By Bev Stevens
I was in my sixties before I turned my hand to creative nonfiction. I was, and still am, writing web copy and how-to guides for online accounting software: dry stuff, but that’s okay; it pays well, I have an analytical mind and a good deal of persistence. For a long time, I had no pretensions to be a real writer. I had been mightily discouraged by a primary school teacher. She read my poem and said I’d never be a writer, too many lists . Actually the poem was okay for a seven-year-old; it used concrete sensory detail and went something like, Blue sky, green grass, autumn leaves, falling down . I told anyone who asked that I could never write a novel; I lacked imagination. That, too, was something a teacher had said, but it was the sewing teacher, irritated with my constant requests for help to make a sundress.
In my mental hierarchy of writers and writing, literary fiction was at the top. I read and reread Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen. I devoured their biographies, and those of other women writers, fascinated by the links between their lives and what they wrote. I read contemporary novels by award-winning or well-reviewed writers including acclaimed New Zealand writer Barbara Anderson who was in her sixties when her first novel was published. That fact stuck with me. Years later, I was at the university graduation ceremony where Barbara, now aged 83, was awarded an honorary doctorate. But by then, dementia meant a helper had to lead her on stage. My mother’s mental state started to decline at about the same age, and I found myself counting the number of good years I reckoned I had left in which to do all the things I wanted to do. It turns out, creative writing is one of them.
I began with a story I’d uncovered in an internet archive of old New Zealand newspapers of how, in 1912, my eminently respectable grandfather, then aged 19, was charged with riding a motorcycle furiously and negligently , knocking over a small boy who was running across the road. I wanted it to make the story inviting enough that my daughters, nieces and nephews would want to read it. But I failed; it was lengthy and dry. That spurred me to enroll for a memoir course, the first of many creative writing workshops and webinars over the past six years.
Now, I’m building a collection of essays that tell the story of my life. What drives me has altered. There’s a sense, despite—or perhaps because of—my reserved nature, of wanting to be known; of, after three score years and ten, having something to say. I grew up, the eldest of six children, in a family where little warmth or affection was shown, where emotions were kept in check except for the occasional flare of my father’s temper. Dinner table conversation was restricted to Pass the salt please , and May I have a second helping . We heard no details of my aunt’s divorce or my father’s rift with his parents. We kept up the appearance of a well-adjusted family even into adulthood; the cracks that appeared as the six of us moved towards middle age, whether it was alcoholism, affairs, domestic violence, embezzlement, sexual abuse, or gambling, were whispered about, covered over and sealed up.
So to open up in my writing is a challenge. How much can I say without breaking the family compact to hold things in and keep them close? What can I tell without upsetting someone, hurting their feelings, or damaging relationships? I can write about my breast cancer, but not my marriage breakup. I can write about my parents openly now that they are gone. But my brothers and sisters are a different matter; so are my friends, my daughters, and my ex-husband. Even if I was a great writer, I couldn’t convince myself that I’m entitled to tell all in the service of art. The defense that it’s my story to tell from my perspective doesn’t sit well with me.
It means there’s a lot I can’t tell unless I can frame it with compassion; unless I’m willing to show it to anyone who is portrayed in a less than flattering light; and unless I have their permission to publish. I toy with the idea of changing names, submitting to US journals the people I write about won’t ever come across, and not sharing those pieces on social media. But that still gives me an uncomfortable sense of betrayal. And what’s the point if I can’t trumpet my success?
I’ve realized I do want to be known, but selectively. I’m happy to stay clear of scandal and trauma except for passing hints, instead portraying pivotal moments from ordinary life. I’m keen to have essays accepted by literary journals in recognition of having reached a certain level of proficiency in the craft. The story of my grandfather’s reckless driving and brush with the law, however, still awaits, and deserves, a rewrite.
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Beverley Stevens is a writer of creative nonfiction by night and a web writer by day. Her work has been published in leading New Zealand literary journals Landfall and Headland, as well as in the Longridge Review and Dorothy Parkers’s Ashes. She lives in Wellington, New Zealand. Visit her website at designit.co.nz
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