Season 2, 008: Scenes from our reading lives: What books (given, lent, lost, found, shared, annotated, more) - or memories of reading/being read to - are at the heart of our own stories?
In 2003, my partner and I arrived in the high, thin air of Mexico City at the start of a year long adventure. The culture shock was massive, a combination of altitude, the bustle of 10 million people, unfamiliar food, smells, faces and so much noise. The hostel overlooked the Zocalo, with its Spanish colonial buildings sitting on top of an aztec temple, the main square of the city. I felt homesick, shocked and disoriented and searched for the familiar. We travelled lightly and the hostel had a shelf full of books left by travellers coming and going from all parts of Central America. I found a battered copy of McCarthy’s Bar by Pete McCarthy, a story of his travels around Southern Ireland. I took it with me when we hopped on the bus south to the Mayan riviera and read it cover to cover on the 20 hour journey imagining the green fields of west cork as we drive along the parched Mexican highways scattered with cacti and dust. Arriving in Playa del Carmen in Yucatan with its turquoise sea and blazing white beaches and another hostel, I swapped my book for another battered novel and lay reading in a hammock. That carried me on to a jungle traveller village in Guatemala with an open air jungle canopy bathroom and howler monkeys in the trees as I sat reading on the loo. And so it went. I read, I passed my book on, I swapped and shared battered books with global travellers all the way through Belize, through LA and onward to Fiji, on campsites and hostels across New Zealand and Australia. The comfort blanket of novels and autobiographies and books I never dreamed I would read. Adventure, poetry, classics. Anything that was there- I was open to it all. I have never read so widely and prolifically even during my literature degree. I had no expectations, no requirements, I just read what was available and there for me. No judgement. My final swap was in a hotel on the Khao San Road in Bangkok after winding our way through south east Asia. I ended my journey and flight back to London with another story of travel, another story of wandering in Ireland. The books carried me, were my blanket, my thread, my familiar, my safety in a year of absolute freedom and uncertainty.
Helen, this was fascinating to me who has so rarely travelled. It gives me a whole new perspective on how it might be to go so far beyond my comfort zone, by using books as a blanket. But I love that even as they provided you with safety and continuity, the actual book in hand was always contingent upon whatever had been left behind by a previous traveller.
It's also simply a gorgeous piece of writing. Have you considered sending it to an online travel magazine or approaching a newspaper travel section with a pitch on this?
In the meantime, here is a link to it in the story archive (happy to add you last name if you confirm here via reply)
Thanks so much Tanya. This is such a lovely safe space to try out a bit of writing after many years and I am really enjoying it (and the anonymity at the moment but that might change as I feel more confident!) - the themes and the surprising things that come to me under those themes has been really exciting! Look forward to more and thanks for creating and curating it xx
Oh my - good point about anonymity! I was feeling a little too bold earlier to be using my full name... I may rethink that as my writing becomes more personal.
Ah! I'd just tweeted asking for Twitter magic to find a replacment - but I've deleted instantly as the link has your name in it!
Do you want me to remove your last name from the story archive listing for it?
I quite understand the need to get used to having your words on the web - several contributors don't give last names (yet/ever) for that reason: it's enough for them to get used to seeing their words presented in a public place at a little distance from them. They often - as you did - see their words in new ways too once they're published. This is true of all writers - however hard I proof read, I only ever see some errors the minute it goes to my editor!
I can't undertake to make lots of editorial changes for style post submission because of the volume of pieces I edit and publish: I can only make change if a big misspelling or formatting problem is spotted...
But I can change your name straight away. On this platform it doesn't get indexed on search engines, and most subscribers don't read all the subcomments on threads...
Oh no, that's absolutely fine! I think I want to do it this way. I just hadn't really considered it. I have now, and please do send that tweet out onto the world. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to waste your time. Thank you!
Your piece is so rich and evocative. It's reminded me of the years i travelled myself and picked up a book - that story unfolding as your own travel story unfolds, running alongside one another. A double story so rich, like a bit of life twice lived, really loved reading this x
Thanks Louise! It’s funny as I think the tradition of passing on books as we did as travellers isn’t so common anymore as everyone travels with kindles- seems a shame really!
Loved this, felt taken along to places I've never been, always admire people with your sense of adventure, so touched by all of the book sharing, a link around the world.
There were no books in our house. No, that’s not correct, there were books, but they were locked in the bedroom of the random uncle, and that meant I wasn’t allowed even to see them on their shelves.
The random uncle had been swept up with us when our house in the East End was slum-cleared and we were moved to the red-brick housing estate box. The books he brought with him glittered in my imagination, I knew I wanted to read, the picture books at school were already dead weight. There was treasure behind that bedroom door.
Then the RAF accepted him and he was no longer part of our family. I was the youngest but the complications of gender, relationship and noisy nightmares meant that I was moved into his room. I held my breath as I followed my bedding through that door for the first time, the books were still there! Instantly, in that golden moment, my world expanded 5…. 10…100 times.
There was nothing here that would be considered a childrens book, the uncle was a frustrated traveller, here were foreign lands, strange places, people with different coloured skin. Yet the greatest joy was that there were no librarians to send me back to replace my choice of books on the shelves because they were ‘too old for me’, the ongoing battle I had at the public library.
Nights became adventures, I saved precious pocket-money for torch batteries, I took flight from that unheated bedroom, landing softly (don’t let parents know I’m not asleep) in Africa, Canada, Australia. In the morning I went richer to school, knowing my teachers for what they were, they wanted to ground me in Sunderland. I tolerated their leaden feet, come nightfall, I could journey once more.
Geoff - what a compelling piece this was: in itself like the colour-plate in one of those books: that sort of magnetism (that I remember too: my reading was likewise found material in my grandparents' house, relics of an uncle who'd moved out just before I arrived!). And then that last paragraph - how you invert the roles of student/teachers: stunning.
Love this, Geoff. The sense of anticipation, the dream realised ... and then the 'travel' to untold shores, broadening the mind, preparing your escape. Was it Laurie Helgoe who said "Reading is like travel, allowing you to exit your own life for a bit, and to come back with a renewed, even inspired, perspective"? Evocative writing. Barrie
So touching, how hard you worked to feed your curiosity, "that golden moment." I felt myself cheering you on. I love how everyone takes these prompts and is able to tell a complete story of themselves in so few words and yet leaves the reader longing for more.
Thanks so very much for taking the time to respond so positively Sheila. I find these prompts are a great opportunity to take one small memory and give it the words it might deserve (I've just finished a book-length memoir and if I gave every memory this attention it would be a long book indeed!)
Dec 11, 2022·edited Dec 11, 2022Liked by Tanya Shadrick
Judy Blume – Forever
Michael had a penis named Ralph and none of the moms knew about it, these moms who trusted Judy Blume because of Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret? and Tiger Eyes. But my seventh grade friends and I sure knew about Ralph. We read and reread Forever, the story of first love and lost virginity between Michael and Katherine. Love starved, nearly knock-kneed skinny, told by an uncle that I looked like Olive Oyl, by others that I was a carpenter’s dream: flat as a board and never been nailed. (Every decade has its own version of 7th grade awful.)
I was sure a boy would never love me the way Michael loved Katherine. Filled with longing, remarkably insecure, intrigued by sex, overruled by terror, craving a tenderness that I wasn’t sure existed. Nice men narwhal-like, heard of but ever so rarely seen. My early efforts at trying to attract my own Michael were laughable: I bought a one piece bathing suit with plunging neckline and leopard skin print to wear while prancing around the Apollo Pool, gnawing on my Charleston Chews and picking the red remainders of Swedish fish out of my braces, always hoping that when I came up out of the water nothing came out of my nose. Lying on my towel, waiting to be adored, flat enough to be mistaken for African safari roadkill.
Looking back now at 54, it would be easy to be sad that this was something I wanted at that age and sadder still that it was something I thought didn’t exist. Instead, a kind smile for that girl whose aches made her foolish and clumsy. She learned to write her own story.
Gorgeous! I loved that book so much, although it had slipped from memory until this by you. Your physical description of young you - unsparing but so vivid! And this 'nice men narwhal-like' - yes, yes. Then the last line, which I've now come to anticipate keenly with each new piece from you as it always leaves with me a physical sensation of changed perspective. Thank you as ever - and also for the generous way you're reading others' work on here. It's so appreciated by me as well as those you're responding to. All my very very best for the holidays.
Tanya, It was so hard to choose a book...I almost did A Tree Grows in Brooklyn since that was also a favorite of my youth, and then became a favorite of my daughter which made it all the more special, could go on and on here. A special thank you as we near the end of the year. I first heard you on the Wintering podcast and knew I must read your book, hands down one of my favorite books ever, searingly honest, beautifully written, inspiring, affirming of all the humanity within us. So wonderfully strange how something so random can be truly life changing. Then this platform with all of the generosity you offer each one of us allowed the journey to continue. When I first saw the word limit, I thought, no, that's not for me, I cannot do that. Then, I did! I really believe that I have become a more confident and better writer through the word constraints, it really made me think about what could be stripped from the writing. My very best wishes to you as this year ends and a new one begins and my hope for you is that all of the love you have given us through the year is felt returned in kind. So grateful.
I missed out on Judy Blume, having my head buried deep in Silver Brumbies (Elyne Mitchell) (little did I know that one day I would be emigrating to the land of these beautiful horses!), so I really enjoyed this post and the effect her writing had on you!
I bought , Are you there god for my Daughter I think she was less interested but I loved it so much when i was young and now you have me thinking now of flowers in the attic another great series of books for teenagers,which I loved and I know friends at the time did too !
Dancing magical letters on a page – my Nan's description of going from confused symbol onlooker to avid reader. ‘One day it clicked’, she would demonstrate finger to thumb. I heard the story many times, often as I gripped my little blue readers journal ‘cause for concern’ scratched within it.
It must have confused my parents, because we traveled many places via book spines before bedtime, my shyness had got us all into trouble. The issues remained non-the-less; salty streaks of heat as I stood on a plastic brown chair, unable to spell rhinoceros with a horrified small faced audience. Still it haunts me. Even as the results from my Bachelor’s degree pinged into my inbox, subject: English language & literature, I shivered at the memory of words once twisting unpleasantly.
But there was one person who always made sense to me, with lyrics like spinning tops and sparkling sweets in my mind; Edward Lear. Complete Nonsense & Other Verse for breaking through to sanity. To me and my stoic friend (Rosey bear); lots of honey wrapped up in money was indeed the best way to escape reality. And, as an adult living in a canal boat, a pea green boat is definitely the best vehicle to get there.
