The Ferris Wheel: Two months at the Stout Centre

Abstract

I started working at the Stout Centre just after Christmas Day 1992. There was no one around; when the sun was out I took a chair on to the deck, and sat there staring at the view for hours, a book open on my lap. The beginning of the two-month Reader's Digest PEN-SRC fellowship coincided with four weeks' leave from my half-time work at The Evening Post, and to me four weeks without having to visit the newspaper seemed an almost infinite expanse of time. That must be why I arrived at the Stout Centre with such grand plans. I wanted to write a novel that I'd been thinking about for a couple of years-to get at least a decent first chapter written. But before I started writing I also wanted to read a large number of books as research for my own (about which I will say no more than that it involves amnesia and a Jot of fibbing). I think I somehow anticipated fitting four months' worth of work into those four weeks (and the five half-weeks after them). In any case, I soon realised that I didn't know enough about the kind of novel I wanted to write and I didn't have the time or the patience to read all those books. My novel remained a cloud from which no rain fell. Other things happened instead.