_No Previous Experience_; Cameron, Elspeth
Literature is life at its most vulnerable, intense, and achingly mundane. That’s how it sneaks up on you.
A professor once told me reading a book is as risky as attending a lecture; you never know it’s dangerous until you know too much. When you learn something, you can’t turn back. You can’t pretend you’re unaware. You’ve changed before you realize change happened at all. A word. A sentence. A few pages.
How could I have expected that a lecture -- more specifically, a lecturer –- would transform my understanding of love and life, as well as propel and guide me through the treacherous world of academia? How could I have known that a woman almost three times my age would inspire strength, hope, and conviction?
My transformation began during an 8:00 a.m. class, in the winter of my second year at university. A group of cold, apathetic students filed into a large classroom and slumped in their chairs, more interested in their coffees than the upcoming lecture. I was one of these students. I remember opening my notebook half-heartedly and scrawling the course code in the lined margin: "ENGL 2P92: Canadian Literature After 1920. Professor: Dr. Elspeth Cameron."
She jolted us awake immediately, responding to a question by a student unsure of which textbook to use. Her articulate yet slightly gravelly voice filled the room. “You mean you haven’t read this poem?” she inquired incredulously, holding up the now-open book. “It’s the first day of class, isn’t it? Why would you come unprepared?” Sixty sleepy-eyed students stared at her, mouths agape, coffees in mid-air. "Who was this woman?" they seemed to ask.
It was my first experience studying “CanLit” since high school, and I found myself once again falling in love with some of Canada's great writers. I delved into the assigned reading with gusto, yet, what I didn’t know was the piece of literature that would most affect me had been written by the quietly confident woman at the front of the room.
A fellow student informed me about Prof. Cameron’s memoir, No Previous Experience, near the end of term, after she had heard a rumour that Prof. Cameron was lesbian. This classmate told me she had apparently come out in her book, and had recently left her husband for another woman. Intrigued, I took down the title, and was intent on reading it when I had the time.
I began No Previous Experience as soon as classes ended that school year. After a mere two pages, I was in "too deep" to turn back. So I risked it. What I learned was she was a risk-taker, too. “It can happen on a hike,” she begins, mysteriously,
"You round a woody corner and suddenly you’re in the clear on the brink of
a pale limestone bluff, your stomach clenched, breath held, as you stare
straight down into the lush damp valley you never suspected was there.
Or you pass through the quiet streets of a nondescript town and a double
rainbow arches right in front of you, so close you can see the iridescent
droplets suspended mid-air, and you are speechless with wonder."
"...It can happen when you aren’t paying attention. You can miss the whole
thing. You can be blinded by blizzards, forget the password, pass by the cliff or plunge to disaster over its edge... It can happen anytime, anywhere."
I devoured the book in two days. It was not entirely what I expected, in that it was not a detailed, linear account that culminated in the exposure of her sexual orientation; instead, the book follows her re-evaluation of her sexuality in mid-life, with carefully chosen flashbacks to her youth. It begins at a conference in Edinburgh, where she encounters and develops a friendship with a fellow academic. Over the next 200 pages, Prof. Cameron boldly and openly describes the unique, intense bond of their friendship as it evolves into a lesbian relationship. Interspersed in this love story are her reflections on “fabricating the illusion” of her marriage, the terror of abuse and divorce, the importance of women in academia, as well as an exploration of motherhood, feminism, nature, sex, and personal growth. It is a narrative that not only investigates connectivity and self-discovery, but also the value of the unexpected and the possible.
I remember looking up after reading the final page. My couch was covered in wet tissues, crinkled wrappers, and empty mugs. The room itself looked the same, as did the world outside the windows, but something was different. I felt different. I felt a strange bond with this woman, a connection that wasn’t shaped by common experience, age, or even location. It was a bond over the realization of my own potential as a human being. Suddenly, I understood in my life I would probably make tremendous mistakes, but I would learn from them and survive. I realized there were parts of myself that would remain unexplored until a particular moment in time, or a particular person awakened them. At this moment, there was a connection not only to the author, but to other women in my life. What I knew as theoretical had turned into something real. It seemed I had always known women who had experienced emotional abuse and divorce. There were women I knew who had been sexually abused as children, beaten and controlled by their partners. I also knew women who had given up children, questioned their sexuality, struggled in their careers, and suffered with broken hearts. While I did not need Prof. Cameron’s memoir to validate experiences of other women, it somehow gave these individuals a stronger voice. Together, her story and the combined stories of the women I knew, fused together and forced me to value and consider my own life. Here was an epiphany: if they could move on and learn from the hardships they had endured, I could too. This pushed me to think: what was I capable of? What strength did I have? How would I live my life?
