Since ancient times we have told each other stories. We sit around camp fires watching the flickering flames and exchanging tales, or curl up in bed with our books, or sit in the cinema, or in front of the television.We read newspapers, listen to the radio and browse the internet. We make up stories for our children, or meet friends for coffee and swap anecdotes. When we sit down at the dinner table and talk to our family, we construct stories from the events of the day, shaping our ideas into a satisfying structure with a beginning, middle and end, creating a narrative flow, an atmosphere, tensions, hooks and characters.
Stories are a natural part of us, deeply embedded in our psyche. Aside from their entertainment value, they help us to make sense of the world. Stories provide frameworks, enabling us to find meaning in our lives, to create order from chaos, beauty from horror. In stories we seek commonality, universal truths. Through stories we reach out to others and we discover ourselves.
For most of my life I have been closely linked to storytelling, professionally, as a writer, an undergraduate and postgraduate student, an editor, mentor, and a teacher of writing. And personally, as a child eager for stories, then as an avid adult reader and a mother of small children. All this time I have been developing my own ideas about the transformative nature of story. What stories give us. What makes them important in our lives. Questions that have become the basis for my thesis.
Over years of writing and teaching I have come to understand just how vital the creative process is to human development. When we shut down that process we shut down ourselves. I believe most writers would agree with Kafka who once wrote: ‘ . . . the existence of the writer is truly dependent on his desk and if he wants to keep madness at bay he must never go far from his desk, he must hold on to it with his teeth. (84)
There are many forms of creativity and each has its own craft with its own techniques and tools that must be learned over time. But there is also a timeless element, the art, the magic of creativity. For me this magic comes in the form of writing. And it exists in the fusion of memory and imagination.
It is well known that memory is closely linked to creativity. The word itself comes from the greek word Mnemosyne. Born from the marriage of Uranus and Gaia, heaven and earth, Mnemosyne was personified as the mother of the nine muses, the patron goddesses of poets and the source of creativity
Memory grounds us, it encompasses what we know, creating fences and boundaries, forming our identities and blurring the fine line between subjective and objective. Memory has a tendency to reinforce the past, creating patterns of unconscious, but learned behaviour, proved perhaps in the old adage - history repeats itself. But memory also has the potential to enable the development of wisdom.
Imagination is like the trickster gods of old. It is a liberating force, cutting through what has been established, making strange what is normal, allowing us to step into the shoes of another, to break free of what we know and to fly. According to Websters dictionary, ‘imagination is the act of forming a mental image of something not present to the senses or never before wholly perceived in reality’. Although imagination has the potential to create an entirely new future it is often dismissed as mere fantasy or used in a destructive manner, as seen in the tendency the human race has to apply the imagination to the invention of weapons.
Memory and imagination are each double sided and together they appear to be contradictory. A tension is created, between the grounding nature of memory and the flightiness of the imagination. For me, the vitality of that tension creates meaning. It is the source of my stories. Trusting it, is an act of faith in the unfolding mystery of story. (more…)

Excerpt

. . . Words have power. They change people. They cause revolutions, both social and personal. They flatter, they please, they move. And they hurt. I have never believed in the old proverb ’sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me.’ Like many others, I learned from experience that like stones, words can be weapons, and they are dangerous. The wrong word can break something inside a person. A stray sentence, overheard by a child, can burrow deep, building layer upon layer of scar tissue around it, changing the course of that child’s life, so that they live every day in reaction to it. As a child I was drawn to words, but I was also afraid of them. Reading helped me to see that like stones, words can be used to create something powerful and beautiful. Much later again, I realised that like a stick used to splint a broken bone, words can also be used to heal.

Writing began as a source of solace in my turbulent young adult years – though looking back now, I see how turgid my creations were. But eventually I began to develop a style, a voice and a small amount of self discipline. I began to understand that writing wasn’t all about inspiration. That becoming a writer was equivalent to agreeing to a lifetime’s apprenticeship. At least 90% of writing is craft based, which involves learning many technical skills – building three dimensional characters, plotting, structuring, exposition, pace, tension, description, dialogue. . .Over time these skills developed. I wrote short stories and travel pieces – some of which were published. I completed a BA in writing and literature and then went on to do an MA in creative writing in Britain. To support myself I began assessing manuscripts for literary agents and publishers in the UK. Then, back in Australia I continued editing, taught creative writing, and eventually went back to my early love - myths and symbols.

Despite many setbacks, I have continued to write, with small successes – publications and grants - luring me on every time I was tempted to give up. Nowhere Man, my first novel, about a homeless man living on the streets of London, was a study of identity and statelessness. It found me agents in the UK and Australia, and was admired and rejected by publishers who believed it was too bleak to sell as a first novel. I wrote another novel, Gathering Storm, less bleak, but still exploring the same themes, this time through family history and genetic inheritance, but also from a broader cultural perspective, in relation to nationhood and citizenship. In seeking the truth about her past, the protagonist, Storm, searches forwards in the form of a journey, backwards into history, to the source of her problems and metaphorically inwards to uncover the wounds which have formed her. As the story unfolds, Storm moves towards an understanding of psychological and physical exile and finally towards resolution of the conflicts within herself. In a way Gathering Storm is a coming-to-self novel. It is a work of fiction but its themes mirror my own. (more…)

The silent dark is broken by the padding of feet, drawing me slowly out of the depths of dreaming. The bedroom door opens a fraction, letting in a thin rectangle of light, then closes, drawing out the light once again. Something else has slipped in with the light. I strain my ears, listening for clues, but there’s only a sixth sense of another presence. Then comes a sigh, softer than the gentlest breeze, and a small sleepy body slips in beside me. Inside the covers, a cold foot presses on my belly.

On winter mornings the darkness lingers. I expect my children to wake with the light, later each morning, until the solstice, but that isn’t what happens. Instead they wake early, 6am, 5am, sometimes even 4am, and shuffle around the house in the cold, waiting for the sun, expecting breakfast and stories and warm fires from me. Every winter I make up rules. Tell them they mustn’t wake so early. Tell them it isn’t fair. Tell them I won’t. But I always do.

They try. For minutes at a time they hold back their restless energy and lie in bed, searching their senses for morning clues. They listen for the stillness before dawn, the distant rush of cars, birds stirring, a change in the feel of things. . . They listen until the exquisite pain of anticipation propels them out of bed and into the new day.

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I’m sitting next to Tim in the van, daydreaming, hands cradling my rounded belly, the baby lulled quiet by the engine and the gentle rhythm of the road. In the back, the children are asleep, mouths wide open, red hot faces and damp sticking hair. When they wake we will stop for lunch and after lunch we will move on again. We’re not going anywhere in particular, just meandering, letting one thing lead to the next.

After months on the road our days have formed a regular rhythm. Sometimes the children cry and grumble and the van fills with a sharp tension. Sometimes they play happily together and Tim and I spend time savouring long conversations. Often we sing along to children’s tapes, songs and nursery rhymes, played over and over. But there are also quiet times like now, when the children sleep or just stare out. Then we pass hours moving through flat landscape with low bush, termite mounds for as far as we can see, dry riverbeds, the occasional car … Regularly we see kangaroos, usually dead on the side of the road, their bodies swollen with the heat, or carcasses half devoured by Wedge Tailed Eagles who rise into the sky as we pass. The monotony has its own sort of beauty. There’s something hypnotic about it, something about the vast expanses that makes us look inward.

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