Voice of Californian sun

I've been touch-screening through my phone over the last few days, sorting photos, videos, texts, emails. And I came across Notepad. Since last September, I've been adding little stories to it, and poems, straplines, random thoughts, ideas for projects. And more.

Here's something I wrote after seeing Joshua Idehen perform his spoken word piece 'My Love' at Roehampton University in January, when we both returned as alumni to speak to current writing students.

This is about Professor Samuel Maio, a wonderful man who taught me about writing, literature and life at San Jose State University in 2005. And inspired me to try.

Where to start? Where do you start in telling stories of Professor Maio? He's a man I knew for a few months. But in that time, in rhyme, in lines, this man inspired me. Through Poe I remember most vividly, creeping ahead of the class, back hunched and voice lowered and breathy telling us the story of the house of Usher. We watched with eyes glued, nowhere to hide. In that time his mind turned my mind into a storytelling machine. Cleaner than it'd ever been. Leaner. Leaner than a bit of beef that's dropped from George Forman's lean mean grilling machine. Professor Maio inspired. Stood up, asked questions. He fired me to write like my writing life depended on every word working. Every line counting. Counted the metre under his voice. Just enough to show that he was into it - living each word, each pause, each verse, each clause, getting to know each character... You can rhyme, Robert, he'd say in his sun-setting-between-the-Californian-hills way. And he was right. He inspired us all, every time we sat in the line of his eyes and smiled.