The Writing Life Podcast

National Centre for Writing

In May 2023 I was invited by the National Centre for Writing to take part in a panel for the City of Literature Weekend as part of Norfolk and Norwich Festival. Before the event I recorded an episode of The Writing Life Podcast with former CEO Chris Gribble.

This episode of The Writing Life Podcast was published on 23/10/2023 and you can listen to it here:

The Craft of Life Writing with Fiona Mason

We chatted about life writing, about my memoir 36 Hours and about life as a writer. Thanks to Chris for being a perfect host.

It was a great opportunity to share something of the journey from initial idea to publication of 36 Hours and to talk about the support I received from Arts Council England with a Developing Your Creative Practice award.

36 Hours

36 Hours Fiona Mason

I’m delighted to announce the publication of 36 Hours.

36 Hours Fiona Mason

ABOUT

Less than a year after being diagnosed with inoperable cancer, Fiona Mason’s husband died at home. She was his carer. Unflinching in its detail, this book is a delicate chronicle of his last day and an account of thirty-six hours that changed her life. It’s also an invitation to find better ways to talk about death and dying.

Buy Now

Bookshop.org: https://bit.ly/3sAbAFF

Waterstones: https://bit.ly/36HoursFM

Kindle Edition: amzn.to/3EWct16

Amazon: https://amzn.to/3EmOXKi

Buying from EU or overseas? EMAIL for details.

REVIEWS

Fiona’s intimate account of the last 36 hours of a man’s life is a powerful work of life writing. It’s courageous, tender, exasperated, angry, lyrical and occasionally even funny, but never voyeuristic. The simplicity of the prose and the honesty of observation are compelling. BLAKE MORRISON

This is a beautiful and moving account by Fiona Mason of her husband’s death at home. Their experience of care professionals, who attended in person yet without compassion, is so deftly observed it made me wince. A perfect 36 Hour memoir. It’s incredibly powerful. It’s beautifully told. It’s a gem. I think this is a book that has the power to make a difference. DR KATHRYN MANNIX 

Very moving and beautifully written. Marvellously clear and brave. JENNY UGLOW OBE

Powerful and precise writing. It tackles elusive emotional states in a highly nuanced way. The detail is so lovingly preserved and presented. SASHA DUGDALE

Rarely have I felt so transported by someone else’s words. Fiona draws you into the most intimate and personal of spaces and offers you the privilege of sharing 36 hours that would normally be invisible to the outside world. With great honesty and generosity, she invites us into her home as she cares for her dying husband. It’s an invitation you won’t want to turn down. BOBBIE FARSIDES, Professor of Clinical and Biomedical Ethics, Brighton and Sussex Medical School

36 Hours addresses an area of real current debate and interest and does so in a way that prioritises both aesthetic and human concerns equally. Committed and talented writing. CHRIS GRIBBLE, National Centre for Writing

The writing is vivid and very clear, highlighting the delicate balance and poignancy of the work involved in end-of-life care and the minutiae of support involved in the simplest of daily activities, making the mundane poetic. A remarkable piece of work. KATE FLATT OBE

Deeply moving and intensely raw. LI MILLS, Death Doula

I’m in awe of the honesty and openness with which Fiona described her experience. Her account is a wonderful way of opening up some much-needed conversations about death and dying, not only at a public/societal level but, also at the patient-professional level. DR SIMONE ALI, Consultant in Palliative Medicine

***** Waterstones

***** Goodreads

***** Amazon

Developing My Creative Practice – 5

On The Uses of Life Writing

We already possess the potential for transition from grub to butterfly.

The DYCP project has forced me to consider my relationship to life writing. Especially my ability to manage the realities of personal exposure.

I committed to a gruelling project. As such, I’ve had to re-inhabit a distressing and painful period in my life. And I’ve had to consider how much I want my creative life to be bound to the public reliving of personal of experiences.

Stilling the Inner Voices of Admonition

The desire to have others bear witness to one’s experience whilst metaphorically wanting to hide behind the sofa, is a contradiction inherent in life writing. And it’s one that I have not fully resolved. I’m not a ‘me’ sort of person. I’m an other-focussed rescuer. In this context, writing about myself with the express intention of public sharing, feels unnatural and awkward. I can hear my Grandmother’s stern reproaches about showing-off – small children, especially girls, were to be seen and not heard.

Whilst other writers might have the confidence and ego to ‘write it, publish it and be damned’, I worry about upsetting other people. It feels selfish to own and share one’s story at the expense of another’s sense of wellbeing. But this means committing to a lifetime of not speaking-up, of not authentically being the protagonist in one’s own story. This is a sacrifice I would never demand of others.

Getting the DYCP award helped me to stand more boldly in my own light. The Grandma in my head might still be telling me off, but the award has helped give validity to my creative practice. This in turn has helped me to turn down the volume on Grandma’s megaphone.

