Last week, we posted Australian Writing It Real member Beth Spencer’s winning narrative poem “The Shipwreck Coast.” This week we are posting an essay she has written for Writing It Real members about what spurred her on in writing this personal poem and what writing it helped her re-learn as a writer. As you read, I know you will recognize the challenges and the joy of the outcome. You can learn more about Beth on her website and by browsing her books:  How to Conceive of a Girl (fiction) and Things in a Glass Box (poetry) are available in re-issued kindle editions on Amazon. She also maintains a website about using Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) or tapping on acupressure points while focusing on and talking about and gradually reframing an anxiety or issue)

Regarding “The Shipwreck Coast”
by Beth Spencer

I still find it hard to read over (and revise) this piece, because it about such a difficult time in my life, but also an innocent time — back when I thought this illness was just a temporary thing that would soon pass with a few months ‘rest’.

It’s also the first time I’ve ever written about having CFS (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome / ME). So it’s a kind of coming out in a way, as this has been such a powerful (but to most people invisible) subtext to almost half of my life.

It also feels very raw there on its own (and very Australian in its associations). In fact I was stunned to hear it had won a place in this competition, as I only entered to get the benefit of Sheila’s feedback. I couldn’t believe anyone would enjoy reading what still feels to me like a Jeremiad, a big long whinge.

But it is part of a book of poems I’ve been writing called Vagabondage, about the year I sold my house in the country and lived in a van. And within that book I feel it has a necessary place.

For the main themes of the book are the idea of home, and the fine line between solitude and loneliness. And these are themes that have taken on an extra edge in my life since that time I left my share house and friends in Sydney and had my first strange experience of the isolation that was to be repeated in smaller ways, and in ways beyond what I could have imagined for myself, for the next 25 years.

Travelling in a van is for many people a life dream. There were so many times during that year when I was told how lucky I was, and how envied (by people with meaningful jobs, partners, children, houses)…

If I was travelling in a van (as opposed to living in one), and by choice (with a home and a life to go back to afterwards), my smile in response to these effusive comments might not have been so strained. And yes, the first few months in the van were extremely interesting and often fun; but then summer came and it was ruthless.

Lying in a non-air conditioned van in 100-degree heat with the ocean 20 meters away, but too exhausted to walk to it, was not fun. And yet this is the aspect of CFS that is usually invisible to others, especially if you live alone, and especially if you also have days when you look and feel fine (the up days of the boom-bust cycle).

What most people saw was “wow, you live in a van, you are so lucky!” What they saw was freedom — from responsibility, from their jobs, from the down sides of their lives. While for me, jobs, family, partners, home — these were things that I missed and craved, and felt guilty for not having. What they longed for was a taste of freedom, and experience of it, but what I had was a strange mix of a disorienting amount of it, within the prison of my body.

I knew I would eventually write about this experience. So I just salted the feelings and episodes away, until one day when I was driving to the supermarket (from my house – yes, I did find one, and a desk and a bathroom and kitchen and all those things I’d learned never to take for granted ever again!)… And the thought came to me, why don’t I write a small book of poems about the year in the van?

So began what I thought of as my “writing rehab” project.

I’ve been writing and publishing my work (two books, numerous articles and radio pieces, etc.) for many year; but writing had become so loaded with so much expectation (it was the only way I was able to make money) and so much complex emotion (so associated, for instance, with the isolation of my life because I didn’t have the energy to both socialise and write) that I had got to the stage where I would develop debilitating pain even from an hour at my desk. So the year I sold my country house was also the year I gave myself permission to not be a writer.

At the time, for ten years I had been working on a long complicated novel project, which seemed endless and like a mountain in my path that I would never get over. A challenge, even for a fit person. But I had already spent  so long on it, and had received several Literature Board grants for it, that for a long time there seemed no alternative but to keep pushing on. Until finally my body said (emphatically) No.

It took seven months of self-therapy (using EFT – Emotional Freedom Technique or tapping on acupressure points while you focus on and speak about an issue — a technique, by the way, that I highly recommend to all writers) before I could say without my heart racing and feeling sick to my stomach: I may never finish this novel and I don’t have to be a writer.

Hence that moment on that drive to the supermarket when I thought, “I could write a little book of poems” was significant. “Who reads poetry these days anyway?” I thought. “Only about four people will read it. No pressure at all. I can handle this.”

So I learnt to write with joy again, for which I am forever grateful. And I was able to write in fragments (often speaking the first draft of the poem into the recorder on my iPhone while I lay in bed), and to write in a non-linear way. To piece the story together in a way that gave space for the contradictions and for the unsayable. To write about the great pleasure of parking my van beside a river or an ocean, opening out the doors and making a cup of tea and feeling an immeasurable contentment and solitude. And also to write about (or evoke or hint about) the opposite, the times I felt imprisoned in my crazy vagabond life that was both chosen and not chosen.

“The Shipwreck Coast” is one of the few long, more narrative-based poems in the book. I loved being able to choose a form to suit that moment, or that thought/memory, rather than being committed to a particular form for the length of the whole book. So some of the poems are short and much more “experimental” in their language and design. And even though the voice changes throughout, sometimes light, sometimes heavy, sometimes humorous, it is still all my voice.

Tricking myself into thinking that few would ever read this was extremely valuable, because I was able to get back to that freedom I felt when I first began writing, where I could be completely open and revealing without worrying about who might read it and be hurt (or judgmental) — because back then it was hard to imagine ever getting published!

However, it wasn’t too long into the writing of this “little book of poems” that I started to get excited about it as a book, and of course wanted to share it and put it out there so it could have its own life in the world. So I’ve had to develop new tricks to allow myself to have that freedom within the conception and revising of it, to give myself that pure private space of me and the page.

And I think it really has worked as a rehab project — in fact I now feel ready to go back into that abandoned novel and take another pass at it (allowing it, for instance, to be even less linear and more montage than I had before, with the lessons learned from this book). But most of all I have learned to create a space of privacy and joy for myself when I write, a space I had almost lost. And this, more than anything, has been a coming home for me.

Vagabondage is currently out with a university press in Australia (one of only two that still publishes poetry). And the publisher has said she likes it and will be taking it to her committee in the next few weeks, and (just between us, still a secret) she’s also put in a grant application for funding for printing and publicity costs — which if successful will be fantastic (way beyond my initial idea of four readers!). So, fingers and toes crossed for that one.

Meanwhile, other things have started to shift for me, too, and I have been invited to create two more books (by two different publishers) from previously published work.

The first of these, a book of cross-genre work (essays, memoir, and what might be called “ficto-criticism” — writing on the boundary of fiction and essay) called Telling Stories is due out in April with a small press from Tasmania. The other is a bilingual (Chinese-English) book of selected poems (and this, too, is a little cross-genre as some of the “prose poems” in this were first published in my “fiction” book).

So I am glad I made that choice to give up writing, so that I could come back to it again afresh. And I am very glad that I listened to that little voice that popped into my head as I was driving to the supermarket. And I now know that for me, even if writing is work, and even when it’s really hard, it must also be play and it must always, always be fun.