Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer.

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer.

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer.

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer.

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer.

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer.
If I wrote Haiku
in Gunnas  today then
it would be concise

or many concise
points from my perspective on
my experience

I have yet to say
anything about my feelings
they are avoided

so, I feel into
my body and I feel tense fear
constricting my whole being

I keep writing and
throat clenched against rising vomit
my shoulders are tense

my stomach feels like
a concrete slab, reinforced
and I continue

I am a survivor
of self inflicted murder
obviously failed

not witty, not fun
just lost and hurt and broken
If I didn’t die

Then I was meant to

live, so I better
start living and that means
integrating me

All of me into
me, all feelings and thoughts
merging into me

and now I gestate
this unborn me and I love
I love and nurture

nourish, protect, serve
myself because with help I
realise that I am

I am here, I am
I am here and I matter
I matter to me

owari

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer.

Every day was the same. Monotonous. Futile. Tedious. It was always going to be just a matter of time before I snapped.

As I knelt on the bed, giving a sad hand job to a pathetic man, I cast my gaze around the room. The lurid pink walls and tacky red satin sheets were more offensive in the dim lamplight than they seemed under the fluorescent room light. The organza draped ‘tastefully’ around the room did nothing to soften my mood, either.

God, I hate this place.

The pathetic man, lying back in what I can only presume was a state of euphoria, groaned.

“Oh, baby. Keep going.”

I rolled my eyes. Really? I smiled sarcastically at him, daring him, no, willing him, to open his eyes and see it. But he didn’t, so I slipped into my world of dreams. I called up my favourite fantasy – the one where I’m a surgeon, and I can cure cancer. I slice and stitch with the greatest of skill, helping people to heal and letting them live their lives to the fullest. The patient I was working with this time was a single mother with a brain tumour. She had four kids at home, whose lives depended on her survival. I skilfully moved the scalpel, knowing how other surgeons must pray to be a fly on the wall, to learn to work miracles the way I do. With the tumour cut free, I pulled at it with the tweezers…

“Hop on baby, let me take you for a ride,” moaned the man, dragging me from my fantasy.

That was it.

I yanked hard on the appendage in my hand. It had the desired effect.

“What the-?”

“I’m not your baby.” I cut him off. “I don’t even like you. In fact, you completely repulse me.” I spun on my heels, and flung the door open. “Fuck this shit! I’m sick of it all!” My scream raced through the wallpapered corridor, and a few of the girls stuck their heads out to see what was going on. I started marching, until I was flooded with a strange mixture of grief and relief, and then I was running. Far away from here.

Well, that was how it played out in my mind. The story reality told made me want to weep.

“Full service is extra, baby, and you’ll need to pay up now,” I whispered sweetly.

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer

When people start to get to know me and find out all the things my partner and I juggle in our lives (parenting three children, one of whom is our foster, I am currently doing a degree, between us we hold down several jobs, we have a beautiful staffy named Soren and a thriving veggie garden, we are committed to active involvement in our local community, and we each have lots of other projects on the side) I often hear “oh, you’re so good… I could never do what you do” and I never really know how to react. Yes, we have a lot on and it takes quite a lot of work making sure our foster daughter sees her dad and goes to counselling, and that our other children are travelling okay, but really, we’re just living our lives. I know it is a big deal because we have helped to change the life of a little girl and that is ace, but day to day? We are just getting along like any other family with its stresses and shitty times and great times.

We do things that might seem a bit reckless to other people. We have always lived by the philosophy that there will never be a perfect time to do things so just do the thing and figure out the logistics later. We made a choice to take a risk when we volunteered to be foster parents. We had a 5 year old and a new baby and we were on one very meagre income (still are!) and so, if we were planning and thinking strategically about it we never would have done it. But we did it anyway and made it work. If we hadn’t have done it, it would have been one of those deathbed regrets that no one wants to have. I now have three wonderful children that I love equally. I cannot imagine my life without my darling April.

Last year I attended Clare Bowditch’s Big Hearted Business Conference and among a whole heap of amazing inspiration, I was really challenged by something said by leadership expert, Fabien Dattner. She said she has banned the word “busy” from her vocabulary because it has so many negative connotations.

Busy = crazy, chaotic, being out of control and frustration. It means you feel like you’re missing out on the things you want to do.

Instead she chooses to say “my life is full of the things I choose to have in it”. She also talked about balance…and this is something I am working on in my own life constantly, she says:

“If you’re always worried about juggling and balancing, you don’t know why you’re doing what you’re doing”

This really hit home for me because of all of my commitments and responsibilities. I constantly feel like I have seven balls in the air at any one time. I’m sure people who know me and my family would forgive me for talking about my chaotic life. But I decided right there and then that I was also going to banish the word “busy” and to stop feeling like I am a victim of circumstance.

