I would hate to estimate when it was that I bumped into a woman I did coaching training with – let’s say for argument’s sake it was more than three years ago. She knew I had started a novel in about 2015 which was about the time we started studying together. So in 2019 she asked me “Is it finished?”
It was a perfectly sensible question to ask me. But it was not. “It” was the novella, Not His Story that I have dragged through at least three online courses, a retreat in Delphi, Greece, through the mill of a couple of mentors, both of whom pronounced it unpublishable. It ballooned to more than 100,000 words, shrank to 25,000. It even spent a brief stint in the bin. It was rescued from said bin two years ago when I applied for the Western Australian Emerging Writers Program. When I was successful in that application, I had the “oh shit!” moment of realising that it meant I would have to actually finish the damn book.
And with the framework that the Emerging Writers Program provided, I did finish the damn book. Workshops and a group all suffering together, and a mentor who set me on my wobbly legs and encouraged me to the finish line.
But only to manuscript stage, where now it can experience a whole new set of rejections but this time with publishers. If I am very lucky, it may be accepted for publication. And acceptance will mean yet more work to ensure it meets the publishers expectations while staying true to my vision of the book.
I do understand what Liz Gilbert talks about with the shit sandwich of writing. It’s not for everyone, and talent alone will never get you there. So much work is required.
But I do believe this particular shit sandwich is for me.
And now, off to celebrate this milestone of finishing the damn book!
I’m up to the stage of submitting my novella manuscript to publishers (yay and eek all at once). I have been working on it for about eight years, so it’s quite the gear shift. I’m keeping myself connected to my writing practice by writing shorter pieces, looking for places to submit for publication or to enter competitions.
A writing prompt this weekend has got me thinking about housework, and servants. What a strange, co-dependant relationship it was, between servant and mistress. I fell down quite a few research rabbit holes trying to find out more about servants in England before and after the First World War. Far too many rabbit holes for the shortness of the piece I was trying to write.
It was interesting to reflect that as the world was modernising, some households were changing, becoming more bohemian. But not quite bohemian enough to do the dusting. So still, they kept servants.
One of the drivers of the (ahem) rare lively discussions between darling husband and I was my desire for a housecleaner. Back in the day when I was working more than full-time. It was classist he intimated, and of course there was the cost. We compromised by him doing all the housework in return for being taken out to dinner fortnightly. It was win, win, win for me, but what with the menopausal gap year and quitting my job, that arrangement has come to an end. I’m back on the end of the mop.
On the whole, I’m glad. But… writing retreat last weekend, mopping the next. It’s hard not to long for more grand times in writing cabins!
Thursday feels gratifyingly far away and long ago now. I’ve even lost track of the days on this three-day, mini self-guided writing retreat at KSP. For the uninitiated, KSP stands for Katharine Susannah Prichard, one of Australia’s best-known authors. Born in 1883 in Fiji and raised in Victoria, an inveterate traveller, she eventually moved to Western Australia in 1919 with her husband Hugo Throssell. The KSP Writers Centre is their old home, and it offers cabins for hire, and I was able to use a voucher from when I left Health Consumers’ Council to cover some of the cost.
I’ve been staying in a very cosy and comfortable writing cabin styled on her original writing cabin (see my cabin to the left, hers to the right, top right hand picture) but with the marvellous addition of a reverse cycle air conditioner and ensuite bathroom. My window, like hers, looks over the Perth skyline (top right image).
I didn’t want to come here until I had read Nathan Hobby’s biography of her, The Red Witch. Sensitive to the problem of human suffering, KSP settled on communism as the answer. Nothing that happened in Russia was ever to dissuade her from that right up until her death aged 86 in 1969. The neighbourhood dubbed her the Red Witch because of her communist beliefs and it has stuck.
I feel her all around me, in the house itself, in the gardens and surrounding streets, some of which bear her or Hugo’s names. Each morning after I did my yoga (see yoga altar with gifts from the garden, bottom left), I lit incense sticks outside my cabin door for her. I mean, I wanted to light them inside but didn’t want to risk setting off any fire alarms. Generally speaking I have been here alone, bumbling around trying to work out where light switches are, keen not to set off any burglar or fire alarms.
