36 Hours has been shortlisted for the 2023 East Anglian Book Award in the Biography and Memoir category. Now in their sixteenth year, the awards celebrate writing talent within the East of England. The East Anglian Book Awards are a partnership between Jarrolds, the Eastern Daily Press, and the National Centre for Writing, supported by UEA Faculty of Arts & Humanities. The awards celebrate the very best of publishing, writing, and reading in the region. Category winners will be announced in January 2024 and the overall winner in February 2024.
In May 2023 I was invited by the National Centre for Writing to take part in a panel for the City of Literature Weekend as part of Norfolk and Norwich Festival. Before the event I recorded an episode of The Writing Life Podcast with former CEO Chris Gribble.
This episode of The Writing Life Podcast was published on 23/10/2023 and you can listen to it here:
We chatted about life writing, about my memoir 36 Hours and about life as a writer. Thanks to Chris for being a perfect host.
It was a great opportunity to share something of the journey from initial idea to publication of 36 Hours and to talk about the support I received from Arts Council England with a Developing Your Creative Practice award.
On October 7th 2023, I joined fellow authors Christina Patterson (Outside, the Sky is Blue) and Alison Jean Lester (Absolutely Delicious) at Birmingham Rep for a panel event chaired by Toby Crowe, discussing our different approaches to writing about life before and after loss when no words feel adequate to the situation.
It was great to have another opportunity to bring 36 Hours before a wider audience and to champion the book’s central provocation: to have better conversations about death and dying in order that we can fully embrace the business of living!
Thanks to Birmingham Literature Festival for inviting the conversation.
On Friday 26th May 2023, I joined fellow author and junior doctor Roopa Farooki (Everything is True) at Dragon Hall, Norwich, for the National Centre for Writing City of Literature Weekend for Norfolk and Norwich Festival. We discussed how books can help to address difficult conversations around life, death and grief and how memoir can reframe delicate discussions and help others to find a voice.
A Q&A session followed with lively and poignant input from the audience.
Events such as these help bring 36 Hours to a wider audience, to encourage more open conversations about death and dying. The intention is not to be morbid, but, as attributed to Marie Curie, ‘to understand more that we may fear less’.
Saturday May 27th 2023 I am running Life Lines, a creative life writing workshop at Dragon Hall for the National Centre for Writing as part of the City of Literature Weekend.
In the workshop we’ll explore ideas to get to the heart of your story and find your voice. All welcome, from seasoned wordsmiths to closet scribblers!
36 Hours has appeared in the National Centre for Writing’s Top 10 City of Literature Weekend book recommendations alongside writers including Caleb Azumah Nelson, Don Paterson and Kathryn May.
Dr Karen Chumbley, GP and the Clinical Lead for End of Life Care for Suffolk and North East Essex Integrated Care System, published this review of 36 Hours in the British Journal of General Practice.
I’m delighted to announce the publication of 36 Hours.
ABOUT
Less than a year after being diagnosed with inoperable cancer, Fiona Mason’s husband died at home. She was his carer. Unflinching in its detail, this book is a delicate chronicle of his last day and an account of thirty-six hours that changed her life. It’s also an invitation to find better ways to talk about death and dying.
Fiona’s intimate account of the last 36 hours of a man’s life is a powerful work of life writing. It’s courageous, tender, exasperated, angry, lyrical and occasionally even funny, but never voyeuristic. The simplicity of the prose and the honesty of observation are compelling. BLAKE MORRISON
This is a beautiful and moving account by Fiona Mason of her husband’s death at home. Their experience of care professionals, who attended in person yet without compassion, is so deftly observed it made me wince. A perfect 36 Hour memoir. It’s incredibly powerful. It’s beautifully told. It’s a gem. I think this is a book that has the power to make a difference. DR KATHRYN MANNIX
Very moving and beautifully written. Marvellously clear and brave. JENNY UGLOW OBE
Powerful and precise writing. It tackles elusive emotional states in a highly nuanced way. The detail is so lovingly preserved and presented. SASHA DUGDALE
Rarely have I felt so transported by someone else’s words. Fiona draws you into the most intimate and personal of spaces and offers you the privilege of sharing 36 hours that would normally be invisible to the outside world. With great honesty and generosity, she invites us into her home as she cares for her dying husband. It’s an invitation you won’t want to turn down. BOBBIE FARSIDES, Professor of Clinical and Biomedical Ethics, Brighton and Sussex Medical School
36 Hours addresses an area of real current debate and interest and does so in a way that prioritises both aesthetic and human concerns equally. Committed and talented writing. CHRIS GRIBBLE, National Centre for Writing
The writing is vivid and very clear, highlighting the delicate balance and poignancy of the work involved in end-of-life care and the minutiae of support involved in the simplest of daily activities, making the mundane poetic. A remarkable piece of work. KATE FLATT OBE
Deeply moving and intensely raw. LI MILLS, Death Doula
I’m in awe of the honesty and openness with which Fiona described her experience. Her account is a wonderful way of opening up some much-needed conversations about death and dying, not only at a public/societal level but, also at the patient-professional level. DR SIMONE ALI, Consultant in Palliative Medicine
In 2021 I was invited by Prof Bobbie Farsides and Dr Rich Gorman of Brighton and Sussex Medical School to collaborate on a unique qualitative research project, facilitating creative writing with a group of families affected by rare genetic conditions. This research programme was part of the Wellcome Trust funded Eppigen project.
