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Like Heaven Writing Holidays Your hostess, Sally Sontheimer
Your Writing Coach Niala Maharaj
"In her year with us she distinguished herself as the finest writer and most perceptive critic of all the talented members of her workshops. I want to recommend her to you not only as a brilliant young woman, a great wit, and a gifted writer, but as a thoroughly responsible person of great character."
Leslie Epstein,
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Home Profiles Classified Ads Links Articles Poetry Pages CWN Jewellery Shop Tuscany is for Writers Two Women’s Joint Writing Journey by Sally Sontheimer and Niala Maharaj 1989 Sally -Here is a photo of me and my friend Niala Maharaj on the terrace of Villa Madreselva, an old house in Tuscany. Life threw us together in Italy at the beginning of our careers as development aid workers. I’m American; Niala is from Trinidad. The house is my husband’s villa just outside Siena.’ Niala -Our friendship is sealed in vomit. In 1989, Sally organized a conference about poverty and women in New Delhi, and I was invited to give a presentation. I got a violent bout of ‘Delhi-belly’. Despite Sally’s frantic workload, she insisted I sleep in her room so she could look after me. I woke up in the middle night and barely made it to the bathroom – the walls, the floor, everything was spattered. Sally hustled me back to bed and insisted that she do the yukky cleaning up. 2002 Sally -Niala left Rome shortly after this photo was taken but we stayed in touch through the years. Then one day I called her in Amsterdam where she was living. ‘I need a writing coach!’ I yelled. I was consumed with a desire to write about the tumultuous experience of having married the whole of Italy, or that’s how I put it. I had even left a well-paying job at the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation to follow my writing dream and look after my two young children. But I was stuck! Niala had recently done a Masters in Creative Writing at Boston University and had been leading writing workshops in Amsterdam, so I figured she could give me some advice. Niala -I was more than stuck at that point. I had started writing short stories in Italy and became so enamoured of writing fiction that I was ruining my career as a freelance journalist and communications consultant. I only worked till money ran out, then returned to the novel I had begun writing. But each time I picked up the novel again I had difficulty reassuming the voice of my narrator. By the time I managed to re-enter the narrator’s personality and the voice was flowing again, I had to leave it to earn more money. It was a vicious cycle. The year I took off to go to Boston left me in such a financial mess that my relationship in Amsterdam was destroyed and I couldn’t dream of writing fiction for a while. Sally -Niala agreed to come for a visit. We talk about my story, about the difficulty of intercultural marriage, about how I never quite felt at home in Italy. She deals with everything with that humor so typical of people from the Caribbean. It inspires humor in me. When I tell her my woes, all the ins and outs of marriage and life in Italy, I turn the irony up high to please her. At the end of one of my tales, her voice still bubbling with a good laugh, she says, ‘That’s it, Sally. Just write like that.’ 2003 Niala -I continued to work on my novel in fits and starts. And at the end, my agent turned it down! I was devastated. I hadn’t been in contact with Sally for a while, and then one day, she suddenly called again with the words, ‘I need a writing coach.’ I wasn’t feeling anything like a writing coach at that moment. I started bending her ear with my troubles. She interrupted me. ‘Come to Rome, Baby,’ she said. ‘Just come here. You need to come here.’ It was something in her tone of voice, the voice of down-home America (though I’m not American). Nobody else’s efforts to console me had had that effect. It instantly brought me back to that night in Delhi when I was sick as a dog and she shooed me off to bed and got down on her hands and knees to clean up the bathroom. Moving like an automaton, I booked a flight to Rome immediately. Sally -I got in touch with my old colleagues at FAO, re-wrote Niala’s CV, and got her a three-month consultancy so she could remain in Rome for three months to lick her wounds. Then, on weekends when we went to Tuscany, I continued to talk about my obsession, this book I was trying to write. I followed Niala round the garden like a dog, babbling about the story. She kept nodding her head. ‘Sounds like Trinidad,’ she said as she pruned the roses. ‘Sounds like my Indian family, wedged between tradition and modernity. This conflict always finds its expression in relations between the sexes.’ Niala -Sally’s story was about a collision between the New World and the Old, about an enthusiastic young American girl coming into conflict with a culture that had developed over centuries. The marital problems were a clash of ideologies, that of a modern woman who felt the world was open to all her efforts to transform reality, and that of a man who had learnt to mistrust change from long historical knowledge. And even within these two ideologies there were contradictions: the young American actually longed for contact with an old civilization, a slow-food culture, while the man was employed in that most modern of industries, electronic communications. Sally – Niala laughed about incidents I found tragic. ‘It’s my brother!’ she kept saying about my characters. The problem is, in a sense, her brother was my husband. I couldn’t exaggerate his faults and mistakes to heighten the drama in a book. I’d destroy my marriage. I couldn’t put in intimate things based on the lives of living people I was close to. Niala –Sally’s problem was that she didn’t have the distance to allow a fictional dynamic to take root. It was the same fault my agent had identified in my rejected novel, which had been based on my mother’s life. Yet Sally’s story was a wonderful one, classic American literature. It was Portrait of a Lady set in modern times. But Sally was no Henry James. Her natural storytelling voice was that of Mark Twain, and her spirit was similar to Steinbeck. I grew frustrated, trying to get her to give up her hesitations and doubts, her fears about ‘what the family would say when they read it’. Sally -One morning I found Niala bent over her laptop in the dining room typing furiously. It was the beginning of a new novel, set in Trinidad, but dealing with the same clash between strongly held beliefs that I was trying to handle in my own story. Niala- Sally’s issues were the same ones I had escaped to Europe to avoid. But where I found freedom from tradition in Europe, she had found nooses of tradition here. So I had developed the distance to write about these things while she was still struggling with them. One night, the plot of a story set in Trinidad started to grow in my head. I couldn’t wait for daybreak to start writing it. 2005 Sally -A blocked writer can become unblocked by going inside herself. I organized a yoga and meditation retreat at the house in Tuscany, using my contacts with the local population to have authentic Tuscan meals served and introduce participants to the region in a way not available to the normal tourist. It was wonderful. I called Niala in high spirits. She was in even higher spirits! The book she began in Tuscany had been accepted by the first publisher she sent it to, Random House. The title was Like Heaven. ‘That house is heaven,’ I exulted and explained some of the history. My husband's grandmother bought it in 1920. Before that Villa Madreselva was the residence of the parish priest. In 1843, the priest living there found a portrait of a Madonna and Child abandoned in what we call the tower room. He built a small chapel on the ground floor to commemorate the event, restoring Mary to a place of honor. People from the neighborhood came to pray to her here. I think for this reason, the house has a wonderful energy. When I sit down under the portico, pen and paper in hand, something happens. I do my best writing there. Niala -I do think the openness of life in Tuscany helped create that breakthrough for me, what Sally calls ‘living in abundance’. The commitment to excellence in all life has to offer --in food, in relationships, in landscape and architecture. It causes your imagination to soar, you put aside the mundane things of life and reach for ways to express dreams and possibilities that were only tiny sparks in your mind before.’
------------------------ Sally and Niala are returning to Tuscany to write this summer and are inviting others to join them. See www.likeheaven.it for details.
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