Columns

Inside the tram it smelt like wet sheep. The floor was smeared with a cocktail of Coke, coffee and winter rain. We’d all had enough and were heading home. No one looked more debilitated by the working day than the man sitting opposite me. His face was a picture of misery. I looked away then looked back again. The shape of the face, the colour of the eyes. Something familiar from a time when all faces were new and therefore unlike any others. Those faces can stick in your memory for decades.

The word shy has a number of different meanings, none of which are flattering. To ‘shy away from’ something implies avoidance. ‘To shy’ can also mean to move suddenly in fright. To ‘be shy of’ something can mean to come up short, or be insufficient. And to be a shy person in our extrovert-worshipping age can be seen as being inadequate for the task of relentlessly positive self-presentation.

 To the girl standing right in front of me at the Byron Bay Blues Festival recently: Because you have only lived in that creamy clear skin for two decades I don’t expect you to know that it was not polite of you and your friend to push your way through the crowd of people who had been standing on their tired mud-caked feet for over an hour in order to be close to the front when Paul Simon sauntered on stage.

Stepsisters often get a bad rap. Think of poor Cinderella, dealing with not one but two of them, both ugly, selfish and vain. Think of poor Mary Shelley (author of Frankenstein), whose stepsister Claire Clairmont was rumoured to have had an affair with Shelley’s famous husband, Percy the poet. Just a couple of months ago US gossip magazine Newsweek featured a breathless tale of a poor woman whose dream wedding venue was ‘stolen’ by her wicked stepsister. But I’m here to tell a different tale about these much-maligned siblings.

How do you use language to illuminate the darkest moments in a life? How do you recount the desolation of grief without further wounding yourself - or your readers? Can writing tether you to a place of safety when you are engulfed by vulnerability? These are questions Justy Phillips and Sian Prior were forced to contemplate whilst writing their recently-published memoirs.

Early in May this year, just before Mother’s Day, I flew to Vietnam for the first time. It was a planned escape. I wanted to avoid being ambushed by media images of motherhood - the breakfasts in bed, the bunches of flowers, the adoring children. In Vietnam, mothers are celebrated in August, not May, so my first day in Hanoi would be an ordinary Sunday. No danger of being reminded of my involuntary childlessness. Or so I thought.

We’ve all been there. Walking down a dark laneway at night, our senses suddenly hyper-acute, checking for danger. Listening behind us for footsteps breaking into a run. Listening ahead of us for footsteps falling silent. Using our ears because our eyes don’t work so well in the dark.

This has been my experience night after night as I’ve walked home from the local train station. When you’re a theatre critic night work is inevitable. Most of the time I feel lucky to be living only a ten-minute stroll to the train. And yet, night after night, I’ve had to steel myself to enter the long dark alley between the station and the end of my street.

In the main street of a small town in northwest NSW there’s a street sign covered in hieroglyphics. The strange wedge-shaped strokes look like some ancient Sumerian script. ‘Stock Brands of the Liverpool Plains’, the title says. Next to the hieroglyphics is a list of names - ‘Known Early Squatters’ - and all but one are men.

As I wander the deserted town I notice all the names on all the buildings – lawyers offices, proprietary hotels, automotive repair shops – are men’s names. The women are silent and invisible in the public records of this town. Behind the scenes, though, the women have been making themselves heard.

I’ve been teaching writing as therapy for eight years, but I’ve been practicing it for decades. Since my teens I’ve found writing to be the best way to make meaning from my thoughts and feelings, and to manage my anxieties. Some people keep a daily diary as a way of making that meaning. Others might write a memoir, a poem or a short story. All forms of creative writing can help us shape narrative from the chaos of our daily lives. But how does it work?

Thirteen times: that’s how often I’ve packed up my personal diaries and carted them from one house to another over the years. That’s a hell of a lot of cardboard boxes stuffed with notepads full of stuff about me. Why did I do it?

Recently I joined a small gathering of women who had volunteered to read out random excerpts from their youthful diaries. At the event dubbed ‘The Symphony of Awkward’ we fell about laughing as we paraded our unedited former selves in front of each other. How quickly embarrassment can mutate into hilarity when it is shared.

Once every change of season I pack my bags, travel to a nearby suburb and get semi-naked amongst a group of strangers. This intimate ritual has become a highlight of my social almanac. Before you jump to conclusions, let me be clear: there’s no hanky-panky involved. The ritual of undressing is called Clothes Swap and it involves a loose collective of about twenty-five women, many of whom only ever meet at these events.

I've fallen in love with a media star. And here's what I've learnt: front-page fame won't necessarily save you from extinction. My love-object first hit the headlines a couple of decades ago when former premier Jeff Kennett dismissed it as a "trumped up corella". The orange-bellied parrot (its real name) was getting in the way of Kennett's plan to move a chemical storage facility to Point Lillias, near Geelong. The "OBP" was endangered and Point Lillias was one of the places the remaining parrots came to feed.

Here’s a weird fact: a couple of years ago the most popular new emoji on the interwebs was that little face with the rolling eyes. You know the one – contempt embodied in a yellow circle. It should come with the sound effect of a sigh. I thought about this emoji recently when I heard an elderly man farewell a woman with the words ‘good girl!’ The three of us were in a lift together and as the silver-haired gent exited, the woman turned to me and rolled her eyes.

I’ve never had the courage to move to a new town. I’ve thought about it often, perused property listings in warmer places, fantasised about fresh starts. Stayed put. So I admire and envy people who take the plunge. How do they make those new friendships that are so vital for our sociable species? This July I have been in Mildura on a four-week writing residency. I could have stayed behind closed doors, used my writing project as an excuse to be anti-social. But I was curious about this town and its folk. So I put the lead on the dog and began walking the streets.

As a child, my unattainable object of desire was a giant Derwent pencil set. I knew that if I could just get my hands on one of those big boxes, my whole life would be more colourful. It took four decades but last Christmas I finally scratched that itch and bought myself a set of 36 Derwents. I pored over those creatively-named pencils, wondering who’d first come up with Blue Violet Lake and Golden Brown.

One of the things I miss most about life before You-Know-What is singing with choirs. Monday nights you would normally find me hanging out with a chamber choir. Wednesday nights it was a French choir, and on Sunday nights the neighbours had to put up with my noisy quartet. Tiring days morphed into inspiring nights when I was making music with other tired-then-inspired choristers.

Want to hear a good news story? Fifteen years ago I travelled from the north to the south coast of Timor Leste to visit some friends. We hadn’t met before, but we were officially friends, courtesy of an agreement between my local council and theirs. In 2005 there were a handful of ‘friendships’ between Australian local governments and East Timorese communities. The City of Port Phillip, where I was living, had befriended the town of Suai in the district of Covalima, and I was curious to see what that friendship looked like.

When you’re childless not by choice, Mother’s Day can be a painful reminder of profound loss. For some it’s miscarriage, for others it’s infertility, and then there’s something called ‘circumstances’, a term with a complex set of sub-categories. My story involves all three.