Tag: writing

Posted in Life, Writing

Forgiving Light

Posted on by Sharon

Eleanor lifts her camera just as the woman raises her head. Her face is streaked with tears, the light catching them, so it seems they shimmer rather than fall.

She quickly takes in a half-finished coffee, scarf draped over the back of the chair, and a book open on the table. Something in the woman’s stillness suggests she hasn’t turned the page in a while.

Her finger hovers over the shutter button. The woman meets her eyes; a fragile thread of connection stretches between them.

Eleanor’s mind, unhelpfully, begins to invent possible stories about the woman. Grieving, she thinks. Recently divorced. Terminally ill. Bereaved daughter. Job loss. A pigeon-related incident. Endless possibilities spinning through her mind like a carousel.

She could walk away, let the woman have her sadness in peace, but something in the woman’s faint smile sees Eleanor push the door open and step inside.

The bell gives its half-hearted ting. ‘Just the usual, thanks Matt,’ she calls. ‘Oh, and one of your Portuguese tarts.’ She turns toward the woman. ‘Would you like one as well? They’re dangerously good.’

The woman shakes her head, then mid-shake says, ‘Yes, why not.’

Eleanor smiles. ‘Excellent decision.’

‘Is it all right if I sit here?’ she asks, pointing to the table next to where the woman is sitting. ‘I promise not to talk unless it seems vital.’

‘That sounds perfect,’ the woman says, wiping her face. Eleanor, pretending not to notice, stirs her coffee as though it requires medical precision.

They sit in silence. Eleanor wrestles with the tart’s flaky pastry and warm, wobbly custard, while across from her the woman breaks hers cleanly, long fingers steady and assured. Eleanor’s own fingers feel clumsy – her sister once called them ‘sausage rolls,’ and she has to admit the description isn’t entirely unfair.

She guesses the woman is in her late thirties, graceful in that effortless way some younger women are. “Well put-together,” Eleanor’s mother would say, “considered”.

‘When I first saw you,’ Eleanor breaks the silence, ‘my imagination went into overdrive. I kept inventing reasons for the tears. Little scenarios, death, divorce, job.’

The woman glances at her, curious. ‘None of the above,’ she smiles, licking crumbs from her fingers.

‘You’re a photographer?’ she asks, nodding at the camera on the table.

‘Sometimes. Depends who you ask. My grandson says I’m a breakfast-face photographer.’

The woman laughs. ‘Breakfast-face?’

‘Yes. He thinks he’s my muse. I take photos of him eating breakfast.’ Eleanor chuckles, shaking her head. ‘Don’t ask.’

‘Can I see?’

Eleanor flicks through the images on the camera until she finds yesterday’s – Garry mid-spoon, mouth wide, eyes half closed. The light falling on him like a benediction.

‘He’s wonderful,’ the woman says. ‘And clearly plotting something.’

‘Always,’ Eleanor says. ‘It keeps the mornings interesting.’

The woman traces a fingertip along her cup. ‘You took my photo earlier,’ she says, not accusingly, just a fact laid gently on the table.

Eleanor blushes. ‘I did. I’m sorry – it was the light. It does that to me sometimes.’

‘Can I see?’

Eleanor turns the screen toward her. The woman’s face is luminous against the dark interior, the tears faintly catching the light.

The woman studies it for a long moment. ‘You’ve made me look… beautiful. Not sad at all, even with those tears.’

‘You are beautiful,’ Eleanor says simply, then wonders if that’s too much. ‘It’s mostly the light,’ she adds, flustered. ‘It’s very forgiving this time of day. Like a kindly aunt.’

That earns another laugh.

‘I wasn’t sad, you know,’ the woman says finally. She closes the book, letting Eleanor see the cover. A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness. ‘It just caught me off-guard. That ending.’

‘So,’ Eleanor says lightly, ‘you were crying over fiction, not a break-up?’ She leans back slightly, watching the shift in the woman’s expression.

‘Mortifying, isn’t it?’

‘Not at all,’ Eleanor says. ‘I once wept in a tram over a poem about a cabbage. People gave me space, though, which was nice.’

The woman laughs, a bright, sudden sound that makes Eleanor laugh too. Matt glances over, shakes his head with a faint smile, and goes back to his orders.

When the laughter subsides, they sit smiling at each other, the moment oddly companionable.

‘Thank you,’ the woman says at last.

