Desney King Writes From The Heart

Desney King Writes From The Heart

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

writing, book, people, love, Desney, grief, stroke, living, nature, Angelica, character, transit, years, find, read, river, life, draft, podcast, valley.

SPEAKERS

Pamela Cook, Desney King

Pamela Cook  00:04

Welcome to Writes4Women podcast all about celebrating women's voices and supporting women writers. I'm Pamela Cook, women's fiction author, writing teacher, mentor, and podcaster. Each week on the Convo Couch, I'll be chatting to a wide range of women writers, focusing on the heart, craft and business of writing, along with a new release feature author each month.

You can listen to the episodes on any of the major podcasting platforms, or directly from the Writes4Women website where you'll also find the transcript of each chat and the extensive Writes4Women backlist.

If you love what you hear, you can support the podcast through Patreon for $5 a month ‑ the price of a large coffee, or maybe two small ones - by clicking the Patreon link in the show notes or on the info page on the website. Patreon supporters will receive a monthly Wisdom from the Convo Couch roundup with curated tips from each episode, and exclusive access to an extended edition of the monthly craft episode in both audio and video format, where I'll be asking my guests for their top writing tips, and some curly additional questions.

On a personal writing note, my current release is All We Dream. If you'd like to know more about it or any of my books, you can check out my website at pamela cook.com.au for more information.

Before beginning today's chat, I would like to acknowledge and pay my respects to the Tharawal people, the traditional custodians of the land on which this podcast is being recorded, along with the traditional owners of the land throughout Australia, and pay my respects to their elders, past, present and emerging.

And a quick reminder that there could be strong language and adult concepts discussed in this podcast. So please be aware of this if you have children around.

Now, let's relax on the Convo couch and chat to this week's guest.

***

It's a huge honor for me to introduce Desney King as my first guest for the new format, 2021 Writes4Women. Desney is someone I've wanted to have on the podcast for some time and the perfect choice for the first Heart of Writing episode. And this bio from her website might explain why: Desney is a writer, author, reader stroke survivor having had eight strokes since 2012. She's a mother, a friend, a retired book editor, an environmental and human rights advocate and activist, a vegetarian, a meditator, a healer and a nature lover. All of which I might say comes through in her first novel Transit of Angels, pre-strokes, Desney loved walking on beaches and in the bush, camping in nature, long road trips and crocheted many blankets. Post-strokes, she lives on her bed, making occasional forays into the outside world in her purple wheelchair. Desney's overbed table is a desk: it holds her laptop, diaries, notebooks, tablet, and phone, as well as being her meal table. Hydrotherapy is her favorite exercise, and she still crochets. I first met Desney in 2008, in a series of wonderful workshops run by writer and Buddhist Joyce Kornblatt. And through the wonders of technology, we've been able to reconnect on Facebook over the last few years. Last year, I had the enormous pleasure of reading Desney's beautiful debut novel Transit of Angels, for which I happily provided a cover quote. Transit of Angels was published in 2020 by Pilyara Press. There are two more novels and a memoir in the works. It's a huge privilege to welcome Desney to the Writes4Women Convo Couch today.

Desney King  03:49

Thank you so much for having me here. It's very exciting to be here.

Pamela Cook  03:56

It's wonderful to be able to catch up. As I said, we have known each other for quite a long time now and through a lot of writing and life tribulations. But it's great to be able to connect again and to actually be able to let people know about your novel because I enjoyed it so much. So, I'd really like to start with Transit of Angels and then work our way back. Could you tell us what the novel is about?

Desney King  04:22

Very briefly, I mean, in a word, it's about grief. It's about a young woman, Angelica, whose husband is killed in an accident, right at the beginning of the book. And the entire book is Angelica travelling through grief, through all the aspects of it. And you know, not stepping back from that really. Angelica telling the story in such a way that she carries the readers with them and slowly, slowly, slowly her reemerging back into some kind of a new life.

Pamela Cook  05:03

That sums it up so beautifully. And you know, when I read it, I was so struck by, in a way, the normality of her experience, but also the universality of it. One woman in a situation that many, many people have experienced: the loss of a very close loved one. But you deal with it in such a beautiful and heartfelt way. And I just wondered, because I know that it's been a long time project of yours, where did the idea first evolve? Where did it come from for you?

