The Writing Life....Fluffy Bathrobe Version

I HAVE always wanted to be a writer; I won’t deny it, but I have been protected from its effects by not actually writing much, and, if I did write, being reluctant to admit to it.  It sounds so self-aggrandizing, doesn’t it; ‘Hi, I’m Iona, I’m a writer.’  I mean inevitably someone would eventually demand proof, and a children’s book you wrote thirty years ago and a couple of poems in obscure literary journals just aren’t going to cut it. 

In the 80s I even got a Master’s degree in writing from the University of British Columbia, as a way of further putting off actual writing.  I was the nearly oldest person in my little pod for the 2 years I was there.  There was one slightly older woman who wrote terrifyingly good, intense short stories about working for the Canadian government as a fish counter and having to spend her time on Russian fishing boats throwing up.  I’m going to come out right away here and say I’m not willing to go to those lengths to acquire experience; my Russian isn’t good enough and I don’t like throwing up.

Another thing that put me off saying I was a writer, besides having an actual oeuvre, was going to a few literary parties.  These were back in the days when people still smoked.  Everyone there except me and the fish woman was young and intense, and clearly destined for literary glory.  They sat in the smoky dark in tight circles around empty bottles, pushing their hair out of their eyes with nicotine-stained fingers, declaring that no one over the age of 25 could really, really understand or write anything meaningful.  Fish woman and I had not been 25 for a good long while by then.  We drank vodka and ate sardines by the kitchen counter wondering if we’d been like that in our 20s.

My mother was a writer; she had two books published to prove it.  She was a woman who, in her advanced old age, divided her time between buying exciting modern gadgets and writing a three hundred page book about bears on actual paper, with a typewriter.   A disaster was inevitable.  One hot summer’s day she plugged in and turned on her brand new, high-powered, top of the line electric fan, and her little sitting room became an explosion of 300 un-numbered pages, which could never again be coherently reassembled.  She quit writing after that and devoted her time to “Dallas”, but I still have her disassembled bear book as a reminder of the futility of adopting airs, or doing anything with air, really.

But sooner or later we all succumb.  My publisher has just informed me that the hours I have spent in my fluffy pink bathrobe in the mornings writing have resulted in an actual purchasable book.  I’m afraid Dead In The Water would only confirm the fixed views of my young literary colleagues at the university, but it’s mine, and I wrote it.   With the help of a bowl of dark chocolate malt balls always to hand, I think I might just stay in bed and write another one.  It’s the sort of bohemian life-style we writers are famous for.