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| As I am dyslexic, I lack short term memory and have symbol difficulty with numbers and names, but my visual and long term memory is acute. This is how I survive and it informs my writing. |
| Creatively, as a teenager I wrote dairies, poetry and short stories, and my ideas of writing were shaped by my favourite writers: Leo Tolstoy, Guy de Maupassant (in translation) Henry Miller, Saul Bellow, Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov. As I was exhibiting and selling paintings from an early age I went on to study at Art School. |
Alyson in Titirangi 1962
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| In 1970, when I was 21, I was shot in Kensington. I was walking next to the Natural History Museum, carrying a painting, when I was shot in the head. Luckily two American tourists saw me fall to the pavement from a black cab, and the driver raced me through the traffic to St. Georges Hospital, Hyde Park. Wrong place at the wrong time I guess, who knows? The accident affected my sight and made reading (the movement of my eyes) impossible. |
I switched from painting to photography, the camera serving as a go-between the world and my sight. I had lost all confidence in my writing because I couldn't read. To quote Dr. Johnson:
'The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book'.
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| Even though I wrote fitfully, agents I met in London, Ruth Needham from MBA Fitzroy Square, and Lesley Polinger of Polinger Ltd, were very encouraging. My neighbour in North London, India Knight, typed the stories for me. I knew the agents wanted me to write a book to sell, and I worked so hard on this but failed to complete them - 'The Diving Bell' 1993 and 'The Lodgers' 2002. I just could not focus for long enough in a room by myself rewriting. |
As my headmistress at Auckland Girls Grammar used to say, 'Alyson, what we want from you is 'stickability' and to quote Dr. Johnson again:
'Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but by perseverance.' |
| So I don't have stickability and it is with great relief I can say there is not a book in me. Half a dozen pages and I am fine. I would like to continue as an artist and to use writing as well as another medium, like music, and to see if I can write lyrics, as that would be a development from my poetry. |
| Here is one story 'Fringe of Heaven' written in 1992, which is set in the 1950's.
The girl Alice's thinking is influenced by stories where a young girl is the main character; 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' by Lutwidge Dodgson, 1863 and 'The Wonderful Wizard of Oz' by Frank L. Baum, 1900. |
| It is about fear, marriage, puberty, and sacrifice. |
Fringe of Heaven |
| "The neighbour went into the shed, and grasping a surprised chicken by the neck with the same hand, twirled the body around in a great flash of white feathers, and the head was now drooping, the sharp eyes covered with soft blue lids of skin. He picked them up one by one, until there was a big quiet pile to present to mother. 'No more blood!' mother shrilled like a little girl, clapping her hands in excitement. The three adults stood around the white heap, laughing, the killing tension gone, but another tension creeping in. Alice watched them from beneath the tamarillo trees, their acrid smell in her nostrils." |
| Download the full story here (PDF 187KB) |
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