My short story, ‘Mother’

March 19, 2023 ~ Libby Sommer ~ 2 Comments

Have a read of my short story, ‘Mother’ first published in Quadrant Magazine. ‘Mother’ is one of the self-contained chapters in my book, The Usual Story (Ginninderra Press) – a delicately fragmented story of memory, intrigue and passion.

MOTHER:

The day is softening into night, my desk in shadow as the sun moves behind the building. Birds hover in the trees as the wind blows across the surface of the sea. It’s hard to know which way to go. Every day I fear that I can’t do it. So I’m watching as it gets dark.

Tonight I’m thinking about the saddest bits. Thinking, for example, that the night was alight with thunder. Lightening cracked the sky. Just a flash and then darkness again.

That I loved him, and sometimes he loved me too.

I’ll begin with the birds. Three birds flying in perfect but constantly changing alignment. So often there are three. And then a lone bird darts across the sky in the opposite direction.

On the radio a voice says: ‘We need to know the history, the history of the before, and then to know how the person chose to continue living, what baggage they chose to bring with them, to incorporate the memory into themselves or to leave it behind.’

A door bangs shut behind me; footsteps sound on the concrete driveway leading from the back door just a second or two after the door bangs. The flame tree throws a shadow on the cane chairs on the balcony. I stop working, put my hands and then my arms around my body and think of the feel of his skin.

How appealing, how irresistible that prospect of intimacy is, with the very person who can never give it.

After a day in which I have evoked Jack again, all the pain and disappointment and wanting him all over again came back. I try to guess where he might be and what he might be doing but cannot imagine it. His absence is still as heavy as the wave about to break above me, a wave that has appeared suddenly, and then it curls over me forcing me down to the bottom of the sea where I am helpless in the power and pull of its rip.

Last night I dreamt about a man with a hook for an arm. I didn’t realise at first that the man had a disability because he’d kept it hidden behind the counter. On the spur of the moment I told the man I was going to see a free film as part of the film festival and asked if he would like to come with me. To my surprise he closed up the shop, put on a freshly laundered shirt and said he’d come. That’s when I saw the hook arm. As the evening progressed I was surprised by how very quick and skilful he was in the use of it. He hooked me a chair and one for himself when we found the small cinema where the film was shown. He seemed interested in me but I wondered how I would cope with his disability.

Sitting at my desk this morning, trying to work, I saw the line of the horizon as the sun beat down, heating up something outside so that its taint floated in on a breeze. It was the dank scent of the earth after rain, entering through the open door. It reminded me of the smell of his hair in the mornings and it came between me and my work. I wondered why all of this has to go on for so long.

It’s dark tonight with only a small crescent-shaped moon over the sea. I’ve decided to take a walk to the house where I lived as a child. I put on a cardigan and step out into the night.

The house itself is no longer there. It has been torn down and a block of units stands in its place. As I walk down the steps towards the beach and mount the hill, waves loom in the fading light; streaks of white against the dark sea. Above me clouds gather against a starless sky. I walk up the steps then stand at the lookout as the sea rolls in.

When I was growing up, this suburb was full of large houses and blocks of art deco units. Some of the houses were very grand and others fallen into disrepair like ours. Mother was ashamed of our house. It was basically a mass of rooms surrounded on three sides by wide verandas and wooden painted rails.

Walking along my old street and its rows of gums and mix of glass and chrome home units and white-painted mansions, I see the stairs that connect this street to Birriga Road. Those stairs that I walked up every day to catch the bus to school until Mother decided it was important that she drive me to school before she went to work. ‘What will the neighbours think with you talking to boys at the bus stop?’

And there’s the house where the boy with diabetes used to live. The boy who used to double me on his bicycle. I can still feel the imprint of his ribs under my hands. ‘It’s not ladylike for a girl to ride a bike,’ Mother said. This boy’s house had seemed a long walk from mine but now it seems just a short distance as I walk up our old driveway.

Sixty apartments share our old address. Forty units across the back yard and twenty on the driveway. The trees I used to climb in the back yard are all gone. No wild foliage, just bricks, concrete and cement, although one scrawny hibiscus droops over garage number twelve. A couple of branchless tree trunks wedge between the units and the fence of the block next door. Nowhere for the trees to branch out. No sunlight. Suffocating. Vines strangling trunks. Trees choking to death. I feel a thudding in my chest.

Drowning again and again. A recurring dream. And then I would wake and lie there waiting for the sound of the birds and the light of the dawn. I’d count slowly: one, two, three on the in breath, one, two, three on the out breath until I would notice the waves lapping up and into my bedroom again.

It was already too late when I was eight. I grew old at eight. It came on very suddenly. I saw the blood spreading over my grey school bloomers. As the year lightened and turned hot, it got worse. ‘Don’t tell anyone,’ whispered Mother. ‘Especially your brother.’ January was too bright so I stayed in bed in the darkened bedroom. I was ashamed of how I’d changed. I wasn’t prepared for it. I leant against the pillow in disgust. I lost the desire to move. But as dusk came one evening in February, there was the gentle sound of the wind through the leaves.

I see my former self. The small child with hair pulled severely back at the sides of her large forehead revealing an open face that seems always to be frowning. I can bring to mind a tall gawky adolescent with pimply skin with her arms crossed over her chest. She wears dark wool skirts in the winter with long shapeless jumpers over the top, perhaps a long pendant, or cotton print dresses in the summer with a cardigan. Her hands would clasp and unclasp in front of her. Ridiculous. Her hair looked ridiculous. The hair must have been cut into a fringe but instead it bounced up into one tight little ridiculous ball in the middle of her forehead.

So I was eight and three quarters. Mother made me wear dresses with pleats and frills. I wore them with loathing. I looked fat and childish in the dresses that were gathered at the waist and had a Peter Pan collar at the neck.

That day my hair was in bunches hanging down to my shoulders, not cut short at the back as usual, but long enough for me to put an elastic band at each side. To my own hair I had added the hair of our housekeeper. I wore her hair attached to my own. I was using makeup already. A crème pancake base that Mother had given me. ‘Cover up those hideous freckles.’ I don’t know where I got the pink lipstick and the clear nail polish. Perhaps I stole them. I was wearing a little 4711 eau de Cologne.

Today the early morning light shines through the thick curtains, the mysterious light when it’s raining but the sun is still shining through the clouds. But there is the exhausting and suffocating heat of Sydney’s humid summer days and nights to cope with. It’s seven forty-five already. I have overslept. There is no sound in the building. No footsteps, no cars reversing. I guess that everyone has gone to work.

On the radio: ‘Just a couple of drops of rain during the night here and there.’

I’m remembering Mother reclining in bed. Her eyes closed and her hands crossed against her chest. Her mouth open. Now and then she’d catch her breath as if gulping the air. At that moment, she appeared to be asleep.

