In 2010, when I was 64 years of age, I decided, albeit for a short time, to play truant from my everyday life. An internet search set this wife, mother, grandmother and PhD candidate on a journey that continues to this day. I discovered Circle of Misse in the Loire Valley by chance. I keyed “writing courses” and “France” into Google. On my screen were pictures of a three-storey house; a garden of trees, herbs and wildflowers; a bowl of perfect tomatoes on a kitchen windowsill; a nearby ancient abbey; a black spaniel puppy named Echalote; a few chickens. That October, I arrived in Paris and took a train to Saumur where Aaron, Misse’s co-owner, was waiting to drive another participant and me to the house. By evening, I was sipping a cocktail prepared by Aaron’s partner, Wayne.
“I hear a woman’s voice,” said someone on the first floor. Carol, Misse’s writer-in-residence, appeared at the door of the art deco lounge. “So, you’re doing a PhD,” she said. “Yes,” I replied, guilty of putting my research aside to take a workshop in Strange, Dangerous Writing. The next morning we sat in the library and commenced making sentences from words in a series of books Carol had plucked from the shelves. “Now choose three of these words and write a short story,” she said. I skipped between genres: magical realism, science fiction, apocalyptic. Whether it was the weak autumn sun streaming through the window, the food, the wine, the friendly professional atmosphere or the lack of fear, my notebook filled with wild ideas.
We visited the local market in Thouars and took photographs of crayfish legs, knobbly Jerusalem artichokes and fishes’ eyes. I drew on bright colours — red, orange and aquamarine — with hints of Arthur C. Clarke’s science fiction and the film, Apocalypse Now. There were times of euphoria when I touched a core of my writing voice. Pictures, the more bizarre the better, enabled me to reattach myself to otherwise forgotten moments: my stepmother, with a rose between her teeth, doing the limbo; Dad getting excited over my brother’s horseracing game Escalado. The freedom of allowing words to flow without ridicule. Above all, I wanted to stand in Misse’s fragrant garden and scream or curl up on the cool flagstone hallway. But I was too constrained to fall about or shout, although the knots in my stomach had begun to uncurl.
In 2011, I returned to Misse. In my airline carry-on bag was a jumble of thumb-drives but no inspiration. My PhD seemed to be going nowhere. Writing to understand my relationship with my author father, Burton, explorations into ways other women wrote memoirs about their author fathers, had become tangled messes of thoughts and half-baked ideas. On my flights to France, I watched back-to-back movies, trying to ignore the nagging disquiet that the creative nonfiction section of my thesis, Invisible Ink, had become lost in threads compressed with memories, disjointed and wobbly, anecdotes mixed up with facts, fictions and theories.
The library at Misse, now an old friend, had shelves jammed with an eclectic collection of books. Delicious aromas drifted in from the kitchen. My glasses, the ones with multi- coloured speckled frames, slotted into a case embossed with butterflies, were nowhere to be found. I’d left them in Perth and felt naked and wordless when the writing workshops began. Then magic happened.
I rose early each morning, sat in the garden, and drank my first cup of tea. After breakfast, we went about our various activities and wrote to the rhythms of the house, the buzz of insects, the sounds of tractors on nearby farms, the occasional footsteps of a walker taking a detour off the pilgrim road, or neighbours heading to the river. On a hot Saturday night at the end of August, we gathered in the garden, ate a late dinner of barbecued lamb chops and grilled eggplant, and drank plenty of chilled white wine. Wayne turned off all the outside lights, and we watched the sky for shooting stars.
Back in Perth, I moved to my daughter’s house to write. A mound of her art books jostled for space on her desk covered in my prune pips, apple cores and stained tea mug. Those small objects speak to me of the writer I’d become: an untidy, constipated tea drinker. Mess like this can have meaning, can portray the various steps in a writing life, and if we take the view that women socialise the little things, such ephemera speak to us about our lives.
In 2015, I arrived in Murcia, jet-lagged on a wintry January afternoon. I wanted to throw myself into the arms of the driver who waited in the airport arrivals hall for the Misse writers, and we were soon on our way to Misse-on-the-Beach at San Juan de los Terreros. Aaron and Wayne had packed up the French house and headed to southern Spain for the winter. San Juan de Los Terreros probably hasn’t changed much since the 1950s. It’s a sleepy hollow with a detective agency. Being here made me want to create more stories, but my task was to re-edit my story of Burton and me. Would it ever be finished? I doubted it. The invisible ink of my past seeped from my imagination into my present. Writing had given me a way of translating my thoughts.
My room overlooked the sea, returned to its cornflower blue after a few days reflecting the grey clouds. I felt close to my father here. In 1968, he spent a few years in Spain. A sabbatical, he said, to write a bestseller. My past is always easier to imagine. I see the small child with her serious, inquiring eyes; her hair has been cut into a thick fringe, uneven because she had fidgeted. She sits on a large Indian rug and draws mandalas that she cuts into pieces to make different patterns. The places I share with Dad are often of an imaginary nature. Spain has always lived in my mind, so coming here was not a journey to a new location, but a return.
I wrote in Henrok, a beach bar within metres of the Mediterranean, gloriously aware of myself as an old lady in a grey beret, spectacles with multi-coloured frames. She wears a pashmina. The red one. Her favourite. A woman who has discovered the life of a writer in ways a decade ago she could never have imagined. Words always keep coming. I’m a Doctor of Philosophy now, and though my memoir about my dad, my charismatic, unreliable author father, is over in an academic sense, my evolution as a writer continues, and, more importantly, I think, as a woman. I’m 73 years old, and if age has a way of creeping up, I’ll ignore the signs for as long as I can and will return to Circle of Misse in October.
Read more in The Australian
Also see Circle of Misse featured in the Observer Magazine