Desney King  05:40

Where did it come from? So, you were there, Pam. I can't remember the theme of Joyce's 2008 workshop. I suspect it must have been very much about examining our hearts and looking for the, you know, the most painful stuff and the most joyful stuff and writing exercises around all of that. By the August, and then September, I thought, oh, something's happening here. And by October, I looked at the bits and pieces I'd written and I realised that I had started to write a novel. Transit of Angels. 12 years in the making. It was probably almost 12 years to the day from that realisation to release date, which is bizarre.

Pamela Cook  06:49

Yeah, it's quite incredible. I didn't realize that this initial idea came from those workshops that we did together with Joyce.

Desney King  06:59

It did, and you mentioned that I've been a healer, I am a healer. I did a lot of palliative care work when I was when I was focused on healing work. While my children were growing up. And so I had the privilege of spending a lot of time with people who were dying slowly, mainly cancer, one from motor neuron disease, and with their friends and with their families. And I also volunteered at hospices, and so on. So I've been up very close with people who are grieving because they're dying, and everybody around them and the grief that they experience and you know, grief in my own life, not from losing a partner, but my mother's death.

Pamela Cook  08:01

It's such a difficult topic, as you know, it's one that I write about, as well. And it is such a difficult topic, isn't it? Because it's something that we tend to shy away from and death is something that most of us fear. And so, there's all those emotions around talking about it. But I guess in your position where you've had that privilege, as you say, of speaking with people, at different stages of grieving as well, it's enabled you to have a really thorough understanding of how people do deal with it.

Desney King  08:38

Yes, and I guess as the book evolved  over the years prior to that stroke in 2012 it became increasingly important to me that I must write a novel about dying and death and grief, and what that experience really feels like. I think in Western society, as you say, we don't deal well with any of those things. And we don't have a lot of rituals and ceremony as many other cultures have. We tend to give people about six or six or eight weeks and then expect them, or say to them ‘you know, look, it's been a while it's time to start moving on’. Grief never goes away. And so the challenge for me was to write a novel about grief - and it's in the first person present tense so it's very immediate every step of the way - without losing them, without it being so immediate and so painful that readers couldn't handle it. So, that that was a craft challenge, I suppose. And a challenge as an author as a writer.

Pamela Cook  10:18

Yes, that's true, because the story is hugely character driven, isn't it? And driven by the emotion and the feelings and the experience that Angelica has. It's not a heavily plotted novel in terms of action or anything. So, there is a great challenge in that, in keeping the reader and having them travel on that journey with your main character.

Desney King  10:43

Yes, I'm a pantser. And then for any listeners that's someone who writes by the ‘seat of their pants’: no plotting, no whiteboards, no stickies on the wall. Nothing. And honestly, for a lot of the time, when I was writing that, I knew I was writing a novel. And I knew as a long-term editor that I needed time for at least around 80,000 words, and I had no idea how I could possibly get that far yet.

Pamela Cook  11:23

So even when you were a couple of years into the writing, you were really exploring the ideas through the writing and learning about the character.

Desney King  11:37

Honestly, I don't feel as though I really wrote this book. I feel as though it came through me. I don't know anybody like Angelica, none of the characters are based on anybody I know. She's absolutely not me or anything like me. And it just emerged so I would write every morning. When I was writing my first draft, I would get up every morning, an hour early before going into work. I’d get up at 4.30 and I had a ritual with the right tablecloth and the teapot and cup, etc, etc. And I'd just sit down and the story would pour out for about an hour. And then I’d just stop. And that was it. It was done. And so, I was doing that every day. I think the first draft just sort of poured out over six months. I've got notebooks full of notes on the characters and the settings and the astrology and the numerology. Yeah, I do all that.

Pamela Cook  13:04

I do too. For some of my books, I end up with a quite detailed character analysis, but like you say, I often do that later. I try and get the story out first and see what I've got. I love being a pantser, too. I keep trying to be a plotter but it doesn't work. For me anyway, and not for you. So without giving spoilers, Desney, could you tell us a little bit more about Angelica, the main character and the journey that she does go on through the course of the novel with this dealing with the grief?

