Lowry - Still Life with Teapot

BRIGID LOWRY is the author of eight books for young adults, including best sellers Guitar Highway Rose and Juicy Writing: Inspiration and Techniques for Young Writers. She has an MA in Creative Writing and has taught writing at all levels, including at Curtin University. She spent seven years living in a Theravadin Buddhist community and is a long-time Zen student in the Diamond Sangha tradition. Her interests include social justice, creativity, travel, spirituality, and food. Her work explores what it is to be alive in the twenty-first century: this fertile, crazy, wonderful, scary moment in time.

book club notes and creative writing exercises available from fremantlepress.com.au

I am The Queen of Everything Soup, but feel free to call me Madame Teapot, Moonbeam or Pencil Brain. I amuse myself by choosing a new creative name each day, inspired by the guy in Melbourne who changed his name to Very Impressive by deed poll in 1992. Go ahead, you can play too. How about Nasturtium, Shoe Dude, or Blue Happy?

Beyond my name, I am sixty-two years old, a woman living in a time and place moving so rapidly that I cant keep up. Have you heard the story about a man riding very fast on a horse? As he galloped past, his friend yelled, Where are you going? I dont know, ask the horse, the rider replied. I dont have a horse, but you get my meaning.

Its raining, and Im making soup. This is my recipe.

Everything Soup. Choose your two oldest onions. Fry them gently with garlic, ginger, cumin, paprika, turmeric. Be lavish with spices. Chop whatever is in your crisper drawer: the shabby remnant of cabbage, half a withered capsicum, two carrots all vegetables are welcome here. Cover with water, add a tin of tomatoes, some frozen peas, a slosh of sweet chilli sauce, a blob of curry paste and a tablespoon of tomato paste if it hasnt gone mouldy. Herbs are excellent: basil, parsley, spring onions, those last limp coriander leaves and stalks. Lemon zest, a can of chickpeas, leftover chicken if youre that way inclined. Bring to the boil and simmer gently. When the veggies are cooked add some miso. Dissolve it in a cup with some hot soup broth first so it doesnt remain a big lump. Serve in your favourite bowl, sprinkled with parmesan. Its divine with sourdough toast if you havent given up an entire food group, such as dairy or carbs. My thought about this, by the way, is that unless you swell up and die when you eat something, theres no point avoiding it. Heres the thing: no matter how many gym visits or green smoothies you make, or vitamins you swallow, you wont escape old age, sickness and death, unless of course you die young. Meanwhile, why deny yourself cream on your pudding or yummy, oily pizza? Just saying. My views on this make me a tad unpopular with some of my friends and relatives, as you can imagine. Anyhow, what I was going to say, and forgive me for employing an obvious metaphor before weve got to know each other better, is that life is crazy abundant with all manner of things: haiku, petticoats, cancer, global warming, cucumbers, mountains, small children, slippers, turtles. There is Facebook and there are mice. It is Everything Soup, guys, and we are in it.

Fresh vibe, flower moon, strange path of life leading everywhere and nowhere Shirt sleeves, autumn melancholy, bright curtains, bouquets of hideous roses, a frayed green dress

What more do you need to know about me? Once I was almost beautiful, but now I have a wrinkly neck and sometimes go shopping with my cardigan inside out. I am twice divorced. No need to feel sorry for me. I dont regret my marriages and Im nearly over the shock of my last husband suddenly preferring a dumpy woman from his fishing club. Mostly, I like being single. I have a lovely range of creative loungewear: floral pyjamas, vintage kimonos, soft dressing-gowns. Im in complete command of the remote control. I do whatever I want whenever I want. Sometimes my dinner is last nights pad thai eaten in front of the telly. If Im feeling particularly decadent I dont even heat it up. Ah, the wicked freedom of it! I was far too sensible when I was a wife.

I now have an invisible husband. When I change my mind about a supermarket purchase, I return it, explaining to the nice young chap at the service counter that my husband bought the wrong batteries, or got oat milk instead of almond milk. He gives me a refund, no worries, and we have a little chat about his latest hair colour. He seems to like me, although he must wonder why I have such a fuckwit of a husband.

Ive decided to write a pillow book. Ive always loved the famous one The Pillow Book of Sei Shnagon: a collection of observations written by a courtesan of Empress Consort Teishi in tenth-century Japan. I admire her lists, her elegant gossip, her fine eye for detail and dry sense of humour. I want to be her when I grow up, as well as Leunig, Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, Jack Kerouac, Frida Kahlo, Sharon Creech, Helen Garner, Anne Lamott, Eloise, and Pippi Longstocking. Id prefer not to have the deaths of Jack and Frida, just the creativity and colour. The good thing about being my age is that if you havent grown up already, you dont have to. So Ive decided to write a pillow book, because I have things to say about what it is to be an ageing woman living in the twenty-first century with as much dignity as she can manage, and saying these things out loud on the bus is probably not the best way to interface with the universe.

My book will be a good place for me to record my lists. Sei Shnagon compiled lists on many topics: Surprising and distressing things; Amusing things; Things that look better from the back than the front. Its interesting how many of her observations are relevant today. For example, her list of Rare things includes a pair of silver tweezers that pull out hairs properly and a person who is without a single quirk.

I have always been in favour of lists. I make sensible ones: Buy pecan nuts, avocado. Post office. Bank. This serves the function of helping me feel that life is under control, even and especially when it isnt. The other kind of list is more fun. You pick a category and then record your observations, as Sei Shnagon did.

Annoying things: A sesame seed stuck in your teeth. Telephone numbers that are one digit short. Supergluing your fingers together. People who dont give a friendly wave when you make way for them in traffic.

Wonderful things: Finding something is half-price when you were going to buy it anyway. Being the only one in your swimming lane. The spongy surface at kids playgrounds. Scoring a purple leopard skin jacket from a dress-up box. New Yorker cartoons. Mangoes. Stepping on a Cheezel and crunching it to smithereens.

Things one should not admit to: Preferring ones own company. Peeing in the sea. Peering into other peoples medicine cupboards.

Interesting book titles: 5 Easy Steps to Becoming a Witch; Freuds Couch, Scotts Buttocks, Bronts Grave; The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories; All My Friends Are Dead; Why Men Marry Bitches; The Pop-up Book of Phobias.

Disagreeable things: Finding a hair in your food. Phone calls from strange call-centre people in India. Chain emails that ask you to send them on to eight amazing women who have changed your life.