cognitive-conversations-1-synergies-the-art-of-living-a-double-life
Bianca
Welcome to the Science Write Now podcast. Science Write Now is a free online magazine featuring essays, fiction, poetry and artwork by Australian writers, scientists and artists. Check out our current edition, the Underground, if you haven't already. We also have a call out for submissions for our next edition, Synergy, which I'll link in the show notes and be sure to follow our Substack and socials for updates.
Bianca
We've got a fabulous lineup for you today. Three special guests are joining me for the first episode in a brand-new series titled Cognitive Conversations. This episode is Synergies the Art of Living a Double Life. I'm your host, Bianca, an emerging science writer, editor and PhD student researching the intersection of creativity and neuroscience. I'm based in Brisbane, Meanjin, on the beautiful Maiwar River, and I'd like to acknowledge the Yuggera and Turrbal people and pay my deep respects to elders past and present. I'd also like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands on which my guests live and create. First up, we have Dr Fiona Robertson, a writer and doctor based here, also in Meanjin, Brisbane.
Fiona is the author of the short story collection If You’re Happy, which won the Glendower Award in the 2020 Queensland Literary Awards and was shortlisted for the Steele Rudd Award in 2022. Fiona's short fiction has been published in Australia and the UK and has been shortlisted for international competitions. Currently, she's working on a novel.
My second guest today is Dr Laurie Steed, a novelist and short story writer from Perth Borlu, living on Whadjuk Noongar country. Laurie was a recipient of the 2021 Henry Handel Richardson Flagship Fellowship for Short Story Writing from Varuna, among other fellowships and residencies. His debut novel, You Belong Here, was published in 2018, followed by Love Dad Confessions of an Anxious Father in 2023. His third book, the short story collection Greater City Shadows, is out now.
And last but certainly not least, especially when it comes to marathons. Dr Jo Skinner is a writer and GP based in Meanjin, Brisbane, who writes contemporary women's fiction as well as freelance nonfiction articles, issues and mental health. And as you might have guessed, Jo has a distance running habit. When she is not working or writing, you will find her accruing kilometres while plotting her next story. Jo's debut novel, the Truth About My Daughter, is out next month in September 2024. So welcome Jo, Laurie and Fiona.
Laurie
Thank you. It's great to be here.
Fiona
Thanks, Bianca. Very excited to be here.
Jo
Yeah, it's lovely to be here. Thank you for the invite
Bianca
That's our pleasure. Now, I'm going to dive right in because we have a lot to cover, and I'm really excited to be bringing this synergy of minds together to discuss the art of leading a double life. What I mean by that, of course, is the dual occupations that writers commonly hold and all the fascinating connections in between. So, Jo and Fiona, you're both trained doctors. Jo, you're a practising GP, and Fiona, you've previously worked in general practice. For the past decade, you've worked as a surgical assistant. You're also both writers. What do you perceive as the common threads that bring your creative and medical practice together? Jo, would you like to start?
Jo
Thank you. Look, it's a big question, and I do think the most important part of both writing and being a GP is the ability to put yourself into somebody else's shoes, to be able to see the world from another person's point of view. And I'll be quite honest, as a GP, I probably started doing that about halfway through my career because I was so focused on getting everything right and being paranoid about missing a diagnosis that I focused on lists of questions, making sure I got to things and probably didn't let patients speak and tell me what was actually really troubling them.
And probably my best example of that was a woman quite a long time ago who came in complaining about bloating, and it was very easy just to dive in and ask her about, you know, the range of symptoms and when it started and how long it lasts and things. But I actually stepped back, and I said, so what's really worrying you? And she said one of the mothers at the school died of ovarian cancer, and she's the same age as me. So, it took the consultation in a completely different direction. And it's something we call narrative medicine, which I'm really trying hard within the time pressures and things of general practice to do. And I think what is important, that ability to observe people and to really listen to them, and I think, as a writer, to create characters that really are absorbing and that bury themselves into people's imaginations and people, characters they think about even when they're not reading your book, come from writers who really observe people and really listen to people and are able to translate that into great stories.
So, I think that idea of empathy and being able to see people stand in somebody else's shoes, which can be surprisingly difficult, I think, is a big intersection for me.
Bianca
Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you, Jo, for that generous answer. And it's just making me reflect on things I've been reading in my own practice around going back to the original, you know, streams of psychology and psychiatry and Freud, talking about artists, writers and psychologists, you know, being such great allies because they're masters of description and analysis. So, yeah, no, thank you. Fiona, I wonder if you could talk us through your creative and medical practice. Any similarities? I was thinking and reflecting as I was preparing for this podcast. Thinking, gosh, is a structural edit on a manuscript anything like the patience and precision required for surgery?
Fiona
Well, to answer the second part of that question, I think editing a manuscript is harder. Harder than what I have to do. Oh, my goodness. But to come back to the first part of the question as the common threads between creative practice and medical practice, I agree with what Jo said. I think that putting yourself in someone else's shoes through the practice of medicine is really what we're doing as writers when we write fiction or really any other form of prose. And I think as a GP, and even now to some degree, I'm constantly hearing stories. But they're not just stories like, you know, I went to the shop, and I bought a litre of milk. These are stories where people are really at their most vulnerable. And I think vulnerability is how we connect as human beings.
So how we connect in a medical sense, in allowing people to be vulnerable, hearing them, empathising with them, it's the same kind of thing that you do when you're writing fiction. So, I feel like there's actually a really strong link. And I feel like almost my medical career prepared me to be a writer in that.
In that way, anyway. Obviously, the consequences are not as significant if you get it wrong, but I just find it harder to, you know, because in medicine, there are a lot of guidelines and procedures, and you're doing similar things over and over again, whereas writing, it seems like nothing is the same. Nothing.
Bianca
You're always venturing out into the unknown.
Fiona
It seems like every project, even if it's the same thing, even if you're, say, writing a story after having written a short story, it's a whole new ball game. Everything feels just as difficult. I don't. I don't find it any easier as I, you know, spend more time doing it.