Arts / Science Collaboration

Thinking about the uses for life writing and how to share my work, I met with Bobbie Farsides, Professor of Biomedical Ethics at the Brighton and Sussex Medical School. We talked about using the text as a training tool for trainee GPs.

Following our initial conversations, Bobbie then put me in touch with Rose Turner FRCP, Consultant in Palliative Medicine at the Martlets Hospice in Brighton. We’d hoped to organise an event as part of Brighton Festival in summer 2019. But, due to people’s availability and some of my own health issues, we decided to put it on hold.

The event was to combine readings of my work, interview/conversation with Rose and then a panel discussion before an audience of public and medics.

Although now on hold, this is a really exciting development and positive outcome for the project because it means 36 Hours could have real and lasting public benefits. It’s been exciting to consider the potential of an arts/science collaboration. And to think about how these initial discussions might lead to further public engagement with the work.

My Story – a course in life writing

In addition to the work for DYCP, I also wrote and delivered My Story, a 6-week creative writing course in Life Writing. This has been a hugely satisfying and rewarding experience. Following this success, I plan to develop this into an online programme and build a community around life writing.

I’ve found this process of writing and teaching a life writing programme deeply rewarding because it’s been a way of exploring and sharing my life writing process and practice without personal exposure.

And I’ve learned that, just like me, people have a deep need to reveal and share their stories. What could be more human, after all? What my course does is help people to find the ‘story’ within their story, often with surprising (to them) results.

I’d now argue that the merits of life writing as process and practice are almost greater than the text outcome. It’s been interesting to observe how a deep engagement with personal narrative is a fantastic catalyst for getting to grips with what makes a great story. In fact, since grasping the nuts and bolts of good storytelling, some of my participants have gone on to have success with fiction writing.

Next Steps

Overall, DYCP has been a game-changer for me. Receiving the award raised my level of confidence and has allowed me to ‘own’ my identity as a writer.

Next steps for me are:

> confirming an agent to support the distribution of 36 Hours.

> developing an online life writing programme to build an international community of life writers.

> delivering a public event with BSMS and exploring the potential for extending this to other areas.

> holding a residency at two locations in the east of England to roll-out a life-writing engagement programme.

Emerging

I can now see that a future career transition really is possible. Moving away from my life at the business end of the arts and towards a focus on my writing practice. This is an incredibly energising thought.

I’ve also realised that we already possess the potential for transition from grub to butterfly. With the right encouragement and commitment, whatever our age or circumstances, we can emerge and fly.

This will be my final DYCP blog post, but it’s not the end of the story.

A series of blog posts about my journey through my Arts Council England Developing Your Creative Practice project.

Developing My Creative Practice – 4

On Bearing Witness

Zero Point #1 (acrylic on canvas) Fiona Mason 2014

Zero-point energy is the lowest possible energy that a quantum mechanical system may have. In this project, Zero Point stands in for the contradiction of the chaotic void, the intense single point of energy and the enervated vacuum of grief, whatever its source. Each painting represents a different expression of that experience.

Before I began to find the words to express my experience, I moved paint around on canvas; pushing, pulling, smoothing, disrupting. I was trying to get at the thing behind, beneath, between. I was trying to see it, feel it, represent it. I was trying to rend the veil between my outer, coping, resilient social self and my inner selves who were struggling in their various ways.

My mother was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2005.

Her illness was ongoing when my husband became ill. She watched his terminal journey, fearing it might foreshadow hers: the brain metastases in particular. Daily life became dominated by one form of cancer or another. I felt surrounded by things I couldn’t see, confused by the two-faced otherness and sameness of rogue cells and unable to protect those I loved from their lurking, sinister and destructive squatters.

a breast cancer cell

I found myself drawn to the form of neoplasms as things in themselves. If encountered in a more benign context, the are complex, beautiful and extraordinary natural phenomena. As viewed under electron microscopy they’re like some kind of exotic seed or marine creature.

In their final weeks and days, I sat vigil at my loved one’s bedsides, in my mind’s eye trying to see inside; to imagine what was going on at that moment, the industrious, pointless replication of cells that would ultimately wipe themselves out in the process.

The paintings were attempts to capture this experience of trying to see.

I used to think that, philosophically speaking, language was bound to miss the mark when expressing experience – that words were conceptual containers of social-historical making that inevitably constrained thought and experience by what was permitted in a given lexicon. I felt that visual art maybe did a better job of communicating what it is to be in the world. But what does an abstract painting communicate, without a label or explanation from the artist? Would a viewer look at the four images in this post and understand them as views of the same scene through different windows?

As I explored the potential of metaphor and proxy and myth and narrative I found language to be far richer and more nuanced than I’d permitted in my earlier thinking. The right words in the right order allow us to look slantwise at life, revealing experience in richer, more layered, more nuanced ways. Words, language – these are not hermetically sealed containers for experience. The myriad combinations reveal conceptual boundaries that are porous and leaky.

