My introduction to writers and workshopping came in 2007. I was adrift on an extended travel, aimless—the kind of travel that’s marred by the constant anxiety of needing more funds to continue the trip. I took up residence in Beijing with an Icelandic expat who’d decided to write a novel. The man spent countless nights painfully toiling over his computer, empty Ching Dow stubbies stacked over the kitchen table, ashtray overflowing. On mornings when I’d wake, I’d find him sleepless and crazed, walking around our level-sixteen salmon-coloured apartment reciting lines, asking me about cadence and rhythm, grilling me about his protagonist’s motivations. Back then I wasn’t a writer at all; I’d tell him to go to bed, let it rest. I grew tired of his constant need for feedback, his relentless desire to expose himself like that.

It was with a certain irony that eight years later I returned to China a writer for residency. The night I arrived, I gazed out at the pimple-faced lights of Guangzhou and tried to reconnect with who I’d been before. This was the same China I remembered, of dirty pastel-coloured high-rises and push bikes, of red signage and smog, but I was irrevocably different.

We sat around a 15 seater table taking turns, the philosophy being that we would ‘get to know one another through our writing’. As an emerging writer, I’ve only ever workshopped in a university context, in classes of fellow emerging writers all coming to terms with their craft. Perhaps it’s the fact of studying the craft so closely that leads to a workshopping experience that focuses on the minutiae of your writing: the syntax, the rhythm, the words. The WrICE experience afforded me a different type of workshop. An hour was spent on each story, slowly dissecting both the characters’ and the writer’s motivations, and the story’s specific and universal themes. Here, the deeper layers were the thing. What’s it about? Writers asked. What’s it really about? Forcing me to traverse below the surface layers of my story and ask bigger questions about the human condition and why we desire to tell the stories we do. Maybe it was the insightful opportunity of sharing my stories with people who live in very different contexts, people who have unique identities and perspectives on the world that forced me to look at my story fresh and uncover layers I didn’t know existed.

My stories touch on things that are shameful and sad. I find sharing my work terribly exposing. As people, we dance around our gaps. And yet, on the page this is harder to do. I used to harbour an ambivalence about the act of writing. A sort-of suspicion born from the memory of my Icelandic friend; I’d be laboured by questions around what writing was essentially for and if it was just an indulgent luxury. Now I understand writing as an offering.

One of my favourite poets Anis Mojgani once wrote: all of this has never been for me … for I am cutting out parts of myself to give them to you. As writers, we give of ourselves when we share our work—and it can be awfully frightening. Indeed, we engage in the act of exchanging stories to build conduits of understanding. And in doing so, we open ourselves up and give others permission to do the same.

I feel blessed to have been able to share my stories with some of the Asia-Pacific’s most cutting-edge and talented writers. I’ve come away with insights into why we choose to share our work; and why this has the potential to deepen our understanding of both others and ourselves.

Story: Mia Wotherspoon