You can read the research review paper by Rich Gorman and Bobbie Farsides, recently published in BMJ Medical Humanities HERE.
Gorman R, Farsides B Writing the worlds of genomic medicine: experiences of using participatory-writing to understand life with rare conditions Medical Humanities Published Online First: 13 April 2022. doi: 10.1136/medhum-2021-012346
In May 2021, I was invited by Brighton and Sussex Medical School to take part in a conversation on zoom about dying at home for #DyingMattersAwarenessWeek.
Hosted by Bobbie Farsides, Professor of Clinical and Biomedical Ethics at BSMS, I shared the panel with end of life Doula, Li Mills and Palliative Care consultant Dr SImone Ali. The event was part of the Ethics in Performance series, and was an opportunity to read from and reflect upon the themes raised in my forthcoming memoir 36 Hours.
I have wrestled with the ethics of writing from life, which is why 36 Hours has been slow to enter the public domain. This event was a turning point because it was my first tangible opportunity to explore the work through the lens of the wider conversation about death and dying.
Following my husband’s death, I couldn’t find the book I wanted to read, so I wrote it. I didn’t want saccharine or euphemism. I wanted raw and real. I had always intended and hoped that 36 Hours might prove to be of some use to others going through a similar experience and that it might also prepare any reader for the possibility of caring for a loved one in the last stages of life.
The feedback from the event was positive and I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to share my writing in such a forum. I look forward to further such platforms to share this work.
My thanks to Bobbie, Li, Simone and the BSMS team for convening the event.
We already possess the potential for transition from grub to butterfly.
The DYCP project has forced me to consider my relationship to life writing. Especially my ability to manage the realities of personal exposure.
I committed to a gruelling project. As such, I’ve had to re-inhabit a distressing and painful period in my life. And I’ve had to consider how much I want my creative life to be bound to the public reliving of personal of experiences.
Stilling the Inner Voices of Admonition
The desire to have others bear witness to one’s experience whilst metaphorically wanting to hide behind the sofa, is a contradiction inherent in life writing. And it’s one that I have not fully resolved. I’m not a ‘me’ sort of person. I’m an other-focussed rescuer. In this context, writing about myself with the express intention of public sharing, feels unnatural and awkward. I can hear my Grandmother’s stern reproaches about showing-off – small children, especially girls, were to be seen and not heard.
Whilst other writers might have the confidence and ego to ‘write it, publish it and be damned’, I worry about upsetting other people. It feels selfish to own and share one’s story at the expense of another’s sense of wellbeing. But this means committing to a lifetime of not speaking-up, of not authentically being the protagonist in one’s own story. This is a sacrifice I would never demand of others.
Getting the DYCP award helped me to stand more boldly in my own light. The Grandma in my head might still be telling me off, but the award has helped give validity to my creative practice. This in turn has helped me to turn down the volume on Grandma’s megaphone.
Following our initial conversations, Bobbie then put me in touch with Rose Turner FRCP, Consultant in Palliative Medicine at the Martlets Hospice in Brighton. We’d hoped to organise an event as part of Brighton Festival in summer 2019. But, due to people’s availability and some of my own health issues, we decided to put it on hold.
The event was to combine readings of my work, interview/conversation with Rose and then a panel discussion before an audience of public and medics.