I keep a second-hand copy. It is a brilliantly insane yellow at my bedside, just in case my dreams run quiet and the night grows tall. Limerick is often dismissed as a writing structure, but if possible, you shouldn’t turn away a smile. Poetry is self-aware, offering extra space to the reader, add some fun and it’s freedom. Edward Lear twirls you in and creates movement in your mind; happiness bubbling the brain.
So, my Nan was telling the truth, because Lear’s words, they danced - by the light of the moon.
Jen! So happy you've joined the project - and what a wonderful, dancing first contribution: so poignant & full of precisely-remembered sensory detail. And I love how you have it by you now in adult life. A pleasure to have this in the story archive, and here is your direct link to it:
Once or twice a term, the teacher would hand out the Scholastic Book Club catalogue for us to take home. I studied this document with great care and my heart pounded as I compiled a library in my mind from its contents. I looked with envy as the ordered books were handed out to others and carelessly slung into slumped backpacks. I dreamed of one day knowing this kind of extravagance.
But, I was also acutely aware that it would not be fair to ask my mother for a book from one of these catalogues. The sensitive second child, it would have pained me to see the anguish mar her face when she would have to tell me that it would not be possible. And so, to this day, I don’t know from where I summoned the courage to ask for one. But one book compelled me, magnetised me, and I knew that I had to have it. Admittedly, the reasons were far from literary. I was nine years old and the cover was the most glorious shade of purple and my middle name was in the title and this seemed reason enough. Mum said yes.
The air was thick with summer heat and humidity and the clouds were heavy boulders hung low in the sky the day my book arrived. Fat drops of rain splotched on to the concrete path as I ran the last hundred metres home, thunder rumbling and pushing me on. Straight to my room I went and lifted my book from my bag. The storm crashed down as I began reading the opening pages of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and the course of my life was sealed.
Now, as a secondary school English teacher and mother to a girl named Charlotte, many copies of Jane Eyre live in my library but there is still something that draws me to that purple cover from all those long years ago.
As a child who also grew up with real financial constraints, I responded so deeply to how you've recreated here so powerfully the way wanting a book or art materials interfused with everything around me. The sensory alchemy that happened when we could finally be in possession of something we wanted, and take it away into a room, so that - as you show here so beautifully - we remember not only the story we read, but the day, the weather, the things around us. Wow.
And then the thrill of your last paragraph! Thank you for sharing this with us.
Thank you Tanya for once again including my words and for prompting me to write. You are very generous with your time and your words and with gifting us this beautiful space. Many heartfelt thanks, Em xx
You have triggered a fond memory for me here now Emily. I recall the smell of the new books being handed out around the class .. and my sad envy of those who were able to order one every time. We had the Scholastic Book Club catalogue too and I am sure I was allowed to order at least once - being the last of 7, I had a few more privileges than my siblings. (My Mum really encouraged reading.) Can't recall which book I got though. I felt your excitement of getting it home - how very special.
Just recalling a second hand book (with that wonderful musty page smell) Heidi - as a small girl I was enthralled by her days, and intrigued about the cheese and the mountains and goats, so alien to my Australian beach side landscape. Turns out my GG grandfather was from the Swiss mountains .. perhaps it was a DNA memory/longing ;)
Beautifully written and I love that you tie together the start of your story with the end. How powerful that one book was! I don't think we got those Scholastic books in my elementary school but I remember reading from some kind of box that had various reading levels, not really caring what they were about but just hungry for anything to read.
The first shock was the cover. I’d remembered a series of small images, mini-lino prints, of everyday scenes, domestic scenes. In fact there were only eight images, and two of them were of a whisky bottle and a glass. In the others, figures were disembodied: legs, arms, the back view of two people in a car. The faces that could be seen had harsh black slits for eyes, for a mouth.
And then I opened the book, and memory went awry. I’d written a date on the fly leaf: May 1985. I was 25. This couldn’t be. I’d convinced myself I’d bought this book when I was at university.
I left university in 1981.
I read a few lines of the first story. The language is spare, sparse: a waitress describes serving a very large man in a restaurant. I remembered reading it in 1985: my amazement at what the simplest language could achieve. The lack of similes, of metaphor, made the emotional impact of the stories even more intense. This was real. This was true. I believed every word. Nothing was wasted. I absorbed the stories as if by osmosis, and wondered how he did it. The stories were perfect. His words described the quiet desperation of the characters in a way I had never seen before, the loneliness, the alcoholism, the despair.
1985. The year I had my first abortion. The year I lost my job. The year I woke up in many strange beds around the city, wondering if I had the money in my pocket to get home. I never made the connection between the life I was leading and the stories I was reading.
Many things have changed.
But looking back, it can sometimes seem as if, in that year, I was sleepwalking: a bit part player in my own life. Like a Raymond Carver character, hungover, staring into space.
We didn't touch on Carver in our wonderful mentoring conversation - so it's a thrill to find a shared love and awe for his work here, now, through your own spare and very powerful prose. I thought when I first began reading your work - in your mentoring application and then your first few pieces here - that you are in the lineage of Lessing, Duras, Ernaux: those women who write the full range of emotions and experiences, but with an economy of language. Now, too, I see that what I prize in Carver in part of what you bring to story-telling too.
I love how you used the prompt here to reflect on his writing, your life.
This is wonderful, seems ripe for a longer piece. The paragraph that starts: 1985. The three short sentences then the two longer ones, spare but says everything, palpable.
I drove in hard memory nails into those fifteen pages; a stash of words that have stalked me and unleashed the past, calling out my name. Those words took me by the hand and ragdoll shook me; an out of control moment that left its mark.
It was a happy time, family knitted together, warming each others needs. Four wheels treading the road to a seaside of possibilities. West Scottish coast scent- seeping into the car; a week to roam in my books and stick family together. A sea salt sanctuary, lashings of waves and wonder to tease and taste. I chose the chilled air of early morning to tour the pages of Robert James Waller. A wave of time had washed up this book and beached it into my hands. " Love from Ted " 2004. A scribbled sentiment once written from a friend, a lover ....... I chose, A Canticle for Roadcat. A short essay about a cat that drifted into Robert's life and shared time and place with him; becoming a trusted companion for many years. The story provoked my togetherness; a tsunami of words tore into me causing a shock wave which rippled through my body. A sob big enough to suck the moon from orbit erupted inside me. The words smote me, stroked me with pathos. I ran for open space, soothing sea and a sprinkle of calm, but the sobbing would not stop. The flimsy, weak handles of the baggage I carried broke and spilled over into the streets of Seaside Town.
Can words alone grasp one with such intensity? Was it a collision of state of mind; of place, end of journey expectation and my jangled up bag of DNA controlling the moment? Those pages have remained shut.
Steve this piece fascinates me. I've read it several times and realise I haven't - despite a lifetime (like you) of reading deep and hard - ever had this kind of awesome wave or fission/fusion happen with a book. I did get taken by surprise by Sarah Winman's Tin Man and found myself weeping from page 2 to the end, strange grizzling tears then sobs. But no, nothing close to what you've described here. It makes me curious to know more about that experience when we can talk again next...and also curious as to what poem or book or story might ever deliver me into that altered state...
I've emailed you separately with a question about the piece you submitted post workshop. Will wait til I hear back from you on that.
And separately to that (!): I'm planning to start doing a featured writer in each of my monthly newsletters from Season 3 starting at the end of this month. I want to showcase what's in the archive and who are frequent or longest-term contributors are. I'd love you to be one of these please.
I'm going to spend time next week thinking through how I want to approach it. I like the idea of asking each of you to provide a few lines of bio, a link to any pieces/website/account if you have any, but also to answer a couple of questions. This will then go with one of your pieces into the body of the weekly newsletter. That's the plan anyway - need to think through a few bits of logistics!
Hi Tanya, yes like you a number of other books have brought me to tears but nothing so intense and dramatic as that morning in Portpatrick. It is a feeling that has left its signature in me, and made me feel intimidated by its power. I would appreciate talking to you about that experience when again that becomes possible.
I didn't receive an email from you asking about the workshop exercise. It must of got lost in the ethers somewhere.
I like the idea of what you intend to do in Season Three. I would love to take part in that.
I would just like to thank you again for taking time to make all this possible. Cheers Tanya.
We were supposed to sit still, but I was so delighted I’d wriggle like a puppy and halfway through the story I would slide inch by inch off the cushion onto the cool grass, ending up with green ankles and knickers. The teacher with the kind eyes and a voice like honey read to us every afternoon that summer term, as the sun tickled my face and it was too hot to be inside.
I felt sick in my tummy every morning before school, even in those days. At lunch time I’d stand with my back to the wall, watching the other kids play games. In class, they made naughty children sit next to me, as a kind of punishment. I would invent all kinds of ailments to keep me at home. If that didn’t work I would hide in the woods, lurk in the park, or hang around the shops, anything to avoid going to school. I stayed in the shadows; nobody noticed me.
But Stig of the Dump changed all that. I longed to hear what Barney had been up to, the lonely boy with his imaginary friend. If I missed a day at school that meant I missed a chapter, and if I missed a chapter I would never know what happened in the end.
The teacher with the kind eyes and soft voice got sick, a few days before the summer holidays began. I begged the supply teacher to read Stig of the Dump, but he was a hard, uncompromising man more used to unruly pupils.
Half a century later I realise I never did find out what happened in the end.
Cathy, this is such a poignant, quietly powerful piece. Thank you. How well you recreate your own particular sensory memories of those early school years but in that way of good writing so that I was flooded, reading you, by my own sense-memories of that time. Yes, yes, I kept thinking at each line.
And that same book was read in my classroom, and like you, I felt deep kinship with it, feeling outside of so much as the only child in school with divorced parents, and a father entirely absent.
The last line is exciting to me and full of possibility. Are you going to read the book over the holidays? Or - perhaps - find an audio version so you can sit again and listen? I'd love to know back here on this thread if you do...
And I'd love to see what you do with other prompts from the substack. All stay open without deadlines.
Reading and I have become estranged, and it picks at my peace of mind.
My earliest memories were of bedtime stories read by my mum. Her mouth topsy turvy as I stared up from my pillow, her lips kneading and spilling words that toppled down to my ears like confetti. From the age of 6, my little life became nestled snug in the corners of wild and whimsical stories. Illicitly, at night, I would snake a desk lamp into my wardrobe, closing the door so only a chink of light betrayed me and curl up beneath the dress hems and shirt tails to scuttle between pages. When I was older, I would traipse over the fields to find a tree beneath whose boughs I could read for hours in peace.
