The Writing Life Course - Mary-Rose MacColl
The Writing Life course is for those who want a life with more creative writing in it, those who aren’t sure how they might do that, those who keep getting stymied from doing that, those who’ve lost their way somewhere, maybe having suffered loss or trauma, or those who simply want to work with likeminded folk on doing more creative writing. It will suit anyone who creates by using words on a page.
I have been telling stories since I was old enough to talk, and writing them since I was old enough to write. I don’t know why I do this, and when writing left me five years ago, I didn’t know why it left me either. I only knew it was something to do with the world and grief and my own need to believe in goodness, which fled with the words. For me, writing, going off into that place where I create something, craft something, has been the thing I was called to do. When it was gone, who was I?
I started walking in nature, blindly. I walked miles and miles, my life on my back, on my own, through forests, along beaches and cliffs, over mountains. I kept coming back to forests, mainly rainforest, and the old, old trees that provided not comfort but something I knew I needed even if I couldn’t name it. I didn’t do much writing, as it happens.
Time spent in nature provides healing. We know that from science and even if we didn’t, it would still be true. The Japanese call it forest-bathing, we’ve been told, and pilgrimage has a long history in just about every spiritual belief system. Walking writers and writing walkers are also well represented in history, through the writing those walkers have left and the walking those writers have written to us about.
Walking in nature showed me the way back to writing and so the course will include help with finding experiences in nature that can help a writer write. It will also include what I’ve learned over thirty or so years about finding your own unique voice and the form that suits you, getting started, procrastination, finishing, editing. It will hopefully help those who want to explore their experience of the world through words find their own way to do that more or better or at all.
Author of six novels and two non-fiction books, essays, short stories and feature journalism, Mary-Rose MacColl has helped many people tell their stories. Her non-fiction book The Birth Wars included women’s stories of their experience of Australia’s maternity care system. For a Girl tells a story from Mary-Rose’s own life. Her recent novels explore grief and regret, often with historical settings. Mary-Rose writes occasional journal pieces at mary-rosemaccoll.com/journal about long walks in nature.
She is a recipient of a 2022 Queensland Writers Fellowship through the Queensland Literary Awards and the tutor of the upcoming Queensland Writers Centre course Writing Life.
