A shot in the dark. I think this is what I initially thought about my application to the JGF residency programme, taking it rather lightly. And once it materialised, I could only claw in disbelief to four little words I adopted for myself in a New Year’s resolution from a horoscope: change, breakthrough, purpose and care.
My stay at Paulet House goes a long way toward fulfilling that. It’s very easy to imagine before arriving here that the dreaded isolation most writers live with and fear just continues only in a more serene, less frenetic atmosphere from a remote destination. Not within reach of the usual distractions. While most of this is in fact correct, the distinction lies with the stimulus you derive from a group of other writers sharing the space with you. When at breakfast, lunch or dinner over a scrumptiously prepared meal you meet, discuss, commiserate and share the most bizarre, intellectual, sometimes hilarious chats and anecdotes only those with incorrigible sensibility can indulge and appreciate. And also during which someone might just touch on a topic it so happens you have pages of notes on for a new work you’re embarking on. It makes you sit up in that moment in astonishment, never expecting you’d hear it roll off someone else’s tongue as regular as sliced bread. And that right there is the trigger that allows your creativity to take flight and craft your next masterpiece.
Thank you, Paulet House, for the warmest hospitality, and thank you to the Jakes Gerwel Foundation for the opportunity.
Shireen Mall is a writer and academic from Cape Town, South Africa, who obtained an honours degree in English literature at the University of the Western Cape and a master’s degree in creative writing at Rhodes University. She is the author of the long research essay “The Goodbye Letter” (WritingThreeSixty, 2018). Shireen is particularly interested in the various approaches to writing the self, how fickle memory is, poetics (as in form) and psychological trajectories, which she hopes will come to the fore in her current offering, M O Y, a novel of creative nonfiction. When she is not studying, she works in the English Department of the Education faculty at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, where she teaches LOLT (language of learning and teaching).
