Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer

Remember    .those quiet evenings

That’s supposed to be a writing prompt, or something to barge through writer’s block, courtesy of Brian Eno via Ms Catherine Deveny.

But you can’t give the punctuation person something like that!

Remember space space space full stop those quiet evenings

It makes me furrow my brow, question whether the punctuation is intentional – does it mean something? Or is it just really poor copy editing?

The judgmental punctuation person in me says the latter. I internally scream, “What? No! Wrong! Ugh, idiots!”

There will be no quiet evenings with punctuation like this.

But, But. Somehow, there is something quiet about looking at those words, and that punctuation, typed across the middle of the white card, that softly does remind me of quiet evenings with my lover, in front of a fire. Him playing his guitar. Pouring another glass of wine. Me leaning back in the dining chair, titling my head to one side, smiling.

Perhaps I’m misremembering those evenings, because mostly my lover would play his electric guitar, badly, and he can talk the legs off a chair. The evenings were rarely, in fact, quiet.

But still, it does bring to mind evenings in the country, punctuated by music, by good red wine, by the flicker of flames, and by being loved.

https://yoginime.wordpress.com

https://yogafudge.wordpress.com

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer

My wrist is sore. Why the fuck am I not typing on the iPad? Dumb fuck! Everyone else looks cool with their notepads. “Real” writers. Oh god, I have wanker’s elbow from writing and it’s not even lunch time. Oh for fuck sake.

My bladder is bursting but I don’t want to miss anything. Do we get ciggie breaks? How exactly am I going to bring that up?!

I’m excited, and I’m in pain. Maybe it really is wanker’s elbow?

The lady next to me’s handwriting is so neat. She defo doesn’t have wanker’s elbow. Or maybe she’s well-practised? No, don’t think that. Shit. Too late. No, do not look around the room at people you don’t know, writing away, and think about their wanker’s elbow.

Maybe we should rephrase – from now on it’s “Writer’s Elbow.”

————————–

I’m just sitting here listening to this voice. People around are munching on their lunch and chatting about writing, blogging and formatting, which is probably the most bizarre thing I’ve ever witnessed for a start. But there amongst it all is this booming voice.

One that’s clearly trained after many years of keynote speeches and stand-up performance. Used to and adept at commanding a room.

There is the sound of a woman that I openly admire. I am small by comparison and yet I fell a kindred spirit in the seeking of a better world and a wish to do & be something worthwhile in it.

And laugh. The human condition is a many splendid thing. I am uncomfortable here, but she is not. I feel out of my depth. Lowly in a room full of educated, wealthy, creative middle-class women.

I am the antichrist of the room. Loud, brash, lower class. Frightened into silence as a servant in the presence of lords and ladies. Yet I feel at ease and in awe of our host. Holding her own – no, smashing it – amongst this crowd.

I don’t eat arty food. I make a turkey and salami sanga, sneaking out for a smoke while others chatter and nibble. Fish out of water. And yet I am so happy to be here. Anchored by the presence of that booming voice.

Admiration and eagerness do indeed overcome social inertia. A win for the small peeps. Thanks to Catherine.

—————

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer

Tony woke with a jolt and found himself sitting upright. It was as if an electric bolt had sparked him to life. He was wired. A delicious feeling filled his being. That momentary feeling you get when you first wake up and know something good has happened or is about to happen but you haven’t remembered it yet.

Then it came to him. He’d had an idea! His idea, not Peta Credlin’s, not Joe Hockey’s but his. This may be the thing that would revive his popularity. This was it. Maybe now John Howard would look at him with renewed respect. It was the kind of decision that Menzies would have made.

Things had not gone to plan last year. All those barnacles sticking to his captain’s vessel. It really wasn’t his fault. But now, this was his chance to showcase to the nation his true values, his intellect, his impeccable judgement, the vision that so often had been clouded or misrepresented by the press.

The feeling of excitement and impending success built as Tony began planning his announcement. There was no need to bother the Cabinet with this decision, no need for them to share the credit. This would be his moment.