Desney King  13:42

Yes. She’s 34 when her husband Bill is killed in a motorbike accident. That's not a spoiler. It's in the blurb on the back cover. So she's a very young widow. She and Bill have had a really happy marriage living in the inner-city suburbs of Sydney. She's working as a graphic artist, but she is actually an artist. She has a twin sister and a younger sister. I won't say much more about that. You know, she's had stuff happen in her life, but nothing that would prepare her in any way to suddenly find herself a widow at 34.  She doesn't really hold anything back in the telling us about the whole experience of grief. She's still referring to her grief by the end of the book. But she goes into areas that that are taboo, really. She talks about, shows us really, how much she misses their sex life and the many intimacies of their relationship, including their sex life and conversations and all sorts of things. She looks for signs, I think this is very common for people who are experiencing grief. She looks for signs, that Bill might still be around. And eventually, eventually, as she's beginning to emerge from the paralysis of that first year sort of grief, she's isolated herself, and she wants to talk to her twin sister again. And through a series of events, she does move to the country

Pamela Cook  16:19

It is such a beautiful, beautiful setting that she finds herself in. And I wondered, it’s the Hawkesbury, isn't it? Is that somewhere that you're familiar with yourself?

Desney King  16:35

It's a fictional Valley but it is very closely based on a valley I lived in. I rented an old farmhouse for about two and a half years in a valley very much like this River Valley.

Pamela Cook  17:00

It's really lovely. And we're going to talk about that a little bit more in a moment, we're going to get you to read a short excerpt, but you mentioned that it is first person present. Was that an instinctive voice for you right from the beginning? Or did you play around with the point of view at all?

Desney King  17:21

Look, that's how it came out. And there was a point several years in - when I had the stroke it was February 2012 and I was on the 13th draft. And so I had played around with it a lot. And there was a point where I think I'd read somewhere, or the conversation in writing circles with some people saying that it's a very dangerous thing to write in first person and that it’s a cop out, and so on, and so on. So, I had a go at making it third person, which didn't last very long at all, because it just didn't work again. We had to be right up close and personal with Angelica all the way. Otherwise, it just fell apart.

Pamela Cook  18:23

Good on you for sticking to your guns with it. I mean, you hear all these things, don't you? You know, ‘you should never open with this or that’ or ‘you should never use that sort of voice’ or whatever. But it all comes back to whatever works for your story and for you as a writer doesn't it?

Desney King  18:41

And for the characters.

Pamela Cook  18:43

Yeah. And it's different often for each story that you write and each character that you're dealing with. So, let's get back to talking about the setting. It is very gorgeous, it's evocative. She does move to this remote River Valley and she's living in a mud brick house. And  it's  largely through her environment that this healing process starts for Angelica. I'd like to talk about how you find nature as a regenerative and healing power if you like, or a source of healing.

Desney King  19:24

Yes, I should just say that mud brick cottage is probably my dream house. I've never seen or being in a cottage or anything like that. Yeah.

Pamela Cook  19:35

Well, you dreamed it up beautifully, because I could picture it when you described it.

Desney King  19:38

I'd love to live there! I was born in Walker in New South Wales. I spent my first three years on a big wheat property. Mum was a farmer. Until she, you know, until she left home at 23 and she raised me with a with a real love of the country, love of nature. You know, she had these envelopes with ears of wheat and oats and so on that she would pull out and say ‘this is really where your food comes from’, everything was back to nature. And she talked about the seasons. So, I guess I was raised with mum's very strong connection to nature, you pass that on. And I feel that we are all connected, that there's no separation, that nature is us. And we are nature. I've always found that living somewhere in nature, whether it be a suburb, or as I mentioned living out in the valley, it's really important to be immersed in nature. I've also got a very dear friend who lives up in the Northern tablelands area of New South Wales, Rosie (I'm sure she wouldn't mind me mentioning her) who has just under 1000 acres of rain forests and country bordering on World Heritage wilderness. And I was lucky enough to spend time up there in the forest and with other people who knew the forest intimately and so on. So that's been incredibly healing. When I went through a terrible marriage breakup, I suppose, it was very, very, very painful and spending time at Rosie's I came back healed on lots of levels. And of course, when I grew up, I spent those first three years in the Riverina area. And then I grew up in Newcastle in a suburb called Stockton, which is almost an island, with river on one side, the harbour and the Pacific Ocean, so I grew up with the ocean and the river. And you know, rivers are really powerful for me. And powerful for Angelica as well.

Pamela Cook  23:03

The river plays a really strong role in the novel. It's very symbolic. I think you've got a little excerpt Desney, that you're going to read for us. I just want listeners to hear the beautiful language, the way that you write, and the way you draw on that natural world, and that connection that you were talking about really comes through in the book between Angelica and the other characters and their environment. So I really want people to experience that.

