Emma Ashmere’s new book fills in the gaps
Adelaide author Emma Ashmere has overcome many hurdles en route to becoming a writer, and her new book calls on many of these experiences to lift the lid on traditionally taboo topics.
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It took a while for Emma Ashmere to figure out how to be a writer. She always knew that’s what she wanted to do, but the gap between dream and reality seemed unbridgeable.
Ashmere had completed a Bachelor of Arts that “took 100 years”, she had travelled all over the world, worked many different jobs, but couldn’t find her way into the world of writing.
“Sometimes somebody would lend me a typewriter, as it was back then, and I’d try really hard but I didn’t know what to do,” says the author who draws on her experiences as a queer woman with a disability in her just-released collection of short stories, Dreams They Forgot.
But then again, she always believed she had time on her side.
“I remember sitting with a friend somewhere in a cafe and she said, ‘Did you know Simone de Beauvoir didn’t write her first novel until she was 35?’
“And we thought, ‘Oh good, we’ve got 10 years’.”
Ashmere was 25 when she had that chat with her friend. Ten years later, she hadn’t matched de Beauvoir, but she had taken a big step towards bridging that gap and becoming a writer.
Ashmere signed up for Adelaide University’s creative writing course and immediately felt at home. That this was the world she had been looking for. In contrast to that century long BA, she wanted to take on everything the course had to offer. She would walk from her job in Kent Town to Adelaide Uni to attend lectures and tutorials at lunchtime.
“It was the first time I sat down and thought I wanted to do every single thing they are asking of us, rather than what can I get out of,” she says.
“I had 35 years of stuff from inside my head and it looked really easy at first and that is probably because I didn’t know what I was doing. Then after that, you start realising it’s actually a bit harder.”
Ashmere’s dream of being a writer started early. Growing up she remembers a house full of books. Her father was a journalist at the Stock Journal, her mother always reading history or art books.
“He had his typewriter thundering away at the end of the kitchen table and my mum, they both had books.”
In her Adelaide Uni class, Ashmere gravitated towards short stories. Dreams They Forgot covers her more than 20 years of writing, taking her all the way back to those days at Adelaide Uni. Her oldest story is The Second Wave, set against the backdrop of former premier Don Dunstan taking to Glenelg Beach to defy predictions the city was about to be wiped out by a tidal wave.
Now living near Byron Bay in northern NSW, Ashmere liked the short format better because “it’s not like a five-year commitment to a novel”, although her debut novel The Floating Garden was well-received when published in 2016.
“It really teaches you to be precise and think this story, that word limit thing, is a bit of a liberation because you just have to go to the word limit,” she says.
Dreams They Forgot includes 23 stories. Ashmere says she wants to give voice to the silences and gaps in Australian history. There are affecting stories such as Silent Partner about a family’s slow realisation that Aunt Harriet’s “great friend” Winnifred, who was buried next to her, was actually her partner.
“It’s a different generation. They just got on with their lives and I really admire that, but then people don’t know their stories,” she says.
There are stories of soldiers suffering from PTSD, of other damaged men who came back from war, as Ashmere’s own father had done. “I just feel really sorry when they came back they were basically told to go and have a drink and get married,” she says.
Then there is the semi-autobiographical Standing Up Lying Down. Ashmere says that while the character Laurie is fictionalised “it just sort of upset me to revisit that era”.
Ashmere has endured serious health conditions over many years. Her condition meant she had to use a walking stick and sometimes a wheelchair, but was undiagnosed. For a long time it was thought to be multiple sclerosis but was finally determined to be ME/CFS, myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome.
In Standing Up Lying Down, Laurie is trying to understand her own medical situation, undergoing MRI tests, while hopeful that a new relationship will work out. But also dealing with work and being told by an occupational health and safety pen pusher that because of her disability, in any emergency that causes the high-rise building to be evacuated, Laurie will be last out.
“Can’t have you on the stairwell holding up everybody else. So, make sure you wait for everyone else to leave first. Okay?” the man tells her.
Ashmere’s illness put a stop to her writing. For around seven years she “didn’t write anything at all”.
But Ashmere decided to try again. And started with something even shorter than a short story. A haiku. The Japanese poetry form which takes in 17 syllables over three lines of five, seven and five.
She was also trying to finish her PhD. For 10 months, Ashmere worked 10 minutes a day to complete the work. Then a local newspaper asked her to do 200-word book reviews and she again started writing short stories.
Dreams They Forgot was originally scheduled to be published by Wakefield Press in June. But, then … COVID-19.
Ashmere says it’s a relief to see her book now out in the world despite the “strange time” we are living in. “It just feels nice to have something going out and something positive to focus on,” she says.
Ashmere says she will continue to write short stories, as well as working on a novel about a missing portrait. And while, Ashmere took inspiration from de Beauvoir at the start of her writing life, it was the message delivered by Oranges are Not the Only Fruit and Frankissstein author Jeanette Winterson at a masterclass that she carries with her.
“She gave this incredible talk for two hours. We were all completely spellbound. And at the end she said remember to enjoy it,” she says. “I have worked such terrible jobs, sometimes I think, ‘My God, I am sitting here writing. It’s amazing’.”
Dreams They Forgot by Emma Ashmere, (Wakefield Press, $24.95).