I’ve been teaching writing as therapy for eight years, but I’ve been practicing it for decades. Since my teens I’ve found writing to be the best way to make meaning from my thoughts and feelings, and to manage my anxieties. Some people keep a daily diary as a way of making that meaning. Others might write a memoir, a poem or a short story. All forms of creative writing can help us shape narrative from the chaos of our daily lives. But how does it work?

Out the front of my house stands a eucalypt whose bark is the same flesh-pink as those giant human babies sculpted by Ron Mueck. At least, right now it is. Sometimes the bark is as grey and slit-scored as a medical student’s cadaver. Every day there is an imperceptible change in the colour of the tree and sometimes months pass before I notice the transition. About twice a year the slits peel back and the tree does a slow-motion striptease for me, shedding its curled fragments all over my garden. In between long stints at my desk I head outside to sweep the dry scrolls off the path. It is a comforting Sisyphean ritual.

Thirteen times: that’s how often I’ve packed up my personal diaries and carted them from one house to another over the years. That’s a hell of a lot of cardboard boxes stuffed with notepads full of stuff about me. Why did I do it?

Recently I joined a small gathering of women who had volunteered to read out random excerpts from their youthful diaries. At the event dubbed ‘The Symphony of Awkward’ we fell about laughing as we paraded our unedited former selves in front of each other. How quickly embarrassment can mutate into hilarity when it is shared.

Once every change of season I pack my bags, travel to a nearby suburb and get semi-naked amongst a group of strangers. This intimate ritual has become a highlight of my social almanac. Before you jump to conclusions, let me be clear: there’s no hanky-panky involved. The ritual of undressing is called Clothes Swap and it involves a loose collective of about twenty-five women, many of whom only ever meet at these events.

After my heart took a trampling recently, a wise woman advised me to get out from under the doona and look at the horizon. So when an invitation arrived to go walking in the Snowy Mountains I decided to take her advice and see if some of the most spectacular horizons in Australia could help lighten my load.

Sian Prior thought she was in for a tough mountain trek through southern France. With a little cheating and a lot of good food, she discovered that a 120 kilometre hike could be an exercise in hedonism.

 Imagine this: you are about to deliver a presentation to a classroom full of your fellow school students, watched over by your teacher. Perhaps your palms are sweating, your face slightly flushed. Perhaps your heart rate has increased. Perhaps there is a tremor in your hands as you shuffle the pages of your talk, anxiously checking that they’re in the right order. Imagine yourself imagining that everyone in the classroom is staring critically at you, waiting for you to stumble over the first paragraph. Imagine yourself standing in front of that critical audience, wishing that you were invisible. Now imagine feeling just like this every time you find yourself in a social situation with people you don’t know intimately, because you are shy.

What I wonder:

Hey Lofty is this how it was?

The mind returning and returning to the leaking body,

to the seeping ulcers where the bones are peeping through,

the bones aching from the fever,

the head aching from the blows you took

when you tried to stop the Japs burying a skeleton

who was not quite dead,

a skeleton whose hands still shook,

though his blank eyes stared star-wards?

I've fallen in love with a media star. And here's what I've learnt: front-page fame won't necessarily save you from extinction. My love-object first hit the headlines a couple of decades ago when former premier Jeff Kennett dismissed it as a "trumped up corella". The orange-bellied parrot (its real name) was getting in the way of Kennett's plan to move a chemical storage facility to Point Lillias, near Geelong. The "OBP" was endangered and Point Lillias was one of the places the remaining parrots came to feed.

Here’s a weird fact: a couple of years ago the most popular new emoji on the interwebs was that little face with the rolling eyes. You know the one – contempt embodied in a yellow circle. It should come with the sound effect of a sigh. I thought about this emoji recently when I heard an elderly man farewell a woman with the words ‘good girl!’ The three of us were in a lift together and as the silver-haired gent exited, the woman turned to me and rolled her eyes.

Recently a new version of the champagne meme was doing the rounds on Twitter, and this time the targets were memoirists: ‘I’m afraid it’s only autofiction if it comes from the autofiction region of France. Otherwise it’s just sparkling narcissism.’

As the author of two memoirs, I chortled and happily re-tweeted it. It’s not just witty, it’s also a useful reminder of what to avoid when writing about your life for imagined readers. Narcissism—or the perception of it—is one of the potholes you may encounter when shaping a confessional narrative from your lived experience.

I’ve never had the courage to move to a new town. I’ve thought about it often, perused property listings in warmer places, fantasised about fresh starts. Stayed put. So I admire and envy people who take the plunge. How do they make those new friendships that are so vital for our sociable species? This July I have been in Mildura on a four-week writing residency. I could have stayed behind closed doors, used my writing project as an excuse to be anti-social. But I was curious about this town and its folk. So I put the lead on the dog and began walking the streets.

I’m peeling again. Great strips of grey bark flaking off me. Feels good. I’m born again, a naked lemon-scented gum tree swaying in the Victoria St Glade in the Forest of Northcote in the Community of Darebin. And there’s a dead woman feeding me. She died in her eighties back in the year 2039. Luckily there was a flurry of aged care policy changes in the 2020s when all those dementing Baby Boomers started wandering the streets.

As a child, my unattainable object of desire was a giant Derwent pencil set. I knew that if I could just get my hands on one of those big boxes, my whole life would be more colourful. It took four decades but last Christmas I finally scratched that itch and bought myself a set of 36 Derwents. I pored over those creatively-named pencils, wondering who’d first come up with Blue Violet Lake and Golden Brown.

One of the things I miss most about life before You-Know-What is singing with choirs. Monday nights you would normally find me hanging out with a chamber choir. Wednesday nights it was a French choir, and on Sunday nights the neighbours had to put up with my noisy quartet. Tiring days morphed into inspiring nights when I was making music with other tired-then-inspired choristers.

Want to hear a good news story? Fifteen years ago I travelled from the north to the south coast of Timor Leste to visit some friends. We hadn’t met before, but we were officially friends, courtesy of an agreement between my local council and theirs. In 2005 there were a handful of ‘friendships’ between Australian local governments and East Timorese communities. The City of Port Phillip, where I was living, had befriended the town of Suai in the district of Covalima, and I was curious to see what that friendship looked like.

When it came to funeral planning, my mother had only two requests. She dictated them to me a year ago, when she could no longer write. Margot wanted ‘no church but lots of music’, and she wanted her body to be ‘left to science’. When she died seven weeks ago in the middle of Melbourne’s lockdown, we were able to fulfil her first request, but the second proved impossible. The bodies of those who’ve had Covid19 are not currently welcomed by the medical research establishment. Instead, Margot’s death is being co-opted by those preaching a brand of politics she loathed.

Month after month I felt increasingly at the mercy of external forces, including the male-dominated medical profession. No one could explain why I was unable to fulfil my desire to become a mother.

The girl gives up on her prodding and wanders towards the birds. Suddenly she’s running at them, waving her hands. I lean forward, leg muscles tensed. Just before the girl reaches the edge of the jetty the squabbling gulls rise as one, circling back towards the shore. The child stops and stands with her hands flung wide as if to catch any tardy gulls. ‘Gone,’ she says, to the air in front of her.

When you’re childless not by choice, Mother’s Day can be a painful reminder of profound loss. For some it’s miscarriage, for others it’s infertility, and then there’s something called ‘circumstances’, a term with a complex set of sub-categories. My story involves all three.