Although now on hold, this is a really exciting development and positive outcome for the project because it means 36 Hours could have real and lasting public benefits. It’s been exciting to consider the potential of an arts/science collaboration. And to think about how these initial discussions might lead to further public engagement with the work.
My Story – a course in life writing
In addition to the work for DYCP, I also wrote and delivered My Story, a 6-week creative writing course in Life Writing. This has been a hugely satisfying and rewarding experience. Following this success, I plan to develop this into an online programme and build a community around life writing.
I’ve found this process of writing and teaching a life writing programme deeply rewarding because it’s been a way of exploring and sharing my life writing process and practice without personal exposure.
And I’ve learned that, just like me, people have a deep need to reveal and share their stories. What could be more human, after all? What my course does is help people to find the ‘story’ within their story, often with surprising (to them) results.
I’d now argue that the merits of life writing as process and practice are almost greater than the text outcome. It’s been interesting to observe how a deep engagement with personal narrative is a fantastic catalyst for getting to grips with what makes a great story. In fact, since grasping the nuts and bolts of good storytelling, some of my participants have gone on to have success with fiction writing.
Next Steps
Overall, DYCP has been a game-changer for me. Receiving the award raised my level of confidence and has allowed me to ‘own’ my identity as a writer.
Next steps for me are:
> confirming an agent to support the distribution of 36 Hours.
> developing an online life writing programme to build an international community of life writers.
> delivering a public event with BSMS and exploring the potential for extending this to other areas.
> holding a residency at two locations in the east of England to roll-out a life-writing engagement programme.
Emerging
I can now see that a future career transition really is possible. Moving away from my life at the business end of the arts and towards a focus on my writing practice. This is an incredibly energising thought.
I’ve also realised that we already possess the potential for transition from grub to butterfly. With the right encouragement and commitment, whatever our age or circumstances, we can emerge and fly.
This will be my final DYCP blog post, but it’s not the end of the story.
A series of blog posts about my journey through my Arts Council England Developing Your Creative Practice project.
Zero Point #1 (acrylic on canvas) Fiona Mason 2014
Zero-point energy is the lowest possible energy that a quantum mechanical system may have. In this project, Zero Point stands in for the contradiction of the chaotic void, the intense single point of energy and the enervated vacuum of grief, whatever its source. Each painting represents a different expression of that experience.
Before I began to find the words to express my experience, I moved paint around on canvas; pushing, pulling, smoothing, disrupting. I was trying to get at the thing behind, beneath, between. I was trying to see it, feel it, represent it. I was trying to rend the veil between my outer, coping, resilient social self and my inner selves who were struggling in their various ways.
Zero Point #2
Zero Point #3
Zero Point #4
My mother was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2005.
Her illness was ongoing when my husband became ill. She watched his terminal journey, fearing it might foreshadow hers: the brain metastases in particular. Daily life became dominated by one form of cancer or another. I felt surrounded by things I couldn’t see, confused by the two-faced otherness and sameness of rogue cells and unable to protect those I loved from their lurking, sinister and destructive squatters.
a breast cancer cell
I found myself drawn to the form of neoplasms as things in themselves. If encountered in a more benign context, the are complex, beautiful and extraordinary natural phenomena. As viewed under electron microscopy they’re like some kind of exotic seed or marine creature.
In their final weeks and days, I sat vigil at my loved one’s bedsides, in my mind’s eye trying to see inside; to imagine what was going on at that moment, the industrious, pointless replication of cells that would ultimately wipe themselves out in the process.
The paintings were attempts to capture this experience of trying to see.
I used to think that, philosophically speaking, language was bound to miss the mark when expressing experience – that words were conceptual containers of social-historical making that inevitably constrained thought and experience by what was permitted in a given lexicon. I felt that visual art maybe did a better job of communicating what it is to be in the world. But what does an abstract painting communicate, without a label or explanation from the artist? Would a viewer look at the four images in this post and understand them as views of the same scene through different windows?
As I explored the potential of metaphor and proxy and myth and narrative I found language to be far richer and more nuanced than I’d permitted in my earlier thinking. The right words in the right order allow us to look slantwise at life, revealing experience in richer, more layered, more nuanced ways. Words, language – these are not hermetically sealed containers for experience. The myriad combinations reveal conceptual boundaries that are porous and leaky.
In Zero Point #3 above, the dark point is a throughway, a liminal threshold to another hidden space. Life and death are thus. These images are physical, visceral experience re-worked into canvas.