I did my A-level paper on Iain Banks’s the Wasp Factory. My mother bought me tickets to see him talk. She had dressed up with due reverence for those ‘intellectuals’ who would surely be in attendance and was shocked that he held forth in a dingy pub, populated by eclectic fans of his science fiction writing; he was fabulous and kind, a seismic imagination in wool and corduroy.
My 20s, leading a vagabond and often solitary life, a book would be my companion for a few short weeks, then left on trains and buses a gift to a new home as my backpack could hold no more.
Now, in my 40s in my own home, the walls are so full of books, but they are not mine. My small collection minimal, drowned out, lingering neglected on the nightstand. My husband’s reading is dominant, voluminous. Mine, intensely private and small - but insistent – tapping on my heart like a grief until I carve a space for it once more.
Louise - this is simply stunning writing. How much you have done in so few words...
There is that concentration of childhood experience that gives me the same sensory pleasure I get from C S Lewis and Laurie Lee ('Illicitly, at night, I would snake a desk lamp into my wardrobe, closing the door so only a chink of light betrayed me and curl up beneath the dress hems and shirt tails to scuttle between pages.')
But then you also manage to say something deeply affecting about your adult experience, right now. Particular to you, but true (in that way of good writing) to something so many of us experience - when we are with a friend or partner whose efforts or interests somehow (often without any intent on their part) crowd out or diminish our own.
And then that very last line which gave me the same mix of disquiet and hope I get from Dickinson.
Wow. It makes me want to have a long writer and reader conversation with you. But as we aren't in the same town, I wonder if you can say a little more here in comments about that small collection on your bedside table - of what composed?
I'm also moved by your piece not only by its beauty but by the synchronicity of it: After reading constantly, deeply, widely my whole live I have found myself in a paradox in this publication year - what made me want to become a writer (that deep, sensual flow got from reading) has retreated from me in a long season where I've often had to respond at short notice to requests to blurb books, give talks, travel to events. It's all been a privilege...and yet I no longer feel myself. On Friday night and all day Saturday I read whole Hardy's Return of the Native which somehow (how?) I'd never read. It was mind-blowing. To regain my whole concentration in the act of reading about imaginary people from hundreds of years ago as if they were absolutely real and their situation urgent to me. And yesterday I began rereading a biography of Hardy first read in my twenties, but different now that I've been published and reviewed both well and badly myself...
All this a long-winded way of saying: I, too, have lost the habit of reading often and deeply and intend in this coming year to place it at the soul and centre of any free time I have.
I'd love so much to know whether reading returns to you and how. And what that is. Using this thread for that? I get notifications on any new comments, however deeply nested in the main thread those be...
Thank you for this truly fine piece of writing. Your link to it as follows:
Thank you so much Tanya for your amazing words and for being so generous with your own story. So interesting to hear that a version of this has also happened to you and that I too have found my lack of reading has caused an uneasy sense of straying from, and not feeling, myself.
My husband read my short piece and suggested I make a private reading den just for me away from him! His books are hardback tomes on wars and great leaders, a religious user of the bookmark, he treats his books with reverence, read, displayed and every word remembered. Mine are well-thumbed paperbacks, pages turned down and spines cracked - my act of reading more visceral and interactive. After being read my memory is of feelings, colours and landscapes, and of the time and place where I first immersed myself- with names, dates and facts, which my husband asks for, often forgotten. I think the difference and my comparison of this has shamed me into non-reading, which is completely unintentional on his part. In contrast to him I feel a careless reader but as you say it is the ‘act of reading about imaginary people from hundreds of years ago as if they were absolutely real and their situation urgent to me’ that is magical for me. It reminds me of a book I read last year, James Meek - To Calais, in Ordinary Time.
As for my reading pile, I should say that The Cure for Sleep has been on it for some time, though I finished it today. I think I knew it would require something deep and difficult from me, which was why I simultaneously bought it and avoided it, only dipping in and out when I felt I could. This platform together with your book has stirred in me a need for bravery and first steps, your profound and unwavering honesty, a liberation for me in so many ways, thank you.
Also on my pile is David Mitchell’s Utopia, Phillippe Sand’s The Ratline and Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend (given by a friend) and a special one - Emma Harding’s Friedrichstrasse 19 – written by an old school friend who I am so very proud of, a phenomenal knowledge and quiet talent whose debut novel I hope to read next.
I'm aware that the noise and distraction of the outside world also plays a part in my lack of reading and your safe space here to write has given me an opportunity to explore this and gently find my way back, perhaps in a new way? A recalibration of the second half of my life that is needed before I can return to reading with a new sense of self and desire. I am willing myself to crack a new spine in the coming days, perhaps a little braver in heart and inching further down the path to a new hope and desire for my future…I’ll let you know how I get on xx
Louise - how strange. I was sure I'd replied to this...but see now that I've instead been in ongoing conversation with you/your words in my thoughts! Our exchange here really has moved me. I read your piece, my response, your reply to my husband as an example of what wonderful things are happening on here. And it led to another great conversation between he and I about reading. Thank you.
Please do keep writing for us here, and I am fascinated to read whatever you want to share about your 'recalibration'.
Since we last exchanged words here I've gone on from Return of the Native to Hardy's biography (just finished) and now I've cracked open a much-sellotaped copy of Tess of the D'Urbervilles that I've had since university but never read because of how often tutors and classmates called me her, on account of my rural accent. I see now, so late, how I turned away from my rural heritage into a study of the modernists simply because I resented being characterized by others. But lost a lot in so doing.
It's lovely to feel there's a group of us all recalibrating in our different ways. xx
Louise, I hope you can find your way back. All those worlds are waiting for you, as is your new world. I barely read for years when my kids were little, and now I'm back, it's like getting to know my self again. Have fun x
I often search the Internet for a particular edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. But all I really remember is that it was chunky, yellowish with grey lettering and illustrations, so finding it will be pure luck. For years I refused to buy another copy, longingly waiting to come across that edition I used to own, hoping to restore it to my library and alongside the book regain something else lost a long time ago too: a sense of home. My budding library, 30 books at most, was thrown away when I was 19 by people who just wanted me and my meagre possessions out of the flat I had lived in all my life. Thirty years on, I can say that losing all my books then was more traumatic than having to leave that flat, because already at that point in my life my books were my home.
I was the only reader in my family, and yet I have been shaping my life around books ever since I could read. I began with the very few books within my reach, but when I started to really want to choose what I read public libraries were not enough – I became very greedy about surrounding myself with my own books. My family was disintegrating, and my library became something to hold on to. As most young teenagers, I had very little money of my own. That copy of Huckleberry Finn was in English, bought from the British Council in Lisbon, imported and expensive. I probably spent all my monthly allowance on it. It became the cornerstone of my library and of my life as I wanted it to be, in a way. That is why it meant so much to me and why I am still looking for it.
This is such fine and deeply moving writing by you, Maria, making me glad all over again that you applied for Ilkley mentoring this year, and that I chose you. And it's a special feeling to have you join this writing project now with this piece, given that this month's prompt was decided upon after our conversation, after hearing you speak of your younger-self's library being destroyed.
And if you'd be happy for me to share a link to your beautiful words on Twitter, we might get lucky and find that hive mind, and Christmas spirit, leads you to the book? I will only do that if you say I might!
I do hope other prompts interest you to write for, as I'd like our writing conversations and connnection to continue now long past the funded one that brought us together this month!
Thank you so much, Tanya. Rereading it, I think the word 'books' is in there a few times too many! Funny how I only noticed that when reading it on the archive page though.
I love the challenge of keeping the piece to 300 words, it's such a good writing exercise and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Tentative steps. Please do share it on Twitter. Thank you again for your generosity, and for creating this wonderful platform and community. I hope to become a valuable part of it and, yes, to continue our writing conversations and connection. Maria x
We were a disjointed, disconnected, and damaged family who shared a love of reading yet it never managed to bind us with even the slither of a thread.
My father would typically buy his books, rather than borrow; however, the rest of us were frequently found in the old village library, hurriedly searching for new adventures to brighten our otherwise depressing and desperate lives. Each of choosing to take our separate secret journeys away from the seemingly mapped-out route that we were on.
Reading by candlelight well into the wee hours was the only way to partake of my adventures, for to be found doing anything other than 'working' was to be a glutton for punishment. Not that I minded, of course, for squeezing into an old cupboard with the flickering light and golden glow of a candle only added to the magic of it all!
Until I read this post of Tanya's, I had long since stopped thinking about the beautiful tales of the Silver Brumbies, written by award-winning author Elyne Mitchell, that enticed me deep into the Australian Alps for many otherwise harrowing years! Followed by the timeless work of Enid Blyton.
I have been in awe of the magic of the written word all of my life, and I feel that it is why I believed that becoming a writer was so far out of my reach. Writing assignments while studying didn't pose a threat but trying to capture a moment or two in time was easier with a pencil or paintbrush than words.
Since reading The Cure for Sleep, I am beginning to realise that it is high time I tried!
I think you make a poignant and painful corrective here, Tracey, to the romantic idea that all who read are content, kind, easy to be around - connected through a love of the written word. Instead - quite often - I've found that books are a way for members of a family to hide from one another in separate, self-protecting worlds. You show that to such effect here - and how I feel for the young you.
And so it's a very special privilege to think this space I've made here is one is which the writing, story-immersed you no longer has to hide away but can step forwards and join in: not only as a reader, but as a writer yourself...
Tracey, You did so much in such a short writing, showing the heartbreak of your life but also your resilience, how you were able to make the hiding away into cupboard into a bit of magic. So glad you decided to take a chance and honor your creativity and join this space!
Thank you for your kind words Shelia, I am grateful for your thoughts.
I am also so grateful for this safe space to finally express my creativity in words. It is interesting just how quickly my way of expression is changing. Normally, I am imagining how I might capture a scene in life with a pencil or paintbrush but now (just since reading TCFS) my imagination is trying to find the words instead. It feels like Tanya's memoirs have found a way into somewhere deeper than all of the authors that have gone before her.
(Of course I realise that there are many variables at play here, timing, space, energy etc.} However I do believe that TCFS is the catalyst for me.
I felt the same when I read TCFS, definitely magic in there! I'm sure being an artist will meld beautifully with your writing since you already have the gift of seeing. And you are very welcome!
You sound inspired in a similar way to me . I loved reading about your childhood salve of reading by candlelight. You portrayed so well how it was like a companion(I think) which is very much how I felt when I read. We moved around a lot when I was a child but reading (& swimming) felt like constants to me and it sounds like it was for you too.