Jo
That's very reassuring, Fiona.
Bianca
So, Laurie, you wear your fair share of hats, too. Author, editor, mentor, creative writing teacher, manuscript assessor, AKA professional word wrangler. What does your day-to-day look like? And do you have techniques or strategies you use for switching between these modes?
Laurie
Well, that's a great question. The short answer is no. I don't have very good techniques for switching between those cognitive modes. So typically, what I'll do is monotask to a point, depending on what role I'm doing. So, if I'm assessing a manuscript, I say to that writer, I'm yours for the fortnight. Like, this is what I will be working on, and we'll really go knee-deep on that if I need to write during that time. All right, first thing or last thing used to be first thing, but because I have young boys now, it's typically once they're down for bed, and I can do it a bit later on.
None of that is my ideal working mode. So, I know that before I had children, I'd go on these retreats, and I'd be out in a Hanging Rock for a week, or I'd be at Varuna, and I'd be getting all this conducive sort of flow happening. And that doesn't really happen anymore. So, it's probably even from the author’s side of it.
I think that's why Greater City Shadows ended up coming out when it did was that I didn't have that long-run novel-type atmosphere or ability to be that focused on something. So, I was able to work on short pieces in whatever time I've got. I use music to get into my writing space, which sounds a bit crazy, but my brain is typically noisy. So, by having music, it almost just silences about three levels of noise. And really weirdly, there's certain other types of music I can listen to while working that's not writing, and it's fine. And it’s usually pretty middling Pop music I can just listen to, and it doesn't distract me at all to that point. So, if you were to put Agadoo on, I'd probably get three spreadsheets done. So, there's something about the triviality of the music, too. Whereas I can't listen to Bon Iver or something if I'm trying to do some sort of basic admin tasks. So, I don't know what's happening cognitively with me, but it's interesting, and I'd like to learn more.
Bianca
Oh, that's so fascinating. I have exactly the same thing. I have different playlists for when I'm editing, when I'm writing when I'm just doing the admin. And if it's writing, it's something creative. I can't have any lyrics.
Laurie
Yeah, I’m the same.
Bianca
I need to be able to enter that flow state.
Laurie
I agree.
Bianca
It sort of needs to have a regular beat as well.
Laurie
The drafting process in itself it just needs that space, doesn't it, for the ideas to sort of form. Whereas the revising space, and particularly if I'm marking up a manuscript, it's almost. It's an entirely different part of my brain, and it doesn't get affected as much by the music. It's just doing. It's almost like a supercomputer just going, 01010101. So, it becomes almost like story mechanics at that point. Whereas the drafting. Can't have that much during mechanics in the room, or you won't get it anywhere fast.
Bianca
Yeah. The deeper I dive into sort of neuroscience, that type of thing, for as part of what I'm researching, it's just like, oh, my gosh, our brains are computers. Or computers are. In a way.
Laurie
It's a great question in terms of that. None of those roles were deliberate. They just sort of happened as a consequence of being a writer. So, I have to remember to still be a writer and keep my writing practice up while I'm doing all this other stuff that's writing-related.
Jo
Well, I. I can't listen to music at all. I find music is, for me a separate thing completely. So, my husband's very keen on music and he works and does everything to music. So, we actually have separate rooms now and have to close the door. But for me, music is. When I finished, it's like. It's like, oh, this is. I finished writing now, if this is another space. So, I like silence. I'm really. I'm good in a library or in my own room with nothing else. Even the dog snoring, I find a bit distracting, to be honest. So, I get up very early in the morning and write when there's nothing else except bird songs.
Bianca
Okay.
Jo
I like the birds outside, but not. Not music. No.
Bianca
Beautiful. Yeah. What about you, Fiona?
Fiona
Yeah, I'm very much the same. And particularly, anything with lyrics really bothers me because I hear the words and interferes with my words. But I do really enjoy, in a particularly emotional story, if there's something the character is listening to, I will listen to that. And I don't know, that really seems to help me get into that moment with the character. So, there are exceptions to the rule, but mostly, that's at the redrafting stage, as Laurie said, as well, where I am just making small modifications and trying to get the emotional connection through the music.
Bianca
Yeah, music certainly does that. The absence of sound is really interesting. So recently, on the residency I was on, which is in Katumba, the writer's house Varuna and, I found I had to listen to music to get myself to sleep at night because it was so quiet, and I'm living in the inner city in Brisbane. I'm constantly in this. Surrounded by this constant hum. And so yeah, it was just this, oh my gosh, I can't sleep because it's actually. The silence is too loud.
Jo
So interesting.
Bianca
Your mind does invent things, senses sometimes like sound. We started talking as well. Laurie mentioned before things, the occupations, you know, that you were involved in sort of sprung from being a writer and. But there are also many other roles that we play in our life over the course of a lifetime, including partner, friend, mother and father, sister, brother.
So, I'm really interested in hearing your take on writing family. In The Truth About My Daughter, the title of your forthcoming novel, Sisters Finn and George navigate a love-hate relationship growing up in a highly dysfunctional family. You write Steinbauer family history is being rewritten even as it is happening until it becomes too difficult to recall which bits are fabricated or embellished. Can you tell us what inspired you to write this story? And why do you think we, as readers and writers, become so preoccupied with these cerebral themes such as dysfunctionality, family, truth and memory?
Jo
This novel was actually in my imagination in a very embryonic form for a very long time, long even before I think I wanted to start writing. I had little seeds of it growing there, and I don't think I had the courage to start with this novel. So, I actually had to write three novels first before I got to this one.
So even though it's my debut novel, it's not the debut novel in my head, although I have written some others. So, I'm going to go back and work on them now. But I think I needed to do that as scaffolding for this one. There was something about this one, lots of layers in this one, which I guess even though it is completely.
