If you are new here, hello and welcome! I am Mel Parks and I have been running creative writing workshops in Sussex, UK for ten years while being a freelance writer, researcher and editor. I began this Substack, Awen, in 2022 as a gathering place for my thoughts about the writing process and to share some stories and creative inspiration along the way. Awen is free to read and share.
For 2024 creative writing workshops including my Tuesday afternoon Zoom writing group, click here.
Dear all
I hope you’ve all found some space for yourselves during the past week, whatever you’ve been up to.
My thoughts have begun to turn to the next essay in my Moonpause series and since Benjamin Zephaniah passed away at the start of this month, I have been remembering the job I had for a children’s charity when I interviewed him on the phone. I wrote an article about him for the magazine I edited:
I loved editing this magazine for playworkers and had lots of freedom in what I included. In 1999, I was not yet thinking of writing creatively but I can see the threads here of my work now. Sadly, this job also came with a lot of stress for me and I have written a little bit about it here. Punctuating that job with my next one in a doomed venture-capital funded dot com, was a holiday to Mexico with my then boyfriend and now husband, Karl.
For some reason, I have tried to write about that holiday many times during the past maybe 15 years - in poetry, fiction, non-fiction and even a combination (haibun). I say ‘tried’ because each time, I’ve not quite finished or the piece has not been published and I’ve left it languishing on my hard drive. In a way, I understand its significance - it was a turning point in my life. But in another way, I’m not quite sure why it continues to haunt me as much as it does - it was only a 10-day holiday after all. So in my next essay, I will hopefully bring together all the strands of this writing I’ve already done as well as some unexplored memories of my job and what led me to that point.
What follows is a beginning of an essay I wrote about three years ago and then a fictional short story I wrote a few years before that…
It must be twenty years ago now, that I pushed open the heavy doors of a travel agency on Regent Street at the end of a rainy London summer. My umbrella dripped on the scarlet carpet and my boots left damp footprints as I made my way to an agent flicking through brochures behind a desk.
‘Where’s hot in November?’ I asked.
She looked up, stared at me. ‘The Canaries? You know? Tenerife, Lanzarote?’
I held her gaze. ‘Further.’
‘Further than the Canaries? Very popular for winter holidays. The Canaries. Or you’ve got Africa, India, all those southern hemisphere places. Morocco. How about Marrakesh? I dream of someone whisking me away to Marrakesh for the weekend. Don’t you?’
‘No. Not really.’
She started tapping at her keyboard. I peered at her screen, green words and numbers flashed up. ‘Cheap would be good,’ I said.
‘Ah, hang on. Marrakesh is getting booked up. Looking busy. Oh, what’s this? Merida. That’s in Mexico and it’s cheap. What a bargain. Wow. May book myself on one of those flights. Never been there, mind. Though I know a lovely hotel in Cancun. Do you want me to check Cancun?’
‘No, Merida sounds just fine.’
‘Stopover in Miami?’
‘Even better.’ I handed over my credit card.
I’d never heard of Merida but bought a travel guide to Mexico on the way home and told K the news. He was up for the adventure. We needed a break from the rain, a break from our jobs, a break from life.
*
That holiday was the start of things. It was also the end of things. It was both the start and end of things. It was a page marker, a pause, a semicolon. It was also liminal. I was not a mother then. I was not a writer. I am both now. Somehow, I knew I’d want to begin and slipped a small, red, cloth-bound notebook into my luggage. And while I never thought it important to be married before I had a baby, by the time the holiday was over K and I were engaged and so I count that holiday as the beginning of our committed life together.
The other thing that changed was that the day before the flight I left a job that made me so anxious I vomited each morning while cleaning my teeth, and began a new one the Monday following our return. From time to time, I have tried to write about Mexico, but I have superimposed another story onto it, a story of what it’s like to be a not-yet-mother, trying for a baby. This wasn’t us yet, but it seemed a good, contained space in which to play out that story. It never felt right to me, though. So now I’ll try to tell the story of us, of the me that ended and began then, and the pre-maternal feelings may or may not show up. This writing is an attempt to figure out why the holiday is like a recurring dream. Writing is how I think (Richardson, 1998). Writing is how I breathe, feel and live.
Celia slapped her palms onto the dashboard, elbows stiff as Ed swerved an oncoming lorry. After driving on what felt like the wrong side of the road in the Mexican heat, following truck after truck down narrow roads, they were nearly at Valladolid where they’d booked a hotel. But Celia wanted to stop at a little-known cenote on the way. Celia liked that. To travel off the beaten track.
They arrived at a grime-covered wooden sign painted with the name of the cenote. Dark haired, barefoot children scampered towards them as the car sputtered to silence, and the dust settled in a fine layer on the windscreen. The sound of the children clamouring grew louder inside the car. They poked their heads in through open windows. Celia laughed as she tried to close the window making a slicing motion with her other hand. They bounced back but jostled each other to stay close to the car.
