First Chapters
Ngā Wāhangā Tuatahi writing programme 2010
Introduction
Always at the beginning of a writing workshop there is an atmosphere of nervous tension and anticipation as people await the start of the first session. On the afternoon of the very first workshop in Life Writing for the 2010 First Chapters – Ngā Wāhangā Tuatahi programme The Sir Edmund Hillary Library in Papakura I scanned the faces of all thirty new writers and caught in their expressions a mix of expectancy, uncertainty, and apprehension. The anxiety in the atmosphere had a pitch I could hear and feel. Then I asked people to write down what had brought them to the First Chapters programme. There was an exhalation of breath and the room settled into silence. People knew what to write. When they looked up again I could see their hearts had returned to their chests and, as they shared their responses with the person sitting next to them suddenly the room was alive with conversation and comment, with drifts of laughter and exclamation.
Then around the whole group we went sharing our writing dreams, realising we were in this together, bound by the same motivation, that vital need to communicate our stories to others. We discovered that many had been drawn to writing from when they were very young. In childhood they had been read to or they had listened to oral storytelling and discovered the magic of words and how they can create pictures, scenes, worlds beyond our own, words that move and excite and leave one wanting more.
Encouragement had been important. Sometimes a teacher ‘in the primers,’ or later at secondary school had praised a piece of creative writing. One writer remembered opening her writing book and seeing five orange stars lined up beside her story. We found too that the love of the written word had been carried over into jobs and careers where writing is an essential component. There were people from medical and scientific backgrounds, people who worked in the arts, in community organisations, in libraries. For others the storytelling is an essential aspect of their culture and a means of passing on the stories of the ancestors from generation to generation.
Some were motivated to attend the programme by the death of a close family member and the subsequent sorting through boxes of belongings; photographs, diary entries and letters that told stories about that person’s life. Regret was expressed over forgetting to ask the crucial questions and record the answers. Now there was a desire to put that right through writing one’s own story for the immediate family and subsequent generations.
People commented on the vast changes witnessed over a lifetime leading to the current highly technological and trans-global stage of human evolution and wanting to tell stories of a different and simpler way of life where people lived in closer proximity to their families and whanau and the wider community. They wanted to record the freedom they enjoyed as small children able to roam in nature all day long and to describe the games and imaginative play.
We were fortunate to have writers on the programme ranging in age from eighteen to eighty. Some of these writers had reached a mid-life point and were realising they no longer had forever to achieve their writing dreams. It was now or never, they declared. We also discovered in that first ice-breaking round that there were people on the First Chapters programme from all corners of the world; England, Scotland, South Africa, the States, Switzerland, Western Samoa and here in Aotearoa New Zealand we had people of Māori and Pākehā and Pacific origin — so many different perspectives and life experiences that we would listen to and learn from over the next few months.
The framework of my programme revolved around short bursts of timed writing on given themes; birth and early childhood memories, a turning point or a defining memory, the moment when the writer found their place in the world, a portrait of a significant person, of an unforgettable landscape and finally a self-portrait written in the present and containing a reflection on the writer’s life. Over the weeks that ensued participants were introduced to the writing craft through sessions on the editing process and in private mentoring sessions where they were encouraged to extend and deepen the stories. They were given a reading list as well to assist them in their own study of autobiographical literature
At the second workshop participants were asked about their writing space. The answers illustrated a wide spectrum of human solutions from the very pragmatic to the quirky. Some had a desk and a designated writing space in an office or a study. Some worked on the kitchen table, or in a La-Z-Boy chair, or in corners of bedrooms, one writer worked in the garage. Writing went on in the head while swimming or biking. Others worked late at night when the children were sleeping and the computer was finally available. One writer announced that bed was the ideal place and had developed a routine whereby the writing started early in the day and stretched until 11.30am when there was glass of red wine and a piece of blue vein cheese to reward a morning’s work.
And so over a period of four months dozens of stories were written and read aloud in the workshops and critiqued in the mentoring sessions. Then a selection of stories, one from each of the thirty participants was gathered together into a collection entitled ‘Memento.’ At the end of the programme participants were invited to enter a writing competition to feature in the book Translucence” Life Writings from Manukau and Papakura. While eleven stories were eventually chosen for that publication there were many more stories that deserved notice. The following account includes an overview of the stories written for ‘Memento’ and for the publication Translucence.
There were childhood stories of adventure and imaginative play, of running away and getting into trouble. In A Turning Point, a story that features in this book, Annette Bannon writes of how at the age of eight, she and her older sister crept out of the house into the dark night running, running through the frost, over the fields and into the bush. They had escaped, ‘our heartless family and taken matters into our own hands. Our new home would be the forest.’ Other stories from childhood captured the irrepressible, unstoppable energy of young children with one opening on a pronouncement from a frustrated ballet teacher to the child’s parents; ‘Do not bring her back – she’s disruptive and a bad influence on the other girls. She’s a like a whirlwind; chaotic, noisy and uncontrollable.’
There were stories that explored the gullibility of small children who put their trust in ‘wise’ adults, of a little boy who ate plums from the neighbour’s tree and whose father said if you swallow a plum stone a plum tree will grow from your ears. That night the small boy tossed and turned, waking regularly to check his ears in the long bedroom mirror. Another writer described the extreme actions her grandfather took to protect his family against the Poliovirus of 1948. He carried a piece of sulphur ‘the size of a man’s fist and bright yellow’ on the end of a long-handled shovel into the house and the family watched it burn, fascinated. Until they were overcome by ‘sharp acrid smoke’ and the long-handled shovel was thrown out the door and the family ejected onto the street after it.
In Saints and Sinners, the fourth story featured in Translucence, Kay Mills writes about accompanying her father and his workmates to the hotel, after a funeral, and of her boredom and discomfort dressed in starchy church clothes, her hair arranged in unfamiliar ringlets, waiting while her father agrees to play the guitar for a sing-a-long. ‘It’ll be a snowy day in hell boys, when you catch me without my guitar.’
A Change of Heart by Katarina Wildermoth is a warm and humorous coming-of-age story about long summer holidays with her whanau at Tokaanu in the central North Island. She writes vividly of escapades with her ‘cuzzies,’ where they would ‘borrow’ her uncle’s Ford Model A vintage car which ‘never had a Warrant of Fitness or a “rego”’ and take turns to drive, hoping they wouldn’t get caught. ‘Aunty Selly could get really wild if she found out.’
Teenage rebellion and the splendid over-confidence of youth was another reverberating theme. During the workshops one writer captured the tone authentically using diary entries written when she was eighteen including an account of a plucky Aberdeen girl setting off to Edinburgh one day in 1964, to interview the Rolling Stones. She was only sixteen. After the interview, which she said was a shambles, Mick Jagger put his harmonica to his gorgeous, sensuous lips and then placed it on her own mouth.
During the programme a young mother wrote a brave story entitled ‘The Best Mistake I ever Made’ about discovering she was pregnant at fifteen and deciding to go ahead and raise the child herself. Another writer, the animation director on the former hit television series Bro’ Town described the turning points in his life beginning with when he was a young boy and his father drew him a picture of a cowboy. He wrote, ‘I was hooked from that moment.’
The first story in this book, The Nullarbor Trap by Jenny Healey, recounts the experience of a young New Zealander travelling in a Kombi van through central Australia. When the story opens Jenny is lost in the shimmering Australian desert and panicking as scans the horizon for the van that has been swallowed up in the heat mirage.