It is fictional. There are things drawn from my own experience. I think, looking back now, I didn't know that then. That was probably why I needed to have. Have other things that were distanced me a little bit from the work, so other novels. So, I think I. I did grow up in a dysfunctional family, and I think we always think our experience is when we're younger is reasonably unique in things. Now, having been a GP for such a long time, I realise that most people grow up in dysfunctional families. There's just this constant sense of unease or walking on eggshells, and you just have to keep my father happy. And if and anything, it was quite unpredictable what made him unhappy. And if it did, my mother went to enormous lengths.
We also tiptoed around him to appease him, to make things good again. So, it was always this sense of hypervigilance. And when he wasn't there, which was often, he was used to disappear for weeks at a time. Everyone had to sort of breathe out, just. But you didn't know when he was coming back, so you didn't completely breathe out.
So, I think that sense, I was trying to capture that a little bit in this novel, I think actually came through in Laurie's first book. That sense of.
Laurie
I can very much relate to that. Yeah. I mean, I'm really excited to read The Truth About My Daughter with that in mind. It's sort of. I probably. It's a very healing thing to see that universality of dysfunction because it can feel so individuated and so focused like you're unlucky or you've stumbled into something that you would never would have wished upon.
But then, when you sort of work towards acceptance and other people's realities, there is something. I wouldn't say it's heartening, but it's healing to think of what people endure or come out of and move into a place of kindness and compassion. So, yeah, it's a really interesting space to navigate, particularly in fiction.
Jo
I think we do all have our own perspective on things that happen, our own interpretation, and I think that's. We all have a prism through which we view the world, and it's based on our own experience. Like that analogy, you know, looking at the elephant from different points of view. You either just see the back or the tail or the or the trunk, and you see the elephant. And what you're seeing is actually true. This is what an elephant looks like, but it's different to what the other viewers are seeing. So, it's a very interesting and complex issue, I think.
Bianca
Yeah. And definitely in terms of writing, particularly writing memoir, it's one of the great challenges is representing, you know, whose truth are you representing? And there's multiple versions. So, Fiona, I'm going to bring a little quote into this. I've read that in your short story collection. Your stories traverse the globe to reveal people at moments of change or crisis as they struggle to repair fractures in their lives and search for something close to happiness.
A divorced woman, an abandoned toddler, a lonely man, a second wife, a young Australian war vet. All these people are certainly fractured and longing for wholeness. But is that the same as happiness?
Fiona
That's a very big question, Bianca. I mean, you can start off by going, what is happiness? I. I think that what they're really looking for is connection and purpose. I think connection, first of all, I think sort of overarching theme of the collection is loneliness and longing. And I think that's because they are lonely and they are longing for connection.
So, I see that as more what they're searching for rather than happiness because, A, what is happiness? And B, you know, I don't think it's sustainable as a constant state of mind. So, yeah, that's what I see all these people as looking for, is connection. And with connection probably brings a sense of purpose, because most of us, our purpose is doing something in the world that helps others. That gives us our sense of purpose and that gives us connection.
Bianca
Absolutely. Yeah. Happiness is such a ethereal thing, in a way. It's.
Fiona
It's very nebulous.
Bianca
It's very nebulous. Yeah, absolutely. So, it is about that finding connection, fulfillment and purpose like, you say. And do you think fiction responds to these moments of crisis and upheaval? Yeah. How might you use fiction to respond to crisis and upheaval when something might change us fundamentally in our life?
Fiona
I think that fiction can respond in a whole variety of ways. I think sometimes it allows us to rewrite history so a story can unfold, and then it can have a different ending, to. For that character or whether it's, you know, something from our own lives. I think sometimes it can just allow us to be at peace. I think one of the biggest ways that story does that is a bit like what Jo was saying. You know, examining a difficult or perplexing situation from a whole range of angles and from different perspectives allows us to see why people may have behaved that way. They have. And that may allow our characters to reach a level of acceptance, even if literally nothing changes within the story.
And then, of course, there are the stories where things just spiral and get worse and worse and worse. And I kind of like them too, sometimes. So, I think, yeah, there's a whole range of ways that fiction responds to these moments of crisis. It can be very open to interpretation. Like, I've had people say to me, oh, my God, that story, you know, that you left here, what happens?
And I say, what do you think happened? I like to leave it open enough that the reader can choose, in many instances what they think happened.
Bianca
Yeah, I love that. Great answer, Laurie. Your stories, at their heart and soul, are about people and memory and belonging. I'm drawing a lot of threads here between all of your work, really, and as well as relationality and family. Your memoir, Love Dad, explores what it means to be a father in the 21st century.
Hence the subtitle, Confessions of an Anxious Father. And your later short story collection, Greater City Shadows, showcases the small but magnificent ways people find connection on one of the most isolated continents on Earth. Yes, Australia. So, Laurie, where do you find connection and belonging? And in what ways does your creative practice enhance or perhaps hinder this? After all, sort of writing is such an introspective, solitary practice.
Laurie
Yeah, it's a weird one because when I started writing, I really wanted to belong somewhere. And then these other things came into my life that started making me feel like I belonged outside of that. So, I think my first my wife and then my two sons, I really feel like I belong in that space and like me being me is enough in that space, and yet at the same time, it's never quite enough. But I know that I belong there, that there is. I'm meant to be there within that family unit. And so, writing's a funny one because I didn't have a feeling of belonging when I started writing. And then over time, when you mentor writers, it's like 80 to 90% craft, but then there's about 10% of it just encouraging them to be visible and to trust in their intuition and to back themselves.
And so that's a really vulnerable space that they're letting you into, to be that person who can. They can open up to, and they can grow as a writer. So, I think I feel like I belong in that space too, that that's a real gift, to not just be a writer, but to actually sit with an emerging writer that might not feel there yet at that stage and say, you're doing it now, like the wheels are actually moving.
I know it doesn't feel like you're riding the bike, but you're actually riding the bike now. So, belongings are funny one in the sense that I think I was an island when I started writing, and I felt like I could pull build my chateau for myself as a writer. And ironically, everything that I've done in the writing sphere has just led me to more and more people and more and more connections to the point that it's kind of strange to go from You Belong Here, which is about this very dysfunctional family, to a story collection like Greater City Shadows, where people keep showing up for each other over and over.
