Becoming a Writer

This was the moment in time when I felt I had to share my story. Something thick and viscous started bubbling inside me, and I must dig a channel to guide it through to an outlet, or it would smother my being. This was the moment when I started talking to myself.

I had written a lot before that: awkward, forced school compositions on days at the seaside and why you love your mother; letters to my various penfriends in Naples, Brescia and Milan, Nuernberg, the Canary Islands, Iran; an MA; school reports (“must try harder”); a PhD thesis. But all this writing was for homework, in fulfilment of degree requirements and job demands, to forge friendships, to exchange news and love and nostalgia (now long defunct and much missed), but not because I just had to.

This is what happened: it was 2001. Lorna Sage won the Whitbread Biography Award for Bad Blood in January and died a week later. We were spending a summer holiday with the Greek family in a seaside hotel near Athens. I was reading Bad Blood. My father had just got diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. I heard that a shepherd boy I knew from my native island Kassos, in the south of Greece, had died of cancer in New York and was laid to rest back home.

That’s when I really realised that words can disappear. The shepherd boy’s words all of a sudden, my father’s slowly but inexorably. My words would also disappear, unless I wrote them down. I started keeping a diary to stop my words from disappearing. I have been talking to myself ever since.

© Sofia A Koutlaki 2020