Category: Writing

People who work in the arts world need patience.

A visual artist can probably bring an idea to fruition more quickly than others: a painting or drawing may be completed in hours, but often it takes much longer. But then there is the puzzle of how to share the piece with others; unless they view or buy it, the appreciation is fleeting and perhaps never to be repeated. It may end up being relegated to the back of a studio.

Performance arts involve long periods of planning and rehearsal, then culminate in one or several performances. Those who watch and enjoy have to carry the memory and images of these occasions and the feelings they evoke, but the actual events may never be repeated. Months of work is over in a few hours.

A writer faces a long period of gestation. Longer than a pregnancy, probably. Anything from months to years, with no guarantees that anyone will ever see this embryonic manuscript. It may take some time before the words even begin to appear on the screen. Some books involve massive research while others are inspired cameos written in notebooks, devices on the run or the back of a paper napkin.

My books spawn many sticky notes, shifted endlessly around on an empty wall. The chapters jostle for their order and some are deleted in rash moments, only to be dug out from computer trash and restored to dignity somewhere else in the evolving story. Ideas that seemed brilliant at the start are left sitting on the languishing list of thoughts, some never make it to the written word.

(more…)

It was as near to “hearing a voice” as I can remember. I had finished writing my own lengthy story and was struck by the fact that Veronica had only needed two paragraphs to document her part in my life. Veronica Knight, as dear as a daughter, had been like a member of our family for about three years in the 1970s. We were newly married and living in Adelaide; Peter worked as a residential care worker with troubled young men and I was teaching at a Lutheran secondary college.

We met Veronica when her hostel contacted us and said she was looking for a church or youth group. That was the beginning, and before long, she had become part of our family through informal foster care and an enthusiastic participant in the life of our church. In 1974, Veronica was nearly sixteen. She had no family and was mildly intellectually disabled. Lovable and cheeky, she lived life with gusto that belied her abandonment as a child and consequent status as a ward of the state.

Soon after she turned eighteen, she disappeared forever. As the tragic events of the Truro serial, tandem murders of 1976-7 emerged in Adelaide some years later, we had to absorb the shocking fact that she had been the first victim.

Forty years later, a lifetime had passed and our own children had grown up and given us many grandchildren. Veronica was a memory tucked into her special corner of my heart. Until I wrote about her and was shocked by how little I knew. Soon after, I was in hospital, recuperating from a knee operation. I began chatting to one of the nurses who then showed me a book she had written about losing her mum to cancer (tinyurl.com/np69s). She was touched that I downloaded it and read it in one night, but it set me thinking.

What had I experienced in my life that was deeply human and might resonate with others, as had nurse Leigh’s simple story? That was when I heard a voice, at least in my head, that said, “Write about Veronica”.

(more…)

Children all say to their parents at some stage, ‘Tell me a story’. Sometimes they want wild, fanciful and even scary stories; other times it will be about an almost forgotten, distant childhood kept alive by the retelling by their parents.

My mother, Jean.

My mother, Jean, would have been ninety-nine today were she still alive. Sweet, outgoing and essentially humble, she always said that her life was ordinary. As a gift for her eightieth birthday, my brother met with her weekly and asked her about her life, recording the conversations. He transcribed these into a book with almost no editing and captured Mum’s extraordinary story: born and brought up in China and India, separated from her parents as a child and then when her parents were interned during the war, working with hundreds of orphans in Hong Kong – all before she turned 30! Her life was far from ordinary, and the captured story reads like a novel. Soon after that, she slid slowly into dementia.

Roy, my paternal grandfather, never told me his story. Like many who returned from World War 1, he kept its horrors to himself. After he died, I discovered from my father that Grandad played an important part in the war on the Western Front at Fromelles and was taken prisoner there. He did not come home to his wife of three weeks for three long, terrible years, but carried for the rest of his life the memories of what historians have sometimes called the worst twenty-four hours in Australian history.

(more…)