How lonely it must have been for KSP after her husband Hugo succumbed to the depression that had plagued him since his war service in the First World War. She was travelling in Europe when he completed suicide in 1933, and found out by reading about his death in a London newspaper. I took time to stop by the mournful monument to him erected in 1954, twenty years after his death (middle image on the right).
I had a solitary meal in her kitchen on Thursday night – middle picture – beef and red wine I cooked to bring with me. Because no retreat for me is complete without a solid focus on food.
Friday night I was thrilled to find out Nathan Hobby had won WA Premier’s Book Of The Year for The Red Witch. I adjusted the signage in KSP’s kitchen next to his book the next morning (middle left image).
Being an extrovert writer can be difficult for me but my solitude was relieved each day after a suitable amount of writing time by KSP local and friend from my youth, Trish. We walked, talked, ate and she even lent me a cache of my old letters to her to pore over. There’s one mammoth letter from Thessaloniki where I discover I’m pregnant and adjust my plans for returning to Perth in 1998. What a ride.
And so it’s time for me to return to Perth 2023. I will leave Steven King the final word on writing retreats-
I suppose you might end up in a version of that sylvan writer’s colony in East is East: your own little cottage in the pines…. If you got a chance to participate in a deal like that, I’d say go right ahead. You might not learn The Magic Secrets of Writing (there aren’t any – bummer, huh?) but it would certainly be a grand time and grand times are something I’m always in favor of.
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. Steven King (Chapter 14)
Last week was all about celebration – finishing the Emerging Writers Program and farewelling my mentor. Collecting my second prize certificate and winnings. Celebrating with a meal and a toast to creativity.
And then, it’s onto the next thing. This week I’ve been putting together an application for a residency in 2024. I decided to dip back into my 2014 memoir as there was a chapter I thought would be perfectly suited to the application.
And…. I hated it. Could I really have written it? Sent that out into the world? I itched to edit it, and spent today’s writing session scratching that itch.
As well has hating my former writing, I’ve been going through my many notebooks and scribblings from the workshops and courses I’ve attended over the last two years. Little gems like the one in the picture above keep popping out at me.
And so it goes on. Pen to paper. Acts of discovery, and let’s not forget, a lot of editing.
There are Ideal Days we can visualise, and yesterday would have to be my Perfect Writers Day. A bittersweet ending, an excellent writing course, receiving my prize for the John Gavin Writing Competition and dinner with my daughter and sister to close the day.
Bittersweet endings – the biggest picture is me with my Emerging Writers Program Mentor, closing out our two year partnership. Nathan Hobby has been encouraging, challenging and true to the end. He even gave me a book and inscribed it so kindly.
Excellent writing course – I retreated to the State Library for a quick sob after saying good bye to Nathan, before heading confidently to the Night Parrot Press Flash Fiction course on level floor of the State Library. Only to realise I should have been at Perth Library! I scampered there breathlessly and was welcomed warmly. If you squint you might be able to see me at the back of the room in the picture with facilitators Laura Keenan and Linda Martin from Night Parrot Press. Luckily my sister saved me a seat near the door for me to slip in late. It was an inspiring, hands-on workshop and they worked us hard with prompts to try our hand at flash fiction.
Receiving my prize – I have previously shared my joy at placing second in the John Gavin Writing Competition and my sister and I went from the flash fiction course to the award ceremony. We met others there including my husband, daughter and another sister. I got a chance to read my entry out, A Mother’s Vigil. I met again with Brooke Dunnell, also pictured, judge of the Award and another of Perth’s generous, talented writers.
Dinner with my sister and daughter – no pictures, just happy memories of a night celebrating creativity and all who sail in her.
This year I have been trying my hand at submitting to writing competitions. Responding to writing prompts leads to fun and innovation. And submissions have been keeping me at the desk, writing, while waiting for feedback on the novella manuscript.
When the Writing WA, Night Parrot Press and Raine Square opened the 2023 Love to Read Local Flash Competition, it focused on landscapes – or flashscapes, as we had but 100 words to tell a tale about a WA landscape.
