Never give up
On publishing a piece I must have been wrestling with for seven years
Shortly after noon yesterday, a piece that I’ve written and rewritten, and sought and sought an outlet for was finally published. It’s a travelogue-cum-meditation of a journey that I took six years ago to Samarai island in southeastern New Guinea, once the home of Beatrice Grimshaw, a Northern Irish writer from the turn of last century who was written about in some sentences as Conrad, Stevenson and Kipling. Samarai was once an important part of Britain’s maritime empire of the South Seas, a stop on the steamer from Tokyo to Brisbane, a bustling entrepôt, but now it is a ruin.
I went alone in search of Grimshaw but throughout I was in and out of touch with an academic called Susan Gardner who wrote her doctoral thesis on Grimshaw and, in a tragic echo of what was likely the fate of her muse, was suffering from the final throes of dementia. I’d love you to click on the link, read it and tell me what you think because it’s probably the hardest bit of writing I’ve ever done.
On and off, getting the piece has taken me seven years. I took the journey in late 2019, it’s now 2026 which makes it seven years of wrestling with it. Originally my idea was to make it part of a book I was planning to write about Papua New Guinea. I spent a year on and off trying to wrestle words into shape on that but I never really felt it worked - the words just didn’t suture together properly, the layers I was trying to put into the piece weren’t elegantly arranged no matter what I did. It felt flat and the project didn’t go anywhere.
I tinkered on and off trying to improve the words during COVID but that didn’t work either. The words went to and fro during our years in the US but efforts here and there didn’t work either. I had what still felt like a blob of words.
Last November, I tried to include a version for submission to a special edition of the Griffith Review - an Australian literary journal I admire - on ‘loss’. I took two weeks off, rewrote and re-edited, getting some excellent feedback from the writer Susan Francis whose work I admire tremendously. I felt really good about the draft until I got the dreaded pro-forma rejection a jaunty email wishing me well.
I submitted to two more journals - two more responses wishing me well - and was utterly ready to give it up entirely.
Then an unexpected plot twist. I got in touch with Peter Browne, editor of the wonderful Inside Story news magazine dedicated to long-form journalism to congratulate him on his magazine’s effective return from death’s door: a benefactor had provided the magazine a financial lifeline. Back and forth our emails went and then I thought why don’t I pitch it to him. There seemed something poetic about a long half-dead piece being placed with a recently resurrected magazine.
He said ‘yes’ and, with a little bit more pruning, he accepted the piece. The relief is slow-burn but it is real.
What’s the lesson here?
It’s something about never giving up and the sheer necessity of keeping going, of the sheer amount of time is needed to polish and buff something to the required degree - Anthony Trollope wrote that writing itself was akin to the endlessly polishing and buffing shoes, which is a simile I love even though I don’t think I’ve actually polished a pair of shoes in about a decade. I smile-cum-inwardly groan when my son tells me that writing just requires two drafts, ‘a rough draft’ and a ‘finished draft. If only it was so easy.
Fundamentally it’s about never giving up.
Thank you for supporting my work.