As he dragged on his Speedos, ready for his morning laps, he dreamed of the look of admiration on the faces of Australians nationwide as he announced the deserving recipient of the Knight of the Order of Australia   …

His Royal Highness The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, Earl of Merioneth, Baron Greenwich, Royal Knight of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, Extra Knight of the Most Ancient and Most Noble Order of the Thistle, Grand Master and First and Principal Knight Grand Cross of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, Member of the Order of Merit, Companion of the Order of Australia, Additional Member of the Order of New Zealand, Extra Companion of the Queen’s Service Order, Royal Chief of the Order of Logohu, Extraordinary Companion of the Order of Canada, Extraordinary Commander of the Order of Military Merit, Canadian Forces Decoration, Lord of Her Majesty’s Most Honourable Privy Council, Privy Councillor of the Queen’s Privy Council for Canada, Personal Aide-de-Camp to Her Majesty, Lord High Admiral of the United Kingdom.

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer

Once upon a time there was a Jewish woman who started a dance academy in a small town in Germany. Her name was Hilda.

Every day, Hilda would travel the same route to the dance academy, left then right then left again.

Hilda loved to dance but loathed to teach. But dance gigs were few and far between in her tiny German village. Known for her harsh criticism, cold demeanor and an incredible high kick.

Over the years, Hilda taught many children but she longed for her own daughter to hold, to scald and to mould into a world famous dancer.

One day Hilda turned  right first instead of left on her way to work and she walked past a green grocers. She admired the precise nature of the produce displays. All in colour order and separated by different shapes and sizes. “I shall marry whomever is responsible for this efficient display.” And she did, she married Mr. Hitler the green grocer.

9 months later, a baby arrived, but it was a boy and of course a disappointment. They named him Adolf. But Hilda would not give up on her mumager dreams.

The little boy was forced to dress as a girl and attend dance class everyday with his mother. He was not a natural talent, and Hilda tried in vain to teach her son how to high kick but it was hopeless “you look like a goose!
And what the hell are you doing with your arms?!”

Years later, Adolf was still mistaken for a girl and because of that decided to grow a moustache and join the army.
With his dance experience he choreographed a new march called the goose step and paired it with a strong arm extension.
You could say it went viral or swept the nation…

Ahh, if only Hilda had allowed her child to be who he wanted to be, or at the very least not turned right!

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer

I am so full. This is partly due to the incredible delicacies we feasted upon at La Luna today and of which I partook with great relish and enormous satisfaction (thank God there is a restaurant left in Melbourne that still celebrates the use of salt in its cooking! ) but also, and perhaps more importantly, I have come to the rather alarming realization that I have a mental disorder of the kind which might be aligned with, er, let’s just say, a literary back-up. A consternating constipation which, interpreted for the average Aussie, means “full of shit”. (Being full of shit is not the disorder, obviously, as most of us are well aware that almost everyone around us is full of shit most of the time and it is indeed a rare person or moment that transcends the norm and rises above the shit). Sometimes we grow so familiar with our little patterns and habits that we fail to see our lives clearly, and we don’t know why we feel ‘blocked’ or stuck, we just know we feel shit. And then we keep going, doing the same that we have always done, even when we know something needs to change, because to change is far harder than to remain stuck in what is familiar to us (Catherine, if this was one of your many quotes from famous people today then I’m sorry. I’m even sorrier if it was something I picked up from a bumper sticker on my dazed bike ride home. Is this plagiarism? I’ll need to know if I’m going to be a real writer)

It is only when we are hurled out of our comfort zone that there comes the opportunity to have our innermost selves reveal a shard of information that may just be the sharp key to cutting open the belly of the whale and releasing the hidden Pinocchio (sorry but I’ve gotta get this out before 10pm or I run the very real risk of exploding, so deal with the shit metaphors and similes or whatever and bear with me) that has been causing indigestion for so long. Quite frankly, I have had a bellyful of stories for so long that I say slit that blubber and free the unborn babies of their hideously unnatural gestation period of 20 odd years – okay, 30, – damn! And just let it be birthed, whatever it is. Obviously it’s some sort of Frankenstein by now, some re-hashed zombie of what once was pure and natural and dewy in its youthful prime, but please, let me just release the beast!

