Welcome to my blog..


"We struggle with dream figures and our blows fall on living faces." Maurice Merleau-Ponty

When I started this blog in 2011, I was in a time of transition in my life between many identities - that of Artistic Director of a company (Apocryphal Theatre) to independent writer/director/artist/teacher and also between family identity, as I discover a new family that my grandfather's name change at the request of his boss in WWII hid from view - a huge Hungarian-Slovak contingent I met in 2011. Please note in light of this the irony of the name of my recently-disbanded theatre company. This particular transition probably began in the one month period (Dec. 9, 2009-Jan. 7, 2010) in which I received a PhD, my 20 year old cat died on my father's birthday and then my father, who I barely knew, died too. I was with him when he died and nothing has been the same since. This blog is tracing the more conscious elements of this journey and attempt to fill in the blanks. I'm also writing a book about my grandmothers that features too. I'd be delighted if you joined me. (Please note if you are joining mid-route, that I assume knowledge of earlier posts in later posts, so it may be better to start at the beginning for the all singing, all dancing fun-fair ride.) In October 2011, I moved back NYC after living in London for 8 years and separated from my now ex-husband, which means unless you want your life upended entirely don't start a blog called Somewhere in Transition. In November 2011, I adopted a rescue cat named Ugo. He is lovely. As of January 2012, I began teaching an acting class at Hunter College, which is where one of my grandmothers received a scholarship to study acting, but her parents would not let her go. All things come round…I began to think it may be time to stop thinking of my life in transition when in June 2012 my stepfather Tom suddenly died. Now back in the U.S. for a bit, I notice, too, my writing is more overtly political, no longer concerned about being an expat opining about a country not my own. I moved to my own apartment in August 2012 and am a very happy resident of Inwood on the top tip of Manhattan where the skunks and the egrets roam in the last old growth forest on the island.

I am now transitioning into being married again with a new surname (Barclay-Morton). John is transitioning from Canada to NYC and as of June 2014 has a green card. So transition continues, but now from sad to happy, from loss to love...from a sense of alienation to a sense of being at home in the world.

As of September 2013 I started teaching writing as an adjunct professor at Fordham University, which I have discovered I love with an almost irrational passion. While was blessed for the opportunity, after four years of being an adjunct, the lack of pay combined with heavy work load stopped working, so have transferred this teaching passion to private workshops in NYC and working with writers one on one, which I adore. I will die a happy person if I never have to grade an assignment ever again. As of 2018, I also started leading writing retreats to my beloved Orkney Islands. If you ever want two weeks that will restore your soul and give you time and space to write, get in touch. I am leading two retreats this year in July and September.

I worked full time on the book thanks to a successful crowd-funding campaign in May 2014 and completed it at two residencies at Vermont Studio Center and Wisdom House in summer 2015. I have done some revisions and am shopping it around to agents and publishers now, along with a new book recently completed.

I now work full-time as a freelance writer, writing workshop leader, coach, editor and writing retreat leader. Contact me if you are interested in any of these services.

Not sure when transition ends, if it ever does. As the saying goes, the only difference between a sad ending and a happy ending is where you stop rolling the film.

For professional information, publications, etc., go to my linked in profile and website for Barclay Morton Editorial & Design. My Twitter account is @wilhelminapitfa. You can find me on Facebook under my full name Julia Lee Barclay-Morton. More about my grandmothers' book: The Amazing True Imaginary Autobiography of Dick & Jani

In 2017, I launched a website Our Grandmothers, Our Selves, which has stories about many people's grandmothers. Please check it out. You can also contact me through that site.

In May, I directed my newest play, On the edge of/a cure, and have finally updated my publications list, which now includes an award-winning chapbook of my short-story White shoe lady, which you can find on the sidebar. I also have become a certified yoga instructor in the Kripalu lineage. What a year!

And FINALLY, I have created a website, which I hope you will visit, The Unadapted Ones. I will keep this blog site up, since it is a record of over 8 years of my life, but will eventually be blogging more at the website, so if you want to know what I am up to with my writing, teaching, retreats and so on, the site is the place to check (and to subscribe for updates). After eight years I realized, no, I'm never turning into One Thing. So The Unadapted Ones embraces the multiplicity that comprises whomever I am, which seems to always be shifting. That may in fact be reality for everyone, but will speak for myself here. So, do visit there and thanks for coming here, too. Glad to meet you on the journey...