Life passages were explored as well including the experience of motherhood with stories from young mothers ensnared in the domestic juggling act working long hours running homes, raising small children and feeling the pressure constantly to live up to societal expectations. An excerpt from Fiona Kidman’s At the End of Darwin Road about her struggle in the 1950s against the pressure to conform to conventional gender roles and how her writing had to be a secretive activity, resonated strongly for these young mothers who exclaimed, ‘Nothing’s changed. It’s still like that today.’ And one young mother wrote at the session that day: ‘In a couple of years when my son starts school, the all-consuming monster that is Playcentre will spit me out having exhausted and squeezed every baking, fundraising and meeting bone in my body.’
Some of the stories were set in exotic locations growing up in Uganda, South Africa, Switzerland and New York State. Shirl Sagala, whose story A Peaceful Assurance features in Translucence, describes an idyllic childhood living with her great grandmother, Mama, in Faleula, Western Samoa. Each day Shirl and her cousins roam the rain forests on the family land feasting on fruits; coconuts, mangoes, bananas, ‘v’ fruit, or they go bat hunting or parrot hunting. ‘We caught the parrots with a slingshot and plucked the feathers and then barbequed them on a fire. Roasted parrot was my favourite delicacy.’
In a workshop on the theme of an unforgettable place, there was a story about a park ranger’s family and their experience living on Motutapu Island in the Waitemata Harbour and an emergency dash, with a sick child, by floatplane to Auckland Hospital. The writer describes wading into the water with the child in her arms and flying up the Waitemata harbour into the setting sun.
There were Maori stories of life in Aotearoa; of a mother who was a member of the Ratana faith and on Sundays ‘dressed like an angel’ and sang in the choir. Despite the demands of raising a large family in harsh conditions - cooking on a woodstove, heating water for drinking and washing – still, her daughter wrote; ‘Late into the night, or early in the mornings, she would read. I often wondered if she slept.’ The sixth story in Translucence, The Family Whistle by Missy Tia, describes early morning food gathering expeditions, with the writer, a young child, perched on the bar of her father’s bike. Together they gathered watercress covered in dew, wriggling eels from the icy-cold stony creeks of Papakura, and karahu mud snails from the Manukau harbour. Another writer described her childhood living between the two cultures, growing up in Parnell with a Māori mother and Pākehā father who was an early ethnographic photographer and film-maker. She remembers her mother packing their lunch into a kete and catching the tram to Western Springs to gather raupo for poi making. And when her mother waded into the water, the writer followed very slowly because she was convinced there was a taniwha living in the lake.
When we read a memoir there is an expectation that the story told is a truthful rendering of what happened but as the word re-membering suggests the retrieval of memories is a complex and actively fluid process whereby the writer is continually involved in reviewing and making sense of the past from a position in the present. Each time we return to the task the inflection can shift in light of current learning experiences, our exposure to new information, the gaining of greater insight. And the writing process itself can influence the narrative as we strive to craft our memories into engaging stories. In the process the writer selects those scenes and incidents that add meaning and texture to the account while leaving out other details that appear irrelevant or insignificant. What impressed me about these writing participants was their courage and willingness to explore those events that were difficult and painful.
I had suspected, and the programme reinforced the notion, that writers are often drawn to the memoir genre because they have a tragic story to explore. They want to make sense of the senseless. They want to transform their own pain into a powerfully told story that will speak to others also affected by profound heartache and grief. And so there were family tragedies; the child who lost her mother when she was small, the child who lost a sibling and remembered riding to the tangi on a yellow ARA bus, driven by her uncle, and watching the small white box in the aisle with a bouquet of yellow flowers on the lid. One mother wrote about how it felt when she miscarried a baby and another about the agony of having a child taken from her following birth. There was an account of the death of a first baby during labour and how the insensitive comments of medical professionals telling the young mother to have another child so she would forget this baby, intensified her anguish. How could she forget this baby who had wriggled and jumped in her womb for nine long months.