Desney King  23:34

And just before I read I'll say, I do believe that nature is a character in the world of the book. This is about a third of the way through. Angelica has just moved to the cottage and is in the valley and she's having a meltdown because she's wondering what she's done and how she's going to cope, and also grieving over how she could possibly have left the house that was hers and Bill’s. So, she's with her twin sister, Essie.

Desney King  24:27

Essie sees me slipping. ‘Let's go for a walk Angel. Come on, get a cap. We're going down to the river.’

     She pulls me firmly by the hand. Tashi yells and leaps, but this is no time for walking the dog. Chest-high fronds of softly seated grass brush as we walk single file along the track. In the whispering heat of late afternoon the river laps against its banks. Essie pushes through heavy green foliage, holding back branches so that I can pass, all the time moving closer to the water, to the shimmering ebb and flow of this valley’s ever changing heart.

     Breaking through into a light-flooded clearing I realize she has been here before, knows about the almost-white sand, the mound with its short, soft grass, this secret place where sisters can sit and be initiated into the river’s arcane ways. She pulls me down beside her, keeping hold of my hand, urgent, silent, fierce.

     ‘There's no way to go except forward, Angel, she murmurs. ‘Look at the river, how it moves, always moves. Does it question its purpose? Think about giving up or turning back?’ Then she points to the forested hillside, reaching up to the vivid blue sky, the ancient smudge sandstone that long ago lined the ocean floor. ‘Sometimes, the change is so slow that even the gods seem unaware.’

Pamela Cook  26:24

It's really beautiful Desney. I got goosebumps once again, listening to that.

Desney King  26:28

Thank you.

Pamela Cook  26:30

You mentioned her sister. And there's a number of other characters that we meet as the story unfolds. Clyde, and a few others. Could you tell us just a little bit about some of those support characters?

Desney King  26:45

And yes, you know, and when we made us this partner is very early in the book. So that's lived down in the valley for quite a few years. As a school-teacher, a tiny little one teacher school. And Liz is an environmentalist working with the river. Who's the character you mentioned?

Pamela Cook  27:13

 Sorry, not Clyde.

Desney King  27:14

Oh. Yeah. Clyde is an old, wise man who lives in the valley and he becomes a friend to Angelica. And there's another character … you asked me earlier how the story changed and evolved. There's a character who was barely mentioned early on in all the early drafts and then I realised how important he was. And his name is Neil. He's Bill's older brother. And for a long time, since Bill was a teenager, he’s been nomadic. Angelica looks for him to tell him about Bill's death for the funeral and can't find him, and so on and so on. But then Neil started to come to life for me. And ironically, a month before I had that first stroke – around Boxing Day/New Year 2011/ 2012 – a friend lent me a beach house up on the north coast of New South Wales. And I spent that week writing about 10,000 words of Neil into the story and it's interesting because he's crusty and he's rough and shouldn't be a lovable character. But I think Angelica comes to love him and I've come to be very fond of him too.

Pamela Cook  29:28

There's a lot of poignancy around his character and about that relationship with Bill. And the relationship Angelica comes to have with him as well.

Desney King  29:41

Yes, that's true. And we can't forget Tashi, the little brown dog. Angellica is paralyzed at first but the need to feed the dog, walk the dog, etc etc keeps her going.

Pamela Cook  30:08

Which is often the case, isn't it, with people who are in that deep grief, having to be there for an animal?

Desney King  30:21

I was also probably subconsciously feeding into the story all these things that are very common to us when we're grieving. If there is someone or something that forces us to keep going. Many people do look for a sign and many people do start looking to mystical realms or looking into alternative viewpoints, I suppose – the unexplained or hoping that their loved one is still around. How they can connect but then being really angry with the person who's died. The stages of grief are all neatly listed, but never happen in that order.

Pamela Cook  31:43

Yes, that’s true they’re all over the place. You mentioned that in 2012 you'd done 13 drafts. Is that right? And is that the point at which you had your first stroke?

Desney King  31:57

Yes. And I have a terrible confession, but I'm going to do it. Remember, I've been an editor for 30 years and so many times I said to people ‘never send your first draft out’. But I didSo embarrassing. Anyway, I got all the rejections, and so that's what propelled me into the second, third, fourth, fifth and into the 13th draft.

Pamela Cook  32:56

After you had that first stroke Desney, I'm imagining that there was a big stall in the writing for you?

