The Writer's House

The Writer’s House I could not sleep the night before I travelled to the Blue Mountains. I could not bring myself to go to bed. I wanted the night to pass without my losing sight of it in sleep. I wanted to keep hold of the familiar before launching myself into the unknown. Vera, the organiser of the Writers House, had told me in an email that the train from Sydney airport to Katoomba would take three hours. I was welcome to arrive on the Monday around one pm. So I booked an early flight. I woke before the alarm at ten minutes to four and showered quickly, then drove my car into the long-term car park at Melbourne airport before taking off on a plane bound for Sydney and then by train towards the Blue Mountains and Varuna, the Writers House. It was an uneventful trip apart from the fog that descended as the train from Central Station chugged its way into Katoomba. The entire trip took far less time than I had bargained on. I arrived mid morning with hours to spare. It is strange to be writing this now and to think back to that time when I first arrived at Katoomba railway station with a suitcase filled with clothes, my computer, a portable printer and great expectations. I travel heavy because I like to have clothes available for every possible weather change. I patted myself on the back then in Katoomba. If I had not followed my instincts and the weather forecast that I had looked up beforehand on line, I would not have taken my jacket and running shoes and I would most certainly have suffered from the cold on those first two days when the mist that shrouded the Writer’s House in a grey blanket left me feeling as if I were in the middle of Europe in winter. I stopped for a hot chocolate at one of the many cafes along the main road outside the railway station and finished the book I had taken for the journey, Ann Patchett’s Truth and Beauty. A Patchett, 2004. In the café I read about Lucy Grealy’s death from a heroin overdose and wondered again why so many people have taken Ann Patchett to task for daring to write as she has about her beloved friend, Lucy Grealy, the author of the acclaimed Autobiography of a Face. Some time after Truth and Beauty was published, Suellen Grealy, Lucy Grealy’s sister launched an attack on Patchett, which took the form of an article ‘Hijacked by Grief’. ‘Books on the Brain blog’. In it Suellen Grealy expresses her family’s displeasure at Patchett’s work. The article first appeared in 2004 in The Guardian and has since been published online. Suellen Grealy’s lament has attracted a great deal of attention largely in the form of critical comments either condemning Patchett for her cruel disregard for her friend and her appalling writing – this from many commentators who have not even read Truth and Beauty – or alternatively praise for Patchett’s efforts. I could use the response to these books I thought to illustrate my thesis topic: the degree to which life writing and autobiography can emerge from powerful feelings, including shame, rage and a desire for revenge. I was conscious as I sat in the café that every movement I made, every experience I had, held the promise of my life on a journey, my life away from home, away from the safe and the familiar and I thrilled at the thought of beginning. Only let it happen now. Vera had told me in her email that if I arrived early I could drop off my bags at the house and go for a walk until my room was ready. At eleven I decided to try my luck. The taxi cost me eight dollars, which gives some idea of how close the Writer’s House is to the railway station. Again I had expected a longer journey. I had tried to come to Varuna with an open mind, but once there I found so many of my expectations turned on their head. Even the woman who greeted me at the front door was not Vera as I had anticipated but one of the writers from a previous group. She was waiting for a taxi for her return to Melbourne after a weeklong workshop. ‘You have the second best room, my room, the Ladder Room’ she told me, after she had checked my name at the entrance. ‘It has a wonderful view.’ The writer was leaving just as I was arriving. Her bed was scarcely cold. There is a regular flow through of writers at Varuna. Scarcely a week goes by when there is not some group or other active and busy at the Writers House. Another Varuna associate, Joan, was cleaning out rooms but she interrupted her work to take me on a guided tour given that Vera had stepped out for a few minutes. ‘I can show you all the rooms now,’ she said, ‘before the other people arrive and make them private.’ My room was indeed the second best room and given that there are five separate spaces in which to stay at Varuna I had no complaints, until I saw the best room, which had its own en suite. I wondered then about the decision to allocate rooms. Was there a pecking order or were rooms allocated on a first come, first served basis? I did not care, I told myself, but in the back of my mind – my competitive mind – I wondered about my fellow writers. Were we ranked in order of age, of writing success, of talent, or was it merely the luck of the draw? The other writers from my group arrived in dribs and drabs, but we did not get together till six that evening when we first met Peter Bishop, the creative director, and shared a glass of wine before dinner, which had been scheduled for six. ‘Five women in a group is not unusual at Varuna,’ Peter Bishop told us. ‘Applications come in at a ratio of four to one, female to male.’ Peter Bishop is a warm and gentle man who glows with pleasure when he talks to us. He has a manicured, sandy coloured beard streaked with grey, and reminds me of my father, in facial appearance only. He is not tall like my father, nor is he short; he is somewhere in between, and a man whose physicality seems of less importance than his mind. I barely notice the clothes he wears. His words carry more weight. Peter Bishop tells us that he is interested in the process of writing, particularly creative non-fiction, although he hates the term. ‘Robin Hemley from Iowa University who visited last week prefers the term essaying,’ Peter Bishop says. ‘But this term also has its problems.’ He then raises the question: ‘What conversation does the writer have with the reader?’ His question is rhetorical. ‘Write without an audience in mind,’ Peter Bishop tells me later during my first private interview with him. ‘And follow the tangents.’ He quotes Vasco Popper: ‘He travels without a path and the path is born behind him’. Three times the next day as I explore this new territory I walk up the wrong driveway to the Writer’s House. Three times I trick myself into believing I am headed in one direction when I have in fact taken a wrong turn. ‘Creative non-fiction is an associative process,’ Peter Bishop says. ‘Follow the tangents. They will take you where you need to go.’ Day two and we are on the run down to dinner. I look forward to it. Sheila who has cooked for writers at the Writer’s House for something like seventeen years is herself a writer, she tells me, though not so much of late. ‘I started to write after my marriage broke up,’ Sheila says after I tell her about my thesis topic. ‘I’m sure I wrote out of revenge then,’ she says. Sheila prepares our dinners with the flair and style of a celebrity chef. She dresses as though she is about to join us for dinner rather than simply prepare it. ‘It’s a part time job and I love it,’ she says. ‘I get to meet all these wonderful people and still have time for myself.’ Sheila is as much of an icon at the Writers House as Peter Bishop and Varuna’s founder and previous owner, the twentieth century novelist, Eleanor Dark. The house reeks of history, and all those who visit whether from near or far away are readily seduced into playing some part. On the afternoon of that second day I take a walk down a steep path carved into the side of a hill. It has steps in places and is muddy underfoot. I do not wear the type of shoes I should have worn, because I had planned on a much less exciting venture out into the last of the day’s sun. The cold mist has cleared to an eye blue sky and now it is hot. I am weary and could almost enjoy a nap, if only for a short time. My head is filled with ideas. I walk along Sherman Street and take the turn into Loftus. From there I find my way down the slope to a recreation reserve. Take the tangents, I tell myself as I walk along the safety of the hot and sticky bitumen. Take the tangents, I think as I turn off the road onto a narrow unpaved walkway that leads down through the bush to the reserve. When you take tangents through overgrown places you are likely to meet snakes, I tell myself as I scurry past upended logs. A perfect home for snakes those logs. Take care, I tell myself, but not too much care. This writing process is fraught – too much caution and the writing dies. No caution at all and you can wind up in trouble. In her book, Reading, Writing and Leaving Home, Lynn Freed says, you must choose between ‘the truth and decency’. L Freed, 2006, p. 38. And along the way, someone is bound to be hurt. In all likelihood it will be you. It is a constant preoccupation. I live between two worlds: that of a writer and that of wife and mother, and between two other worlds: that of a psychotherapist and that of a writer. Often times they seem incompatible. My mind leaps furiously from one association to another. I cannot get it to settle anywhere. I am trying to travel up the one-way drive to Varuna. I am trying to explore the idea that a writer’s desire for revenge can stimulate writing, but there is no narrative in it, only abstract reasoning and I cringe at all my stops and starts. I am troubled by my responsibility to others, including those at Varuna about whom I now write. I cannot write about my children or my husband without some sense of disloyalty, of using them as fodder for my concerns. Equally I cannot write about the people with whom I work as a therapist. This leaves me with the past – that foreign country – or fictionalised versions of the present. Lily Brett once wrote a story about her stepdaughter’s decision to announce to her stepmother that she was gay. L Brett, 2000. The story makes me wonder about Brett’s stepdaughter’s feelings. Was she pleased to be included thus in her stepmother’s story? My children would not give me permission to write about them so liberally. My children might feel eviscerated, the way I would feel were my mother to write about me. In my mother’s autobiography, my birth is recorded, like that of all my brothers and sisters, and little else. At the back of her book, my mother lists her children’s achievements, largely in the form of profession for the boys and marital status for the girls, sometimes both for both. To use Carolyn Steedman’s term, we are bit players in our mother’s drama. C Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman, Virago, London, 1986, 2000, pp. 5-6. And so perhaps it should be. Although there are others who have written hauntingly and necessarily about their children, I cannot do so. Why then do I feel free to write about my siblings, not that I do so as much as I might? To write about myself I must inevitably write about them. They feature in my memories, like the smells and tastes of the past. Yet it becomes dangerous to write about them, too. ‘Don’t write about the living,’ a writing agent once told me. ‘Or if you must, then fictionalise them.’ Whereas others insist I write the ‘truth’. If there is a storm outside the Writer’s house, Joan tells me that first day, it might cause a power surge and burn out the insides of your computer. Every word I write at Varuna seems fragile therefore, as if it is only a matter of time before it gets burned, lost, or destroyed. After my walk I wait for Sheila to arrive with dinner and I watch from my upstairs window as Vera drags two rubbish bins out onto Sherman Street. That’s our job I want to say. We have a roster of tasks as part of our commitment to our stay, but Vera cannot hear me unless I scream and I do not want to interrupt my fellow writers. I imagine Drusilla Modjesksa seated at her writing desk or one similar to the chair on which I am now seated. She writes with a focus, but I am all over the place. I cannot focus and my seat is too low but I cannot work out how to adjust it and I do not want to disturb the other writers to ask for help. So I plod on regardless as my hand grows irritated from the height. Outside my window the sun dips lower. It is still bright enough to turn the adjoining buildings gold. The Writer’s House is rendered over in circular strokes and painted in a mustard colour, with dark turquoise doors and window ledges. A group of butterflies flutters alongside a wall of bricks in the middle of the garden. My mind wanders to the opening of some book I once read. It opens at the scene of a brick wall lined with moss, cratered in parts, worn in others. In her book on writing, Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott says you can only write as far as the headlights on your car illuminate the road ahead. A Lamott, Bird by Bird: some instructions on writing and life.,Random House, New York, 1995. The road ahead seems very dark at present, as if my headlights have dimmed into non-existence, a disappearing trick. The sun slips further behind a cloud. I think of recent events in my life where others have complained about my autobiographical writing. It is too explicit they say, too self-revealing for a psychotherapist. If I have become a loud and obnoxious person then who speaks out when others would prefer not to hear, how much does it have to do with the disappearing, which like the business of being silenced has left me without a body, without a voice, a woman of her time? I kick off my shoes. I pad around the carpeted room and stair well of the house as if I live here. I wait for the dinner to be served and my body aches with the inactivity of being the one who is waited upon rather than one who attends. I am reminded of Modjeska’s thoughts about the composer Stravinsky. She writes about the great man who once insisted that he be free to think about his compositional work throughout mealtimes and that his family, including his small children, respect this by staying silent throughout the meal. D Modjeska, Stravinsky’s Lunch, Picador, Sydney, 1999. Why not take his tray up to his room, Modjeska wonders? Why inflict his needs onto others, especially his children? Why should art take precedence over life? I ask myself the same questions again and again, for here in the rarefied space of the Writers House for seven days I live the life of a writer and my domestic and professional life with its duties and tensions have been absorbed by the call of my craft. My children and my husband must wait at home for me, must fend for themselves while I am attended to by others in order that I might be free to write. In the mornings I feel the crisp and sudden shock on my feet against the cold linoleum of the kitchen whenever I make yet another cup of coffee, another cup of tea. The kitchen retains its cool even as the days hot up. It is located at the centre of the house underneath the stairs. It looks out onto a neighbour’s back yard. Early one day I notice three children, two of them girls, jumping up and down on an above ground trampoline. They are protected from falling onto the hard ground below by a thick green mesh screen that circles the trampoline like a mosquito net. They squeal with joy. They are naked. I wonder: Does the Writers House provide a similar cocoon for writers? We bounce up and down on the trampoline of our lives, naked, protected against falling onto the unforgiving and skull cracking ground, at least for a time? In spite of this illusion of protection, I am still aware of the dangers both inside and outside in this business of writing. ‘Please drive at a walking pace.’ The sign at the entrance to the circular driveway that leads up to the Writer’s House serves as a warning. Do not run, do not speed through words, or ideas or events or details or description with too much haste or you will not be welcome here. That is fine. This is a wool gathering time, I tell myself and I am a cobbler. Mixed images, I know but they come to me as I sit here trying to walk my way across an unfamiliar keyboard and into meaningful writing. It is one way up a narrow winding driveway to the Writing House and one way out via a shorter and flat road at the side. The paint on the house is faded and in patches is covered in lichen and dark stains. The house however inside and out is clean and cared for in an old-fashioned sort of way. The books that line the bookshelves in each room are faded from their once new state and there is the smell of rising damp. So what of my surrounds, I have come here to write. What is it about being