My Story ‘Around the World in Fifty Steps’

September 3, 2022 ~ Libby Sommer ~ 6 Comments

Libby Sommer with her book The Crystal Ballroom in book store

‘Around the World In Fifty Step’ was my first published story. It appeared in Overland Literary Journal Autumn, 2000. Since then, more than 50 of my stories and poems have been accepted for publication in prestigious literary journals including Quadrant, Overland and The Canberra Times.

Have a read of this first one. Hope you enjoy it.

Around the World In Fifty Steps:
Copyright Libby Sommer 2022

Joanna lives in a Sydney suburb with her two sons. It’s 1992 and Australia is in recession.
“I’m sick of licking arse in a service industry,” she says of her marketing business. “And I’m fed up with financial insecurity, the feast or famine of too many projects or not enough and chasing new business and getting clients to pay their bills.”
“I’m thinking of renting the house out and travelling,” she tells her grown up sons after reading “The Pitter Patter of Thirty-Year-Old Feet” in the Sydney Morning Herald.
“You’re ready to leave home are you mum?” said one son.
“Why don’t you just go on a long holiday instead,” said the other.
“I want a new beginning, a change of career, a new home, a community of people, an intimate relationship with a significant other, that sort of thing.”
“You could always get yourself a dog,” suggests a friend.
Her son moves out when she puts his rent up.
“Are you going to wait till he buys a new house for cash before you ask for a decent rent?” her mother had said.
“I’ve decided to go and live with Dad for a change,” says the other son.
“I’ll be away for six to twelve months,” Joanna says as she throws her client files on the rubbish tip.
She spends the spring in Italy. The summer in England, Scotland and Ireland. The autumn walking the gorge country of the Ardeche in France.
In the winter she rents a studio apartment in Villefranche on the French Riviera. The studio belongs to a friend of a friend so she’s able to get it at a good price. She works as a casual deck hand on one of the luxury cruisers in dry dock for maintenance. “The first thing I want you to do,” says her boss when she arrives at work on the first day, “is blitz the tender.” After a backbreaking morning of hard physical work cleaning the small run-about she goes to lunch. She orders a salad nicoise and a coffee and realises her lunch will cost her a morning’s pay.
A young and handsome French man who lives in Paris but comes to Villefranche to visit his grandmother most weekends, pursues her. Joanna comes to realise that French men love and cherish women as much as they appreciate good food.
She shops at the markets, paints and reads and falls in love with the light and the colours of the south of France.
“I’m able to live contentedly alone without a regular job, without a car, without speaking the language,” she writes to her friends back home.
In the summer she moves on again before the tourist masses arrive and the rent goes up.
She gives away to her new friends in Villefranche all the things that won’t now fit in her backpack but keeps her paint brushes and pallet knife.
On the Greek island of Skyros she joins a group of landscape artists led by a famous English painter.
“My purpose in leading this group is to help everyone find their own unique style,” says the woman.
Joanna spends the autumn in London meeting with other artists from the island and the woman becomes her mentor and they meet for a cup of tea every week and talk about the isolation of being an artist as well as many other things.
“It’s important to stop and regenerate before the creative battery runs flat,” she says.
Joanna paints every day and goes out with an English man named Clive.
“Your painting is vivid and alive,” says the famous English artist. “I’ll write you a letter of introduction to my contacts in Australia when you’re ready to exhibit this collection.”
Clive has a strong face with chiselled square cheekbones. Dark brown eyes and dark hair that falls in a square fringe on his forehead. His fingers are long and sensitive for playing the piano.
“What are you doing there?” her mother asks on the phone from across the ocean.
“I’m painting,” says Joanna.
“But what are you doing?”
“My mother is like a poisonous gas that can cross from one side of the world to the other,” Joanna says.
Joanna dreams about her sons every night and Clive tells her she cries in her sleep.
She yearns for the bright Australian light and for the sound of the ocean.
She returns to Australia for her eldest son’s wedding.
In Sydney, Joanna supplements her income from the house rental by getting a job as a casual for a clothing company. She unpacks boxes and steampresses the garments. Her back, neck and shoulders ache and she suspects she’s getting RSI from the steampresser.
Clive rings to say he’s coming to visit her.
In preparation for his arrival she moves all her furniture out of storage and rents a small place near the beach hoping that he’ll love it in Australia and decide to stay.
Two weeks before his arrival Clive rings to say he’s not coming and Joanna finds out through a friend that he’s met someone else and is moving in with her.
She tears up his photos and throws his Christmas present at the wall.
Joanna stops painting.
She reflects on the past and all that she’s lost.
I thought when love for you died, I should die. It’s dead. Alone, most strangely, I live on. Rupert Brooke.
Joanna stays in bed most days but still feels so tired that she can only remain vertical for four hours in any twenty-four hour period.
The phone stops ringing.
She rehearses her own death by going to the edge of the cliff.
From the edge she sketches the waves breaking on rocks, the lone seagull on the shore at the water’s edge.
At home she fills in the drawing, blending black charcoal and white pastel reminding herself the darkest hour is before the dawn.
And, after winter spring always comes.
Joanna sells the house where she lived with her children and spends half the money on a home unit overlooking the ocean and the rest of the money on Australian shares.
Her new home faces the east and she can smell the salt from the ocean.
“It takes twenty years to be a successful artist,” echoes in her mind.
On a new canvas she drags the colours of the sunrise across the blank white space.

