The Answer

All the world's a stage, 
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts, 
His acts being seven ages.

William Shakespeare, As You Like It.

I find myself having the very good fortune to be in  Europe, where the myths and stories of the ages are painted, carved and writ large on the buildings and in the very streets in which I am walking. Story is every where here, and the same stories repeat themselves, over and over, through the centuries. The stories of many, repeating again and again through the seven ages of humankind, spun as if by the hands of the Fates themselves.

They are stories of victory and of loss, of love and loneliness, of joy and anguish. From the triumphant splendour of Parisian monuments, to the unspent anguish that bathes the daisy-spotted countryside where the bones of the war-dead lie eloquent in their massed silence, these stories weave and breathe everywhere, a constant reminder of the turning of the wheel of fortune in the life of every man.

And the wheel turns, always, and for all. When confronted with difficult times, the well-meaning are wont to soothe with platitudes such as 'we are never given more than we can bear'. This is not true. Life, in all its brilliance of colour and tone, hands many people more than can be borne. The weight of these things can break a person, or crush them completely. This is never a reflection on that person, their strength or worthiness, only a reminder that all humans, by virtue of the fraility of our own flesh, are vulnerable to the tide of fortune that washes around us, constant, inexorable, infinite.

When faced with what is difficult, do what you need to. Adjust what needs to be adjusted, even if it's the very direction of the course of your life. What matters is you, your wholeness and wellbeing. Live as honestly and as well as you can, hold yourself to your own standards, and forgive yourself your failings when they arise despite your best efforts. Never apologise when life hands you a heavy load. Be a good human being to other human beings. Be kind. Honour the light in yourself, and the light you find in other people. Know yourself, know your story, and tell your story. Weave it through your life, in the words that you speak and the actions you take, and in your art and your writing, so that it becomes the strong fabric that holds the stars in your own night sky, a map made of light to lead you in your own darkest hour, or even a beacon of hope for someone else who has become lost along their own dimmed path.

This is what the very best of our protagonists, characters and personae dramatis do. They live once, in their actions, and again in their moment of realisation, the finding of their own strength, wisdom or genius. By finding the answer to their deepest question within their own story, they become awakened, whole, real. The story becomes alive. It breathes, stretches, steps off the page and into the streets and towns and the very lives of humanity.

Possible

The possible's slow fuse

is lit by the Imagination.

~ Emily Dickinson   

Instructions

As a new year unfolds around me, I find myself pausing to look backwards, and to lean forwards to examine what the road ahead might hold. 

“… and back again” – The Hobbit’s long journey home.

(Warning: Long. Get a cup of tea). 

I was all of ten years old when I read The Hobbit, and since then, my recollection has been muddied by a fabulously overblown three-part movie adaptation. So when a friend waxed lyrical about it recently, I was moved to re-read it. I found myself entranced all over again, but this time for very different reasons.

Everyone's a Winner! Best Australian Blog denouement

Things got kind of busy there for a while, (denoue)mental, you could say. In my frenzy of real-life activity (yes, I do exist away from this computer) I missed blogging the exciting announcement of the Best Australian Blog finalists, and then the winner.

The finalists, then, in the Words and Writing Category were (in no particular order):

·       ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

·       Just Add Story 

·       Killings: The Kill Your Darlings blog 

·       PublishEd Adelaide 

·       The Book Post 

My personal favourite among the finalists (if anyone’s interested) is Just Add Story:  spare, clean writing, plenty of cleverness, and more than a pinch of writerly mystique too (Uh oh. Too late to re-anonymise D:D).  I feel a kindred-spiritedness with this blog, which examines the writing process from the inside, albeit with a different slant to Destination: denouement.  So my (imaginary) money was on Just Add Story to win.

So it’s probably a good thing, then, that I’m a writer and not an illegal bookmaker**, because the winner was ANZ LitLovers LitBlog. This is a massive, longstanding blog, chock full of reviews and commentary about Australian literary fiction (mostly).  The best new blog was Judging your breakfast, and the People's Choice went to TV Tonight, which received 785 votes, in a field where 17,250 people voted for their favourites among 940 blogs. Congratulations to these, and all the other category and award winners.

And as for Destination: denouement?  It was always going to be a long shot, wasn’t it?

I am, however, happy to announce that I received a vote from at least one reader who was not a) genetically or b) contractually related to me (nor even a facebook friend).

That’s got to be some sort of achievement.

I did however treat the whole competition as a massive blog-stomp opportunity, and found some great – mostly new – blogs in a similar vein to my own.  So, in my book, everyone’s a winner!   Congratulations to all those brave blogging souls who stepped up to the challenge just by participating.

And now all the excitement has died down, I can get over blogging self-consciously and get back to writing, about actual writing. 

** More on illegal bookmaking HERE.  

Get started writing

I was thrilled to be invited by Connie Berg to co-present a “Get Started Writing” workshop for members of the public at the Tea Tree Gully Library.  The aim of this two-hour workshop was to introduce participants to writing by “doing”, and give them some tools and hopefully some inspiration to continue on with it.

Ironically, I was nominated to run the section on poetry, for which I have great appreciation but little compositional skill.  I had enormous fun putting together a haiku worksheet, and a shared poetry-writing exercise, which was enjoyed with amazing and occasionally hilarious results.  Participants then wrote some of their own fiction, and had the opportunity to share their work with a supportive audience.  Anyone who’s engaged with a good group of writers knows how enormously rewarding and encouraging this can be. 

But life is a wonderful and mysterious thing, and the workshop held a surprise for me.

I was surprised at the late arrival of lady who had both the face and the surname of my Grade 3 teacher, Mrs R.  Could it be my most fondly remembered teacher?  She had been flaming-haired and vivacious, passionate about imagination, about learning.  I remember, as the quiet, strange girl that I was, that this was the teacher who showed me that if you put in extra effort, you can produce something good.  Something beautiful.  Something that you can be proud of.  Even though I spent only two-thirds of the year in her classroom, it was a pivotal time in my learning.  She encouraged my reading, but even more importantly, she switched me on to writing, neatly and well. 

I remember the shining feeling of pride seeing two gold stars and a smiley stamp on what must have been one of my very first works of imaginative fiction.  I clung to that feeling when I was suddenly uprooted to a distant, hot land.  I changed schools five more times in the next five years, but the memory of her and what she had taught me kept me engaged with learning, even in desolate emotional terrain.  I had wondered since whether I might ever meet her again, and hoped one day to thank her.

And yes, thirty years later, in this community writing workshop, it was indeed Mrs R.  She remembered the sad, quiet girl I had been at age 7.  When the class ended, she handed me an acrostic poem she had written for me.  This beautiful, expressive, expansive teacher – who’d had no idea of the impact she’d had on my life - had seen a spark inside a quiet child and coaxed it to a flame.  She was rewarded all these years later by seeing that girl transformed, and that flame now blazing as passion for writing and the joy of sharing it with others.  

The significance of this moment was not lost on me.  It seems like more than just coincidence that I reconnected with the teacher who taught me to want to write well, in that same space – the sphere of writing, of sharing learning, of getting started on the thing that calls you.  It affirmed in both of us the power of sharing what you’re passionate about, in a moment of unexpected, exquisite denouement.

So, the moral to this story, if there is one, is to get started.  Get started writing.  Or painting.  Or singing.  Or whatever it is that lights you up, get started doing that.  Do it often, and share the joy that it brings you.  It creates a space, a magical chink through which all sorts of unimagined rewards can enter your life.

What are you waiting for?   

Light it up... by young_einstein @ Flickr