On having the courage to read our words out loud
There's an additional vulnerability that comes with reading our writing in public, but it can also be freeing.
Dear reader,
I shared this post on Thursday (22 May 2025) with my paid subscribers and am now offering it to all. The vast majority of my writing will always be free to read, but I am hugely grateful to my paid subscribers because their financial contribution helps me to keep writing. Getting the balance right between the writing I share freely, and the writing I share with my paid subscribers is delicate, and it’s all new to me, I am very much in experiment mode. Above all though, I’m hugely grateful that you have all found me and are reading my words. Thank you!
How are you this Thursday? Here in Ilkley the sun has gone for a wander and we have white grey sky above us rather than the clear blue we’ve got used to these past few months.
And this evening it’s our writing group, Moor Words, Spoken Word evening. It’s an evening full of joy and it’s an evening that pushes - in a good way - we writers out of our comfort zone.
Firstly we have to write some words. Commit them to paper or screen and as writers, creatives you’ll know that’s easier said than done. Secondly, we share them in the most public way. No hiding behind a screen, hitting ‘Send’ and running off to make a cup of tea.
This is in the moment reaction to our words, the energy shifting with each reading, each voice. The gap between writer/reader and listener gossamer thin. The response in the room palpable, the shifting, the silence, the murmurs. I only know what it’s like to share my own life in the room and not fiction, does that add another layer of vulnerability into the mix?
I salute Emily for encouraging us to do this, there may be nerves, but there is also, in my experience, something incredibly freeing, empowering about doing it. I thank my violin and piano playing, all those readings in church from an early age for giving me the muscle memory to know that nerves are to be expected, but that’s ok.
Because I love feeling my words float out of my mouth into the air where they might (or might not) land in the audiences’ ears. I know my writing isn’t for everyone, and that’s ok. I can’t control how my words will be received, all I can do is send them out with confidence, hope and belief that this is the best I’ve got right now.
That said, without fail, a week before the event I always tell Emily I don’t think I’ll speak. I don’t have anything new. I want to just sit and enjoy the other readings. The excuses are feeble, the words and delivery.
Emily listens, offers a ‘Thats’ fine, just let me know,’ and doesn’t push me but I think we both know I just like to know I have this get out clause. I also hate letting people down, and I know how much time and effort Emily puts into our group, the monthly meetings, the door always open to new writers. Putting on a Spoken Word evening takes time and energy and it’s not fair to muck her around.
I mention to another writer that I might not read this time, that I have nothing to share. She says, ‘But what about that piece you shared way back when, it was a few years ago. The one about the panic attacks, about waking in the night. A lot of us related to that.’
A piece of writing I’d forgotten about. I’d forgotten about the sleepless nights and the panic attacks. Forgotten I’d woken one morning and written about it in Writers Hour and shared it that same evening at writing group.
She planted a seed, I didn’t need to write something new.
And so I went back through the files on my Mac, read the panic attack one and it didn’t feel right, that time has passed. I couldn’t see myself reading to a room full of people on a Thursday evening a piece about panic attacks, whatever I read has to feel right.
No matter, I kept looking and spotted it. The piece about mum and her Wednesday afternoon visits when we lived in Bath when the children were little. I’ve shared it before in various versions and I’ve rewritten for this evening and I guess for Saturday too. It’s the tenth anniversary of mum’s death on Saturday.
It’s a piece of writing that lives, shape shifts, reflecting how I feel in any given moment. Each time I open it is a chance to go back to those soft afternoons, to spent time with mum on the page. Grief is different now, it doesn’t overwhelm as it did. Her face and voice have faded. Writing with her summons her back from the shadows.
It’s a piece of writing that will never be ‘done’.
And so this is what I’ll be reading this evening. I’ve recorded it here so that you can hear how it sounds in my voice, minus the background bar noises of clinking glasses, but still with my stumbles and croaks.
PS Still a few hours to go before Spoken Word and I can’t guarantee I won’t tweak it further!
ÂVictoria Sponges are Wednesday afternoon cakes
Mary Karr, author of The Art of memoir wrote, ‘If you let yourself tell those smaller anecdotes or stories, the over-arching capital-S story will eventually rise into view.’ This is one of those smaller stories and it’s dedicated to my mum, the cake baker who died ten years ago on Saturday and my three children for reasons that will become clear.
The hug on the doorstep is brief, awkward all clashing arms and noses what with mum trying to put her car keys in her handbag and stop the cake tin from falling and me trying to stop the dog from escaping. Passing the open living room door she volleys a ‘Hiya Saskia’ which is ignored, Saskia in a lunchtime CBeebies trance, sticky sandwich hands clasped in her lap.
In the kitchen at the back of our terrace mum hangs her handbag on the corner of a kitchen chair, places the cake tin on the table and goes to the open glass doors and arms folded over her cardigan looks out at the garden while I flick on the kettle, retrieve mugs and teabags from cupboards, milk from the fridge.