That got me thinking about Taylor’s Well. When I was growing up, my father always talked about Taylor’s Well, just outside Pingelly. He lived there in the 1920s and 1930s with his father, mother, two sisters and three brothers. He always said that was when he had his first conscious memories, and his affection for that piece of WA lasted right up until his death in his mid-nineties. I was taken to Pingelly and Taylor’s Well in 1965 as a babe in arms (see the photo above – my dad, mum, brother and four sisters. Top marks to my mum for smiling while being the mother of six children under the age of eight!)
I went again with Dad in 2019, not long before he died. When he got out of the car his memories tumbled from him like poorly packed luggage from a plane’s overhead locker. He was not with us, he was back in 1930s Taylor’s Well.
The site of his home was by then a blank block with the house long gone. Never mind, it was the bush that was his home, his back and front yard, his food and entertainment system. In the morning he and his three bothers (“we four boys”) would head out bush with a bottle of milk and a slingshot. They’d catch lunch, and would also hunt rabbits for their pelts to sell to the rag and bone man. It was boy heaven.
The town of Pingelly was a short horse ride away, so too far for my grandmother to walk in for groceries or socialising. Six children in a deeply unhappy union, she was by now stout.
Here is a snap of the Catholic Church steps in Pingelly above-in 1964 so I am yet to make my appearance (I was born in 1965). These are the church stairs where my grandmother stumbled and fell, and received words of ridicule instead of concern from her irascible husband. She would go on to have another five boys with him, and follow his slow progress through small schools across rural WA until they ended up at Rosa Brook.
When I visited Taylor’s Well with Dad in 2019, I thought I could glimpse his careworn mother, my Granny, still only in her late twenties or perhaps early thirties. Five children. Sweat dripping from her face. No running water. Carting water for the laundry, combusting over the boiler to clean the clothes, making food, keeping the modest house clean. The loneliness and the sheer ache of slogging so hard with a contemptuous husband old enough to be her father. Irish brogue slinging insults, nagging for service, boots up while she scrubbed around him.
How did she ever survive?
Congratulations to all the short-listed Flashscape writers!All entries including mine are being published on this link (by Wednesday 7 June). This blog is one of my earlier drafts I radically cut to make 100 words!
Last week at our Saturday morning yoga class, we did a lovely flow sequence where we began and ended in a kneeling position. We cycled through a range of mantras such as “I reach with trust”, “I move forward with enthusiasm”, “I open myself up to possibilities”, “I surrender to peace”, and finally, “I honour life”.
It is so easy to forget that life is a gift. So many pressures and distractions morph into a sense of immortality, as if death is something that happens to other people.
I’m on another Howards End jag, marinading in the discussions in the novel that I love. “Death destroys us, but the idea of death saves us.” In other words, we’re nicer people when we remember that all this is impermanent.
I’ve dedicated the last few days to birthday lunches, a quick writing getaway and scrolling through kind birthday messages. (Sometimes I think I like Facebook best when I have a birthday.)
And I haven’t forgotten to feel so very grateful for another turn around the sun.
Every family has their little sayings. “You were robbed” was something our father would say to us whenever we, say, got 90% in a test. It was always said in jest, and wrapped in a general cocoon of his pride and kindness.
Recently and rather impulsively, I decided I would try my hand at the RTR Radio presenter’s course which is run regularly. I wanted to test out some of the ideas I have had about podcasting. Mainly I wanted to learn more about writing for broadcasting. I wasn’t so sure about all the techie skills required but I figured I could work it out. I mean, it all looked simple when we went through it with the tutor. I have been using computers since the 1980s after all and consider myself a relatively geeky person. But when I found myself alone at the desk, all alone, I just couldn’t do a single thing. The manual from class just wasn’t helpful and I couldn’t seem to get the You Tube videos to work.
I’m not sure when the last time was for you that you were learning a new skill and hit that boiling point of frustration. It has been a while for me because I’m generally doing things I have done many times before. That’s one of the benefits of being older. We have Experience behind us.
Faced with the presenters desk, I knew I was stumped. I mean sure, I was over-tired but I was surprised by how much the frustration pushed at my chest, dredged up the tears until they stood out on my lashes. The hour of studio time elapsed with me no further ahead except in being able to access my inner three year old.
I took myself and my inner child over the road for a bite to eat and a glass of wine, pulled out my journal for some catharsis. The tears were liberated by this and my napkin was soon quite soggy. That’s another benefit of being my age – not you’re experienced, but you’re also invisible. You can cry in public and no-one will ask if you’re OK.
