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Guest Post: Living Life Creatively by Laura Roklicer

As many of you know I love featuring poets who want to talk about their creative process, share tips on publishing or writing, or even just give us a sneak peek into their office spaces.

Today’s guest is Laura Roklicer, a poet whose collection The Broken God was published in June. She’ll be sharing her creative process, as well as her outlook on life. She offers a unique perspective on how we view the world and how our subjectivity can be used to change the world around us.

Book Synopsis:

The Broken God is Laura’s first published book released in by United p.c. publishing and distributed across the U.K. and U.S. A poetry collection that challenges all those worldviews and systems that do not play in favour of human satisfaction but rather keep us separated and unfulfilled. There is some beauty of tragedy, tragedy of love, bluntness of loss, and reflecting questions of existence in there, too.

These are not poems about the beautiful landscapes of the world. These are poems about the bittersweet, destructive human nature and the pity of the stale worldview. The mix of societal disappointment, the tragedy of love and the existential depression still hides hope in every poem; there is something beautiful in the chaos of the universe, and in the chaos of ourselves.

People have the power to lead their own lives in any way they want to, but they mostly choose their comfort zone on expense of their happiness and only really make their own choices in dreams or video games. They settle for unfulfilling jobs, they settle for grey love, they settle for mediocre selves. And so they are breaking the God within them.

I hope that you’ll give Laura a warm welcome.

The inner struggle of doing something meaningful that contributes to changing society for the better and pursuing an artistic life that I was born to live, has always been too real for me. This debate inside my heart culminated last year as I felt the need to “do something bigger” with my life than authoring poems, lyrics or stories, and portray moving images. But then, finally, I had a Eureka moment, and it hit me; I am not just a writer, and I will never be one. I’ve always embraced my own weird philosophy of a better society through challenging the trending issues and questioning the ever-mysterious concept of consciousness and wrapped this into flowing stanzas or capturing images.

Every leaf creates a garden: whether it was bright green, freshly yellow or dry and brown. Every one of us creates the society, shapes it, and is shaped by it, and my only real purpose, that I have created for myself is giving this world a touch of my own colors to make it less grey. If the pit you are falling into is black, then do not be afraid to see it as black – the sky will only seem brighter that way and darkness might turn out to not be as cold as you thought. We should not be escaping reality just because it sometimes does not suit us because it will never satisfy us that way, not until we change it.

This book marked my year. It is a story of my struggles, developing beliefs and debates with myself (I always enjoy those). At the time, I was working at the European Space Agency and, motivated to do something for my dad that had just passed away; I decided to finally find a publisher for my work. I never liked stories about abracadabra and magical worlds. I liked real things because to me; writing is as real as it gets. It imagines a world in which you can change all the rules but choose not to change any but shine a light on that one thing that people pass by every single day, blinded by the chaos outside and inside of them.

I have not created The Broken God. We have all created it. Waiting for our lives to fly by so that we can finally stop the struggle, waiting for holidays that we will spend fighting with our families, daydreaming of being superheroes while crumbling under endless excuses, and settling… An ordinary human in today’s society keeps settling for unfulfilling jobs, for grey love, for mediocre selves. We accept wars because we have never lived without wars. We accept poor politics because no one gave us a different option. We accept loveless relationships because we do not believe in true happiness, or we do not think we deserve it. But guess what? We are the ones making those wars; no alien force is making us fight each other. We are the ones allowing these damaging politics. We are the ones breaking our hearts.

I am passionate about absolutely everything I do, and the above topics are some of the issues I am most focused on. That is what I write about, and that is how I change society. I reach so many beautiful conclusions while finding even more questions, through writing, and my goal is to inspire others to open their eyes to all these questions, to explore the depths of the universe within us, and to be better human beings.

I never know what the next sentence I write will be, that is what fascinates me most about writing. I love to surprise myself. Once I know exactly how the story will end, I suddenly lose interest. With poems, I might start writing about a guy I met on the subway, but end up talking about inequality, mental illness, or the fifth dimension. I never know what comes next, not in writing nor my own life, and that excites me more than anything.

Sometimes, I write down random thoughts and weird mixes of words that somehow form a poem, and I have a beer thinking about what the hell I wanted to say with that. I then read back the poem and reflect on the meaning that now wholly makes sense. My head is exploding with ideas and, somewhere inside my unexplainable mind; there is a beautiful mess that I often do not understand. So when all these words or images, or other senses come to me, writing them down helps me understand my thoughts a lot better, and that is when I feel like those words could help heal some broken soul, broaden perspectives and tickle shady hearts.

The first section of The Broken God is titled “Where God Screams”. It is a wordplay, just like most of my titles, representing the contrast of our beliefs and the bluntness of the possible truth. God is screaming at us, or is he yelling at himself? I need to get lost in nothingness, where we are just as small as we should be. I realize that I am alone, laughing at God. Here, I am trying to portray an idea that we should stop growing our egos, that we should stop creating gods in the sky that keep making us destroy those gods within us – the only gods that make sense. We are the creators of ourselves; we choose where we are going to take ourselves, our thoughts, our actions, and our society, and we must stop blaming humanity on external gods. We are all equally powerful and equally insignificant.

The second section is called “Artificial Significance”, and it talks about the perspective of meaning and purpose. We are taught that killing spiders and capturing wildlife for nothing, but our entertainment and irrational fears are okay because we are higher beings than any other we have lived to know. We have also been brought up with the belief that we must have a purpose outside of this life; that we have a select reason for being born and habituating this planet. We are forcing the universe, or our gods, to give us an idea as to why they have created us, and with this, we are murdering the real purpose of our existence – life itself. We are bypassing this party waiting for the afterparty to which no one has invited us. Optimistic nihilism tells us that embracing a perspective of nothingness before and after us, of insignificance, can make us so much happier. The quality of our lives improves significantly once we stop looking for alternatives to our own lives.

“Terror of Beauty” and “Out of Control” are sections that deal with love, family, and personal struggles that one goes through in a lifetime. They are indeed private to me, and most of the last section is dedicated to my father. I believe these are especially relatable to those that have experienced any loss in their life. Of course, there is a lot of impossible and unrequited love and escaping the truth for the beauty of the illusion of possibilities. We all bleed; some of us under thinner and others under thicker skin, and admitting this is the first step toward healing the Broken God.

Thank you, Laura, for stopping by and sharing your creative process with us.

Please view the Book Teaser on Facebook.

Buy the Book:

About the Poet:

Laura Roklicer is a 23-year-old freelance writer, scriptwriter, lyricist and a filmmaker, whose educational background is in film production and psychology. She has worked with over a hundred artists worldwide and is a citizen of the world who doesn’t believe in borders that people put up (geographical or mental) and finds her thrill exploring different areas of the world, as well as exploring the cultural differences, individuality, and different worldviews.

She believes the true beauty of nature lays in those differences and the power of subjectivity. Laura is on a mission to contribute to the world change for the better and she hopes to do so through her writing and films.

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