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RETREAT BY THE SEA

/ Edwina Shaw / 3 Comments
Writers on the headland

Writers on the headland

I’ve just returned from another wonderful writers’ retreat with my best writing buddy, Helena Pastor, whose book is coming out with UQP next year ( I will keep you posted about that). For nine years now we’ve been meeting up along the New South Wales cost to read and edit each other’s work, brainstorm, talk writing, swim, walk and relax.

This retreat was special, in a cabin complex we’d never been before and that we had to ourselves except for tame kangaroos that ate out of my hand and cheeky kookaburras that wanted to do the same. Helena read my current project, “Dear Madman” in one day and didn’t find much to fix at all. PHEW!

We both went shopping in nearby Bellingen and came home with pretty new dresses to wear for our next launches (we hope!). Most exciting was a surprise phone call form a cousin of mine who is an emerging film maker who had used a story from Thrill Seekers as inspiration for a screenplay that had interest from a producer! How exciting is that? I felt very famous 🙂

He’s applying for funding form Screen Australia so I’ll keep you posted. But do cross everything.

Now it’s time to get stuck into the final draft (well for a while anyway) of Madman using Helena’s feedback and from other writer friends and family too. I aim to submit to a major publisher at the end of the month. Here’s to many more retreats and many more glasses of JOYFUL WRITER’S TEARS.

Joyful writers' tears

Joyful writers’ tears

A Double Spring

/ Edwina Shaw / Leave a comment

Recently I attended an Australia Council Market Development Skills Workshop at the Queensland Writers Centre. Jaki Arthur the Campaign Manager at Hachette Australia lead us all through a day of learning how better to spruik ourselves and our writing in the marketplace. I came away having learnt an enormous amount – mainly about what I’d been doing wrong!. Bust also feeling as if the work of writing was valued and important. And that’s not something to be sneezed at.
At this workshop I met the lovely Juliet Darling whose memoir <em>A Double Spring, resonated with me, dealing as it did with madness and loss, two of my key themes. I’ve recently read her book and found it very moving. See the review I did for GOOD READS below.Double Spring: A Year of Tragedy, Grief and LoveDouble Spring: A Year of Tragedy, Grief and Love by Juliet Darling

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a beautifully written book about the first year of traumatic grief after the murder of a partner. It is full of the raw emotions of grief – anger and pain, but also love and the beginnings of faith. Darling’s partner Nick (a famous patron of the arts) is portrayed as a wonderful man, though he wasn’t quite perfect. That Darling lets us us know this is one of her strengths. Nothing is hidden in this memoir. It is a rare and courageous writer who can lay herself so bare.

I couldn’t help but imagine that if my brother, who also suffered schizophrenia like the murderer in this book, had not killed himself at twenty, I may have ended up writing just such a memoir of murder. It is a travesty that it is so difficult to get the dangerously mentally ill hospitalised. A point rammed home by this terrible and avoidable tragedy.

What inspired me most about this book was that Darling never once got angry with God. She got angry at everyone else, understandably, but never the Divine. It seemed that through the priest Steve, who was a steadfast and wise friend as Darling struggled in the huge dumping waves of loss, she was able to find a way to peace and healing.

View all my reviews

A Double Spring by Juliet Darling

A Double Spring by Juliet Darling