I started out writing letters home to friends and family whilst I was living with my parents in Latin America. It was a lonely year, I was a young teenager, thrown into an unknown environment in a local school where no one talked my language. For some reason this prompted me to get even more familiar with my own language, discovering an identity, and a putting a voice to thoughts which I didn’t know I was thinking.

It was light entertainment, a heady hopscotch of tongue in cheek Amazonian adventures. No one could say it wasn’t true. Everyone was on the other side of the world. And everything was based on something, and then exploded like a Cornelia Parker sculpture, dissected and hung out to dry in unexplored fragments, page after page.

In my case, there’s nothing to say until you start saying it. Inspiration comes through the sweat and grime of pushing a pen and pushing your mind to deliver a thought, twist it and repeat it.

Two things struck me early on, before I even thought of publishing:
a) No matter my mood, I felt better when I wrote. This, ‘no matter what my mood’ was important. Any mood meant any subject. Everything was up for grabs. I could be funny, sad, play the loser, play the bully, get into other people’s heads. Try and find my own.
b) Whatever I wrote, whatever the mood or subject, people were saying it made them smile, it lifted their hearts.

Back in the UK at 16, I now knew I was going to be a writer. I devoted myself to developing an inquisitive mind, and to observing human behaviour. I opted not to go to university. I didn’t want to study my passion to death and come out an expert on other experts and never be free of comparisons, with every word I wrote. So, I took endless odd jobs and wrote. In my 20s I started publishing, poems and short stories. I fell into the puppet theatre world, and this helped give me a frame and focus. The animate in the inanimate, the internal life of objects. Ghosts, angels, spirits. The internal dialogue. This became my playground for the next 20 years. Creating sparse, magical moments.

I tried the novel, but I didn’t like the planning, the plot, the dilemmas, the writing seemed almost secondary. Something you did when you’d finished planning. I could never keep the suspense, as several editors noted: things were magical yes, but there was no need to turn the page. With a slightly dented heart I realised I was probably stuck with poetry; whether I was to blame for creating that bent in my mind, or I was really born like that; I didn’t know who was to blame. I literally lost the plot. Or at least the need for one.

My sparseness grew, I let my mind wander. I lost the need to be published. I began to write in themes, small collections of writings on a single theme. Still-lifes: 28 poems on stones, 47 poems on gaps and holes, not enough for a publisher but a private quest in curiosity. A collection on bushes and trees. Another on snow-filled landscapes. Stories based on a single colour. I wasn’t publishing anymore; I was being heard. Working with modern dancers, jazz musicians, doing installations in galleries and going on tour.

Then I came across a feast. I had a commission to document the Dorset accent. I could write whatever I liked, as long as it used the Dorset accent. I got paid to get into someone else’s head. I revelled in it. I began writing internal dialogue collections. Someone else’s voice formed the structure, and rhythm, decided on the subject, and presented it with their own truths loudly advertised and the only plausible explanation. I was hooked for a decade and I’m not sure I’m out of it yet.

Meanwhile in 2017 I got blood poisoning and acute septicaemia, was held in a coma, and nearly died. For a week I couldn’t speak, only writing short messages on bits of paper. That’s when I started on my most recent collection, with a new internal voice; instructions on how to turn yourself inside out again and come back into this world, despite your reservations. How to drag yourself back, as you obviously hadn’t disappeared.

I’d been working on repetitive phrasings, and affirmations; screen printing them into poster sized works for sale. Something that started in the 90s with a meditative collection for silent retreats with the Norwegian church, where my works were printed up in size 0 posters and hung about for people to sink into.

Reflecting on what’s come and gone it’s easy to see that many little journeys were left unfinished, and returned to, many years later. The journeys themselves too, seem evidently not as diverse as I first thought. A little myriad of pathways trodden across a frost riddled paddock perhaps. The pattern gaining complexity and colour through the fresh seasons.

I’m sticking with the screen printing for now.

(To see Fredrik’s recent work: www.fredriklloyd.org and sign up to his monthly postcard.)