It is the task of the writer to seek out arresting, unusual and revealing detail. One writer described a funeral in the Australian outback for a mother who had died at 28, from complications arising from a stomach stapling procedure, leaving behind three small children. The writer observed the poignancy of a small child putting on a beautiful white party dress ‘twirling around with pleasure showing it off to the family’ and then stopping to have a black sash tied around the middle.
Sometimes the detail was atmospheric and thrilling. At a graveside in South Africa, the writer floats above the scene at her grandfather’s graveside providing a bird’s eye view of the small group of mourners including the black farm workers, whose strong melodious voices carry the final Abide with Me, and she sees; ‘the raw black clods of earth beside the ugly deep hole, my mother’s black skirt swirling in the wind and myself shrunken and exposed.’
There were stories of awful, random accidents that turned lives upside down in a moment. In the workshops a mother and her son wrote about an accident. It began with the mother being woken by a phone call from Auckland Hospital. Her son had fallen from a considerable height and was in the intensive care unit with brain and spine injuries. That night they were told he might never walk again. But the mother was an optimist and told the specialist she believed her son would recover. On day one of the First Chapters programme her son walked into the room, holding one crutch. He told us that during his long journey to recovery he began reading to improve his vocabulary and one day he spotted the First Chapters poster at the Papakura library. He is now writing about his experience for the benefit of patients at the spinal unit at Middlemore Hospital.
The fifth story in the book, Lost and Found by Tracy Ayres is about a father and son expedition into the Kalahari Gemsbok Game Reserve, which goes horribly wrong when the Jeep misses a bend in the dirt track. The vehicle rolls and rolls and the son sustains a serious brain injury. Tracy documents the accident and her brother teetering between life and death, along with his excruciating path to recovery, with extreme sensitivity. In the process she transforms a shattering experience into well-crafted literature.
The penultimate story in this collection, Mary Sunshine by Sara-Jane Morgan, is a poignantly written account of the author’s experience of losing her mother too young from pancreatic cancer. Moving skilfully between past and present Sara-Jane arranges her account of the initial diagnosis, the progress of the illness and her mother’s death around the story of her mother’s life producing in the process a loving tribute.
From Mother to Child: How Dementia Stole My Mother by Joan Hugo is the eighth story featured in Life Writing from Manukau and Papakura. It begins with an admiring portrait of the writer’s mother before the onset of dementia. With an acute observational eye and respect for her mother’s condition, the writer documents the dreadful, inexorable descent into dementia and her father’s desperate battle to keep her mother’s brain active; ‘He would have sold the house to keep her with us as long as he could.’
More by Daniela Affolta is the third story in this book and employs a disarmingly frank and confessional narrative to relate how the writer overcame an addiction to alcohol and a struggle with depression. Daniela’s account of an eight-day Outward Bound course, to mark the third anniversary of sobriety is inspirational.
In Ngātaki by Kat Davita, the writer describes her life in a schoolhouse in the far north, tracing with specific detail, the beauty of the natural world, the changing seasons and the passage of day into night; ‘Often I would sit at my window in the dawn watching the sun’s first light peep above the horizon, flooding the sky with a palette of colours; delicate pinks, pale purples, gauzy blues, fiery reds, oranges and yellows…On nights when the skies were clear the heavens were populated by stars that filled up the entire night sky.’
At the end of the mentoring sessions I asked each individual again about the writing dream. Many were forming a commitment to complete the memoir, while others were setting realistic goals to fit around a busy life stage. ‘But tell me how do you feel when you write?’ I asked. Over and over again the writers said, ‘I feel like me. When I write I am no longer a mother, or a wife, or a husband, a son, an employee … I am me.’ Another writer declared, ‘When I sit and write I come alive.’ And yet another writer said, ‘Writing gives me peace.’
That is the magic of the writing experience. It offers a place we can go that is just for us. When we are fully immersed in the process, time flies, morning melts into afternoon, afternoon into evening. And as we work at the sentences, and a shape begins emerging that pleases us, we find we are hooked. Remember those feelings. And never stop believing in the power of your story.