As for writing ,aren’t we lucky to have this space and the encouragement to share that Tanya gives us so freely and warmly .
Thank you Louise for taking the time to comment on my writing. Yes, reading was certainly a constant for me (nature too), it is a wonderful way to escape isn't it!
We are blessed to have this space and dear Tanya's guidance indeed! I wonder if there is anywhere else quite like it.
There is an exquisite intensity to the tiredness in the early months of first-time motherhood. You haven’t the foreknowledge for it to tarnish into all the tiredness that there will be, the years of broken sleep, the decades. You are tired beyond all previous imagining, but you do imagine it will end. It must, surely?
During that time, I found myself in the library near our new home. It was warm, the librarians were friendly, and there was a shelf of parenting books. I knew I didn’t want to be told to leave my baby to cry, but I felt I should linger there, show willing. A pale, novel-sized paperback caught my eye. A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother, by Rachel Cusk. I’d read one of her stories, a million years ago. Perhaps she had something for me.
So I borrowed it, and read it, cover to cover, during a day of epic breastfeeding, the three of us on the sofa. Me, the baby, and Rachel. Rachel knew it all, knew all about the darkness lurking under the tiredness; the contrast between imagined ranks of immaculate, blissed-out mothers and my increasingly fragile self; the existential angst in the small hours. And the guilt at this. Oh, the guilt!
And as I read, I realised that my favourite passages had the page corners turned down. Someone had literally been here before me, had felt the same connection – someone possibly in the next street. The isolation I had felt was whisked away, once by the book and now by this unknown person – and their proximity.
The next week, I set up a group for local parents. Over the months that followed, as I got to know each exhausted mother, I wondered: was it you? Did your fingers turn down those corners? What the hell do we do now?
**
Tanya, I feel this will be the first of many pieces I write as I go through my changing "bibliography". Thank you for the space and the prompt x
Amelia, I got goosebumps reading this, several times over. You've recreated so powerfully not only your early months of mothering, but so many women's, mine included. The heat and safety of the library. The visceral importance of certain books. I remember being shaken to the core by Cusk's book - and aware too of the critical outrage it called forth. I love so very much how you felt connected to other unmet women through the page folds, and admire how you then took action in your community to make yourself found, and to find others. I will look forward to every new piece from you in this project: love how you write, and think.
Thank you for this response, such a nice way to wake up this morning. Have you ever written about the reading her books and then ending up living there? It is always fascinating when these connections happen.
Thank you so much, what a brilliant idea! I haven't written anything really, well not anything other than uni assignments or IG posts, although I've wanted to. This space that Tanya has created feels so safe that I am finally going to be dipping my toes in the writing pond! I am looking forward to it and so blessed to be surrounded by so much talent! X
That's wonderful to hear. Paul, one of the other contributors, gave me a comment in my Longing writing that encouraged me to continue on with it, said it felt like the beginning of something. I decided to give it a try and it has been a fun romp, doing writing I never would have thought of without his comment, so I'm always happy to share this encouragement. This definitely is a great space, full of goodwill and kindness and such heartfelt stories. Let me know when you post something.
I have posted twice now! So exciting! One on the Reading post and the other on the Skills post. I love how the memories are being stirred up in thus beautiful safe space created by Tanya. Xx
I’ve just read your beautiful contributions now & I will be back here in comments later today when I’ve added them to the story archive. We already have a Tracey in the project who doesn’t use a last name though - are you able to give me your last name (or a pseudonym one!)
So glad you’ve joined the project & I love how you’re reading and responding to other people’s pieces: so generous of you.
My favourite book? Most impact? The one I would give to others?
Impossible tasks; all three.
Books are my favourite things next to people and pets and swimming. So, books about water and animals and relationships, ah now you’re talking! But just don’t ask me to choose between them.
Reading is as much part of me as the clothes I wear and the air I breathe. If I was to be too unwell to read I would ask for a reader to sit with me; with the stack of books I always have by my bed and delve into whichever one took my fancy in that moment.
Without reading I would no doubt feel more alone. In fact this was put to the test when we travelled in France, Spain and Portugal in our campervan. I had a kindle by necessity as then I could escape into different worlds by a click. This would break the loneliness and isolation of travel with a depressed partner and a language I had minimal grasp of .
Of course this would be no substitute for a trip to the library, leaving with a too heavy bag, full of books to soothe, to ease the difficulty of living I had found through the years.
Books found on shelves under gardens; self help ; travel; craft; cookery ; psychology ; parenting; history. Each binding me to others somehow. To the struggles, to the questions, to the solutions they had found. Could some of these work for me? It didn’t so much matter, what mattered was that we were now together in this pursuit. And that in that library I could see individuals who looked lost too, and those who were on a mission, driven and ordered and organised. Sometimes this would scare me just a bit, make me feel less than. Usually though it would comfort me and remind me that my little home up the road was nearby. It was near to this smell, these strangers, the familiar librarian, the click of the date stamp the collection of CD’s and the magazines.
Returning from travelling I comforted myself with visits to charity shops and became a member of the library before we had a new home, before I started work again. To surround myself once more with fictitious people, pets and problems to be solved.
For Season Three of The Cure for Sleep with Tanya Shadrick…
As you know, I’m wanting to begin featuring pieces from the story archive, and hope also to share some thoughts from their authors.
I’ve been trying to create a form for this purpose, but it’s getting too complicated. Instead, if you’d like to be featured, please may I ask you to give the following information here in comments?
Where are you based (country or county is fine)
Your bio (no more than 50 words; written in third person)
A link to your website or social media – only if you’d like that to be included
(Remind me of) The piece you’d like featured
Where are you in your creative journey right now – and how does writing for this story-sharing community support that? (no more than 100 words)
Is there anything else you’d like to say about how you came to join this community? (no more than 100 words)
Louise! I love it when a piece by you comes through - and this one is a beauty of deepening feeling and surprising perspectives. Love what you say at the end about the community of strangers one gets in a library...
Ah,thanks! I ruminate on a prompt for ages, hence the late response to Nov. Honestly could have written several pieces on reading and had a post write moment of thinking what a cop out not to have mentioned a single book or author.
Now enjoying reviewing writing for Feb and realise I’ve got quite a collection now ,thanks to you & encouragement & inspiration.
Hope all ok with your mum, so sorry to hear your recent news xxx
When i read the subject of our writting invitation this month I felt excited then overwhelmed! I Had loved so many books from reading from an young person to now in my mid forties what books had meant so much to me ? The answer was they all have
I have always felt all the books that have passed my way at the time of reading they had given me something to sustain me but what did jump out at me thinking about this topic was the book The end of the affair by Graham Greene .
The film I seen at the cinema on a whim to watch and then the book came after not something i would normally do,
and to write of it here I knew I had to reread again and with covid visiting again i had the time.
The book has always meant so much to me as a exploration of faith ,love and belief .Themes that I think alot about in my life
The book contains so much of those human feelings like hate, jealousy and bitterness all those we rather not let others see but also how inspite of ourselves and our feelings we are drawn to look for answers and can find a belief through our suffering even when we are so apposed to it and the circumstances that has brought us to it .
A wonderful book i will always treasure reading again and again .
Monique, every time you contribute words to this project, I am filled - all over again - with a sense of your huge and bright spirit. You really do shine through screen as person who really believes in things, and takes risks in the realm, the service, of human connection. In the stories you share, but also how you read and support others here.
And its a special delight to see you describing a book which also means a great great deal to me. It's not one that I reference explicitly in my own book (the way I do with Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Thoreau and others) and yet you will now from reading my story how I struggled with my double love - all that it surprised in me: shame...but also abundance, and absurd joy and hope where guilt should have been.
That book by Greene gets closest to the strange grace of love that doesn't fit into the places and roles it should. It doesn't dodge the pain and hurt of that.
Your description of it means I'm adding it to my travel bag now for the time I'm about to spend down with my mother before returning home to my husband and children just before Christmas. At the end of my book's publication year, this feels like the right book to keep company with. Thank you.
Here is your link to your words in the story archive:
I've spent time redesigning the landing page for the all the stories, and each of the story pages themselves, to better showcase all of your words. I'd love you to take a look...
And in the new year I'm going to redesign the whole website, again with the aim of making your stories stand out still further. The paperback in April has as its final page an invitation for readers to join our story-sharing community - so I'm hoping many more hundreds of people over the coming years will be reading you!
I agree, also felt overwhelmed, so hard to choose. I'm intrigued and want to read this now, another one added to the list. Always so fun to hear what books meant so much to others.
In 2003, my partner and I arrived in the high, thin air of Mexico City at the start of a year long adventure. The culture shock was massive, a combination of altitude, the bustle of 10 million people, unfamiliar food, smells, faces and so much noise. The hostel overlooked the Zocalo, with its Spanish colonial buildings sitting on top of an aztec temple, the main square of the city. I felt homesick, shocked and disoriented and searched for the familiar. We travelled lightly and the hostel had a shelf full of books left by travellers coming and going from all parts of Central America. I found a battered copy of McCarthy’s Bar by Pete McCarthy, a story of his travels around Southern Ireland. I took it with me when we hopped on the bus south to the Mayan riviera and read it cover to cover on the 20 hour journey imagining the green fields of west cork as we drive along the parched Mexican highways scattered with cacti and dust. Arriving in Playa del Carmen in Yucatan with its turquoise sea and blazing white beaches and another hostel, I swapped my book for another battered novel and lay reading in a hammock. That carried me on to a jungle traveller village in Guatemala with an open air jungle canopy bathroom and howler monkeys in the trees as I sat reading on the loo. And so it went. I read, I passed my book on, I swapped and shared battered books with global travellers all the way through Belize, through LA and onward to Fiji, on campsites and hostels across New Zealand and Australia. The comfort blanket of novels and autobiographies and books I never dreamed I would read. Adventure, poetry, classics. Anything that was there- I was open to it all. I have never read so widely and prolifically even during my literature degree. I had no expectations, no requirements, I just read what was available and there for me. No judgement. My final swap was in a hotel on the Khao San Road in Bangkok after winding our way through south east Asia. I ended my journey and flight back to London with another story of travel, another story of wandering in Ireland. The books carried me, were my blanket, my thread, my familiar, my safety in a year of absolute freedom and uncertainty.
Helen, this was fascinating to me who has so rarely travelled. It gives me a whole new perspective on how it might be to go so far beyond my comfort zone, by using books as a blanket. But I love that even as they provided you with safety and continuity, the actual book in hand was always contingent upon whatever had been left behind by a previous traveller.
It's also simply a gorgeous piece of writing. Have you considered sending it to an online travel magazine or approaching a newspaper travel section with a pitch on this?
