Room

You arrive in a room in a foreign country, the one that is next on your list.

You saw an ad, made an application, got some funding and hey presto,

here you are, a writer on a writer's residency in Istanbul.

You sit in your room in a foreign country, you get out all your notebooks, your electronic writing pad and make a start. You have an idea already, you made some notes on the plane. You sit in your room in a foreign country and all is going well.

You sit in a room in the foreign country of Turkey (it's obviously not foreign to them), the sunlight shines in through the quaint wedding tulle curtains and you listen to the sounds of the neighbourhood: cars revving, men yelling, children shouting, music blaring...

but you don't mind, you are a writer on a residency in a room in a foreign country and you soak it all in.

 

You've done this before, you make a habit of landing in rooms in foreign countries like Morocco, Indonesia, Vietnam, Burma, India, in foreign towns like Sefrou, Essouira, Ubud, Jakarta, Jogja, Hoi An, Rangoon, Pondicherry (you are sure to have forgotten a few). 

You relish the fantasy of time to write; just you and the desk, no distractions, except for afternoon sortees into the local culture to bring home some crackers and laughing cow cheese.

 

You sit in a room in a foreign country and you realise you are addicted to this room landing, this culture hopping, and that it's probably because of all the years you didn't travel when the kids were little and the complications of life that followed, but now you are making up for it, and you want to arrive in all the rooms in all the foreign countries of the world, before the seas start to rise, before the  jet fuel runs out, before the calamities of the world make it safer to stay at home, or until you feel too old to do it anymore.

You sit in a room in a foreign country and you are in a rush, because not only do you want to see the sights of this new town, you also want to write.  So you make a plan: 

6am yoga, 6.30 am meditate, 7 - 9 am write, 9am light breakfast, 9.15 am write until 1pm.  (No internet or SMS except in emergency) 1 - 1.30 pm lunch, 1.30 - 4.30 pm sightseeing, 5 pm back to the desk, edits, rewrites, 7 pm light snack, 7.30 to 10 pm related reading, 10.30 sleep.

You announce your intentions on Facebook, get a few likes, a few admiring comments; it's good for the ego, good for the spirit, good to have a cheering squad, every writer needs one.

 You sit in a room in a foreign country called Turkey, in a city called Istanbul and your chair is wobbly and too low for your desk, your back is beginning to ache but it doesn't bother you because you are on a roll. You go at it like a madwoman, typing everything you wrote on the plane and adding more, wortking late into the night. It's a new novel or maybe a collection of linked stories, your Turkish story will be Chapter One.

You sit in a room on a writer’s residency in a town called Istanbul and you are very pleased with your progress, all is going well,

 

 until... 

You wake up in your room in a foreign country and decide everything you have written is crap. 


Overnight all your doubts and demons have come out to play.Your fancy plan with your fancy writers goals and fancy writers routine all goes to shit.

The room you loved with its views onto the nineteenth century cobbled street, with its charming nineteenth century apartment buildings with their fleur-de-lis motifs on the lintels, suddenly feels like a prison. The noise on the street is not charming either. A man outside a cafe is yelling into his phone, a group of men are in the middle of the street having an argument, a truck is stuck in a small lane trying to back out, men are shouting directions and banging on its metal sides, a loud doof-doof beat starts up in a cafe down the way.  

You leave your room in the district of Beyoğlu in the city of Istanbul in the country of Turkey and you walk the streets trying to keep your cool, trying not be upset, trying to pretend you are not an outsider,  not a blow in, not one of those writers' in residence who arrive in foreign countries all over the world to sit in a room and write their great works.

But you can't pretend as you walk the streets of this too-cool-to-be-true district of Beyoğlu with its vintage stores and antique shops and groovy hole-in-the wall cafés and restos where boho chic creatives are having important meetings about important projects.  You want to let them know you are a creative too, that you would be very interested to hear all their ideas and do you mind if I sit nearby? But you don't have the hutzpah and you walk on by and with the of scent of loneliness on your tail. You grab a few groceries, a few litres of bottled water (a weeks supply at least) and crawl back to your room. 