My first reading of No Previous Experience helped me reconsider what I knew as love. While my parents had always inspired me with their beautiful, loving partnership, I was in a relationship that was on the brink of disaster. For months, I struggled to make it work, to change myself, and hope that my partner would change too. Soon after reading the memoir, I found the strength to end the strife and move on, despite the humiliation I felt in ending it. What my professor said in a similar situation came to mind: she had done her best. I had done my best, too, but realized something more fulfilling might be found. I turned to the memoir for inspiration and strength, and found comfort in new beginnings. Then, I could see over the edge of the cliff she described, and felt my heart pound. When she reflected on Paul’s abuse, my stomach knotted in anger and my hair practically stood on end. When she caved and went back to him -– over and over -– I understood, but was frustrated on her behalf. When Janice came to her and told her they could be together, I felt her surreal relief and contentment.
Over several terms, I came to know Prof. Cameron better after a few more of her classes. She became a mentor, and helped me run the gauntlet of undergraduate work. She praised my writing while at the same time bluntly articulating what was wrong with it and how to correct it. She encouraged me to do research at the National Archives in Ottawa, and was pleased when I returned overwhelmed with what I had discovered. When she found out I was interested in becoming a Teaching Assistant, she was the first to recommend me, and the first to reprimand the Chair of the department when he said I was “too junior.” I worked as a TA in her classes, and she allowed me to prepare a lecture. “Get used to being nervous, it doesn’t go away,” she declared, before I began. She was an encouraging reference included in all of my graduate applications. “Be sure to say exactly what you want,” she advised, “Don’t be afraid to be aggressive. It’s competitive out there, and you need to learn to stand up for yourself.” I tried to heed her advice. Eventually, when I received word I had been accepted to a graduate studies program, she emailed me, delighted. “I’m proud of you,” she wrote.
For other people, No Previous Experience may be a resource for sexual rediscovery, but to me it is a story of being and becoming, of learning as an incandescent process. It is an examination of boundaries and of love and the human experience. Most of all, it is about making mistakes and learning to learn from them. Many women will not have the chance to know the authors who inspire them; I feel lucky to have known, even for a limited time, the woman behind the words.
These stories -- whether they are from the pages of a book, from our relatives and friends or from the woman next to us on the bus -- connect us in our struggles and successes and allow us to draw courage from the world at large. We are never alone, whether we find courage from the pages of a book by a risk-taking author, or we seek out narratives of our grandmothers, mothers, sisters, aunts, other relatives, teachers, and friends. In my experience, the connections we make and lessons we learn as a result are always worth the risk.
Elspeth Cameron
No Previous Experience
Penguin Books
1998
Lyndsay Wilson hails from Beamsville, Ontario. She completed an undergraduate degree at Brock University and master's degree at the University of Ottawa. She currently works in educational publishing and lives with her lovely partner, Clark, in Toronto, Ontario.
Showing posts with label memoirs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label memoirs. Show all posts
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Monday, May 19, 2008
Reading Across the Ocean -- A Rite of Passage -- Isabel Huggan
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter; de Beauvoir, Simone
In the autumn of 1966, just as I was turning 23, I sailed for Britain on the Cunard Franconia. I’d spent the year after university working as a copyeditor for the Macmillan Company in Toronto and, although my pay was only $75 per week, I’d saved enough to cross the Atlantic. In those days the cheapest fare, whether by air or sea, was around $200: I reckoned that seven days of fun was a better deal than ten hours cooped up in a plane, and booked passage from Montreal to Southampton. On the ship there were several Rhodes Scholars on their way to Oxford: the atmosphere, in the bar or on the dance floor, was giddy, exciting and full of promise, for every one of these confident young men seemed on his way to be somebody. By contrast, I didn’t have a clear goal other than leaving my good-girl girlhood behind.
