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About the author and blogger ...

Anne Goodwin’s drive to understand what makes people tick led to a career in clinical psychology. That same curiosity now powers her fiction.
A prize-winning short-story writer, she has published three novels and a short story collection with small independent press, Inspired Quill. Her debut novel, Sugar and Snails, was shortlisted for the 2016 Polari First Book Prize.
Away from her desk, Anne guides book-loving walkers through the Derbyshire landscape that inspired Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.
Subscribers to her newsletter can download a free e-book of award-winning short stories.

TELL ME MORE

Memory, memoir and fiction (again): A Daughter Your Age & Washday Blues

20/2/2016

17 Comments

 
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I once had a summer job in a pickle factory in Germany. The work was boring, smelly and noisy but the money, even though being foreign and female entitled the management to pay us at a lower rate, was good. I shared some of the memories for a
bite-size memoir challenge on first jobs a couple of years ago, but I didn’t expect I’d turn it into fiction. To be honest, I didn’t find interesting enough.

I wrote recently about how
fiction can function as a metaphor for the personal stories we struggle to tell. This post is about the reverse side of that, of how, in fiction, we can take a mundane, or shapeless, event from our lives and stretch it into a more intriguing story.

The pickle factory was in a village with a couple of pubs, but we had to travel to a larger town in the Netherlands to do our food shopping. If we missed the bus, we’d hitch across the border. Only once did I have any concerns about my safety.
The man who picked me up that morning didn’t seem suspicious but, instead of sticking to the main road, he took me on a detour to show me his house. It was a rural area, forested; the kind of place that would be accompanied by an ominous sound track in a movie. But nothing untoward actually happened. He pointed out his house as we whizzed by and dropped me ten minutes later at the train station.

I don’t know what prompted me to think of this a few months ago, but I got to wondering just what had been in that man’s mind when he turned off the main road. What did he think I would think? Before long, my musings developed into a short story, and I liked it enough to send it off to a competition, something I hadn’t done for a few years.

I was already a writer when I went to work in the pickle factory; I’d even won a student writing prize, but I hadn’t served my time. But I like the idea that winning a competition now with a story based on my late adolescence can be a gift from me to my younger self. There was a bit of Katherine Carlyle’s recklessness in me in those days such that I can’t help breathing a sigh of relief that I came out the other end.

Thanks to The Writer’s Bureau of this vote of confidence in my writing which, even with a novel published, I still need. Do go over to the site to read A Daughter Your Age and tell me what you think.

I planned to pair this post with an apology for dropping out of Irene Waters’ Times Past memoir project at only the second hurdle. After my breathless discovery that I could relate to memoir as social history, I realised that, in contrast to some of the other respondents’ contributions, mine read more like a research report than creative non-fiction. The source of my difficulty became clearer when I analysed my feelings in response to this month’s prompt to write about our first memories of washday.

For me, creative writing is about
storytelling, and story derives from character. Even the description of an activity, such as the self-harm scene in the opening chapter of my novel, is revealing of character in the emotions, or lack thereof. So a story about washday is inevitably a story about my mother. Given that part of the reason I make things up is my complicated relationship with my parents, this isn’t something that makes my fingers itch to dance across the keyboard (or, in my case, to dictate to the recalcitrant toddler who lives in my machine).

But one of the great things about being a writer is how the sentences can sometimes flit across our minds uninvited. My subconscious chose to go with the memoir prompt as if it were a flash fiction challenge. The story it’s generated is a little over the usual 99 words, but I think it gives the flavour of washday memories for this kid at the end of the Baby Boomer generation.

On Mondays, the atmosphere was as steamy as the water in the top-loader, as grey as after the last batch of laundry had been churned through the machine. My stomach was as tight as the clothes squeezed through the ringer, my heart as cold as the wind whipping at my fingers as I pegged the damp sheets on the line. Often, Being Good could take the heat out of my mother, the grey out of a day. Being Good could relax my stomach and take the chill off my hands. But not on Washing Day. I was too young to understand back then but, on Washing Day, my mother felt as trapped by domesticity as a lion in a cage.
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This blurry photograph is from a different time and place: me washing clothes in the river in India circa 1985.  I was quite proud of my prowess as a dhobi.
Thanks for reading. I'd love to know what you think. If you've enjoyed this post, you might like to sign up via the sidebar for regular email updates and/or my quarterly Newsletter.
17 Comments
Sarah
20/2/2016 11:44:28 pm

That memoir / "flash fiction" is fantastic. I love it. And congratulations on the short story. 🎉 Over to read it...

Reply
Sarah
21/2/2016 12:03:11 am

Brilliant story, Anne. Don't want to give anything away so... Really well done!

Reply
Annecdotist
21/2/2016 05:19:51 pm

Double thanks, Sarah. Glad you liked them both!

Reply
Irene Waters link
21/2/2016 04:28:08 am

Congratulations Anne. Like Sarah I am not going to spoil the story for anyone else but will say that I agree with everything the judges said. A deserved win.
Thank you for participating again in Times Past.Your flash memoir adds an extra layer to the mix this week and put me as the reader into the emotions of the young you whilst giving us a very visual image of laundry day in your house.

Reply
Annecdotist
21/2/2016 05:22:45 pm

Thank you so much, Irene.
With the memoir, I wasn't sure if it would give enough of a sense of the practicalities of washday in that era, but then I decided just to go with what resonated for me. Glad you thought it worked.

Reply
Heather Burnside link
22/2/2016 03:04:26 pm

Congratulations on winning 1st Prize, Anne. It's a great story. I enjoyed the one above too, and it's interesting reading about your inspiration for the Writer's Bureau short story.

Reply
Annecdotist
23/2/2016 03:28:43 pm

Thanks so much, Heather, kind of you to read and comment.

Reply
Charli Mills
22/2/2016 11:32:27 pm

Of course, I'd love the format you put it into both for the familiarity of the constraint and the grace with which you met the memoir struggle. I'm still struggling but plan to sneak in later this week. I like the result of the reflection on your mother and how trapped she must have felt in that duty, among others.

Reply
Annecdotist
23/2/2016 03:31:51 pm

Thanks, Charli, yours was definitely one of those last time that made me think (in a good way) that I needed to raise my game. Still have very mixed feelings about memoir, but I think my writing is very driven by emotion and was pleased to find a way of capturing that – without too much compromise.

Reply
Mrs Sherri Matthews link
26/2/2016 07:10:28 pm

Anne, your memoir/flash is superb (and here we could go again, ha!)...and your short story is incredible. Just read it. Many congratulations. I did my creative non-fiction writing course with the Writer's Bureau. It's wonderful to see you there as the deserved winner. I also loved the critique and as Irene says here, agree with every word :-)

Reply
Annecdotist
27/2/2016 01:24:52 pm

Thanks so much for reading and commenting, Sherri.
I hadn’t seen initially that the judge’s comments were included with my story – I think they weren’t there when I first had the link – but it’s lovely to be able to get a taste of the thinking behind the decision. Helps me see what I should try and keep doing.
A course with the WB is actually part of the prize and I’ve opted to do the article writing course which I think has some overlap with the one that you did. I thought it would be helpful for the guest blog post I am writing etc but since signing up I’ve become obsessed with short stories and drafted three last week from ideas that have been floating about in my head for years.

Reply
Lisa Reiter link
29/2/2016 01:08:57 pm

Gorgeous bite of memoir Anne. A lot summed up in there and I've just read your story competition winner - it is fab! I was surprised and relieved at the ending and love the message. The fact that it's derived from a smaller event in your own life just goes to show how intricately wound imagination is with experience.

Reply
Annecdotist
1/3/2016 09:27:34 am

Thanks, Lisa, they're both certainly strongly intertwined for me – but this would have been a pretty boring story if I'd stuck to the truth of my experience!

Reply
Norah Colvin link
10/3/2016 11:00:36 am

You were right in sending me to this post, Anne, and I finally get here to comment! I always enjoy your posts for the wonderful perspectives you add to everything you read. I have linked through from other posts to this one, and from this one to others. I've been galloping all over the place so I hardly know what I've read where. I had a bit of catching up to do - and still more to come!
Congratulations on your short story. It is well deserving of the prize. It is a gripping read. As others have commented, I totally agree with the opinion of the judges. I am yet to read a disappointing story from your "pen". (The toddlers obviously don't wreak too much havoc on your storytelling prowess.) I think I have previously commented on enjoying the twist at the end of many of your stories. This one is craftily done.
Your wash day memoir had me weeping for you, and then weeping for your mum. Being trapped by society's expectations was a punishment too cruel for many to bear. Unfortunately their private torment was often meted out unmercifully on the innocents that were created and trapped by those same expectations. You mention that for you creative writing is storytelling, and that storytelling is to do with character. Both your short story and your memoir demonstrate your talent to do just this.
Your work in a pickle factory reminds me of one of my first holiday jobs - three weeks shoveling frozen peas into plastic bags along a production line. I haven't yet explored its story potential. It froze the mind as well as the fingers!

Reply
Annecdotist
10/3/2016 02:43:32 pm

Thanks for making it across here, Norah, and glad you liked the story. I did remember what you’d said about my twists some time ago, and particularly in relation to this story, which is why I particularly wanted you to see it.
I think you’ve captured the essence of my memoir perfectly in recognising the tragedy for both “characters” – certainly not uncommon at that time.
I wonder if your holiday job seemed attractive initially in the novelty of being somewhere cold. But that’s a great line which you should definitely use in its capacity to freeze the mind as well as the fingers.

Reply
Suzanne link
21/3/2017 04:58:19 pm

I have emailed you about The Writers Bureau and would love some feedback to my email. A Daughter Your Age, is brilliant.

Reply
Annecdotist
22/3/2017 09:53:17 am

Welcome to my blog, Suzanne, and hope you received my reply to your email. I’m so glad you enjoyed my short story and thanks for reading.

Reply



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