Ngā Wāhangā Tuatahi writing programme 2010
Introduction
Always at the beginning of a writing workshop there is an atmosphere of nervous tension and anticipation as people await the start of the first session. On the afternoon of the very first workshop in Life Writing for the 2010 First Chapters – Ngā Wāhangā Tuatahi programme The Sir Edmund Hillary Library in Papakura I scanned the faces of all thirty new writers and caught in their expressions a mix of expectancy, uncertainty, and apprehension. The anxiety in the atmosphere had a pitch I could hear and feel. Then I asked people to write down what had brought them to the First Chapters programme. There was an exhalation of breath and the room settled into silence. People knew what to write. When they looked up again I could see their hearts had returned to their chests and, as they shared their responses with the person sitting next to them suddenly the room was alive with conversation and comment, with drifts of laughter and exclamation.
Then around the whole group we went sharing our writing dreams, realising we were in this together, bound by the same motivation, that vital need to communicate our stories to others. We discovered that many had been drawn to writing from when they were very young. In childhood they had been read to or they had listened to oral storytelling and discovered the magic of words and how they can create pictures, scenes, worlds beyond our own, words that move and excite and leave one wanting more.
Encouragement had been important. Sometimes a teacher ‘in the primers,’ or later at secondary school had praised a piece of creative writing. One writer remembered opening her writing book and seeing five orange stars lined up beside her story. We found too that the love of the written word had been carried over into jobs and careers where writing is an essential component. There were people from medical and scientific backgrounds, people who worked in the arts, in community organisations, in libraries. For others the storytelling is an essential aspect of their culture and a means of passing on the stories of the ancestors from generation to generation.
Some were motivated to attend the programme by the death of a close family member and the subsequent sorting through boxes of belongings; photographs, diary entries and letters that told stories about that person’s life. Regret was expressed over forgetting to ask the crucial questions and record the answers. Now there was a desire to put that right through writing one’s own story for the immediate family and subsequent generations.
People commented on the vast changes witnessed over a lifetime leading to the current highly technological and trans-global stage of human evolution and wanting to tell stories of a different and simpler way of life where people lived in closer proximity to their families and whanau and the wider community. They wanted to record the freedom they enjoyed as small children able to roam in nature all day long and to describe the games and imaginative play.
We were fortunate to have writers on the programme ranging in age from eighteen to eighty. Some of these writers had reached a mid-life point and were realising they no longer had forever to achieve their writing dreams. It was now or never, they declared. We also discovered in that first ice-breaking round that there were people on the First Chapters programme from all corners of the world; England, Scotland, South Africa, the States, Switzerland, Western Samoa and here in Aotearoa New Zealand we had people of Māori and Pākehā and Pacific origin — so many different perspectives and life experiences that we would listen to and learn from over the next few months.
The framework of my programme revolved around short bursts of timed writing on given themes; birth and early childhood memories, a turning point or a defining memory, the moment when the writer found their place in the world, a portrait of a significant person, of an unforgettable landscape and finally a self-portrait written in the present and containing a reflection on the writer’s life. Over the weeks that ensued participants were introduced to the writing craft through sessions on the editing process and in private mentoring sessions where they were encouraged to extend and deepen the stories. They were given a reading list as well to assist them in their own study of autobiographical literature
At the second workshop participants were asked about their writing space. The answers illustrated a wide spectrum of human solutions from the very pragmatic to the quirky. Some had a desk and a designated writing space in an office or a study. Some worked on the kitchen table, or in a La-Z-Boy chair, or in corners of bedrooms, one writer worked in the garage. Writing went on in the head while swimming or biking. Others worked late at night when the children were sleeping and the computer was finally available. One writer announced that bed was the ideal place and had developed a routine whereby the writing started early in the day and stretched until 11.30am when there was glass of red wine and a piece of blue vein cheese to reward a morning’s work.