My father had seen me off in Montreal – my mother was recovering from heart surgery and had stayed back with my sister. On my departure, he presented me with a long-stemmed red rose, which I then threw back to him, rather dramatically, just as the ship pulled free of its moorings. In “Knowing People”, the final story of You Never Know (Knopf, 1993), I made use of this moment in fiction:
"My father had given me a carnation corsage to wear, and I threw it down to him as the ship began to move, in what I imagined was a symbolic gesture. I wanted no connection with my parents. I was off to Europe to free myself at last from their embrace. He caught it and waved it at me, and then began pinning it on my mother’s jacket. She was weeping furiously, as if she knew what was going on in my mind."
During that year at Macmillan’s, I had been befriended by an older woman named Billie who was the first – and for that the most memorable – feminist I’d ever met. Divorced, and bringing up her son alone, Billie was smart, tough and utterly unsentimental in her evaluation of people and ideas. Knowing I had aspirations to be a writer, she gave me a photocopy of Tillie Olsen’s essay “Silences” that had appeared in Harper’s, and bid me think deeply about what I intended to do. Later, she lent me her copy of The Second Sex, which we discussed at length with the other copy editors during tea breaks and, before I left, she suggested the first volume of Simone de Beauvoir’s autobiography, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, to read on the voyage.
“You’ll see yourself in these pages,” she said.
Reading while stretched out in a deck chair, sipping hot Bovril delivered by a steward, I soon discerned that similarities between Simone’s life and mine were not immediately obvious – in fact, the details could not have been more different. For a start, she was born Roman Catholic in Paris in 1908 just three years before my mother was born Protestant on a farm near Lake Huron: the crucial distinctions multiplied as the pages turned, but I began to understand why Billie had wanted me to read the book.
Here was a sensibility to admire! Here was a writer unafraid to examine her life with a fierce and meticulous honesty! Indeed, here was a woman I could learn from and emulate: Simone, who as a child had dutifully obeyed her bourgeois parents and conformed to their religious and social practices, eventually found the courage to follow her own heart and mind. During her early twenties, she blossomed into an extraordinary, unconventional individual – and a prolific writer – seeking only to be true to herself.
Could one want anything less for oneself? This was exactly the kind of person – the kind of writer – I wanted to be: fearless, determined, and fastidious about uncovering and expressing the truth, in life and in art.
I read her Memoirs passionately. Her account of adolescence described how she had felt confined in a cage of expectations, from which it was necessary to escape in order to survive. Amusingly, I believed that I too was liberating myself from middle-class constraints – on a luxury ocean liner (albeit in steerage). I grasped the comic irony even then, but it did not distress me, for Simone herself took years to loosen her family ties, and was still living at home – with a younger sister who was a willing accomplice to adventures into the seamier side of Paris – at an age when I’d long been independent. For years she straddled two worlds, but as she matured, her reading of philosophy (as well as contemporary novelists like Gide, Fournier, Cocteau) pushed her over into the realm of self-determination where she was free.
As soon as I settled in London that fall, I acquired Force of Circumstance, the second volume of her autobiography, which traces Simone’s unusual romantic involvement with existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and her own growth as a writer and intellectual. This book was even more compelling and inspiring than the earlier one, and led me to buy two of her novels, She Came to Stay and The Mandarins. I was initially surprised by what I read, for it seemed that events in her fiction exactly matched events in her memoir: she’d clearly absorbed Jean-Paul’s advice to allow her self to invade her art and to use her own experience, barely disguised, as material. Somehow, this discovery was hugely freeing, as if what Simone had done validated and legitimized the act of transforming one’s own life into fiction, and I saw other writers I was reading then – Drabble, Lessing – in this new light.
I think it is no accident that within a decade I had begun writing a series of stories about a child who felt herself to be unfairly caged by life in a small Ontario town in the 1950s (The Elizabeth Stories, Oberon Press, 1984). In the Gallimard edition (1991), the title is L’Échappée Belle, “the perfect escape”: the French translator understood the heart of the book. Here are a few lines from “Jack of Hearts”, the third story:
By all odds, I should have been dragged down by the life I led as a child in Garten. I should still be there, or somewhere like it, forced under by my upbringing and all the expectations around me. But luck was with me, and small pockets of defiance multiplied beneath my surface, keeping me afloat, preparing me for that final escape.
