​At the end of last month I had the pleasure of hosting new author, Mariam Ottimofiore, for her book tour of the Netherlands. Her book, This Messy Mobile Life, was published earlier this year and, after launches in Bangkok, Dubai and Accra, it was our turn. I invited her to speak at a pot luck lunch at my home directly after one of my free monthly Writers’ Circles. She agreed wholeheartedly and so, almost 20 people crammed into my sitting room to hear her talk about how to move from writer to blogger and why it should be something to think about.
 
“Who thinks they are a writer?” was her opening gambit.
 
About four raised their hands and one of them was me! What?I thought. Fifteen of them had just attended Writers’ Circle. Some of them have been coming along for more than ten years and they stilldon’t think they are a writer.
 
“Who invests in themselves as writers?” was her next question.
 
Three raised hands. Again one was mine.
 
So, they attend Writer’s Circle. They write and share at least two pieces of writing each time and yet they don’t believe they are investing in themselves as writers?  And yet believing you are a writer and investing in yourself as a writer are connected, surely? It stands to reason that if you write occasionally just for the fun of it then that must mean you are a little bit of a writer. A writer is someone who writes. Period. Who said that you need to be published in a newspaper, perhaps, or have a book deal with a publisher to be a real writer? I certainly didn’t. 
 
But then Mariam hit on the nub of the matter, going on to discuss Imposter Syndrome and how not really believing you are any good seems to go with the territory of being an artist –  painter, dancer, actor or writer. I believe that it is this inbuilt humility that makes you sharper. Makes you work harder and recognise that you are only ever really as good as your last piece of work. Mariam, who blogs very successfully at www.andthenwemovedto.com, believes that if we blog we should not judge our writing by the number of likes we get but by the number of shares and the comments we elicit. In other words it’s about the engagement we have with our readers.
 
A writer is someone is writes but they are never going to know if they are any good unless someone else reads it or listens to it and gives feedback. Those comments and shares are feedback. They are fuel for the writer. And, for many of us, receiving them goes some way towards believing we deserve to call ourselves writers. Attending a Writers’ Circle can tick this box too. For, if it is any good, the meetings should foster live engagement, sharing and feedback.
 
Surely then, attending a writing club or circle is a way of investing in yourself as a writer, isn’t it? Even if you only write for a few minutes each time. You see, even if you only move your pen across a page for ten minutes those ten minutes are an investment that will move you closer to that elusive self-belief.
 
When Mariam asked those questions I think the audience believed that ‘being a writer’ meant more than what they do already. I disagree. I think they believed that ‘investing in yourself’ meant more than giving yourself a few minutes alone with a pen and paper. I disagree. Sure, it can also mean that you pay to attend courses or attend writing retreats. But doesn’t buying a book on writing count? Doesn’t appreciating the writing craft in the novel you are reading count? Doesn’t making up a poem about the way the rain runs down the windowpane count? Doesn’t attending an author reading count? 
 
Earlier that morning several of the attendees burst into spontaneous tears, moved by their own writing or by another’s or, in at least one case, moved from the joy of words written and shared. Wasn’t that, then, investment? Weren’t those attendees who took two or three hours from their busy schedules that day investing in themselves and thus that makes them writers… just a little bit?
 
So, let me ask those questions again and add one more of my own:
 
“Are you a writer?”
 
“Do you invest in yourself as a writer?”
 
“What are you going to do this month to invest in yourself as a writer?”

Have you ever subscribed to a writing magazine? I have. Over the years I have taken Writing Magazine,The Writer,Mslexia, Granta and Poetry Magazine. I have found them not only to be valuable sources of advice but also of interviews with amateur and professional published writers. Importantly for me, when I was starting out, it was the source of new markets and competitions that was the main reason I took out subscriptions. For any writer there is nothing so compelling as a focus, a deadline and a word count to get the creative juices flowing. I know that, today, blogs are a great source of inspiration and content but, for me, there is nothing like the print version of a publication. As for the classifieds sections, they are always worth a read. 

I don’t know about you, but I do love a memoir. They are not the easiest genre to write because even though you are writing about real life you still need to have a plot and characters. You need to set scenes and evoke atmospheres that will be so familiar to you that it is hard to see them with fresh enough eyes to recreate them effectively for your readers. And, as for dialogue, it is phenomenally hard to remember what people said verbatim and how they said it and then write it down so it sounds natural. So, when I noticed that Tracey Thorn and her partner, Ben Watt, the two halves of one of my favourite bands, Everything But the Girl, had written memoirs, I decided to read both of them back to back and compare. Okay, so it’s not very fair of me to do that, but then I did know they both studied English at Hull university. I know this because they were contemporaries of mine and I saw them now and again on campus. I also know I love their songs and am particularly drawn to Tracey’s lyrics. They had also both gone on to write more than one memoir, so if the publishers liked their work their readers must have done so too. I was hopeful. 
 