Beside her I pulled the dead bits off the flowers. I put the vase into place on the shelf above the bed and stared at a Picasso print of a woman’s body sectioned into geometric pieces. I smiled at its startling arrangement of shapes. I reached for another vase and began my pruning.

Mother leaned towards me, and in a rush of tenderness, unusual in her, tried to hug me. I recoiled, unable to check the repugnance I felt for the touch of her.

My half-sister entered the room quietly. I got up at once throwing the bruised and browning petals into the wire basket by the door. I went over to the bed, and looked at Mother, who kept her eyes closed.

‘She’s resting,’ I said.

My sister went over and turned off the bedside light until there was only the weak light from the window. She sat down so she could see Mother. She stroked Mother’s forehead; leaned down over the face, using her fingers to exert pressure on the place between Mother’s eyes, pulled the skin across her forehead, pressed gently into the sides of her face.

Mother opened her eyes. ‘You smell of garlic. I can smell it on your breath.’ But then she let herself sink again. ‘You are very good to me,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t deserve all the things that you do for me.’

Inez continued to massage her head and face until Mother fell asleep.

Inez said, ‘I think about Mother nearly every day. When Mother spoke to me in her clipped determined way, I often didn’t understand what she wanted from me. I tried so hard, but of course I never managed to please her. Then she’d show her impatience. She was always impatient. With all of us. She’d had a hard life and I forgive her. I loved her because she was so—I don’t know what to say, exactly—because she was always such an overpowering presence. But she could be so cold. I would come to her wanting some affection, some understanding even, she’d turn away from me and be so cruel or she was just too busy to listen. Yet I felt for her, I understood, and now that I’m older I forgive her totally. If only I could see her again and tell her I wish now that I had tried harder and that if I had, things may have turned out differently.’

‘Your sister has decided to smooth the surfaces and to remember her mother as a saint,’ Dr Ross concluded. ‘Her mother had a hard life and now she’s turned her into a saint.’

I’m imagining walking into the old house. Across a big enclosed verandah and in through the front door. A coat cupboard to the right, along another corridor to the maid’s room and bathroom, painted a light green, then out to the back porch and the lockup garage. To the left of the maid’s room is the large kitchen with a table in the middle and a pantry to the side. Behind the kitchen is the laundry, the room where I’d do the ironing.

Mother is at the table with Father in the dining room, with its mahogany furniture and red and gold flocked wallpaper. It is already dark and the thick lined curtains are closed. The silver candlesticks on top of the white linen tablecloth reflect the light of the chandelier.

Husband and wife are dressed formally. Perhaps they’ve been to synagogue, or else they’ve been to the Chevra Kaddisha to pray for a dead relative, or they may have been to an afternoon tea at a friend’s house.

Father is two years younger; his face jowled, his mouth relaxed, his eyes small and piercing; his smile is kindly but wary. His hands shake slightly. His hands are broad, with thick blunt fingers, and are mottled with pigmentation spots. The short moustache and the grey hair are neatly trimmed.

Husband and wife eat in silence. The silence is full of contempt—a shared contempt.

She wears white gold wedding rings that are simple in design, and two diamond rings. And around her neck is a necklace of marquisette with drop earrings to match. He has given her many presents of jewellery over the years.

He turns to Mother and tells her he’s going to adjourn into the lounge room with the newspapers, is she going to join him?

She shakes her head. He shrugs at this, confirming: Let’s see who will break first. Who will be weakest in this mutual destruction of each other.

‘What are you laughing at?’ he says.

‘Nothing. I’m not laughing.’

‘Will we listen to a record in the lounge or will we go upstairs to bed?’

‘I don’t want to hear any records, thanks.’

She knocks the sugar bowl over as she reaches for the teapot. The fine bone china dish breaks into pieces and the brown granules spread over the white cloth. She glances at him in barely disguised fear, but he keeps on stirring his tea, looks straight ahead. He finishes his tea, wipes his moustache with meticulous care then throws the creased napkin onto the table and stands up.

‘It’s getting late. See you up there.’

To the right of the top of the staircase is their bedroom. I imagine Mother sitting down at the dressing table and taking the pins out of her hair. It falls to her shoulders, the heavy weight of it released. She puts on her nightgown and then stands in the middle of the room.

‘It’s a man’s world,’ she says in an absent-minded, dispassionate voice.

Father enters the bedroom, walks towards her. He is wearing a navy blue satin dressing gown and is holding a book in his hand, his glasses pushed up high on his forehead. She walks past him, pulls back the sheet. The sheet is spotted with blood. He sees the blood. She smiles to herself.

At twilight the sky is a deeper darker shade of blue. The clouds are puffy but stagnant. Faint hush of the sea. Traffic noises in the distance. A brief hammering. The sea turns from blue to soft grey as the waves move south in lines of darker grey. Thudding music from the house in front starts up but then it stops. The rumble of a plane overhead as it nears and then recedes. Moves closer—moves away. Kitchen sounds from the unit next door. Another plane rumbles in the distance.

The heat is leaving the day although the leaves and branches of the trees are not moving. Then a breeze picks up. A dog barks; the cicadas start up. Street lights, headlights. The sea darkens and the thudding party starts up again in the house in front.

It’s enough for me now just to think of Jack’s face with that peculiar, stricken look. Was it only later that as I searched for the memory of his face and looked at it and then his whole body, so often motionless and turned in on itself that I either took his face out of my memory or returned it to when I stood looking at him still asleep in the bed?

If he is living around here, he may be beginning a day’s work just now, since he never was one for an early start, or he may be sleeping with the doona over his head, unable to face another day. He may be listening to the sounds of the people around him preparing for work. Or he could be with that woman with the three children. Or he could just as well be living out west again.

Mother thought that God was cruel and hard. But in her prayers she still turned to Christ. She converted to Judaism when she married Father. I’m imagining her long honey hair rolled in a bun, her fine cheekbones, her mouth held in an ungenerous curve.

Her eyes are red with lack of sleep. She had been lying for several hours wandering whether to get up or not. It’s better to get up, straighten out the body, turn on the bedside light, try and read.

She gets up and stands for a long time by the hospital window. There is moisture on the pebbles of the veranda outside. Everything out there in the garden is blurred and hazy.

‘Thank you dear Lord for giving me daughters. I needn’t worry so much about what will happen … sometimes I think I’ve had enough of this world. How am I to cope?’ She lets herself sink. There is only one solution.

She turns off the bedside light then hears footsteps in the corridor. A nurse comes in and takes her pulse and her temperature, makes notes on the clipboard before replacing it at the end of the bed.

Or this is how I imagined it.

Outside the window a bird clutches a branch. Leaves surround and envelop him as the wind moves through the leaves. He trills a contralto then darts off towards the sky, swift as an arrow. The wind heaves the branches and scatters the leaves as another bird with a flurry of wings and a nod of his head darts off.

