Today, a good friend of mine, Elisabeth Hanscombe, steps into the attic to write about what writing means to her and the difficulties of squeezing it in around a heavy working schedule. I met Elisabeth through blogging, in particular through a writing course we’ve both done and writing about our difficult childhoods.
Elisabeth is a psychologist and writer who lives and works in Melbourne and has published a number of short stories, personal essays and book chapters in the areas of memory, psychoanalysis, shame, trauma and memoir.
She blogs at https://www.sixthinline.com where she explores the fine line between fact and fiction, and the ways in which memory plays havoc with past experience to allow new ideas to emerge.
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My writing life
When I was a child I fancied myself as a poet. On weekends, I crawled over the back fence onto the Farm Road housing estate in the newly formed suburb of Cheltenham and with pencil and note pad in hand I strolled across the disused market gardens past abandoned chook sheds in search of inspiration.
My writing sensibility had been informed by the poets and prose I found in the Education Department’s Victorian Readers where I came across the hedgerows of the British countryside, the coppices and lanes of green and shaded gardens. I looked out across the stretches of cleared land in front of me where the builder AV Jennings had laid out a lattice of concrete roads in readiness for the houses that were soon to spring up in their thousands and tried to imagine a different landscape.
As a young poet, I went in search of nature, which I found near the golf links that straddled Farm Road where a long line of Lombardy poplars caught my eye. I looked up to the sky at the tip of these trees and imagined myself another Christina Rossetti or Wordsworth, a person of fine sensibility for whom words arose like magical notes of music.
Only my words were clumsy and despite the admiration of some of my older siblings, The Age newspaper’s Children’s Corner never published a single one of my contributions. I began to wonder whether I would indeed become the poet of my dreams.
Life intervened then and for the next twenty years I completed my education and focussed my energies on a career in social work and psychology such that my writing took a back step. Then, in 1991 the psychoanalysts dismissed me from their training program. At the age of 39 I felt my life had come to an end.
‘At the age of 39 I felt my life had come to an end.’
I began to write into the shame of this experience as a way of helping me to make sense of why I had been dismissed, to write in such a way as to make sense of this crazy fracturing of my life.
To that extent I have always tackled the autobiographical. And although I enrolled in a novel writing class in the early 1990s on the pretext of writing a novel – this in the days when memoir writing held little of the popularity of today – I wrote, as many before me have done, in third person, my own story as someone else’s life and I began to practise the craft of writing.
Slowly I came to realise, it’s not inspiration per se that drives writing, it’s practise, persistence and a desire to get words down onto the page out of the compost of your life in such a way as to create whole new worlds that can inform and entrance.
My writing life has always straddled the demands of two lives, my life as a psychologist, and my life as a writer. The two worlds have not always coexisted comfortably but instead of railing against the pressures as I might once have done, I’ve tried to find ways of writing into them.
The tension between the physical demands, hours spent each day at therapy work delving into and helping others with their lives – not as stories but as real life events and experiences – contrasts with my own preoccupations with my life on the page.
There are days when I long to be in a position to write full-time, days when I imagine I could get so much more done. I could dig down deeper. I could float away into fictional worlds if I had more time and fewer distractions.
Then, there are other days when I tell myself this is how it is. I write when I can. I write on weekends and in the spaces between. I arrange to go away on writing intensives at places like Varuna in the Blue Mountains and Freefall writing weeks elsewhere in country Australia. I seek out mentors who can read my work and give me feedback. I write and reshape, redraft and go on and on, time and again, to create the pieces of my writing until they are good enough to send out to find homes. And then I write some more. Always circling the wound, as Siri Hustvedt writes. ‘The writing self is multiple and it circles the wound’. I circle the wounds of my childhood to make sense of my life and that of others in today’s world.
There is an urgency to my writing. I struggle to feel it’s okay to write; there are some who consider therapists should remain largely invisible to the people with whom they work and so when I write autobiographically it goes against the professional grain. At the same time the ghosts of my several siblings rebuke me for daring to take a position on experiences we once shared.
‘Beware of Lissie,’ one of my brothers told my sister recently. ‘She gets things wrong. She makes things up.’
At the time, I heard it as a compliment. But I also I heard it as a threat. I heard it as a call to silence. I continue to write regardless, determined, as I am to keep on with this strange pockmarked thing I call my writing life.
And when I am not writing between times, when I am not preoccupied with the concerns of those with whom I work or with my immediate family, my children, my husband, then I think of my writing.
Writers not only write, they think about writing, they read other people’s writing and in between even in their dreams they imagine words on the page, as I have done for years now.
MJ Hyland, who once mentored me many years ago when she was still Maria Hyland and had not yet published her books, told me she only wrote every Sunday from late morning into evening. For the rest of her time she worked as a lawyer.
I was both impressed by this and relieved. It gave me permission to struggle on in my piece-meal life as a writer caught between the demands of full time work, a family and wanting at the same time to lead a committed writer’s life. It’s possible to do both.