“Me”
“No, me.”
The children were so close Celia and Ed worried about knocking them over when they opened the car doors. Red blotches appeared on Ed’s cheeks, forehead and jaw. He slid his hands to the top of the steering wheel and rested his chin. The heat was becoming unbearable with the windows closed. Sweat gathered at the back of Celia’s neck. She pulled a hairband from her wrist and tied her hair in a knot. It was skitting out in this weather; some strands stuck to her head and some vertical as if she’d had an electric shock.
“It’ll be cool in there,” Celia said. “We’re here now, let’s go in.”
“How will we get past them?” He pulled his t-shirt away from his back doing nothing to alleviate the dark, damp sweat stain. He gathered a fresh top that had been carefully laid out on the back seat, then spread it out in his lap as he pulled the damp one over his head. He handed it to Celia and with thumb and forefinger she dropped it into a carrier bag, as he put on the fresh one. All the time the children were peering in.
“They are only children.”
“What do they want? Can’t you tell them to go away?”
“They belong here. They’re probably after our money. You’ve got change, haven’t you?” Celia opened the car door and swept away children like the tide. It didn’t take long for one of them, slightly taller than the rest with one eye dark brown and bright and the other storm grey, to find his way round. He held out his arm for Celia to hold onto as if he’d been the chauffeur. Celia took it, stood up and straightened her skirt.
“Hello, lady. Where you come from? What is your name?”
She laughed and answered his questions, as Ed came to join her, pulling out a handful of change.
“We take good care of your car sir, lady. Good care.”
“I guess this is the Mexican version of pay and display,” she said to Ed as he held one coin after another up to the light, tilting it this way and that. The boy pointed to the one he wanted and got a few more too. He shared the coins out amongst the other children, then ran to the entrance of the cenote, saying, “this way, follow me.”
Children hopped and hurried down the narrow passage of the cave after them.
“They move so quickly,” Celia said, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the light. “What about our car they are taking such good care of?”
The wet rock underfoot was slippery. Celia shivered. Ed’s cinnamon smell radiated from him and she stretched out her hands to hold onto his familiar warmth.
“Don’t grab onto me,” he said, pulling away. “I’ll fall. I can see about as much as you.”
“I help you, lady.” It was the boy again, the one that seemed to be in charge. His unsettling eyes stared up at her and she let him walk in front of her as she put her hands on his shoulders.
It wasn’t long before the dark passage opened out into a huge cave. There was a pool of green water lit by a circle of sunshine from a hole in the cave roof highlighting the translucent fish like an x-ray. Children crawled through tiny gaps in rocks, climbed thick dripping stalactites, curled themselves into balls and jumped into the green water with a reverberating splash.
Celia and Ed patted a few flat rocks before finding a dry one to sit on. She sat down first, then he found a better rock a little way away, so she moved to be next to him. There was a gap between their shoulders like a crevasse. Other people were getting changed behind rocks then sliding into the pool, inch by inch.
“Our costumes are packed in the car; maybe I’ll go back and dig them out,” said Celia.
“Don’t bother. It looks freezing.”
Every sound in that cave was amplified and echoey. They sat until the people, white and cold got out and the ripples of the water flattened, reflecting every crack and crevice of the cave walls.
“It’s like a womb in here,” Ed said. “The womb of the world.” He looked at her smiling, waiting for a response.
Celia stared at him as if she could transfer her thoughts about how wrong his image was. She decided to speak in case he hadn’t got the message.
“It’s not though, is it? All cold and black like this...although maybe mine is. It might as well be.”
Ed did not move closer to her. He did not put his arm around her. He did not know how.
The other tourists left. The children receded into the shadows. Celia slipped off her flip flops, stood up and before she had time to think about it, undid the button at the side of her skirt. She let it fall to the ground in a circle around her feet. Then lifted her t-shirt over her head.
“What are you doing?” Ed loud whispered as he looked around, stretching his neck.
“Going in. Coming?” Celia wrapped her arms around herself and walked towards the water without looking back.
Celia put her head back in the pool, and lifting it up, smoothed the hair off her forehead and splashed her face. The water became still around her. “Come in, it’s lovely,” she shouted to Ed, her voice returning again and again, quieter each time. She blew a bubble of laughter into the water.
“Looks freezing.”
“Not when you get used to it. Not at all.” Celia’s white legs were striped with ripple shadows and as she paddled through the clear water; the translucent fish tickled her legs. She tilted her head to look up at the sky through the cave roof and the spotlight of sunshine fell on her. Ed unzipped his jeans, pulled his t-shirt over his head and dived in, creating a wave over Celia. She shrieked and laughed, and after coming up for air he dived back under making a grab for her legs. She swam away, to the edge and then to the middle again, to the warmth of the sun circle, where they both treaded water.