So, I don't really understand any of that. But I think it's quite profound that whatever I'm doing on the page seems to ripple out to my day-to-day life. And I think what Fiona said about acceptance is a really poignant thing, too, about accepting a situation, because I never necessarily get the answer declaratively for something that's bothered me, but I get an answer, and it's probably the best answer that the story could come up with.
And it's usually a lot better than what my present cognitive self had come up with on its own. So, there's something about that subtextual stuff that feeds into new interpretations or revisiting of data and going, oh, wow, I hadn't seen that perspective before. I hadn't had that camera angle. And now that I have it, I can process that a little better.
I take great joy in assessing manuscripts and the story mechanics because I have answers all the time. In a way, I don't on the page when I'm writing is that I can literally look at the novel and go, that's what's wrong. It's this. It's a split build, or you haven't developed that character enough, or this doesn't tonally work with the rest of it.
But when I'm drafting it myself, it feels like I just saw this video of this guy who base jumped off a mountain with a carpet, and he flew for a while on the carpet, and then he let go his parachute, and he floated down. And I went, you did that on a carpet? Like, what, are you crazy? But it was quite a nice metaphor for writing. It's like, oh, you literally just went to the page and worked it out as you went along, and it somehow became book. One of the things about working with publish writers a lot is we probably don't give ourselves enough credit that we have books that exist in the actual world because that's not easy. There's like 900 things you can do wrong with a book at any time. So, to have one that made it through every one of those gates is pretty spectacular, too.
Bianca
I wish being at the keyboard was just as exhilarating as, like, skydiving.
Laurie
I know, right?
Bianca
It can be in certain instances where you're really hitting a good stride with the scene.
Laurie
One of the strangest things I found about creativity, and I do talk about this in Love Dad, is I hire this creativity coach at a point to get Greater City Shadows published. And I think this is genius. This is going to work, everything's going to go fine, and in the end, a whole memoir comes between those two books that I didn't even plan to write.
And so, the nature of what needs to be said or what needs to be written at any time is fascinating, too. And so, the literary self's a funny one because it's probably created first, and it's the safest one because it's performative. And you can go as this excellent work, and then somewhere authenticity, sincerity, and vulnerability enter the room.
And it might end up in fiction, or it might end up in memoir, but it's almost impossible to remain that conditional if you write for long enough because a door will open, someone or something will open up a door you'd locked, and then suddenly you're writing about something else. So, yeah, I think I, one of the strangest joys about assisting manuscripts, too, is tracking different writer’s journeys. So, one writer will stick with a manuscript and literally just doggedly get there years later. And other writers will try different things. So, I think it was Ceridwen Dovey who told me this idea of, like, you're either a fox, sniffing out your next project, or you're a hedgehog, and you just do the same thing over and over again.
I wouldn't say I'm any other meaning of the word fox, but I am a writing fox. So, I do sniff out these things and go, okay. And I think there's liberation in that, that you can just say, I write, I tell stories, and then you don't. It probably isn't liberating in the industry sense or in the commercial sense, but as a creative, it's so liberating to go, this is my next project because I'm excited about.
Bianca
Yeah. And sometimes, life simply intervenes. And.
Laurie
Yeah
Bianca
In my case, it was halt all of the fiction projects. I had two, you know, finished manuscripts under my belt, unpublished, that I was working towards. And then suddenly I, you know, experiencing a unexplained neurological illness meant for me my way to respond to that and to start seeking answers was through writing creative nonfiction. And it was. Even though the diagnosis took 13 years, it was writing that led me to eventually finding answers, along with bringing in sort of specialists and doctors to that conversation, because they were just as confounded. And so, yeah, it is. Sometimes, it feels very much out of your control what you. What you end up sniffing out.
Laurie
Yeah, absolutely.
Bianca
I'm just constantly amazed by fiction or memoir that taps into a deep theme, something that maybe is taboo, that we don't like to talk about. The one that springs to mind automatically for me at the moment is Carly James Metcalfe's memoir, Breath.
Jo
Fantastic.
Bianca
And I know we've had conversations, Jo, and she's opening up this whole dialogue about dying and death in a way that hasn't been done before. And she does it with such spirit and humour and really uncompromising. She's just not afraid to go there. So, Jo might continue on with the question that I had.
What seeps in through your. Your day-to-day as a GP in the clinic, listening to stories from people of all ages and backgrounds and, you know, all sorts of conditions, and when you go for a run, are they percolating away? And then they might sort of transform into something on the page that might not be an exact replica of, you know, a real-life story, but something that looks a bit like it or that's inspired by your work as a.
Jo
GP, I feel, in a way, it's a. A lush position to be in. I'm being paid to listen to people's stories being honest with how things are. I don't think we should. Fiction should. We're not, you know, we're not polishing gemstones. We're. We're presenting life, a slice of life as it is, and then creating a story around that. So I think, yeah, I've been incredibly fortunate to have some real little gems just dropped into conversations, which, as I say, I don't take somebody's story ever, but I'll just take a line or something that somebody says, and often that'll be the basis of, you know, some of the flash things that I write.
I just. I just jot them down, and then I come back to them and use them or don't use them or incorporate them into something. Like, if you enter some of these little story comps and things, which I really enjoy doing, it'll just be like 500 words or something. I'll write something. I think I actually really like that I'd like to play that character. Hangs around, you know, they sort of. And then there's one where I ended up incorporating that whole thing, that scene, into a book that I then wrote. So, I think people say, kill your darlings. I never kill my darlings. I have a folder called Bits, and I keep all my things. I cut out and delete when I'm, you know, doing an edit or, you know, the editor sends you something back, and there's a red slash.
So, it's like, take all those bits and put them into this other folder. And often I go back to it, and I harvest sometimes just a line or. Or a scene or even just once, I just took a character's name because it was a good name for what I was writing. It sounds like harvesting organs or something.
Bianca
So, you're. You're resurrecting your darlings?
Jo
That's exactly. I resurrect my darlings regularly. Yes. Yes.