I must have been five when I came running in with a painting to show Mother, the picture of the birds in front of the clouds, the red sun to the left with its rays of sunlight. ‘I’ve got a present for you,’ I said. ‘Close your eyes.’ I put the painting in her hands. ‘Open your eyes.’ She looked at it. I pointed at the birds. ‘One bird, two birds, three, four, five, six black birds,’ I said. ‘It’s alright,’ she said in her dismissive voice. ‘You don’t have to count them all.’ I showed her the swirls of blue. ‘And this is me with my feet in the water,’ I said. ‘And this is you standing behind me watching. And this is the purple woolly rug that we had on the picnic. This is you and this is me.’

This may be the last time that I make the effort of remembering Jack. The last time that I let him make me suffer. It’s the forgetting that takes so long.

Memories of Mother have almost faded altogether. I don’t remember if I ever loved her. In my mind I no longer have the feel of her skin, nor in my ears the sound of her voice. I can’t remember the exact colour of her eyes, except sometimes I can see them all misty and watery with some secret. Her weeping I can’t hear any more – neither her weeping nor her laughter. It’s over with her, I don’t recall the details.

That night in June a strong wind had blown through the leaves. So strong it blew small branches off the trees and on to the car. Dirt blew along the road. Thunder, louder this time. A car alarm sounded for three beats and then it was silent again. A plane flew into the grey, its lights flickering as the horizon blurred and the sea turned into deep dark grey. People had flocked to the beach during the 34 degrees but now they hurried home as lightning split the sky. The thunder grew louder but, strangely, the sky was still blue above the ocean still lit by the setting sun even as it began to rain.

I’d taken off my nightie and sunk into the hot salt and oil, stretched out as the phone continued to ring. I lay there and listened. He hung up without leaving a message.

I’d felt the grief rising up from my stomach.

A bird plummets to the earth and Jack is no longer here. I sometimes find it hard to bear. After all this time I am talking about it to be free of it all, although I know I never can be. Over there to the east is the same sky reflected in the same water. But I am not the same, not the same as I was then, and not the same after telling it.

Dawn through the curtains casts long shafts of light across the carpet. There is a gentle breeze through the bamboo as I step outside and notice a white sail in front of the low hanging cloud. I stand there and watch as the yacht progresses along the flat line of the horizon.

My Short Story, ‘The New Baby’

January 8, 2023 ~ Libby Sommer ~ Leave a comment

Have a read of my short story, ‘The New Baby’ first published in Quadrant Magazine. Hope you enjoy it.

THE NEW BABY;

In the second month after the baby was born Kate came out to meet her mother wiping her hands on her grey tracksuit pants. Kate’s hair was tied back off her face revealing tiny white milk spots above her cheeks. Anny told her that already she looked so slim and good. Kate ran her hand over her rounded stomach, arched her back and stuck her belly out at her mother.

They both laughed.

Anny had rushed out early that morning to get to the supermarket before going over to her daughter’s house to babysit. But she was happy to be available to help Kate. After all, her own mother had been too busy to help her when Kate was born.

Kate had rung over the weekend and asked what Anny’s plans were for Monday.

‘I can fit in with you,’ her mother had said. ‘I can come over whenever it suits you.’

‘I’ll go to aqua aerobics then. I should be back by ten thirty. So if you can get here at nine. And bring lunch.’

‘Will I stay on and make dinner?’

‘No. Don’t stay on.’

‘We’ll see then. We’ll see how we go.’

After Anny had been to the supermarket she’d discovered that she’d forgotten to bring the Marie Claire cookbook and the soy sauce, the ginger and the vegetable stock cubes that she had already in her kitchen. So she had to quickly dash back home to Bondi. And then, just before the Cahill Expressway there’d been a breakdown and the traffic was lined up and she was stuck in a bloody traffic jam before reaching the Harbour Tunnel.

‘What kept you?’ Kate asked by way of a greeting as her mother lifted the shopping bags and the laptop computer out of the boot.

Anny’s own body shape was disguised in black trousers and a black vee-necked tea shirt, although she’d contrasted and softened the black with a long amethyst necklace.

Kate inspected the necklace around her mother’s neck. She picked it up, tugged at it. Banged it playfully against her chest. Is it new? Had she bought it recently? she accused Anny. Or did Anny only imagine it was an accusation? No. It wasn’t new. She’d bought the necklace at the markets in Beijing last year when she’d done that Cycling in China trip. She’d chosen the stones and had it made up on the spot.

Kate gave her a final inspection. Flicked her eyes up and down her mother’s body before giving her the okay to proceed towards the front door.

The windows of the red brick house rattled as a news helicopter vibrated in towards landing at Gore Hill.

Kate and Anny carried the shopping bags to the kitchen. They tiptoed along the wooden corridor past the closed door of the baby’s room. ‘Don’t use the doorbell anymore because the noise wakes the baby,’ said Kate. ‘Just let yourself in with your key.’ Anny breathed in the familiar smell of baby shampoo and fresh linen in the bathroom. The morning sun shone through the blues and reds of the leadlight window highlighting the plastic baby bath that was turned upside down inside the big bath.

Just weeks before the baby was born Kate and Anny had gone to choose a baby bath. They had already begun the habit of Mondays together. It had taken ages to find the right white plastic baby bath. They must have looked at every bath in Chatswood. Kate had wanted one that had a hole down one end and a plug so she could empty the bath without tipping the whole thing up. They’d walked the length and breadth of Chatswood.

Back home they’d re-arranged things in the spare room to make space for the baby. They’d emptied drawers, taken underwear and socks out of one place and stacked them in with others, re-organised the shelves of the laundry, re-located Kate’s husband’s wine collection.

Dan didn’t complain about his wine being re-located, but he did say he didn’t want his mother-in-law handling his underwear. ‘It’s all a matter of intimacy and certain things being private,’ he’d said.

In the weeks after the baby was born Anny had come over every day to help. She’d cleaned up the kitchen, unstacked the dishwasher, made lunch, folded up the clean linen, brought the washing in.

As Anny unpacked the shopping Kate gave her mother the instructions:

‘Don’t feed him before ten. Preferably not before 10.30. The breast milk is in a bottle in the fridge.’

‘Yes. I didn’t realise that it’s better to feed him later rather than sooner so he’s more willing to take the bottle from me.’

Last time Kate had come home early and he’d refused the bottle because he could smell his mother and knew he had a better option.

‘Run the water from cold to hot,’ Kate continued. ‘Then let it sit in the hot water for five minutes. Check it on the inside of your wrist. And don’t forget to give it a good shake.’

‘Yes. Yes. I know how to do it but show me again anyway.’

In the small bright kitchen two hand-painted ceramic plates were secured on either side of the wooden window that looked out on to the backyard. Anny put the food into the fridge and then set up the computer on the dining room table.