‘

My Poem, ‘Quarantine’

August 21, 2022 ~ Libby Sommer ~ 2 Comments

My poem ‘Quarantine’ was first published in Quadrant magazine in September 2020. It was written during the first year of the Covid pandemic.

Have a read. Hope you enjoy it.

Quarantine:

But there still are the other things –

water’s rhythmic tumble

over rocks,

the gentle hush of wind through leaves –

we celebrate

in solitude.

Copyright © 2022 Libby Sommer

My Poem, ‘His Coriander’

August 9, 2022 ~ Libby Sommer ~ Leave a comment

His Coriander:

Flourishing above the planter box, it’s ready for harvesting.

I snip the curling tendrils with their skinny stalks,

hearing the clean snap of stem from dense green foliage.

At the end of a rain-filled night, the earth smells heady.

He took his suitcase, his cello, and his sheet music.

He left the fragrant coriander seeds,

said, Tending a relationship is like keeping a plant alive.

So I’ll take this herb

inside to the kitchen and chop it.

I’ll disperse it piece by piece with my hands,

the longed-for exotic spice of citrus and curry.

I’ll be forever grateful for escape,

from my infatuation

with coriander.
Copyright Libby Sommer 2022

‘His Coriander’ was first published in Quadrant Magazine September 2020

My Poem ‘The Cellist’

July 24, 2022 ~ Libby Sommer ~ 9 Comments

Have a read of my prose poem, ‘The Cellist’ first published in Quadrant September 2020.

Hope you enjoy it.

‘The Cellist‘:
I was grudgingly ancient. Not older, wiser and ancient. But easily recognisable as ancient. Skin was the culprit – the human body’s largest organ. I had his mobile number and he had mine, the cellist from the seniors’ dating site. I examined its configuration. Was there a pattern I needed to decode? I hated initiating, but he needed reassurance. It might take him forever to ring. Composing a text, my palms sweated. My heart thumped. Was he okay with texting? I hated my impatience. I hated my unexpected fragility. I sent the text. Yesterday’s meet-up was fun. I’d like to go for a ride on your motorbike sometime, although the helmet will squash my hair.
Then I worried I’d gone too far. My legs wrapped around him on a bike? I sounded like a whore. A desperado. A woman too long without a man. His reply was immediate. Had he been holding the phone in his hand? We can start with a short ride around the block. I’ve got a large helmet. Everyone gets hat hair.
I don’t want you to go on his motorbike, my daughter warned. I’ll go for a ride on his bike, my granddaughter offered. What sort of boat’s he got? A tinnie or a sail boat? asked my grandson. I googled: ‘what to expect when riding pillion’. Hang on. Brace for braking and acceleration by holding on to the rider’s waist. Bikes must lean to corner. Relax. Tyres provide plenty of grip.
We had dinner, exchanged silly jokes, leaned towards each other, went back to my place – and had incredible sex. The sensitivity of a stringed instrumentalist was really something else. If I knew how, I would have burst into song.
Copyright 2020 Libby Sommer

