On Writing

Without the garden, but with a wife...

But first briefly…

There is much that is exciting which is still being worked out and yet to come, but these are the events on the horizon for the next month.

For those local to me in Bath, I’ll be running a mindful creative writing workshop for Climate Hub in the lovely Sydney Gardens on Saturday 7^th March at 1pm. Tickets are free, though a donation is welcome, so do come, think, write and welcome spring in a lovely setting.

Further afield, I’ll be speaking in Birmingham at Hodge Hill Church (and streamed online) as part of the very thoughtfully put together series ‘Our land – digging deep in search of common ground’. My talk will be on Wednesday 11^th March at 7:30pm, but every Wednesday evening in Lent you can hear from other speakers like the incredible Corinne Fowler, and Leah Gordon. I know I’ll be trying to catch them all.

It has been January and then February and I have not been in the garden. First it was beautiful and sunny and frozen, ground too hard to do anything useful. After that too-brief interlude, it has been unrelentingly wet. The kind of sodden dampness that makes toes wrapped up in woollen socks and encased in rubber wellies feel chilly and soaked through just at the thought of stepping into the garden beds. I have left our heavy, saturated clay alone, and instead I’ve been inside reading Stephen King’s On Writing. It’s a compelling read, and on getting to the meat of his advice for writers, a frustrating one. My takeaway so far is that for a successful writing life, I need two things, which carelessly I have let escape me: good health and a wife.

Well. I suppose this at least partly explains my absence from these pages. (Are these pages? I’m not entirely sure how I envision Substack, now that it is this hybrid of blog, social media, storefront and messenger, and perhaps that is also part of the issue.) In recent times, I have had neither.

It feels too trendy to talk about, but being afflicted has been no fashionable experience. Perimenopause hit me like a freight train. Or like a slowly moving tractor wielding the large jaws of a flail – I am still standing, and there has been some fresh growth, but for a long time I was bare, ravaged. A half-chewed-up version of myself that I hardly recognised. All the clichés applied. It took me too long to accept what was going on, and then medical professionals (who were kind, and listened, and investigated, which picked up related problems, but then were unable to join the dots enough to see the big picture) too long to believe me. In the end, I sought help privately, and extraneous hormones have done a world of good. As has seriously addressing the profound iron deficiency anaemia, which left me feeling so exhausted that some days I wondered whether I was dying. (I can be theatrical, but on a cellular level, starved of the means to carry oxygen around to power my body’s functions, a slow shutting down resembling something akin to death is probably what my cells were experiencing.) But even these treatments haven’t been a magic bullet, and hormonal storms still occasionally sweep through my internal landscape. Like the climate chaos of winter storms outside my skin, they are unpredictable in their coming, immense in their strength, and leave swathes of damage in their wake. They are remaking me.

One of the biggest losses of this reshaping was of words. I couldn’t find them. Not for ordinary things, or more serious ones. I continued doing talks and events during this time, and after a few initial panics about how on earth I would cope on stage, for the most part adrenaline somehow carried me through. In the moment of being in the spotlight, in something like muscle memory, my brain managed to remember to do the thing it used to do. But offstage I floundered. I often couldn’t remember the most basic words for things. I certainly couldn’t write.

I was going through this profound change in my bodily identity and sense of self, and starting to mourn the loss of my fecundity – of that sense of possibility that perhaps there could be another child one day if I really wanted one, and of my idea of myself as a life-maker – without the words to make sense of the experience. At the same time, demands on me as a wife, daughter, and mother also intensified.

Being a daughter in a body loudly ageing, while watching the maternal body with which I am highly identified begin to itself visibly degenerate with age, in a way that I too may come to face one day, is an ongoing grief so intense that it is hardly surprising that words to examine it mostly continue to escape me. I know that I need to. I know that it will help me to face the changes that I am currently experiencing, and that may eventually come my way, but how? How to even begin to bear to sit with such a thing? And how to write in part about someone else’s story when they themselves are still coming to terms with the losses it carries?

That question also holds for the needs on me as a mother. Things are much better now, but for a while they were not, and the pain I was feeling was not my own to turn in my hands and shape into words and share piecemeal. It was only mine to hold enough to make it bearable, to help another mind be able to understand its cause, and to do what I could as a parent to change the external circumstances that might have contributed.

All that I was holding and processing and composting took up so much space internally. It is only when wellbeing and contentment began to return that I was able to make room for my own thoughts once more. In a literal enactment, banished from the garden by winter rains, I decluttered and tidied the creative spaces in our home. When my own desk was finally clear, I sat down and began once again to write.

As much as it irks me to admit it, Mr King was right – my writing has needed my return to health, but also my return to a wife. It’s taken me awhile as I am always too slow to acknowledge when I need help, but I am back once again, actively participating in a community of women writers, the wonderful Mothers Who Write. It took a village of women to get me through the writing of Uprooting, to hold me as I sought to find the words for things that seemed impossible to make sense of. But as I find myself once again wrestling with the words that may come to form part of a bigger project, to that village I have returned, remembering that writing is no solitary act. It is, as he says, a means of telepathy – I have always thought of these words on the page as a form of conduit from my unconscious to yours, transmitting feeling more than ideas. But who holds the writer to enable the transmission of these feelings? For me, it is the richly blooming diverse community – the beautiful garden of other mother writers, if you like – that takes the form of my writing wife.

And in my actual garden, the time has finally arrived for sowing new seeds. I can’t wait to see what will blossom this year.

A little note: these words have sat in drafts for a while. In the intervening time I have been home to Trinidad for Carnival, an experience which is still reverberating through all my senses. Writing on that is sifting through in the daily writing challenge by Megan Macedo that I’m taking part in this month, and posting on the notes section of the Substack app if you’re interested in reading them. I am certain that some words on that joy will make their way here eventually, but for now I am holding it close and feeling it and feeling it and feeling it…