So. Inadvertently, today, in front of the group share in Catherine Deveny’s Writing Masterclass, I referred to myself as a “word hoarder”. I have never used this term before, it just spilt out of me like some sort of writerly confession fuelled by two lattes and a mild case of hyper-anxiety at having to speak in public. I had no idea that I had just diagnosed my own mental illness, even when Catherine suggested at the end of class that it might be a good idea to go home and look up something like “Help for Hoarders” and ‘play around’ with that as a concept.

I told the class how I had been writing since I was thirteen, and kept a diary pretty much every day of my life, but had never put anything out there to be published. In all those years, I wrote copious amounts, mountains of memoirs, great piles of pages, almost all of which have never read by anyone but myself. I hoarded them and stacked my shelves with each book as I finished, scrawling in inner-city cafes and getting a chain of addictive crushes on boy baristas as I went. Apart from a brief – but nonetheless fairly spectacular – burning of all my diaries on my 30^th birthday (actually all I really remember is the smell of burning plastic from the cheap covers, and the smouldering metal spirals that remained in the ashes afterwards) there has been no hiatus in my literary hoarding career. Like anyone with an obsessive compulsive disorder (yes, the Hoarding Disorder is very often linked with OCD but is even more innocuous and hard to recover from, according to my very current research) as soon as I burnt all those diaries from my teens and twenties, I immediately began writing once more and filing them away, watching them rapidly pile up again.

I am a Word Hoarder. A hoarder of words. My diarized self-obsession is nothing more than long-term narcissism. I live – nay, survive – in a house full of words piled to the ceilings. They are inside the rafters, packed into every nook and crannie, they grow old and mildewy under the floorboards, and they darken the rooftop where I’ve bound them to me with rope so not even one page might fly away. Wikipedia says that “often the perceived importance of the hoarded items far exceeds their true value” and that “the results of hoarding can lead to BLOCKED EXITS and HEALTH HAZARDS (due to vermin infestation, excreta and detritus from excessive garbage or the risk of stacks of items collapsing on the occupants and blocking exit routes” ). I realize that I am actually lucky to still be alive. Heavy, burdened with shit, but alive.

Funny, really. Ironic, in a macabre and haunting kind of mental way that only us writers can truly understand… but I have always wanted wings. I longed to be a faery, not a giant, heavy Word Hoarder. I fantasized about flying above it all, laughing at the scenes far below me, not attached either physically or emotionally. I dreamed I could leave it all behind. I would catch the next wind current and soar to new lands, new visions, new ideas, new adventures. I wanted to be the light-boned, bright and feisty Tinkerbell, not the sensible story-telling, shadow-sewing Wendy.

Perhaps my subconscious mind was all along only trying to protect me from the lonely, accursed, unappreciated destiny of the scribe. Maybe part of me was inwardly screaming against a destiny which, as Catherine so honestly and forthrightly- and somewhat repeatedly -insisted today in our class, IS NOT FUN. To quote:”Writing is shit. It is hard work and if you think it’s fun then you are severely deluded.” That’s what I learned. I am pretty devastated because what this means is that today I realized that not only am I a severe Word Hoarder who lives in a derelict metaphorical dump, a narcissistic literary heavyweight of my own masturbatory mindscape, but also that I am a glutton who has not shared the plate around but sat gobbling at the writers feast for as long as I can remember and grown heavy of my own accord.

But still, I have hope. I have this coffee cup which is sitting right here with me on my desk now (subtly suggesting I drink tea rather than vodka). And on this cup, this vessel of destiny, my very own holy grail, are inscribed the words of one Theodore Roosevelt :   “FAIL WHILE DARING GREATLY” and to this end, I make tonight a simple yet heartfelt offering of a NEW kind.

Thank you Catherine. My head hurts but my heart is happy. And to my dear friend who gifted me with this wonderful day, Sheree Cairney. Thank you xxx

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer

Ladies and Gentlemen:

It is such an honour to be standing here today accepting an Oscar. Who would have thought that a horrific chain of events could have turned into an Oscar award-winning movie.  *shake head oozing with pride.

There are so many people I would like to thank. Of course, I would like to thank my mum. Despite raising five children alone on what I thought was just the sole parent pension, her dying confession was there is no shame in having a sugar daddy if it affords your children the best possible education, lifestyle and opportunities. To those men, unknown to me – thank you, thank you from the bottom of my heart.