In 36 Hours, I want language to expand and fill-out these attempts to see. And whether it’s a painting or a text, it’s about a viewer or reader bearing witness to the microcosm of my lived experience and extrapolating this to the macrocosm of the human condition. We all die, we all grieve, we all suffer. I claim nothing unique about my losses, but my experience of them is unique to me. Maybe in sharing them, others will find validation, recognition and some comfort.
A series of blog posts about my journey through my Arts Council England Developing Your Creative Practice project.
36 Hours is a detailed account of a man’s last day.
The man, my late husband, died at home, just short of a year after a diagnosis of lung cancer.
I began writing the book during my MA in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths. It didn’t emerge until the summer term of the first year of the programme. I’d skirted around the topic, writing various pieces of fiction that felt like playing in the dressing-up box. As in, they weren’t really me, the language was not quite my own voice.
It was a Sunday afternoon in late March, around the anniversary of the death. I was sitting on the sofa looking down the hallway towards the front door. Memories flooded in, I picked up my laptop, and began to write.
I was almost a bystander in the process, observing myself with interest. It was six years since my husband’s death, and it had taken that long for me to reach a point where the experience permitted itself to be written. I’m not entirely sure why, given a long habit of keeping a journal, other than this was a different approach altogether – a clear and deliberate intention to write a complete work with a strong narrative structure.
The words tumbled out with urgency, each sentence making visible an interior experience of loss that until then had been hidden.
The form emerged spontaneously: writing in the first person present tense. The effect was to drop the reader unambiguously into the scene where the day could unfold without the distancing effect of third person and back story.
I wanted to convey the intense feeling of claustrophobia I experienced – being isolated at home as a carer, knowing what the outcome would be, but not knowing exactly when or how.
As the work progressed, the narrative began to organise itself into hourly blocks, as I worked my way through 36-hours, beginning at 6am on the Monday and ending at 6pm on the Tuesday. The effect for me was an unfolding of memory – re-living each hour in vivid detail.
I shared the opening two hours with my MA workshop group and was moved and pleased by its reception. For the first time, I felt I’d found and shared my authentic voice. The work is an intensely personal and intimate account, which might be cause for holding back when sharing with strangers. Yet it felt liberating – bearing witness to my lived experience.
I completed the work during the second year of the MA, benefitting from a weekly life-writing workshop with Blake Morrison. The feedback and suggestions helped me shape and hone the structure and bring even more authenticity to the narrator (aka me).
The therapeutic impact of life-writing has been profound. When I weighed the printed, hard-bound manuscript in my hands, my MA thesis submission, with the title printed in gold along the spine, I thought ‘There. It’s out. I don’t have to carry it around in my head anymore.’ That’s not to say that I miraculously ‘got over’ my husband’s death, but rather, that I could permit myself to set it aside when the burden was too much to carry. The book became a container for my lived experience, something I could refer to if I wanted to, like one might pull a photo album from the shelf. The act of committing memory to text allowed me to reclaim some of the interior mind-space that had previously been swallowed-up.
This is why life-writing is so interesting to me – of course, I want the work to have merit ‘as writing’, but also the processes is philosophically and therapeutically potent. It reveals something of the human condition through an account of a particular moment, allowing the reader to bear witness to the writer’s experience.
Returning to the image at the top of the post, in Chinese conceptual artist Liang Shaoji’s work ‘the silkworm symbolises generosity, and its silken thread is emblematic of human life and history. Many of his sculptures consist of objects, such as the wire cots in Beds/Nature Series No. 10, around which silkworms have spun their cocoons’. Exhibited as part of Art of Change – New Directions from China, at the Haywood Gallery in 2012. I am strongly drawn to the literal, lyrical and metaphorical possibilities of threads, spinning, weaving, and mark making as a way into untangling, unravelling and revealing lived experience.
A series of blog posts about my journey through my Arts Council England Developing Your Creative Practice project.
During my career, I’ve worked with a multitude of theatre-makers, actors, directors, dancers, choreographers, composers, musicians, artists and curators. I’ve never met one who considered themselves beyond learning. In fact, I’d say quite the opposite. The majority will have studied their chosen discipline in further and higher education and many will have later relished the opportunity to advance their practice at postgraduate level and feel all the richer for it. They might have arrived with talent, but it’s guidance, dedication and practice that will have transformed them from good to great.