Reading her in 1966, I was struck by how scrupulous Simone was in her self-examination, exposing inconsistencies, jealousies and weaknesses as well as describing, without false modesty, her great intelligence and ego. I admired her for that, and for openly admitting personal confusion regarding various matters. For example, in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, she told of how she detested the idea of matrimony but at the same time wanted to marry her cousin Jacques; she could hold two opposing thoughts in her mind at once, as I so often did – wanting to stay single, at the same time as longing to love and be loved. Somehow, by writing so honestly, she allowed readers to forgive their own contradictions.
There must be thousands of women like me who read Simone de Beauvoir at a similarly impressionable age, who came to the same conclusions and made the same commitments: we would free ourselves, we would be ourselves. We would live by our ideals. Unlike some of the influential feminist texts of that period, Memoirs was not intentionally “instructive” but simply a record of a life: still, it stayed in my knapsack as a kind of Bible, as if Simone would show me the path.
In the two decades since her death in 1986, facts have gradually emerged about Simone’s adult life (most recently, in Tête-à-tête, the fine study of Beauvoir and Sartre by Hazel Rowley), giving her old admirers a rude shock: indeed, she may not have been as devoted to the truth as we believed. Her autobiographical works presented a certain “face” by leaving out details that would have altered the picture considerably, and her apparent self-criticism was only a literary ruse. Still, no matter what we learn now, what she wrote then, and how we read it, changed a generation of women in a manner not only benign but beneficial. We admired her because she dared to be herself: why then couldn’t we?
Re-reading Memoirs today, my reactions are overlaid with images of Simone gained through her later work and letters, and through biographies which have cast a harsher light on her life than she did, for all her seeming frankness. But, as Hazel Rowley writes in her introduction to the new paperback edition of the Memoirs, “This is the fifty-year-old author smiling at her youthful dreams, but in fact she never lost them and she was right not to. It is impossible to read about Simone de Beauvoir’s life without thinking about your own.”
Just as wise Billie had said.
My life turned out not at all like Simone’s: by 27, although I’d claimed at 23 I’d never marry, I was married, and by 34 I had a child. I have led a conventional life and it would be difficult to find any similarities, except one: I too have written from my own experience – “using what is given” as Bronwen Wallace said about using her own life as material – in part, I believe, because Simone’s work gave me that early “permission”. My last book, Belonging (Knopf 2003) combining memoir with short stories, aimed to make clear the intimate relationship between experience and fiction, sisters in pursuit of the truth.
I have lived in France for nearly nine years, on the edge of mountains where Simone hiked on holidays as a young woman, and not far from the Limousin region where she spent her childhood summers. It is only three hours by train to Paris, the city where she spent her life and where she died, but it has never occurred to me to make pilgrimages to see where she lived (although one cannot sit in a café with a notebook without thinking of her). Still, she stays with me as a kind of guide, and for more than 25 years, wherever I’ve set up a desk, above it I have hung a present from my husband: a framed enlargement of a quote from an interview in which she was asked for advice for a young writer:
"Je lui dirais de lire, d’étudier, d’apprendre, de réfléchir. Je lui dirais, écrivez : c’est un grand bonheur d’écrire malgré toutes les difficultés. Et puis occupez-vous du monde autour de vous, essayez de vous engager dedans."
**
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
Simone de Beauvoir
First published in its English translation in 1959
First Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition published in 2005
**
Isabel Huggan, author of The Elizabeth Stories, You Never Know, and Belonging: Home Away From Home, spent the first 43 years of her life in Ontario, and has lived abroad for the last 20. She crosses the Atlantic twice every year to return “home” to Canada, and then to go back “home” to France. She has been a mentor in the Humber School for Writers Correspondence Program for the past decade, and also gives writing workshops in France and Switzerland.