Kate waited by the front door for her friend.

She sat down on the steps.

The wind picked up flapping the blue and white awning of the house next door. In the front garden a pile of magnolia petals lay in a heap on the grass. Kate sat there at the top of the stone steps at the front door. She leant down. Rested her head in her hands. She felt the pounding of her heart against her chest, the cold sweat on her hands. She tried to breath in. Tried to slow her breathing. She’d never had this before. Gasping for breath. It would happen even when she was lying on her bed trying to rest. Her heart would bang hard against her. Bang, bang, bang. Expecting the baby to wake at any moment. The sensation frightened her. Was she going crazy? And the recurring nightmares. The house burning down and she couldn’t get the baby out in time. And the crying, wanting to cry all the time. And at strange times. Like when she was out shopping with the baby. She couldn’t even go shopping and get a couple of things without him putting on a performance.

Anny heard her in the hallway pacing up and down.

‘Why don’t you ring and check your friend is coming for sure?’ she said to her daughter.

‘Because we spoke only yesterday and confirmed the arrangement.’

Kate couldn’t keep the irritation out of her voice.

She walked down the hallway and into the bedroom to check the time on the

clock beside the bed. She sat down on the white linen bedspread. Looked across at the antique pine dressing table and her books piled high: “Settling Techniques, Newborn to 6 Months”, “The Baby 0-9 Months”, “Motherhood: making it work for you”, “Meditations for Women Who Do Too Much”, “The Baby Swings Book”, “Baby Love”. She got up and went back into the kitchen to look at the time on the microwave clock.

‘Damn it,’ said Kate. ‘Now we’ll be late for the class.’

‘Why don’t you go on your own and I’ll tell her that you’ve gone when she arrives?’

A car door slammed outside.

Kate picked up her swimming bag and hurried to the door. It was someone for next door. She came back in.

Anny suggested again that she ring her friend and say she’d meet her there.

Kate checked the time on my watch. Then picked up the cordless phone and dialled.

‘I thought I could meet you there,’ she said into the phone. ‘I thought you might be rushing and it would save you some time.’

Silence as she listened to her friend’s reply.

‘Tell her you’ll meet her there,’ Anny insisted.

‘I’ll wait then,’ Kate sighed into the phone. She hung up. With the phone still in her hand she moved towards her mother. Her eyebrows were pressed together in an angry frown.

She used the aerial of the phone to prod Anny in the arm.

‘Stop it,’ she hissed. ‘Just stop it.’

‘Stay out as long as you like,’ Anny encouraged when Kate’s friend finally pulled up in the car. “Make the most of it. If I need you I can ring on the mobile.’

Kate hoisted her swimming bag up on to her shoulder. Kissed her mother on the cheek.

‘I can handle him,’ Anny assured her. ‘I feel confident. The only thing I can’t manage is if he gets hysterical like he did last night.’

‘Take him for a walk in the pram if he cries too much. He got hysterical last night because he was overtired.’

Anny waved goodbye from the front door.

After Kate left Anny swung into action. Watered the pot plants, adjusted her rearrangements from last week – moved the wooden plant stand from the lounge room to the dining room, the blue and white porcelain plant holder to the top of the plant stand. Kate said it was okay. If Dan didn’t like the re-arranging he’d put everything back where it was.

Eleven fifteen and no sound yet from the baby’s room. Anny shut down the computer and went into his room to check he was still breathing. She opened his door moving quietly as she stepped over a teddy bear on the floor. She approached his white painted cradle and looked down at him as he lay on his back, his head slightly to the side and tipped down against his chest. His long eyelashes fluttered against his cheeks, the tip of his button nose catching the light from the window. His rosebud lips pulsed ever so slightly together.

When he woke up she warmed the milk and carried him into the lounge room. She held him close against her body for the twenty minutes it took him to drink the bottle. One of his tiny perfect hands stayed wrapped around her thumb.

The drought in NSW continued through the winter. ‘Even Sydney has experienced one of the driest stretches since European settlement,’ said Agriculture Minister, Richard Amery.

Anny had been to the gym and hoped to ease the aches in her legs by relaxing in a hot bath. The telephone rang while she was running the bath. She stopped and listened and then switched off the taps. She went to answer the telephone.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Anny here.’

‘Mum. It’s me.’

‘How are you darling? I’ve been thinking about you and wondering how you were going.’

‘I so much didn’t want this to happen,’ she said. ‘I was at breaking point. Things were getting worse and worse. But they’ve looked after me here. They’ve looked after me very well.’

‘That’s good darling,’ Anny said trying to sound calm and positive.

‘I expressed for the last couple of days and they gave him the bottle at 3.30 in the morning. He slept for seven hours last night. The first time ever. And the first time I’ve slept deeply since he was born.’

Anny could hear gentle classical music playing in the background.

‘Who wouldn’t go a bit mad with the sleep deprivation alone? said Kate. ‘Let alone all the other stuff. And the hormone thing. It’s like having PMT for three months.’

So what do you think you’ve learnt from the week?’

‘I suppose for me not to feel that I have to be totally responsible and committed to him twenty-four hours a day and being with mothers in a similar situation helps too. That there are a lot of people whose support I can utilise. I was able to hand over to the midwives and have a rest. It took the whole responsibility off me. They pretty much said that he’d picked up where I was at.’

‘Did they say anything else?’

‘Take a chill pill.’

‘A chill pill? How will you do that?’

‘It’s an expression. Try and go with the flow much more. They said it’s not good for the baby for me to be like this, which makes me feel great! They offered to show me more information about the effects on the baby, but I didn’t want to see. My counsellor said that people like me are much more connected. We are sensitive and intelligent people. Qualities that she really likes in a person. I asked her couldn’t I just do Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, and go to yoga twice a week. She said all those things will help, but they won’t change the brain chemistry. And she said I’ll bash myself up even more because I’m not able to change my thinking with the CBT.’

From the window, as Anny watched, a storm came in, rolling in across the dark metallic grey of the sea. She cradled the phone between her neck and her shoulder. Pressed her hands against the window. Felt the cold glass against her palms. Watched the imprint of hands recede as she held the phone to her ear.

‘So what can the people who love and care about you do for you?’ she said.

‘When someone is at my place that I can go out and have a break from him. Giving me time away from him. I was thinking of going home for a week or two and see how I feel before making a decision about going on medication.’

The first of the rain started to fall as Anny watched.

‘I always felt total love and connection to him,’ said Kate. ‘But I knew he was unhappy and there was nothing I could do. That was very painful for me. To see my baby so distressed and not being able to do anything for him.’

The wind blew the leaves on the trees in front of Anny helter skelter as the storm built up. Hail the size of small marbles landed on the railing of the balcony, bounced to the ground, hit the pot plants.

‘I may go into denial when I get home,’ said Kate. I need you and Dan to tell me if I get worse. I need Dan to say, “Honey, you’re getting worse.” You could say that to me too. So how’s the week been for you?’