on a writing retreat that makes it so hard to write, that makes it so hard to get a sense that the words on the page are of any value whatsoever? For the past ten years I have wanted to come to Varuna. I toyed with applying for a fellowship but did not consider I had enough material or a solid enough sense of my writing project to apply. I put the thought out of my head. Then one day a friend told me I could go to Varuna if I were prepared to pay a fee. That was it, I thought. When the time was right, I would buy my way. I would buy my way into the Writing House and I would share the wonderful experience that so many other writers have shared. Even with money enough to pay my way the business of organising my visit to Varuna did not come easy. Time was a problem. Every time Vera put out a call for interested participants with suggested dates they did not fit in with my work schedule or my family’s requirements. At the beginning of the year 2009 however, the dates for the final opportunity for that year, seven days at Varuna during the penultimate week before Christmas, became a possibility. I could start my holidays a week early. And still get home with four days to spare before the mad rush to Christmas. I talked it over with my husband. ‘Go for it,’ he said, little knowing then how much he would hate it when the time came. He came to hate it because he was under pressure with his own work and ill equipped to deal with the extra domestic load at home that I like so many other women perform – invisible mending – every day. All that year whenever I have found myself stuck with my writing, whenever I have found myself obsessed with my on line blogging life, I have told myself, ‘it’s okay, you’re going to Varuna for a week soon and there all will be revealed’. You will work hard. You will write and write. You will have the opportunity, I told myself daily, that you long for – the opportunity to write uninterrupted for hours on end. You will not bother to access the Internet. You will say goodbye to your blog friends at least for the week and you will leave your work and your family to fend for themselves. I fear I have travelled here with a particular path in mind, to work on my thesis topic, and it obscures the new path I must create. I sit in the lounge room at Varuna listening to Peter Bishop talk on and on about the business of creative non-fiction, and about the need to work past the hump that inevitably arises for any writer at some point during their project. He talks about publishers even as he tells us we should not think too much about publishers, at least not until a certain time. ‘Don’t go near a publisher until the moment when you can be sure that your book knows what it is.’ Peter Bishop preaches the language of non-expectation, of openness to discovery, to the mystery that is the writing process. We each have a separate meeting with him to discuss our various projects. I offer to go last. For me last is best. It is the position of the youngest child. Not that I am the youngest. If you go last you might get more time. On the other hand, you might get less, or worse you might get an exhausted interviewer who has little energy or enthusiasm left for you, whose yawns he tries to conceal behind flared nostrils. Not so Peter Bishop. He has as much energy for me when we meet as I imagine he had when he began the series of five interviews at ten that morning. He calls for me sometime after four and we spend the next hour and more moving through his thoughts on my project. ‘These are more or less writer’s notes,’ he says of the pile of writing I have sent to him, my attempt at a manuscript, which I do not yet possess. That’s okay, I think to myself. I do not mind. He is right after all. I have sent him my thesis chapters knowing that even to me they make for ‘boring’ reading. They are too academic by half. ‘You have a book in here somewhere,’ he says. ‘But you need to get to it.’ Peter Bishop quotes from a poem on ‘Doubts and Loves.’ Doubts and loves, I want to spit it out at him. ‘What about doubts and hates?’ I say. ‘Whenever I write about the events of the past, I am assaulted by feelings of fury and rage, so bad I could almost kill.’ Peter Bishop’s eyes light up. ‘Good,’ he says. ‘Write into the rage.’ He leans forward in his seat. ‘I once told a writer to vomit on the page. Get it out. Write without worrying where it will take you. Write without thinking of publication. Forget your audience. Write to explore.’ I leave this first meeting filled with the exhilaration that comes from time spent with a man who is interested in my writing struggle and a man who seems to see more value in my struggle than I; a man who might lead me out of the morass in which I find myself after two short days at the Writer’s House. Nothing I have written thus far sings to me. Nothing meets my expectations. Some of it I cannot bear to read back over. I am too afraid of what I have written, too afraid of myself as audience. My reading self is more vicious than my writing self. My reading self has read the works of other writers. My reading self has read Drusilla Modjeska, the writer, I tell Peter Bishop, whom I would most like to emulate. I know that it is a useless endeavour comparing myself with the famous and the established, but I cannot help myself. I am sixth in line in a family of nine, still waiting for my turn. On this fourth morning I put on my red shoes. My red shoes, my dancing shoes, my dangerous shoes. Today I write about my rage, red for rage, the colour of fury, of fire and of fear. Peter Bishop says I can write about my rage. I can write about the circle