Caringbah, NSW, AUSTRALIA
Congratulations, Shona!
Shona’s Bio:
Shona Snowden lives with her husband and children in Sydney, Australia. She works as a freelance copywriter, squeezing essays and fiction in around paying clients. Her short stories have been published in several national magazines in Australia and 'The People's Friend' in the UK, and her humour has appeared in 'The Sydney Morning Herald'.
Shona loves writing for both adults and young adults and finds, sometimes to her own surprise, that most of her characters like to hurl themselves into paranormal mysteries. Maybe the spirits are trying to tell her something…or maybe Shona's characters are just braver than she is.
As well as writing and taking care of her family, Shona spends her time reading, cooking and learning to identify the many Australian spiders and snakes that would like to kill her.
More information on Shona's stories for young adults can be found at: http://www.shonasnowden.com
Recreating Home
It was a stalker that made me leave my home in Edinburgh.
For weeks, I flitted from sofa to sofa, visiting my apartment only to pick up clothes, always with a companion, always ready to run. One day, burning with a fever, I applied for a job in Amsterdam. A month later I crammed my life into two suitcases, and the rest into the wardrobe of my childhood bedroom, and left for a country I knew nothing about beyond the flavor of Edam cheese and that it was far enough away for my stalker not to follow me.
In Edinburgh I had lived in Stockbridge, just down the hill from the neat ranks and squares of the Edwardian New Town. From my windows I could see curving sandstone terraces and cobbled streets winding up towards the chic shops of George Street. From the rear of the building I could look across the River Forth to my home region of Fife; velvet green fields dotted with cotton-wool ball sheep.
In Amsterdam, the office found me a studio apartment in a condemned building in De Pijp, a tatty district of dark winding streets and peeling green doors. 'You are lucky,' said Caroline, my new colleague and guide. 'Property is hard to rent here.' From the studio's single window all I see was the flaking brick and peeling window frames of the back of the identical house opposite. 'It will do for now,' I said.
Caroline gave me an old gas heater, a wobbly white table and a new toilet seat. Another colleague's wife took me to a cheap furniture store where I bought a bed sofa, green china plates, each with a different flaw on the surface, and thick tumblers with bubbles in the glass. I stacked the china on raw wood shelves and pushed the sofa up against the stained wall.
Nothing matched. My coffee table was a cardboard box with a scarf thrown over it and the heater smelt of gas. Because the building was condemned, the landlord refused to fix anything. At night, mice ran along the pipes that stuck out of the kitchen walls and in summer the air buzzed with mosquitoes from the dank canal at the end of the road. Sometimes thieves with metal cutters and vans drove along the streets outside and took every bicycle on the street. Junkies lingered in doorways and men drove slowly past the windows of the neighboring red light district in family cars with baby seats in the back.
And yet. The place that 'would do' grew around me like a new skin. The creaking steps of the old, dark stairs welcomed me home and the skitter of the mice in the walls greeted me like a friend. When I looked out of the window at night, at least one light gleamed in a window. Whatever the time of day, somebody was always eating, always talking. The clatter of cutlery and smell of food, savory, sour or sweet, hung in the air, along with laughter and voices. In the evenings, the sound of half a dozen televisions harmonized with my own. I grew flowers in window boxes lined up on the peeling sill. I danced to the music I heard from the studio below; and bought earplugs to deaden it while I slept. I listened to the Portuguese family above argue, cry and laugh. I threw parties with my bubbly glasses and flawed china. I cooked haggis on the two-ring stove and people from eight different countries claimed to like it. Beneath the sagging ceiling, I kissed my future husband for the first time.
Almost accidentally, I recreated home in this condemned building. The place that 'would do' did for four years. By the time it was finally demolished, an unexpected architectural stricture meant that an identical building, at least externally, had to be put up in its place. I haven't been inside the new building, but when I go to Amsterdam, I always visit and look up at the windows, imagining, that, at the back, there is a recreated studio flat with thick green china and tumblers with bubbles in the glass lined up on raw wood shelves, while mice dance along the kitchen pipes and outside there is always a light on in at least one window.
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