You'll just be the mountains

You’ll Just Be The Mountains: A Reflective, Vulnerable Take on Two Humbling Weeks at Varuna, the National Writers’ House

By Laurie Steed

View of the escarpment from near Varuna.

It’s June 2021, and I am headed to Varuna. I’ve won the Henry Handel Richardson Flagship Fellowship for a short story collection that, so far, no one is particularly keen to publish.

Is the collection any good? It’s incredible, I think, but that doesn’t always matter within the publishing industry. Varuna is both in and outside of that space, though. In their infinite and maybe questionable wisdom, they have picked me.

And so it is that I walk up that loose stone path of 141 Cascade Street, shrouded in foliage, for the first time since 2012. And so again, I seek truth when it seems no one gives a rat’s about the stories I am so desperately trying to tell.

On the train from Sydney to Katoomba, a man, Alex, gets on, with four poles and a box. So I talk to him. He chooses where he’ll stay each night and then sits in the darkness, in a tent the size of a Barina and listens.

I tell him I’m headed to Varuna, and a grin surfaces, spreading out across his face. ‘Well, you’ll just be the house,’ he says. ‘You’ll just be the mountains.’

It goes like this all trip. Varuna’s story advisor, Carol Major, asks why I am there. I tell her I received a fellowship for the short story collection. She asks what I really want to write, and I tell her I started a memoir on the plane about being a dad, and maybe I can work on that.

‘Do it,’ she says without hesitation.

‘What do you mean, “Do it,”? Can I just do that?’ I ask.

‘You can do anything you want,’ she says, and there’s that smile again. ‘So go, go do it.’

After Carol leaves, I sit in the main house's living room and do calculations on what it would take to finish my memoir while at Varuna. It’s 5,000 words a day, which would get me to 77,500 by the end of my two-week stay.

After that, I do it every day. I walk around the mountain tops in the morning, playing A Trick of the Tail by Genesis, over and over. I watch The Trip on my lunch breaks. I shift my desk from seated to standing and back again, in search of those 5,000 words. I resist talking to anyone between 8 am and 5.30 pm. Then, at 5.30 pm, I emerge from Jerra Studio, walking to the main house and reconnecting with the nation’s finest authors, emerging and established.

Another writer, Rachael Mead, is also in residence. When I reach 60,000 words written, I tell her, gleefully grabbing a mint slice from the biscuit jar.  

‘This is the stuff of legend,’ she says, smiling. ‘Laurie, this is amazing.’

And it is. A gift. A blessing. A belated change in fortune just as it felt that the die was already cast.

Varuna house and gardens during Laurie’s residency.

So what happened that allowed me to write so much in just two weeks? Well, perhaps:

·      I gave myself permission to fail. Before I went, I rang my friend Jon and told him of my fears about the upcoming trip. He said, ‘Well if you write nothing, that will still be an experience in your life. The time you went to Varuna, and no words came.’

·      I let my guard down when not writing. At the 2014 Sozopol Fiction Seminars, I met Shelly, a fellow short story writer. However, it wasn’t really me she met, as I felt under immense pressure being the first Australian fellow in its history. After two weeks of diplomacy and wearing a button-up shirt and trousers, I showed up in jeans and a hoody for our final dinner. I tapped her on the shoulder. She turned around, smiled, and said, ‘Oh, hey. It’s you.’

That ‘you’ was there with me in its entirety for the duration of my stay at Varuna, and it felt deeply liberating to be me, and for that me to be enough: valued, loved, and appreciated.

·      I silenced my inner critic and rediscovered my inner sage. While a good drill sergeant, my inner critic is still an irredeemable, insatiable dick. By telling him to relax, I allowed a kinder voice to take its place. While at my most lost, I said, ‘I don’t know what to write next.’ The inner sage said, ‘Me neither. But let’s find out, together.’

I’m immensely grateful to Varuna, The Henry Handel Richardson Society, and all my fellow writers in residence at that same time for such an incredible stay. Since my time in residence, my memoir, Better Than Me: The Story of a Dad has been revised at the Centre for Stories in Perth and now accepted for publication.

In closing, I’d encourage all writers at Varuna to not necessarily emulate such productivity but to embrace the freedom that preceded it. As writers, we sometimes learn to perform rather than create. It’s only when we turn off that constant gaze and see what we so desperately need to say that we can indeed be the house, and the mountains.

About Laurie Steed

Laurie first came to Varuna on a Retreat Fellowship in 2012, and was recently awarded the prestigious Henry Handel Richardson Flagship Varuna Fellowship for Short Story Writing (2021). His debut novel, You Belong Here, was published in 2018 to critical acclaim, and was shortlisted for the 2018 Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards.