with writing and how has it evolved?

PH: Writing and I have been tempestuous lovers through many long years. Yes, I think that's a good way to visualize it. Perhaps we started out as very peripheral acquaintances while I had other creative outlets as affairs--intense infatuations with visual art and fashion, passion-filled dalliances with dance--but expressing and making order of my energetic, sometimes frenetic thoughts and ideas in poetic form has always been this constant, this very sane and centered solitude to which I return.

P: What value does reading add to both your personal and professional life?

PH: In reading, even genres and stories to which one would normally not be drawn, especially these initially "undesirable" topics or ideas, one's tastes are imperceptibly shaped. The interest is suddenly expanded or constricted to a very definite preference. For me, this easily parlayed into how I approach my own writing; there is an intuitive purveyor of sorts that shapes voice, story, direction, style.

P: Can you describe your current literary ventures and what can we look forward to in future posts?

PH: Is there every any predictability when comes to my writing? For better or worse, I write what the very moment whispers in my ear. Or what tends to wake me in the middle of the night, insisting on being heard and faithfully recorded. I admit I am being seduced once more into the genius of eloquence within brevity--I'd like to revisit there, see where it will lead. A peculiar notion (peculiar to me at least) popped in a few weeks ago to try out something episodic, something narrative, drawing on non-sequential recollections with a uniting element.

P: What do you love about Prose?

PH: The endless corridors and turns where I happen upon talented new writers. I have yet to discover everyone and that is both maddening and exciting! The like-minded friends I have made; I doubt I will meet a Proser that would be astonished should I ever decide to run away from my daily life, live in a shabby but picturesque cottage in a charming, minuscle village, subsist on toasted dandelions and homemade wine, and write my days away. It would be a plan insane to anyone else but fellow writers.

P: Is there one book that you would recommend everyone should read before they die?

PH: Maus by Art Spiegelman and Noli Me Tangere by Dr. Jose Rizal. Without at least a glance backward, we are devastatingly blind. The future is out of the question. We do it no favors by disrespect to what has already transpired. Lest we repeat the same mistakes.

P: Do you have an unsung hero who got you into reading and/or writing?

PH: At this very moment, three ladies popped into my mind:first there was my mama, who I have earliest memories of patiently reading to me from well-worn Golden Books. I also remember my fourth grade teacher Miss Ellis. My god, she scared me with her steel wool hair and her strict ways! But at years end, when my family and I were moving away to the Philippines, Miss Ellis gifted me with Carlo Collidi's "Adventures of Pinocchio." 

That book was my security blanket for my first homesick year. Then there was Bea, my mother-goddess, free-spirit, one-woman-fan club at the advent of my adult writing journey. She would supply exactly what was needed at the perfect moment: no nonsense advice, praise (even for the laziest and smarmiest of my writing endeavors!), and feedback. 

Oh, and Iyanla Vanzant! I mustn't forget. Bea was a big fan of quoting Iyanla Vanzant. I think those wise, wild woman ideas still stubbornly find their selves wedged between my words.

P: Describe yourself in three words.

PH: Incorrigible. Transparent. Real.

P: Is there one quote from a writer or otherwise that sums you up?

PH: "A mind lively and at ease, can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer." Jane Austen

P: Favourite music to write and/or read to?

PH: Almost everything! Disney tunes, showtunes, no kidding. Right now, the Hamilton Mixtapes.

P: You climb out of a time machine into a dystopian future with no books. What do you tell them?

PH: "Sit down, everyone, and let me tell you a story..."

P: Is there anything else you would like us to know about you/your work/your social media accounts?

PH: I'm trying to share my writing world with the "real" world, a teensy bit at a time. I can be found lurking on Instagram (@phynne_belle), Twitter ( @PhynneBelle) and Facebook (@PhynneBelle and @WeAreWordWeavers). I've got a little bit of a theme going there, eh?

Thanks to PhynneBelle for letting us in. You know what happens now. Follow her, interact, like and all that business. Do YOU want to be featured? We’re running low on victims (I mean participants). Do you want to find out about another Proser and wish to volunteer them up for scrutiny? Then send us a message on info@theprose.com