How old is sian prior

Sian's essays have been published in Meanjin and her first book, Shy: A Memoir , was published by Text in Subscribe to the Wheeler Weekly for the latest on our upcoming events, broadcasts and notes from our website, and previews of events and presenters from our programme.

View our privacy policy. Skip to content. Account Update account information Update email preferences View cart. Members of the Trade Union Choir are currently doing Zoom rehearsals on Thursday nights, soloing at home with mute buttons on. Sian Prior: Happy birthday, hollering comrades. Please try again later. The Sydney Morning Herald. By Sian Prior May 30, — 4. The earth might be in trouble—overpopulated, descending into ecological crisis—but I was always sure my kids would help make the world a better place.

I would be a green-feminist supermum, having it all. Nothing turned out the way I expected. Like many women, Sian Prior arrived at the point where she was ready to start having babies—and found they were not hers to have. Three miscarriages with a supportive partner; a new partner who already had all the children he wanted; step-children; step-grandchildren; the decision to parent solo, followed by many rounds of fertility treatments.

After all this Sian found herself, at fifty, childless and coming to terms. Weighing up the freedoms against the losses. She knew the day would come when she would not be around for the carolling. She had already swapped her baby grand piano for my old upright, hoping this beautiful object — now ensconced in my living room — would entice me back to the keyboard.

Or was it something more juvenile — the recurrence of an old irritability? Throughout my childhood Mum insisted I practice the piano and clarinet every day. I loved being able to play these instruments but loathed having to spend hours shut up alone in the music room, tinkling and tooting.

Now — of course — I regret having ignored her warnings about the carols. My piano-playing fingers are stiff and forgetful. My attempts to play the accompaniments are just a series of clanging mistakes. Even my singing voice is rusty, after months of no choir rehearsals. Will this be the year when our family carolling tradition finally dies out? I can picture our mother pointing at the silent piano and shaking her head in disappointment. My nephew plays a mean guitar.

Maybe I can hand the baton on to him this year. Perhaps this family ritual can adapt and change. This column was first published in The Guardian in December Class numbers for Writing as Therapy will be limited to approximately ten participants, but if the course books out I am happy to schedule some more classes.

Classes are via Zoom, from 7 pm to pm. Writing is a tried and tested method for coping with and understanding personal dilemmas, crises, depression, anxieties, stress and traumatic events. The simple act of putting down words on the page can reflect our attempt to make meaning from the thoughts and feelings and experiences we have.

It helps us to gain distance from the things that cause us distress. From keeping a daily diary to penning a poem, all forms of writing can help us to shape narrative from chaos. Therapeutic writing can also help us re-discover our playful selves. In this four part course I will lead you through a series of ideas and exercises in therapeutic writing, using a variety of techniques and exploring the methods that might work best for you.

Each session will involve a mix of listening, thinking, writing, reading and brainstorming. No experience is necessary and grammar, spelling and writing ability are irrelevant. First she sees that she has them. Then she acknowledges them to herself. Then she considers them as a way into the experience: then she realizes they are the experience.

She begins to write. The first session involves a gentle introduction to some key concepts in writing as therapy, including; catharsis, self-awareness, self-acceptance and self-transformation. We will employ simple writing techniques to identify the internal conversations we have with ourselves the dialogical self , and learn how these conversations can help us resolve the challenges we are facing.

Carl Klaus. What remains to be resolved? How can writing help us identify and move through the unexpressed choices and conflicts in our lives? Finding the language of pain — we will examine how employing writing techniques such as point-of-view eg. These distortions and tricks can sometimes cause us distress — and sometimes they can help us. In this session we will look at how to access faded memories and identify their truth content — both factual and emotional — through writing.

To register your interest, please contact me via the Contact page on this website, specifying which of the three enrolment options above you prefer. Deposits will be required to ensure you have a place in the course.

To listen to a recent ABC radio interview I did about writing as therapy click here. My father is sitting at my kitchen table telling a story about a dog. Many decades ago he was tasked with collecting a guard dog, an Alsatian, from some far away kennels. My father knelt down in front of the small cage containing the large dog and spoke to him in a gentle voice that I know well.

It was a long drive back to the city and my father spoke quietly to the dog the whole way. When they arrived at their destination — an isolated warehouse with a high fence inside which the dog would be locked, alone — my father opened the passenger side door.

But the dog began to whimper. At this point in the story my father stops speaking and lowers his head. In the next room there is a woman lying on my couch trying to remember who she is. That woman is my mother, but at times now I also wonder who she is.

When she first got the diagnosis she wanted to die. She told us so repeatedly. In response, my father made it his mission to try to persuade his wife that life was still worth living. He has always been inventive. If I ever get lost in the wilderness I hope it will be with my father because I know he will find a way out for us. He has hand-carved elaborate wooden handles for various items of furniture in their home to help her get up and down.

He has bought and sold several caravans in the hopes of enticing her to go camping with him one more time. For his sake my mother has tried to cultivate a taste for life. For my sake she has tried again to play the silent piano. She plays the same bars over and over, wondering why the tune goes nowhere. And one by one her words — the ones she needs to explain her decomposing world to us — have sunk away in her marshy brain before she could utter them.

In the daytime my parents have tried hard to keep to the rituals of their old life. When visitors come my father finishes her sentences for her. The visitors are amazed by their fortitude, and many have been fooled by the brave front.

After dark, though, my mother becomes someone else, a whimpering caged thing roaming the house trying to find a way out. And night after night my father makes her cups of tea and holds her close and tries to talk her back to herself in that gentle voice of his. In the mornings she remembers nothing but he remembers it all, and shakes his head when he tells me the barest details, trying to protect me — the youngest child — from the horror. My older siblings fill me in and we wonder how long it can go on.

We worry that our father, our brave captain, will go down with the ship. He promised himself — and us, and her — that as long as my mother knew who he was, he would keep caring for her at home. A man in his eighties with a dicky heart can only go so far on so little sleep. And although his wife of fifty years still knows who he is most days, the time has come for him to relinquish her into full-time care. His children are urging it. His GP is urging it.

The people who tune up his pacemaker are urging it. Even he knows he has reached his limit. A different walking frame, a renovated bathroom, a new drug, surely to goodness there must be some drugs out there that can bring his wife back. But the doctors shake their heads. Soon my father will open the passenger door of their car and help my mother out of her old life and into her new — her final — life, for the first and last time.

And my father will have no one to invent things for, or to try to lead out of the wilderness. And now, at the kitchen table, I breathe deeply and wait for him to lift his head again. Then I ask the question the story demands. When it came to funeral planning, my mother had only two requests. She dictated them to me a year ago, when she could no longer write. On Monday the Victorian opposition leader held a press conference on the lawn beside state parliament.