Desney King  33:03

Huge Pam. I was in hospital for nine days in the stroke ward. And it seemed as though I'd come away very lucky from a brainstem stroke. Well, brainstem strokes are the ones that can kill you on the spot. Yeah. Even locked in syndrome. So yes, I am incredibly lucky. I think I am; I know. But it took months for all the damage to reveal itself. And there's a lot of damage. And there's been a lot more damage done over the years as I've had subsequence small brain stems. And I couldn't write at all. Well, that's not quite true. What I haven't mentioned is that long before I met you I started writing morning pages recommended by Julia Cameron in her book, The Artist’s Way. I think I've been writing morning pages for about 18 years. Every morning, and I think I've probably only missed about two weeks-worth of mornings in that whole time. And I wasn't writing them during those nine days in the stroke ward. But I started as soon as I got home so I was writing morning pages. Like that's all I could do. I'd been blogging about editing and publishing and life in general but I couldn't do that anymore. You know, cognitive damage. I have worse cognitive damage now.

Pamela Cook  34:59

That's really interesting about the morning pages. And I'm just realizing…I think it was probably when I first started doing morning pages after those workshops, so you probably introduced me to them. But I haven't done them that much lately. Did you find that doing those morning pages, when you could get to the page in the morning, that that was a part of your recovery? How did the writing help you?

Desney King  35:30

Absolutely. It's an anchor. Julia probably says this in the book, but what you realize when you write morning pages is it's a writing discipline. It builds extraordinary discipline. They're called morning pages because they're the first thing you do every morning. So, you're prioritizing not only your writing discipline, but also yourself. Grounding yourself. It's a form of therapy. The rules with morning pages, there aren't many, but they are that it's a handwritten stream of consciousness. And nobody ever reads them. You don't read them yourself. And nobody else does. And when each notebook is full, you destroy it.

Pamela Cook  36:28

You can destroy them? Does that mean that those boxes I've got them in my study I can actually get rid of now? J

Desney King  36:33

Have a bonfire. J  Yes. But I must confess I've saved a few along the way that I thought had material in it that might be useful for some other writing that I was doing.

Pamela Cook  36:56

 So, back to the novel … When were you able to then come back to the novel and think, okay, now, I think I want to do something with it? What happened next?

Desney King  37:11

I got back to blogging first. A good friend, Chloe, about six months after that first stroke, said to me, ‘Desney. Surely you can write something? You must be able to write something. Write a haiku. It's only 17 syllables. Write a haiku.’ Haiku! But, you know, that was my entree. But honestly, Pam. I'm an optimist. By nature, I'm a Pollyanna, really. And luckily, I think every time I started to feel a little bit more competent, cognitively, and a little bit more on top of daily life, just getting through the days, I would open up file for Transit of Angels and try and do a little bit on it. And realize that I couldn't. Hmm. It's still really emotional. That was difficult. Really difficult. And probably, over nearly nine years now until it was picked up by a publisher, I might have spent two or three weeks all up, on the manuscript and doing very little work.

Pamela Cook  38:56

And so how did it come to into the hands of Pilyara Press?

Desney King  39:01

Aha. Well, back to the teaching, editing and publishing days. I ran a one half-day seminar on the inside workings of a publishing house for wannabe authors. And Jennifer Scoullar was in the morning seminar. And I remember, she stayed back and we ended up chatting in the foyer for a little while. And she told me that she was on her way with her first manuscript to meet an agent, to see if the agent would take her on. And the agent did and the rest of it you know. We clicked straight away and we maintained a very spasmodic occasional connection. Mainly Facebook. I read every one of her books. I really admired that because if I'm an environmentalist, Jenny's the ultimate conservationist. And she has a brilliant way of writing fantastic stories that weave those things through without preaching. Great. So, I had messaged her and we'd been messaging a little bit through 2019, just about the books that she was working on at the time. She'd actually been messaging me and asking me little editorial questions. Should it be this way? Or should it be that way? I loved that, because it was tapping into that part of me that had been inactive.

Pamela Cook  41:09

Yeah.

Desney King  41:11

And unacknowledged. And yes. So, it was really warm, but very occasional contact. And then at the end of answering one of those questions for her somewhere along the line I must have sent her one of the drafts of Transit of Angels. And at the end of one of those little messaging exchanges Jennifer said to me, ‘By the way, you do know that Pilyara Press would love to publish your novel when you're ready’. It was about nine o'clock at night. I didn't know what to say. Honestly, during those years when I tried to work on it, I had let it go. After a spiritual practice for 30 odd years, the power of letting liberates you. Accepting what is, and truly letting something go. And so I'd let Transit of Angels go into the very back depths of my laptop and thought, Well, you know, it's just gonna stay there. And so I didn't know what to say!