Things Raymond Carver Said About Short Form Writing

July 17, 2022 ~ Libby Sommer ~ 6 Comments

‘My attention span had gone out on me; I no longer had the patience to try to write novels. … I know it has much to do now with why I write poems and short stories. Get in, get out. Don’t linger. Go on.’
‘Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications.’
‘It is his world and no other. This is one of the things that distinguishes one writer from another. Not talent.’
‘Isak Dinesan said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair.’
‘”Fundamental accuracy of statement is the ONE sole morality of writing,” Ezra Pound.’
‘It is possible to write a line of seemingly innocuous dialogue and have it send a chill along the reader’s spine – the source of artistic delight, as Nabokov would have it. That’s the kind of writing that most interests me.’
‘That’s all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones, with the punctuation in the right places so that they can best say what they are meant to say.’
‘I like it when there is some feeling of threat or sense of menace in short stories.’
‘I made the story just as I’d make a poem; one line and then the next, and the next.’
‘V.S. Pritchett’s definition of a short story is “something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing.” Notice the “glimpse” part of this. First the glimpse.’
‘The short story writer’s task is to invest the glimpse with all that is in his power. He’ll bring his intelligence and literary skill to bear (his talent), his sense of proportion and sense of the fitness of things – like no one else sees them. And this is done through the use of clear and specific language, language used so as to bring to life the details that will light up the story for the reader. For the details to be concrete and convey meaning, the language must be accurate and precisely given. The words can be so precise they may even sound flat, but they can still carry, if used right, they can hit all the notes.’
Raymond Carver, Fires, Vintage 1989

So who is Raymond Carver?

Raymond Carver, in full Raymond Clevie Carver, (born May 25, 1938, Clatskanie, Oregon, U.S.—died August 2, 1988, Port Angeles, Washington), American short-story writer and poet whose realistic writings about the working poor mirrored his own life. – Encyclopedia Britannica

The Writing Process

July 3, 2022 ~ Libby Sommer ~ 4 Comments

At a literary event I heard someone say, “The thing to do is put the idea in your subconscious. Your brain will do the work.”

It takes time for our experience to make its way through our consciousness. For example, it is hard to write about a journey while you are still in the midst of the adventure. We have no distance from what is happening to us. The only things we seem to be able to say are “having a great time”, “the weather is good”, “wish you were here”. It is also hard to write about a place we just moved to, we haven’t absorbed it yet. We don’t really know where we are, even if we can walk to the train station without losing our way. We haven’t experienced three scorching summers in this country or seen the dolphins migrating south along the coast in the winter.

“Maybe away from Paris I could write about Paris as in Paris I could write about Michigan. I did not know it was too early for that because I did not know Paris well enough.” – Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964).

So we take in experience, but we need to let things make their way through our consciousness for a while and be absorbed by our whole selves. We are bower birds, collecting experience, and from the thrown away apple skins, outer lettuce layers, tea leaves, and chicken bones of our minds come our ideas for stories and poems and songs. But this does not come any time soon. It takes a very long time (three to ten years in the case of literary fiction). We need to keep picking through those scraps until some of the thoughts together form a pattern or can be organised around a central theme, something we can shape into a narrative. We mine our hidden thoughts for ideas. But the ideas need time to percolate: to slowly filter through.

Rumi, the thirteenth-century Sufi poet, summed up what could be the creative process when he wrote “The Guest House”:

This being human is a guest house.
Each morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing and invite
them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
Jalaluddin Rumi, in The Essential Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks, 1999

Our work is to keep rummaging through the rubbish bins of our minds, exercising the writing muscle, in readiness to answer that knock at the door when it comes.