‘For what?’

‘For seeing me. Even if you got the story wrong.’

‘Oh, I usually do,’ Eleanor says. ‘But I enjoy the practice.’

The woman slips the book inside her bag and stands. ‘You should call that photo Forgiving Light.’

‘I just might,’ Eleanor says.

When the door closes behind her, Eleanor’s eyes settle on the table where the woman was sitting.

She lifts her camera and frames the scene – the empty cup, the wrapper, a few stray bits of pastry scattered across the plate. Caught in a narrow shaft of fading golden light, the woman’s scarf draped over the chair.

She presses the shutter, then scoops up the scarf and rushes out after the woman.

Posted in Life, Photography, Writing

Shaping what’s seen

Posted on by Sharon

“It is Chanel No. 5, you’re right,” Miriam says, her voice calm. “I just didn’t expect to read something about myself. I wasn’t aware I was being watched so closely.”

She smiles, guarded but curious.

Eleanor shifts in her seat. “You read it?”

“It popped up in my Substack feed,” Miriam replies. “I wasn’t expecting to see myself there.”

Eleanor hesitates, unsure whether to apologise or defend herself. “It wasn’t really about you,” she says finally. “I just used small things I remembered from my last visit.”

Miriam nods. “It made me think about the way you see people.” She leans back into the leather chair. “Do you feel, as a photographer, that you’re always watching? That you see things others overlook?”

Eleanor smiles. She likes people who ask good questions. “When my husband was alive, we used to go on photography trips into the city or to gardens. He’d come home with hundreds of photos of things I hadn’t noticed. I’d look at them and think, was I even there? It was like I was blind.”

She glances out the window. Light glints off the building across the street, a curtain flutters and a figure moves behind it. “I need a starting point – for both photography and writing. But I don’t think I get starting points from watching.”

“What do you mean by starting points?” Miriam asks.

“Once we drew colours from a hat before heading into the city – his was blue, mine was red. That gave me something to look for. And that was great. I actually came home with some images I liked.” She smiles at the memory.

“So you don’t think you’re always watching?”

“No, I don’t think I’m observant at all.” Eleanor pauses. “Someone once called me a bowerbird. They said I collect things – stories, words, ideas – and I use them to create something. Like the story you read. I guess it came from things I’ve collected.”

“When I read what you wrote,” Miriam says, “I felt you’d taken pieces of me – my wonky left eye, my unmatched suit, my perfume. Seeing them was … confronting.”

Eleanor resists defending herself. That’s not why she’s here.

Miriam lets the silence stretch. “When you take a portrait, or write a story,” she says finally, “do you think about how the people you’ve collected from might feel? About how collecting can reveal more than you intend?”

Eleanor meets her gaze. Calm, but piercing.

“I watch, I listen, I interpret too,” Miriam continues. “But the difference is, you collect, and then you show your work to the world.”

Eleanor smiles wryly. “I wish I could show the world, but my audience is very small.” Her smile falters. “Sorry, that was inappropriate.”

A bus pulls into the stop one floor below, its mechanical sigh heavy in the air. Eleanor rubs the back of her neck, the muscles tight from holding herself still too long. The bus moves on, leaving the room too quiet.

“Are you saying I’m unethical?” she asks.

“I’m saying you’re powerful,” Miriam replies. “And that power carries responsibility. You decide how someone’s captured … and you also decide how they’re presented to the world.”

Eleanor looks down at her hands. “I always thought of it as seeing, not shaping what’s seen.” A bird lands on the railing and shakes itself, feathers settling. She sits back, something in her easing. “I never thought of it as power.”

“When you think about your portraits – your Faces of Melbourne, for instance – do you see that power there?”

A face springs from Eleanor’s memory: an older woman near the State Library, bent under the weight of her shopping bags. She had helped her to the tram stop, and as they walked, the woman shared stories of her early life in Melbourne. She stopped to show Eleanor grainy black and white photos of her son who had taken his own life many years before. The grief was still raw, as if time had barely touched it.

“When I asked if I could photograph her,” Eleanor says, “she nodded straight away. I chose a spot where just her face was lit. It’s such a beautiful portrait. She gave me something real and I wanted to honour that.”

Miriam studies her for a moment. “You were moved by her story,” she says. “You wanted to see her, and to let others see her too. That’s empathy – but it’s also exposure. Maybe that’s the tension you live with as an artist.”

