A Tribute to Jennifer Bryce

On 27 April, our friend and colleague Jennifer Bryce from my writing group died peacefully in Melbourne, farewelled by family and friends. Jenny and Barry Lee Thompson co-founded Elwood Writers in 2007. Helen McDonald and I both joined two years later.

I have written previously, both on my blog and for the online US newsletter Working Writer, about the importance of my writing group to me. Workshopping one’s creative work is different from involvement with other groups. In writing you are sharing a part of your soul. There is almost a sanctity to the idea of entrusting one’s ideas, poems and stories to other people for critique and comment before sending them out into the world. In honouring this potentially fragile process, our ever-thoughtful Jenny was exemplary.

As she bravely faced more and more time in hospital, it happened that at one meeting she and I were the only attendees. She had encouraged me to enter a memoir-writing competition, and on this particular Tuesday sat down to with me to edit 5000 words of my opening chapters, sentence by sentence, line by line. When I last visited her in hospital, I wanted to thank her for this kindness. Writing memoir has its own vulnerabilities, and I appreciated the insightful support that she – as a fiction writer – had given me. I wasn’t sure if she could hear what I was saying by her bedside, but it was important for me to express a little of my gratitude.

I’d originally met Jenny at a writing workshop in the CBD. At lunchtime I overheard her telling another participant about her writing group. On an impulse, I asked if I could join. She said she’d get back to me and some weeks later I attended my first meeting. Over the years, it was decided to keep the group compact in number, so I’d managed to slide in through the door to this wondrous club before it had been shut. It was one of my better moves.

Dear Jenny, you and your fine qualities will be sincerely missed.

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