afterburn

I'm stuck at home with a whiney Jack Russell, a fractious almost four-year-old and an interview question I just can't face. I'm just back from the Playa, wishing I had never left. For five glorious days, I forgot about my career and read poetry to blindfolded janes and johns in a dusty desert bordello while my fluffer spritz'd ylang ylang scented water into the air and ran feathers over skin. Five days of forgetfulness and playfulness and creation that had nothing to do with money or success. Of not worrying why my agent and publisher weren't answering my emails or why no one had signed a novel of such singular genius up at an auction at the LBF. Worrying it wasn't so genius after all.

AfrikaBurn will do that to you. Unplug you from the rat race and show you that people are amazing, capable of creating wonders just for the fun of it, just because we can. Participating is a reminder that we're naturally creative beings that love to share and express joyfulness, especially when it's not attached to our modern concept of happiness;  flatscreen TVs, fancy Mercs, injections of face freezing botox that strip us of expression as well as wrinkles. And when our creations, artworks that sometimes take months to build, monumental effort to transport into the middle of nowhere where there are no mod cons like electricity or running water, go up in flames, we're reminded that everything is transitory and we should savour every moment.

Every year, when the Burn date nears, I'm filled with trepidation. I say I won't be going, that it's too much effort, that it's exhausting. I complain about the ticket prices, and the amount of tickets on sale, but I pack far too much and go anyway, because some part of me doesn't forget and wants to live in Tankwa Town forever. In spite of the dust and the long drop toilets and the freezing cold nights. Because humanity is amazing, given the opportunity. And the Burn is just that. The opportunity to be yourself without restraint.

because you're a writer

The silence wears you down. In amongst the ticker tape news feed scroll of social media announcing book deals and rights deals and translation deals from the London Book Fair, the lack of any news of your own erodes whatever hopes you had pinned to its tail. Turns out that idea you had that you were different from your peers because you wanted it badly enough was mere foolishness. Turns out you were lucky the first time around. Turns out all those jaded writers who came to speak to your creative writing class and told you not to write for the money, weren't just has-beens. Turns out, you might be one of them.

Finishing a book is the beginning of letting go. Not just of the characters you've lived with for years and the landscapes of imagination you created for them, but of the dreams you placed your trust in. You hope this book will change your life, but the changes it brings will most likely end when you add the final full stop. The process of writing changes you, the book probably won't. It will go on, if it gets published, to alter the lives of a few readers in some small way, perhaps it will inspire one someone to do something wonderful, but your life will likely be less for the transition from writer to published author, not more. With your part in the story over, you will have to wait the grief and disappointment out. Until a new story comes your way.

Then, in spite of the scars the last book left on you, you will begin again. You will begin again with all the optimism and enthusiasm you began the last book with. Slowly, as you unravel the narrative, you will start to dream, thinking if you just make it shiny enough, this time will be different. Because you're a writer. You have no choice. What else are you going to do?

on writing and mothering

I do not have any answers on how to write or parent. A decade ago I had strong opinions on both. Back then, I was a fool taken in by writer/mommy bloggers who thought writing a book or having a child made them experts. I believed in the misinformation they dispensed like gurus that have been to the top of the mountain and returned with commandments carved in stone.  I mistook their arrogance for knowledge.

Two books and one child later, all I can tell you is this:

- My first book did not help me with writing my second.
- My second will, no doubt, do little to assist me with my third.
- Your second child will humble you as much as the first and, if the first didn't, the second will.
- Next time round I might be less inclined to buy stuff and more inclined to believe in the tenacity of human life.

From all the articles I have ever read about authors more famous than I, all I have learned is this:

- That  Isabella Allende wears earrings when she writes will not help me write.
- That Tim Winton writes long hand will not help me write.
- That Joyce Carol Oates runs 20 miles a day will not help me write (or run for that matter).
- That Hemingway pulled the trigger of his shotgun with his toe will not help me write.
- That Jeffery Eugendies sometimes sleeps at his desk will not help me write.
- That Nadine Gordimer writes 2000 words before dawn will not help me write.