Eleanor squirms. The word artist sits uncomfortably.

They sit in the stillness, neither reaching for resolution. A soft chime breaks the silence. Their hour has ended.

Outside, the late afternoon light is soft and luminous, the kind photographers dream about. Eleanor walks home, stepping around puddles and cracks, her thoughts running faster than her feet ever could.

As she passes the café on the corner of her street, she notices a woman in the window, alone. A half-finished coffee, a book open on the table, shoulders slumped. Something in her stillness suggests she hasn’t turned the page in a while.

Eleanor lifts her camera just as the woman lifts her head. Her face is streaked with tears. Eleanor is again captivated by the way light touches faces and the stories faces tell.

Her finger hovers over the shutter button. The woman smiles, a fragile thread of connection.

Eleanor lowers the camera, pushes the door open and steps inside.

Posted in Life, Writing

Protect your highlights

Posted on by Sharon

Eleanor rehearses the line in her head while she waits.

My default thinking is that no one likes me.

It sounds both dramatic and true, overly self-indulgent and that annoys her. She considers softening it – I sometimes feel people don’t like me – but that sounds evasive. She wants to be honest.

Across the waiting room, a framed print of a misty forest hangs slightly crooked. She wants to straighten it, but tells herself to sit still. There’s a low table stacked with mindfulness magazines she has no inclination to flick through and a box of tissues that looks too deliberately placed. On the door opposite her chair, neat lettering reads: Dr Miriam Clarke, Psychologist.

Eleanor wonders if it’s called an office. It feels too intimate to be a room, too small to be a practice. Office sounds right, though sterile. Her thoughts drift – as they do – and she has to remind herself why she’s here. Then, because she can’t help herself, she wonders why am I here?

Before she can answer herself, the door opens.

‘Eleanor?’

She stands, grabs her bag, and out pops the line she’s been practising.

‘My default thinking is that no one likes me.’ Her heart double beats as the words leave her mouth. She stops abruptly. Too soon! At least get into her office first. Absurd and self-indulgent is not the look she was going for. She wonders if her face has already frozen into permanent cringe. Should she tilt her head slightly? Smile? Nod like a normal human?

Dr Miriam Clarke, a woman in her early 40s with silver-rimmed glasses and a calm voice that Eleanor suspects is not the one she uses with her children, gestures toward the chair. Eleanor tells herself it’s fine, though her mind argues otherwise. Maybe I should have started with something neutral. Weather. Shoes. Hers are nice. Mine look a bit worn. She puts her bag down, sighs, and sits.

‘What makes you think that?’ Miriam asks, calm and measured.

Good question, though not one I was expecting. She realises she’s talking internally, and Miriam’s slightly raised left eyebrow suggests that’s not useful. Eleanor flattens a crease in her pants and says out loud, ‘I’m too blunt, or too much, or not enough, or something … I don’t know. I ask questions that aren’t polite, say things that don’t sound as gentle as I mean them. I think I’m being honest, but apparently honesty needs padding. I never did learn how to pad.’ She stops abruplty, embarrassed by her burbling.

Outside the window, a bird lands on the railing and gives itself a shake. Eleanor focuses on its movements, letting the silence lengthen. The city noise is faint beyond the glass – traffic, sirens, the mechanical sigh of a bus pulling in to the stop a floor below.

When she’d first arrived in the city, she’d taken a long time to settle in. The city disoriented her – it was too loud, too fast, too much. It hadn’t helped that she’d spent too long finding a proper place to live. She’d spent months house sitting, staying with friends of people she knew, renting a room above a garage that had a bathroom but no kitchen. She felt disconnected and she so desperately wanted to connect.

She’d gone to a women’s book group in Toorak for a few months. Nice enough women, though she sometimes wondered if any of them actually liked to read. They talked more about retreats in Provence, how the Amalfi coast ‘just isn’t the same these days’, about having to ski in Denver this year because they just couldn’t make Switzerland work. Eleanor had wanted to talk about books – not the cover art or the author’s holiday house, but the writing itself: how they were written, what made them work or fall apart, the sentences that stayed with you for weeks, and the ones that stopped you in your tracks.