‘Okay. I didn’t worry too much about you because I knew you were in good hands – that you were being looked after. I knew you were in the best possible place. I didn’t worry as much as I do sometimes. It’s hard not to because we’re so inter … inter- connected. You and me.’

‘Inter-woven.’

‘Yes. That’s a better word. Interwoven. We’re interwoven.’

The rain eased. The pot plants all wet and shiny.

‘How did the parents’ night go at the hospital?’

‘The idea was for the fathers to talk about how they’re feeling but it didn’t turn out that way. They got on to talking about settling the baby – and the conversation stayed on settling.’

Anny walked into the bathroom and turned the taps back on. She added a scoop of Radox, picked up a washer from the end of the bath. She warmed it in the hot water, pressed it against her face. Then lay back against the porcelain. She closed her eyes. Thought about her own feeling of helplessness as she’d watched her daughter in distress.

She remembered when Kate was a baby. Her own mother’s nagging. Was the baby getting enough to eat? Did Anny have enough breast milk? The constant worrying about why the baby was crying. And her mother undermining her confidence, telling her that the baby was crying because she didn’t have enough milk to feed her baby.

‘Shut the door and walk away,’ was her mother’s advice. But the doctor had said she wasn’t to leave Kate to cry. He said Kate was a sensitive baby and would withdraw from her if she was left alone to cry.

Anny rubbed the coarse fabric up and down her arms, then up and down her legs. She lay in the bath for a time and then got out. She looked in the mirror as she dried herself. Turned her body sideways to the mirror. Pulled her stomach in, tucked her bottom under, stood up straight.

A warm day. Anny watched the sun rise in the morning. Saw the red sun hidden behind a cluster of clouds. The colours of the clouds changed each part of a second as she watched. More pink. Less mauve. The glow extended out along the horizon. The sea flat. The birds making noises like soft percussion triangles.

Kate and her mother sat on the floor of the bathroom as Kate bathed the baby in the big bath. A deep old-fashioned porcelain bath perched above black and white tiles. Kate kept splashing warm water on to his back to keep him warm as he stood up inspecting the taps, investigating the exit of the water from the faucet. His back wet and shiny. His bottom dimpled.

Kate looked across at her mother, a frown on her face and a dipped inflection in her voice. ‘I heard a terrible story this week, she said.. ‘It’s a horrible story.’

Anny could tell by Kate’s tone that perhaps it would be better if she didn’t tell her the story. But she didn’t say this. She took a deep breath instead.

‘You know Vivian who lives across the road?’ Kate said. ‘Vivian from the mothers’ group.’

Anny nodded.

‘Well it’s a friend of Vivian’s. They’ve known each other since they were children and their mothers are friends. The friend’s mother thought her daughter seemed not herself after the birth of the baby. The friend’s mother had said to her son-in-law that she wanted to discuss it with him. Before she was able to talk to him the daughter tried to kill her husband. She attacked him. Tried to strangle him. Then she jumped off the balcony with the baby in her arms.’

‘Oh no! That’s dreadful!’

‘The baby died and the woman is in hospital.’

‘That’s a dreadful, dreadful story.’

‘She’d thought that if she killed the whole family then they’d all be together in heaven.’

The baby sat down in the bath, then picked up a blue plastic scooper and used it to drink the bathwater. He smiled up at Kate and Anny as they leant over the bath. He pushed some plastic toys down from the side of the bath and watched the toys splash into the water.

‘How will it be for her when she realises she’s killed her baby?’ said Kate. And what about her relationship with her husband?’

Anny and Kate looked at each other. Kate reached down and picked the baby up out of the bath. As she wrapped a towel around him he put his arms down by his sides and leant his head against her chest. She held him tight against her.

Anny could hear Kate and her friend and the friend’s baby as they came in the front door. Kate introduced the friend to her mother. Her name was Alice. Anny offered Alice a cup of tea and the three of them sat around the dining room table. They drank tea out of pretty china cups – half open buds and violets and forget-me knots. The midday sun slanted through the window.

Alice fidgeted with the teaspoon on her saucer. She picked the spoon up, turned it over, put it down again. ‘I wish my mother was here,’ she said.

‘Where’s your mother?’ Anny asked.

‘In England. She lives in England. England is so far away. I ring her up but she’s busy doing her thing. And my father complains about the phone bills.’

‘That’s a shame,’ Anny commiserated.

Alice’s baby watched her, listened, turned his head towards her. Her voice lowered. ‘It would be so nice to sit down with my mother and to be able to talk like this. To be able to say, “The baby did this or she did that. The baby rolled over.”’

Kate and Anny looked at each other and nodded in agreement.

Anny remembered the last time she had seen her own mother. Anny had always felt that her mother wasn’t any good at the business of mothering. Motherhood hadn’t come easily to her. Perhaps she should never have been a mother; certainly she was one too soon. But hers was not an age in which women felt they had a choice.

It was five years ago now since that afternoon before she died. They were sitting in the visitors’ sunroom of the Jewish Hospital in Woollahra. Her mother’s hair an immaculate coiffure as always. A pale pink dressing gown tied around her waist. Anny had rung her children and arranged to meet them at the hospital. What she remembers most clearly about that afternoon is her mother’s anger because Anny had taken so long to wash and dry one of her nighties. Taken longer than her older sister who usually took the dirty nighties home and who had a clothes dryer. Anny had hung the nightie on a clothesline in the sun in her backyard and she’d thought it smelt particularly fresh and clean. But her mother was angry with her for not bringing the nightie back sooner. What took her so long? Wasn’t there anything she could do properly? Couldn’t she get anything right?

The scent of spring jasmine in the cooling air. A row of cherry blossom trees blossomed soft pink against dark wooden stems. Anny stood at the front door and waved goodbye to Alice as Kate helped her out to the car. She looked across at a blood-red hibiscus in the garden next door. A dog asleep on the grass.

Kate came back and stood beside her mother at the front door. Put her arm all the way around her. Patted her on the back. They leant into each other. Then went inside and closed the front door.

My Short Story, ‘After the Games’

November 24, 2022 ~ Libby Sommer ~ Leave a comment

My short story ‘After the Games’ was first published in Quadrant magazine and is included in my collection of short fictions titled ‘Stories from Bondi’ published by Ginninderra Press. Have a read. Hope you enjoy it.

After the Games:

Anny saw him again today. He looked older. Their paths crossed on the cliffs between Bronte and Bondi. He walked with a woman she had never seen before. The woman had long beautiful legs – bronzed a clear nut-brown. She was wearing a man’s undershirt and brown shorts and had a crochet bag hanging loosely from a black nylon strap draped over her hips. Her hair was long and it flicked out in golden corkscrews over her shoulders and down her back. They were laughing. He walked right past Anny and kept right on walking.