The waitress delivered the food and wine and retreated after a quick look at my face. Then I remembered I had booked another session in the studio in an hour’s. I opened up my laptop towards me to cancel. I knew I was beat.
Then I saw the email.
I had placed second in a writing competition.
After decades of writing in the dark. 8 years alone on have been lavished on the last manuscript, with thousands of words written and abandoned and written again. In recent months I’ve been submitting regularly. Every entry has disappeared into the ether, with occasionally a “thanks but no thanks” response.
This particular submission was for the Fremantle Roundhouse. It was a thought-provoking prompt about the European executed in the colony of Western Australia. A 15-year-old boy John Gavin who had only been in Western Australia a matter of months, after having been sent out from Parkhurst Boys Home on the Isle of Wight.
The intense discomfort of my failed studio session was suddenly flooded by the intense excitement of this news. I was pressed my soggy napkins to my eyes and sobbed even more energetically. It was amazing how the frustration and the joy felt, well almost as powerful as each other.
When I awoke the next day I’d largely forgotten about the discomfort of struggling with learning new skills. But the delight in having placed in the writing competition was as strong as ever.
Then I could just hear my Dad’s voice in my head. He’s been gone three years now, but I could swear I heard him say “You were robbed!”
You can click on the link below if you want to read the winning entries:
This is the chapter I would have written for the Minds Went Walking- Paul Kelly’s Songs Re-imagined book if only I had been asked to contribute. Australian singer songwriter Paul Kelly is our Bob Dylan. Our Billy Bragg. Perhaps they sent me an invitation via email and I missed it. Certainly the song I wanted to cover isn’t in it, so perhaps I might squeeze into a second edition? In anticipation of this unlikelihood, here goes with my entry.
Please note that this post deals with sexual assault and a respectful trigger alert applies. If this is not a topic you want to engage with just now, scroll on by.
God’s Hotel
Early June 1990 I was leaving Perth for London. On a one-way ticket. By then I had a degree and professional working experience under my belt. Also, I had nurtured my unbreakable vow to myself made in 1979 that I Would Be Back to London, Europe. I had been so very bloody lucky to go to Europe with my parents in 1979 as a 14-year-old. It was like going to the moon and looking at the earth, everything in its realistic proportions. I just didn’t think it would take me eleven years to fulfil this vow. But here I was at 25 years of age and all those career and travel dreams were ahead of me.
Being the 1990s, Paul Kelly happened to be playing in Perth. Back then, I was able to nip in to see him at the Herdsman Hotel, no queue. Just a final listen to this wondrous song maker in my home town before my heroine’s journey began.
Even though I was never one to have much of a record collection, I made sure I packed my Paul Kelly CDs. Post. Gossip. Under the Sun. I set off to London to make my fortune, bobbed around precariously from house share to house share and snagged myself a job that kept me just above the poverty line.
About 1991 I got to see Paul Kelly in London, this time there was a queue, a cover charge. I stood up above and noted his bald patch. How could the ever sexy, youthful Paul Kelly be ageing?
By then I had been settled into my new London life, and was even blessed with a colleague who became a flat mate for the next few years. She is the kind of friend you can see after years and the time and distance disappears. While she and I were aligned in many ways, I could not get her to see the wondrous beauty of Paul Kelly’s ballads. To be fair, my CD collection was limited so he did get a bit of a flogging.
I’d continued to follow his new releases, add them into my Paul Kelly discography. Wanted Man in 1994 was a particular favourite. Paul followed me back to Perth via a three year detour in Greece. I returned home for good a decade after my departure, in 2001. By then I was the mother of a delightful half-Greek toddler.
And then came 10th May 2002.
When you’re lucky, privileged, like I’ve been, you can go about your life right into your 30’s, thinking life is fair. That bad things can’t happen when you live your life well and do good works. And bloody hell, Perth is a small country town. Ten years in Europe and no mishap, I was convinced the whole Perth crime scene was a media beat-up.
Until 10th May 2002. I heard a noise in the night, got up to investigate. In the early hours of that day, a faceless man broke into my home I shared with my beautiful toddler daughter, sexually assaulted me and left.