Then there was the writer’s group, which had a meet-up one Sunday a month in a pub in Fitzroy. She was determined to go, to meet people, to talk writing, to hear about what others were writing, to share stories of the struggle of writing good sentences, to learn how others cope with rejection. Outside the pub door, she felt the familiar flutter – the one that comes before entering a room full of people who could dislike you. She’d pushed through the door anyway, spotted twenty people talking in tight little circles, walked closer and waited for someone to notice her. She’d stood there for what felt like ten full minutes, waiting for just one person to look up … no one did.

‘I thought it best to just leave,’ she tells Miriam, and instantly recognises how it wasn’t best to just leave.

Miriam says something measured about connection taking time, about shared interests and patience, but Eleanor is lost in her thoughts and only half hears her.

Later that afternoon, at home, she makes tea and sits at her kitchen table. A shaft of light catches the rim of her mug, turning the steam gold. She’s been trying to photograph light again – the way it illuminates the flowers she’s stuck in a vase, how it changes what you see – and grabs her camera. The light is still strong, creating bright edges that lose all detail.

It made her think of a photographer she follows on Instagram who once said something about “protecting your highlights.” She searches his YouTube channel till she finds the video and watches it again. He means it technically – exposing correctly so the brightest parts of the image don’t blow out – but then he gets philosophical. Protect your highlights in life too, he says. Those moments of brightness that remind you who you are.

‘Interesting’, she says aloud.

On a whim, she goes into her room and pulls a box down from the top of the wardrobe. Inside are things she’s kept without understanding why, things she hasn’t looked at in years: scrawled feedback on an old piece of writing: Your analysis is thoughtful and original. Beautifully expressed. A card from a former student: Thank you for helping me see what I could do. A note from a friend on her 50th birthday: Visiting you today was more like visiting a sister. A reference she’d kept from her first workplace, the paper yellowed at the edges, the letters slightly uneven, unmistakably typewritten: Miss Eleanor Hardy is a highly competent and diligent employee. She approaches her duties with professionalism and care, and would be an asset to any organisation.

She lays them all out on the bed, one by one. Evidence, small, steady reminders of her highlights.

It is clear, not everyone has disliked her. Some people, it seems, have clearly liked her.

Eleanor goes back to the table, and writes herself a note:

Protect your highlights.

She props it against the vase of mini gerberas she’d been photographing earlier.

The following week, Eleanor is back in the psychologist’s office, still unsure about her motivation for being there.

Same chair, same muted city noise beyond the window. She flattens the same crease in her pants, then looks up.

“I’ve had a thought,” she says slowly, pleased with herself for waiting till she’d sat down before speaking. “Maybe the problem isn’t that people don’t like me. Maybe it’s that I don’t believe them when they do”

Miriam’s left eyebrow lifts slightly. “That’s a powerful thought.”

That afternoon, at home, Eleanor takes another photograph of the late light spilling across the table. This time, she adjusts the exposure, careful not to lose the detail in the bright edge of the mug.

She saves the image to a new folder: Highlights.

Posted in Life, Photography

Faces of Breakfast

Posted on by Sharon

Eleanor is plagued by a dream of herself that she has not yet managed to actualise.

It visits her most mornings, while the kettle boils, the version of herself she keeps coming back to, the one who moves through the streets with a camera at the ready, collecting quiet moments. That woman is captivated by the way light touches faces and the stories a face tells. She lives in a house smelling faintly of cedar and tea, with shelves of photography books she browses intermittently. Her portraits don’t hang on her own walls, but they do hang on other people’s – portraits others have described as intimate and assured and quietly transcendant.

Eleanor, on the other hand, mostly photographs flowers these days though she’s not exactly sure why. She thinks it’s something to do with their fragility, their complexity – how each flower seems to have a personality of its own. Photographing them feels like a small experiment in seeing differently: shifting focus, playing with light, adjusting angles until some kind of story emerges. At home, she works deliberately, arranging light and background, the process almost meditative. In gardens, she responds to what’s there – wind, shadow, a sudden burst of colour. She’s exhibited her work a few times – small shows where people have bought pieces and said kind things – and members of her U3A photography group often tell her she has a real eye. She thanks them, smiles, but inside she thinks they’re just being kind … or polite … or wrong.