In the autumn of 1966, just as I was turning 23, I sailed for Britain on the Cunard Franconia. I’d spent the year after university working as a copyeditor for the Macmillan Company in Toronto and, although my pay was only $75 per week, I’d saved enough to cross the Atlantic. In those days the cheapest fare, whether by air or sea, was around $200: I reckoned that seven days of fun was a better deal than ten hours cooped up in a plane, and booked passage from Montreal to Southampton. On the ship there were several Rhodes Scholars on their way to Oxford: the atmosphere, in the bar or on the dance floor, was giddy, exciting and full of promise, for every one of these confident young men seemed on his way to be somebody. By contrast, I didn’t have a clear goal other than leaving my good-girl girlhood behind.
My father had seen me off in Montreal – my mother was recovering from heart surgery and had stayed back with my sister. On my departure, he presented me with a long-stemmed red rose, which I then threw back to him, rather dramatically, just as the ship pulled free of its moorings. In “Knowing People”, the final story of You Never Know (Knopf, 1993), I made use of this moment in fiction:
"My father had given me a carnation corsage to wear, and I threw it down to him as the ship began to move, in what I imagined was a symbolic gesture. I wanted no connection with my parents. I was off to Europe to free myself at last from their embrace. He caught it and waved it at me, and then began pinning it on my mother’s jacket. She was weeping furiously, as if she knew what was going on in my mind."
During that year at Macmillan’s, I had been befriended by an older woman named Billie who was the first – and for that the most memorable – feminist I’d ever met. Divorced, and bringing up her son alone, Billie was smart, tough and utterly unsentimental in her evaluation of people and ideas. Knowing I had aspirations to be a writer, she gave me a photocopy of Tillie Olsen’s essay “Silences” that had appeared in Harper’s, and bid me think deeply about what I intended to do. Later, she lent me her copy of The Second Sex, which we discussed at length with the other copy editors during tea breaks and, before I left, she suggested the first volume of Simone de Beauvoir’s autobiography, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, to read on the voyage.
“You’ll see yourself in these pages,” she said.
Reading while stretched out in a deck chair, sipping hot Bovril delivered by a steward, I soon discerned that similarities between Simone’s life and mine were not immediately obvious – in fact, the details could not have been more different. For a start, she was born Roman Catholic in Paris in 1908 just three years before my mother was born Protestant on a farm near Lake Huron: the crucial distinctions multiplied as the pages turned, but I began to understand why Billie had wanted me to read the book.
Here was a sensibility to admire! Here was a writer unafraid to examine her life with a fierce and meticulous honesty! Indeed, here was a woman I could learn from and emulate: Simone, who as a child had dutifully obeyed her bourgeois parents and conformed to their religious and social practices, eventually found the courage to follow her own heart and mind. During her early twenties, she blossomed into an extraordinary, unconventional individual – and a prolific writer – seeking only to be true to herself.
Could one want anything less for oneself? This was exactly the kind of person – the kind of writer – I wanted to be: fearless, determined, and fastidious about uncovering and expressing the truth, in life and in art.
I read her Memoirs passionately. Her account of adolescence described how she had felt confined in a cage of expectations, from which it was necessary to escape in order to survive. Amusingly, I believed that I too was liberating myself from middle-class constraints – on a luxury ocean liner (albeit in steerage). I grasped the comic irony even then, but it did not distress me, for Simone herself took years to loosen her family ties, and was still living at home – with a younger sister who was a willing accomplice to adventures into the seamier side of Paris – at an age when I’d long been independent. For years she straddled two worlds, but as she matured, her reading of philosophy (as well as contemporary novelists like Gide, Fournier, Cocteau) pushed her over into the realm of self-determination where she was free.
As soon as I settled in London that fall, I acquired Force of Circumstance, the second volume of her autobiography, which traces Simone’s unusual romantic involvement with existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and her own growth as a writer and intellectual. This book was even more compelling and inspiring than the earlier one, and led me to buy two of her novels, She Came to Stay and The Mandarins. I was initially surprised by what I read, for it seemed that events in her fiction exactly matched events in her memoir: she’d clearly absorbed Jean-Paul’s advice to allow her self to invade her art and to use her own experience, barely disguised, as material. Somehow, this discovery was hugely freeing, as if what Simone had done validated and legitimized the act of transforming one’s own life into fiction, and I saw other writers I was reading then – Drabble, Lessing – in this new light.
