Tag: long-distance friendship

An invitation to Paris, and news from North America and North Wales

Published on by emmaclairesweeney2 Comments

When Emily posted her last update on here, some four years ago now, to mark the publication of her new book Out of the Shadows: Six Visionary Victorian Women in Search of a Public Voice, we were both living and working in and around London. In recent months, we’ve each made huge changes to our lives. I’ve moved to rural North Wales and Emily has moved to North America. In our mid-forties, we’re once again nurturing our friendship over a long distance – just as we did during our mid-twenties.

It’s long-distance friendships with literary women that allow me to invite you to the Ruppin Agency’s third annual Paris writing retreat. My friend Jacqueline, founder of Véranda Association Culturelle, hosts the retreat in her stylish venue in the 15th arrondissement. I’m so grateful to Jacqueline for introducing me to this glorious corner of Paris – walking distance from the Eiffel Tower and yet a neighbourhood of real Parisians.

When you open the unassuming front door of the secret retreat venue, you step into a light-filled orangery where we hold the morning warm-up and late-afternoon cool-down workshop sessions to get you into the writing zone and help you reflect on what you’ve written. We keep the group sizes small so that we can shape all our activities to each participant’s needs.

The retreat venue has won an International Design and Architecture Award, and its enviable staircase bookshelves featured in top interiors magazine House & Garden.

I love walking through the retreat venue during the daytime seeing participants writing independently at desks in the library or in private studies in the cave and penthouse. The creative energy is palpable. And the real treat for me and my husband Jonathan Ruppin, an editor and former agent, is meeting one-to-one with participants in the garden studio, where we delve deep into each participant’s projects and processes.

It was another literary friend, Saara, who first introduced us to Jacqueline. Jonathan and Saara had worked together for years at Foyles independent bookshop before Saara moved to Paris, where she started up Magical History Tours. Saara’s literary excursions are always a highlight of our retreat.

I’ve witnessed many a new friendship form while Saara gives us an insider’s glimpse of Paris’ literary scene – antiquarian book markets, writers’ hangouts, hidden reading rooms. The conversations we have over retreat breakfasts and lunches, and the work we share during our welcome drinks reception and farewell readings event, are the kernel of friendships that continue to grow once the retreat has come to an end. The most joyful aspect of running these retreats is watching literary shoots reach out across continents – a Texan novelist meeting up via Zoom with a short story writer from London; a self-help writer from Poland sharing drafts with a memoirist from San Francisco; an American essayist who has long lived in Paris meeting in a local café with a Brit who has also made her home in one of the world’s most literary cities.

If you’d like to learn more about the Ruppin Agency’s Paris Retreat, you can hear Emma and Jonathan on World Radio Paris. To nab a last-minute spot on the upcoming retreat, email Emma at studio@ruppinagency.com and mention Something Rhymed or quote Paris100 to get your £100 discount.

Long-Distance Neighbours

Published on by emmaclairesweeney2 Comments

Inspired by the evolving nature of Margaret Mason and Mary Shelley’s friendship, this month we’re reflecting on the moments of change that we have experienced. As Emily’s post revealed, some long-anticipated forks in the road have ended up continuing to lead us along parallel routes. But we have also stumbled on unexpected cross roads…

Emily and I first became friends when we were both living in Japan: her in a tiny apartment surrounded by carparks and convenience stores; me in a tatami-floored house that looked out onto rice paddies and groves of bamboo. In these very different environments, each of us picked up our pens.

Although we hadn’t yet come out to each other as aspiring writers, Emily and I began at weekends to take the three-hour round trip between her urban flat and my country home. This way, we forged our friendship in both the ice cream parlours of the neon-choked city and in bath houses hidden up dark mountain lanes.

This image is in the public domain.
This image is in the public domain.

But, after just one short season, we each had to decide in advance whether or not we would stay in Japan the following year. By the time the maple leaves had fallen from the trees, Emily had chosen to continue her unofficial writing apprenticeship in Matsuyama, enduring the chill of a second Japanese winter. I set my sights instead on a long trip with my boyfriend, imagining myself penning stories on sun-bathed verandas in Thailand, Vietnam and Laos.

Many messages pinged between the computer in Emily’s Japanese staffroom and the internet cafés I visited in Chiang Mai and Hanoi and Luang Prabang. On the surface, I was having the time of my life. But, although my boyfriend and I journeyed together all the way from Bangkok to Beijing, our relationship was falling apart.

While Emily was continuing to write fiction in between teaching lessons, I wasn’t jotting down much more than an angst-ridden journal. Looking back on it, I see just how easily I could have retreated into solitude during that time. And so I feel especially grateful that my faraway friend kept on making efforts to remain close.

When Emily and I both moved back to Britain, we continued our friendship – each of us, over the years, travelling thousands of miles across country to meet in Liverpool’s underground bars; riverside cafes in York; the walled garden of Ely cathedral; a Cumbrian bunkhouse; Portobello Market; a field in Herefordshire. More often than not, we’d come laden with drafts of each other’s novels that we had annotated in advance.

During those years of long-distance friendship, we anticipated the literary success of one before the other as a fork in the road, just beyond the line of sight.  But, gradually, our writing lives became so intertwined and our vision of ‘success’ so complex and incremental, that jobs and awards and publications no longer felt like junctions that required much navigation.

This image is in the public domain.
This image is in the public domain.

I was delighted when, in 2011, Emily told me that she’d be moving to London. For the first time in a decade, she would live nearby. What’s more, she would be teaching at the same universities as me, so we’d also get to see each other each week at work.

Not long after Emily’s move, we embarked on co-writing literary journalism, sitting side-by-side at the same desk. I was newly single again, so it was all too easy to lose myself in work – especially work with Emily, which was so convivial, and always punctuated with shared meals: cinnamon buns; home-made soups; late-night dashes to the Turkish take-away for shish kebabs in spicy sauce.

But work, however fun, cannot replace a social life. This struck me one evening after a staff meeting, when Emily and I went off our separate ways. I’d come to miss our long-distance friendship, when we saw each other less often but, perhaps, prized our time together more highly.

When I eventually mentioned this to Emily, she immediately arranged a night out to a jazz bar, and we spent the evening listening to music and drinking cocktails and catching up on all those things we’d forgotten to tell each other while sat at a desk side by side.