She finds, in a box of prints tucked under the bed, photographs she took six years ago while she was going through cancer treatment. That time still lives in her skin, the memory of so many hands touching her, adjusting her, ensuring her position is just right. It had made her uneasy, and that unease became the focus of a project – hands as both comfort and intrusion. In one image, Sonia, the model, stands in a shaft of late afternoon light, her body half-covered by her own hands, the gesture both protective and exposing. Eleanor studies the image for a long time – the narrow beam of light, the rawness in the posture, the quiet, potent vulnerability of it. This, she thinks, is the kind of work she wants to return to.

She reaches for the book of portraits she printed when she’d finished her Faces of Melbourne project and flicks through it. She remembers where each shot was taken, her subjects’ names, and the stories the older women told as she photographed them. She was deliberate about her practice – the light, the framing, the angle – she’d known what she was doing. Looking through those pages again, she feels the quiet certainty of that work, the joy it gave her, yet something in her still resists believing it was assured.

Eleanor hears the scrape of a chair behind her and looks up. Her grandson has wandered in from the garden, a piece of toast in one hand, his current favourite dinosaur in the other.

‘Who’s that?’ he asks, pointing to a photo in the open book.

‘That’s Josette,’ Eleanor says. ‘She was walking through Myer when I saw her.’

‘Did she tell you stories?’

‘She sure did,’ she says. ‘Stories about her son who grew up and got married – and she showed me pictures of him too.’

He studies the page, eyes wide. ‘Who’s that? I think she’s pretty.’

‘That’s Bella. Her name means beautiful. And that’s Brabh. He was my first face of Melbourne. I was standing at the traffic lights and I saw him across the road. His face was so interesting I just had to take his photo.’

He looks up at her. ‘You should take my photo too. Every morning when I come here. You could make a book about me – Garry’s Faces of Breakfast.’

She laughs, surprised by the small flicker of excitement that rises in her chest. ‘Maybe I could,’ she says.

At 7:10 the next morning, Garry arrives, sleep still in his eyes, hair sticking up, a dinosaur in each hand. She gets him a bowl of Coco Pops and sits with him at the table. The light from the window falls across his face. Eleanor lifts her camera, adjusts the focus, and presses the shutter.

The image on the camera screen is a little soft, a little crooked. His spoon is halfway to his mouth, milk dripping onto the table.

She makes tea, sits across from him, and listens to a story about a dinosaur that can fly and also do karate. She nods solemnly. “Sounds plausible.”

Later, she opens her laptop and creates a folder: Breakfasts with Garry. She’ll add one photo a day until he gets bored, or until she does.

While she doesn’t feel actualised … or even assured … she does feel like someone who knows how to begin.

And that, frankly, is more than she expected.

I have used the same first line as my previous story While the kettle boils. I wanted to see if I could take it in a different direction.

Posted in Life, Writing

While the kettle boils

Posted on by Sharon

Eleanor is plagued by a dream of herself that she has not yet managed to actualise.

It visits her most mornings, while the kettle boils, the version of herself she keeps coming back to, the one who writes before dawn, sitting at a wooden desk while a mug of tea cools beside her and words spread across the page. That woman lives in a house smelling faintly of cedar and old books, where quiet work happens. Her own novels fill a shelf – novels the reviewers call assured and luminous.

Eleanor, on the other hand, lives in a house that smells of toast and tea, where crumbs, spilled juice, and scattered blocks demand her attention. Her desk is the kitchen table, her laptop fighting for space amongst the mail, the Aldi catalogues, and her grandson’s Elsa costume. Drafts are stacked in manila folders, marked up by people who, she has to believe, mean well in their critique. Lovely imagery. This doesn’t work. Show, don’t tell. You don’t need this section. Two pats, then the slaps. Or more often, multiple slaps with few pats. 

The stings linger.

Her agent says the publishers see “promise”, but not enough to take a risk on her. The competitions reply with polite variations on no: “You have a distinct voice … there are moments of real beauty here … we received many excellent entries, unfortunately your submission did not stand out in the current field … we wish you success placing it elsewhere … we hope you’ll consider submitting again next year.” Eleanor is familiar with the rhythm of rejection, the preamble as softener, then the stinging dismissal. She imagines the editors, judges, unseen decision-makers standing behind an iron gate, steadfastly refusing to hand over their giant key. Instead, she pushes her work through the bars and listens intently for the sound of approval.

Silence.

Yesterday, she found a story she wrote when she was twenty-three, tucked deep into one of the folders. She read it and winced, then told herself to be kind – it was from forty years ago, after all. She’d lived a life since then, worked, raised children, lost people she loved. She’d written through work and play dates and trips to the beach, through illness and recovery, through poor decisions, through countless rejections.