I can’t remember how or when these Wednesday afternoon visits started or how many there were. Maybe it started with a ‘Harriet dear, how about I pop over one afternoon, sit with Saskia, collect the boys from school. You can rest. I can’t do Friday afternoon because I have art, and I don’t want to leave dad for too long, but maybe a Wednesday.’ Mum visiting wasn’t new, mum visiting on her own, leaving dad at home was and I can’t remember if she always brought a Victoria sponge or if this was added to the ingredients list later on.
Mugs of tea in our left hands we’d walk around the garden, the grass scuffed from the dog and games of football, mum murmuring approval of the honeysuckle and hops climbing up the apple tree that only ever gave us inedible apples, foliage masking traffic from the main road, creamy pink magnolia hiding the trampoline and collection of rugby and footballs.
The garden, the kitchen table, matching clear blue eyes, the Victoria sponge between us, my, ‘But how do you get it to rise’ and her ‘You just need to weigh the eggs Harriet’ part of conversational routine. Moments of stillness, respite.
I declare myself incapable of baking a Victoria sponge, any baking. Feeding the children – pasta, shepherd’s pie, bangers and mash I could do. But baking? That was adulting I didn’t think myself capable of. I didn’t need to learn either because as long as mum came over from Cardiff in her blue Fiat Agila, Radio 3 blaring, cheering as she passed the ‘Welcome to England’ sign I’d be looked after in the cake department.
We talked; we chatted at that table but left so much unsaid. The cancer cells getting a free ride in her lymphatic system, the surgery trying to stop them, slow down the melanoma. Consultant appointments for her, nurse and physio for dad.
The bone crunching fatigue of my ME that put me in a profound black sleep more hours of the day and night than I care to remember. Was I coping with Andy living and working away from home.
Instead she’d eyeroll at mentions of dad, his Wednesdays known for his lunch club and afternoon snoozes in front of the TV, newspaper sliding down his outstretched legs, crossword partially completed. She’d tell me about concerts she’d been to at St David’s Hall, articles she’d read. Films she’d watched with friends. We ticked off family members from our conversation list with sighs and shrugs and smiles.
But after she left there’d be clockwise and ant-clockwise phone calls between mum and my two sisters and then me and my sisters, less so my brother. ‘But didn’t Harriet say anything about the house move, the kids school places’ ‘did mum even mention what the consultant said?’ No, I didn’t ask. She didn’t say. It didn’t come up.
I didn’t know she’d captured these afternoons in deft pencil strokes until much later. The children on the sofa, knees bent under their legs, crumb covered plates on the coffee table faces staring at flickering screens. The dog snoozing in her bed.
Peaceful afternoons before we moved away to Bournemouth, and news that her cancer was impervious to all treatment. Soft memories even though I know there were probably just as many slammed car doors, shouts of, ‘Come on kids, you can carry your own book bags and water bottles’ and ‘I’m going out the back to play football.’ ‘Can Seb come round?’
My now 16-year-old daughter’s face creases into smiles when I ask her what she remembers of these afternoons, ‘The car journey to school. Having to give her directions to school from my booster seat in the back even though we did it every week. She knew where she was going didn’t she.’
I ask my eldest - he’s 22 on Sunday – his 12th birthday the day after she died, his brother’s 10th birthday just a couple of days before, a clumsy birthday embrace around her death. ‘Victoria Sponges’ he says. ‘Yours are good, but grandma’s were better. Oh and her secret stash of wine gums in the car.’
Like the sketches, that she kept a stash of wine gums in the car just for the children is only revealed after she dies. And it’s funny because her mum, my grandma also had a secret stash of wine gums for her grandchildren, hers kept hers in a tin in the kitchen.
My just 20-year-old studies in Cardiff now and often walks past the end of mum and dad’s road on his way to and from different campus. He marches through Roath Park headphones on, the park where mum would push him, his siblings, his cousin on the swings, encourage them to have another go on the slide.
He’s away this week on a uni trip messing with clay, potters wheels and sketchbooks, a week mum would love (as would I) and while I can’t get hold of him to ask, I remember him saying a few years ago, ‘You can’t bake a Victoria Sponge on a Saturday morning mum; Vicky sponges are Wednesday afternoon cakes.’
And me? What do I remember of these afternoons? Conversation, conversation and her clear blue eyes that missed nothing. Oh, and a bloody good sponge.
Thank you for reading and for your support,
Harriet
PS Written off the cuff this morning, any and all typos my own, stumbles in the audio all me too!
Loved listening to your story. Thank you for sharing these wonderful moments with us here. Tender, moving and beautifully written.
So lovely, thought provoking and moving, as ever. Really sorry that I am not around tonight to hear you. It’s too good not to be heard!