Christine Bayly was one of the Kalymnos Workshop participants in April 2025. Although she had never been to Kalymnos before, she had spent some months in Greece with her family when she was young. In this reflection, she brings together both experiences, and gives us a sense of mountains, sea and sky. The image shows Christine (seated at rear) in the citadel of Chora, mapping the view to the port-town of Kalymnos.

British Cliftie John Hinde was not part of our April 2025 Workshop Group, but he has recently done some exploration on Kalymnos that has taken our journey forward. A number of us ate in this oyzeri while we were on the island, but we completely missed seeing the sign! Wonderful to have this new layer of Mermaid Singing uncovered.

Into a description of a farewell visit to the church of Saint Nicholas — the church of the parish where Charmian Clift lived in 1955 — Kathy Kallos weaves stories of Kalymnian migrants. As well, she tells us about the migration journey of her father, who also made the trip to the Promised Land of ‘Afstralia’ in the 1950s. Lighting the candle makes a fitting end to the writer’s pilgrimage.

Although we have now left Kalymnos, the island — with its connection to Charmian Clift —  remains close to the hearts of the workshop participants. In this beautifully imagined piece, Carmel Kostos returns to walk in the footsteps of Clift’s heroine Kathy, from the novel Honour’s Mimic, as she climbs the citadel at Chora.

Our Workshop was very fortunate to have a guest apppearance from Patricia Anton, who has translated Mermaid Singing and Peel me a Lotus into Spanish for Barcelona-based publishing company Gatopardo. I always say that I cannot imagine how beautifully Patricia must write in Spanish, given the lyricism of her prose in English. She is the perfect match for Charmian Clift.

Taking a photograph of a historic photograph can be a way of bringing the past into the present, even if — or sometimes especially if — we do not know the identity of the subject. In this piece, Mike Ranger (wearing the white hat in the title photo) uses images of Kalymnian women seen in various local museums as a way to focus on Charmian Clift’s observations of the ongoing power of the matriarchal women of the island. Even the reflections in the photos highlight the reflectiveness of this piece.

So hard to follow all these great pieces of writing in the Kalymnos Workshop Journal! For my own contribution, I decided to take one of the objects in the Kalymnos Archaeological Museum, and use it as a springboard for fiction. I used to do this kind of exercise when I was in Greece in the 1970s, trying to find my voice.

Here Janelle Warhurst responds in poetry to some of the places we visited together: First the islet on the western side of Kalymnos, where the legend of the ‘Princess of Telendos’ is a poignant tale. And then the Gorge of Vathy, cutting sharply back to the fertile valley with its famous mandarin orchards.

Here Teya Dusseldorp writes of Charmian Clift’s ‘love letter to women of the past, and the future’, but this piece is itself a love letter, both to Charmian and to our group of ‘wise women’ — shown in Teya’s photos as walking together through the ‘Country’ of Kalymnos.

In this acutely-observed piece, Sarah Waterworth invites us to accompany her as she pays a visit to the home of an Australian-Kalymnian friend, situated Epano — high above Charmian’s house in the parish of Saint Nicholas. Step by step we walk with the writer, as she meets a variety of Kalymnians and recalls an earlier part of her life’s journey.

The 'Lady of Kalymnos' (whom we saw in the island’s Archaeological Museum), encapsulates the duality of Matriarchs and Mermaids that Janelle Warhurst describes in this piece. This bronze statue, dating back to the Hellenistic period, was brought up (like a mermaid) in a Kalymnian fisherman’s net a few years ago. This Kyria, or lady, is a not a naked and nubile goddess but a middle-aged and maternal figure.

Here Anna Fienberg begins by taking us ‘Epano, above Charmian’s coloured cubes’, as shown in this photo of the part of town behind and above the house where Charmian and her family lived in 1955. Then Anna swirls us on into a kaleidoscope of stories and scents and sounds and tastes that encapsulate Kalymnos.

We all bring our own family stories with us when we travel. For Sarah Waterworth, it was her grandmother’s story that she carried here: a story of hardship and resilience reminiscent of the experience of the Kalymnian women Clift writes about in Mermaid Singing.

Sunday 6 April marked the Feast Day of Saint Savvas the New, the patron saint of Kalymnos. Kathy Kallos and a couple of other workshop participants made an early-morning pilgrimage to the saint’s church and monastery, high above the port town. As Kathy explains in her piece, Saint Savvas has a special and very personal connection with her family.