Journalist Kate Wild on how Stephanie Dowrick helped her + join my new online memoir writing workshop on Aug 29
'You make your discovery of self in the company of others'
Dear friends and readers,
I’ve been woken up early by list-making dreams lately (and perhaps dreams are too generous a description for the compulsion to mentally scroll through my commitments in my sleep). But then, I am listing good things, hopeful things, working for community and stories on my little patch of the earth.
In the humbling daze of midlife in this era, in this world, I find my ambitions limited, or maybe just honed in, to seeking out small wins in the real world.
One of those things I want to tell you about is an online writing and memoir workshop I’m running on Saturday August 29th, from 2-4pm.
It’s a two-hour workshop aimed at writers of memoir, or anyone interested in exploring their own story and histories. I’ll be using techniques from narrative practice to help you start delving into the stories you’d like to explore, or have started working on.
The workshop is important to me because it’s a fundraiser for the daughters of Aprila Wayar, West Papua’s first female novelist, a journalist leader, and my friend and peer who for many years guided my thinking on West Papua through her words and company.
Aprila died in 2025, and the fundraiser will support Aprila’s two orphaned teenage daughters to finish their education. All funds raised from the workshop will go directly towards helping them.
There are two other amazing workshops you can also join, on eco-feminist narrative essays and Indigenous Writing Ecosystems, with large discounts if you attend all three workshops.
If you can’t make the workshop/s and would like to support Aprila’s daughters, feel free to make a donation, or buy Aprila’s book.
99 Problems But a Book Ain’t One
If you’re having [life] problems, I feel bad for you, son
I got 99 problems, but a [book] ain’t one
Wonderful to have Kate Wild join us for this installment of 99 Problems! She’s an investigative journalist and author of The Red House, The Age’s Book of the Year, and shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards this week! Congrats Kate!
The Red House describes what happened when Kumanjayi Walker, a young Aboriginal man, was fatally shot by Zachary Rolfe, a white police officer, in a remote community in the Northern Territory. As I read The Red House, it reminded me of how I felt reading Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood for the first time as a teenager. A realisation, or a re-realisation of what longform narrative nonfiction can do, when it’s done well.
The Red House cuts through bullshit political spin and our broken media cycle and race relations, and tells this most human, confronting story, underpinned by deep research, history and cultural understanding.
For 99 Problems but a Book Ain’t One, Kate’s book that helped her is Intimacy and Solitude: Finding new closeness and self-trust in a distanced world. It’s a meditation on the self and connection that I have also held close at different times.
Its author, Dr Stephanie Dowrick. has been many things— a psychotherapist, an interfaith minister, an author, a publisher, and now, a newsletter writer on Substack.
It’s a curious experience to read Intimacy and Solitude now, 35 years after it was first published. In many ways it’s a somewhat prophetic book, a shout from the past about what we need ever more now. Kate says “it has aged well”, and I agree.
Bel: What was happening in your life when you discovered Intimacy and Solitude? What problem or question were you facing?
Kate: Going by Intimacy & Solitude’s publication date in the early ‘90’s. I was studying at a regional university a long way from my closest friends, and doing a lot of things by myself. I’m an introvert so that was mostly OK but I was also lonely. The question I was trying to answer was about my first real relationship, which was on-again, off-again, long distance and very confusing. I was completely absorbed in my boyfriend when I visited him and pretty solitary in my life back at uni, so the title of the book appealed to me! I had pretty binary ideas about intimacy = relationship and solitude = single, I think I wanted to know if or how you could have both at the same time.
Bel: Can you share some quotes that stood out to you, and tell me why they were important?
Kate: I remember finding this revelatory;
“You make your discovery of self in the company of others. Through some else’s belief that you exist, and have a right to exist in your own way, you begin to find your solid ground within. From that place of inner reality you are able to reach out - perhaps even to forget yourself temporarily - to make contact with others.”
I’m pretty sure that up to that point I believed I had to figure out who I was on my own and bring that to relationships like a passport that would give me entry into intimacy. I was convinced that I was lacking something, but if I could find it or figure out what it was and obtain it, my relationships would all become easy.
This quote opened up the idea that I didn’t need to turn up with a passport - it was OK to let other people see that I didn’t have everything figured out.
And the following words helped me see solitude as a warmer, gentler place than I had been picturing;
“Knowing who you are, trusting that you are, you can also be alone. Not in a state of defensiveness against others, nor in a state of loneliness, but knowing that you are alone with your own self - someone with memories and experiences of others.”
Bel: What changed for you after reading Intimacy and Solitude?
Kate: Dowrick was probably my first interaction (albeit on the page) with a psychologist. Intimacy & Solitude offered the possibility that dealing with your own business was the key to being more at ease in the world and with other humans. I still carry this thought from Intimacy & Solitude with me every day -
“When you experience something ‘out there’ as a conflict which really stirs you up, or when someone ‘out there’ is behaving in a way which tears at your emotional defences, it is likely that you have projected outward what is actually a conflict within your own self - between your psychic ‘bits.’ “
Bel: What does Intimacy and Solitude mean to you now?
Kate: Going back and re-reading it now, 30 years later, I feel really warm towards this book and grateful to Stephanie Dowrick. It really is possible for a book to change your life. Intimacy & Solitude gave me a positive, compassionate way to look at feelings and questions I was struggling with at a really difficult time in my life. And that compassion has stayed with me. I’m so glad I read it when I did.
Thank you to Kate Wild, and subscribe to Stephanie Dowrick’s newsletter for her gorgeous collection of curated poems this year, including this one:
Read more about books that have solved problems. And suggest an author I could speak to via notes@belindalopez.net.