Last year, I was the grateful recipient of a Residential Fellowship at the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writer's Centre in Perth, Western Australia. I spent two weeks there last August working on my PhD novel. You can read all about my experience here. You will see I still enjoy using the marathon as a metaphor all these years later. But, I argue, it is most apt. In the months that have elapsed since my return the parallels between the two experiences have amplified. I am definitely at the point in the race where it is, as writer Fiona Kelly McGregor put it in A Novel Idea, “a matter of stamina, of technicalities, and of getting the job done.”
Also, Perth in August is lovely! Balmy warm days, expansive skies and an awesome annual secondhand charity book sale that frankly would be worth flying back for each winter, providing one brought an empty suitcase…which I did not.