So, I slept on it. Perhaps a lot of listeners might not know, Pilyara is a collective of wonderful writers and publishing professionals with all the skills required to publish a book. It's collective. and it's a cooperative, so that we all help each other - we all work for each other. I wrote a long email to Jennifer the next morning explaining how much her offer meant to me and how much I would love to accept but that I didn't feel I could reciprocate sufficiently. And two hours later, I received a reply in capital letters saying, WE WOULD LOVE TO HAVE YOU. And you're fantastic.

Pamela Cook  43:36

What an amazing story of again, connection, you know, that connection that you'd made all those years ago? And then coming back at the right time to into your life?

Desney King  43:49

Yes, yes. And I honestly also didn't know whether I'd be able to cope with the process of being edited. I had no idea whether I'd be able to handle that. But I did. I was going say it was nerve wracking, but it was actually really fun. I had marvelous editors - hats off to the editors at Pilyara Press!  Honestly, really wonderful. The book is a much better book for the work they did with me. But I wasn't particularly nervous about being edited. I was very nervous about being the editor being edited. Because I'd been an editor for a long time, but no, but it was a joy. It was such a joy to be back into that world again. Their insight, their suggestions and their kindness and gentleness. And you know, that way of working. It was a fantastic experience. It was very slow because I can only do a short amount of work per day, and not every day. It was slow, but it was wonderful.

Pamela Cook  45:26

So, what was it like after all that you'd been through, and the time that you'd spend on that book, to hold that first copy in your hand?

Desney King  45:35

There’s a very cute/embarrassing little video on my YouTube channel showing me opening that first copy. I was like a little kid. ‘It's real. It's real.’ You know that feeling of don’t you?

Pamela Cook  46:05

I do. It's like you're having an out of body experience?

Desney King  46:15

Yeah.

Pamela Cook  46:16

And this was your debut novel, and the first one that you’d seen, you know, with a cover on it and all that sort of thing. But it never gets old, either, because each book is a different experience. And each book has its own joys and its own difficulties. And so, to actually get to the point where that's all come together, and it's got a beautiful cover on it, and it's going to go out to readers… it's a unique experience each time. Fantastic.

Desney King  46:48

That's wonderful to hear.

Pamela Cook  46:54

Are you are working on something else, Desney?

Desney King  46:57

I am. I was still smarting from all the rejections from the draft, but I belonged to a writing group for a number of years. And I started one during NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. So there are two novels with a few 1000 words each. And there's a memoir called Blank Canvas. But my heart is with fiction, with storytelling. It brings that sort of lifeforce energy right up through me from the soles of my feet. And, I get lost in it. So, I pulled out the novel: Love Song for Timmy Chen. Timmy Chen is nothing like me. And he'd been hassling me. He’s really cynical… yeah.

Pamela Cook  48:28

I love that he's hassling you J

Desney King  48:30

He'd been hassling me from the time that Transit of Angels was released, ‘Come on, tell my story’. And so, I did I got out that file and I tried to do it and that was actually a heartbreak. Because at the moment, I'm not capable, cognitively of writing a novel. However, somewhere else along the way, I've written a lot of blog posts, before and after the strokes, and that is what Blank Canvas is really about: when life strips away all of the facades, who are you? What's your purpose for living? And the blog posts that I collected are all the bright shiny, looking on the bright side, finding the silver lining posts. So, with Blank Canvas what I want to do is intersperse what was really going on, and how tough a lot of it was.

Pamela Cook  50:06

I love that idea. The facade and then what's happening behind all that.

Desney King  50:14

Yes, the façade. Even in your introduction of me, you know, all those things that I am or I say I am or but what’s really underneath when all that's stripped away? There's the essence of us. But what is that? Yeah, it's a real question, isn't it? And, you know what can I do? Why am I here?

Pamela Cook  50:46

Someone who's been through what you've been through has, I think, some special insight into that, too.