In the meantime, here is a link to it in the story archive (happy to add you last name if you confirm here via reply)
Tan x
https://thecureforsleep.com/november-issue-reading/#Helen
Thanks so much Tanya. This is such a lovely safe space to try out a bit of writing after many years and I am really enjoying it (and the anonymity at the moment but that might change as I feel more confident!) - the themes and the surprising things that come to me under those themes has been really exciting! Look forward to more and thanks for creating and curating it xx
Oh my - good point about anonymity! I was feeling a little too bold earlier to be using my full name... I may rethink that as my writing becomes more personal.
Ah! I'd just tweeted asking for Twitter magic to find a replacment - but I've deleted instantly as the link has your name in it!
Do you want me to remove your last name from the story archive listing for it?
I quite understand the need to get used to having your words on the web - several contributors don't give last names (yet/ever) for that reason: it's enough for them to get used to seeing their words presented in a public place at a little distance from them. They often - as you did - see their words in new ways too once they're published. This is true of all writers - however hard I proof read, I only ever see some errors the minute it goes to my editor!
I can't undertake to make lots of editorial changes for style post submission because of the volume of pieces I edit and publish: I can only make change if a big misspelling or formatting problem is spotted...
But I can change your name straight away. On this platform it doesn't get indexed on search engines, and most subscribers don't read all the subcomments on threads...
And that's such great insight, about proofreading and missing things. Thank you again.
Oh no, that's absolutely fine! I think I want to do it this way. I just hadn't really considered it. I have now, and please do send that tweet out onto the world. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to waste your time. Thank you!
Your piece is so rich and evocative. It's reminded me of the years i travelled myself and picked up a book - that story unfolding as your own travel story unfolds, running alongside one another. A double story so rich, like a bit of life twice lived, really loved reading this x
Thanks Louise! It’s funny as I think the tradition of passing on books as we did as travellers isn’t so common anymore as everyone travels with kindles- seems a shame really!
I know! Your piece bought back lovely memories of books handed down and handed on, undertaking travels of their own!
Loved this, felt taken along to places I've never been, always admire people with your sense of adventure, so touched by all of the book sharing, a link around the world.
There were no books in our house. No, that’s not correct, there were books, but they were locked in the bedroom of the random uncle, and that meant I wasn’t allowed even to see them on their shelves.
The random uncle had been swept up with us when our house in the East End was slum-cleared and we were moved to the red-brick housing estate box. The books he brought with him glittered in my imagination, I knew I wanted to read, the picture books at school were already dead weight. There was treasure behind that bedroom door.
Then the RAF accepted him and he was no longer part of our family. I was the youngest but the complications of gender, relationship and noisy nightmares meant that I was moved into his room. I held my breath as I followed my bedding through that door for the first time, the books were still there! Instantly, in that golden moment, my world expanded 5…. 10…100 times.
There was nothing here that would be considered a childrens book, the uncle was a frustrated traveller, here were foreign lands, strange places, people with different coloured skin. Yet the greatest joy was that there were no librarians to send me back to replace my choice of books on the shelves because they were ‘too old for me’, the ongoing battle I had at the public library.
Nights became adventures, I saved precious pocket-money for torch batteries, I took flight from that unheated bedroom, landing softly (don’t let parents know I’m not asleep) in Africa, Canada, Australia. In the morning I went richer to school, knowing my teachers for what they were, they wanted to ground me in Sunderland. I tolerated their leaden feet, come nightfall, I could journey once more.
Geoff - what a compelling piece this was: in itself like the colour-plate in one of those books: that sort of magnetism (that I remember too: my reading was likewise found material in my grandparents' house, relics of an uncle who'd moved out just before I arrived!). And then that last paragraph - how you invert the roles of student/teachers: stunning.
Here is your link in the story archive:
https://thecureforsleep.com/november-issue-reading/#geoffcox
Tan xx
Love this, Geoff. The sense of anticipation, the dream realised ... and then the 'travel' to untold shores, broadening the mind, preparing your escape. Was it Laurie Helgoe who said "Reading is like travel, allowing you to exit your own life for a bit, and to come back with a renewed, even inspired, perspective"? Evocative writing. Barrie
So touching, how hard you worked to feed your curiosity, "that golden moment." I felt myself cheering you on. I love how everyone takes these prompts and is able to tell a complete story of themselves in so few words and yet leaves the reader longing for more.
Thanks so very much for taking the time to respond so positively Sheila. I find these prompts are a great opportunity to take one small memory and give it the words it might deserve (I've just finished a book-length memoir and if I gave every memory this attention it would be a long book indeed!)
Wow! Good for you. Best wishes with that!
Judy Blume – Forever
Michael had a penis named Ralph and none of the moms knew about it, these moms who trusted Judy Blume because of Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret? and Tiger Eyes. But my seventh grade friends and I sure knew about Ralph. We read and reread Forever, the story of first love and lost virginity between Michael and Katherine. Love starved, nearly knock-kneed skinny, told by an uncle that I looked like Olive Oyl, by others that I was a carpenter’s dream: flat as a board and never been nailed. (Every decade has its own version of 7th grade awful.)
I was sure a boy would never love me the way Michael loved Katherine. Filled with longing, remarkably insecure, intrigued by sex, overruled by terror, craving a tenderness that I wasn’t sure existed. Nice men narwhal-like, heard of but ever so rarely seen. My early efforts at trying to attract my own Michael were laughable: I bought a one piece bathing suit with plunging neckline and leopard skin print to wear while prancing around the Apollo Pool, gnawing on my Charleston Chews and picking the red remainders of Swedish fish out of my braces, always hoping that when I came up out of the water nothing came out of my nose. Lying on my towel, waiting to be adored, flat enough to be mistaken for African safari roadkill.
Looking back now at 54, it would be easy to be sad that this was something I wanted at that age and sadder still that it was something I thought didn’t exist. Instead, a kind smile for that girl whose aches made her foolish and clumsy. She learned to write her own story.
Gorgeous! I loved that book so much, although it had slipped from memory until this by you. Your physical description of young you - unsparing but so vivid! And this 'nice men narwhal-like' - yes, yes. Then the last line, which I've now come to anticipate keenly with each new piece from you as it always leaves with me a physical sensation of changed perspective. Thank you as ever - and also for the generous way you're reading others' work on here. It's so appreciated by me as well as those you're responding to. All my very very best for the holidays.
https://thecureforsleep.com/november-issue-reading/#sheilaknell
Txxx
Tanya, It was so hard to choose a book...I almost did A Tree Grows in Brooklyn since that was also a favorite of my youth, and then became a favorite of my daughter which made it all the more special, could go on and on here. A special thank you as we near the end of the year. I first heard you on the Wintering podcast and knew I must read your book, hands down one of my favorite books ever, searingly honest, beautifully written, inspiring, affirming of all the humanity within us. So wonderfully strange how something so random can be truly life changing. Then this platform with all of the generosity you offer each one of us allowed the journey to continue. When I first saw the word limit, I thought, no, that's not for me, I cannot do that. Then, I did! I really believe that I have become a more confident and better writer through the word constraints, it really made me think about what could be stripped from the writing. My very best wishes to you as this year ends and a new one begins and my hope for you is that all of the love you have given us through the year is felt returned in kind. So grateful.
Hi Sheila
I missed out on Judy Blume, having my head buried deep in Silver Brumbies (Elyne Mitchell) (little did I know that one day I would be emigrating to the land of these beautiful horses!), so I really enjoyed this post and the effect her writing had on you!
Thank you
Tracey
Love Judy Blume so much ! This story of your youth is lovely ,lovely full of brilliant adolescent yearnings 💗🌺 love it
Thank you very much. I wasn't sure if she was popular outside of the states, glad to hear she resonated with you too, just loved her.
Yes totally popular here
i think !
I bought , Are you there god for my Daughter I think she was less interested but I loved it so much when i was young and now you have me thinking now of flowers in the attic another great series of books for teenagers,which I loved and I know friends at the time did too !
Oh my, yes! I read those too.
🙏💗😂💕🙋🏾♀️
The Nonsense of Edward Lear
Dancing magical letters on a page – my Nan's description of going from confused symbol onlooker to avid reader. ‘One day it clicked’, she would demonstrate finger to thumb. I heard the story many times, often as I gripped my little blue readers journal ‘cause for concern’ scratched within it.
It must have confused my parents, because we traveled many places via book spines before bedtime, my shyness had got us all into trouble. The issues remained non-the-less; salty streaks of heat as I stood on a plastic brown chair, unable to spell rhinoceros with a horrified small faced audience. Still it haunts me. Even as the results from my Bachelor’s degree pinged into my inbox, subject: English language & literature, I shivered at the memory of words once twisting unpleasantly.
But there was one person who always made sense to me, with lyrics like spinning tops and sparkling sweets in my mind; Edward Lear. Complete Nonsense & Other Verse for breaking through to sanity. To me and my stoic friend (Rosey bear); lots of honey wrapped up in money was indeed the best way to escape reality. And, as an adult living in a canal boat, a pea green boat is definitely the best vehicle to get there.
I keep a second-hand copy. It is a brilliantly insane yellow at my bedside, just in case my dreams run quiet and the night grows tall. Limerick is often dismissed as a writing structure, but if possible, you shouldn’t turn away a smile. Poetry is self-aware, offering extra space to the reader, add some fun and it’s freedom. Edward Lear twirls you in and creates movement in your mind; happiness bubbling the brain.
So, my Nan was telling the truth, because Lear’s words, they danced - by the light of the moon.
https://compasskeen.wordpress.com/
Jen! So happy you've joined the project - and what a wonderful, dancing first contribution: so poignant & full of precisely-remembered sensory detail. And I love how you have it by you now in adult life. A pleasure to have this in the story archive, and here is your direct link to it:
https://thecureforsleep.com/november-issue-reading/#jenratcliffe
I do hope you'll enjoy trying out some of the other prompts. All stay open for contributions with no deadlines.
Tan xx
Thank you so much - and for this great project which I will be happily reading next to my fire over Christmas xx
I really love this ! Wise Nan's hey 💗
Thank you💗
Once or twice a term, the teacher would hand out the Scholastic Book Club catalogue for us to take home. I studied this document with great care and my heart pounded as I compiled a library in my mind from its contents. I looked with envy as the ordered books were handed out to others and carelessly slung into slumped backpacks. I dreamed of one day knowing this kind of extravagance.
