More Writers Abroad

The Memoir Project:  Week two and not one of the three of us have written a word.

Kim can’t come today so it’s just Heidi and me.

“We’ll start with the sentence, “Here’s how it happened to me,” I say.  “The idea is we don’t stop writing for five minutes straight.”

We’re sitting in the gym at a plastic table in plastic chairs.  It’s the visiting area for the patients in Forensics 3 of the Arizona State Hospital.  Heidi, a pretty forty-year-old woman, has been sentenced to ten years in prison and her records say she is criminally insane.

This is our third meeting and I see little difference between us.  Probably that should worry me but it doesn’t.

I read mine first.

“Here’s how it happened to me. It was a crispy cold morning in the mountainous town of Kermanshah the day I was nearly arrested.  I’d worn my “Muslin Muslim dress” my mother had made for me – a brown caftan that covered me from my toes to my fingers to my neck.  Still, the group of teenage boys stalked me, stones in hand.”

Heidi writes, “Here’s how it happened to me.  I could not understand the psychiatrist’s questions.  No one else in the room seemed to understand him either.  I felt sad and alone and angry.  The whole thing was ridiculous, a farce.”

I take her notebook from her and write on the top of the page.  “Smell. Touch. Hear. Taste. See.”

“This time,” I say, “Describe the room using your senses.”

“His glasses dangled from his lips as he listened,” she reads next.  “He would not meet my eyes.  Instead, he looked at everyone else, as if he was waiting for their opinions.”

She sighs, and shakes her head.

“What?” I ask. “It’s good.”

“I can’t remember anything else. I’m mixing up all the different sessions I’ve had. I can’t write this.”

“Ok. Start with something smaller. Something small that evokes a big feeling, or a memory.”

“Like?”

“Like, um, the smell of a certain food, or, a door slamming shut, or… Okay, how about this? I’m driving here and this depressed, flat feeling washed over me. It seemed to come out of nowhere, until I noticed a sheet of white clouds over the sun. The light muted all the colors, produced this glare, this, quality that made me think of hot afternoons in Africa where I had to play outside alone while my dad napped each day.”

She gets this. We set the timer and write for another five minutes.

I read, “I knew they would be waiting for me when I emerged from the market.  It was what they always did.  I knew too they could not throw the stones here, where there were so many people. Instead, they would sidle through the crowd until they were close enough to spit on me, or try to fondle me.  I smiled and grasped my heavy bag of potatoes more firmly. I was ready for them today. Me and my five kilos of potatoes were ready to do some serious damage.”

Heidi writes, “They took us to the showers each night, whether we needed to bathe or not.  The wood around the green door was soft and rotting and when the guard turned the key in the lock paint would peel off and fall to the floor.  Inside, everything smelled like mold and mildew. The small green tiles were slick with it, and I always shuddered at the sight of this dark and damp place.”

I nod. “That’s it!”  She nods too, and dips her head down over her writing. This time she doesn’t wait for me to set the timer. 

She goes first. “As I laid my towel and shampoo on the only bench for the six of us, I looked up at the single window of the room, long, narrow, and barred.  Outside, I could see the rolled concertina wire and I thought the same thing I always thought when we trudged in here – this must have been how the prisoners in the concentration camps felt when they were taken to the showers.  To a horrible, scary place like this.  Then I looked through the window again and saw the white, billowing clouds through the barbed wire and I felt a spark of hope, a bit of hope, inspired by the beauty of them.”

I smile. “That worked. You know why? Because you took me with you, and I was there, with you, the whole time. I saw what you saw, and I felt what you felt. Bravo.”

I finish reading mine.

“By the time the police came, he was coming to.  To my surprise, the crowd sided with me, and argued furiously with the police on my behalf.  They seemed impressed, and kept opening my shopping bag and showing the men the potatoes inside.  Eventually the police backed off, and when the boy sat up, and saw everyone laughing at him, he jumped up and ran off.  After that, that particular group of teenagers kept their distance from me, and stuck to rock throwing.”

The buzzer goes off and the prisoners and their visitors stand up.

“Thank you,” she says.  “You’re a good teacher.”

As are you, I think, as I watch them lead her away.

As are you.

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It’s a bit like a fairground. The writing business. So much is beyond your control.  At times, publishers could be akin to fairground ride operators. You know, the guys with the beer guts, sweaty arm pits and cigarettes clinging to papery lips. Taking your dollar bills while you climb aboard the dodgems or the helterskelter. Taking your chances. Putting your faith in their expertise, their wisdom. Hoping they’ll give you a safe ride.

