Caro Giles Writes...
The Chain Week One
Hi friends,
Here as a free or Membership-level subscriber? Enjoy this beautiful slice of memoir from
written exclusively for us to launch The Chain: our six-week flash memoir experiment in co-creation. After you read, hit the heart, please! New here? Head to this post to find out what The Chain is all about, and upgrade to paid if you want access to our writers’ own responses, posted to the comments after our live writing sessions.Here as a link in The Chain? As above! Have a think about how you might want to use this as a prompt for your own writing then join me and your fellow writers on Zoom at 11am or 8pm UK time for whichever of our hour-long writing sprints suit you today. Use the same link in your email for all sessions. You have half an hour following the close of our live session in which to post your writing as a comment on this piece if you’d like to enter it for consideration as next week’s prompt.
I can’t wait to work alongside you.
I’m sitting cross-legged on my bed, hiding away from the many things I could or should be doing if I wasn’t pouring my head into my computer. Outside, after-school tyres swoosh over tarmac and a heavy sky threatens rain. I cast my mind to the washing I’ve strung across the back lane, get ready to race out and gather it into my arms. On the table next to the radiator, flowers I trimmed and placed in a white jug last week are past their best. A faded orange lily petal lies upside down on the mahogany surface, and the head of a yellow rose droops. I am frayed and tired, my eyes dry and stinging. I could lie down for a few moments, close them against the day and let my bones to sink into the duvet. Yet here I am, tap tap tapping on the keyboard, trying to make sense of all the who’s, why’s and when’s.
I’ve written before about how resistance and rage can lurk amongst the bubbles in the washing up bowl, how dreams click behind my eyes like Super 8 film images as I scan the supermarket aisles. I don’t really know any other way to create than amongst the domestic mess of life. So as I lean back against my pillows and type, having just interrupted my work to run out into the rain and rescue my laundry, my mind is scattered between the many little moments that make up my days.
The tyres outside are louder now, slicing puddles that have formed on the road. A daughter texts me, telling me she is only minutes away and needs collecting from her school bus. My heart races a little as I quickly try to form my thoughts into sentences, excavate my mind and think about what I really want to say.
If I question why it is that I am compelled to record my life on the page, I suppose it is in order to make sense of this wild adventure I am living. I want to understand why it feels as if everything I do is for the first time, yet there is such solace in the resonance of other people’s experiences. I will never fail to be surprised by the way the newness of each day rubs up against emotions and actions as old as time. Every moment I inhabit is fresh and raw, but also I am not the first person to raise four daughters alone, run naked across icy sand, or dance barefoot in my kitchen.
My phone pings once more, and I swing my feet off the bed and into waiting trainers. I’ll continue to mull this thought, stretch it and weave it around my brain until a few minutes fall into my lap and I can pin it onto the page in another guise. Less time to write lends my creativity an urgency that sometimes drenches my words. All we have is now.
Buy Twelve Moons: A Year Under a Shared Sky (Harper North 2023)
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We have house guests coming on Tuesday, which focuses the mind and directs my energies, if no one else’s. The friends who are coming will barely be here because they’re in the city for something else and our house is simply a necessary base in a city where affordable family accommodation is thin on the ground. I’m good with that. The request felt to me a sign of our friendship. What else is there to say to the honest question of “We aren’t coming to see you, we know, but could we stay with you anyway?”
Of course.
I read somewhere that one of the tests of a genuine friendship is being at peace with throwing open your doors to invited guests without cleaning and tidying first. Without stuffing the evidence of the messy life you actually lead into cupboards and drawers. Without cooking a special meal, without baking a celebration cake, burning incense or doing all the other silly things we do that convince no one that we live that way all the time.
I remember liking this warm approach to hosting, thinking that it sounded to me like the ultimate generosity. Meet me where I am – unvarnished, unembellished. This is me and I know you’ll accept me for that, as I accept you. It made me think of the sorts of spontaneous hospitality I’ve seen and experienced elsewhere in the world that we, in Britain, do so rarely (and poorly). Times when I’ve been welcomed, fed and watered without ceremony. How such generosity – offered without expectation of reciprocity – has felt hard to accept. People without a lot to go around still sharing what they had.
And yet, I’ve spent much of my weekend cloth, duster or hoover in hand. There are cookies in the fridge ready for the oven at a moment’s notice. There are multiple dining options in my head ready to be deployed depending on the amount of time we have with them between arrival and departure. They’ve managed expectations, telling me they’ll barely be here (which I hear as their way of asserting they want no fuss) but none of it stops me from doing the things I do.
I wonder at what the cleanliness and tidiness, the stage management of it all says about my need, still, to be palatable to others. Whether I’ll ever move beyond it, even in the knowing that the doing of it all will likely be felt more as a pressure by my guests to be a certain type of guest given I’ve gone to evident effort on their behalf.
Just jumping in here for three reasons: first to say I've copied and pasted all of the brilliant responses so far as best I can without reading them into a word doc so that I can read them at close of day with as little extraneous noise / identifying features as I can (though I know many of you and your work already so 🫠).
I'll be looking for and selecting a piece with two criteria in mind: clear scope for editorial input which is not an easy task since all of you so far are writing SO INCREDIBLY WELL not only under these conditions but IN GENERAL and with an eye on ways to steer us for next week a wee bit if I see a new or a different angle. I cannot therefore come at this task simply from an enjoyment perspective! I want the editorial process to be valuable to the writer, so I'm not judging anyone's work as 'the best' when I make my selection. Hope that's clear. I want to be able to offer valuable, actionable feedback and give all the writers taking part plenty of scope moving from week to week.
Secondly, thank you everyone for entering into this spirit of this endeavour with such bravery, grace and sense of collegiality. It's been absolutely brilliant watching you all respond to one another throughout the day, prompting yet more thoughts and ideas. We are ourselves such fertile ground. It was my hope that I could open this space mostly for you guys to do this for one another across the weeks and you have leapt right in ❤️
Lastly, there have been some Zoom glitches for folk (that I don't have an answer to but others might?!) so if you're coming live at 8pm tonight just check you can get in ok in advance 😃