Deborah Shepard Books
  • Home
  • Books
    • The Writing Life >
      • Reviews & Interviews
    • Giving Yourself to Life
    • Her Life's Work
    • Translucence
    • Between The Lives
    • Reframing Women
    • Tributes
    • Personal Writings >
      • Lockdown Journal
      • Travel Journal
      • Elegy for a friend
      • Christchurch - Post Quakes
      • On a residency
      • Deborah’s Love Letter to the Women’s Bookshop
      • Deborah's Q & A With Unity Books
  • Writing Memoir
    • Defining Memoir
    • The Participatory Model
    • Tips on Writing and Posting a Story
    • The Value of a Writing Class
    • From writing course to book publication
    • Your Writing Space
    • Writing on a Theme >
      • Window
      • Surviving a Crisis
    • Reviews of Memoir
  • Writers' stories
    • Covid-19 Stories
    • Writing Guidelines
  • Events
  • About
    • Testimonials
    • Media
  • What People Say
  • Contact

Writers' Stories

A collection of life stories by writers who have attended Deborah's classes

My earliest memory by Julie Star

25/10/2014

 
Julie is fascinated by memory, story and the creative process.  She sailed to New Zealand from the United States aboard her yacht Miss Kathleen.  Writing helps Julie enjoy the beauty and understand the meaning of life.

My earliest memory is standing on my toes, looking out onto Lake Michigan from the 22nd floor of our family apartment.  When I see a picture of myself on the sill with my little hands pressed against the window, I remember the quality of lightness in my home.  Surrounded by windows, without curtains, there were views onto the lake and the city below, and sometimes simply the clouds.     I remember my mother’s loneliness, as an immigrant, having left the support of her country and her career as a brilliant young scientist to focus on raising children.  I have a memory of her holding me in one arm and cooking or tidying up with the other; keeping me safe from my older brother’s reach.  I remember yearning to feel her love.  While I sensed something was wrong, what I didn’t know, as a baby, was that she was yearning for this love as well.  

But my first official memory is when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon.  People can’t believe it, but I have a clear image of the event as seen from my position on the floor, on my belly, at nine months.  I remember the fuzzy movement on the screen of our black and white TV, brought out of the closet only for this occasion.  I remember seeing the wooden legs of our couch and the complex woven fabric underneath its cushions.  

The moment I entered the world, the sun was just below the horizon and the moon was setting.  Jupiter, Pluto, Mars and Uranus were aligned and also rising.  It was the ‘60s, a time of upheaval, sexual revolution, liberation and scientific discovery.  It was also a time when my father slipped into a deep depression.  

I have forever had a fascination with the moon, with science, with the stars, and with the deep vastness and exploration of new horizons.  Being born I think for me may have felt like taking a first step onto solid ground after a wild journey of floating in space, like making that first uncertain step onto the moon. 

To my türangawaewae by Lorene Verheijden

24/10/2014

 
Lorene is currently employed as an interviewer for a market research company.   The nature of the job allows her more time in between projects to pursue her desires that have been on the back shelf for far too long.  Writing and Painting.  Now Lorene is set to write and paint her heart out.

At present I like being home. The spring garden is full of new life. Regal tuis, tiny finches, playful rosellas. The shrieking White Cockatoos seldom fly over the house, only the valley. They are considerate. Kereru in a tree, five at once. On occasion a shy kingfisher makes its presence known. The black assassin cat sits waiting. Jingling. His neckband.

The birds geographically leave droppings of a promise, gifts of flowers and unwanted weeds. Are they sowing gratitude to nature? I’m happy to see the wild orchids are back. They don’t oblige every year. The pink cherry blossom trees fit upright tight between other specimens, determined. Camelias white, cerise and crimson. Shiny leaved magnolia. Bottle brushes deep to vivid reds, not to mention the exotic leucadendron and protea. Two huge Japanese cedars, landmarks from afar. Our home is on a flat ridge.

East beyond the sparse Kanuka and Manuka over the valley and towns Rangitoto feigns its sleep. During my petulant moods, fierce red rock spews powerful into the sky, followed by darkened smoke.  Sky Tower and not so tall skyscrapers manage to connect with a heaven of every hue. Auckland city stands petite.

Colours of storm and night.  My husband sighs in his sleep. I forgot the time and missed the moonrise. Out of view the Tasman Sea, hidden but not forgotten, by a hill of lofty pine, reduced, felled profusely. Logging trucks heard daily. The scalped right side of the mound saddens me. I wonder about the destiny of those tree giants, perhaps they are bound for China, reincarnated into furniture?  

Sometimes in the still of the night we can hear the roar of the waves. The wild meets the tame and I feel safe and secure.     

Breathing Out by Amanda Aitken

24/10/2014

 
Amanda Aitken is a mother of two small energetic boys who loves to read, write and sometimes just stare into space in her free time.