As the author Vivian Gornick said, “The writers life is the pits. You live alone and you work alone, every day I have to recreate myself.” She paused and laughed. “But when the work is going well there is nothing that compares.”

What about you? Are you ready to answer the knock at the door?

My Poem ‘Hostilities’

June 19, 2022 ~ Libby Sommer ~ 6 Comments

My poem ‘Hostilities’ is published in this month’s Quadrant magazine, available in newsagents, good book stores and in libraries. Big thank you to Literary Editor, Barry Spurr.

Hostilities:

I worry about the ones
who disbelieve in science,
the ones on social media
with no qualifications
but a good command
of gobbledygook,
and the one who said
she’d had enough of wimps like me.
Scientists observe and calculate,
study the risks,
wave us across
as we wait by the side of the road,
even though the science of pandemics
is incomplete.
It takes a lot of guts sometimes
with those who are close to us.
Relatives, old school friends, intimates …
Anti-vaxxers still find arguments
to fire at us. I think of Aristotle’s warning:
there is only one way
to avoid criticism –
do nothing, say nothing,
and be nothing.
Copyright 2022 Libby Sommer

My Prose Poem ‘Someone I Don’t Know Sideswiped My Car’

May 16, 2022 ~ Libby Sommer ~ 2 Comments

Have a read of my prose poem ‘Someone I Don’t Know Side-Swiped My Car’, first published in Quadrant magazine April 2021, Hope you enjoy it.

Someone I Don’t Know Side-Swiped My Car:

Bad luck recently, you could say, after surviving some extremely unfortunate luck. For hours I sat across from you in the Emergency Bay: your face dripping with blood. They gave you a compress to stop the flow of red from your cheekbones and your nose. Every time you touched your face, it opened up the wound. Punched in both eyes and the nose. A robbery as you walked home, I hear you tell your girlfriend on the mobile. And then you’re telling the emergency nurse you can’t wait any longer to see a doctor. ‘You may have concussion,’ she cautioned.

Did you find your way home?

For days I wonder how you are. I sniff the first spring jasmine hanging over the fence and your girlfriend whom I’ve never met crowds my thoughts, till one day, peering out my bedroom window, I notice someone has side-swiped my car. Not exactly what I’d expected to see but, man, the wisteria are showing their purple blooms. A nervous possum balances on the telephone line above the road and there’s a newspaper article about an elderly cyclist who died after a freak bike accident caused by a swooping magpie. Bad luck that a second vehicle crashed into my car while it waited at the smash repair place. Look up, take care, someone or something you don’t know may sideswipe you or punch you in the nose.

What Is Flash Fiction?

May 12, 2022 ~ Libby Sommer ~ 3 Comments

Have you tried writing flash fiction yet? What does flash fiction mean?

‘A flash fiction piece is a self-contained story (beginning/middle/end), 1,000 words or less, that can entertain, intrigue, and satisfy a reader during an F5 tornado. That’s it. No genre restrictions, age requirements, or prior experience needed. Just quick, clean stories.’ – Writer’s Digest

‘Part poetry, part narrative, flash fiction–also known as sudden fiction, micro fiction, short short stories, and quick fiction—is a genre that is deceptively complex.’ – The Review Review

‘Flash fiction is a fictional work of extreme brevity that still offers character and plot development. Identified varieties, many of them defined by word count, include the six-word story, the 280-character story, the “dribble”, the “drabble”, “sudden fiction”, flash fiction, nanotale, and “micro-story”.’ – Wikipedia

I like writing in a short form. I’ve been told I have the sensibility of a poet because I have the ability to distill, so the short form suits me. You may be more of a long distance runner, rather than a sprinter, and prefer the long form of a novel.

Have a read of my flash fiction titled It’s Pot Luck When You Move Into A Unit, winner of the short short fiction UTS Alumni Competition a few years ago. Hope you enjoy it.

