My name is Beata S. I’m one of you, a teacher, a counsellor and creative writer who would like to introduce you to her world, the world we are all living in right now but we all see and experience through different pair of eyes.
I’m currently available for comments and advice.
Based in Australia, I live and take care of the farm, that survived the extreme bushfires in 2020, the year of pandemic.
After graduating with a degree in education, I migrated to Australia from Europe enhancing further my university education in human psychology, counselling and creative writing. Over time, I became more concerned with the state of our environment and our own human fragility.
SQSP
A regular reflection on the state of our human and natural affairs, with an even split between the personal recent and past examples of the resilience and survival. The stories I provide are chosen from the ‘creative writing file’ project that combined the creative and professional skills and expertise of twenty women from different parts of the world of different ages, cultures and circumstances. The project that started in the time of the lockdown 2020 is ongoing.
Emerging Questions
I love to connect with anyone from any culture, belief or nationality to understand our interconnection in changing new world, with a special focus on shifting definitions of what is necessary to survive for us all as humanity in rapidly shifting profit driven economies. I have no answers and I am just searching like everyone else.
Future Forecasting
I’ve conducted numerous examples in my short story telling from the present and the past for major questions asked to help predict our possible scenarios for tomorrow. I have personal contacts with various individuals of different cultures, beliefs and nationalities in over forty countries to deliver a truly international perspective on the most important questions we have to ask ourselves today.
From the most isolated capital city in the world I will reach you to report what is happening around me and tell you a story from the present or the past, from my own shores or from any places in the world I have lived in or visited. The story that keeps me going and give me hope in our humanity and our ability to re-emerge from any disaster more resilient and more human.
Recently I have returned to my first manuscript for the publishing titled: ‘The Girl from Lamac’. It starts in 1960 and ends in 2020. For me personally the year of natural disasters and worldwide epidemic is defined as the ‘Year of Humanity.’ I hoped we were all slowly waking up to greet a new world where the protection of human life and care for our environment would be of the outmost importance. I can not wait for the new morning to come…I wrote then. I do not believe in it anymore in 2026. Maybe therefore I am returning so often to the year of the missed opportunity.
THE GIRL FROM LAMAC is structured around three paired relationships spanning three generations: Julia and Julian, Lamaca and Maco, and Antonia and Anton.
In each generation, a woman confronts the challenge of loving a man whose life has been shaped by wounds, loss, or circumstances beyond his control. Yet the women respond differently.
Julia carries. Living through war, displacement, and Communism, she accepts responsibility for the survival of the people around her because that is what her world expects of her. She becomes the family’s anchor, sustaining both the living and the broken.
Lamaca inherits Julia’s sense of duty but also Julian’s longing for freedom. After spending more than thirty years behind the Iron Curtain, she discovers a wider world through travel and migration. Yet freedom brings its own burden. Drawn between independence and responsibility, she repeatedly struggles to reconcile her desire for self-determination with her devotion to the family she has built.
Antonia belongs to a generation shaped by opportunities unavailable to either Julia or Lamaca. She loves and supports Anton through difficulties of his own, but she does not define herself through sacrifice. Instead, she builds a relationship grounded in mutual respect, personal responsibility, and partnership. Where earlier generations carried others, Antonia chooses to walk beside them.
Together, these three relationships trace a generational movement from survival to freedom to self-determination. The historical backdrop of war, Communist occupation, revolution, migration, and life in Australia shapes the choices available to each generation, but the memoir's central concern remains deeply personal: how people learn to love one another without losing themselves in the process.
At its heart, THE GIRL FROM LAMAC asks whether the burdens inherited from family and history must always be carried forward, or whether each generation can create a different way of belonging.
Imagine yourself in any part of the world in the year of pandemics 2020. Imagine yourself to be lucky enough to have basic needs covered: water, food and shelter. Imagine yourself to be alone most of the time to protect yourself and others from the infection. Imagine yourself disappearing in the nature around you. Suddenly there is no artificial noise to block it off. No hustle and bustle of civilisation constantly knocking on your door loudly luring you to purchase something or invest in something. Times are lean and times are uncertain. What do you miss the most in these quiet, fearful times?
Rottnest Island, the previous Aboriginal prison, most recently Perth’s people summer playground has become the quarantine place for COVID-19 affected Western Australians. I have myself spent so many happy summers there, now my Aussie friend who has just returned from the overseas trip spent self isolating lonely time there. Rottnest Island will become the island of self-reflection and pain not only for our indigenous people but us as well…
If you look closely enough you will see my home safely tucked behind the trees. In the time of summer wildfires the same trees are my enemies with their trunks full of the combustive oil that would explode with one fire spark. Right now the same trees are my protectors that protect me from the civilisation and close up and personal human interactions. I do not own my house and neither the farm I work on to earn my keep.
I came to my new country with one suitcase and I leave this world owning very little just the head full of stories and life full of experiences. I count myself truly lucky to possess a good passport and many skills I use when I offer annually around the globe working for my keep and visiting my friends and relatives. Everywhere I go I collect stories because that is who I truly am…a free spirit and story-teller…