The only useful thing anyone has ever said about writing is to show up. Show up, hammer out some words and hope something takes. A bit like trying to get pregnant.

surviving (a cross-posting from BooksLive)

I sit in this limbo between books, one recently put to bed – still at the printers, in the shops in April – one burning in the back of my mind, waiting for the murk that seems to accompany the end of books to lift. I say seems because I only have two books worth of experience.The end of each has been followed by weeks of depression. With Gem Squash Tokoloshe I felt like I was grieving for someone I’d lost, an old friend who’d died too young and left a void in my life. It was more sadness. There were tears, surprising and wet and real. With Sister-Sister it is something else altogether. A sense of impending doom has settled over me and I can’t help thinking that the five years I spent crafting this beautiful piece of work has only brought me five years closer to financial ruin. I find myself looking back over the decade since I left my job in an advertising agency and set off to London convinced of the idea that writing a book would change my life.  And I keep asking why? Why did such a painfully shy human being give up everything to do something she had never done, nor studied to do? Why make such a foolish choice?  The answers do not make me feel any better.

Because I am a dreamer. Because I do nothing in halves.Because I never thought about financial security. Because I believed I would be young forever, that children and aging and the desire to own art were things that would not happen to me. Because I did not contemplate rejection. Because I give everything.

Always. I give everything.

In order to not end up spooning Huskey into my mouth in my dotage,  I must let go of the dream I have held so close for ten years. Find other ways to define myself. I must be more than a writer to survive what it means to be one. So I’m off to write my CV, to find work that will occupy me, redirect my obsessiveness into the construction of things besides books. Things that pay rent and put food in mouths and clothes on backs.

But I can’t help wondering if it will be different with the next. Perhaps book three is a charm and will be followed by elation. Happiness. Success. Andrew Miller once said that it takes sheer bloody-mindedness to be a writer. That we keep going, ploughing through dead books to create new fictions, is testament that.

An excerpt of Sister-Sister (Kwela Books) is available to read on Book Oxygen. Sister-Sister is out mid-April.

humble crumble

I was born without the instincts for baking; sweet goods, that is, I've been known to knead a fine loaf of bread into being. My childhood recollections, from baking sponge cakes that never rose in my mother's heart-shaped tins - so full of promise, to the rock-hard raisin scones I had to buy to spare myself the embarressment at the school bake-sale, are of disaster.  So why then, after thirty years of acceptance,  do I find myself attempting to bake apple pie on a Sunday afternoon?

The answer lies in my life-long fear that I don't fit in. Anywhere.

Yesterday, my good friend went to her son's school for his orientation tea. She took along a plate of muffins she'd bought at the supermarket. She'd taken them out of their plastic packaging and displayed them on a plate, not because she was trying to deceive, but because you just don't serve baked goods straight out of the plastic. The orientation went well, until she tried to leave and discovered a bunch of parents hanging around her plate of muffins.

"These are delicious," one exclaimed. "The best," another agreed.

Before anyone could ask her for the recipe, my friend laughed and said, "they're from...," and she named the supermarket, (something I'm not going to do unless they pay me). Smiles dropped from faces at the speed of bombs falling on Laos during the secret war. Her son is not starting at any old school where bakers day means  bringing two rand to school and lining up to buy a store-bought cupcake from a classmate who gets to play baker for the day in a lesson about consumerism. Her son, like my daughter, is going to a Waldorf school. And today is AJ's orientation tea.

If you follow this blog, you already know that at AJ's last school, I was labeled the weird mom. I do not want to be the odd one out amongst the weird mom's at Waldorf. I want to fit in. Hence, I find myself trying to dig the sticky (read failed) pastry made form gluten-free chickpea flour from under my nails on Sunday instead of decanting a perfectly good apple pie from the local SPAR onto a pretty plate and lying through my weird-mom teeth.