It’s Pot Luck When You Move Into a Unit
A nice quiet weekend? the woman downstairs said. What do you mean? I said, through the open back door, a bag of rubbish in each hand. She smoothed her ironing on the board and said, They weren’t around over the weekend—with the baby. She looked happy. I’m lucky living on the top floor, I said. She nodded towards the other side of the building. Jim isn’t so lucky—he’s got the woman upstairs, she said, When he plays the piano and she thumps on the floor. She put the iron back on its stand. She’s heavy-footed, that woman. Bang, bang, bang. I hear her coming down the stairs every morning at six, and the slam of the front door.
That night the wind knocked my vase off the window ledge. I lay awake wondering if the noise of the smash had woken up the people underneath—the ones whose barbecuing sends smoke and disgusting meat smells into my unit. Nothing clings to your furniture like the stink from last week’s burnt fat. Sorry about the crash, I muttered to the floor, It was the wind.
Copyright © Libby Sommer 2018

Why not try your hand at writing in this short form and enter a flash fiction competition. Good luck

Finding the Writer’s Magic

April 24, 2022 ~ Libby Sommer ~ 2 Comments

So much advice out there on writing process but these three books, old ones but good ones, are my favorites. You can see how well-loved they are by how many pages are marked with stickers. I’ve used the books many times when teaching my ‘Writing from Within’ course where we try to harness the unconscious by falling into an artistic coma.

Have you ever longed to be able to draw or paint, write or compose music? In ‘The Artist’s Way’ by Julia Cameron you can discover how to unlock your latent creativity and make your dreams a reality.

‘The Artist’s Way’ provides a twelve-week course that guides you through the process of recovering your creative self. It dispels the ‘I’m not talented enough’ conditioning that holds many people back and helps you to unleash your own inner artist.

‘The Artist’s Way’ helps demystify the creative process by making it part of your daily life. It tackles your self-doubts, self-criticism and worries about time, money and the support to pursue your creative dream.

In ‘Writing Down the Bones’ by Natalie Goldberg, the secret of creativity, she makes clear, is to subtract rules for writing, not add them. It’s a process of “uneducation” rather than education. Proof that she knows what she’s talking about is abundant in her own sentences. They flow with speed and grace and accuracy and simplicity. It looks easy to a reader, but writers know it is the hardest writing of all.’ – Robert Pirsig

‘Writing Down the Bones’ Natalie Goldberg’s first book, sold millions of copies and has been translated into twelve languages. For more than thirty years she practiced Zen and taught seminars in writing as a spiritual practice.

‘Becoming a writer’ by Dorothea Brande is a reissue of a classic work published in 1934 on writing and the creative process. It recaptures the excitement of Dorothea Brande’s creative writing classroom of the 1920s. Decades before brain research “discovered” the role of the right and left brain in all human endeavor, Dorothea Brande was teaching students how to see again, how to hold their minds still, how to call forth the inner writer.

‘Refreshingly slim, beautifully written and deliciously elegant, Dorothea Brande’s Becoming a Writer remains evergreen decades after it was first written. Brande believed passionately that although people have varying amounts of talent, anyone can write. It’s just a question of finding the “writer’s magic”–a degree of which is in us all. She also insists that writing can be both taught and learned. So she is enraged by the pessimistic authors of so many writing books who rejoice in trying to put off the aspiring writer by constantly stressing how difficult it all is.

‘With close reference to the great writers of her day–Wolfe, Forster, Wharton and so on–Brande gives practical but inspirational advice about finding the right time of day to write and being very self disciplined about it–“You have decided to write at four o’clock, and at four o’clock you must write.” She’s strong on confidence building and there’s a lot about cheating your unconscious which will constantly try to stop you writing by coming up with excuses. Then there are exercises to help you get into the right frame of mind and to build up writing stamina.

‘This is Dorothea Brande’s legacy to all those who have ever wanted to express their ideas in written form. A sound, practical, inspirational and charming approach to writing, it fulfills on finding “the writer’s magic.”‘ – John Gardner

I hope these recommendations are helpful. Do you have useful books on writing process you would add? Let me know in the comments and please share this post with a friend if you enjoyed it.