Writing the Story of Your Life, by Carmel Bird

Carmel Bird is an Australian writer of novels, short stories and essays. She has written books on the art of writing, and has edited anthologies of essays and stories. In 2016, she was awarded the Patrick White Literary Award.     

– Wikipedia.

This book, written in 2010, I only recently discovered. Glad I did! I’d been flirting with the idea of a memoir for years, always deciding against. But Carmel writes beautifully, and we have a long history….

We knew each other as children, and again in our forties. 

I was born in 1939, she in 1940. We grew up in Launceston, Tasmania, in the same neighbourhood. We didn’t play together often – her place was around the corner and up a hill from mine, a longish walk for a youngster. But our families were acquainted. We remember attending each other’s birthday parties when we were in primary school.  

We both had elocution lessons, and recited (other people’s) poems in The Competitions – an annual State-wide eisteddfod for music and elocution students. We were at the same school awhile too, in different classes. Then, still in our teens, circumstances took us on separate journeys, geographical and otherwise. 

We met again in eighties Melbourne, as featured writers at Montsalvat Poetry Festival, and got to know each other all over again. We almost became the close friends we weren’t as kids. But, circumstances…. We became geographically distanced once more. Now we have only slight awareness of what the other is up to – both still engaged in literary life, but in different arenas; with rare contact, friendly-but-brief.

Nevertheless, the shared childhood place and experiences, and our similar feelings about them, creates deep understanding. We are both – as she calls herself in the book – expatriates, yearning for the home we remember. (We've both occasionally revisited.) 

Though each chooses not to live there now, the yearning is real. Whenever anything's on TV about Tasmania, I’m glued to the screen. This book, full of Carmel’s childhood recollections, from her journals, awakens and satisfies that yearning. 

She offers fascinating insights about memoir, related to both fact and fiction. She makes memoir writing sound like the most seductive of pleasures! The enticing exercises, though, I didn’t (yet) do. I told myself I was reading for the lovely writing and lovely reminiscences. Yet even before I finished, I began a new memoir I know I’ll complete – not about childhood, but a later experience I’ve been blocked from writing. This book freed me.

Note: This is a longer, more detailed and personal version of my Goodreads and Amazon review.

I'm sharing this with Poets and Storytellers United at Friday Writings #30:  Beloved Books, in which I invite people to write something inspired by one of their favourite books. This part review, part memoir celebrates a new favourite of my own – and the memoir it helped free me to write is the story about prison poetry workshops which I have recently been sharing, bit by bit, with P&SU.

Things people say to poets

I advise my writing students against showing their unfinished work to their nearest and dearest. I don't know why it is, but they are the very people who will bring you down. If they too are writers, they may be exceptions to this rule – but you can't count on it.

Australian author Carmel Bird – known for her fiction but also an accomplished poet – gives her students the same warning. In her book Dear Writer she shouts it in capital letters and exclamation marks.

'Beware!' she says,

'DO WHATEVER YOU LIKE WITH YOUR FAMILY AND FRIENDS BUT DON'T SHOW THEM YOUR UNFINISHED FICTION'

I can only add that the same applies to your unfinished poems, plays, scripts and non-fiction ... and anything else I may have forgotten.

Carmel tells of students who ignore the warning and then come to her 'in tears and rage' to tell her 'how their loved-ones rejected their creation.' She adds wryly:

' "But," you say, "my lover is different. He would never be unkind about my work." Try him.'

The comments of strangers can be almost as alarming – especially when they haven't even read your work.

When I first began getting published, my then husband, Bill Nissen, introduced me proudly to new people with, 'Rosemary's a poet'. This engendered some interesting responses. A common one was,

'Oh, that must be such wonderful THERAPY.'

Well yes, it can be, as a side-effect – but I was rather aiming to create works of art!

Then there were the blokes who asked with a leer,

'Do you write dirty poems?' and guffawed at their own wit.

Yes, actually; they didn't know the half of it. I have indeed been known to write red-hot erotica. But see, I don't think that's dirty! And in terms of 'language' it's more inclined to be metaphoric than pornographic.

Most mind-boggling of all was the man who said,

'How can you possibly be a poet? You're much too young. You haven't SUFFERED!'

We had only just met and he knew almost nothing about me. Granted, I have always looked quite a lot younger than my years, and perhaps he didn't realise he was talking to a woman in her thirties (at that time). But youth is not exempt from suffering anyway. For instance, I was fifteen when my parents divorced and I found myself saddled with a cruel, mad stepmother whom I always describe as 'right out of the fairy-tales'. My brother, who was her favourite scapegoat, was only eleven.

Few people reach adulthood without experiencing some suffering, if only the death of a beloved grandparent or pet animal. Many children in the world know horrendous suffering from an early age.

This of course begs the question of whether suffering is in fact necessary in order to be a poet. Perhaps we'll never know, since it's so difficult to imagine even a young life completely devoid of suffering. But a talent for poetry seems to be genetic or hormonal, or perhaps both; not merely a product of circumstances. People typically start writing it either in childhood or during puberty, according to a study I read a long time ago. It definitely runs in my family!

Then again, I sometimes think it's natural to us all. People who are institutionalised often turn to poetry as a necessary form of self-expression. We need self-expression whether we're suffering or not. And the urge to communicate it, which follows immediately, is also very powerful.

I admit that emotions like grief and anger tend to be more urgent in demanding expression. When things are going well, I'm more inclined to bask in the moment than set it down on paper. But poetry can be made from joy as well as suffering, as witness all the rapturous love poems which poets have always made. 'Shall I compare thee to a summer's day...', 'My luve is like a red, red rose...' and so on – centuries of them.

I found it disconcerting when Bill introduced me as a poet. I felt I didn't know how to 'be' a poet. Perhaps I still felt I wasn't one, really. Evidence accrued, however, in the form of publication and paid performance, and after some years I took the matter so much for granted that I became blasé about being introduced that way. At that point of self-acceptance, suddenly everyone else accepted the fact too, reacting as if the occupation of poet was unremarkable. Thereafter the only comment was likely to be,

'Where can I read your work?'

Astonishing! I have to think it was a profound change in my own energy which made the difference.

I guess the moral of this story is that we need to believe in ourselves.