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If you’d like to be a part of this ‘Writers in the Attic’ series, please drop me a line via the Contact page. The invitation is open to everyone, published or unI’d love to hear your story—about what writing means to you, your inspirations and goals, the reasons you write, and the obstacles and battles you face. If you’d prefer a Q&A, I can send some questions.
I’m drawn towards personal writing that digs beyond the superficial, but only write what you are comfortable sharing. Pseudonyms are welcome, too. Most posts are 600-1200 words in length, but that’s not set in stone. I also need a photo, a concise bio, and a link to your website and publications.
If I publish your essay, I like to send a small thank you gift of a $20 book voucher from Booktopia (or Amazon if you live overseas).
Such an accurate portrayal of how uneasy writing can be, and largely is. Rarely is it effortless. But still we obsessives give in to its demands, questioning everything we write, why we write, how we do it, when. It can be like unrequited, misunderstood love, but then that shaft of writerly magic shows itself and we chase it down another rabbit hole to see where it will take us. The never ending chase.
Thanks, M—beautifully put. Elisabeth has perfectly captured the difficulties of trying to squeeze in something we love to do around the things we need to do. We’d all love to be able to give in to even more of its demands, even if unrequited! As you say, that occasional shaft of writerly magic (I love that phrase, by the way) makes it worthwhile. 🙂
It’s lovely to meet you here, olsolomeoh and thank you for your thoughts on this tough gig, this writing life that we would neither of us trade for quids. At least I know I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. It’s quite a journey, or a chase, which ever way we choose to see it. Thank you.
Hello Lis; I do admire your dedication to writing and your dance with the poetry of life, in the midst of your career and family life. I am more fickle than you; when I’m working (editing) which, for the last few months, I’ve been doing almost every day, I don’t think much about my writing or my painting. When I have no editing to do, I have to push myself to write or paint. What does that make me, I wonder. Not-a-writer, not-a-painter, an editor…. but I don’t worry about it, because when I do pass through that gateway into the poetics of vision and words, I don’t feel like an intruder, just a learner, a practiser with words or with pastels.
I’m totally in awe of Lis’ dedication to her work and her writing, too, Christina!
I’m a bit more like you in that I love editing, but have to really push myself to create something to edit.
You’re right about passing through that gateway into another place of vision and words and not feeling like an intruder. Why is it we have trouble labelling ourselves as writers? Is it because we don’t fit the stereotype of the serious writer that we hold in our minds? …
I think for me it’s partly that I’m a one-off in my family of origin, who are all professional people with ‘careers’; and partly that I came to both writing and painting late in life, but have to balance them with earning a living, so they remain secondary, apart from the few years when I was studying for higher degrees. But you and Lis have primary careers too, and still write….
Anyway, I don’t worry about it, I just go with the flow.
Christina, and what about your dedication to a creative life across the board? If you’re not writing yourself or helping other people with their writing, you’re painting. Not to mention your academic pursuits in your love of literature and all things life writing. I’m in awe of your perseverance and persistence and determination to get the most out of a life that can’t have been any easier than mine. We go back a long way now, you and I, and it’s wonderful to see how the years evolve and how we each grow. A friendship across time and distance that endures.
Well said, Lis! How nice that you share a long writing friendship. x
How lovely, Lis. Thank you, from my heart. We’ve shared a lot and I treasure it. Remember that hotel room in Honolulu, and the alarm that went off soon after midnight? And the rainbow and clouds spilling off the tall building at dusk, seen from the hotel window as we sipped a glass of wine? And you getting up early each morning so you could be bright-eyed at the conference, always near the front, always participating….
What a beautifully eloquent personal essay. I am always amazed at different people’s approaches and feelings about their writing life. Still waters run so very very deep. And not one of us is unscathed by a lack of confidence in our own work and worth, some of us just hid it better than others. 🙂
It’s true, Tabetha, writers are full of doubt and that’s not a bad thing. Imagine a supremely confident writer. what drivel they might produce. something of the impossibility, the difficulties of the task make it worth sharing. Thanks.
I love what both of you have said. Self-doubt is a double-edged sword—we need it, but in moderation, and it’s hard to keep that balance. Tabetha, you’re right about some of us hiding our self-doubt! Or at least pushing it away while we go about our work.
PS. I’m looking forward to posting your essay here soon, Tab! 🙂
Another wonderful instalment, Louise! I particularly love this,
‘it’s not inspiration per se that drives writing, it’s practise, persistence and a desire to get words down onto the page’
This is so true! The more we write, the more we learn about the craft – practise and persistence are a huge part of it, as much as the ability to tell stories. These essays are so interesting in that they reveal we each have our own stories, our own pathways to writing, yet all of them are valid. Self-doubt, as you said above, is a double edged sword, and too many of us fall under its weight.
I’m glad you’re enjoying the different perspectives of the essays, Helen. We’re all so individual, and yet there’s something in each one them that I relate to. As for self-doubt—oh god, I could kick its ass! Thanks for commenting. xx