Love, Dad - Coming Soon from Fremantle Press!
In June 2021, I wrote a memoir at Varuna, the Writers' House in two weeks. That sounds like a joke, although I can assure you, it happened. And, while expansions and revisions are taking slightly longer, that initial feat is still something special in terms of creative freedom and productivity.
As a creative professional, it feels important to reflect on this and see what lessons one might take away. For me, the three reasons why I typically take years to write a novel and yet somehow wrote a complete memoir in a fortnight in 2021, are clear:
· I gave myself permission to fail: Before I went, I rang a friend and told him of my fears about the upcoming trip. He said, ‘Well if you write nothing, that will still be an experience in your life. The time you went to Varuna, and no words came.’
· I let my guard down when not writing: At the 2014 Sozopol Fiction Seminars, I met a kind, smart, and necessarily no-bullshit fellow short story writer. However, it wasn’t really me she met, as I felt immense pressure being the first Australian fellow in the history of the seminars. After two weeks of diplomacy and wearing a button-up shirt and trousers, I showed up in jeans and a hoody for our final dinner. I tapped her on the shoulder. She turned around, smiled, and said, ‘Oh, hey. It’s you.’
That ‘you’ was there with me in its entirety for the duration of my stay at Varuna, and it felt deeply liberating to be me; for that 'me' to be enough: valued, loved, and appreciated.
· I silenced my inner critic and rediscovered my inner sage. While they're a good drill sergeant, my inner critic is still an irredeemable, insatiable dick. By telling him to relax, I allowed a kinder voice to take their place. While at my most lost, I said, ‘I don’t know what to write next.’ The inner sage said, ‘Me neither. But let’s find out, together.’
There is likely another reason, too. The beginnings of which all started a few months earlier, when I told my newsletter subscribers that the publisher of my first book was slowing operations. I received calls, and nice messages from all kinds of surprising sources. In a message from Rebecca Laffar-Smith, she wrote:
'Here's me reaching back to you to say you are AMAZING. And I think there's one comment (among many) that is worth really reinforcing within yourself because it is the epitome of the hopefulness that matters right now. "...maybe this is the beginning rather than the end of the journey."'
Never doubt the power of your words to help others heal, hope, and go again, even in their darkest hour. This memoir, Love, Dad: Confessions of an Anxious Father, will be published by Fremantle Press in 2023. Until then, thank you to Rebecca, to Varuna, staff and scribes, Rebecca Giggs (long but awesome story), The Faber Academy, and everyone who pulled back the curtains or otherwise shone in a torch into what was at the time a cold and lonely space. It is no longer, and I cannot wait to share this book with you.