But, I was also acutely aware that it would not be fair to ask my mother for a book from one of these catalogues. The sensitive second child, it would have pained me to see the anguish mar her face when she would have to tell me that it would not be possible. And so, to this day, I don’t know from where I summoned the courage to ask for one. But one book compelled me, magnetised me, and I knew that I had to have it. Admittedly, the reasons were far from literary. I was nine years old and the cover was the most glorious shade of purple and my middle name was in the title and this seemed reason enough. Mum said yes.
The air was thick with summer heat and humidity and the clouds were heavy boulders hung low in the sky the day my book arrived. Fat drops of rain splotched on to the concrete path as I ran the last hundred metres home, thunder rumbling and pushing me on. Straight to my room I went and lifted my book from my bag. The storm crashed down as I began reading the opening pages of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and the course of my life was sealed.
Now, as a secondary school English teacher and mother to a girl named Charlotte, many copies of Jane Eyre live in my library but there is still something that draws me to that purple cover from all those long years ago.
As a child who also grew up with real financial constraints, I responded so deeply to how you've recreated here so powerfully the way wanting a book or art materials interfused with everything around me. The sensory alchemy that happened when we could finally be in possession of something we wanted, and take it away into a room, so that - as you show here so beautifully - we remember not only the story we read, but the day, the weather, the things around us. Wow.
And then the thrill of your last paragraph! Thank you for sharing this with us.
https://thecureforsleep.com/november-issue-reading/#emily
Txx
Thank you Tanya for once again including my words and for prompting me to write. You are very generous with your time and your words and with gifting us this beautiful space. Many heartfelt thanks, Em xx
You have triggered a fond memory for me here now Emily. I recall the smell of the new books being handed out around the class .. and my sad envy of those who were able to order one every time. We had the Scholastic Book Club catalogue too and I am sure I was allowed to order at least once - being the last of 7, I had a few more privileges than my siblings. (My Mum really encouraged reading.) Can't recall which book I got though. I felt your excitement of getting it home - how very special.
Just recalling a second hand book (with that wonderful musty page smell) Heidi - as a small girl I was enthralled by her days, and intrigued about the cheese and the mountains and goats, so alien to my Australian beach side landscape. Turns out my GG grandfather was from the Swiss mountains .. perhaps it was a DNA memory/longing ;)
Yes, both the words on paper and the smell of paper can be portals to so many places - both real and imagined. Happy reading! xx
Beautifully written and I love that you tie together the start of your story with the end. How powerful that one book was! I don't think we got those Scholastic books in my elementary school but I remember reading from some kind of box that had various reading levels, not really caring what they were about but just hungry for anything to read.
Yes, the hunger to read is powerful indeed. Thank you so much for your kind words xx
The stories of Raymond Carver
The first shock was the cover. I’d remembered a series of small images, mini-lino prints, of everyday scenes, domestic scenes. In fact there were only eight images, and two of them were of a whisky bottle and a glass. In the others, figures were disembodied: legs, arms, the back view of two people in a car. The faces that could be seen had harsh black slits for eyes, for a mouth.
And then I opened the book, and memory went awry. I’d written a date on the fly leaf: May 1985. I was 25. This couldn’t be. I’d convinced myself I’d bought this book when I was at university.
I left university in 1981.
I read a few lines of the first story. The language is spare, sparse: a waitress describes serving a very large man in a restaurant. I remembered reading it in 1985: my amazement at what the simplest language could achieve. The lack of similes, of metaphor, made the emotional impact of the stories even more intense. This was real. This was true. I believed every word. Nothing was wasted. I absorbed the stories as if by osmosis, and wondered how he did it. The stories were perfect. His words described the quiet desperation of the characters in a way I had never seen before, the loneliness, the alcoholism, the despair.
1985. The year I had my first abortion. The year I lost my job. The year I woke up in many strange beds around the city, wondering if I had the money in my pocket to get home. I never made the connection between the life I was leading and the stories I was reading.
Many things have changed.
But looking back, it can sometimes seem as if, in that year, I was sleepwalking: a bit part player in my own life. Like a Raymond Carver character, hungover, staring into space.
We didn't touch on Carver in our wonderful mentoring conversation - so it's a thrill to find a shared love and awe for his work here, now, through your own spare and very powerful prose. I thought when I first began reading your work - in your mentoring application and then your first few pieces here - that you are in the lineage of Lessing, Duras, Ernaux: those women who write the full range of emotions and experiences, but with an economy of language. Now, too, I see that what I prize in Carver in part of what you bring to story-telling too.
I love how you used the prompt here to reflect on his writing, your life.
Here is your link to it in the story archive:
https://thecureforsleep.com/november-issue-reading/#kerrywhitley
Txx
This is wonderful, seems ripe for a longer piece. The paragraph that starts: 1985. The three short sentences then the two longer ones, spare but says everything, palpable.
I drove in hard memory nails into those fifteen pages; a stash of words that have stalked me and unleashed the past, calling out my name. Those words took me by the hand and ragdoll shook me; an out of control moment that left its mark.
It was a happy time, family knitted together, warming each others needs. Four wheels treading the road to a seaside of possibilities. West Scottish coast scent- seeping into the car; a week to roam in my books and stick family together. A sea salt sanctuary, lashings of waves and wonder to tease and taste. I chose the chilled air of early morning to tour the pages of Robert James Waller. A wave of time had washed up this book and beached it into my hands. " Love from Ted " 2004. A scribbled sentiment once written from a friend, a lover ....... I chose, A Canticle for Roadcat. A short essay about a cat that drifted into Robert's life and shared time and place with him; becoming a trusted companion for many years. The story provoked my togetherness; a tsunami of words tore into me causing a shock wave which rippled through my body. A sob big enough to suck the moon from orbit erupted inside me. The words smote me, stroked me with pathos. I ran for open space, soothing sea and a sprinkle of calm, but the sobbing would not stop. The flimsy, weak handles of the baggage I carried broke and spilled over into the streets of Seaside Town.
Can words alone grasp one with such intensity? Was it a collision of state of mind; of place, end of journey expectation and my jangled up bag of DNA controlling the moment? Those pages have remained shut.
Steve this piece fascinates me. I've read it several times and realise I haven't - despite a lifetime (like you) of reading deep and hard - ever had this kind of awesome wave or fission/fusion happen with a book. I did get taken by surprise by Sarah Winman's Tin Man and found myself weeping from page 2 to the end, strange grizzling tears then sobs. But no, nothing close to what you've described here. It makes me curious to know more about that experience when we can talk again next...and also curious as to what poem or book or story might ever deliver me into that altered state...
here is your link:
https://thecureforsleep.com/november-issue-reading/#steveharrison
I've emailed you separately with a question about the piece you submitted post workshop. Will wait til I hear back from you on that.
And separately to that (!): I'm planning to start doing a featured writer in each of my monthly newsletters from Season 3 starting at the end of this month. I want to showcase what's in the archive and who are frequent or longest-term contributors are. I'd love you to be one of these please.
I'm going to spend time next week thinking through how I want to approach it. I like the idea of asking each of you to provide a few lines of bio, a link to any pieces/website/account if you have any, but also to answer a couple of questions. This will then go with one of your pieces into the body of the weekly newsletter. That's the plan anyway - need to think through a few bits of logistics!
Tan xx
Hi Tanya, yes like you a number of other books have brought me to tears but nothing so intense and dramatic as that morning in Portpatrick. It is a feeling that has left its signature in me, and made me feel intimidated by its power. I would appreciate talking to you about that experience when again that becomes possible.
I didn't receive an email from you asking about the workshop exercise. It must of got lost in the ethers somewhere.
I like the idea of what you intend to do in Season Three. I would love to take part in that.
I would just like to thank you again for taking time to make all this possible. Cheers Tanya.
Steve.x
I'll email again midweek when I 'm back from a trip! And really look forward to making you a featured writer in Season Three. xx
Thanks Tanya. Look forward to it. Steve. x
We were supposed to sit still, but I was so delighted I’d wriggle like a puppy and halfway through the story I would slide inch by inch off the cushion onto the cool grass, ending up with green ankles and knickers. The teacher with the kind eyes and a voice like honey read to us every afternoon that summer term, as the sun tickled my face and it was too hot to be inside.
I felt sick in my tummy every morning before school, even in those days. At lunch time I’d stand with my back to the wall, watching the other kids play games. In class, they made naughty children sit next to me, as a kind of punishment. I would invent all kinds of ailments to keep me at home. If that didn’t work I would hide in the woods, lurk in the park, or hang around the shops, anything to avoid going to school. I stayed in the shadows; nobody noticed me.
But Stig of the Dump changed all that. I longed to hear what Barney had been up to, the lonely boy with his imaginary friend. If I missed a day at school that meant I missed a chapter, and if I missed a chapter I would never know what happened in the end.
The teacher with the kind eyes and soft voice got sick, a few days before the summer holidays began. I begged the supply teacher to read Stig of the Dump, but he was a hard, uncompromising man more used to unruly pupils.
Half a century later I realise I never did find out what happened in the end.
Cathy, this is such a poignant, quietly powerful piece. Thank you. How well you recreate your own particular sensory memories of those early school years but in that way of good writing so that I was flooded, reading you, by my own sense-memories of that time. Yes, yes, I kept thinking at each line.
And that same book was read in my classroom, and like you, I felt deep kinship with it, feeling outside of so much as the only child in school with divorced parents, and a father entirely absent.
The last line is exciting to me and full of possibility. Are you going to read the book over the holidays? Or - perhaps - find an audio version so you can sit again and listen? I'd love to know back here on this thread if you do...
And I'd love to see what you do with other prompts from the substack. All stay open without deadlines.
Here is your link:
https://thecureforsleep.com/november-issue-reading/#cathyrobinson
Tanya xx
Reading and I have become estranged, and it picks at my peace of mind.
My earliest memories were of bedtime stories read by my mum. Her mouth topsy turvy as I stared up from my pillow, her lips kneading and spilling words that toppled down to my ears like confetti. From the age of 6, my little life became nestled snug in the corners of wild and whimsical stories. Illicitly, at night, I would snake a desk lamp into my wardrobe, closing the door so only a chink of light betrayed me and curl up beneath the dress hems and shirt tails to scuttle between pages. When I was older, I would traipse over the fields to find a tree beneath whose boughs I could read for hours in peace.
I did my A-level paper on Iain Banks’s the Wasp Factory. My mother bought me tickets to see him talk. She had dressed up with due reverence for those ‘intellectuals’ who would surely be in attendance and was shocked that he held forth in a dingy pub, populated by eclectic fans of his science fiction writing; he was fabulous and kind, a seismic imagination in wool and corduroy.