Writing is my business; turning artists’ visions into funder-friendly prose that will engage and persuade and generate a grant. Begging letters, as my Dad Continue reading →
Walks. The body advances, while the mind flutters around it like a bird. — Jules Renard
As Lao-tzu, the great Zen sage said: ‘A journey of thousand miles begins with a single step.’ This small, but profound idea is a call to simplicity, to breaking down the big daunting tasks of life into bitesize achievable chunks, and most of all it’s a call to starting somewhere. It’s a proverb that applies equally well to walking and writing.
The walkers amongst you will understand only too well the psychology of chunking, for what big walk can be started or summit reached without the incentive of snack and drink breaks at various points along the way? Of course, there are some walkers who thrive on the chase: the race to the finish, their competitive streak setting them in motion, propelling them to the top and back at breakneck speed. Whatever the process, no walk can be completed without it first being started, without one foot being placed in front of another, and on and on.
And so it is with writing. Just as every journey starts with a single step so too does every piece of writing begin with a single word. Step after step is walking. Word after word is writing. It’s a helpful thing to remember when giving yourself a hard time for not yet having written that novel or that memoir you’ve been meaning to craft about your grandparents. Yes, it’s breaking the task down into achievable chunks, but most of all, it’s about getting started, word after word after word.
it’s about getting started, word after word after word.
But the parallels between writing and walking extend beyond the helpful metaphor of getting started.
As Ferris Jabr wrote in the New Yorker in 2014 ‘Since at least the time of peripatetic Greek philosophers, many other writers have discovered a deep, intuitive connection between walking, thinking, and writing.’ Not only does walking increase the blood flow to the brain, thereby aiding thinking, it is also requires little in the way of conscious thought, allowing the mind to wander and to stroll unhindered through the labyrinth of the imagination.
In his 2009 book, The Lost Art of Walking, Geoff Nicholson talks in depth about the relationship between walking and creativity. ‘There is something about the pace of walking and the pace of thinking that goes together,’ he says. ‘Walking requires a certain amount of attention but it leaves great parts of the time open to thinking. I do believe once you get the blood flowing through the brain it does start working more creatively.’
Writing in the 1850s, Henry David Thoreau waxed lyrical about the necessity of walking and the call that beckons you to both lose and then find yourself in the wilderness, not as something separate to the natural world but as an essential part of it.
Rediscovering that connection can gift us riches of understanding and creative imagination by helping us to break through the veneer of daily habit and tap into something deeper and more profound.
In my own experience, it is the steady pace and rhythm of walking that seems to act like an Archimedes Screw, drawing thoughts and ideas from somewhere deep within and delivering them to my conscious mind, unhindered by the trappings and distractions of the everyday. I can be similarly transported whether walking in urban or natural landscapes, but what is interesting to me is the quality of the thoughts and ideas that arise.
My wilderness walking conjures ideas that are often mythic or folkloric, I think about ancestors, the traces we leave behind, human connection to landscape and place. Urban walks conjure ideas about dereliction, dystopia, what is broken, what can’t be mended. The edges between these natural and urban experiences are soft and porous, so the wildwoods can also be fearful places full of dark metaphors just as the concrete jungles can be full of heart and home.
…’take your story for a walk’. It’s great advice, as long as you don’t overburden the walk with the story.
What seems to me to be most important of all is not to approach walking with the intention of creating. The advice sometimes given to blocked writers is to ‘take your story for a walk’. It’s great advice, as long as you don’t overburden the walk with the story. Instead, feel the quality of the ground beneath your feet, watch the kestrel hover as it spies its prey, listen to the wind rushing through the trees, observe a storm front building from the west, allow your hands to brush through sun-warmed shrubs of Rosemary and Thyme, releasing clouds of hungry scent, watch the small blue butterfly swoop in Us from flower to flower, staying just ahead of you as though a natural tour guide. Walk alone or walk with companions. Talk about nothing and everything. Have moments of solitude and silence. Just be.
From that place, the great thread of the Archimedes Screw will slowly begin to deliver riches from the deep. All you have to do is to be ready to receive.
Just under 20 years ago I joined a bunch of fellow arts fundraisers on =MC’s National Arts Fundraising School, an annual fixture in the arts and cultural sector’s professional development calendar.
I wrote a blog piece for NAFS to remember and celebrate the career changing week I spent in a country house hotel in deepest Gloucestershire in 1998 and to reflect upon the fundraising skills I learned that I am still using today.
