Tim Baker’s upcoming Memoir as Catharsis workshop invites writers to explore how personal experience can be shaped into memoir with honesty, control and craft.
A best-selling surf author, former magazine editor and research fellow, Tim brings decades of storytelling experience to the question of how writing can help us process grief and trauma.
Ahead of his Writers Victoria session in October, Tim spoke with us about his book Patting the Shark, surfing, self-doubt and the careful work of turning lived experience into a piece worth reading.
It began as personal writing therapy, “morning pages”, to try and process this devastating experience I was going through. Somehow, I find things less scary if I can pin them down on the page. Over time, I began to think there might be something that hung together, and it was helping as therapy, so I just kept going. It became a book and a PhD project, so it just kind of developed some sort of momentum.
How has surfing shaped your life and your approach to writing?
It’s been my main recreation and the main subject matter of my work for my entire adult life. I grew up a long way from the surf in suburban Melbourne but got a taste for it on some family holidays and was just smitten – with the act and all the cultural accoutrements of the tail end of hippy period in the late ‘70s. It all completely entranced me. I quit a newspaper job to work for a surfing magazine and my fate was sealed. Surfing and writing both require a certain flow but also the endurance of much turbulence to get to those brief moments of flow state. I’ve learnt to really appreciate those fleeting moments when both can feel effortless.
It feels to me like when you can write your way through tricky emotional terrain you’ve tamed it a little, taken some of the sting out of it. – Tim Baker
You have established support groups for people going through difficult times. How can writing and reading help us heal and find hope?
There’s good evidence now for the efficacy of writing therapy. At its simplest, there’s good research that shows how just naming the difficult emotion we are experiencing can reduce our cortisol levels. It feels to me like when you can write your way through tricky emotional terrain you’ve tamed it a little, taken some of the sting out of it. I think it offers a release of tension, and then when you combine it with a honing of craft, or skill acquisition, you are making art from your suffering. This feeling of growing mastery overlays a positive experience over these difficult events that I’d like to think is healing.
Self-doubt is part of being a writer. What advice would you give someone writing memoir?
Write like it will never be read by another soul. That can be liberating. My rule to myself in Patting The Shark was, if it makes me uncomfortable it goes in. But be in it for the process, not the outcome. Write your way through whatever life experience you are trying to capture, step into discomfort and then enjoy the release of tension that comes with staring down your fears. And try and find the universal in the personal – it’s like you zoom in and then zoom out and interrogate the wider implications of your specific experience.
Write your way through whatever life experience you are trying to capture, step into discomfort and then enjoy the release of tension that comes with staring down your fears. – Tim Baker
Can you tell us what you’re currently working on?
Honestly, bits and pieces. I run a book club at Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, as a form of social support. I’m a research fellow at Monash University’s Prostate Cancer Research Group, which is more like a writer in residence, collaborating with researchers to write articles about their work. I’ve been doing some personal writing that might become something, mainly exploring themes around masculinity and mortality. And I try and exercise and eat well each day.
What are you hoping participants of your workshop will take with them?
Tools that will help them navigate some of life’s more challenging episodes, writing practices that can help process or soothe difficult emotions like grief or trauma. I always say that this work doesn’t take the place of counselling or therapy, but it can be a useful adjuvant. Running a pen across a page can be a lovely form of self-soothing, which is a nice tool to have in one’s mental health tool kit.
Memoir as Catharsis with Tim Baker offers writers a practical, reflective space to explore how personal material can become a crafted memoir when held with care, courage and technique. Places are limited, enrol now to avoid disappointment.