Bianca
I'm gonna go totally against the grain and off-script here, but Fiona, I'm interested. You're part of a writing group called the Dead Darlings Society. I'm just gonna put that in your corner. Now, what are your thoughts on the darling's argument? To kill or not to kill?
Fiona
Definitely kill. I tend not to keep. I keep stories that didn't work. It's funny, I was just listening to Joe thinking, I don't think I like. I keep things, but I always go with the revised edition. I don't know if I've ever revised the story and then gone, oh, no, I need to go back to the previous revision. I feel like once I kill things, I'm quite ruthless.
Bianca
So, Laurie, you've drawn on your own childhood experiences and important relationships in your life alongside challenges of trauma and mental health, and you openly and honestly share how you strive to overcome those challenges. You write; I could list every mistake that's filed away in my mind. I could mention that these memories are stored not according to a timestamp but.
But according to their emotional intensity. That to remember the good or even adequate is harder than to remember the catastrophic. This is such a powerful reflection. Could you talk about writing from lived experience as a practice and the part it has played in opening up this incredible dialogue on the page?
Laurie
Yeah, sure. Look, it's a funny thing. I've often said that writing saved my life. And that's not a flippant comment. Like, that's an actual observation, I guess, about my emotional awareness before I started writing and after I started writing and how the world appeared to me and how threatening the world seemed. So, I think that when pushed up against a wall, it's funny that one might find a gate that wasn't there. And writing seemed to be that gate. And s,o having clearly not met the metrics of what masculinity was at the time, I was lucky enough to write about what it felt like if you're not, like, what masculinity is supposed to be like. And so, by doing that, I guess I never wanted to be, like, an emotionally lewd writer.
And if I were to literally write about my upbringing, it would not be a very fun or enjoyable read. It would just. And it would probably be a bit biased too. So, I was always interested in revisiting things from my life. And so maybe in one case, if a character lost a dear friend, there was someone there for them that time and how that would have looked. So, it's almost like going back over a film reel and inserting new characters or new scenarios that weren't there the first time around. So, I guess it's a. It's sort of a strange one, because what happens on the page, even in memoir, is more contained than what happens in life. So, one of the funny things, obviously, writing about my father and things happening after the memoir had finished and life bleeding out after that point, and really, I guess trying to move past one's past, to actually have one's past be the past, is not something I was experiencing when I was younger. I used to have sort of a new release section of memories that just kept showing up over and over in my brain from whatever emotional intensity. So, it's kind of funny now that they start to be shelved and put away and to go, oh, this is what it feels like when you're not carrying a sack of stones, like when you've got one of the stones out.
I don't think me writing about trauma is that interesting at all, but I do think there's something to be said for honestly looking at one's imperfections and flaws and realising that they're not as catastrophic as they might once have felt.
Bianca
Yeah. So, I'm just thinking in terms of those. Those. The way a memory is encoded at the time, depending on your emotional state, the intensity feels very strong at that point. But maybe that is to do with your age or your environment or the first time.
Laurie
The first time that something's occurred. So, I can tell you without. Without getting emotionally lewd. I can tell you just a random memory. I do have a photographic memory, which is both blessing and a curse.
Bianca
Same here.
Jo
Yeah.
Laurie
So, one of my first memories is actually age four. And I leave my family home, and I go up the hill about four houses down, and I walked into the backyard, and someone had a soldering iron, and it was on. And I put my hand on the soldering iron, and it just burned the inside of my hand. I was like, ah. And it's a very strong sensory memory, that idea that, like, touch was heat. And my mum wasn't with me there, so I had to go back home going, ah. There was no one to immediately reflect that I'd hurt myself. So, I think what's interesting about it is that it's almost like some of those sensory experiences at such a young age they predate intellectual processing.
So that's why they can get stuck, too, because we don't have the reference for that thing. So, it just becomes a big mass of stuck data. So, I can talk about it in the next question, but as part of my own sort of personal development, I've done quite a lot of EMDR on trauma, and that use lies in metaphor.
So, we can get into that a bit later on if you like.
Bianca
Oh, I want to talk for the next hour.
Laurie
Isn't it incredible that our brain has adaptive technology, and it's almost. It's not parallel, it's almost lateral like it takes you somewhere where you weren't and gives you a different resource or a different tool and suddenly, you're looking at different data. And that, to me, is fascinating. Or you're manipulating the data in a way that wasn't possible with the original stored memory.
Bianca
So that's fascinating too, and, and just for listeners as well. EMDR is eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing. And it's a therapy that's been around since the 80s, I believe, but it is fundamentally, it can be life-changing in terms of processing of difficult traumatic or triggering memories. Flashback and what it's doing in the way I understand it, I'm not a a specialist in this area, but it's activating, it's using a particular eye movement technique while you're talking through a distressing memory, and it's activating a part of the eye, the rapid eye movement.
Say when we're sleeping, and we're processing the day's memories, and what's happening is while we're sleeping, the brain's automatically working, taking those memories from short-term memory and parking them in long-term. But sometimes, with these memories that don't get encoded properly, or the timestamp and the emotional intensity, I think that's such a good way to look at, to explain it.
So, this method is activating that process and also helping the brain process those memories. So, yeah, incredible.
Laurie
Yeah, yeah. Almost a whole episode in itself, really.
Bianca
I think it could be just fascinating area.
Laurie
I do remember my dad, who obviously was the doctor, him saying to me, I think it comes up in Love Dad briefly. I say something about my therapy, and he's like, ah, quacks. The lot of them. And I'm like, what, all of them? And he's like, yep, total. So, I don't know if there's like a medicine oath that if you're a GP, you must look suspiciously upon the psychiatric world or the psychological world?
Jo
No, no, not at all. I think it is. It is shown to be very effective. It's interesting; I think EMDR, I might. I might have been reading something recently where it was found. Incidentally, there's a woman actually on a train, and she was. She'd had some sort of traumatic memories and was using that eye movement. And she said, oh, actually, she was actually feeling better. And I explored a little bit more. I'd have to see if I can find that article again. So, I said to my patients, you've done very well. I think it's my next newsletter. I talk about more. I'm talking about it more from a point of having what I call page fright or, you know, you've got a day off, whole day to write, and then you stare at the computer, and you just can't.