“These fish are amazing. Look at them, tiny skeletons swimming around.”
“I know, right.” She stopped looking at the fish and looked at him. Her husband. The word still felt strange even though it had been a year. Diving into this pool somehow made the lines starting to appear on his forehead disappear. She could see the boy in his face again. He looked at her too and reached out to touch her arm.
Something fell from the air and splashed in the water; they started swimming again with the rise and fall of it. A small grinning face bobbed up to the surface.
“Hey, you could have landed on us.”
Another child dive bombed from a stalactite, and another. And still more appeared from the shadows; they swam in and out of their legs and laughed. Celia and Ed looked at each other, nodded, then cupped their hands, straightened their arms and whirled around splashing the children. One of them grabbed onto Ed’s shoulders, another onto his arm. He tried to swim with them like that and then released them one by one throwing them into the water; they came back up and asked for more. And more. Celia watched and circled them.
“Sir, mister,” one of the children shouted from the edge. He was wearing Ed’s t-shirt. It was huge on his skinny body. The child danced around hopping from one leg to another, and then his next hop was straight into the pool, just as Ed shouted, “don’t jump”.
“Sorry sir, wet shirt.”
Ed chased after him and tried to lift the red, floaty fabric off the child. He turned his attention to another child parading around with Celia’s skirt on, waistband scrunched together, sassy hip-swinging walk.
Celia was hugging herself, shivering and standing on a rock submerged in the pool. She held out a hand to the child.
“Can I have my clothes?” she asked.
The child ran off and hid behind a rock. Her face appealed to Ed.
Sounds of shouting in Spanish above the splashing revealed the return of the older child; the one who had taken the money. Two of the others stopped what they were doing and handed over the clothes.
“The car keys,” Ed said to Celia as he jumped out of the pool, pulled on his sodden t-shirt and rushed over to the rock where he’d left his jeans, leaving a trail of drips. They weren’t there. The older boy followed him. “My jeans,” he said. “They were here.”
“No jeans there.”
“I know that. They were here. One of your little friends has them.”
He shrugged. “Not my friends.”
“Friends, not friends. Doesn’t matter. Someone has my jeans and my car keys in the pocket.”
“Never leave things in pockets. We have a sign up there.” He pointed towards the entrance. “Not safe here.”
There was a pool appearing around Ed’s feet, which were getting twitchy, “Look. If you find my jeans, I’ll give you money.”
“You have no money.” The boy indicated at Ed’s naked legs and lack of pockets.
“Not now.” Ed stamped his left foot, glared and growled like a child. “You get the jeans, I’ll get my car keys and find you money in the car.”
Celia squeezed the water out of her hair as she appeared next to them, damp patches on her skirt and top. “Let’s get out of here. I can’t wait to feel that warm sun again. What’s going on? You okay?” she asked the child. He whistled and someone appeared with Ed’s jeans. Ed snatched them and checked the pockets, held out the keys and gave them a reassuring rattle.
“Say thank you,” said Celia to him.
“But…how did you manage that? Thanks,” he said pulling on the jeans. The child held out his hand. “Money? You want money after all that?”
“Let’s go. This way. Come again. Fun today sir, madam?” And he led them out into the sunshine and hung around by the car.
Ed opened the door letting out a cloud of heat and rooted around in the glovebox. He pulled out a handful of change, turned round but the child had gone; he’d joined the crowd who were scampering around in the dust as another car with a hire company sticker pulled up.
“We’ll soon dry off,” said Celia as she clunked her seatbelt into place.
“Kids,” said Ed as he started up the ignition.
“I know. One day, we’ll have a few of our own,” she smiled, spread the map out on her knees and found where they were with her index finger.
Writing invitation
Take a moment that was pivotal in your life. Freewrite what you can remember. Use all of your senses. Then write it out like a scene. Fill in the parts you don’t remember. Add the layers of colour, the weather, food. Anything that helps it come alive.
2024 Creative Writing Workshops
To book or find out more, click the links below:
Tuesday afternoons on Zoom - starting 9 January 2024.
Tuesday evenings at Chequer Mead, Sussex - starting 16 January 2024.
Thursday mornings at Chequer Mead, Sussex - starting 11 January 2024.
Until next time…
Mel
This newsletter was created by Mel Parks, a writer, researcher and workshop facilitator based in Sussex, UK. Mel runs writing workshops locally and on Zoom and researches creativity in midlife as well as her personal connection to nature. She has been widely published and is currently working on a series of moon and plant-inspired essays.
It is free to read and share, but if you value my work, please do stop by my virtual honesty box and leave a handful of loose change.