You sit in your room in a foreign country and feel so relieved that you are not out on the street feeling like a self conscious teenager, a stranger in a strange land, a foreigner abroad...

and your room becomes your haven, your little retreat, and when you go to the bathroom, you remember how you have always wanted to live in a house with such exquisite tessellations of tiles, like those you have seen in Laos and Morocco. You love the wedding tulle curtains on the windows and the noise out on the street, somehow now it feels like home.

You sit down at your desk in your room in a foreign country and pick up your pen and think, maybe you can throw out everything you wrote so far and make a fresh start, maybe you can just open up a fresh page and really settle down to write. 

You sit in your writer’s room in a faraway country and so far so good. The new direction is much better than the old one, more immediate, more compelling and more importantly, more you. The sun floods in through the wedding tulle curtains and you feel at peace.

You sit in your room on a writer’s residency in a foreign country called Turkey, in a city called Istanbul in the super cool district of Beyoğlu and REPEAT THIS ROUTINE several times until one morning it occurs to you: how can you write about a city that carries on its dance of life without you? 

So you decide to down pens and head out on the streets of Istanbul to breath in its moody grey skies, its cobbled lanes, with its scrawny stray cats and large stray dogs, its tiny cafés, Burek and kebab, roast chestnuts and corn... 

You climb the steep windy streets leading to the Istiklal crowds, with its ding donging trams, window dripping baklava, bell-ringing-spoon-clattering ice cream sellers, broken accordion gypsy kids, red haired folk singers, fake South American buskers, pepper spray police...

You wind your way downhill to Galata tower, past music shops filled with ouds and tambourines, hand drums and flutes and musos jamming on Anatolian riffs, past orange juice vendors and trinket stalls and you arrive at the Bosphorous blue water, with its dolphins leaping, its fishermen casting, its ferries ferrying...

You cross to the other shore, to glimpse the mighty mosque domes, the skinny minarets, the come-on-my-boat-trip touts, the umbrella hat men, the whining beggars, the grumpy ticket collectors, the smelly-shoe-bag-carrying Blue Mosque hordes, the loud pushy Topkapi Palace lines, the Hagia Sophia chandeliers and giant calligraphy, its zebra marble walls and floors, the damp underground arches of the Basilica Cistern, its giant carp circling an upside down Medusa's head. 

It's a total visual feast and you are so glad you have come, but soon you begin to feel tired, overwhelmed by the centuries of history; the Romans, the Byzantines, the Ottomans; you wonder how to take it all in, what to do with this ancient knowledge. 

You see a sign, Sixteenth Century Hammam,  one a friend had recommended, you can't believe you have just stumbled across it, and you go straight in. 

You lie half naked on a slab of heated stone, and gaze at the tall dome above. Should be a cathedral, could be a church, but no, it's a bathhouse. Light streams in from tiny moon and star windows high in the dome, the room so large you wonder how can it possibly get hot in here, until you learn that the warmth comes from fires burning beneath the circular marble; no wonder you feel so relaxed. A woman comes to lather you up, to scrub you down, to order you about, she throws buckets of water over your tired body, your overthinking mind. When she is finished she says you can stay lying on that warm stone for as long as you like.

You might just take her at her word, maybe you won't go back to your room, maybe you will set up here near the spring that rushes out of the wall. This will be your spot. You won't need paper or pen, or a computer screen, you won't write anything down, you'll just listen— to the gurgling of the past, the echoes of ancient walls, the stories of naked women and their strong handed scrubbers, their voices low and watery. 

Jan Cornall was writer in residence for three weeks in June 2015 at Maumauworks in Istanbul.
Her residency was funded by CAL, The Copyright Agency.
Many thanks to Naz and Sine from Maumau, and to CAL for a great residency!