in which I was once trapped, the circle of the association from which I am now excluded. When you are inside the circle, the circle is closed and you are part of the closed circle, part of the inside, an insider, safe and snug, but once you are wrenched outside of the circle, it closes behind you and no longer can you get back inside without wrenching the circle open and that is impossible. Nor is it desirable. Once outside the circle, as an outsider, you look at the circle through different eyes, the eyes of the outsider. We meet together with Peter Bishop for a second time as a group on day four. I have spent the early morning writing into my rage but I do not feel uplifted by the experience. I am devastated at how prosaic my prose has become. It reads like a chronicle of boring events, at least it would read that way were I to read back over what I have written but I cannot bring myself to do this. I walk away from my writing and sense I have left behind a pile of mutilated bodies strewn across the page. My writing is a travesty of anything I might have once imagined I could produce here during my visit to Varuna. Peter Bishop talks. He talks and talks. It is okay, I think again, as perhaps the others do, because he has things to say that resonate and even though there are moments when I would dearly love to say something out loud, to speak and respond in some way, I resist the impulse. Peter Bishop talks about his own writing and his recognition that so far he himself has not been able to write, perhaps, he says because he is lazy, but then he qualifies this glib comment with another. Perhaps he has spent so many years at Varuna enjoying the stimulation of helping to bring other people’s books into life that it has left him unable to tackle his own. But now he begins to see he tells us that his writing self is separate from his other self, or other selves. The person who runs Varuna, the grandfather, the father and husband who lives a happy and fulfilling life elsewhere is not the same as the writer. The writer lives in darker places, is subversive, a rebel. Peter Bishop’s writing self wants to write about stories of sadness. Happiness, he tells us, is only conceivable on the grounds of being able to accept sadness along with other feelings like anger, jealousy even rage, the mixed feelings, of love and despair. It is necessary, Peter Bishop tells us to begin with a particular episode that might lead the writer into the larger story. The larger story might be one of grief or of rage but it must be entered via its coordinates. The associations to one’s personal story become these coordinates. Four words have emerged in his mind to form Peter Bishop’s coordinates. They are ‘father, home, sadness and work’. The ‘fecundity’ of his story exists in these four words. I listen to Peter Bishop speak and as I do so I try to disengage for long enough to think about my own four words. I write them down in my notebook as if I am taking notes on Peter Bishop’s words. My words are: ‘rage, incest, love and family’. My coordinates include family, the Catholic Church and psychoanalysis – three authorial cornerstones that threaten to overwhelm me at every turn. We reach our coordinates only through the painful process of writing. We cannot get there by force. They will not be coaxed out of hiding; they will not be beaten into presenting themselves. They will only come out through work. Good grief, I say to myself when I look back over these words. Where does the idea of love come from? Am I not overridden with rage? Am I not the person who murders on the page those who have challenged her? Peter Bishop talks about Christmas day in the trenches after a truce was called. The men put down their guns, they buried their dead, smoked cigarettes and played cards, and then they went back to their ‘ordinary’ times in the trenches until the war was over, when they could return to their ‘ordinary’ lives back home. I do not know why the tears run down my cheeks when Peter Bishop speaks to us about the soldiers. His words touch something deep inside of me and I realise yet again that I am overwhelmed with something that I cannot put my hand on. It is not the first time I have been in a meeting when the person who speaks elicits something from the well of my emotions and involuntarily my tears fall. I have no tissue and I refuse to reach over for a serviette from the table where the coffee pot sits half full alongside the morning tea of cakes, bananas and grapes. I keep my head down. I hide behind my glasses. I feel like a small child who imagines that by standing behind a narrow pole she is invisible. I am not invisible yet all eyes are directed towards Peter Bishop and he is far enough away from me on the other side of the room not to notice. The feeling passes as sure as it has come and I can listen again. Peter Bishop talks about the associative process, about how we must hold firm to our flexibility – a paradox again but I am getting used to paradoxes during this strange journey at the Writer’s House. I stop wanting to question every idea, or to make a comment even as the associations that flood my mind as Peter Bishop speaks beg to be let out. The others sit in silence, too, and eventually Peter Bishop looks at his watch and wonders that he has spoken for so long. ‘I’ve always thought that anyone who speaks for longer than an hour is boring,’ Peter says. ‘ No no no,’ we chime in unison. Never boring, but I admit out loud to the occasional wish to say something in response. ‘The writer does not take sides,’ Peter Bishop tells us. The writer admits to all kinds of emotions but