The beach seems unusually quiet today apart from a yoga class taking place on the grassy verge behind the Pavillion. On the ocean, surfers in wetsuits loll motionless on surfboards. On the sand, a gaggle of seagulls stand rigid as Irish dancers. And over on the rocks at the southern end of the beach other seagulls laze in the early sun in groups of three or four, or six or eight – their chests puffed out, feathers bristling in the spring breeze, as they nestle into the face of the rock.

It is shortly after the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games and Anny is on a rostered day off from her job with the ABC. She is also a poet but she doesn’t refer to that unless it is something people know already. She doesn’t think of making a living as a poet, not only because the income would be non-existent, but because she thinks, as she has innumerable times in her life, that probably she will not write any more poems.

On the grass a woman works out with her female personal trainer. The trainer holds an oblong plastic cushion at waist height while the woman kicks the bag.

One, two, three, calls out the trainer.

Kick, kick, kick, goes the woman’s leg hard into the cushion.

Four, five, six.

Kick, kick.

That’s the way, the trainer encourages.

Nine, ten, she continues with a rising inflection in her voice.

The trainer is forced backwards slightly with each kick but makes a quick recovery to her original position.

A man and a woman lie together kissing, sheltered by the shadow of the rocks at the southern end of the beach. Anny came here at night with Howard and they sat over there near the rocks with their arms around each other into the night. The pull of the tide kept bringing the waves closer to their feet. Anny saw the froth advancing and retreating and her own toes digging into the sand. All the time he spoke she saw her feet and when they started to go numb in the damp sand she knew without looking up what he was going to say; the whole of her seemed to be in her toes. Her love was in the waves. For some reason she thought that if the waves reached her, things would work out between them. The waves advanced and retreated but never quite reached the rock where they sat: never quite bridged the gap, the space between them and the ocean.

On the sand a one-legged seagull hops towards the water laboring over the crumbs of loose sand which break away and roll down as he passes over them. The one-legged seagull seems to have a definite goal in sight differing from the high-hopping tangerine-footed bird who attempts to cross in front of him, and who waits for a moment with his black beak trembling as if in deliberation, and then hops off as rapidly and strangely in the opposite direction. A line of seaweed with deep green lakes in the hollows lies between the seagull and the water’s edge where the other gulls are pecking for food. The seagull waits, undecided whether to circumvent the mountain of seaweed or to breast it.

Anny stops and watches the struggle of the seagull.

The ocean is grey and flat today. It is so quiet in fact that she can hear the tiny whisper of the breeze, the rustling of the waves approaching the shore, the creaking of the wings of a gull-like bird which flies low over the Promenade and the flapping of her own thin skirt as it blows against her legs. But there is no wind, nothing but a steady pressure forward as she progresses along the beach. Somewhere behind the veil of clouds there is a pale sun which can be seen, in the far distance, that casts a white gleam on the water.

Who would know there had been a Beach Volleyball Stadium here on the beach at Bondi? She bought tickets for the preliminaries for herself and her son. They hadn’t been out, just the two of them, since he was a little boy when she took him to a Kiss concert.

After the game they’d walked back to her place and he’d come in briefly for a glass of water before saying goodbye. She’d kissed him on the neck – on that soft groove that she used to know so well when he was a little boy.

When he’d left she couldn’t think of anything for the rest of the afternoon except that soft part of his neck and the kiss.

Near the end of the Promenade a woman cradles a baby in her arms. Anny can see the baby’s face clearly as it is lit by the sun. She can almost smell the baby’s soft hair, that familiar baby smell she once knew so well. The woman strokes the baby and looks down at it and the baby looks back up at her. She looks up again with a faraway gaze that all new mothers seem to have and rocks slowly from side, to side, her feet shuffling against the cement. The light picks up the woman’s high cheekbones and glints off her glasses.

Anny moves to the left as a woman pushing a three wheeled stroller runs past. The baby clutches the sides of the pram, the front wheel lifting as the woman negotiates the corner.

Anny first met Howard at a dinner party at a mutual friend’s house. He’d talked business with the host and she hadn’t really connected with him. It was only towards the end of the meal when he’d passed her the chocolate-covered strawberries and encouraged her to eat one that she’d warmed to him slightly. Go on, he’d said. Have one. Chocolate is good for you. He was a chunky sort of a bloke, a thick head of brown hair, greying at the sides. She had to admit that she wasn’t attracted to him when they first met. You were disappointed I could tell, he said later. A week after the dinner he’d rung and asked her out for dinner. He’d come over to pick her up and they’d walked down to Bondi. Coming back to her place later he told her he knew she was interested in him because she kept brushing into his arm as they walked up the hill.

Anny trusts what she makes of things – usually. She trusts what she thinks about friends and chance acquaintances, but she feels stupid and helpless when contemplating the collision of herself and Howard. She has plenty to say about it, given the chance, because she likes to explain things, but she doesn’t trust what she says, even to herself; it doesn’t help her.

Because everything and everyone else in his life came before me, she might say. His two businesses, his children, his ex-wife who lived across the road.

The one-legged seagull has now considered every possible method of reaching his goal without going round the line of seaweed or climbing over it. Aside from the effort required to climb the seaweed, he is doubtful whether the slippery texture will bear his weight. This determines him finally to creep beneath it, for there is a point where the seaweed curves high enough from the ground to admit him. He inserts his head in the opening and takes stock of the high brown roof and is getting used to the cool brown light before deciding what to do next.

10.

Howard had said he uses his air rifle to kill birds. He said he’s proud to shoot introduced birds around his house – and has no hesitation in killing dive-bombing magpies and noisy possums.

She remembers his house well. Big, two-stories, red-brick, four bedrooms, two bathrooms, a swimming pool out the back. Black leather and chrome, art books on the coffee tables. Huge original paintings on the walls.

He’d stay in the family room when his children were visiting, which was seven days out of fourteen – everyone in their own special seat at a computer or watching television or talking on the telephone. There was no spare seat for Anny and not enough light to read by.

She bought flowers. She bought presents for his children; clothes for the girls; she talked music with his son. She learned pathways around the house and found places outside where she could sit.

She’d felt flattered when he said that he wanted her to move in with him. He offered to build her a studio out the back. A dog house, a friend had said. He wants you out the back in the dog house so he can keep an eye on you. So you can be on hand whenever it suits him.

Howard talked about all the women his friends had lined up for him – waiting to be introduced. He spoke about a former girlfriend and how he wanted her to move in with him but she wouldn’t, so he ended the relationship. Later Anny found out that Howard had kept on seeing the former girlfriend even ringing her from Paris from the conference Anny had foolishly agreed to attend with him. She’d stupidly insisted on paying her own business class airfare, which she couldn’t afford, in order to be by his side.

She didn’t know any of this until it was too late – until she’d become needy and dependent.