My 20s, leading a vagabond and often solitary life, a book would be my companion for a few short weeks, then left on trains and buses a gift to a new home as my backpack could hold no more.
Now, in my 40s in my own home, the walls are so full of books, but they are not mine. My small collection minimal, drowned out, lingering neglected on the nightstand. My husband’s reading is dominant, voluminous. Mine, intensely private and small - but insistent – tapping on my heart like a grief until I carve a space for it once more.
Louise - this is simply stunning writing. How much you have done in so few words...
There is that concentration of childhood experience that gives me the same sensory pleasure I get from C S Lewis and Laurie Lee ('Illicitly, at night, I would snake a desk lamp into my wardrobe, closing the door so only a chink of light betrayed me and curl up beneath the dress hems and shirt tails to scuttle between pages.')
But then you also manage to say something deeply affecting about your adult experience, right now. Particular to you, but true (in that way of good writing) to something so many of us experience - when we are with a friend or partner whose efforts or interests somehow (often without any intent on their part) crowd out or diminish our own.
And then that very last line which gave me the same mix of disquiet and hope I get from Dickinson.
Wow. It makes me want to have a long writer and reader conversation with you. But as we aren't in the same town, I wonder if you can say a little more here in comments about that small collection on your bedside table - of what composed?
I'm also moved by your piece not only by its beauty but by the synchronicity of it: After reading constantly, deeply, widely my whole live I have found myself in a paradox in this publication year - what made me want to become a writer (that deep, sensual flow got from reading) has retreated from me in a long season where I've often had to respond at short notice to requests to blurb books, give talks, travel to events. It's all been a privilege...and yet I no longer feel myself. On Friday night and all day Saturday I read whole Hardy's Return of the Native which somehow (how?) I'd never read. It was mind-blowing. To regain my whole concentration in the act of reading about imaginary people from hundreds of years ago as if they were absolutely real and their situation urgent to me. And yesterday I began rereading a biography of Hardy first read in my twenties, but different now that I've been published and reviewed both well and badly myself...
All this a long-winded way of saying: I, too, have lost the habit of reading often and deeply and intend in this coming year to place it at the soul and centre of any free time I have.
I'd love so much to know whether reading returns to you and how. And what that is. Using this thread for that? I get notifications on any new comments, however deeply nested in the main thread those be...
Thank you for this truly fine piece of writing. Your link to it as follows:
https://thecureforsleep.com/november-issue-reading/#louiseratcliffe
Thank you so much Tanya for your amazing words and for being so generous with your own story. So interesting to hear that a version of this has also happened to you and that I too have found my lack of reading has caused an uneasy sense of straying from, and not feeling, myself.
My husband read my short piece and suggested I make a private reading den just for me away from him! His books are hardback tomes on wars and great leaders, a religious user of the bookmark, he treats his books with reverence, read, displayed and every word remembered. Mine are well-thumbed paperbacks, pages turned down and spines cracked - my act of reading more visceral and interactive. After being read my memory is of feelings, colours and landscapes, and of the time and place where I first immersed myself- with names, dates and facts, which my husband asks for, often forgotten. I think the difference and my comparison of this has shamed me into non-reading, which is completely unintentional on his part. In contrast to him I feel a careless reader but as you say it is the ‘act of reading about imaginary people from hundreds of years ago as if they were absolutely real and their situation urgent to me’ that is magical for me. It reminds me of a book I read last year, James Meek - To Calais, in Ordinary Time.
As for my reading pile, I should say that The Cure for Sleep has been on it for some time, though I finished it today. I think I knew it would require something deep and difficult from me, which was why I simultaneously bought it and avoided it, only dipping in and out when I felt I could. This platform together with your book has stirred in me a need for bravery and first steps, your profound and unwavering honesty, a liberation for me in so many ways, thank you.
Also on my pile is David Mitchell’s Utopia, Phillippe Sand’s The Ratline and Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend (given by a friend) and a special one - Emma Harding’s Friedrichstrasse 19 – written by an old school friend who I am so very proud of, a phenomenal knowledge and quiet talent whose debut novel I hope to read next.
I'm aware that the noise and distraction of the outside world also plays a part in my lack of reading and your safe space here to write has given me an opportunity to explore this and gently find my way back, perhaps in a new way? A recalibration of the second half of my life that is needed before I can return to reading with a new sense of self and desire. I am willing myself to crack a new spine in the coming days, perhaps a little braver in heart and inching further down the path to a new hope and desire for my future…I’ll let you know how I get on xx
Louise - how strange. I was sure I'd replied to this...but see now that I've instead been in ongoing conversation with you/your words in my thoughts! Our exchange here really has moved me. I read your piece, my response, your reply to my husband as an example of what wonderful things are happening on here. And it led to another great conversation between he and I about reading. Thank you.
Please do keep writing for us here, and I am fascinated to read whatever you want to share about your 'recalibration'.
Since we last exchanged words here I've gone on from Return of the Native to Hardy's biography (just finished) and now I've cracked open a much-sellotaped copy of Tess of the D'Urbervilles that I've had since university but never read because of how often tutors and classmates called me her, on account of my rural accent. I see now, so late, how I turned away from my rural heritage into a study of the modernists simply because I resented being characterized by others. But lost a lot in so doing.
It's lovely to feel there's a group of us all recalibrating in our different ways. xx
Louise, I hope you can find your way back. All those worlds are waiting for you, as is your new world. I barely read for years when my kids were little, and now I'm back, it's like getting to know my self again. Have fun x
Thank you Amelia! I think I'm slowly getting there and you are so right, it does feel like I'm getting to know myself again!
I often search the Internet for a particular edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. But all I really remember is that it was chunky, yellowish with grey lettering and illustrations, so finding it will be pure luck. For years I refused to buy another copy, longingly waiting to come across that edition I used to own, hoping to restore it to my library and alongside the book regain something else lost a long time ago too: a sense of home. My budding library, 30 books at most, was thrown away when I was 19 by people who just wanted me and my meagre possessions out of the flat I had lived in all my life. Thirty years on, I can say that losing all my books then was more traumatic than having to leave that flat, because already at that point in my life my books were my home.
I was the only reader in my family, and yet I have been shaping my life around books ever since I could read. I began with the very few books within my reach, but when I started to really want to choose what I read public libraries were not enough – I became very greedy about surrounding myself with my own books. My family was disintegrating, and my library became something to hold on to. As most young teenagers, I had very little money of my own. That copy of Huckleberry Finn was in English, bought from the British Council in Lisbon, imported and expensive. I probably spent all my monthly allowance on it. It became the cornerstone of my library and of my life as I wanted it to be, in a way. That is why it meant so much to me and why I am still looking for it.
This is such fine and deeply moving writing by you, Maria, making me glad all over again that you applied for Ilkley mentoring this year, and that I chose you. And it's a special feeling to have you join this writing project now with this piece, given that this month's prompt was decided upon after our conversation, after hearing you speak of your younger-self's library being destroyed.
Here is your link to it in the story archive:
https://thecureforsleep.com/november-issue-reading/#mariasimoes
And if you'd be happy for me to share a link to your beautiful words on Twitter, we might get lucky and find that hive mind, and Christmas spirit, leads you to the book? I will only do that if you say I might!
I do hope other prompts interest you to write for, as I'd like our writing conversations and connnection to continue now long past the funded one that brought us together this month!
Txx
Thank you so much, Tanya. Rereading it, I think the word 'books' is in there a few times too many! Funny how I only noticed that when reading it on the archive page though.
I love the challenge of keeping the piece to 300 words, it's such a good writing exercise and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Tentative steps. Please do share it on Twitter. Thank you again for your generosity, and for creating this wonderful platform and community. I hope to become a valuable part of it and, yes, to continue our writing conversations and connection. Maria x
So touched by this....could this be the book? If so, I'd be happy to send along.
https://www.amazon.com/Adventures-Huckleberry-SeaWolf-Illustrated-Classic/dp/1953649807/ref=sr_1_5?crid=19I3R5T4HQ0KS&keywords=adventures+of+huckleberry+finn+book+with+illustrations&qid=1670793612&sprefix=adventures+of+huckleberry+finn+book+with+illustrations%2Caps%2C84&sr=8-5
Thank you, Sheila. Not this one - but thank you so much anyway! x
This Is beautiful and I'm so happy you were reunites with your special book 💗books are family, books are home xxx
Yes, they are! Thank you, Monique. x
We were a disjointed, disconnected, and damaged family who shared a love of reading yet it never managed to bind us with even the slither of a thread.
My father would typically buy his books, rather than borrow; however, the rest of us were frequently found in the old village library, hurriedly searching for new adventures to brighten our otherwise depressing and desperate lives. Each of choosing to take our separate secret journeys away from the seemingly mapped-out route that we were on.
Reading by candlelight well into the wee hours was the only way to partake of my adventures, for to be found doing anything other than 'working' was to be a glutton for punishment. Not that I minded, of course, for squeezing into an old cupboard with the flickering light and golden glow of a candle only added to the magic of it all!
Until I read this post of Tanya's, I had long since stopped thinking about the beautiful tales of the Silver Brumbies, written by award-winning author Elyne Mitchell, that enticed me deep into the Australian Alps for many otherwise harrowing years! Followed by the timeless work of Enid Blyton.
I have been in awe of the magic of the written word all of my life, and I feel that it is why I believed that becoming a writer was so far out of my reach. Writing assignments while studying didn't pose a threat but trying to capture a moment or two in time was easier with a pencil or paintbrush than words.
Since reading The Cure for Sleep, I am beginning to realise that it is high time I tried!
I think you make a poignant and painful corrective here, Tracey, to the romantic idea that all who read are content, kind, easy to be around - connected through a love of the written word. Instead - quite often - I've found that books are a way for members of a family to hide from one another in separate, self-protecting worlds. You show that to such effect here - and how I feel for the young you.
And so it's a very special privilege to think this space I've made here is one is which the writing, story-immersed you no longer has to hide away but can step forwards and join in: not only as a reader, but as a writer yourself...
Here is your link:
https://thecureforsleep.com/november-issue-reading/#traceymayor
Tanya xx
I appreciate your words Tanya, they feel like a healing balm to this resurrected memory that sits so raw in these early moments out in the open air.
To have a space such as this to feel safe enough to write in this way is such a gift, far more than I could imagine.
Thank you again
Tracey xx
Moved. xx
Tracey, You did so much in such a short writing, showing the heartbreak of your life but also your resilience, how you were able to make the hiding away into cupboard into a bit of magic. So glad you decided to take a chance and honor your creativity and join this space!