In Zero Point #3 above, the dark point is a throughway, a liminal threshold to another hidden space. Life and death are thus. These images are physical, visceral experience re-worked into canvas.

In 36 Hours, I want language to expand and fill-out these attempts to see. And whether it’s a painting or a text, it’s about a viewer or reader bearing witness to the microcosm of my lived experience and extrapolating this to the macrocosm of the human condition. We all die, we all grieve, we all suffer. I claim nothing unique about my losses, but my experience of them is unique to me. Maybe in sharing them, others will find validation, recognition and some comfort.

A series of blog posts about my journey through my Arts Council England Developing Your Creative Practice project.

Developing My Creative Practice – 3

On The Project

LIANG SHAOJI 梁绍基 Beds/Nature Series No.10 1993

36 Hours  is a detailed account of a man’s last day.

The man, my late husband, died at home, just short of a year after a diagnosis of lung cancer.

I began writing the book during my MA in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths. It didn’t emerge until the summer term of the first year of the programme. I’d skirted around the topic, writing various pieces of fiction that felt like playing in the dressing-up box. As in, they weren’t really me, the language was not quite my own voice.

It was a Sunday afternoon in late March, around the anniversary of the death. I was sitting on the sofa looking down the hallway towards the front door. Memories flooded in, I picked up my laptop, and began to write.

I was almost a bystander in the process, observing myself with interest. It was six years since my husband’s death, and it had taken that long for me to reach a point where the experience permitted itself to be written. I’m not entirely sure why, given a long habit of keeping a journal, other than this was a different approach altogether – a clear and deliberate intention to write a complete work with a strong narrative structure.

The words tumbled out with urgency, each sentence making visible an interior experience of loss that until then had been hidden.

The form emerged spontaneously: writing in the first person present tense. The effect was to drop the reader unambiguously into the scene where the day could unfold without the distancing effect of third person and back story. 

I wanted to convey the intense feeling of claustrophobia I experienced – being isolated at home as a carer, knowing what the outcome would be, but not knowing exactly when or how.

As the work progressed, the narrative began to organise itself into hourly blocks, as I worked my way through 36-hours, beginning at 6am on the Monday and ending at 6pm on the Tuesday. The effect for me was an unfolding of memory – re-living each hour in vivid detail.

I shared the opening two hours with my MA workshop group and was moved and pleased by its reception. For the first time, I felt I’d found and shared my authentic voice. The work is an intensely personal and intimate account, which might be cause for holding back when sharing with strangers. Yet it felt liberating – bearing witness to my lived experience.

I completed the work during the second year of the MA, benefitting from a weekly life-writing workshop with Blake Morrison. The feedback and suggestions helped me shape and hone the structure and bring even more authenticity to the narrator (aka me).

The therapeutic impact of life-writing has been profound. When I weighed the printed, hard-bound manuscript in my hands, my MA thesis submission, with the title printed in gold along the spine, I thought ‘There. It’s out. I don’t have to carry it around in my head anymore.’ That’s not to say that I miraculously ‘got over’ my husband’s death, but rather, that I could permit myself to set it aside when the burden was too much to carry. The book became a container for my lived experience, something I could refer to if I wanted to, like one might pull a photo album from the shelf. The act of committing memory to text allowed me to reclaim some of the interior mind-space that had previously been swallowed-up.

This is why life-writing is so interesting to me – of course, I want the work to have merit ‘as writing’, but also the processes is philosophically and therapeutically potent. It reveals something of the human condition through an account of a particular moment, allowing the reader to bear witness to the writer’s experience.

Returning to the image at the top of the post, in Chinese conceptual artist Liang Shaoji’s work ‘the silkworm symbolises generosity, and its silken thread is emblematic of human life and history. Many of his sculptures consist of objects, such as the wire cots in Beds/Nature Series No. 10, around which silkworms have spun their cocoons’. Exhibited as part of Art of Change – New Directions from China, at the Haywood Gallery in 2012. I am strongly drawn to the literal, lyrical and metaphorical possibilities of threads, spinning, weaving, and mark making as a way into untangling, unravelling and revealing lived experience. 

A series of blog posts about my journey through my Arts Council England Developing Your Creative Practice project.

Developing My Creative Practice -2

On Learning

During my career, I’ve worked with a multitude of theatre-makers, actors, directors, dancers, choreographers, composers,  musicians, artists and curators.  I’ve never met one who considered themselves beyond learning. In fact, I’d say quite the opposite. The majority will have studied their chosen discipline in further and higher education and many will have later relished the opportunity to advance their practice at postgraduate level and feel all the richer for it. They might have arrived with talent, but it’s guidance, dedication and practice that will have transformed them from good to great.

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