I read Ben’s first. Romany and Tom. His parents. I bought it without reading the blurb and was slightly taken aback to realise this was a book about the last few weary years of his parents’, Romany and Tom's, lives. They were old, feeble and sick, so it’s hardly an attractive topic, but this book gives a snapshot of a life stage we will all go through once as our parents age and again as we age ourselves. It resonated big time. Tracey and the couple's three children feature as shadowy characters as does Ben’s own career but this is a book about his parents, his half-gypsy journalist mother and his now washed-up big band leader father, and their demise. Despite the maudlin topic, this is a great example of a book that stands squarely on its voice, for Ben is a terrific writer with a wonderful way with words. I could not put it down.
 
Tracey’s was next and frankly, despite the fact that she has an MA in English and is the pair’s lyricist, her memoir, Bedsit Disco Queen, is totally different. It is solely about her music career – and what a career it has been.  I’m no musician and so it didn’t resonate quite like Ben’s. That Tracey has a plot is not in dispute and we are compelled to read on to find out what happened between then and now and how they reached such meteoric heights when Tracey had little confidence in her ability. I guess she can't hear what we hear. That she can write is a given, but she handles narrative very differently from Ben, returning to her diaries, written at a time when she was less polished but no less honest. As she matures, so does the book and her writing comes into its own. I’m left impressed at how she handled times when memory's vague knowing that it had to be there; the fan reader really does want to know about the days before the band and how this quirky punk from Hatfield rose above other wannabes.
 
To me, Tracey and Ben come as a pair and have always come as a pair. They have lived and worked together since they were 19. They ‘walk the same line’ as Tracey sang in We Walk The Same Line in 1994. While they often tell the same story, having both lived it, they do so very differently. Their voices are different. They alight on different aspects of the same story and they tell it their way.
 
So, when you consider how you might tackle writing your own memoir, I invite you to consider how you might choose to tell it – like Ben, who expands a short space of time into his 350 page memoir, or Tracey, who packs over 25 years into hers.

Three weeks ago Ian and I took our summer holiday. We joined dear friends for a week sailing in Croatia.  It was our second time there, only a year earlier, just as we’d landed at Dubrovnik airport my phone rang. It was Joshua telling me the terrible news that my father had passed away in his sleep. Of course I would fly straight back to England to be with my mother but, as it took a while to get a flight, I spent two nights on board first. 
   
My memory is sketchy of that time. All I can remember is the pervasive scent of rosemary and collapsing in floods of tears several times a day. According to Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “rosemary’s for remembrance” and the phrase ran in a loop each time I crossed its path.
     
​This year I planned to actually notice Croatia and engage with the experience and so I did. I relaxed into the gentle sway of the boat and watched the sky endlessly as it moved from a buttery sunrise to sunsets streaked with indigo and pink. I tasted every bite of the fresh local seafood and became entranced by the surface of the sea in each of the bays we chose for our berth. I like to focus on the things I hear and see and feel and smell and try to describe what they are like so someone else can imagine it too. Sometimes I use similes, sometimes I just find the right words, so maybe the sea was transparent aquamarine, rippled like fish skin or flat, shiny and thick as an oil slick. I went for a morning swim and focused hard on each of the sounds I could hear, singling them out one by one and naming them: the put put of an outboard motor, the clap of flip flops walking on tarmac, birdsong like a sticky spoke in a bicycle wheel, the squeal and splosh as a young boy leapt from the deck. I was engaged. I was mindful and my mind ran tickertape subtitles as I silently put words to it all. Oh yes, we had a marvellous time. I laughed and I sang and I did not cry. But all the time, at the back of mind, was the thought that I needed to find something inspiring to write about for you this month. And everywhere I turned was that incredible smell of rosemary and whenever it filled my nostrils I was jerked back in time to the previous summer and for a few moments inspiration fled. 
 
It was the last day and we had to be off the boat by 9 am. Bags crowded the deck as we slowly denuded the cabins of all our belongings and the last job was to take the empty bottles and rubbish out to the bins. The task fell to me and the bags bumped against my bare legs as I walked first the gangplank, then the bouncing jetty to the shore. Past the café, the showers and the shop and into the carpark I walked, eventually finding the bins buried halfway down the carpark. There was a huge half-empty silver skip and a range of coloured containers to choose from. But then I heard voices. Three pairs of hands reached through the wire mesh of the fence. I looked up and the whiskery faces of three old women with stringy grey hair called to me. “Here! Here!” they called and their fingers beckoned. They wanted my bags of rubbish. How ridiculous, I thought and moved to look at the signs telling me where to put my plastic, paper and bottles. I pulled the first plastic bottle from my bag and a shriek went up from the one of the fence ladies while the hands waved madly. They wanted my empty bottles! In the end it transpired that they wanted all my recyclable materials and so I gladly passed them through the fence for them to stuff into large sacks as they hollered for the attention of the next customers.
 
