A couple of weeks ago, I applied for a very special writing residency program for expat writers. To be honest, despite encouragement from someone who had previously participated in the program and Himself, I thought I was a long shot.
In a sense I’ve been a writer for hire my whole adult life. I wrote my first press release for a real live, paying consultancy client sometime around my 17th birthday. I spent pretty much every working day from college graduation until our move to Norway writing in some form or another.
Working in in-house and consultancy roles in communications and marketing, I’ve written about everything from lipstick to breast cancer; fun stuff like major youth soccer tournaments to serious contemporary issues like racism, ageism, sectarianism and peace building. I’ve written on topics with passion and personal commitment and honestly, I’ve written about a few things that I really struggled to get terribly excited about.
While I might have experience in writing just about every form of marketing communications you can think of, this writing residency opportunity posed some pretty big new challenges.
In all my years of putting pen to paper and hitting the keyboard, I have rarely, if ever, written about myself and my own experiences or used them as the basis to develop articles that a magazine might actually want to publish. This blog, still in its infancy, is my first attempt at doing so and it’s definitely a challenge.
In addition, while I may be a woman of a certain age, I’m a baby expat, still pretty sparkly and shiny. As these things go, we’ve had two pretty easy locations so far. We haven’t strayed from the Western world. We sound like experienced travelers to our local friends but our experience fades into insignificance when you compare it to friends who have run out of fingers on which to count the countries where they have lived. In the time I’ve been in Texas, one friend has moved twice – Kazakhstan and now India.
We’re not even typical expats – we came to the party late, mid-career for Himself and without kids. If you read the expat literature, we are far from the norm.
The Parfitt-Pascoe Writing Residents program for which I applied is specifically for expat writers so while I can string a mean bit of marketing copy together, I am a long way from being an expat writer.
However, in the spirit of seizing the opportunities of expat life and knowing that you have to start somewhere, I applied.
I didn’t get a Residency place. Disappointed but not terribly surprised.
However, to my considerable surprise and enormous gratitude, I will still be joining the four incredibly talented women who are 2017’s Residents. I will be an ‘extra’, supporting the team as they try to cover every aspect of the Families in Global Transition conference in The Hague next spring.
And as a very exciting part of being an extra, I have been gifted the training course that the Residents must complete, courtesy of editor and publisher, Jo Parfitt.
I’ve just completed my first piece of homework and there are some big challenges ahead. I need to stop playing so safe and I need to stop writing every story pitch as if it’s a press release!
But maybe, just maybe, I am on my way to becoming a writer.
You can read more about this year’s Pascoe-Parfitt Writing Residents here. And if you are going to the FIGT conference next year, please get in touch!