Thank you for your kind words Shelia, I am grateful for your thoughts.
I am also so grateful for this safe space to finally express my creativity in words. It is interesting just how quickly my way of expression is changing. Normally, I am imagining how I might capture a scene in life with a pencil or paintbrush but now (just since reading TCFS) my imagination is trying to find the words instead. It feels like Tanya's memoirs have found a way into somewhere deeper than all of the authors that have gone before her.
(Of course I realise that there are many variables at play here, timing, space, energy etc.} However I do believe that TCFS is the catalyst for me.
Thank you again Shelia x
I felt the same when I read TCFS, definitely magic in there! I'm sure being an artist will meld beautifully with your writing since you already have the gift of seeing. And you are very welcome!
You sound inspired in a similar way to me . I loved reading about your childhood salve of reading by candlelight. You portrayed so well how it was like a companion(I think) which is very much how I felt when I read. We moved around a lot when I was a child but reading (& swimming) felt like constants to me and it sounds like it was for you too.
As for writing ,aren’t we lucky to have this space and the encouragement to share that Tanya gives us so freely and warmly .
Thank you Louise for taking the time to comment on my writing. Yes, reading was certainly a constant for me (nature too), it is a wonderful way to escape isn't it!
We are blessed to have this space and dear Tanya's guidance indeed! I wonder if there is anywhere else quite like it.
Tracey x
There is an exquisite intensity to the tiredness in the early months of first-time motherhood. You haven’t the foreknowledge for it to tarnish into all the tiredness that there will be, the years of broken sleep, the decades. You are tired beyond all previous imagining, but you do imagine it will end. It must, surely?
During that time, I found myself in the library near our new home. It was warm, the librarians were friendly, and there was a shelf of parenting books. I knew I didn’t want to be told to leave my baby to cry, but I felt I should linger there, show willing. A pale, novel-sized paperback caught my eye. A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother, by Rachel Cusk. I’d read one of her stories, a million years ago. Perhaps she had something for me.
So I borrowed it, and read it, cover to cover, during a day of epic breastfeeding, the three of us on the sofa. Me, the baby, and Rachel. Rachel knew it all, knew all about the darkness lurking under the tiredness; the contrast between imagined ranks of immaculate, blissed-out mothers and my increasingly fragile self; the existential angst in the small hours. And the guilt at this. Oh, the guilt!
And as I read, I realised that my favourite passages had the page corners turned down. Someone had literally been here before me, had felt the same connection – someone possibly in the next street. The isolation I had felt was whisked away, once by the book and now by this unknown person – and their proximity.
The next week, I set up a group for local parents. Over the months that followed, as I got to know each exhausted mother, I wondered: was it you? Did your fingers turn down those corners? What the hell do we do now?
**
Tanya, I feel this will be the first of many pieces I write as I go through my changing "bibliography". Thank you for the space and the prompt x
Amelia, I got goosebumps reading this, several times over. You've recreated so powerfully not only your early months of mothering, but so many women's, mine included. The heat and safety of the library. The visceral importance of certain books. I remember being shaken to the core by Cusk's book - and aware too of the critical outrage it called forth. I love so very much how you felt connected to other unmet women through the page folds, and admire how you then took action in your community to make yourself found, and to find others. I will look forward to every new piece from you in this project: love how you write, and think.
Here is your link:
https://thecureforsleep.com/november-issue-reading/#ameliah
Txx
Tracey,
Thank you for this response, such a nice way to wake up this morning. Have you ever written about the reading her books and then ending up living there? It is always fascinating when these connections happen.
Sheila
Hi Shelia
Thank you so much, what a brilliant idea! I haven't written anything really, well not anything other than uni assignments or IG posts, although I've wanted to. This space that Tanya has created feels so safe that I am finally going to be dipping my toes in the writing pond! I am looking forward to it and so blessed to be surrounded by so much talent! X
That's wonderful to hear. Paul, one of the other contributors, gave me a comment in my Longing writing that encouraged me to continue on with it, said it felt like the beginning of something. I decided to give it a try and it has been a fun romp, doing writing I never would have thought of without his comment, so I'm always happy to share this encouragement. This definitely is a great space, full of goodwill and kindness and such heartfelt stories. Let me know when you post something.
Thank you again Shelia!
I have posted twice now! So exciting! One on the Reading post and the other on the Skills post. I love how the memories are being stirred up in thus beautiful safe space created by Tanya. Xx
I’ve just read your beautiful contributions now & I will be back here in comments later today when I’ve added them to the story archive. We already have a Tracey in the project who doesn’t use a last name though - are you able to give me your last name (or a pseudonym one!)
So glad you’ve joined the project & I love how you’re reading and responding to other people’s pieces: so generous of you.
Tanya xx
I appreciate you taking the time to read my contributions Tanya and for popping them into the story archive.
It feels so perfect actually to be 'chatting' with you like this when I am reading your book for the second time and feeling like I know you so well!
I am happy for my surname to be used, which is Mayor. I might change my profile to reflect this to save you adding it each time.
Thank you Tanya. I hope you have a beautiful Monday xx
My favourite book? Most impact? The one I would give to others?
Impossible tasks; all three.
Books are my favourite things next to people and pets and swimming. So, books about water and animals and relationships, ah now you’re talking! But just don’t ask me to choose between them.
Reading is as much part of me as the clothes I wear and the air I breathe. If I was to be too unwell to read I would ask for a reader to sit with me; with the stack of books I always have by my bed and delve into whichever one took my fancy in that moment.
Without reading I would no doubt feel more alone. In fact this was put to the test when we travelled in France, Spain and Portugal in our campervan. I had a kindle by necessity as then I could escape into different worlds by a click. This would break the loneliness and isolation of travel with a depressed partner and a language I had minimal grasp of .
Of course this would be no substitute for a trip to the library, leaving with a too heavy bag, full of books to soothe, to ease the difficulty of living I had found through the years.
Books found on shelves under gardens; self help ; travel; craft; cookery ; psychology ; parenting; history. Each binding me to others somehow. To the struggles, to the questions, to the solutions they had found. Could some of these work for me? It didn’t so much matter, what mattered was that we were now together in this pursuit. And that in that library I could see individuals who looked lost too, and those who were on a mission, driven and ordered and organised. Sometimes this would scare me just a bit, make me feel less than. Usually though it would comfort me and remind me that my little home up the road was nearby. It was near to this smell, these strangers, the familiar librarian, the click of the date stamp the collection of CD’s and the magazines.
Returning from travelling I comforted myself with visits to charity shops and became a member of the library before we had a new home, before I started work again. To surround myself once more with fictitious people, pets and problems to be solved.
For Season Three of The Cure for Sleep with Tanya Shadrick…
As you know, I’m wanting to begin featuring pieces from the story archive, and hope also to share some thoughts from their authors.
I’ve been trying to create a form for this purpose, but it’s getting too complicated. Instead, if you’d like to be featured, please may I ask you to give the following information here in comments?
Where are you based (country or county is fine)
Your bio (no more than 50 words; written in third person)
A link to your website or social media – only if you’d like that to be included
(Remind me of) The piece you’d like featured
Where are you in your creative journey right now – and how does writing for this story-sharing community support that? (no more than 100 words)
Is there anything else you’d like to say about how you came to join this community? (no more than 100 words)
Louise! I love it when a piece by you comes through - and this one is a beauty of deepening feeling and surprising perspectives. Love what you say at the end about the community of strangers one gets in a library...
Here is your link: https://thecureforsleep.com/november-issue-reading/#louisestead
xxx
Ah,thanks! I ruminate on a prompt for ages, hence the late response to Nov. Honestly could have written several pieces on reading and had a post write moment of thinking what a cop out not to have mentioned a single book or author.
Now enjoying reviewing writing for Feb and realise I’ve got quite a collection now ,thanks to you & encouragement & inspiration.
Hope all ok with your mum, so sorry to hear your recent news xxx
Thank you for thinking of us. xx
Ah wow Tanya such beautiful and kind words it's such an honour to be part of this community ! 💗🙏☘️I can't say that enough
It has really opened me up to others and my own writting and made this year something really wonderful and connecting in so many ways .
I hope you have a gorgeous time with mum and the very best Christmas with your family .
How lucky we are to have this time to enjoy !xxx
When i read the subject of our writting invitation this month I felt excited then overwhelmed! I Had loved so many books from reading from an young person to now in my mid forties what books had meant so much to me ? The answer was they all have
I have always felt all the books that have passed my way at the time of reading they had given me something to sustain me but what did jump out at me thinking about this topic was the book The end of the affair by Graham Greene .
The film I seen at the cinema on a whim to watch and then the book came after not something i would normally do,
and to write of it here I knew I had to reread again and with covid visiting again i had the time.
The book has always meant so much to me as a exploration of faith ,love and belief .Themes that I think alot about in my life
The book contains so much of those human feelings like hate, jealousy and bitterness all those we rather not let others see but also how inspite of ourselves and our feelings we are drawn to look for answers and can find a belief through our suffering even when we are so apposed to it and the circumstances that has brought us to it .
A wonderful book i will always treasure reading again and again .
Monique, every time you contribute words to this project, I am filled - all over again - with a sense of your huge and bright spirit. You really do shine through screen as person who really believes in things, and takes risks in the realm, the service, of human connection. In the stories you share, but also how you read and support others here.
And its a special delight to see you describing a book which also means a great great deal to me. It's not one that I reference explicitly in my own book (the way I do with Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Thoreau and others) and yet you will now from reading my story how I struggled with my double love - all that it surprised in me: shame...but also abundance, and absurd joy and hope where guilt should have been.
That book by Greene gets closest to the strange grace of love that doesn't fit into the places and roles it should. It doesn't dodge the pain and hurt of that.
Your description of it means I'm adding it to my travel bag now for the time I'm about to spend down with my mother before returning home to my husband and children just before Christmas. At the end of my book's publication year, this feels like the right book to keep company with. Thank you.
Here is your link to your words in the story archive:
https://thecureforsleep.com/november-issue-reading/#moniquekennedy
I've spent time redesigning the landing page for the all the stories, and each of the story pages themselves, to better showcase all of your words. I'd love you to take a look...
And in the new year I'm going to redesign the whole website, again with the aim of making your stories stand out still further. The paperback in April has as its final page an invitation for readers to join our story-sharing community - so I'm hoping many more hundreds of people over the coming years will be reading you!
https://thecureforsleep.com/beyond-the-book/
Txx
I agree, also felt overwhelmed, so hard to choose. I'm intrigued and want to read this now, another one added to the list. Always so fun to hear what books meant so much to others.