You get. Nothing comes to mind. You're completely uninspired. So, you've got that blank page syndrome. And I actually talk about the. The neocortex and the limbic system. And while it's a little bit different to that and how we form memories and how we can tap into the. Into the right bits of the brain in order to be able to write. So, I've got various. I mean, my newsletters aren't extensive medical tomes or anything. There's a little short section where I do talk about different bits of the brain and why some areas are so triggered and why they. When you've got a memory that's traumatic, that it's actually a protective thing, you know, that we're geared to be safe.
And so, we lived in a. In an environment where if you're going to be eaten by a wild animal, if you're constantly hypervigilant, you are more likely to survive. And the person said, oh, it'll be right. We'll be okay. So, the person up the tree or in the cave is probably more likely to survive.
So, I think anxiety is actually a normal way of being normal in inverted commas. And there's certainly bits of the brain that are. That activate very quickly. I need one or two traumatic events in the same vein for that to be permanently imprinted there and to actually. Actually, override that in any way is quite challenging. And EMDR does seem to help with that a lot.
Laurie
EMDR is helpful in the sense that you're sort of primed for so long at that intensity and that even recoding one or two of those, the bigger ones, does reduce that fight or flight and that survival mode. So, it's interesting.
Jo
Yeah, we'll talk about that forever.
00:42:46 Bianca
And I'm thinking of this in terms of a character point of view, too and how we might really tap into our characters psyches, whether that be in a fiction framework or a non-fiction framework. Fiona, just circling back to your collection, If You’re Happy, and your writing, it taps into this rich vein of moral philosophy that I find particularly intriguing. And that is where we, as readers and writers, identify with a character who embodies a duality neither wholly good nor wholly bad. And to be flawed, as we're discussing and discovering through this conversation, is to be human and therefore more relatable, more affecting. So, I'm wondering which story in your collection affected you the most to write?
Fiona
Yeah, that was a hard question because it's a bit like the favourite child question. Most of them affect me in some way, and a couple of them, I think I do have this bit of a penchant for people that are prickly or difficult to love, and that did. That probably wasn't the case 20 years ago.
But I think that's one of the great things about fiction is that it increases your capacity for empathy. And when you try to write from the perspective of someone who is objectively difficult, cantankerous, unusual, whatever you want to call it, I think you start to think about why are they like this and what are they feeling and what are they thinking inside.
So, I did really enjoy writing. There's a couple of stories in the collection. One called Snowfall, about the main character is an old man called Carl. And he's very lonely, and he's a bit racist, and there's many unlikable things about him. But I enjoyed writing that. And I also enjoyed writing one about another prickly character in the one called If You’re Happy about this sort of unusual middle-aged guy who finds an abandoned toddler and how he copes with that.
In most stories, there's some note of hope. I think that is maybe my way of looking at the world or the way I want to see the world. But I think really, from a practical sense, it was just one of the stories was called If You’re Happy because of the middle-aged guy who finds a baby and he sings the song If You’re Happy and You Know It, clap your hands to the baby.
And I thought, yeah, that the if really appeals to me because like we discussed earlier, I think happiness is such a vague thing and should we even be aspiring to this, this vague condition? So, I liked that If You’re Happy. That seemed to say it all, really.
Bianca
And I'm just going to follow up with another question I had a little bit I'd planned to ask a little bit further on. But I think it works brilliantly here and because we are reaching time. So, there's a lot of metaphors that do pop up in throughout the threads of your stories. It's the sinkhole, an earthquake, a volcanic eruption, a snowstorm, lots of strange weather events. And do you see the climate and natural disasters intersecting with our personal crises? There's something inherently that shifts, I think when we're able to reframe a personal event into a collective experience.
Fiona
I think I just like wild weather and natural disasters. I just think I find them appealing exciting. I know that's probably not a good thing to say. I don't wish harm on anyone, but I just find the power of our Earth quite remarkable. And so that was probably the appeal. And once I'd written a few, I started deliberately looking for incidences to base stories around, like the eruption of Mount St. Helens, you know, this Boxing Day tsunami, a tornado in Texas, those kinds of things. But interestingly, every time I tried to write a story about an event, it became about the people because it's always about the people. So, I feel like the people always eclipse the weather. So, it. It always comes down to the people. To me, the individual people, yeah.
Bianca
And when you can look at something from that macro and micro lens and it suddenly becomes so much bigger. Laurie, in your short story collection, Greater City Shadows, by the way, was that always titled? Did that come out of
Laurie
That one was pretty much. It was actually a bit of an interesting sidebar was that it was called Nova while I was writing it. And Nova is obviously a star that brightens its intensity and then dissipates down to black again. All goes back to its original state. And so that was a bit too abstract. And then they have this short story dispenser in Perth, which is the only one in the Southern Hemisphere that you go and you press and you get a short story out of it in the city. And they were looking for WA writers, and I was lucky enough to get a story in there called Greater City Shadows.
There's quite an array of metaphors that feature in your collection, particularly around the story of the suburban bushfire. And that's set in very much in Perth. Looking characters looking to the sky in the hope of witnessing a comet. It's quite a spectacular cosmic event. A man treading water in the hope of saving a friend.
What can you say about metaphor in your work?
Laurie
Yeah, it's interesting. I think it first kicked in in a story from You Belong Here, which is called The Knife. And that sort of opened up the first real exploration of metaphor. It's not a particularly subtle one in the. In the Knife, but as times moved on, I guess as I've moved more away from grief and trauma and more into hope, you know, it’s interesting what people believe in if they don't have a pre-described dogma or religion to follow and what they find to give them hope and faith.
