Tag Archives: Memoir

Breakfast

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Here in The Netherlands Kookboekenweek (Cookery Books Week) has just ended. A recent annual event, it’s designed to promote cookery books. Bookshops and libraries organise workshops, lectures, and tasting events. Of course, it’s all to encourage people to buy books as presents for December: St Nicolaas and Kerstmis.


Professionals shortlisted six books (Vietnamese, Japanese, Indian, Italian (2), and baking skills). They’ve chosen Bloem Suiker Boter, by Nicola Lamb, translated into Dutch. I’m going with Breakfast, a poem celebrating poetry and friendship.

Breakfast

Bridie would be in the kitchen,
barking with Finn and Tara
in a metal cage under the table.
I’m in your backroom, sheepskin
on the seat of the wooden chair,
just gone 9 o’clock this Tuesday.

You’ve made the scrambled eggs
exactly as I like them, with enough
mustard and fresh chives.
Now you’re coming in with yours,
followed by your small dogs
who settle on the settee, by the fire.

We catch up over this monthly meal.
Soon we’ll sit silently behind our laptops,
typing up poems from old notebooks.
Now eating toast with ginger preserve,
I look out of the window; the smiling
Buddha is lit up by the sun.

W G Sebald -writing prompt

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This week it is 20 years since the writer W G (Max) Sebald died, aged 57.
Propolis, the publishing arm of Norwich-based The Book Hive, published Ariadne’s Thread: In Memory of W G Sebald (2014). This memoir was written by Philippa Comber. She met Sebald in 1981 in Norwich where they both lived. They hit it off and became friends.


Philippa and I met in Manchester late 2004 at a series of poetry workshops and we hit it off too: both practising psychotherapists with several shared interests. I remember Philippa telling me she was planning a visit to the German museum dedicated to Sebald to read the letters that she had sent him over the years.


Sebald died in a road-traffic accident near Norwich. According to the coroner’s report, he had died of a heart attack before colliding with a lorry. Memory, loss of memory, decay, exile are the main themes of his books with their unique blend of fact, recollection, and fiction.

Writing Prompt: My poem is in 14 lines. Yours can be shorter. Do include ‘I do know’ and ‘I don’t know’ at least twice in each stanza.

Knowing and not knowing

I know I mustn’t eat grapefruit as it interferes
with the effect of the medication. I don’t need to know
the Table of Chemical Elements, though I do know
that a few elements have recently been added and
Rutherfordium is one of them.

I know and remember the view of the Wash and the silver
ribbon of the Broads as the plane turns. I don’t know
the names of narrowboats and yachts, but I do know
that the beach huts in Wells-next-the-Sea are on stilts.

I know someone who was a good friend of W G Sebald
and that her letters to Max are archived in a museum
near Stuttgart. I know where I was when I heard on
the radio that Sebald had died: the A17 heading for Norwich,
just before a round-about.

Shoes and siblings

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The Garsdale Retreat

This week I’ve been on a writing course at the Garsdale Retreat: Memoir/Life Writing. It was an intense four days with tutor Cathy Rentzenbrink. She wrote a successful memoir The Last Act of Love and has published two books since. Of course, we were meeting via Zoom. Rebecca emailed us recipes to make up for the fact we would not be eating her delicious, home cooking. There was an afternoon chatroom option, but it could never replace Rebecca’s home-made cake!


One way to elicit memories for a memoir is to think of objects. I’ve read exercises about shoes, seen a tutor on another workshop bring in her first shoes. I have no memories of the shoes I wore as a child, but I have fond memories of the green shoes with three tiers – glamorous and comfortable – I wore that year when I was doing my MA at Sheffield University.


I do recall the astonishing poem My Shoes by Charles Simic. It starts:

Shoes, secret face of my inner life:
Two gaping toothless mouths,
Two partly decomposed animal skins
Smelling of mice-nests.

There are four more stanzas, with a surprise in the second stanza – two dead siblings.

Last year at Garsdale, I was delighted to find that another woman on the course was wearing identical boots! Briefly, I felt like I had a twin sister …