I think it is no accident that within a decade I had begun writing a series of stories about a child who felt herself to be unfairly caged by life in a small Ontario town in the 1950s (The Elizabeth Stories, Oberon Press, 1984). In the Gallimard edition (1991), the title is L’Échappée Belle, “the perfect escape”: the French translator understood the heart of the book. Here are a few lines from “Jack of Hearts”, the third story:
By all odds, I should have been dragged down by the life I led as a child in Garten. I should still be there, or somewhere like it, forced under by my upbringing and all the expectations around me. But luck was with me, and small pockets of defiance multiplied beneath my surface, keeping me afloat, preparing me for that final escape.
Reading her in 1966, I was struck by how scrupulous Simone was in her self-examination, exposing inconsistencies, jealousies and weaknesses as well as describing, without false modesty, her great intelligence and ego. I admired her for that, and for openly admitting personal confusion regarding various matters. For example, in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, she told of how she detested the idea of matrimony but at the same time wanted to marry her cousin Jacques; she could hold two opposing thoughts in her mind at once, as I so often did – wanting to stay single, at the same time as longing to love and be loved. Somehow, by writing so honestly, she allowed readers to forgive their own contradictions.
There must be thousands of women like me who read Simone de Beauvoir at a similarly impressionable age, who came to the same conclusions and made the same commitments: we would free ourselves, we would be ourselves. We would live by our ideals. Unlike some of the influential feminist texts of that period, Memoirs was not intentionally “instructive” but simply a record of a life: still, it stayed in my knapsack as a kind of Bible, as if Simone would show me the path.
In the two decades since her death in 1986, facts have gradually emerged about Simone’s adult life (most recently, in Tête-à-tête, the fine study of Beauvoir and Sartre by Hazel Rowley), giving her old admirers a rude shock: indeed, she may not have been as devoted to the truth as we believed. Her autobiographical works presented a certain “face” by leaving out details that would have altered the picture considerably, and her apparent self-criticism was only a literary ruse. Still, no matter what we learn now, what she wrote then, and how we read it, changed a generation of women in a manner not only benign but beneficial. We admired her because she dared to be herself: why then couldn’t we?
Re-reading Memoirs today, my reactions are overlaid with images of Simone gained through her later work and letters, and through biographies which have cast a harsher light on her life than she did, for all her seeming frankness. But, as Hazel Rowley writes in her introduction to the new paperback edition of the Memoirs, “This is the fifty-year-old author smiling at her youthful dreams, but in fact she never lost them and she was right not to. It is impossible to read about Simone de Beauvoir’s life without thinking about your own.”
Just as wise Billie had said.
My life turned out not at all like Simone’s: by 27, although I’d claimed at 23 I’d never marry, I was married, and by 34 I had a child. I have led a conventional life and it would be difficult to find any similarities, except one: I too have written from my own experience – “using what is given” as Bronwen Wallace said about using her own life as material – in part, I believe, because Simone’s work gave me that early “permission”. My last book, Belonging (Knopf 2003) combining memoir with short stories, aimed to make clear the intimate relationship between experience and fiction, sisters in pursuit of the truth.
I have lived in France for nearly nine years, on the edge of mountains where Simone hiked on holidays as a young woman, and not far from the Limousin region where she spent her childhood summers. It is only three hours by train to Paris, the city where she spent her life and where she died, but it has never occurred to me to make pilgrimages to see where she lived (although one cannot sit in a café with a notebook without thinking of her). Still, she stays with me as a kind of guide, and for more than 25 years, wherever I’ve set up a desk, above it I have hung a present from my husband: a framed enlargement of a quote from an interview in which she was asked for advice for a young writer:
"Je lui dirais de lire, d’étudier, d’apprendre, de réfléchir. Je lui dirais, écrivez : c’est un grand bonheur d’écrire malgré toutes les difficultés. Et puis occupez-vous du monde autour de vous, essayez de vous engager dedans."
**
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
Simone de Beauvoir
First published in its English translation in 1959
First Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition published in 2005
**
Isabel Huggan, author of The Elizabeth Stories, You Never Know, and Belonging: Home Away From Home, spent the first 43 years of her life in Ontario, and has lived abroad for the last 20. She crosses the Atlantic twice every year to return “home” to Canada, and then to go back “home” to France. She has been a mentor in the Humber School for Writers Correspondence Program for the past decade, and also gives writing workshops in France and Switzerland.
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