You just want a handbag, a doormat, a warm body in the bed, she’d accused him.

I have a fatal flaw, he’d explained. I only want what I cannot have.

And what are Anny’s flaws? Angry, demanding, unco-operative Anny. Anny, the unsatisfactory poet.

11.

Two pigeons waddle along the concrete in search of food. Their tails wag back and forth, their necks jut in and out like finely linked springs moving to the rhythm of their webbed feet. On the grass the men and women practicing yoga twist their bodies into unimaginable knots and drop into breathtaking back bends, seeming to hang suspended in the air as they jump from one position to the next. The clear measured voice of the female yoga teacher calls out instructions:

Push down through the buttocks

Pull up through the rib cage

Relax the head down

Spread the fingers out wide

Toes under

Push the hips up

Keep the mind focussed in the moment

Roll over on to your back

And come into the corpse position

If you live alone and you can’t close your hand, it makes life very difficult as you get older, says the yoga instructor. Not being able to open a jar or turn a key in the lock. Every morning when I wake up I take the time to stretch out my body, she continues. I rotate my ankles, stretch out my feet and arms, and then I stand up and stretch out my neck. How many of you stretch in the mornings? Living in the city takes a toll on our health. We sit at a desk writing or sit at the computer – but we need to stretch the hands, the wrists, the hip flexors and to keep our bodies moving.

Anny wonders if the early morning stretches are only for people who live alone – for people who don’t wake up with their lover beside them.

12.

The last time she saw Howard they sat in her car near Ben Buckler in the rain. She rested her hands against the steering wheel, then leant back and listened as the windscreen started to fog. She felt the rise and the fall of her own breathing but she couldn’t hear her heart or her breath. She knew without seeing that the waves were colliding. Below, the swells rolled against the brown cliffs that she couldn’t see.

When she drove back to her apartment she sat down on a chair in her bedroom. She sat for an hour or so, then went to the bathroom, undressed, put on her nightgown, and got into bed. In bed she felt relief, that she had got myself home safely and would not have to think about anything any more.

In fact her only memory now is of the sound of the windscreen wipers swinging back and forth as she and Howard sat in silence in her car.

After the Maccabi bridge collapse in Israel she rang to see if his daughter had been involved. She left a message on his answer machine but he never returned her call.

He wrote to her care of the ABC, to say he’d pack and send her things.

13.

The grey underside of wings flap as a triangle of seagulls fly past in perfect formation above the rocks. They climb to a thousand feet, then, flapping their wings as hard as they can, they push over into a blazing steep dive toward the waves. They pull sharply upward again into a full loop and then fly all the way around to a dead-slow stand-up landing on the sand.

14.

Effortlessly the one-legged seagull spreads his wings and lifts into the air. In the light breeze he curves his feathers to lift himself without a single flap of wing from sand to cloud and down again.

He climbs two thousand feet above the sea, and without a moment for thought of failure and death, he brings his fore wings tight in to his body, leaving only the narrow swept wingtips extended into the wind, and falls into a vertical dive.

With the faintest twist of his wingtips he eases out of the dive and shoots above the waves, a gray cannonball under the sun.

He trembles ever so slightly with delight.

15.

She had his sweater draped over her shoulders. They were laughing. Anny watched their backs move away. She waited by the sea until the sun went down.

16.

The swell is up, the Pacific Ocean expressing its power across the rocks below Anny in spectacular explosions of spray.

It is colder now and the day is fading. A little wind has blown up. The wind tears at her hair. With a wild gesture she pulls her hair loose from its side combs and lets it stream across her face and then lets it fly back in the wind.

A weak sun emerges. She stands still and lifts her face.

17.

Keep your hips still, swing your arms, keep your lower abdominals tight to protect your back. Try to keep your chest high, a nice long neck. Keep your arms out nice and long. Relax the shoulders. Stand tall. Go over to the right side, keep your knees soft. Very slowly. And the other side. Forward roll. Drop the chin into the neck. Hold it. Keep your knees soft and come back up. Really concentrate on spinal articulation here – vertebrae by vertebrae slowly roll it up, shoulders relaxed. Chin in, roll it down. Keep those knees soft. Bend your knees as much as you have to. Go down for four, push it in. Stretch out the shoulders there. Hold it and release the hands on to the ground and roll it back up. Take your right leg out in front. Hands on the hips, keep the hips square. We’re going over in a nice square line. Should be able to stretch the hamstrings there.

And … coming back up.

The End

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.

‘

Writing Tip: Use the Inner Critic

March 15, 2022 ~ Libby Sommer ~ 3 Comments

It is essential to separate the creator and the editor, or inner critic when you practice writing, so that the creator has plenty of room to breathe, experiment, and tell it like it really is. If the inner critic is being too much of a problem and you can’t distinguish it from your authentic writing voice, sit down whenever you find it necessary to have some distance from it and put down on paper what the critic is saying, put a spotlight on the words—“You have nothing original to say, what made you think you could write anything anyone would want to read, your writing is crap, you’re a loser, I’m humiliated, you write a load of rubbish, your work is pathetic, and your grammar stinks …” On and on it goes!

Say to yourself, It’s OK to feel this. It’s OK to be open to this.

You can learn to cultivate compassion for yourself during this internal process by practicing Mindfulness Meditation. Sit up straight, close your eyes, bring your awareness to your inner experience. Now, redirect your attention to the physical sensations of the breath in the abdomen … expanding as the breath comes in … and falling back as the breath goes out. Use each breath to anchor yourself in the present. Continue, concentrating on the breath for several minutes. Now, expand your field of awareness to include the words of the inner critic. Turn your attention to where in your body you feel the unpleasant thoughts, so you can attend, moment by moment, to the physical reactions to your thoughts.

“Stay with the bodily sensations, accepting them, letting them be, exploring them without judgment as best you can.”—*Mindfulness*, Mark Williams and Danny Penman.

Every time you realise that you’re judging yourself, that realisation in itself is an indicator that you’re becoming more aware.

The thing is, the more clearly you know yourself, the more you can accept the critic in you and use it. If the voice says, “You have nothing interesting to say,” hear the words as white noise, like the churning of a washing machine. It will change to another cycle and eventually end, just like your thoughts that come and go like trains at the station. But, in the meantime, you return to your notebook and practice your writing. You put the fear and the resistance down on the page.

*Do you struggle with an inner critic? Any words of wisdom you’d like to share?*

Writing Tip: Flash Fiction

February 27, 2022 ~ Libby Sommer ~ 2 Comments

Have you tried 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 2018 Libby Sommer

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

My Micro Fiction: When the New Boyfriend Nearly Died

February 20, 2022 ~ Libby Sommer ~ 6 Comments

My micro fiction ‘When the New Boyfriend Nearly Died’ was first published in Quadrant magazine in December 2021.

Have a read. Hope you enjoy it.

