‘Children no longer obey their parents and everyone is writing a book’ laughs GS
‘Who said that?’
‘Cicero- two thousand years ago!’
It’s true there are a lot of us writers about, or perhaps we are just drawn to each other.
Writing appears a solitary task but it is not. For memoirists words are a passport, ways to time travel to distant lands, where once we were young and innocent, green and unwise. Fingers race across keyboards conjuring up the past, trying to pin onto paper literary butterflies- the scent of a summer night, the excitement of a longed for first kiss, the screeching of children with feet blackened from playing barefoot and hands stained with fruit juice.
With the power of the internet you can meet your tribe and it is though Facebook Memoir groups that I first encountered the lovely Jelaine.
It was in the middle of Covid, when we were all locked up and the world wasn’t so much naval gazing as eating its own stomach with wokery. A little bit of woke was fine, but the problem will being awake too long is that sleep deprivation leads to madness. Change the world for a better place in the future, but you cannot cancel the past, pretend it didn’t exist. To me that is dishonest-twisting or cancelling the truth fundamentally wrong. It seems the wokerati look for and find offence in anything, even the innocence of childhood games.
Jelaine had put an extract of her work in progress about growing up in a nudist camp in Florida. It was authentic, a breath of fresh air, instantly reminding me of my own childhood. I loved any game of chase- and screeched and whooped whether it was cowboys and Indians, tag, or stick-in-the- mud.
Sensing she may have inadvertently red-flagged the wokerati police and that we risked being kicked out – I pinged her a DM and the rest as they say…is history.
These are Jelaine’s published books https://jelainelombardi.com ‘Running around naked’ and ‘Abby’s tale’. ‘Running around naked’ has just been released as an audio book- I just LOVE, LOVE the richness of the southern accent coming through the words- it’s like melting chocolate. Great choice Jelaine! I can’t wait to get my hands on a copy of ‘Abby’s Tale’
With Covid restrictions lifted I invited Jelaine and other lady memoirists to the villa. But they couldn’t make the same dates. Instead, having assured Jelaine that we weren’t a cult or worse, she came with her daughter and a friend. Our first Writers Retreat was fun but not a word was written.
Ditto the second with Lili, author of soon to be published Lost in Love’s Illusion https://www.facebook.com/LiliJFrost
When Jelaine invited us to attend her Retreat, GS and I booked flights although, to be honest, it wasn’t until we’d actually settled into our seats on the BA flight that I believed we were actually going.
We flew from Key West, over the brackish puddles of the Everglades. Then we flew from Miami to Nashville. While we dozed on the plane, flat land dotted with palm trees and banana plants gave way to rolling hills and deciduous forests.
There was a bit of a fracas at the car hire as we had booked a small car. The woman seemed to be implying that GS’s manhood was somehow related to the size of the car and that with this particular car he would be in the Guinness book of Records -and not in a nice way.
‘God knows what we’ve got’ said GS refusing to upgrade. ‘It’ll be something tiny. We’ll look like we are escaping from the circus’
As it turned out he couldn’t actually fit in the car because the seat adjuster was broken, but we switched and were soon on our way.
A few hours later we arrived at Jelaine and Tom’s stunning log house–stone, wood, fireplaces and soaring ceilings. Beautiful.
They could not have made GS and I more welcome. They had converted the entire basement into a suite for our use, complete with brand-new bathroom, the area decorated to look like an English stable, with Italian touches.
Gradually the other writers arrived and people that I had rarely met in zoom meetings (I have the worst attendance record) turned from 2D TV images into three dimension actual living people. For me, hiding as I do behind a pseudonym, this was quite disconcerting. I’ve just about got used to spilling my personal recollections on paper, can just about read short extracts at speed in rare zoom meetings, but real life? I found myself baulking.
But as it happened the litigation was going to scupper any creative writing anyway.
Every day started with a feast. Tom made us the most delicious breakfasts – bacon and eggs, with grits, with coffee, and pancakes. Then I had to slink away and absent myself, my brain whirring, as I tried to manipulate difficult legal arguments. Cases are won and lost on pleadings. Get it wrong and a judge will destroy you in court with the delight of a sadist pulling legs off a spider.
Meanwhile the ladies of Memoir Mentors, organised by the lovely Christina https://memoirmentors.com did yoga, writing, reading and briefing sessions which, when I could, I slipped in and out of.
These are snippets of conversations that tickled me-
#1
‘Do you by chance have a spare loo brush?’
???? Lube brush?!
#2
‘How did you spend your day?’
‘Drowning worms’
‘??? Oh you mean fishing!’
Meanwhile surrounded by ten last millennium hens, GS and Tom snuck off to do boy stuff. Tom, part pirate, part cowboy, was as much catnip to GS as Jelaine was to me.
‘Don’t let the old man in’ said GS, quoting a frequently played song on the local country radio station and promptly dived into a short lived Moonshine fuelled mid-life crisis. He spent the day racing around muddy tracks in Tonka Toys with cowboys, whilst dressed in an Hawaiian shirt. Thirsts were quenched by peach moonshine, lungs filled with contraband. It was just lovely seeing GS coming home at the end of the day now with a thick Southern accent, radiant with happiness and moonshine, filled with the joy of new friendship making everyone laugh with silliness and anecdotes.
We had wonderful evenings of 14 hour smoked pig butt – utterly delicious, peach moonshine, line dancing and karaoke, bonhomie with the cowboy neighbours, bonfires that went on into the night.
During the day, we walked to Jelaine’s horses, watched barn swallows dive to feed their young, walked around idyllic lakes and kayaked on lazy shallow rivers watched by basking turtles.
We went to buy fat cinnamon rolls from Mennonites, admired soaring Fallcreekfalls, ate foods I’ve never even heard of. The cicadas filled the trees and seemed to breath in and out en mass with their scratching, a sound as soothing as it was hypnotic.
GS tried the local produce, in particular the local brews… http://www.calfkillerbeer.com
Everywhere we went, people could not have been more friendly and accommodating.
Tennessee was beautiful. A land of contrasts where all looked familiar but yet was different. Shops don’t sell wine, but beer and live crickets for fishing. Calfkiller brewery quickly GS’s favourite. The gentle slopes and thick woods looked like unspoilt England but with rattlesnakes and instead of pigeons, vultures flapped lazily down from trees. Hand painted signs hung from trees telling us that the Lord watched us, or to dress modestly. Old wooden houses with stories to tell kept their secrets in dilapidated rooms with staircases that led to long abandoned bedrooms.
Every day was hot, every day thunder rolled and lighting flashed. Tornadoes tore through the country.
It was great, and then on the last day, after a fight with technology, I finally got my documents to England by the deadline. I had, under intense pressure, researched, drafted, polished and arranged service of 15 pages of pleadings and a similar number of forms. I had drained my brain of legal twisters and written my heart out– just not as I had expected.
‘Round ’em up, move ’em out!’ It was time to leave the storms and destruction of sudden tornadoes.
Next stop New Orleans.
I hope you enjoy my little bloglets. Please do share and comment if you do, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
4 Comments
You’ve painted quite a picture there, Pia! So glad I didn’t see any of those rattlesnakes and so very glad you came along, but sad that you were tied up in work much of the time. It was such a treat to get to know you and GS. 🙂
Thank you so much! It was great fun!
I love reading this. I love your descriptions of all you saw and experienced. If I hadn’t been there myself, I could have still gotten a fairly good picture of that magical week.
Thank you so much Carol! I keep remembering things to put in! Happy days 🙂