As I walked back to the jetty it came to me. In writing, very often, our stories are found not in the obvious places, not in the bright and shiny or blissful moments, but down amongst the grit and the dirt and the sorrow. 
 
I often tell my students that their best writing will be the parts of their text that other people remember the next day. I’ll wager that the parts of this story that will stay with you are not my eulogies and my glossy memories of water and sunsets but of my lingering grief and the whiskery rubbish collectors. ​

I’ve been busy since May creating and trialling a brand new 12-week programme that helps people to start creating and writing their life stories one piece at a time.  I call it the Life Story Jar programme and the first wave is now complete so I’m moving towards a launch late this year. Don’t let your stories and memories die with you. My programme, divided into modules on various themes such as childhood and friendship, teaches you how to leave an important written legacy. 
 
Want to register your interest now to be sure you don’t miss out? Just drop me an email.

WHEN: Friday 25th October, 10:00-12:30 
WHAT: Writers’ Circle
WHERE: Jo’s house, Archipel, The Hague
COST: Free
ENQUIRE: Email Jo

March in Malaysia

WHEN: 16-19 March 2020 on Penang Island and at Tiger Rock, Pangkor Island, Malaysia. 4pm 16 March, Penang – 4pm 19 March, Penang.
WHAT: Immerse yourself in the fascinating heritage of UNESCO World Heritage Site’s George Town for one night and then spend two nights in the exclusive jungle island retreat of Tiger Rock. Perfectly timed to follow the Families in Global Transition conference in Bangkok, 13-15 March.
COST: £750 includes all food, transport and accommodation. Want to go straight to the ferry to Tiger Rock on 17th? Pay £600.
ENQUIRE: Email Jo

April in Holland
​
WHEN: 17-19 April, The Hague, Netherlands. 3pm-7pm 17 April, 9.30am-7pm 18 April, 10am-7pm 19 April.
WHAT: Come be inspired by art and flowers in the delightful city, seat of the Dutch parliament. Visit the stunning Keukenhof Gardens when the bulbs are at their peak and the Mauritshuis, home of The Girl With a Pearl Earring. You will also have a few hours on Sunday 19th to explore at your own pace.
COST: £390 includes excursions, cocktails and canapés. Does not include accommodation or meals.
ENQUIRE: Email Jo

​I’ve just emerged from the cinema, my cheeks and Ian’s damp from tears. At one point most of the audience could be heard choking back sobs, squeaking gently in their attempt to stay quiet. The film was Ramen Shop. It was in Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, English and Singlish (that’s what they call the way Singaporeans speak English – and yes, the Singaporeans call it that too) and told the story of a Japanese-Singapore Chinese Cross-Cultural young man called Masato who, at the start, was helping out in his widowed father’s ramen shop in Japan. It was not long before we understood the reason his very talented father continued to make the same broth and the same soup every day was because it was his way of keeping the memory of his wife, Mei Lan, alive. Masato travels to Singapore, where he was born and where he lived for the first ten years of his life, in search of the memory of his mother who had passed away not long after the family moved to Japan. As he moved from one unpretentious street-side family-run soup joint to another he found the tastes of his childhood wherein lay the essence of his beloved mother. Food had led him home. His uncle taught him how to make bak kut teh, the pork rib soup of his childhood, and the act of creating it was infused with intense spices and emotions. The more he learned, the more he cooked, the more his heart was infused with love and loss. There were moments in the film when no words were spoken but we could see in the way Masato held his chopsticks or gazed into his spoon that his heart was both full and breaking at the same time. As his eyes locked onto his grandmother’s and tears rolled down his face, they rolled down ours too. It was some of the most intense cinema I have ever seen.
 
I shan’t spoil the film and urge you to see it for yourself but there are two reasons why I feel so compelled to share this with you. Mei Lan had kept a journal, written to her son for the first years of his life in her native Mandarin, which was unfamiliar to her son. In it she had shared her deepest most private feelings, pressed petals from Japanese cherry blossom, sketches and, importantly, recipes. Recipes that were filled with culture, tradition, family values, heritage and nutrition. We watched enthralled as Miki, a Singapore-based Japanese food blogger who Masato had befriended online, turned the pages of the journal and translated it for him. Now Masato could connect with his mother again. Masato’s mother had preserved precious truths in those pages. She wrote about her life so that her son could find the places where she had lived, worked and had fun and could walk in her shoes. He could learn about what mattered to her, deep inside. Though his mother had passed away when he was only ten, he was at last able to keep his relationship with her alive. Mei Lan knew the value of keeping her stories and her truth, sacred not secret. This is why I created my Life Story Jar programme, so that people like Masato can get to meet beloved relatives who have passed, and through those pages, written with such love and feeling, they can stay connected.
 