When the New Boyfriend Nearly Died:
In the hospital’s public toilet, your face pleads back at you, white and worried. Far as you know, your new boyfriend had a heart attack while bouncing between your child-bearing hips. Too much of a strain. It’s not your fault. When he was admitted to Emergency you didn’t know if you’d ever see him again.
After five hours of waiting, you ask the receptionist if you can go in. When she asks you, you can’t pronounce his Polish surname. You spell out the letters. She considers you through the gap in the partition. You tell her you’re his new girlfriend. So you’re the one, she must be thinking before pressing the red button that lets you in.
He is lying in bed, a canula in his arm. His eyes are closed. You sit in a chair beside him and hold his hand. This would never have happened if it weren’t for you. Nurses and doctors hurry past clutching clipboards.
Don’t die on me, you plead.
If he dies, what you will miss are his text messages of love, the thwack of his body, and the pots of Japanese tea you shared. In bed you’d sip from tiny ceramic mugs.
You make a mental list of your strengths and weaknesses: you’re good at hedonistic pleasures, bad at Cryptics, bad at lonely Sundays, good at making new friends, bad at staying in touch, good at making loose-leaf tea after sex with an addict, good at falling for men who can’t stop swallowing uppers and downers. Good at loving your new boyfriend who took too many pills and now you’re worried he’ll die.
Are you dreaming, or did he just squeeze your hand?
Copyright 2021 Libby Sommer

Writing Tip: Becoming a Writer

August 23, 2020 ~ Libby Sommer ~ 2 Comments

yellow sunflower bookcover of Becoming A Writer by Dorothea Brande

I highly recommend ‘Becoming A Writer’ by Dorothea Brande given to me by a friend many years ago at the beginning of my writing journey.

‘A reissue of a classic work published in 1934 on writing and the creative process, Becoming a Writer 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.’ – Amazon

‘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. She also shows how to harness the unconscious, how to fall into the “artistic coma,” then how to re-emerge and be your own critic.

‘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

Do you have a favourite book about the writing process that you’ve found to be especially useful on your writing journey?

Books on Writing Process

August 9, 2020March 23, 2021 ~ Libby Sommer ~ 2 Comments

One of my favourite books on the writing process is The Writing Life by Annie Dillard, a small and passionate guide to the terrain of a writer’s world.

Dillard begins:

When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner’s pick, a woodcarver’s gouge, a surgeon’s probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year. You make the path boldly and follow it fearfully. You go where the path leads. At the end of the path, you find a box canyon. You hammer out reports, dispatch bulletins. The writing has changed, in your hands, and in a twinkling, from an expression of your notions to an epistemological tool. The new place interests you because it is not clear. You attend. In your humility, you lay down the words carefully, watching all the angles. Now the earlier writing looks soft and careless. Process is nothing; erase your tracks. The path is not the work. I hope your tracks have grown over; I hope birds ate the crumbs; I hope you will toss it all and not look back.

Annie Dillard has written eleven books, including the memoir of her parents, An American Childhood; the Northwest pioneer epic The Living; and the nonfiction narrative Pilgrim at Tinker Creek winner of the 1975 Pullizer Prize. A gregarious recluse, she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

“For non-writers, The Writing Life is a glimpse into the trials and satisfactions of a life spent with words. For writers, it is a warm, rambling, conversation with a stimulating and extraordinarily talented colleague.””–Chicago Tribune””A kind of spiritual Strunk & White, a small and brilliant guidebook to the landscape of a writer’s task…Dillard brings the same passion and connective intelligence to this narrative as she has to her other work.”– “Boston Globe””For her book is…scattered with pearls. Each reader will be attracted to different bright parts…Gracefully and simply told, these little stories illuminate the writing life…Her advice to writers is encouraging and invigorating.”– “Cleveland Plain Dealer””The Writing Life is a spare volume…that has the power and force of a detonating bomb…A book bursting with metaphors and prose bristling with incident.”– “Detroit News”

Which books on writing process have you found to be inspiring?

What can you do while in isolation?

March 22, 2020 ~ Libby Sommer ~ 5 Comments

photo of a woman thinking

David Dale in the Sydney Morning Herald writes about Isaac Newton’s self-isolation during the plague year 1665-66 and how he passed the time.

‘Newton was 23, a student at Cambridge. When the black plague spread there from London, he retreated to his birthplace – Woolsthorpe Manor, near the town of Grantham (later the birthplace of Margaret Thatcher). During what he called his “annus mirabilis”, or wonderful year, at Woolsthorpe, Newton did three significant things:

He invented the mathematical system called calculus,

He drilled a hole in the shutter of his bedroom window and held a prism up to the beam of sunlight that came through it, discovering that white light is made up of every colour (and giving Pink Floyd an iconic album cover), and

He watched apples falling from the trees in his garden and theorised about a force called gravity, which keeps the moon revolving around planet Earth. (He later wrote: “I can calculate the movement of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.”)’ – Sydney Morning Herald

So what can you do while in isolation amid the corona virus outbreak to stay calm and centred and to concentrate your mind away from the current crisis? A writing project could be the answer.

What to write? If you’ve been wondering whether to write a short story or a novel, here are some thoughts on these two different forms of creative fiction:

Is a novel a short story that keeps going, or, is it a string of stories with connective tissue and padding, or, is it something else? Essayist Greg Hollingshead believes that the primary difference between the short story and the novel is not length but the larger, more conceptual weight of meaning that the longer narrative must carry on its back from page to page, scene to scene.

“It’s not baggy wordage that causes the diffusiveness of the novel. It’s this long-distance haul of meaning.” Greg Hollingshead

There is a widespread conviction among fiction writers that sooner or later one moves on from the short story to the novel. When John Cheever described himself as the world’s oldest living short story writer, everyone knew what he meant.

Greg Hollingshead says that every once in a while, to the salvation of literary fiction, there appears a mature writer of short stories—someone like Chekhov, or Munro—whose handling of the form at its best is so undulled, so poised, so capacious, so intelligent, that the short in short story is once again revealed as the silly adjective it is, for suddenly here are simply stories, spiritual histories, narratives amazingly porous yet concentrated and undiffused.

When you decide you want to write in a particular form—a novel, short story, poem—read a lot of writing in that form. Notice the rhythm of the form. How does it begin? What makes it complete? When you read a lot in a particular form, it becomes imprinted inside you, so when you sit at your desk to write, you produce that same structure. In reading novels your whole being absorbs the pace of the sentences, the setting of scenes, knowing the colour of the bedspread and how the writer gets her character to move down the hallway to the front door.

I sit at my desk thinking about form as a low-slung blanket of cloud blocks my view of the sky. Through the fly screen I inhale the sweet smell of earth after rain as another day of possibility beckons.

Self-isolation can give us an opportunity to create something new.

Good luck everyone during this horrific pandemic and please take care.