And so, in Hannah's star party, the one where the character's looking for a comet, I think that I wanted to explore the idea of science is incredible and the idea of the natural wonder of the world and that even something different to say, looking at a waterfall that keeps flowing. They have these moments where something just sparkles or shines. And it's kind of poignant that Tristan doesn't see the comet in that one, but he so wants to see the comet and wants to believe. I was writing new stories for the collection, and I said to my oldest son, give me a title. And he goes, okay, the Heart and the Moose. And I went, really? That's the title anyway. Yeah. And I went, okay, I guess I'm going to write that story. And so, the metaphors that came out of that were really just a gift from his imagination that he came up with a really cool title for a story. There's this notion of loss and grief is bad on a memory sense.
Like, this was something bad that happened to me. And I never come out of a story with that same level of simplicity about it. Like I almost. It's sort of closer to this idea that to be mad at these things is like being mad at the rain because it's going to rain sometimes. And so, writing opens up this other understanding of it. Not so much this was bad, but this was what happened, or this is what this was like. And once we say this is what this is like, we let other people into the space, and they say, I know what that's like. I know what that water feels like.
It felt like that for me, too. So, one of the stranger things, I guess, about writing something like Greater City Shadows is that certain stories, yeah, they resonate with people, and they'll let me know. And sometimes, it's the surprising ones that do. So, it's not necessarily the ones that I thought were the best executed.
They usually. And in fact, one of the stories, The Present, was really just semi-autobiographical. And that's what started the Love Dad journey was someone saying to me, well, that's a really interesting story. And I went, that can't be the interesting story because that was literally my day yesterday, looking after the kids.
So, sometimes, you find inspiration in the strangest places.
Bianca
Yeah, I'm definitely understanding more about what you were saying. Now, this is on. Off. Off-screen, but on a different conversation thread we were having over email when we first started talking about having conversation. And, you know, you're saying how you're fascinated about one's intellectual and emotional processing being regulated by the creative impulse. You've said earlier how what we write can ripple out into our lives, but I think it also has the opposite effect, where what's happening in our life can then affect and ripple inwards ways of relating to one another, using metaphor as a frame of representation.
Laurie
Yeah, I think you're right. And even this idea of categorisation within the work, too. So, one of the strangest things, I mean, I think You Belong Here has its own meaning, but it was also literally, there's where these stories go is over here. So, I almost had another book called They Belong There.
So, it was like, literally, the stuff of memory is probably at its most catastrophic when it's not organised when it doesn't have its own filing system, when it is stored according to emotional intensity. So, I think what's really interesting is that I've never had someone who was, like, close enough to what I'm talking about, validate or that was literally authentically true.
But we're not dealing with literal, authentic truths. We're dealing with emotional truths. And so, when you hit that point, that's like the one metric that matters is, have you found the metaphor that best catches the emotional truth of that? I think I could spend my life doing that. And that's why I like short stories, too, is because if it works, then the rules don't apply as much as they might have in another format.
If you pull it off, then that story did what it was supposed to do. And because it's short, you can tell a story backwards, or you can write it as a list, or you can do all these things. And I love that because so often, if I had a longer project, I wouldn't have found the right metaphors for it. But in the short form, I can go, I know exactly where that goes and how that fits.
Bianca
Jo and Fiona, you're welcome to pitch in as well if you have sort of thoughts on this. But I guess in the clinic when you're speaking to a patient and they're maybe using. They don't have the words for the medical terminology for an illness or a symptom, are they? They're using things like similes and metaphors to explain what's going on from their lived experience.
Is that something that you think about in terms of the language used?
Fiona
I think more about funny things that patients have said to me because they get the medical language wrong. I must use that in a story now that I'm remembering it. But just like, you know, I had beautiful old lady come in once and go, I'm just here to get the results of my autopsy. And she'd had a colonoscopy. And yeah, a little kid came in and said, I've got a problem with my tentacle testicle. Just all those beautiful things that people say that are just so delightful. But I don't really remember patients using metaphor. Joe might have some stories.
Jo
Gosh. Sometimes, when you try and get people to play to, describe concepts that are like particularly mental health concepts or pain. Pain's a really difficult thing to describe. So sometimes we'll try and prompt them a little bit. So, you know, when you get stung by something, is it that sort of sharp pain, or is it like you're having the point of a needle in your thing, or is it more like a dull.
Jo
Like a bruise? I'll say that sort of thing. People really have quite difficulty explaining things about their bodies and their. And I think maybe it's a cultural thing, too. We're not as used to going into our bodies and explaining how things are. And we do see it very clinically. So sometimes it's hard to have. You know, if somebody doesn't have no idea about anatomy or where bits and pieces are. I think my kidneys hurt. Then they point to something that's completely not where their kidneys are. I had one fellow, and he had. He developed a bipolar disorder and quite unusually presented, very manic initially. And that was quite a few years ago.
And he ended up. He was admitted to the local psychiatric private hospital here. And he was tried on one of these newer antipsychotic medications, which are meant to have less side effects, but develop that very rare heart of dyskinesia, which is a complex term for these horrible sort of movements where you just can't. You're constantly moving. It's really. Was really awful. And, of course, having this background of these medicines are really bad, and they do terrible things to you. It really ruined his life. And I ended up sending to him to a neurologist who I liked. And she sent him on to someone who did Parkinson's medicine.
They implanted one of those, they put a deep brain stimulator into his brain, and he was able to then regulate the movements. Actually, gave him his life back. And he came back, he just didn't have the words to describe it, and he didn't. So, I said to him, why don't you just write it down?
And a few months later, he brought in, he said, can I email you something? And he emailed me this 54,000-word thing about his story about psych, his psychiatric pictures. And the pictures were like little metaphors.
Bianca
What I have certainly worked on through my experience of 13 years ago when I was just going, what, what are these episodes, these blips, you know, that I've been having that I don't understand, I was in denial about them. And when they resurged hugely ten years later at the start of the pandemic, and it was the first time that my partner saw me having one, and it lasted 45 minutes, and he just said, it was like you weren't there. It was like you had just left the room. But I didn't have the words for that. All I knew was that I had an immense feeling of Deja Vu in the lead-up to it. And I started just making a list of all the possible similes. You know, I, I described it as.