Since I am now forty and half my life is done, common sense has prevailed. Life is too short to try and rescue pastry.  I've abandoned the brown lump that would have Gordon Ramsey using several eff-words to fire me were I trainee chef in his kitchen, and converted my apple pie into a crumble. Anyone can make effing crumble, surely?

poetry-methadone

I am a poetry junkie. If there was a twelve-step programmes for people like me, I'd never get a chip. At a literary festival last year, I borrowed R500 from a friend to buy two slim volumes - this during a month of brokeness so severe I was driving around on a fume and a prayer, feeding my child from the back of the store cupboard on those gourmet items you buy on a whim but never actually find a use for, like pickled juniper berries and brandied sugar cubes. Call me a bad mother if you must, but my child has a broad palate and once used the word oscillating in the correct context.

The first step to healing is admitting you have a problem, which is the only step I'm prepared to take. I'm not interested in curing my addiction, but I can't afford to feed it with the same gusto ad execs once stuck cocaine up the nostrils*. Like all junkies, I have a supplier of really good stuff who lets me buy on credit, let's call her C. H., but I still need to control my habit lest I binge on payday and my kid finds me passed out in a pool of stanzas.

To feed the beastie so I don't go postal, take out the lovely staff at The Book Lounge and sack their excellent poetry section, I have a reading method I call poetry-methadone. When I buy a new volume, I allow myself only a single poem each day. There are usually around thirty poems in a volume, so I can just about get through the month. Poetry-methadone doesn't always work - sometimes the words are like crack and I can't stop - but, over years, I've developed a measure of self-control. Plus, I have quite a collection of used-verse to dip into, if I need a fix.**

Six months ago, I came across a volume of poetry that poetry-methadone did not work on, nor was it like crack to be devoured in a single setting. I began reading it the evening C.H. presented it to me. I read the first poem. The poem moved me a strange, disconcerting, disconnecting way I had not experienced with any other poem. The next night, I read the poem again. The junkie inside me felt fulfilled, she wanted to savour the poem on her lips, have the images it conjured flicker in her mind while she slept. She didn't want to turn the page, move on to the next poem. She wasn't done with that poem, with the rhythm of it's words, the gasp moment that always took her by surprise at the end, no matter that she'd been reading the same poem for three months, then four. 

It has taken me six months since receiving to Kelwyn Sole's Absent Tongues to read five poems. Each poem is now beloved, each wonderful. I'm still on poetry-methadone, or a variation thereof, reading, and re-reading, and re-reading a poem a night, but one dose of Absent Tongues is a years worth of poetry-crack.  

*Maybe they still do, but I wouldn't know that as I'm well out of that industry.

**Don't tell me to go to the library, poetry must be on tap any time of day or night, so it must be possessed. 

suburbia

I used to be a mottephobic.  The mere presence of even a smallish moth in the same room as me would put me on edge: I'd begin behaving like the next victim in a horror movie, the one who knows the pyscho-killer is just outside the bathroom door and all that stands between her and eternity is a flimsy lock.  I'm no longer the lurgie-phobe I once was. I've developed a new fear - a fear that I'm no longer truly living.  Perhaps this comes from being an adrenaline junkie that has just reached forty, but looking at the road ahead, I see nothing but bum-wiping and sandwich making in the near-future.

I'm don't count myself among the believers, the millions of new ageists that thought the world would end come 21-12-12, but I admit I felt a little disappointed. Part of me was looking forward to the apocalypse. I live in Observatory, on the south hem of Cape Town's city bowl. My friends tell me Obs is not suburbia, and perhaps it's not, in the same way Cape Town isn't really a city. But I've come to realize that suburbia is a state of mind, one that you can unintentionally be dragged into if you're not careful. If you're married with a kid and a dog and a mortgage and not much spare cash. If, most of the time, the only places you can escape to are the flatscreen TV and the bookshelf, and sometimes the bookshelf just reminds you that you've not yet reached your potential. That, so far, as things add up, you're a failure.

Sometimes, I look at my two-bedroom semi-detached, my white-appliances, the lattice-wall pool in the backyard, and I think: fuck, is this really my life? Is this the end of adventure and the beginning of suburbia?