Jan leads international writer's workshops and retreats. Find out more at www.writersjourney.com.auhttp://www.writersjourney.com.au/

Heading out next is Morocan Caravan, Feb 20 - Mar 5.

Writing with pictures

In the 1970s I went travelling to the USA and ended up living in Oregon. I had gotten a job planting trees out on the steep sloping graveyards where logging had decimated majestic conifer forests and the logging companies were obliged to replant. There I met an artist and poet called Paula Treacy.  (She is now known as Simone Treacy- Croft. How she got the name Simone is another story). When we called it quits on the tree planting we moved in together into a house by the freeway in the counterculture capital of the world - Eugene, Oregon. We drank a lot of thick black coffee and spent our days documenting our lives, our hopes and dreams, our joy and pain, in artist diaries. This is when I learned to write with pictures.(Click on pics for close up).

(c) Jan Cornall 1975

Have you ever wanted to bust free from just writing: to write in pictures or paint with words, create a narrative with photographs or filmed images? 

In March 2015 we were in Siem Reap, Cambodia for Temple Dreaming in Angkor Wat. 

It was a trip designed for creative artists of all modalities: painters, poets, photographers, filmsters, performers, writers, doodlers, journalers, et al. An invitation to journey into the heart and spirit of your creativity and explore the ancient temples of Angkor Wat and its surrounds for the purpose making a creative work — collection of poems, sketches, paintings, a creative journal, a short story, notes for a novel, exhibition of photos, short film.  

Seven days of workshops and temple excursions with a showing/presentation of your work on our final evening. A highlight was our workshop The Art of Visual Story Telling with guest tutor, illustrator/comic artist Louie Joyce. Check out  his work and vids here.

Sign up for our Writers Journey Mailing List to find out about the next Creative Journey.

River boat

Banana loaded
pumpkin bearing
hammock lying
brazier burning
card playing
fish eating
red nosing
feet steering
chicken clucking
cigarette selling
petrol guzzling
plank corking
sanpan following
canal hopping
car ferrying...

river boat

Always an Apprentice

This month we welcome a guest post by the author, raconteur and spritual tourist, Walter Mason. Walter was a student of mine some years back at University of Western Sydney where I taught a number of writing subjects. In my creative non fiction class he wrote a brilliant personal essay about meeting a monk in Vietnam. I told him it was so good he should send it out immediately for publication. He found a publisher (Allen & Unwin) not only for that essay but for a whole book of them. (I love it when students take my advice!) His bestselling Destination Saigon was published in 2010 and was followed by Destination Cambodia in 2013. Walter is also a great authorpeneur and a generous promoter of other authors work. If you want an example of how to be an entertaining, living, loving, giving author, just follow Walter around for a month or two on his library events, festival appearances, classes, lectures, web chats, blogs, tweets and FB activity. His energy is boundless and infectious. Here is taste of it...

I’m afraid I am rather an anxious type, and one of the first things I do when faced with a challenge is to read a book about it. And normally not just one. I can lose several days in a whirlwind of research when faced with preparing a coleslaw for a barbecue, or being asked what BB cream I could recommend a personal trainer. I am under no illusion that these are avoidance tactics, pure and simple. I would do almost anything not to put forward a firm opinion, which is why I am a member of several research libraries and am still not really sure what I think about the Macarena. These things take time. Come back to me when I have really examined all sides of the issue.

Worse, once I make a commitment and actually start doing something, I can never really give up researching it and learning more about it. Perhaps it’s a blessing, but I have the ability to remain constantly fascinated by subjects it might be safely assumed I had exhausted. I will still read every book, for example, on the New Romantic movement. I have been buying books about mermaids since I was ten years old. And my library of books on controversies surrounding the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist may be one of the biggest in private hands. I don’t let go of my obsessions easily. 