Food transcends cultures and generation. At its core it is filled with nutrition and culture but, when made with love, that love is a powerful thing. I urge you to write to your own families and as you do so relive the intense emotions that were present at the time of your defining moments and be sure to include the recipes that matter.
 
Ian and I left the cinema that day and made a beeline for an Asian supermarket so we could buy soup noodles, Chinese cabbage and pork ribs. The broth bubbled on the stove for five hours just as it had for Masato and his father.
 
It was such an inspiring film. Go and see it if you can and please make sure you start writing a diary so that your family can come to know who you really are.

​Getting a book published can be an expensive process. Having helped 200 new authors to write, edit, design and publish their books over the last 17 years I know what it can cost. Many authors decide to go for crowdfunding in order to raise the cash required. So, last month I was delighted to hear about a company called Unbound. As publishers they consider a book for publication and then, if they like it, they help you to crowdfund to pay for it. As a result, they have raised over £7 million to fund 470 projects since they began. They are British and based in London. It’s a cool idea, right?

​While we’re on the subject of soup, did you know I’d written a novel called Sunshine Soup? Yeah, right, marketing isn’t my strong suit. It had been my lifelong dream to write and publish a novel and so in 2011 I did just that and it was easily the hardest thing I have ever written. It was very loosely based on some of my experiences in Dubai and tells the story of mum Maya, in her 40’s, married to Rich, a pilot and expat for the first time.  Blind-sided by a stamp in her passport that said she was not able to work Maya had to be creative to come up with something that would give her life meaning. It’s a parable of sorts and includes some of the stuff I put in my book, A Career in Your Suitcase.

I’ve been busy since May creating and trialling a brand new 12-week programme that helps people to start creating and writing their life stories one piece at a time. I call it the Life Story Jar programme and the first wave is now complete so I’m moving towards a launch later this year. Don’t let your stories and memories die with you. My programme, divided into modules on various themes such as childhood and friendship, teaches you how to leave an important written legacy. More news to follow in the next Monthly Inspirer. Want to register your interest now to be sure you don’t miss out? Just drop me an email at jo@joparfitt.com.

​September is all about Mariam Ottimofiore… She has a punishing schedule of talks taking place in The Hague from 24th – 27th September. You can see the full list here, but I am happy to host the one below.

​When: Friday 27th September, 10:00-12:30
​Where: Jo's house, Archipel, The Hague
​Cost: Free including lunch
​Book: Email at jo@joparfitt.com

​When: Friday 27th September, 12:30-14:00
Where: Jo's house, Archipel, The Hague
Cost: Free
Book: Email Jo at ​ jo@joparfitt.com

​Earlier this year, after 12 months’ mentoring from me, Jack and I  were delighted to publish This Messy Mobile Life by Mariam Ottimofiore. We are very lucky that she is visiting The Hague in late September and can come to talk to us about her move from blogger to writer to author.

When: 16th - 19th March, 2020
What: Immerse yourself in the fascinating heritage of UNESCO World Heritage Site’s George Town for one night and then spend two nights in the exclusive jungle island retreat of Tiger Rock. Perfectly timed to follow the Families in Global Transition conference in Bangkok, 13-15 March
Cost: £750 includes accommodation and all food. ​Want to go straight to Tiger Rock on 17th? Pay £600
​Enquire: ​Email at jo@joparfitt.com

When:  17th - 19th April, 2020, The Hague
What: Come be inspired by art and flowers in the delightful city, seat of the Dutch parliament. Visit the stunning Keukenhof Gardens when the bulbs are at their peak and the Mauritshuis, home of The Girl With a Pearl Earring. You will also have a few hours on Sunday 19th to explore at your own pace
Cost: £390 includes excursions, cocktails and canapés. Does not include accommodation or meals
​Enquire: Email at jo@joparfitt.com

When: 9th - 16th May, 2020 - 7 nights
What: Write Life Stories fully inclusive residential retreat hosted by Bill and Lois Breckon. This will be my fifth time at the mill. Come and learn how to write about your life in an exquisite setting. Includes 30 hours of lessons
Cost: Approx £1,800, depending on your choice of room
​Enquire: More details and how to book on watermill.net