I’ve climbed aboard a fair few writerly ‘rides’ recently. And yes, I handed over a few dollars in entry fees - not my normal modus operandi.  But it was time to send out some of my precious words to share with the bigger wide world. It has been a switchback of a month: two rejections and an acceptance. Is that like two strides backwards and a skip forwards?  It doesn’t feel like it. It feels like flying. Soaring to the heights. One acceptance.  An acceptance - oh yes sirree, someone somewhere liked my stuff enough to pay me fifty bucks for 400 odd words. The rejections are good for somewhere else, the potato story and the anthem to the 17 year old girl will find a place. Of that I am sure.

$50 plus a huge uplift (worth its weight in gold).

You can see it’s been a while since I was paid for my writing. Clocking up 1000 words a day means I’m working for far less than a far off knicker maker in the rag trade. But I’m grateful that I’m able to beaver away in a safe building. Very very grateful indeed. I’ve just whacked off an essay about my own knickers, the ones made in the factory that collapsed. The one where over a thousand workers died. I cry when I put them on. Not that that helps anyone, but I’m a sensitive emotional sort of writer, and I can’t help myself. I’ve just sent that (the essay, not the underwear) off to a lit mag too. As I said (or maybe I didn’t), it’s all about sharing.

Back to the acceptance piece. It emerged as a result of a challenge set by a member of this lovely writing group. Interpretation of the challenge was wide open. So I popped the kettle on (it being my muse,) and the scribbling began. As so very often happens with my work, the ideas creep out of a song.  Emergence was written in the time it took to make and drink one cup of tea. An hour later a call for submissions on the theme of Emergence landed in my inbox. Serendipity? Of course I had to send it. How could I not?

And what d’ya know? It made the cut. Can’t wait to see the premier edition of the magazine itself.  Puffed up with pride, I am.

Cover art by Anita Wexler

If you know your proverbs you’ll know what comes after pride. Yup, a fall. And yet again, something outside of a writer's control. Lulu made a blunder with the coffee table edition (the expensive one) of Distant Voices Talking Drums. Bound someone else’s morbid work in our cover.  They’ve apologised. Really. Apologised. Replaced the misbound copy. That’s it. So right now I‘m pushing the Amazon edition for Kindle.

I’ll not dwell on the falling stuff. I’ll keep the wings flapping. Keep on dodging the other dodgem cars, weeding out the publishers who don’t drink beer, sweat, or smoke from papery lips and maybe one of these days I’ll get the call offering me an advance on my six draft novels.

post script 30 May:  http://www.magcloud.com/browse/issue/573525  is the link for ordering this first issue of a spiffy looking Arts Lit Mag.

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Gosh... what a moment yesterday! A tourist asked me out of the blue if I was a writer. I had to admit to the odd scribble. Well it transpires that she had read an article about Symi that I had written and had been published in a magazine and she recognised me from my picture; a small moment of fame. Admittedly she didn’t shout to her friends “Guess who this is.” She didn’t ask for my autograph either but nevertheless it made me feel good.

I have also another publisher interested in my novel but I won’t hold my breath having been through it all before and bearing Mona’s experience in mind I will be very careful.

It is a beautiful morning here in Symi and I am getting ready to walk to the beach and have a swim. Swimming is a good time for writing inspiration. I can let my mind go blank and see what if anything enters into the void.

It is very strange what inspires me to write.

I was at my pilates lesson and thought I was doing well when it occurred to me that at the ripe old age on seventy I was really fooling myself. But the thought expanded and I wrote about an old lady in a home struggling through her exercises for the elderly but in her mind she was young again and a dancer.

I find I write better when given a challenge or a deadline. I am not good at staring at a blank page looking for inspiration.

On BBC radio every morning for four days a week they unfurl the word of the day; normally some rare and obscure word that no one has ever heard of. The challenge is at the end of the week to take the words and form a sentence or two. I can’t wait to find out the words each week and take up the gauntlet. To date my sentences have been read out every week.

The one below is last week’s effort.

Jean was a music teacher and her pupils loved it when she abandoned her usual serious style and performed PIZZICATO on her violin.

She had a selection of HOMOPHONY music which allowed them all to participate and she would accompany them in her easy CANTABILE singing style; however when it came to learning about SCORDATURA they found it an almost impossible concept to grasp.

So what inspires you to write? Do you need to be pushed or challenged like me or are you one of the lucky ones who can just sit down and let the words flow.

Perhaps we can share ideas and see where it leads.

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