The Secret Garden Game

A meditation for (some) writers

“When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. It was true, too . . . by the time she was six years old she was as tyrannical and selfish a little pig as ever lived.”
— from The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

Mary Lennox drawn by Charles Robinson in 1914

I was in Brisbane this week for a series of talks to high school students — a prospect I was dreading and bound to be thankful for (that common formula for the shy, ambitious writer).

I’ve written before about my anxiety in the lead-up to any and all public speaking, the main characteristics being weeks of mental bargaining, over-preparation, irritability, psychological self-flogging, and a torturous sleepless night before the event.

Honestly, I’m a riot.

So it was no surprise to find myself wide awake at 4am the morning of my first day in Brisbane. Since I was sharing a small apartment with an author I’d only just met, getting up to…