In this amazing homage to Clift’s novel Honour’s Mimic, Carmel Kostos re-stages a scene between Clift’s fictional lovers. Then in both text and photos she connects the rocky crags of the old Kalymnian citadel with the broken rock of the Kiama quarry where Clift’s father worked. A brilliant addition to the narrative!  

The historic citadel perched high above the village of Chora also features in the pieces by Kathy Kallos and Anna Fienburg, but Victoria Mascord’s keenly-observed picture gives us new things to see and smell and hear. And her photo of the Byzantine-era cross, with such a happy symbolic fish, is a knock-out!

In our first workshop, we discussed how Clift and Johnston used to say that ‘Conversations are a first draft for writing’. In this piece, Janelle Warhurst has used this maxim as a title for an account of a poignant conversation with a Kalymnian whom she met on the waterfront of the sponge-diving island’s port-town, Pothia.

The ‘Ithaca’ of Christine Bayly’s title is not the geographical island (we are of course on Kalymnos!) but C.P. Cavafy’s symbolic rendering of Ithaca as a destination towards which we all are making our way. (‘And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not defrauded you…’

In this moving piece, Carmel Kostos uses a photograph seen and a family-story heard in the Kalymnian House museum as inspiration for her account of the perilous nature of the sponge-diving industry on Kalymnos. Then she links this with Clift’s fictional sponge diver in Honour’s Mimic.

Here Kathy Kallos gives a vivid sense of our excursion to the citadel where the Kalymnians once took refuge from pirates, and where Charmian Clift takes her two lovers in the novel Honour’s Mimic. The exhilarating view from the old town stretches to the port of Pothia, and beyond.

In this evocative piece, Anna Fienburg reflects on our first day’s excursion — to the Church of Saint Savvas the New and on to the Kalymnian House Museum. Then she shifts focus to Day 3: our climb to the citadel at Chora, where (as Charmian Clift writes in Honour’s Mimic)  ten tiny chapels ‘glitter among the high ruins like celestial droppings’.

An image can be a great inspiration for a written piece. Here one of the Kalymnos Workshop members has been inspired by a photo of a Kalymnian woman, taken in the 1950s. She has included a reference to the healing herbs that we saw growing on the hillside of the old citadel of Chora. This story fits with one of our themes — the strength of Kalymnian women.