 It is one of the first houses you see as you curl into the bay - a little, teal weatherboard bach with thick white wooden window frames, from which the paint peels in an endearing way. 

“There it is,” yell the boys, pointing gleefully, as we drive along the beachfront and then snake our way up the hill.  We pull off the road onto the bottom of the section and the boys launch themselves from the laden car, sprinting up the overgrown grassy bank to the front door.  I grin at my husband then follow them and begin the familiar ritual of opening up the house, inviting the outside in, and letting the lushness of the setting envelope me.  The air is thick with the smell of jasmine.  Agapanthus and torch lilies shoot out bolts of colour against the vast green undergrowth and together cicadas and tuis create an orchestral effect in the trees overhead. In front of me is the ocean - flat, wide and shimmering. At each end, pohutukawa trees reach protectively out over the bay, dark against the white sand of the beach. The light of the setting sun is casting a soft peach beam across the outgoing tide.

I reluctantly shake myself from my reverie and take the groceries into the kitchen where the facilities are basic, but that’s how I like it; each meal a mini adventure.  Before long we will be laughing as the boys pile their plates as high as they can and together we will move out to the table on the deck, lighting candles as dusk surrounds us.

This is our time. 

And the grief goes on by Jane Wilkins

22/10/2014

 
Jane Wilkins is an independent celebrant who loves bringing ceremony into everyday life. She has a keen interest in memoir and biography and is currently working on her father's story. On Deborah’s course Jane has found memoir to be a healing and creative modality to work through serious life struggles.

My darling. My tall, dark, handsome darling, Tane.

I was love struck. I never thought he’d be interested in a plain Jane. In fact I was asked many times by various people, “How on earth did you get him?” to which I would reply, always miffed, “Possibly because he saw something in me that he liked.” 


Experiencing the love of this beautiful, quietly confident man changed my life. He would prepare delicious picnic baskets that we would share at our favourite hollow in the sand dunes at Piha watching sunsets on long, lingering summer nights; loving each other.

I followed Tane around the world for his job as a pilot, a job that he adored. He told me he was in heaven every day, flying in the sky, not a care in the world.

The arrival of our baby daughter. From the beginning he was an adoring, doting, loving father. Nothing was too much effort. He wanted to be a stay-at-home dad, he wanted to home school our kids. He would push Mary in her home-made swing for hours, with the patience of a saint.

When he took a regular flying job with a commercial commuter airline company affiliated to Air New Zealand we felt secure in our tiny family and private universe.

And then Tane died – the engines failed. He went to work and never came home. His kiss on my cheek at 5am lingers in my cells. The police knocked abruptly at our door. How can they be telling me this? They must have it wrong.

Am I hearing this? They are asking me the colour of his underpants. For Christ’s sake I don’t know, he left home at five this morning.

I would never feel his touch, never see his smiling face again.

My Birth: The little copper-haired Kiwi by Sue Alexander

22/10/2014

 
Susan is a mother and grandmother and works in her family’s design and art businesses. She has always been interested in family history, photos and stories and has a simple wish to keep these memories alive for her extended family. She wrote this story of her birth while attending Deborah’s ‘Writing Your Heart Out’ class at the Michael King Writers Centre.

 When I was growing up, Mum always told me that my October birth at the Royal Naval Hospital in Portsmouth, England, caused a great amount of interest, and also consternation, amongst the nursing staff. Delighted that the father of the new arrival had been born at the same hospital twenty-six years earlier, they were at the same time concerned that the young mother of this newborn baby was many thousands of miles from her home and family in the town of Hawera in New Zealand. Hence they showered mum daily with love and attention and doted on her new baby daughter, Susan Lesley, showing me off to all the newcomers on the ward, and constantly marveling that mum had travelled so far to have her baby. Mum was newly wed and six months pregnant when she left the shores of New Zealand, with dad, on the immigrant ship Captain Cook. She was leaving her own family behind and heading towards a new family, to my English grandparents who were awaiting the arrival of their first grandchild with great anticipation. My arrival was welcomed too by my young uncle and aunt. Uncle John was a university student and Aunty Josephine a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl, when I was born.


Born early in the morning with my father’s pale blue eyes, soft English skin and a mop of coppery coloured hair, the nurses soon nicknamed me their little ‘copper-haired Kiwi’. I still have a lock of that delicate baby hair, safely wrapped in now brittle brown tissue and stored between the pages of my plunket book. I looked at it recently and thought about mum’s stories of my birth, and the love of those devoted nurses. Did they ever wonder what happened to their little ‘copper-haired Kiwi’?

A Childhood Memory: Houdini by Katherine Kelly

20/10/2014

 
Katherine first wanted to be a writer at the age of nine. Getting side tracked, she became a marine biologist which led to her meeting her husband and having two children. While she held onto her love of writing through study and work, the last two decades have been spent predominantly as CEO to her family. Now, in the second half of her life, Katherine would like to begin writing again; telling stories about the people closest to her heart.