And so it is with books about writing. I adore them. I buy every new one I hear about, and simply delight in the discussions – circular and endless – that famous and not so famous writers have about their craft. Certain writing books are like holy relics to me, and I read them over and over again. My go-to books are Anne Lamott’s “Bird by Bird,” Natalie Goldberg’s “Writing Down the Bones” and Julia Cameron’s “Your Right to Write.” Added to these are the more belletristic books about writers that dwell on elements of their subject’s professional writing habits and concerns. These I find even more addictive.

The very best are Edmund White’s book about Proust, S. N. Behrman’s “Conversation with Max” and the simply superb “The Quest for Corvo.” I could (and regularly do) just devote two days to sitting down and reading these back-to-back and coming away completely satisfied. And if I were ever stranded on a desert island all I would need was Richard Ellmann’s enormous (and very writerly) biography of Oscar Wilde and I could spend the rest of my years in complete contentment. 

But now there’s a new book which is the perfect combination of these two strains of write-o-tainment. “Always Apprentices” is a collection of interviews and interactions between working writers, all of them originally appearing on the pages of the American literary magazine ‘The Believer’. It is a wonderfully diverse collection, and filled with fascinating observations, pearls of wisdom and insider information. I am on my second read, and bring away something new from it each day.

It contains some big names: Michael Ondaatje, Pankaj Mishra, Joan Didion and Don DeLillo talking to Bret Easton Ellis. These chats are, of course, completely absorbing. But I have been inspired and charmed by some lesser-known writers whose work I have been inspired to seek out because of this book, people like Mary Gaitskall, Christine Schutt and Geoff Nicholson.

“A writer is never successful,” says Bruce Jay Friedman in the book, echoing a sentiment I came across recently in Justin Heazlewood’s brilliant book “Funemployed.” It’s a bitter truth but one I think is true. In a landscape in which writers – and probably all creatives – are increasingly devalued, it becomes harder and harder to earn a living. This is, of course, bad news, but I think it is an essential fact to confront. Now, I think Friedman is making a more esoteric reference, something along the lines that a writer never fully succeeds in the project s/he undertakes. But the more prosaic interpretation stands. We live in age in which we must constantly work and work hard in order to carve some sort of career as a writing professional, and this is why books like “Always Apprentices” are essential reading. We can never afford to get lazy or rest on our laurels.

This brings me back to Zen Buddhism, which is essential to the work of Natalie Goldberg, one of my aforementioned classic writers’ writers. Zen talks about the “beginners mind,” the state of being in which we look at everything with fresh eyes and seek to empty our minds of preconceived judgements and ideas. Such an approach is an exceptionally helpful one for writers, and is, I think, the reason why writers often appear deceptively youthful. To write is to cultivate surprise and to be constantly discovering. It is an extremely healthy approach to life. 

The wonderful eccentricity of the writing life is best expressed in the book by Joy Williams, a novelist who doesn’t have an email address and can’t use computers. Though such a position must be maddeningly inefficient and even socially isolating, I can understand its charm. As someone who currently has  2,751 emails to attend to (and possibly more since you started reading this) I am hyper-aware of the fact that technology can be a writer’s enemy as much as her or his friend. Noy Holland continues the creative luddite theme by conducting her interview with Stanley Crawford through the medium of letters. It’s no surprise that letters are making something of a comeback in this age of ephemeral communication (see the success of Melbourne literary collective Women of Letters). Like handicrafts, zines and waxed moustaches, letters represent a kinder, more tactile age in which some painstaking effort of the hand produced an immeasurable reward. May they continue to experience this resurgence, and may each of you reading this commit to sending at least a few letters and postcards this year.

There is much in “Always Apprentices” that delights the writer, and much that makes the writer despair, but anyone in love with literary loveliness will be delighted by the stories in its pages of survival, resilience and remaining committed to the acts of writing and creation. Reading it I am reminded of the drive that lies behind all authorial efforts, what Graham Greene called: “a desire to reduce a chaos of experience to some sort of order.” Paula Fox talks about being “rediscovered” and of roaming across the city looking for copies of her out-of-print novel (now rightly considered a classic); and Aleksandar Hemon writes of the compulsion of writing, its psychic necessity:

“I write and read with the assumption that literature contains knowledge of human experience that is not available otherwise.”

