A few yards of something exciting and beautiful

and death contemplations in the peak of spring

This month’s newsletter was nearly missed; as it happens, it is only one day late. A much anticipated and greatly enjoyed week in Florence took me over a week’s worth to replenish energy reserves I didn’t know I had and to get back to the writing - or to the stitching together the patchwork of a life.

Over the last two weeks, I’ve been trying to shape a memoir section tied together by the textiles theme. The more I rummage through the fragments box, the more threads I discover running through the whole work. Nor am I the only writer to compare fabric with writing.

In her diary, Virginia Woolf contemplates the hustle and bustle of London:

We were all being shot backwards and forwards on this plain foundation to make some pattern.

And a few pages later:

It was as if the great machine after labouring all day had made with our help a few yards of something very exciting and beautiful – a fiery fabric flashing with red eyes, a tawny monster roaring with hot breath.

Elizabeth Gilbert takes her story back to the drawing board (sewing table?) and muses:

Could I still manage to make it work? I began suturing the narrative back into a sort of sense. As I pieced and pinned sentences together, I realized that the cuts had indeed transformed the entire tone of the story, but not necessarily in a bad way.

Big Magic

Over the years I’ve written about fabrics, going off on different but related tangents: Jane Austen’s marvel of a quilt, and the messages it carries for writers; an elderly aunt and her furious crochet habit that betrayed repressed emotions; hijab, the piece of fabric that usually rests on my head, both hiding and revealing. Above all, the fabric scraps I discovered in the Athens flat and had shipped to London, and which continue to tempt me with the challenge of unrealised projects and untold stories.

Fabrics and textiles have always figured large in my life since I remember myself. The trunk that carried Mama’s trousseau from Alexandria, Egypt to Athens yielded a cornucopia of linen, embroideries and fabric handicrafts; some of them I did not remember ever seeing, like the table runner in the image above. (Those who follow my social media will have seen this embroidery as the background to many of my still life and book photos.) As soon as I un-trunked this treasure, I knew it would become a permanent feature of the room of my own without knowing why. ‘Knowing’ is one thing, ‘feeling’ is another.

Photo evidence shows that this runner was displayed on the dining room sideboard, to the right of the photo, at Eleni’s christening.

I don’t know whether it was Mama’s or Yaya’s project, but I will make up this story and gift it to my Mama’s memory. (Today is mother’s Day in Greece; I used to forget it when she was alive.)

After years of frustrated hope, Mama is finally pregnant with me. To while away the time, she buys a DMC cross-stitch paper pattern, embroidery canvas and the required skeins of embroidery thread in unusually vibrant colours - at least for the Mama I remember.

She sets to work in the long winter nights, and throughout spring and summer, in anticipation of my late October birth. Turquoise for the Attic sky and the Kassos sea; bright orange and two shades of green for new life; sand for the soil that grows new life; dots of yellow all around for life-giving sunshine. The pattern is regularly repeated throughout without a border. She measures out the stitches, filling out each colour as she moves through the fabric. She is making a new baby and a new world.

The baby is gradually transformed from a chewed-up morsel of meat into a miniature human; the blank canvas is filled with uplifting colours; Mama’s moments are imprinted onto a tangible object rehearsing the regularity and the certainty of her happy life ever after. When the main project is over, she lines it with thick, beige taffeta and trims it with a rust-gold fringe. After Eleni’s christening there is no evidence that this runner was used again. The anticipation of the new baby and the excitement of creation faded and were eventually forgotten as the daily grind of two small babies, Baba’s absence and Yaya’s presence shaped her life. The runner was put away in the trunk, with mothballs knotted in torn mesh stockings, in anticipation of other momentous occasions that would come at an indeterminate ‘later’ time.

She may not have expected that the runner would never be used again in her lifetime. The momentous occasion came nine years after her death, when the embroidery emerged from the trunk, still pristine. I had to make sense of it all. I brought it over to London where it lives permanently on my writing desk by the window. It now has a coffee stain, and a couple of wax drips; it’s a question of time until an ink stain or two make an appearance, all traces of a messy, lived life. I hope Mama wouldn’t mind; I like to think that she put it away as a message that would speak in its own good time.

The rest of the strands…

The Stoic Salon

(Image above: me stepping on a grave in Santa Croce Cathedral, Florence, 28 April 2023)

Two inspiring events led by community members are already underway at the Stoic Salon. We are now one week into a 28-Day Joyful Death Contemplation with Stoic texts. No time like the present to contemplate the end of life: in the middle of spring, with new life brimming over every nook, timely reminders to enjoy the everlasting now.

We are also now near the end of the first 30-day course of daily journaling with Brittany Polat’s Journal like a Stoic, a 90-day programme arranged in three 30-day courses. The first course called “Examining the Inner Critic” started on Monday 3 April 2023. The second 30-day course called “The Road to Acceptance” is about to start in early July. Did you need to hear this? Is it a coincidence? Or a message from the universe? (log in to slack and join the 4-journal-like-a-stoic channel).

Will you join us? New friends are always welcome.

Memoir and Life Writing

The Memoir and Life Writing group at The London Writers Salon, continues to meet up on the 1st and 3rd Thursday of each month, to get to know each other, talk about our work and share experiences and resources.

The next community meeting of the Memoir and Life Writing group is on Thursday 18 May, 5-6 pm BST, when we will catch up and check-in with successes and gripes.

If you would like join hundreds of other writers writing in community, join the free Writers’ Hour; one of the four daily sessions is bound to fit in with your daily schedule. We can’t wait to welcome you and to write together!

The heart meets the (left) hand in an embrace of imperfection