And so over a period of four months dozens of stories were written and read aloud in the workshops and critiqued in the mentoring sessions. Then a selection of stories, one from each of the thirty participants was gathered together into a collection entitled ‘Memento.’ At the end of the programme participants were invited to enter a writing competition to feature in the book Translucence” Life Writings from Manukau and Papakura. While eleven stories were eventually chosen for that publication there were many more stories that deserved notice. The following account includes an overview of the stories written for ‘Memento’ and for the publication Translucence.
There were childhood stories of adventure and imaginative play, of running away and getting into trouble. In A Turning Point, a story that features in this book, Annette Bannon writes of how at the age of eight, she and her older sister crept out of the house into the dark night running, running through the frost, over the fields and into the bush. They had escaped, ‘our heartless family and taken matters into our own hands. Our new home would be the forest.’ Other stories from childhood captured the irrepressible, unstoppable energy of young children with one opening on a pronouncement from a frustrated ballet teacher to the child’s parents; ‘Do not bring her back – she’s disruptive and a bad influence on the other girls. She’s a like a whirlwind; chaotic, noisy and uncontrollable.’
There were stories that explored the gullibility of small children who put their trust in ‘wise’ adults, of a little boy who ate plums from the neighbour’s tree and whose father said if you swallow a plum stone a plum tree will grow from your ears. That night the small boy tossed and turned, waking regularly to check his ears in the long bedroom mirror. Another writer described the extreme actions her grandfather took to protect his family against the Poliovirus of 1948. He carried a piece of sulphur ‘the size of a man’s fist and bright yellow’ on the end of a long-handled shovel into the house and the family watched it burn, fascinated. Until they were overcome by ‘sharp acrid smoke’ and the long-handled shovel was thrown out the door and the family ejected onto the street after it.
In Saints and Sinners, the fourth story featured in Translucence, Kay Mills writes about accompanying her father and his workmates to the hotel, after a funeral, and of her boredom and discomfort dressed in starchy church clothes, her hair arranged in unfamiliar ringlets, waiting while her father agrees to play the guitar for a sing-a-long. ‘It’ll be a snowy day in hell boys, when you catch me without my guitar.’
A Change of Heart by Katarina Wildermoth is a warm and humorous coming-of-age story about long summer holidays with her whanau at Tokaanu in the central North Island. She writes vividly of escapades with her ‘cuzzies,’ where they would ‘borrow’ her uncle’s Ford Model A vintage car which ‘never had a Warrant of Fitness or a “rego”’ and take turns to drive, hoping they wouldn’t get caught. ‘Aunty Selly could get really wild if she found out.’
Teenage rebellion and the splendid over-confidence of youth was another reverberating theme. During the workshops one writer captured the tone authentically using diary entries written when she was eighteen including an account of a plucky Aberdeen girl setting off to Edinburgh one day in 1964, to interview the Rolling Stones. She was only sixteen. After the interview, which she said was a shambles, Mick Jagger put his harmonica to his gorgeous, sensuous lips and then placed it on her own mouth.
During the programme a young mother wrote a brave story entitled ‘The Best Mistake I ever Made’ about discovering she was pregnant at fifteen and deciding to go ahead and raise the child herself. Another writer, the animation director on the former hit television series Bro’ Town described the turning points in his life beginning with when he was a young boy and his father drew him a picture of a cowboy. He wrote, ‘I was hooked from that moment.’
The first story in this book, The Nullarbor Trap by Jenny Healey, recounts the experience of a young New Zealander travelling in a Kombi van through central Australia. When the story opens Jenny is lost in the shimmering Australian desert and panicking as scans the horizon for the van that has been swallowed up in the heat mirage.