Desney King  50:51

Yeah. Yeah. And because of my own spiritual practices, and writing practices, and, and all of that. And again, it's that same thing. I want to gently but firmly insist that readers see what it's really like to have everything stripped away, and what it’s really like to be in hospital, and what it's really like to have your head in a cage - locked in a cage inside an MRI machine that sounds like a building site. All those things that we toss around these days. We say ‘I'm going in for colonoscopy, I'm going in for an MRI’. They're not simple things. Yeah. So, all of that. I want to uncover those things and intersperse those realities.

Pamela Cook  51:57

I look forward to reading it. And I love the title … A couple of questions Desney to finish up.  You did talk about this with your fiction and how much you love writing fiction, but what would you say is at the heart of your writing?

Desney King  52:22

I’ve thought and thought about this and I did write something down. What is at the heart of my writing is that ultimate connection with all of creation, that creative force that when I write -  and I think this is true for most writers - we become one with that creative force. There's no separation. And so, the writing flows from my heart, not from my head. It's from my heart. That's part of it. That's a big part of it. And I think the other big heart-based part of it for me is that urge that I was born with to shine a light into the world, to be optimistic. Show that to other people, to give other people the opportunity and to gently support other people in that view of the world if you like. Yeah, I'm from the heart. Really, we call it the gut. But the gut and the heart of very, very closely connected.

Pamela Cook  54:00

I knew there was a reason why I wanted you to be the first heart of writing. Yes, there it is! J

So what would you say Desney to people who, for whatever reason, whether it's a physical disability or an emotional problem, or some difficulty that they're experiencing which they feel has stopped them writing or that stops them from getting to the writing … what would you say to them?

Desney King  54:27

I would actually say to them: let it go, stop trying. Deeply accept that, ‘at this time in my life, I really can't do this’, and just let it go. And if you can arrive at that place of very deep acceptance, it's liberating because it leaves you with all the energy do what you can do, what you have to do at the time. And so, I've been thinking a little bit about that, you know, ‘if you'd love something, let it go and to it will come back to you’. I'm not quite that really. But I'd say, in a meditative way, (if that comes naturally to you) deeply accept that you can't right at the moment. That's okay. That's okay. But never say never. Never say never. Because we never know what's ahead. Now might be really the pits. And we might feel hopeless and useless and incompetent. And all those things. We don't know what's going to happen tomorrow, what's going to happen this afternoon, or next year, or in 12 years time. And the other thing that I've learned as a as a stroke survivor: rehab is very, very much focused around setting goals. And that drove me crazy for a long time, because I couldn't really set goals because of the nature of  living with crippling fatigue. For nearly nine years now. Setting goals was just the most frustrating thing for me. And so, I didn't. I just didn't. I did the acceptance thing with goals. But what I started doing, and just for fun, really was writing down impossible goals. I know, I can't do it, right now. I can't do it! it. An impossible goal would be to find a publisher for The Transit of Angels, have it published. J And there's been a few other impossible goals that have turned real. That's the big one, obviously. But there's been a few other little ones that have astonished me. And again, I think it's that completely letting go process. Somehow it allows things that we can't imagine or envision to come into our lives and manifest or happen in some way, in a way that we couldn't have planned or organized if we tried.

Pamela Cook  58:04

I love that! Some impossible goals. There you are everybody, start setting them. J

Desney King  58:11

Yeah, yeah. Because you just never know!

Pamela Cook  58:16

It’s been such a joy talking to you Desney. Can you tell us first of all, where people can find you on social media? I follow you on Instagram and I love your morning posts. So, I'd love people to find you there. And could you tell us that and also where they can get the book?

Desney King  58:34

Sure. Instagram: desneykingauthor. I've also got a Desney King Author page on Facebook. And anything significant that happens with the book will be on both of those. I have a website: https://desneyking.com.au/

Because of my disability I'm not selling the book directly myself. It's available online at all online retailers worldwide. And at the moment through Amazon as an ebook as well. I might extend that to other online publishers as time goes by. There’s a wonderful old bookstore in Glebe  called Gleebooks that stocks it and also a bookshop in Wahroonga in Sydney. They're stocking it as well but generally online. And there is a little book tab on my website that gives some useful links. The Okay, exit easy for people to find. Yeah.

Pamela Cook  1:00:05

Okay. And I'll put those links in the show notes too, for people to come back and find. Thank you so much for being my very first guest for the year and for sharing your experiences and your wisdom with us.

Desney King  1:00:19

Such a pleasure, Pam, and I feel really honored to be your first guest.

Pamela Cook  1:00:25

And good luck with the memoir. I look forward to reading it!

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