To my ex Andrew, thank you for inviting me to the United States on an intent to marry visa. Thank you for the opportunity to experience the rigorous and costly process of applying for that visa. A process so demoralizing I stood naked for nearly two hours while I had my anus and genitals examined by two doctors. Two incompetent doctors that still required me to give another blood sample to determine my gender even though they fingered me they still needed further clarification. Maybe that says more about my genitals than the doctors, but I digress.

Andrew, it is with the greatest gratitude you cancelled our wedding in New York the night before the event and subjected me to couples counseling instead.  I confess I overreacted but it did take cancelling our wedding a further two more times before I completely freaked out. But thank you for that ordeal because without that experience I would have never have known the invigorating sensation of punching the living shit out of someone’s face. I look at it now with a sense of pride that your face could be battered up by my otherwise gentle hands.

To my brothers and sisters, I thank you for being junkies, alcoholics, bipolar, stupid and lovable. Without all of that my memoirs would not have been nearly as colourful.

Thank you to Catherine for hosting awesome, inspiring writing classes. She got me motivated to write this screenplay.

Thank you to my editor Hilary for thinking it was interesting enough to look at.

To Michael my biological father, thank you for killing yourself when I was two because if it wasn’t for that, my mother wouldn’t have met Chris.

My biggest thanks goes to you Chris, Yes you Chris. Are you watching the TV now pointing at yourself? I doubt it. But I Thank you for being a pedophile and molesting and raping all us kids because if you hadn’t have done that, I wouldn’t have been carrying this burning desire my whole adult life to destroy you. Since I am not a violent person, contrary to what I just said, I wont hunt you down in Cypress where you now live working as a freelance photographer. Instead, I stand here under these bright lights in front of millions of people,  around the world and thank you for giving me the motivation to write this award-winning screenplay based on you, and how you didn’t fuck me up, but gave me the inspiration to be great. Gosh, if it wasn’t for your training I wouldn’t have maintained my smile while those American doctors molested me and charged me $750 for the experience. What a skill.

To all the non-offending pedophiles out there, I want to say you have my utmost support and I sympathise with the anguish you must carry around.

But not you Chris… you can live with the torment that everyone knows your name.

Thank you, god bless.

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer

This is total bullshit. Because I am here. And you are not.

The most creative, artistic, kind and young hearted one of us all.

You stood in front of that train, looked Death in His face, and felt free.

Almost a year ago, I would have envied your conviction. Because my own idea of taking my life matched yours.

I had the plan all worked out.

I would get up in the morning, drop my daughter off to my in-laws (with the pretense of doing some grocery shopping) but instead drive to the train station where I had seen the unfinished fence with enough space to walk through on to the open tracks.

I came so close to doing it. I had taken my daughter to her grandparents. I got in my car. I drove to the local supermarket and parked outside, just to stop and collect my thoughts.

Yet my thoughts, through all the fucked up commentary that my illness fed me, could not convince myself to shut off, go in to autopilot and drive to that train station. So after a time I returned to pick up my daughter and got on with muddling my way through my first year of motherhood.

The crippling bout of post natal depression and anxiety that I faced on a daily basis, amazingly, could not contend with my stubbornness and reconciliation of values to be the best person I could for myself, child and husband. Given the self protection and barriers put up around myself, the means to disclose any of this was petrifying.

But the worst passed, the fog lifted, and I started to look forward to life again.

Then came the phone call to say you were gone. And the regret that I had never shared my experience with someone such as yourself, whom I loved as fiercely as my own brother, hit with a force I would never have thought possible.

What if I could have spared you the anguish and doubt to get unstuck? To know you were loved without consequence and not alone in idealizing Life Without Pain?

I’ll never know. But I do know that I will never stop missing and loving you and this is something I can now share freely with those present here who also cared and loved you the most.

Please send me courage and strength to pass on my story to others so that suicide is no longer the final and desperate act of a troubled soul.

Rest in peace darling Greg.

I am, and will always be, your baby cousin Nat.

