Lately I’ve been thinking about the writing I did in primary school. The story I wrote about a man and a boy ‘fending’ for themselves. What a big word, for a grade five, or a grade four, perhaps a grade six. A teacher, I can’t remember her name, saying we should try to get it published. Walking down the corridor, near the grade-five macrame.
Where are those words? Gathering damp and webs in my mum’s garage?
I think I have gone too far away from my childhood. It was only when I set part of my novel on a road from my teens that it started to work. I needed the physical landscape to find the emotional one. I needed the war memorial tower to find the view of the city. And then I ran a river close by. This is fiction, after all.
