We have a storage cage in our building filled with my children’s outgrown things: it’s Purgatory for stuffed animals, deflated netballs, buckets and spades and rollerblades, cricket bats, fancy dress outfits and enough Lego to build a full-sized replica of the converted 38-apartment textile mill in which we live. Important to hang onto these things: what if my teenagers’ sudden heart’s desire is to rollerblade to St Kilda beach armed with a small plastic yellow spade, a green castle bucket, a couple of soft toys – say, Sandy (a flamingo) and FlopFlop (a rabbit), and me, of course, their loving mother, for an afternoon of nostalgic joy? Hmm.
When I was down in the cage last week, I thought about how long it had been since I carried the old dolls’ house up to the apartment for a visiting child. Fifteen years ago I bought it from an op shop. It’s a simple, sturdy thing with four large rooms and an attic. During its working years all kinds of toys have called it home, from quaint Sylvanian Families to sharp-toothed plastic T-rexes. In that moment I realised that I was the only person who cared about the fate of that dolls’ house. I didn’t want to let it go. Suddenly, I could envision a new use for it.
For the first time I dragged it upstairs purely for myself. I put it in a corner of my study and filled it with children’s books: old, thin paperbacks went into the attic – standing tall in the apex, lying flat in piles under the slopes – and an assortment of books I love and admire or frequently reference slotted into the first and second floor rooms. It was so pleasing to have made something new out of something old. This wasn’t a dolls’ house any more, but a bookcase.
Another type of upcycling I’ve mastered, with more complexity and finesse, is this: I can upcycle manuscripts. In upcycling terms, I can take a ‘broken toaster’ manuscript and turn it into a ‘fully functioning gaming PC’ manuscript. The first time I felt inspired to take a manuscript apart – really take it apart and afterwards put it back together with a range of brand new parts to form a completely different shape so that you almost wouldn’t recognise the original object it had come from – was in 2010. To understand this upcycling, we have to go back to 2006, the year I finished writing my first Young Adult manuscript: a manuscript that went on to be very much rejected.
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