Life passages were explored as well including the experience of motherhood with stories from young mothers ensnared in the domestic juggling act working long hours running homes, raising small children and feeling the pressure constantly to live up to societal expectations. An excerpt from Fiona Kidman’s At the End of Darwin Road about her struggle in the 1950s against the pressure to conform to conventional gender roles and how her writing had to be a secretive activity, resonated strongly for these young mothers who exclaimed, ‘Nothing’s changed. It’s still like that today.’ And one young mother wrote at the session that day: ‘In a couple of years when my son starts school, the all-consuming monster that is Playcentre will spit me out having exhausted and squeezed every baking, fundraising and meeting bone in my body.’
Some of the stories were set in exotic locations growing up in Uganda, South Africa, Switzerland and New York State. Shirl Sagala, whose story A Peaceful Assurance features in Translucence, describes an idyllic childhood living with her great grandmother, Mama, in Faleula, Western Samoa. Each day Shirl and her cousins roam the rain forests on the family land feasting on fruits; coconuts, mangoes, bananas, ‘v’ fruit, or they go bat hunting or parrot hunting. ‘We caught the parrots with a slingshot and plucked the feathers and then barbequed them on a fire. Roasted parrot was my favourite delicacy.’
In a workshop on the theme of an unforgettable place, there was a story about a park ranger’s family and their experience living on Motutapu Island in the Waitemata Harbour and an emergency dash, with a sick child, by floatplane to Auckland Hospital. The writer describes wading into the water with the child in her arms and flying up the Waitemata harbour into the setting sun.
There were Maori stories of life in Aotearoa; of a mother who was a member of the Ratana faith and on Sundays ‘dressed like an angel’ and sang in the choir. Despite the demands of raising a large family in harsh conditions - cooking on a woodstove, heating water for drinking and washing – still, her daughter wrote; ‘Late into the night, or early in the mornings, she would read. I often wondered if she slept.’ The sixth story in Translucence, The Family Whistle by Missy Tia, describes early morning food gathering expeditions, with the writer, a young child, perched on the bar of her father’s bike. Together they gathered watercress covered in dew, wriggling eels from the icy-cold stony creeks of Papakura, and karahu mud snails from the Manukau harbour. Another writer described her childhood living between the two cultures, growing up in Parnell with a Māori mother and Pākehā father who was an early ethnographic photographer and film-maker. She remembers her mother packing their lunch into a kete and catching the tram to Western Springs to gather raupo for poi making. And when her mother waded into the water, the writer followed very slowly because she was convinced there was a taniwha living in the lake.
When we read a memoir there is an expectation that the story told is a truthful rendering of what happened but as the word re-membering suggests the retrieval of memories is a complex and actively fluid process whereby the writer is continually involved in reviewing and making sense of the past from a position in the present. Each time we return to the task the inflection can shift in light of current learning experiences, our exposure to new information, the gaining of greater insight. And the writing process itself can influence the narrative as we strive to craft our memories into engaging stories. In the process the writer selects those scenes and incidents that add meaning and texture to the account while leaving out other details that appear irrelevant or insignificant. What impressed me about these writing participants was their courage and willingness to explore those events that were difficult and painful.
I had suspected, and the programme reinforced the notion, that writers are often drawn to the memoir genre because they have a tragic story to explore. They want to make sense of the senseless. They want to transform their own pain into a powerfully told story that will speak to others also affected by profound heartache and grief. And so there were family tragedies; the child who lost her mother when she was small, the child who lost a sibling and remembered riding to the tangi on a yellow ARA bus, driven by her uncle, and watching the small white box in the aisle with a bouquet of yellow flowers on the lid. One mother wrote about how it felt when she miscarried a baby and another about the agony of having a child taken from her following birth. There was an account of the death of a first baby during labour and how the insensitive comments of medical professionals telling the young mother to have another child so she would forget this baby, intensified her anguish. How could she forget this baby who had wriggled and jumped in her womb for nine long months.