She thinks of that thing Sylvia Plath said: I love my rejection slips. They show me I try and recognises the rawness of that statement. Feels the strength of it. Sits up a little straighter.

She looks outside, to her grandson building a house near the garden beds she’s been developing. He’s starting simple, laying one block carefully next to the other. She sees the clear line from front to back, a foundation solid enough to hold the next storey. She watches him for a long moment. 

When the kettle clicks off, Eleanor makes tea, and thinks about foundations, clear lines from start to finish, starting simple.

She settles back at the table, picks up her pen – and hears a yell from the garden.

A catastrophe, by the sound of it. Possibly involving Lego.

Eleanor takes a sip of tea, then pushes herself up.

The quiet work will have to wait.

While the first line of this story came from a text message I received from a friend recently, this is a work of fiction. I felt it was such a strong line that I wanted to see if I could write a story around it.

Posted in Mid-life blogger, Writing

Tea, music and memory

Posted on by Sharon

She gets home from the gym, showers, has breakfast, makes tea.

Remembers, just as the kettle clicks off, that she hasn’t written in her journal for a few days. Three, maybe four? Not that she’s keeping score, but she promised herself that in these early days of retirement she would keep at it – not for productivity, or for output, but for the structure it gives her thoughts. And her days.

So she grabs her iPad, opens the journaling app, and sits at the kitchen table. The tea, hot, not too milky, not at all sweet, sits just to her right.

In the background, breathe. plays – a band she stumbled across a few weeks ago and was instantly addicted to. Two musicians from Sydney, and a variety of vocalists, creators of something described as ‘music for your darkest days’. As ‘late night emotion’. As ‘a mix of soul and electronic’. Whatever the label, it’s perfect for late nights, and, she’s found, for all day.

Their sound spills into the room, occasionally breaking into her awareness. When it does, she catches herself smiling. The music feels like a hug – warm, quiet, exultant.

She writes slowly, not really sure what she wants to say. She starts by recounting her morning: gym was good, though her knees are sore and her shoulders stiff. And then an image from the morning pushes forward. A woman she saw at the gym, older, in an old t-shirt and shorts, stretching by the wall with a kind of quiet grace. 

She writes about that.

Then, somehow, she’s writing about the cool laundry under her grandmother’s high-set house up north. The old wringer-washer, enamel chipped, in the corner, edged on two sides by concrete wash tubs. Her grandmother’s hands, with their soft, paper-thin skin, feeding wet clothes through the rollers, careful not to catch a finger.

She writes about the smell of Sunlight soap flakes and wet fabric. About the way her grandmother would tell stories, and the comfort of her silences. Not  heavy or cold, but the kind that said, you’re safe here.

She likes the way memory loops like this – from a stranger’s gesture to forgotten wash days in the heat of a northern summer.

Outside, the shadows have shifted across the garden. Inside, her tea has gone cold. Completely untouched.

She notices it only when she lifts the mug and realises it’s room temperature. 

The music is warm and deliciously comforting. Unlike her tea.

She sighs and gets up to make a fresh pot.

Posted in Flowers, Photography, Writing

The single sock

Posted on by Sharon

There’s been a single sock sitting on the chest of drawers for months. I check each load of washing carefully for its partner, but no luck. The sock has stayed single.

Another lone sock joined it for a while, and for a brief moment it looked like they’d make an unlikely pair. I mean, who says socks need to match? But soon enough, that second sock’s partner showed up, leaving the first sock on its own again.

And then yesterday, while putting other socks away, there it was, the missing partner. It had been in the drawer all along. Two single socks became a pair again.

I thought about that sock. How it wasn’t doing any harm, sitting there. How it was never really lost. And how, when I wasn’t actively looking for its partner, it just turned up. Almost like magic.

This week’s word for our photography challenge is flower, so I opened my photo album to see if I had any decent flower photos. Scrolling through, I came across images from years ago I’d forgotten. Photos I’d dismissed because I couldn’t see anything of value in them. This time, looking again, I noticed a similarity running through them – dare I say, a style. It had been there all along apparently.

Like the sock in the drawer, these photos weren’t lost. They just needed me to realise that sometimes what we’re looking for isn’t found by looking, but by recognising.