We hold hands going down the steep, old wooden stairs one at a time; each step a challenge for my little legs. My dad goes into our bathroom and shuts the door behind him. From inside he tells me not to open it and to wait for him. 


So I wait. I hear the toilet flush. “Daddy are you there?” I wait. “Daddy?” I wait some more and try to pretend I’m not in the scary basement where I’ve never been on my own before. When my bravery finally vanishes and I am about to try and scale the steps back up to the bright kitchen, I hear a creak and look up to see my smiling Daddy standing magically at the top of the stairs. I gaze at him in wonder. “How did you do that Daddy?”

“I flushed myself down the toilet and it took me outside.”
“Really?”
“Of course. How else could I get back here?”

I get him to do it time and time again to solidify this amazing thing only he can do.

As a young adult I finally asked my Dad how he did the impossible; confessing how I had told countless children about his trick. Laughing, he told me about the wee window high above the cistern that my three year old self never saw and how he squeezed himself through the narrow gap into the garden and came back through the front door.

Thinking about this now, I realize that the memory of his laughter as he explained his Houdini act is as precious to me as the actual performance.

Don't Fence Me In by Cheryl Price

18/10/2014

 
After years of putting everyone and everything else first Cheryl is now making writing a priority. She is passionate about recording family and local histories, before they are lost forever and gains great satisfaction in helping people realise that what might seem ‘an ordinary life’ to them, can be extraordinary to someone else.

‘Oh give me land, lots of land, under starry skies above, don’t fence me in’. So begins the Cole Porter classic that, in my youth, I thought was written about me. I lived in the same house for the first twenty years of my life. It was a stable, loving home, but right from my early days I craved open space and would escape suburbia, walking down the street, less than 200 metres, to Porritt Stadium.

It was so much more than a running track - the green expanse of the soccer fields, the little piece of bush with its well-worn track leading to distant streets, the farmland behind where cows chomped on the green grass, and the water tower, commanding, on the hill. There I would meet up with friends, and we would walk, or run, or cartwheel barefoot through the grass, dodging the bees on the clover flowers. When I was eight, it was at Porritt Stadium that my Grandfather taught me to ride a bike, and eight years later it was in the carpark that I first attempted to drive a car.

Numerous times I would climb the small service shed beside the water tower, sit on the concrete roof, and look out over the city. There, I spent hours, mulling things over, working them through and making sense of the events of the day. There, with my friends, we would chat, laugh, share stories and secrets, then go our separate ways home. There, I could lie back and just be, feeling the sun beating down, listening to the birds and cows, watching the clouds go by.

Porritt Stadium: a meeting place, a thinking place, an escape place, my green space.

    Your Stories

    Please submit your story via the Contact page and it will receive a gentle edit from Deborah.
    WRITING GUIDELINES
    Tips on writing and posting a story
    writing on a theme
    COVID-19 STORIES