Reading this book restores some of the romance of writing, and a sense of its great wonder. I am put back in touch with the tremendous glamour that accompanies all who choose to take seriously the call to write, and even to write for a living. As ridiculous and constantly frustrating as that path might be, it is undoubtedly still a noble one, and “Always Apprentices” is a record of that patchy, varied and multi-hued nobility. Do get a copy.

“Always Apprentices” is edited by Vendela Vida, Ross Simonini and Sheila Heti. It is published by Believer Books.

Walter Mason is an author, speaker, blogger and tour guide. In November Walter is appearing at the Emerging Writers NSW Roadshow at the NSW Writers’ Centre. http://www.emergingwritersfestival.org.au/event-detail/ewf-roadshow-nswwc/

Does no-one send you snail mail any more as Walter says? Want to receive some exotic postcards in your letter box? Sign up for Postcard Prompts and receive four writing prompts by post card over a designated period of weeks or months. Find out more here.

Postcard Prompts is brought to you by Writer's Journey - heading for Morocco Nov 6-19, 2014.

Reading poetry in the U.S. of A

In July 2014, I had the privilege of reading at a cafe event in West Massachussetts organised by Jacqueline Gens, poet extraordinaire and colleague of Allen Ginsberg. Cafe Mocha Maya in the picturesque town of Shelburne Falls was packed with an attentive audience. Pics below and story to come!

MC and poet Mary Gilliland

 Jim Brauerlein

Jan Cornall

Peter Fortunato

 Appreciative audience

Jacqueline Gens

Louise Landes Levi

Suze Smith

Michael Katz

MD's 100th Birthday Party

The scene was set at Cafe Parliament On King...

Host Ravi Prasad had taken care of all the fine detail including a flat screen with Duras' film, India Song playing.

The guests began to arrive...

They were invited to choose a snippet of text (cut ups from The Lover) and a pic of MD from the box.

Throughout the evening each guest read their snippet and shared their photo.  Here, poet Jacqueline Buswell reads to Mujib Amid, Ravi Prasad and his daughter Miao.

Lisa Sharkey listens while browsing my latest Duras find full of fabulous pics I haven't seen before - La Vie Comme Un Roman by Jean Vallier.

Sonia Bible reads her snippet. Anna Tow and Katharine Rogers enjoying the text.

Hiroshima Mon Amour provides the ambiance for Annee Lawrence's reading.

Walter Mason reads a superb piece about an encounter on a Mekong ferry, from his book Destination Saigon. 

I performed my Ode To Duras, penned on the day; a thank-you to Duras for her inspirasi and a promise to give up being her fan(atic) soon! I also read poems by Jennifer Mackenzie, Julie Thorndyke and Claine Keily.

  Cipi Kat reads an except from her novel in progress which is set in Timor Leste.

Afghani student Mujib Abid reads a piece from his work in progress, a family memoir set in modern day Afghanistan. Listening to his right Bilquis Ghani, also from Afghanistan, who works with the Refugee Art Project.

Coconut sweets from the local Vietnamese grocery were quickly devoured.

The True Love rolls turned out to be just as delicious!

After most of the the guests departed Ravi draped himself about...

and I relaxed with a good book - Duras course!      (Thanks for the pic Matt Jennings).



 Jan Cornall has been a self confessed Duras fan (atic) since she acted in her play L'amant Anglaise at The Pram Factory in Melbourne in 1979. Duras' writing was the subject of her Masters project at the Sydney Consortium, UWS in 2012.

Jan is currently working on a memoir about a trip she took following the footsteps of Marguerite Duras in Vietnam and Cambodia in 2009.  Read more here. She will lead a 15 day writing retreat, Indochine Journey, to share her discoveries with writers in Vietnam Aug 16-30.

Jan is currently an Australian Poetry Cafe Poet in Residence at Cafe Parliament on King in Newtown, Sydney.