It's like when you're in an airplane and it loses altitude. Suddenly, I started really exploring, going into writing about from the body to present that to my GP, who had dismissed this completely as something that was just, oh, you know, we think you're making it up, or we think it's panic attacks. And it actually turned out to be what's known as functional neurological disorder. And so that was my pathway into finding out what a diagnosis was, was the way in was through writing.
So, I'll go to my last question. Jo, you mentioned before your monthly newsletter it's called Running Writing. Just a small plug where you share pearls of wisdom about running, writing and health. And you're also rather fond of marathon, or 2 or 60 in your case. I'd love to for you to share your reflections on running and writing and how combined they produce an effect greater than the sum of their parts, and I guess, the synergy of those two things together.
Jo
Yeah, I mean, running has been, has been a big part of my life for a long time. So, I did complete my 60th marathon at the end of last year, and it's something I, I think when you talk about music before, there's something about when you run, you just, you, you do have to be completely.
You're in your body, and you, you focus on your breathing and you, you get a rhythm if you, you find you. What I call your happy pace. And I think that can be. It's fantastic for your mental health. And I think I've certainly worked through a lot of things through running and, and you have that prolonged period of time where you're in your head.
And I think we have so little time. There's always so much noise in our heads and so many demands on our time. I think running does pull you out of that. And I think running is very like writing. And I do think when you're writing a novel, I say to people, I've actually written a piece in my. I think it's my October newsletter. Every now and then, I write pieces and put them ahead about writing as an extreme sport. And I think we really should treat it that way. They're like your sprints and things when you're training to run and then when you're doing a. A longer run, there's going to be long gaps. So, you think, oh my gosh, you get to about 30km, you just want to stop running. And I think writing is the same. We all have these slumps. We think, oh, I've written crap, and why am I doing this, and this is never going to get published, or all those sort of thoughts that we have.
And I think we just. When we have other writers around saying, come on, you can do. You've written, so you've gotten, you know, you've done really well here, and you write really beautifully, and we just need people sometimes around us. And I think running so like that, it's very much. It's. Even though it's a solitary activity, having people around you, I think looking after your diet reasonably well; I think it needs to include a bit of wine and a bit of chocolate and those things.
But just looking after yourself and honouring your body, I think, really helps. I think helps your creativity. It loosens up a little bit. It seems almost like all that movement just allows it to work more effectively. So, I think they're both very similar activities, and I think one can complement the other one and, and I think particularly if you have mental health issues, it's, it's extraordinary how much you can work through when you're forced to spend, you know, four hours or so alone in your head.
Bianca
Are you listening to music?
Jo
Never I'm always just taking one of the few times where I just let, I do, sometimes I do think I call it free running, where I'm not training for anything and I'm not doing a particular pace or anything. And I just. You become aware of the birds, and you become aware of of the environment.
Like I run down near the river and the temperature where it's hot or whether it's cold or whether you're really sweating and you feel the moisture on your skin if you are. And in the morning, there's this, this morning when it's silent, and then there's this sudden cacophony of bird sounds. It's really. And I wouldn't want to. A lot of people do listen to music and find it helpful, but for me, it's just, I just need to be in my head sometimes. There are very few other times when I am just in my head.
Bianca
So, you're not churning over the plot for your next project?
Jo
That's a different sort of run. So, I think I wrote, there's a few newsletters ago, talked about there's being runs and doing runs. So sometimes in the morning, I'll, if I'm in a tricky bit in a novel and I'm trying to work through a humble something that'll actually go through. But that's a quite a. It's a thoughtful, mindful kind of thing. It's not, oh my God, oh my God, what am I going to write next? It actually, it just seems. I just let things flow through and then there's the being runs which I just described. We just become aware of the sounds and the feeling this, you know, air on your skin and things.
So, there's different types of runs and you don't know which one you're necessarily going to do. Sometimes you plan it, and it becomes one or the other.
Bianca
Yeah, that mindfulness that's coming out as well, I, I, I'm going to be more aware of that. I think I should bring along a pen and paper when I'm on the rowing machine at gym because that's when I get my brainwave.
Jo
It is when you're moving. I think moving your body does. I think that's quite important for creativity and I think it's very easy, particularly when you're writing. You're sitting a lot, and I do think sometimes that can just block things a bit. I think either walking or getting outside or doing something which gets your heart rate up a little bit is, is quite important.
And when I was in that Newcastle residency, we stayed sort of about two and a half kilometres, I think. Two, two kilometres, Sorry. From Lighthouse House, I'd do a run in the morning and then I'd come home, have something, some breakfast and probably read a bit. And then I'd walk up to the light. It was like the perfect balance to the day, really. Something physical in the morning. Once I, you know, it was winter, I actually had a dunk in the ocean, which I only did once because it's pretty cold. And then just letting yourself get lost in that creativity was like perfect week, really.
Bianca
Yeah, sounds like it. And I think that is a perfect note to leave things on because I've had so much fun. I've really, really enjoyed chatting to each of you. So, Laurie Steed, Joe Skinner, Fiona Robertson, thank you so much from the bottom of my heart, really, for joining me today. It's been an absolute delight.
For those tuning in, I encourage you as soon as you finish listening to this episode. It's an epic one. Check out the show notes. I'll link each of my guest’s websites and social media pages and of course where you can purchase their books. And if you're in Brisbane in September or October 2024, do come along to Jo's book launch events.
Jo
Yes, do.
Bianca
So, if you like this episode, leave us a review and share it far and wide. Science Write Now is dedicated to accessibility, connectivity, inspiration and collaboration across disciplines. I think you'll see that very much from our conversation today. Our content is free to access, and we want to keep it that way. So, if you're keen to be part of this growing community of creative writing inspired by science, please hit subscribe and we'll be back with another episode soon and more cognitive conversations to come. And that's a wrap.
Jo
Awesome.
Laurie
Thanks, Bianca. That was awesome.
Bianca
Thank you. Science Write Now is sponsored by the Australia Council for the Arts, hosted by Amanda Niehaus and Jessica White. Thanks so much for listening.