# writerswrite

Recent 7-ON email-go-round:

 

I loved that question: what IS ‘lived experience’? It is so much more than biology, so much more even than social identity, it's the books we read, the plants we notice, it’s what makes us laugh, the bizarre dreams we have, our curiosity, the dishes we love to cook, the music that moves us, the fictional and real-life characters who inspire us ...

 

Have just realised … I have never been a gnome. Or any form of garden furniture. Problematic. 

 

Yes, and in my current play, I’ve never been an archbishop. 

 

I was thinking – Chekhov would have been okay. But Shakespeare – disaster! 

 

Oh, don’t even start. I’m not now, nor will ever be, an 11-year-old Chinese giant. Nor a 17th-century anatomist, a 16th-century wild child, an Iron Age bog queen. 

 

I’m not now, nor will ever be, a sort-of-Charon. Or a dead 1940s shop assistant. 

 

I’m not now, nor will ever be a teenage schoolgirl.

 

I’m not now, nor ever will be an octogenarian, dope-smoking, politically active Aunt.

 

I’m not now, nor ever will be a woman working in Foreign Affairs juggling an alternate lifestyle with a high-powered position in the Public Service.

 

I’m not now, nor ever will be an Albatross. 

 

There's a recent novel by Australian writer, Angela O'Keeffe, Night Blue, which is about Jackson Pollock's Blue Poles, told through the eyes of the painting itself. I think it's safe to assume that Angela O'Keeffe has never been a famous painting—or indeed any kind of painting. 

 

I’m not now, nor will ever be a ghost hunter. Maybe a ghost one day. Maybe.

 

I’m not now, nor will ever be a terrorist.

 

I have not now, nor will I ever give birth to a fish.

 

I’m not now, nor will ever be a man. Or a boy. Or an accountant working at a local council. Or married to William Shakespeare. 

 

‘There are, it seems to me, four main pathways to truth: science, reason, intuition and imagination.’ Iain McGilchrist, The Master and his Emissary: the Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.

 

I’m not now, nor will ever be (sadly) an angel.

 

‘Negative Capability, that is, when a man [sic] is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason ... ' Dead (Consumptive) Straight White Male.

 

I’m not nor ever will be a multi-billionaire, a captain of industry, or the shadow president of many countries but for one sparkling moment in the midst of writing, I thought I was.

 

Thanks to John Keats, Iain McGilchrist, Aubrey Beardsley, and Angela O’Keeffe for reminding us of the power of empathy and imagination. And the ability of artists to express them both.