My first class!

I had the first night of my Writers' Studio Unlocking Creativity class last night. It felt great to be starting finally, to be aiming towards something I love and want to do. There are about 15 people in the class, of whom a handful seem serious. I have this fierce, almost overwhelming, need to be the best in the class. We have daily writing exercises of some 300 words or so, in which we are told to "keep the pen moving and capture first thoughts". Don't let the internal critic silence the tentative creative voice. The first writing exercise is on the theme of "I remember", and I decide to base it on one of the characters (perhaps) from my novel, Sister Mary O'Grady:

I remember when Mother Antonia told me she had a calling to go to Australia and asked, "Do you want to come? It would be a glorious work of God and of service". I had not the faintest understanding of what she was asking. I was just nineteen, and had taken the veil only a year before. And before that, years of looking after my three younger brothers and baby Lucy, years of pots and ovens, brooms and diapers. My only respite was Sacred Heart convent school.

So I think I chose to become a nun because it was an escape from doing the same pots and diapers all over again, except this time for a man who would want other things as well - things of which I only had the vaguest understanding but which made me feel quite nauseated nonetheless. And of course I believed in God, of course I did. But I didn’t have a very good understanding of Him.

I believe in God still, but after 38 years in the Kimberly, where there is every manner of person, I know that belief can be as searing as the desert sun, but also as changeable as the tide. God is not what He seemed to be when I was nineteen. Mother Antonia was such a crafty old thing, God rest her soul, firing me up with so much pride and fervour so that I agreed to come and do God’s work in Australia, when I utterly failed to understand even the most simple thing about it.