Tuesday evening is usually pretty dull: nothing much happens in my house. However, last Tuesday was kind of special. The acclaimed writer and mentor Kathryn Heyman, author of Fury, was giving a free masterclass titled Voices & Vision. So I walked through the door marked Zoom, and had a lovely evening listening to Kathryn weave her magic. If you ever get a chance to work with Kathryn, or go along to one of her workshops, grab it!

One of the nifty exercises we did was writing about the story of our main character’s name. It was an exercise grounded in exploration of character voice and their habits of speech. We first decided what our character’s main linguistic preoccupations were, then we wrote within these parameters. As the text I’m working on at the moment is a memoir, I wrote about my own name. Here’s what I wrote:

I was born into light.

That sounds frightfully pretentious, doesn’t it?

Perhaps I should begin again…

I was born at a large regional hospital north of Sydney. On the day I visited it, as a teenager on holiday from Tasmania, it was being torn down. I stood there and watched the wrecker’s ball swing in. Large sheets of concrete folded like grey paper. Dust became a world above the ground. The clouds fell out of the sky. My ears were gripped by the low sonic boom of explosives.

I was born in this place, with its long spearmint green corridors, and its cheap white painted walls, and its pinboards dusted with demands. I lay on the bed – a useless, red, squally thing – and they shone a light on me. Shone a torch and flicked it across my face, to check my vision. And my goggle smeared newborn eyes grabbed hold of the light and clung to it like a drowning sailor to a spar. Seized the particles of the brightest thing in the universe. Let it speckle my pastey blue irises with infinite pinpricks of exquisite pain.

And they called me Helen – for the old Greek word for light.