she does not take sides. The writer explores why something worries her, why something troubles her, why there is something that she cannot understand. Always with a light tone, Peter Bishop says, a light tone that does not moralise but questions. I talk about the tension I experience when I write, the voices that condemn me, even as I try to write honestly. ‘There is no room for perfectionism in this business of writing,’ Peter Bishop says and again I wonder when he will give us a chance to speak more fully, at the same time I do not mind not having an opportunity to speak. In this strange world where we are offered so many ideas with so little space to respond, does it matter? Yes, the group therapist part of me says, but this is not a group therapy session or even one with my family. I can sit back and let it wash over me. I return to my desk in the Ladder Room in the knowledge that others have sat here before me, other writers, some who may well have typed the very words that made them famous at this desk in this chair. The footstool underneath my desk, a homemade lump of wood covered with faded worn carpet, is testimony to this. The Ladder Room is so named because it houses a fixed wooden ladder that leads up from floor to ceiling. It is attached with bolts to the wall beside my bed, and runs into what looks to be a hinged loft door. I try the ladder one evening after the others have gone to bed. I try it for no other reason than that it is here on the wall beside my bed and there is a manhole above, which begs to be explored. But I cannot shift it. The wood covering the manhole is locked in place. Once again I feel blocked and barred from entry. I go to bed and read Hanif Kureishi’s book Intimacy, raw prose about the breakdown of a relationship. Hanif Kureishi. Intimacy. Faber and Faber, London, 2000. As far as I read it is written through the eyes of a man who is planning to leave his wife of some ten years and abandon his two young boys. I am not such a wife that I would abandon my husband or children, but here I am miles away out of physical reach at Varuna and even now after I have left a call on the answer machine at home at 8 pm there is still no response. I wish I had made arrangements to absent myself entirely. It is hard living between two worlds. Again I ask myself, what am I doing here? For whom am I writing? What am I trying to say? Peter Bishop tells me it is about the sort of conversation I have with my reader. So his is a concern with the process, a process rather than an outcome. When he reflects on his own autobiography of his writing self, he talks about the weight associated with moral values and the lightness associated with ease. ‘It’s what happens,’ he says, ‘when a book knows what it is.’ I do not remember when I first discovered the thrill of note taking, of putting words onto a page as a means of trapping them there and thereby capturing my experience in the writing. When Peter Bishop talks about the process his thoughts flow freely in an associative chain that he could not have rehearsed. He says as much himself. He follows one idea as it links to another in his mind, dependent upon many things I suspect. His chain of associations are linked to the thoughts in his mind that have built up around the five manuscripts he has read, written by the five women who sit in front of him hungry for his knowledge. The chain of his associations is also linked to the long history of his experience as a writing mentor, fifteen years at Varuna, shepherding writers in the process of putting pen to paper, fingers to the keyboard, images, feelings and thoughts into words. Peter Bishop is a man who speaks from his own experience with what seems at times to be little censorship. He does not check himself when he speaks about his childhood, nor when he speaks of his family life in the here and now. On the surface he need not censor himself. His family life both then and now has a quality of respectability that makes it safe to talk about. We the listeners read between the lines. Perhaps it is the therapist in me, the one who seeks out difficulties, but if ever someone tells me they have had a wonderful and happy childhood, I doubt them. I write these things and I worry again about the legitimacy of my words. How will the man himself feel were I to write about his musings in public? We have not been sworn to secrecy. These meetings are not group therapy where the therapist urges members to avoid contact with one another outside of the meetings and where the therapist tries to remain opaque. And yet I hesitate to write about him. But I am a writer and my experience is my stock in trade. Why do I find myself travelling down this path? Why have I taken it upon myself to write about my experience of my time at Varuna rather than writing about all the other things that teem through my mind? Is this itself an act of revenge, a subversive gesture towards the person who has encouraged me, who is even now encouraging me to write into my rage? ‘Don’t be a good girl’ says Peter Bishop, ‘or be a good girl by all means but don’t write about it. I’m not interested in the good, the safe and tame. I and your readers want to hear about the not so good things, the things that trouble you, the things that cause you grief, the things that make you feel bad about yourself.’ Peter Bishop tells us that he is such as person. That he lives a good exemplary life as father, as grandfather as the writing organiser at Varuna but as a published writer on the page he is not. He gives me permission to write as I write now, despite my hesitation. I take notes when I listen to Peter Bishop. I try to capture his words. I try to hold them down for fear they will soon disappear from my mind and memory. But not all of them will disappear. I will be able to hold onto the odd notion here and there. And perhaps it is this odd notion here that matters more than my entire note taking can hold. Still I write fast and furiously. The way I wrote as a child around the dinner table at night after school. I took notes from my textbook, The Web of Life in the life cycle of the dung beetle. The dung beetle feeds on decaying matter. The dung beetle feeds on sheep droppings. The sheep eat the grass; the grass absorbs the sunlight and the moisture to feed itself and to prolong its life. We all feed on one another, babies at their mother’s breasts. Am I a parasite, like the tic that lives in the hides of animals for both home and sustenance? Is this what I am doing here now in writing about my time at Varuna, much of which includes my experience of its patron/father, Peter Bishop? I sense it when I sit opposite him in my individual sessions. I sense the presence of my father. I know that this is what therapists call transference. I know I should take it carefully. I know I should not let my projections onto Peter Bishop dominate my thinking, but still it is his beard, his long greyish beard – perhaps not so long and there are sandy red flecks through it – but it reminds me of my father, the once-was-soldier in the trenches for whom I weep, against whom I rage, whose memory I cannot eradicate. The mist is rising outside Varuna now in much the way it rose the first day I came to the Writers House. The moisture from the rain that fell overnight rises with the increasing warmth of the day. The air is still. I rehearse asking Peter Bishop for permission to write about him. He tells us at one point that he had once found it strange when he read something that someone else had written about him. ‘Is this how I am?’ he pondered. ‘Is this how I come across?’ As I write these words the under pinners at my house back in Melbourne dig deep holes in one side into which they pour concrete. Soon when the concrete has set they jack up a corner of my house in order to rest it in the ground. The water from the down pipes on one side of the house over the years has eroded the soil there and this along with the drought has caused the house to sink. Rock dry soil has no moisture. It has no flexibility. The house sinks, the walls crack. I have been lonely at Varuna much of the time. And this is not so bad, not to be avoided, I tell myself. On the fourth day, the worst day for me at Varuna, I do not speak to anyone all day until dinnertime. Apart from a brief hello to other writers in the kitchen we are like ships passing in the night. I consider this to be a first experience for me. I am so rarely alone for more than an hour or two at a stretch. Keep an open mind, I tell myself. Do not run seek out company as a way to escape your mind. Keep your flexibility, Peter Bishop urges us. Write with a light touch, in other words do not get too caught up in the stuff of moralising. Doubts and loves, he says, will keep you on track. Epilogue It is almost a month now since I visited Varuna. Already the memory fades. I knew at the time that my experience there was difficult. For all the good things I took in, I could sense myself in pain much of the time. Peter Bishop said that he likes to hear that people are struggling, that people are finding the writing process difficult. It signifies that something good is happening. Cold comfort when you are in the middle of the struggle, when everything you write feels like so much dross, and that the gold of the words you had hoped to call forth drops through the thin holes of your mind’s colander and is lost in the long grassy ground beneath. All you are left with is dross. But no, Peter Bishop tells me I have a ‘compost heap’ of writing here. He intends it as a comfort, because as he says good things grow out of compost. But to me compost is like practice. It happens behind the scenes. It cannot be brought forward as the finished product. In my memories I am back at the kitchen table of my childhood home in Cheltenham one evening after school. I take notes in my textbook. I take notes on tiny sheets of pink paper that I hide within the pages of my textbook. On these pink slips of paper I transcribe my father’s words. My father’s words are those of a mad man, unhinged by drink and by grief. The grief that comes from a troubled childhood in a family filled with secrets and lies, the grief that comes from fighting in a war that he could never speak about. And no one else could speak to him either. ‘He wasn’t always mad,’ my mother says. ‘He wasn’t always like that. He didn’t always drink. But there were times, just a few, when I said something or did something that seemed to upset him in ways I could not understand and for days on end he refused to speak to me. He would leave for work in the morning without saying goodbye. He would lie in bed beside me in the night time without saying a word. He would sit at the breakfast table behind his newspaper and ignore me. I had become invisible and I learned to stop pleading with him at these times to speak to me because I knew it would pass.’ ‘Secrets, lies and silence,’ Peter Bishop tells us; this is the nourishment of families. All families, he says. Silence is a weight and one we cannot avoid, but the way we carry it, whether lightly or like a rock around our necks bearing us down, determines the bearability of that weight. On the spine of one of the books in my father’s bookshelf there is the image of an oddly shaped baby, at least this is how I saw it when I was ten. I wondered then what could this book contain. The image was stylised, like a cartoon character, a cross between a cutie doll the sort you might buy at the Royal Melbourne Show, a plump little gold haired missy, both baby and vamp and an Inca. The title of the book was in Dutch, Cees van der Bohm or some such name, its author. I never bothered with the Dutch books. I could not read them, but the travel books in English beckoned to me from distant lands, from Japan and Spain, from South America. The bookshelf looms over us like a wall about to drop at any moment, a wall of words. It is summer. It is always summer in this room at the centre of the house where my father sits on his chair beside the heater. I do not see him take books from the shelves. I do not see him read, but he is a learned man. My brothers tell me this. My mother tells me this and I must respect him at all times and not lose sight of his wisdom. Then why is it that so many of my father’s words do not make sense to me, not just the words he says in Dutch but even the English words. He speaks to us as though we are like a wall, one wall that he must penetrate in order to get through to us and it never seems as though he succeeds for whenever he speaks he only shouts louder and louder. The louder he speaks the more my mother buries her head in the newspaper. The louder he speaks the softer her words become until she is like a tiny mouse squeaking and my father a roaring lion. ‘Would you like a cup of tea,’ my mother says, softly it seems, as though she does not want to interrupt him. ‘A cup of tea, a cup of slops.’ My father bangs his fist on the chair. It rattles the bottle on the floor from which he takes occasional sips. My father only uses a glass from which to drink his brandy when we have visitors. On weeknights when he comes home from work and sits in his chair in front of the television which he keeps on long after we have left the room, I can hear him from the hallway. I come back to these memories often when I write as if I am worrying at a sore that will not heal. I know that I should leave it alone, but it becomes the source of so much of my wish to make sense of it and to turn it around. The doll baby on the spine of my father’s book reminds me of the dead foetus babies on the cover of the pamphlets we find in church. Every Sunday the priest leaves them there. I do not understand why there are pictures of dead babies on the seats in church on Sundays any more than I understand why my father’s voice gets louder when he talks to my mother about us, his children. ‘I should have taken the capotje, Liesje,’ He says. ‘I should have taken the pill. Nine children, Liesje, nine children. I go to work? Make money to feed them? But you Liesje, you go to heaven. God loves you, Liesje, you and your bloody children. God loves you. You all go to heaven and I go to hell.’ My father’s words rattle across the room like bullets from a machine gun. In my imagination, I am still inside the room. I am the fly on the wall, the recorder of events, the Hansard reporter. It is morning I say. You will write. You will find words to meet the wall of words your father launched into the lounge room all those years ago. But my words like his words are repetitive. They do not tell a story. They become a lament, a long-winded complaint about the way things are. The way things were. We were his children invisible to him, this father of sorrows and he talked to us as though he were invisible too, a loud man shouting out, more and more desperate to be heard, more and more certain that the only way to be heard was through the volume of his words. When my father spoke his mouth was full of gravel, his accent thick with Germanic gutturals. He found it difficult to make himself understood – a constant torment, to be misunderstood. I write to counteract this. He is dead now. My father is dead, and so I write for him, for my father who became lost in the tragedy of his life story, who became lost in wars that were not of his own making, who became lost under the weight of burdens he could not bear. He built walls with words. I try to break them down with other words, my words. My father/myself. Now I build up fresh walls of words, at the writer’s house. When I first read William Gaddis’s words in the Sunday Age in an article by Don Watson I knew that these words were important. ‘The best writing worth reading comes like suicide from outrage or revenge.’ It is not the first time I have been in a creative hole as deep as this. It is not the first time that I have sat alone at my writing desk wishing for something to come to me, some thread, some thought, some feeling or image that I might follow, but it is no less painful. I ache all over with the refusal. My mind will not give it up. My mind will not let the words flow, will not let me arrive at some point where I can think, ah ha I have it. I know now what I am writing about. I know now what this book is about. I can proceed. I start again and again, so many false starts so many attempts to move beyond this desperate feeling of not knowing what I am doing. And the audience whom I tried to send away only five minutes ago is back again, my parents and siblings in the front row alongside my conscience. They say to me again, in a chorus, what are you on about. We don’t want to know this. Tell us a story instead and make it good. Make it interesting. But if I start to tell a story, I am sure I will be in trouble with someone. That someone will tap me on the shoulder and say ‘what gives you the right’. PAGE 1