    Authors

    All
    Adele Ellis
    Alan Knox
    Alison Mayson
    Alison Quesnel
    Amanda Aitken
    Angela Eastwood
    Anissa Ljanta
    Anna Caselberg
    Anna Groenestein
    Anne Cavanagh
    Anne Morris
    Barbara Myers
    Bernice Raos
    Beth Jewell
    Betty Chamberlain
    Beverley Morris
    Bren Lawrey
    Bronwyn Lewis
    Carmel Byrne
    Carmel Ni Bhroin
    Carol Clayton
    Carol Jack
    Catherine Groenestein
    Catherine Moorhead
    Cathie Hutchinson
    Cathy Gray
    Cherie Buchanan
    Cheryl McCrow-Young
    Cheryl Nicol
    Cheryl Price
    Colin Radford
    Colleen Paisley
    David Arrowsmith
    David Phuah
    Dawn Webster
    Debbie Corder
    Diane Taylor
    Dianne Moffatt
    Dianne Speed
    Don Cowan
    Doris Riegel
    Elisabeth Sutorius
    Elizabeth Buchanan
    Elizabeth Goldsworthy
    Erica Munro
    Evan Mayson
    Evita Fromter
    Fern Paulussen
    Francie Craig
    Gabrielle Reekie
    Gillian Mayo
    Gill Sanson
    Glenys McGee
    Gloria Neale
    Graham McGregor
    Graham Woolford
    Gretel Jack
    Helen Gillespie
    Inge Rudolph
    Isabella Mcdermott
    Jackie Halliday
    Jackie Hawkeswood
    Jane Bissell
    Jane Ouseley
    Janet Bovett
    Janet De Witt
    Janet Pates
    Jane Wilkins
    Janine Peters
    Jeanette Baalbergen
    Jeanette De Heer
    Jean Rockel
    Jennifer McGarry
    Jenny Healey
    Jenny Riviere
    Jessie Jellick
    Jicca Smith
    Jim Barnett
    Jim Cooke
    Jim O'Donovan
    Jim Peters
    Joan Hugo Burley
    Jocelyn Goodman
    Jo Frew
    John Goodman
    Judy Hardie
    Judy Johannessen
    Judy O'Brien
    Julia Blick
    Julie Star
    Juliet Jackson
    Justine Sachs
    Kacie Stetson
    Kate Lewis
    Katherine Kelly
    Kathryn Kearns
    Katrina Cole
    Leona Fay
    Lexie Candy
    Liz Lees
    Liz March
    Liz Marks
    Liz Thomas
    Liz Wilson
    Lorene Verheijden
    Lydia Smith
    Lynley Stone
    Maire Vieth
    Mandy Robinson
    Margaret Farrell
    Margaret Merton
    Margaret Russell
    Margo Knightbridge
    Marg Slater
    Maria Kazmierow
    Maria Zivkovich
    Marie Cameron
    Marie Coyle
    Marie Lynne Mitchell
    Marijke Batenburg
    Marilyn Eales
    Maris O'Rourke
    Maryan Dawson
    Mary Barker
    Mary Betz
    Mary Bogan
    Mary Borok
    Mary Elsmore-Neilson
    Mary Nicholas
    Mary Weal
    Mattie Wall
    Maureen Sudlow
    Max Adams
    Meg Johnson
    Meret Berger
    Michelanne Forster
    Mike Kilpatrick
    Miriam Frank
    Moyra Cooke
    Myrtle Easton
    Nanci Campion
    Natalie Mullender
    Ngawini Hall
    Nicky Won
    Nicola Brewer Fanefjord
    Nitin Sahare
    Patricia Gross
    Pat Scriven
    Pauline Lumsden
    Pauline Sneddon
    Penny Slack
    Philomena Pinto
    Rachael Breckon
    Rae Abraham
    Raewynne Lory
    Rob Creagh
    Robyn Turner
    Robyn White
    Rosemary Auld
    Rosemary Barrett
    Roslind O'Neill
    Roz Nicol
    Ruth Bonita
    Ruth Busch
    Sally Monks
    Samantha Scott
    Sandra Plummer
    Sandy Plummer
    Sarah Ashmore
    Sarah Gumbley
    Sarah Hardman
    Sara Kimsey
    Sharyn Elliffe
    Shirley Glendinning
    Shona Barker
    Sofia Mella
    Steve Charters
    Sue
    Sue Alexander
    Sue Mercer
    Sue Radford
    Susan Grimsdell
    Susan Mcleod
    Susan Schuler
    Susie Johnston
    Sylvia Dean
    Sylvia Nagl
    Terry Levenberg
    Tim Chamberlain
    Tim Paul
    Trevor Bayly
    Val Cotty
    Verna Cook-Jackson
    Vonne Learmonth
    Wyn Hoadley

    Archives

    December 2022
    November 2022
    May 2022
    October 2021
    May 2021
    November 2020
    January 2020
    November 2019
    September 2019
    July 2018
    June 2018
    March 2018
    January 2018
    November 2017
    May 2017
    January 2017
    May 2016
    April 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    May 2015
    January 2015
    November 2014
    October 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    September 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    March 2012
    August 2011
    July 2011
    June 2011
    May 2011
    April 2011
    February 2011
    January 2011
    December 2010
    November 2010

    RSS Feed

Writing Memoir
Defining Memoir
The Participatory Model
Tips on Writing and Posting a Story
​From Writing Course to Book Publication
Your Writing Space
​Writing on a Theme
Reviews of Memoir
Writers Stories
​
Events
​About
Testimonials
What People Say

Media
​Contact
Copyright © 2017 Deborah Shepard
  • Home
  • Books
    • The Writing Life >
      • Reviews & Interviews
    • Giving Yourself to Life
    • Her Life's Work
    • Translucence
    • Between The Lives
    • Reframing Women
    • Tributes
    • Personal Writings >
      • Lockdown Journal
      • Travel Journal
      • Elegy for a friend
      • Christchurch - Post Quakes
      • On a residency
      • Deborah’s Love Letter to the Women’s Bookshop
      • Deborah's Q & A With Unity Books
  • Writing Memoir
    • Defining Memoir
    • The Participatory Model
    • Tips on Writing and Posting a Story
    • The Value of a Writing Class
    • From writing course to book publication
    • Your Writing Space
    • Writing on a Theme >
      • Window
      • Surviving a Crisis
    • Reviews of Memoir
  • Writers' stories
    • Covid-19 Stories
    • Writing Guidelines
  • Events
  • About
    • Testimonials
    • Media
  • What People Say
  • Contact