It is the task of the writer to seek out arresting, unusual and revealing detail. One writer described a funeral in the Australian outback for a mother who had died at 28, from complications arising from a stomach stapling procedure, leaving behind three small children. The writer observed the poignancy of a small child putting on a beautiful white party dress ‘twirling around with pleasure showing it off to the family’ and then stopping to have a black sash tied around the middle.
Sometimes the detail was atmospheric and thrilling. At a graveside in South Africa, the writer floats above the scene at her grandfather’s graveside providing a bird’s eye view of the small group of mourners including the black farm workers, whose strong melodious voices carry the final Abide with Me, and she sees; ‘the raw black clods of earth beside the ugly deep hole, my mother’s black skirt swirling in the wind and myself shrunken and exposed.’
There were stories of awful, random accidents that turned lives upside down in a moment. In the workshops a mother and her son wrote about an accident. It began with the mother being woken by a phone call from Auckland Hospital. Her son had fallen from a considerable height and was in the intensive care unit with brain and spine injuries. That night they were told he might never walk again. But the mother was an optimist and told the specialist she believed her son would recover. On day one of the First Chapters programme her son walked into the room, holding one crutch. He told us that during his long journey to recovery he began reading to improve his vocabulary and one day he spotted the First Chapters poster at the Papakura library. He is now writing about his experience for the benefit of patients at the spinal unit at Middlemore Hospital.
The fifth story in the book, Lost and Found by Tracy Ayres is about a father and son expedition into the Kalahari Gemsbok Game Reserve, which goes horribly wrong when the Jeep misses a bend in the dirt track. The vehicle rolls and rolls and the son sustains a serious brain injury. Tracy documents the accident and her brother teetering between life and death, along with his excruciating path to recovery, with extreme sensitivity. In the process she transforms a shattering experience into well-crafted literature.
The penultimate story in this collection, Mary Sunshine by Sara-Jane Morgan, is a poignantly written account of the author’s experience of losing her mother too young from pancreatic cancer. Moving skilfully between past and present Sara-Jane arranges her account of the initial diagnosis, the progress of the illness and her mother’s death around the story of her mother’s life producing in the process a loving tribute.
From Mother to Child: How Dementia Stole My Mother by Joan Hugo is the eighth story featured in Life Writing from Manukau and Papakura. It begins with an admiring portrait of the writer’s mother before the onset of dementia. With an acute observational eye and respect for her mother’s condition, the writer documents the dreadful, inexorable descent into dementia and her father’s desperate battle to keep her mother’s brain active; ‘He would have sold the house to keep her with us as long as he could.’
More by Daniela Affolta is the third story in this book and employs a disarmingly frank and confessional narrative to relate how the writer overcame an addiction to alcohol and a struggle with depression. Daniela’s account of an eight-day Outward Bound course, to mark the third anniversary of sobriety is inspirational.
In Ngātaki by Kat Davita, the writer describes her life in a schoolhouse in the far north, tracing with specific detail, the beauty of the natural world, the changing seasons and the passage of day into night; ‘Often I would sit at my window in the dawn watching the sun’s first light peep above the horizon, flooding the sky with a palette of colours; delicate pinks, pale purples, gauzy blues, fiery reds, oranges and yellows…On nights when the skies were clear the heavens were populated by stars that filled up the entire night sky.’
At the end of the mentoring sessions I asked each individual again about the writing dream. Many were forming a commitment to complete the memoir, while others were setting realistic goals to fit around a busy life stage. ‘But tell me how do you feel when you write?’ I asked. Over and over again the writers said, ‘I feel like me. When I write I am no longer a mother, or a wife, or a husband, a son, an employee … I am me.’ Another writer declared, ‘When I sit and write I come alive.’ And yet another writer said, ‘Writing gives me peace.’
That is the magic of the writing experience. It offers a place we can go that is just for us. When we are fully immersed in the process, time flies, morning melts into afternoon, afternoon into evening. And as we work at the sentences, and a shape begins emerging that pleases us, we find we are hooked. Remember those feelings. And never stop believing in the power of your story.