Images from 2007

Images from gardens

Lillies from 2017

Images from today

Posted in Learning, Photography, Writing

Play

Posted on by Sharon

For four years, some members of my family have been involved in a weekly photo challenge. This challenge morphed from previous photo challenges we’ve done over the years, but in its current form, this one has been going for four years. Each week we have a word as our focus and we take photos of a representation of that word, share it in a private Facebook group and each Sunday night we Zoom, have a chat about our week, and talk about the photos.

This week just gone, the word was ‘play’.

It got me thinking.

This blog ‘Musings from the cold’ has a subtitle: playing with ideas and images. It’s something I enjoy – to look at a subject from different angles and see what stories emerge. I’m not always successful of course, but that’s what playing is all about – experimenting, seeing differently, trying out other voices and seeing what feels weird and whether I can sit with the weirdness.

I play photographically, but I realised I don’t often play with my writing. Not here anyway, on the pages of this blog. Over the years I have written many different sorts of things – journal articles, conference papers, book chapters for academic books, textbooks, newletters for parents and staff when I was teaching, interview questions and intros when I worked in radio and scripts for an Arts program I used to produce and present, poems on the fridge. Different audiences, different purposes, different styles.

But I realised through the week, that I only write in first person on this blog and so I decided to play, to experiment, to try a different voice. It felt weird, but I chose to sit with it, to keep writing in that style to see what I could learn from it, determined to push through the distance it gave my writing from myself until I found something new – well, new for me at least.

I wanted to play, and through that play to develop as a writer. It was never meant to be an endpoint, a final stop in my learning about writing – it was to help me go on a journey from one voice to another, one style to others (many, multiple) – to begin opening up the possibilities for my own writing.

When my youngest daughter was in Grade 3, the teacher asked them to write a story about their weekend every Monday. At a parent-teacher interview, the teacher commented that we lived the most interesting life. I knew this not to be true and asked her how she came to that conclusion. Apparently Emma’s Monday journal writing embellished our weekends to a point where they didn’t reflect our reality at all.

The teacher told her to only write what was true.

Emma stopped writing. Boring weekends didn’t interest her, and if the rule was to report only the facts rather than invent stories and worlds and interesting characters we met along the way, then there was no play left in it. And without play, the writing lost its spark.

It’s a reminder for my own practice. Play matters. It keeps my writing alive. So I’ll keep playing – with words, with voices, with styles that don’t quite fit until maybe they do. I don’t know yet where that will lead, but I suspect the detours matter as much as the destinations. If you find me writing strangely now and then, think of it as an experiment. You’re welcome to play along.

Posted in Flowers, Photography, Writing

On recognising your style

Posted on by Sharon

When I was first given a camera, sometime around 2007, I had no idea how it worked or what I would photograph. But I did know something about light from my time at university and so I experimented. A halogen lamp. An oven tray wrapped in aluminium foil. Windows with lace curtains. I bought flowers from the local florist – single stems arranged in whatever came to hand (a vase, a jar, a glass) – and set them up in areas of the lounge room. And then I played with the light … and learnt how to use the camera.

One wall of the lounge room was painted green, and it became my backdrop. The flowers stood out against it, classical and beautiful. I started to take the camera further afield – to the botanical gardens in Hobart, City Park in Launceston, the rhododendron gardens in Burnie. I photographed red hot pokers and made them redder, the daffodils that popped up unexpectedly under the rose bush in the backyard, and the insides of camellias.

Over time, I started photographing people – people I passed in the Bourke Street mall, those lingering near the steps of H&M listening to the buskers, those waiting at the lights on King Street, or outside Flinders St station. Sometimes I asked permission, sometimes I simply asked by lifting my camera, but always there was a burst of courage required in the approach. Most said yes. Some said no. I learned not to take refusals personally. And not to ask women of a particular age – they always said no. I loved the small exchanges: the older women who wanted to chat, the stories shared in passing, the faces that lingered in my memory – Jiggy, Brabh, Junior, Lisa, Samyrah, Belle, George. I gathered these portraits into a book, Faces of Melbourne – and printed one copy only. It’s one of my favourites.

My practice developed. I hired studios, booked models, attended workshops. I learned posing mostly from the models themselves, and more about lighting from every shoot – how to use a beauty dish, umbrella, softbox, and how to make the most of window light. As the gear expanded so did my knowledge. I’d moved a long way from the days of the halogen lamp and the oven tray wrapped in foil.

