A Brief Summary of My Writing Life
When we were girls in England my sister and I loved reading and we used to go three or four times a week to the library. We read books like Forever Amber and Scaramouche, rollicking tales of love and adventure. A long-term favourite of mine was Green Dolphin Country by Elizabeth Goudge, a love story set in 19th century New Zealand. I longed to write books like that, and to go to New Zealand.“I want to be a writer when I grow up”, I said to S. as we walked home with our arms full. But in a family of mathemagicians, word wizardry was not appreciated. I was always first or second in class but Dad would run his finger down my report card until he came to mathematics, and bawl me out when he saw the usual F for failed. In secret I wrote stories and poems that I never showed to a soul. “You’re fond of books”, said the careers teacher, “why don’t you try library work?”
So at 17 I became a library assistant, at 20 I got married, and at 26 I got divorced. My first husband was an airline pilot who resented the time I spent scribbling as much as I resented the time he spent away from home, and with other women. One day he burned all my stories and poems and I burned all his love letters in retaliation. No happy ending for us.
Now I was a single mother of two daughters, busy training first as a chartered librarian and then as a teacher. I was doing plenty of writing, but not the sort I dreamed of – course notes, essays and a thesis; annual reports and committee minutes, and resources for classroom learning. From time to time I wrote the occasional article that was published, unpaid, in a professional journal.
My girls were 12 and 14 when I got married again. A. had two children from a previous marriage and his own dream – to be an artist. Like lots of women, I found it easier to help someone else get what they wanted than to get it for myself. Soon A. was off to art school in Stafford and within two years the uncomplicated man I’d met when he worked on the shop floor at Cowley was an Artist in a smock, earning a living as a ceramic sculptor.
A. took up pipe-smoking and grew a beard. He was now ‘a free soul’ who left worrying about our four kids and how to pay the bills to me. His son was a disturbed child, and that marriage ended when Jeremy attacked my youngest daughter with a knife. The house bought with my superannuation (taken out early) was sold and I had to split the proceeds with A.
Starting over was hard work, and once again I put my dreams on hold. During my time with A. I had written two romance novels as ‘Jane Harmer’ that were published by Robert Hale, but I knew that kind of writing was not for me. When I left A. and moved to Wolverhampton, I got involved with a women’s writing co-operative that published a monthly magazine called Distaff. The other editors encouraged me to create new poems and stories. Some I sent to magazines and competition and I had enough success to encourage me to go on.
But there was never enough time left over from working to seriously engage with writing.
To be a writer is hard. You have to be able to deal with rejection, and, if poetry’s your thing, with the problems of small press publication. Like having a book launch organized in London and the publisher rings you up on the day and says, “Sorry, Jenny, they’re not ready. I ran out of money.” My friends and I got to work frantically and put together a set of 12 broadsheets and a presentation of words and music to keep the punters happy. We took orders for Writing in the Cracks Between (Aquila) and the book finally came out six weeks later.
About this time I met and married M. “I’ve been married twice before”, I told him. “I don’t think I could stand another marriage break-up. So be very sure that you want to last the course.” M. was a good man, a lay preacher, who worked hard for Oxfam and Amnesty and the Hunger Project. I found myself driving him to distant towns and villages to take church services. My writing skills were put to good use – sermons and reports on meetings, letters concerning political prisoners, funding applications and project plans.
I was still working full-time as a teacher-librarian, which also involved much writing. I had given up writing poetry after the book launch that didn’t happen, and rarely found time to sit down and create a character, work out a plot, and write the stories that still crowded my brain.
I wanted to build a home with M. but he had his own ideas on that. “People should live in bedsits”, he would say, “or in communes. You should buy wallpaper you don’t like and train yourself to like it”.
He would give away large sums to anyone in need, but to get any housekeeping money from him was an impossible task. He bought his clothes from op shops and his favourite breakfast was leftover spaghetti, eaten cold. Once when I threw out a baked potato for the birds he ran down the garden and got it back. He brushed off the dirt and grass and had it for his tea.
After four years, we parted, and five years later I finally brought myself to sign the decree nisi.
We still love each other, and we’re better apart. My girls were grown up. G. earned good money in the catering business, and A. doing an arts degree when I moved to London to start a new job. I was clinically depressed and writing was something I had put aside and forgotten. That dream, I thought, had died.
I ended up working for HRH Consensus as a freelance abstractor, producing online information bulletins for clients like Hewlett Packard, Ricoh and the World Wildlife Fund. We had a client brief for each of them, and our team would start work at 6 a.m. and cut out stories and reduce them to a brief paragraph under different headings to be on the client’s desk by noon. We worked under pressure, and there was one young guy there who kept us sane.
L. was the first to help if you had a computer shut down, or couldn’t work out if a story should be in and out. L. would go out at 9 a.m. and come back with croissants and hot coffee to keep us going. L. was first to finish and would immediately help whoever was lagging behind. L. was also dark and good-looking, and a New Zealander far away from home. I told J. who also worked at Consensus, “That’s exactly the sort of young man I’d like one of my girls to marry.”
A few months later I wanted to go to America and stay two months with my sister, still my best friend, still a reader like me, and struggling with her own sorrow at losing a daughter, A., to a brain tumour. I asked my boss if I could train my A. to take over my job for two months, and she agreed. The company paid me to train A. and paid A. while she was training. She had finished her arts degree and needed the cash and took to the work like a duck to water.