I have taken on Fabien’s advice to reframe my experience and now, when I start to feel overwhelmed with everything I take a step back, often by myself in a café, and say “My life is full of the things I have allowed to be in it, I am not too busy, I have exactly the right things in my life”. And thinking like this also helps me recognise when things should NOT be in my life and to do what needs to be done to remove unhelpful things.

We live by the seat of our pants, knowing that there is never a perfect time to live life, so we’re just living it now and having a bloody ace time of it. I sincerely encourage you to do the same.

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer.

IT’S DAWN, barely a trace of sunshine coming through the windows, and already I can hear her crashing around in her room. The Kraken, also known as my six-year-old daughter Amelia, has awoken.

I know this because I can hear her clumsy, elephant-like footfalls pounding into the floorboards. Amelia is awake and the whole world must know it.

It would be churlish to complain because she is deaf and so has no earthly idea how loud she is, as she noisily gathers her numerous comfort items from the bed for transportation into the lounge room.

This is the routine for her, everyday, this girl who hears little of note without hearing aids and is well and truly on the autism spectrum.

Amelia uses various collective nouns to describe these important items. They are ‘her things’, or sometimes, ‘her stuff’.

“Where is my stuff Mummy? I need my THINGS”.

I know where her stuff is because it is never far from her side. She burrows these objects into her bed covers at night and I have to creep in after lights out to extract pencils from her hair and uncurl sweaty fingers from straws, tape, glue-sticks. The lot.

For a young child with autism, these things have a meaning beyond our reach. But what we know for sure it that they are vital this little magpie’s sense of security, her sense of self.

And so, each morning, these curious ‘things’ are dragged from her room and deposited next to her on the couch. Amelia is ready at 5am, or 6 if we’re lucky, to start her day.

It’s then that I feel her presence in the doorway to our room. She hovers there uncertainly, watching for movement, for signs of waking life.

I resist for a minute but I can’t help but lift my weary arm to offer her a little wave – words cannot travel the distance to my beautiful deaf child but one gesture can show her the way is clear for to approach.

And with this green light Amelia runs to my bedside, full pelt, to grasp my hand and throw her body across mine.

It’s my favourite time of day, the part when our bodies are so close and her face turns to my cheek to plant big, passionate smooches there. If I’m lucky, she might reach up to stroke my face with her hand.

Her sometimes-rough hands become gentle in the morning light.

I am barely awake but the smell of her, the feel of her, is everything to me in that moment.

Amelia is up and now so am I, and no matter what the hour, no matter how sleepless the night, and no matter how many ‘things’ I’ll be carting around for the rest of the day, in this moment my heart is bursting with happiness.

Dr Melinda Hildebrandt is a former film researcher and writer with a PhD in English. She writes about being the proud mother of Amelia who is deaf and autistic on her blog Moderate Severe Profound Quirky. You can find her on Twitter as @DrMel76.

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer.

Two things are due on October 14 this year. One is this tiny new life I am carrying inside of me, who will, if history repeats be at least one week late. The other is this book that I am scrawling down on paper this very moment.

The first due date is absolute. The second is arbitrary because I have no one waiting for it save my own expectation, fuelled by a certainty that if this is not completed before this new life is ready then there is a good chance of two terrible things occurring.

One. I never go into labour, so terrified am I of the manuscript remaining unfinished. I have that kind of magic in me. My first child was two weeks overdue, with no sign of labour at all. Eventually they had to cut him out of me. Due to the peculiar circumstances of my life at the time, the primal part of me must have believed the only way to keep him safe was to house him inside my body forever.

Two. I know that I will drown if I do not complete this, my virgin manuscript. I will drown in nappies and breast milk and fat rolls and stretch marks and human shit. And I will drown in metaphoric shit that has in fact been choking me since I was 18 when I first recognised that the only thing that matters is this. To write.

There is only one thing I really, really want to birth before I die. Or before I turn 40 preferably. Which takes nothing away from the babies I have birthed and am still yet to birth. They are great. Really. But one way or another they were coming out (to date one via caesarean and one vaginally. Let’s see what number three has in store). But a book has no such inevitability. It’s growth and appearance in the world has everything to do with my conscious mind, alas, with its entire sub-conscious, self-limiting, metaphoric faeces producing doubt.

I am over this. Do you hear me? Now. The urgency is tangible. If I do not produce this manuscript by the time little person number three comes along, I will die. Maybe not all of me. But certainly the part of me I most like. And so I must write. Just as baby must grow. She grows as she is programmed to do so and this time I take the same approach to my words. They must grow. And then, and only then, the baby can be born.

The deal is made.