One house we lived in had a white brick wall to use as a backdrop, two storeys high and east-facing. It was a space filled with light, and the tulips, hydrangeas, sunflowers, and poppies looked luminous against it.

Then life got in the way …

Eventually, another move, another house. I had a ‘studio’ in this new house, and I painted the walls a neutral colour to use as a backdrop. I kept out some of the lighting gear, thinking I’d get around to using it. But two years passed with only a handful of photographs, none of which excited me. They were just the same, but worse technically. I set up the lights, but couldn’t create anything new. Photography no longer satisfied me in the way it had and I began to wonder if I had anything left to say.

I thought the issue might have been one of space and explored the idea of building a studio in the backyard. But in a moment of clarity, I realised that I hadn’t learnt to use the light in this new house. Shortly after, at a photography workshop in Ballarat, Kris, the facilitator, spoke about recognising your own style – how good it was when someone recognises one of your images as yours because it has a certain style. That struck me and the two ideas became a spark.

I looked around the house again – so many windows, so much light. Different walls, each with its own character/colour/shadows. I realised that what I’d thought was sameness was actually my style, something I’d been building since 2007.

I felt excited again. I made so many different choices, and remembered what a photography teacher had once told me: photography is problem-solving. Given all the problems I was solving (how to hold the reflector in just the right position, how much to open or close the shutters, what to hold the flower with, how close or far away from the background to put the flower), I felt the truth of it. I also knew that the solutions could be simple: a halogen lamp and an oven tray wrapped in foil, a window and a square of black card, a green wall and shutters to shape the light.

And so each morning I reach for my camera and some flowers, and go in search of the light. I fall into a rhythm – one which absorbs and excites me. I feels my style re-emerging, and with it, the outline of a new self.

An early image (circa 2007)

The white wall as backdrop

Street portraits

Samyrah – outside H&M
Brabh – first street portrait (at the lights on King St)
George – Bourke St mall

Working with models

Finding the light – September 2025

Posted in Life, Writing

On seeking an identity

Posted on by Sharon

When she started teaching, she dressed more like an English teacher, although preferred to call herself a Drama teacher. She taught both, but she wanted the stereotype of a Drama teacher to suit her more – creative, exploratory, suggesting invention and movement.

Later, as a PhD student, she carried her lunch into the staff lounge and walked past the big table where the academics sat. She sat instead in the corner, with her sandwich and a journal article or two. She enjoyed the thinking and the stretch of ideas, but she couldn’t yet picture herself wearing the identity that the big table represented.

In time she did, and the academic identity settled more deeply than she expected. In fact, it was the hardest one to let go of. Not because it had ever been easy – it was never that – but because it felt true. It matched her need to make sense of things, to learn, to question, to seek alternatives. And it gave her a title that needed no explanation.

When that identity fell away, she felt a bit lost. Eventually, she became a Senior Consultant Associate. When she was asked what she did, people would invariably say, “What does that entail?” and in the 18 months she was in the role, she never got to the point of being able to easily explain it. So instead, she often told people she was a ‘researcher’ – an identity more closely aligned with ‘academic’.

She had tried retirement before but hadn’t found an identity within it. This time though, with more certainty that it would stick, she knew she needed to work out what her new identity might be.

The question that pushed her in this direction was: “How did you fill your day today?”. She disliked the language of that question, the sense that life without paid work was only marking time, of ‘filling’ time. It’s not a question people asked of those who head off to jobs every morning. And so she bristled at it.

She wasn’t retired from living, or from creating, or from learning. Her life, even her retired life, was made up of more than ‘filling’ time.

And so each morning, she took photos. An anthurium. A sunflower on a black tile. Flannel flowers in a brown vase. Each afternoon she sat at her desk and wrote blog posts, exploring a different style in a different voice to see how it felt.

When she saw the images and words on the screen, she felt a flicker of something that she wasn’t quite ready to face.

But the question lingered: “How did you fill your day today?”. She had no tidy answer yet, but she could feel that she was reaching for something. She’s crafting her ideas into words and images, taking notice, taking her time.

She’s trying on a new identity, one that’s not dependent on a role, or a job, or an income. It’s an identity dependent on what she creates.

She’s not sure she can even say it out loud yet … so she whispers it to herself, to see if it fits.

…

Not yet … but it’s early days and she knows there’s no rush.