Sunday, September 3, 2017

A sacred day

Yesterday, I releases ashes of my stepfather David Berry, into the Atlantic Ocean on Peaks Island, Maine, in front of a cottage that had been in his family for many generations, but was sold recently because the family could not afford the taxes. This cottage was a sacred place for so many of us, a place we felt safe, and was also just incredibly beautiful. If my mother had not met David, which she would not have done if she had not married my first stepfather, then we would not have ever seen this magic place.

Because the cottage was sold, we were next-door at a cousin's place. But this, too, was a place I had many childhood memories.

I had been dreading this day, the release of the ashes, making the loss concrete, and coming to this island, where I had spent the best times of my childhood and also some of the worst, but the cottage was safe, and so to be so close and yet so far and to be saying goodbye to the person who had protected me when I was young when he could and at a crucial time, making this world seem more unsafe than it already does, felt like it would rip me apart.

But David's friend and executor who brought up the ashes had the wise idea to meditate first, and I went down with him to do so, on a little area the cousins had built, a small deck over the rocks. When sitting and listening to the waves hit the rocks and smelling the seaweed of mid-tide and hearing the seagulls and the people chatting quietly on the porch and the click of a camera and the ring of the bell buoy, a sound that had lulled me to sleep as a child and brought me home - as my step-cousin said "as soon as you hear that bell buoy everything else goes away" and she is right. Walking down the dirt road, you are twisting and turning through pine trees and new cottages on the road and then you hear the first ding...dong.... of the bell buoy and you know even though you can't see it the cottage is there and this tiny piece of back shore will greet you, that is both somehow open to the Atlantic and protected by Casco Bay, that is wild and yet holds you safely...And as I was also opening my eyes to see the blue-green water, the blue sky and forest green trees across the way on Pumpkin Nob, I heard David's voice say "it's all life," which made me smile and then cry.

When we were done meditating, we joined the others on the porch and people reminisced about David and the cottage. I mentioned my meditation experience, my regret at having not been able to say goodbye to him, who died so suddenly of a heart attack and not realizing until he was gone that he had been my father - if your father is the one who brings you through childhood and shows you the things that will become such a huge part of your life like writing and theater and the cottage...

I then remembered the photo David had posted on Facebook a year or so ago of him as a young boy at the cottage, happy as a clam in a big rocking chair, maybe a dog nearby. Early 1950s black and white. Sepia toned with age. And it reminded me of a picture someone took of me on the bed in the sunroom smiling, with two kittens asleep on my legs, a young girl, happy as a clam.

What a gift this place was and is in memory...and David was and is in memory.

I was entrusted with the ashes. I was able to climb down onto the rocks to the water's edge, just like when I was little, just like when my mother was freaking I might lose my balance but David wasn't and told her to let me go. So many gifts and for that one I am so profoundly grateful, because I don't feel confident in so many ways physically and definitely as a child I felt awkward, except on the rocks, on the rocks I could fly, falling confidently to the next rock to the next and the next, I felt graceful and at ease, and again now age 54 was able to do the same. Some younger ones helping me, and that was nice, and I accepted the help at times, but I knew the truth, which is, I could have done it myself. Those rocks are in my deepest body memory, a freedom, a knowledge, that the ocean is me and I am the ocean and the rocks are me and I am them and now David is back there, in the ocean, part of it, as he always was, and he is home, and I am sad sad sad because would rather have him here with me, with us to talk laugh argue all of it but I can't anymore, but I can, when meditating, which his friend Wayne reminded me of by offering the space to do so, and I am crying now of course writing this, and I am wanting to say, please stay, you were my father, I didn't know that, I am so fucking stupid, but then know instead I have to say, here, you are home and you are at peace, and thank goodness for that, and hope that is true, but I am fairly sure it is...

But I do miss you, and I always will. That much I do know.

Goodbye and godspeed, may the Atlantic take you home
Shena, Charles, Barb, Bill, Robin, me, Wayne and Mark -
David in photos & John was taking this picture

No comments:

Post a Comment