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Good Reading : May 2012
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good reading may 2012 17 writer’s life 1 and I read the work of Herman Hesse, Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Dostoyevsky, Primo Levi and Italo Calvino. Reading books by and about these authors helped me to recognise something I had until then only suspected: words have power. They change people. They cause revolutions, both social and personal. They flatter, they please, they move. And they hurt. I never believed the old proverb ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me.’ I knew from experience that, like stones, words can be weapons. The wrong word can break something inside a child, changing the course of their life so that they live every day in reaction to it. When I was young, my father would throw words such as ‘bad blood’ and ‘illegitimate’ at me, along with unjust accusations that made me feel guilty and afraid. Consequently, although I was drawn to words, I was also afraid of them. But reading books showed me that words, like stones, can also be used to create something powerful and beautiful. I also realised that, like a stick used to splint a broken bone, words can also be used to heal, a theme that runs deeply through my new novel, Flight, as the protagonist is forced to confront her own past and the wounds she is carrying. ‘Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination,’ wrote Jeanette Winterson in her memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Perhaps this is why I have always been irresistibly drawn to storytelling. It was, perhaps, my way of not just healing the past, but realising that something beautiful could be created from it. Years of experience as a teacher, editor and writer gradually revealed to me that writing is a cathartic process for many people – a way of expelling the demons that haunt them. The seemingly simple act of framing a story or understanding the motivation of a single character can challenge the foundations on which a person has lived their life. Writing Flight was a cathartic process for me, as I was forced to face my own memories and the demons buried within them. Unexpectedly I began a process of personal transformation, and what had started out as a story of alienation and anger became instead a story of love and forgiveness. According to Christopher Vogler in his book The Writer’s Journey, ‘stories have the power to heal, to make the world new again, to give people metaphors by which they can better understand their lives.’ Traditionally this has been the role of myth in most societies, providing us with guiding stories that are, as the mythologist Joseph Campbell once asserted, ‘true on the inside but not the outside’. We have, however, largely lost touch with our myths and now must seek our truths and our guidance from more contemporary stories. When I was a child, stories acted (and still do now) as a compass, guiding me through life. George MacDonald’s fairytales and C S Lewis’s Narnia stories all invoked a rich and magical world of possibilities and provided a moral framework that was wiser than the superficial religious formality I was steeped in. When I became an adult, stories turned into mirrors in which I could explore myself. I found friends, or at least like-minded people, in the stories I read and in the authors who wrote them. Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges are Not the Only Fruit helped me to see that I wasn’t alone and that I too could escape and hopefully one day create something beautiful from my experiences. Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels revealed to me the complexities and dangers of healing the psyche. I learned playfulness from the great Sufi poet, Hafiz, the power of irony through Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and the power of allegory to express the journey of the soul through Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist. Reading stories taught me how to write them, blessing me with the opportunity to share what I had learned. Stories are a natural part of us, deeply embedded in our psyche. They impose order on chaos. They enable us to reach out and connect with each other. They provide us with ways of thinking about how to live in society. As a teenager, reading Carlos Castaneda’s ‘Don Juan’ series and T Lobsang Rampa’s books, helped me to stretch the boundaries that had been placed on my thinking by a strict religious framework. And Kafka’s The Trial revealed to me the absurdity of bureaucratic structures and the extent of injustice in the world. As both a reader and a writer I have come to believe that stories are a vital part of life. Classics such as Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment reveal emotional truths that we have all felt at one time or another, despite the surface differences between us, such as language, race, gender and age. Although stories wear an infinite variety of costumes, they share a fundamental commonality. Most involve a character leaving the safety of their ordinary life and being plunged into new and dangerous experiences, where they don’t know the rules and where they must undergo a series of trials. The second stage of the journey involves accepting change – stepping into the abyss without any idea of what lies ahead. Like birds, we must be willing to fall in order to fly. Risks are taken, and if they succeed there will be a reward. The final stage involves returning to the ‘ordinary world’, integrating the reward and using it. A new status quo is reached and the hero has changed in some way. The character’s arc is a model of the journeys we all take repeatedly throughout our lives. Stories inspire and guide us and we should read them, write them, tell them – and live them. Flight by Rosie Dub is published by HarperCollins, rrp $27.99. Read Rosie’s blog at writeonthefringes. blogspot.com .au ... writing is a cathartic process for many people – a way of expelling the demons that haunt them. May 2012 main 16_17_writers_life_a.indd 17 4/4/12 9:44:00 PM
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