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer

A note to go with this:
I wasn’t going to send this piece; it cut far too close to the bone so I was going to send another one I had been playing with.  But then I saw Rosie Batty had won Australian of the Year and that she wanted the issue of family violence to be brought out into the daylight. My experience is nothing close to the horror that Rosie experienced. But she’s right; one in three of us are going through some version of this and we all need to talk about it.  So here’s a very raw part of my experiences of intimate partner violence and the fucking awful contradictions that it brings. The recipient’s name has been changed.

Dear Adrian,

I thought about driving to you on the way home tonight. And while I didn’t drive to you I did drive past your house. Hoping to glimpse you? Maybe?

For what?

For the charge of adrenaline I would’ve got, had I seen you? So you would see me and feel something?

Who knows.

But, you see, over the past few weeks – almost a year later exactly – it has occurred to me that I did love you; something I have not admitted to myself for a very long time.

I loved you and, worse, – sometimes – I miss you.

It’s the most ridiculous fucking thing in the whole fucking world.

You packed – dumped – all my belongings into garbage bags. You threatened me. You threatened my friends. You spat on me. You bruised my collar bone. You used me. You took advantage of my – admittedly naïve – generosity. You viciously insulted every part of me from my heart to my cunt.

(That was the word you used in that particular verbal attack. To this day I feel horrifically insulted by that accusation above all the others. Here I am writing a letter you will never see and I can’t even bring myself to repeat it. So congratulations, it had the effect you desired; it hurt me and scarred my psyche and I’m now completely paranoid about a part of me, which I hadn’t much thought about the attractiveness or unattractiveness of before. You have managed to make all my sexual encounters since a much more fraught and self-conscious adventure for me.)

You shoved me across rooms. You rubbed my dogs face into the ground. You threatened to release the dogs onto the street. You spread vicious lies that hurt me and others.

(For the record, I have corrected those people who have come to me believing I left you for my ex-husband as you have told them. You and I know that he is in a happy relationship, that I am happy for him and that no other party played any part in me – eventually – leaving you)

You manipulated a counsellor into telling me it was safe to come back to you.

And yet…

And yet.

And yet there is the way you would say, “Oh, that’s so beautiful”.

You’d say it talking about food we had prepared, or art we were viewing, or a piece of clothing that I was trying on for you. About the sex we were having or about the clean new cotton sheets we were having it on. About sunsets and travel plans and fresh food from the market. Even about me, sometimes.

And something about the way you said it – “Oh darrlin’, that’s so beautiful.” – made me believe that you understood beauty.

And I miss that.

It’s a horrible, sick in my stomach, weakening, dignity-robbing feeling to admit that I miss you. I am ashamed. I am embarrassed. I am disappointed in myself.

I don’t miss the drama.

I don’t miss having to constantly report in to you, lest I be fucking someone else. I don’t miss having my phone / emails / facebook hacked so that you could invent stories from what you found and then punish me for your fairy tales, before once again begging my forgiveness and promising it would never happen again.

I don’t miss feeling compelled to check your phone in retaliation and finding you telling that woman in Spain to “imagine your tongue tickling her clit”.

I don’t miss you tearing my house apart while I’m away from home and me being scared to my absolute core.

I don’t miss that you. I hate that you and feel sorry for that you and am scared of that you.

As I should.

But other you. The “Oh, that’s so beautiful” you. Sometimes – just on the odd occasion – I have missed him.

And I know that he is you, which makes me feel like a stupid, pathetic, embarrassed, unworthy belittled little victim all over again.

So I won’t tell you.

I’ll just write it here in this letter that I will never send you.

Because I need to get it out.

I need to get these feelings for you out of me because they are poisonous and I’m scared they’ll infect me and somehow expose me to you again. And I can’t admit these feelings to anyone else because they are too shameful and expose me as that which I do not want to be, more than all the things I don’t want to be: weak.

So they’ll get written down here in this letter that I’ll never send you. And you’ll never know.

Because you can’t.

Because I’d trust you with those words and those feelings and you would act like you could be trusted with them and then, one day, after I had sensed it slowly building like a storm for about a week, you’d sharpen them into a spear and throw them right back at me. And I would lie there bleeding, unable to really believe that I had brought myself back to you, knowing all along that you would spear me with them and with nothing to blame but myself and that niggly feeling of missing that tiny part of you – that “Oh, that’s so beautiful” part of you – that I really believed could recognise beauty. And you would look right down at me on the ground and weave your words to convince me it was my fault again and I would begin to believe that it was and I’d release that spear right back to you again and lie there feeling stupid and half fucking crazy.

