The reader knows best

I contributed a piece to the Varuna Writers Centre newsletter on ageing and the emerging writer.  And find myself aghast at some of the comments. 

It’s as if some people take me literally.

And why shouldn’t they?  My words are all they have. 

And I wrote this piece on the down side of ageing, more than I focused on its strengths. 

Still, I find myself wishing I could qualify what I’ve written, when I know full well: once your writing is out there, it’s no longer yours. 

It belongs to the reader and given there are many different readers, your writing will evoke many different responses and understandings.

So maybe, as Annah Faulkner writes in the comments, I should 'put on [my] big girl panties and get on with it now'. 

Other people's words

At the moment I am sitting in Eleanor Dark’s studio with a rug over my knees and a heater close by, two heaters in fact.  It’s cold in the Blue Mountains, colder than I had imagined, but at least today the sun is shining and the world outside - despite the dew on the grass and the bare tress in the garden dripping with left over rain - looks almost spring like and therefore warmer, warmer at least than yesterday when the day was over cast from morning right through to night and there was a steady misting rain. 

I went out for only one walk into town yesterday and did not enjoy it, not as I have enjoyed my walks through Katoomba in the past.  But it goes in cycles.  Exhilaration to misery in as little as five minutes.  The pressure to do nothing but write and read and think about writing is a luxury but it’s also a burden and for some reason I feel it more acutely this time.

I’m stuck in a well of the familiar and I cannot get out of it.

 

In this studio, once the writing place of Eleanor Dark, there is a series of drawers in which other writers who have used this room have left snippets of their writing drafts, a page or two, no more. And perched on top are two tall chests with flower embossed fronts in which someone has placed a slip of paper with the words:

 ‘Courage is the first essential.’ 

In the next cupboard alongside but separated by mouldy dictionaries and grammar books, this same person, I presume, has penned the words:

‘And coffee second.’

In another of the drawers below where there are countless screeds from countless writers I found one piece that has taken my fancy.  It’s from an Australian poet named Jude Aquilina and it reads like this:

First Penis Transplant

A cutting from The Herald, 2107

Today, the first penis

transplant was successfully

performed on a woman in her

twenties.  I’ve always wanted

one, stated the Sydney

housewife, to prove that

women can wear penises too. I

don’t intend to flash it nor

thrash it, just use it for its

natural purposes and I hope it

comes in handy around the

house.  I want to invent

practical attachments such as

dusters and dish mops.  How

many mothers have wished

for an extra hand? – crossing

the street with a child each

side, I’ll hang my handbag on

nature’s hook.  And when I

 go dancing on summer nights,

I’ll wear bangles that jangle

 from side to side. I really

think they’re going to catch

on, Women have been without

them far too long.  Surgeons

say their lists are full of

women waiting to fulfil their

masculinity; the problem at

the moment, unfortunately,

lies in the lack of donors.

Open doors and apologies all round

My husband left the flame under the pan this morning after he had cooked up a batch of bacon and chorizo. When I walked into the kitchen to fetch my second cup of tea for the morning the place was grey with smoke.  He was reading the newspaper at the kitchen table and had not noticed until I pointed it out and then we discovered the overheating fry pan. 

Open doors and apologies all round.  The smoke has dispersed though the smell of burned fat remains.  It could have been worse.  It could have been kippers, another of my husband’s favourite weekend breakfasts, and one which leaves its traces in the air long after it’s been eaten.

I can’t get Varuna out of my mind.  The smell of the house, musty, the green of the garden and its warmth.  It can get cold in the Blue Mountains but I have only been there through the sultry heat of an early summer, when the weather is unpredictable in the form of heavy storms, early mists, higher temperatures and rising humidity.   

 Varuna, outside my window, and inside the Green Room.

‘Let my nerves be strained like wires between the city of no and the city of yes!’  Yevtushenko.

These are the words that someone had penned onto a scrap of paper in blue ink and pinned to the fridge in the kitchen at Varuna.  They have stayed with me as a reminder of the tension between writing and life.  

Yesterday my youngest daughter went for her driver’s license and passed.  It’s the end of an era for me.  Four daughters, all of whom can now drive a car, or at least are licensed to drive. 

To me it’s a major achievement largely because it took me so long to get mine.  I had left home by then but even if I were still at living at home I could no more imagine my father taking me out to practice driving than asking him to walk me up the aisle.  Neither of which I did. 

Instead I left learning to drive until I was in my early twenties and into my first proper job.  I paid for driving lessons from an instructor who took me out sometimes twice weekly in his turquoise Datson Z.  We drove through the streets of Caulfield. 

In those days I had broken up with my first long term boyfriend and shared a flat with my youngest sister in Narong Road.  My driving instructor may have had an islander background judging by his dark complexion and shock of wary hair.  He was kind and competent.

‘You’re phobic about driving,’ he said to me one day after months of seemingly getting nowhere.  I drove all right but I panicked whenever I needed to make a major change, for instance whenever I needed to go down the gears to slow down or to stop.

I failed my license twice as a result. The first time I could not bring myself to stop when a man with a wheelbarrow crossed the footpath of the exit to the driving school.  I nearly ran him over.  The instructor stopped the test immediately.  The second time round I failed because I completely stuffed up the parallel parking.  By rights I should have failed a third time because I could not master parallel parking but my final examiner took pity on me and let me through. 

I have not been able to parallel park since those days, but if there is a large enough space between cars I can now reverse into place without too many turns of the wheel.  I’m comfortable driving these days but I was such an anxious driver in my early years that I have worried about passing on these anxieties to my daughters.  It seems I have not succeeded.  They are all more confident behind the wheel than I ever was.  

I think I may be experiencing similar difficulties as I experienced learning to drive in relation to writing my book,  not writing it per se, but putting it together.

It is as if I have trouble getting the gears to work in harmony in order to master my story.  You might have noticed, a tendency to be all over the shop.  

Still, I tell myself, I will get there.  What other writer hasn’t struggled in such an endeavour?  Besides, I learned to drive in my twenty second year finally and I have been driving ever since, give or take a year when I first held my license, but was too scared to use it.  Now that's another story.