10th May 2002 taught me that life is random, brutal shit happens and we need to find our way back to positivity and belief in the general (if not absolute) goodness of most people. Somehow.
I’d bought into a social housing suburb, on the leading edge of its gentrification. I’ll never know for sure, but I think he attended parties in the house I’d bought, back in the day, with my university education, European work experience and independent financial means. Apparently there were a few car bodies in and amongst the rubbish she’d left behind before it was chi-chi’d up for the likes of me to move in.
My beautiful little home, my new start for me and my daughter was blown apart. We moved out so I could learn to sleep alone.
I wanted to understand why someone would do something like that. Completely unprovoked. I wanted to forgive, avoid the poison chalice of resentment. But there was no-one to forgive. This anonymous assailant had disappeared into the night.
By the time he was caught fourteen months later through DNA I’d almost become used to the unknown perpetrator story. I’d even survived a few more little crimes – a purse taken from a shopping trolley. Kids smashing the back door of the house just a few weeks after I had tentatively moved back in again after eight months away.
The same policeman who had helped out about the smashed back door incident was on my doorstop again a few weeks later. But he wasn’t there with any news of the young kids who’d broken in as I had expected.
He was “here about the 10th May 2002.”
It’s like his words were a blow to the back of my knees which nearly buckled. Shakily I let him and his colleagues in. The assailant was now identified. I asked if there had been other rapes in the year he’d been at large. There hadn’t and I cried with exquisite relief.
But in order to complete the arrest, they just needed me to go back down to the station… So back to the police station I went, more than a year after I had done the statement and forensic examination. The table in their office was gritty from the previous interview, and horrid memories washed at me as I completed the confusing piece of evidence gathering they needed so they could finalise the arrest warrant. I just had to look at a mug shot of 16 faces and say on the record I didn’t know any of the men. I knew he was one of them, but not which one. It was all done and dusted before I had to pick my girl up from kindy.
All weekend I knew he was going to be arrested. He didn’t.
Friday. Saturday. Sunday.
Yes I wanted the streets safe. But prison.
Prison is the place where we send people away, exile them. I couldn’t put it into words this piercing, tortuous sorrow. I wept alone. No-one except my Buddhist friend could contemplate why I would feel sad.
I couldn’t find the words, but Paul Kelly had them for me. I knew what to do. I got out God’s Hotel (co-written with Nick Cave) and played it on repeat. And over again.
And somehow there was a place for everyone, inclusion and empathy.
This week I marinaded in a shame bath. Monday morning started too early, 4am to be exact. I was glued to the memoir manuscript a dear talented friend had sent me to read after I had begged her. I was following along her teenage travels, heart in mouth. My kind offer to take my sister-in-law to the airport for 7am was something I was quite committed to, but I fell into a strange early morning time warp. Like two adults who think the other was looking after the toddler, I thought she would prompt me, and she was taking her cue from me. The toddler wandered into trouble.
I squashed down my consternation on seeing the time when we finally left for the airport but breezily took off with confidence, drove us to the Roe 8 where abruptly it turned from a hundred kilometre per hour freeway into a car park.
“We’re going to miss the plane,” she said.
I didn’t want to admit this horror hostess-fail, and turned off the car park-freeway and drove as fast as I could down side streets, roared into the airport as soon as I possibly could get us there.
Had she been unencumbered with a bike box and large backpack, technically she could have boarded the plane. It was still saying “Go to Gate.’ We’d arrived at the check-in desk, breathless and with the nasty taste of stress chemicals in the mouth. But our worst fears were confirmed. For that amount of luggage, we were too late and she had indeed missed the plane.
She recovered relatively quickly given it was her plans that had been scuppered. She even enjoyed the extra days and headed off safely midweek. I on the other hand kept watching the horror unfold on playback in my mind’s eye. Not just that day, but several days later. It was deeper than the feeling of discomfort of being over-dressed or under-dressed for a function. My skin didn’t fit right.
Eventually, I reminded myself of the things that help me to feel better. Yoga. Sunset walks. Writing. Somehow the week had been bare of almost all of them. Down to the beach I went, and saw the culprit. This giant moon on Thursday night. Suddenly it all made more sense. Maybe I wasn’t having a mental breakdown after all. Blame it on the moon.
And I turned the other way and looked at the every day miracle of a sunset over the sea.