I flew off to Colorado and came back to find L. had moved in with A. and I was out of a job! They preferred my daughter to me and that was OK – I was soon working happily elsewhere. A. and L. got married and first G. was born and then S. I was the happiest grandma in the world and found out the real goodness of A. and L. as they loved and cared for their boys and for me following a serious back operation that put me out of work.
Dad died and I moved home to York to be near my mother, who, sadly, died less than a year later. Then A. told me L. was homesick and wanted to go back to New Zealand, and now that her beloved grandparents were gone, she had agreed to go with him and start a new life in Godzone. G. and I waved them goodbye. “You can join them when you retire”, said G. “I don’t want kids and I do like to travel. I can come and see you there.”
I flew out for a visit when L. was born, and I liked what I saw of New Zealand. I came home to my job in York Hospital, 20 hours a week only because of the back problems that prevented me working full-time. I got a computer and rediscovered writing. I set up a Women & Words writing circle that is still growing strong. I did the occasional piece, but mainly I helped other women write.
Women & Words met monthly in York’s historic Red House and I was coming away from there one sunny day in August when I tripped over a small irregularity in the pavement and into disaster. I fell diagonally with my whole weight across my left ankle. I heard it crack and the pain was excruciating. But that wasn’t all. I was wearing expensive sandals with Velcro ankle straps. The strap on my right ankle burst open under pressure, but the strap on my left ankle did not. The leather was literally cutting into my ankle and as I lay there screaming I could see white bone and ligaments curling back and red blood spouting. Japanese tourists were taking photos and my friends came running. The paramedics arrived eight minutes later - the longest eight minutes in my life. One of them was kneeling on the ground and I asked the other what he was doing. “Picking up bone”, she said.
I had three operations to save the foot which is now reattached with three titanium rods to keep it in place. I told the surgeon who performed this miracle, “I love you and I want to have your baby, but we’ll have to go to Italy.” (A woman of 60+ had just given birth in Milan.)
Recuperation was a slow and painful process and G. suggested I went to New Zealand to recover. When I agreed, she bought me a return ticket and put me on the plane.
I needed a new passport before I could go, and when the application form turned up some impulse took hold of me. Where it asked for occupation, I wrote ‘Writer’. That was a bold step for a woman in her 50s who had tried and failed for so long.
I’ve now been out here five years. I joined Tauranga Writers and met S. E., a short story writer and novelist. Sue became my best friend and writing mentor, and a continuing inspiration. Within six weeks of landing I sold a story, Green, to New Zealand Women’s Weekly. Within six months I won prizes in the Friends of Whakatane Short Story Competition and the Takahe Cultural Studies Essay Competition. I enrolled on the Whitireia online creative writing course to learn ‘to write Kiwi’, doing a Poetry module and Short Fiction 1 and 2.
Within a year I had poems and stories published in Poetry New Zealand, Blackmail Press, Magazine, Catalyst and other publications. I sold work in the UK and America. I was newsletter editor for the New Zealand Poetry Society for a year, and I do regular book reviews for different papers. I’m secretary of Tauranga Writers – visit out website at www.taurangawriters.org.nz. Usually it’s me who writes our Saturday column in the Bay of Plenty Times, the Write Place.
Last year Hen Enterprises published Constructive Editing and in 2007 will bring out The Crafty Entrepreneur. For two years I’ve been part of the Editorial Collective that produces Bravado, a literary arts magazine from the Bay of Plenty that this year secured substantial funding from Creative New Zealand. (Yes, I wrote the application!) I’m a creative writing tutor at Wairaiki Institute of Technology in Rotorua and one weekend I did a seminar on memoir for the Rotorua Writers WORDshop.
Living and working in New Zealand is not all joy. I often long to go back if only to say a proper goodbye to family and friends as I could not do when I left. It’s so many miles away when things go wrong. G.’s first husband died only six weeks after I got here and there was no way I could return for the funeral.
I also hate the IRD. We’re mutually incompatible and I resent the time and energy it takes to keep them off my back and how they can dip into my bank account and help themselves whenever they feel like it. I am fighting the Equity Campaign alongside many other expat pensioners here and in Australia who lose out on income simply because a son or daughter fell in love with a Kiwi or Ocker. But if home is where your heart is, then I’m where I ought to be.
Tauranga, simply put, is where I want to live and die. And Kiwis are amongst the kindest people in the world, as I first learned from L.
Finally, this year, I finished a novel that I’ve long wanted to write. Roads has been entered for the Richard Webster Popular Fiction Award. I don’t know yet who has won, but it’s probably not me, as this love story is set in the Midlands (UK). But merely to sit down and finish something that is 60,000 words long has been worthwhile. I’m now working on another book, Under a Different Moon, set in 1963. The action takes place between York, Denver and Taos (New Mexico) - all places I know. The heroine Meredith is an English girl whose mother’s marriage to a US Marine did not work out. (I know about failed marriages, too.) The hero Joel is madly sexy and I love him to bits. He’s half all-American boy and half Zuni warrior, a devastating combination that Meredith simply can not resist.
I still do too much for other people, especially childcare for A. who has now had her 4th – and last - child, R. Will I finally make it big-time as a writer? Yes, that’s possible now I have resurrected my dreams.
And signed up with a creativity coach to help make those dreams come true.
posted by Jenny Argante @ 5:37 AM
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