So there it is. And that’s why I’ve written you this letter and why this is the last time you’ll hear from me.

I wish you well,

Suzanne.

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer

This one goes out to the man I love
This one goes out to the man I may leave behind.

Like some U2 songs (I am not a fan), they start out beautifully, quickly move to mediocrity before becoming excrutiatingly painful, rather like our relationship of 26 years.
I hit my final low Dec 2013 and took an overdose. Not because of you – because of me. I felt dead already, unable to work out what needed to happen to change, completely beyond the energy required for change.  I believed the unhappiness I caused, the unhappiness I was immersed and drowning in that I would be doing everyone, including myself, a favour if I just expunged myself from being.  I would be at peace, harmony would reign, people might be shocked a while, sad a while, angry a while but life goes on and from the mud a lotus arises and it eventually for those I left behind it would be ok.

I do not fear death.
I feared life or more accurately I had never learned how to live. I learned this with Ona, the psycholgist I have been seeing three times a week for the past year and I want to thank you for not stressing about the dollars.
After all this therapy it is time for me to tell you that this enormous committment to me has been a hell of a lot of hard, hard work. I have been vomitting, in pain, excrutiating pain, it has been messy, ugly and illuminating. I have had the opportunity to look at my inadequacies and what has caused them. I can see how much I contributed to our dysfunction by  being unable to express how I felt and I am so sorry that this allowed you to be less than you can be.
I have gone back through so many incidences in my life and acknowledged the pain and taken that broken part of me and loved it, I have tapped the shit out of my meridians. I have learned a knew language that is effective, has no hidden agenda and is without rancour. With Ona’s help I am finally learning to feel my emotions and how to express them. I want to thank you for all the practice you have provided me with, it has been invaluable to my learning and growth.

Ona asked me what kind of relationship I do want, this was so hard to compile at first. I had no real understanding to base it on. All the ones I knew were pretty dysfunctional. So, I finally compiled a list which I want to share with you. I am quite nervous, I really want you to want this kind of relatoinship too and I am scared that you will laugh or walk away or deride me or it or or or or or or
So I am being vulnerable and hopeful and quite nervous in revealling this to you.

I want a relationship that is consistently,
mutually respectful,
loving,
warm,
nurturing,
caring,
passionate,
kind,
forgiving,
committed,
generous,
thoughtful,
considerate,
fun,
joyful,
adventurous,
exciting,
inspirational,
intimate,
sexual,
sharing,
a little bit zany, ok it can be batsit crazy sometimes,
where we can be open and honest with ourselves and each other, have healthy effective communication and where I am delighted in and by my partner.
I want this relationship with you. When I see you my heart melts, I desire you, I am in love with you, I want you and I love who you are.
I realised when I wrote this relationship list that what I want in a relationship is how I need to be in a relationship. It was really daunting. I am not all those things I want. I am ok on some, I have a long way on others, very little idea on what some even mean and some I have covered.
I can imagine that it might be daunting for you also to comprehend this kind of relating. I realise it may not be what you want however I would love to work on what both of us do want together.
We are both going to mess up, slip back, make mistakes, forget, get angry, be human but I believe we can have a great relationship together. I believe in you and I believe in us.
I also need you to know that I am able to be my own best friend and my own advocate. I choose not to tolerate behaviour that is ultimatley belittles both of us. This means I am coming to that stage in our relationship where if I do not have a partner who is consistently behaving with loving kindness and isn’t acting in our mutual best interest then I will not be able to live with the incongruency.
This time though I will leaving alive and strong and whole and full of self love. I will also be full of sadness and grief but with out regret. I have put what I want out there and it is your decision now if you want me and this kind of relationship.
Whatever you choose I know that I will have a magnificent life with or with out you.
How naseating to bookend with another U2 song, thankfully  Joy Division are singing Atmosphere, don’t walk away in silence, don’t walk away.

owari

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer.