Inheritance: A 60 Year Diary Archive
A writer's voice at its clearest: digitising my brilliant late granny's diaries
Hello, I’m Stevie Mackenzie-Smith. I’m a writer, artist and facilitator, and I work with writers to turn fragments into cohesive stories. I run free Lunch Writing sessions, writing retreats, and workshops for writing through life, memory and diaries.
Days is about creative pleasure, art-making and how we spend our time. How might writers and artists can build a Good Life for themselves? In the words of Eileen Myles: “a career is just giving yourself prompts.” I’m sharing my workings as figure it out.
Good to have you here.
Read a book by Dirk Bogarte. Read Tender is the Night. Potted a variety of plants. Cleaned and tidied the pantry, sorted the open shelves in the kitchen. Moved my sitting room around and back again because it didn’t work. – Summer 1984 diary
I have to admit that none of us wanted to read the manuscripts, not really. At least that’s how I remember it. We didn’t feel called to read them while she was alive, and we didn’t take great pains to read them afterwards.
She sent manuscripts to agents, enclosed with the cover of that day’s newspaper for intellectual copyright purposes, but not one of them bit. She played host to a regular writing group in her garden flat. Two of her poems were published in a small anthology of women writers in Bristol in the 1990s. My granny was called Annie Smith and there were three manuscripts – one was about the science and mysticism of water.
I did try reading one of her manuscripts. It pained me that it was beyond my comprehension and attention span. It was a dense exploration of her increasing interest in crop circles and scientific enquiry.
Years later, when I stopped hiding from the diaries she’d left me, I discovered her voice at its most unselfconscious and evocative, honest, smart, funny and unpretentious. What a relief.
We didn’t speak about what she wanted me to do with them. I watched her attachment to her possessions wane as she started letting go, and that seemed to extend to her diaries, which lived in a neat line on her bedroom shelves. I sensed she thought I might find them use for something but ultimately it would be for me to decide: she let go of everything in this way. Graciously, trusting that everything in the beyond would work out.
Yesterday fell apart about 1:00 o’clock when the girls seemed to invade my territory – the sofa in my room and spread scrums and rivalry and music around the place. They also crumbled my quilt and pulled my blind down.
