welcome

Welcome to my writing page. I am currently transferring content from my old website. In the meantime please see below my writers bio and a brief synopsis of my manuscripts. Publisher enquiries and requests for bios or synopses are welcome by clicking on the button below.

You can also read more of my content at my substack page.

biography - Robynne L Berg

I am an emerging writer, public speaker, and grief educator, living on Boon Wurrung Country, bayside Melbourne. In 1985, my parents and brother died in a boating accident on the Mornington Peninsula. Grief, trauma, belonging, identity, and the sea are the central themes in all my writing.

In addition to Between Two Waves, I’ve written essays, short stories, and have recently completed the first draft of an adult literary fiction novel Life Without Him, and the outline for a non-fiction work The First Slap exploring sibling abuse.

The Australian poet, Mark Tredinnick, privately mentored me throughout the writing of Between Two Waves. Katia Ariel has edited the manuscript. I am a many-time alumni of Sarah Sentilles’ Word Cave and Right to Write, a member of Writers Victoria, the Australian Society of Authors and Pen Melbourne.

Between Two Waves - book synopsis

Following is the synopsis for Between Two Waves - a journey through adult orphanhood.

• Narrative nonfiction/memoir

• 92,000 words

• Final Edit

• Mentor: Mark Tredinnick

• Editor: Katia Ariel

One week after my 19th birthday, in October 1985, my parents and 16-year-old brother, Bill, died in a boating accident on Westernport Bay. It is the cataclysm around which the story of my life revolves. I felt like I had fallen through the world; I was left isolated, lonely, aching all over.

In the months that followed, as early-morning light contoured the elms outside my bedroom window, I lay curled up in foetal position, unable to move for the pain. I lost most of my friends who were young, unable to cope with my loss. My remaining family communicated in pleasantries; our sorrow was held away from each other.

The only way to survive was to bolt my trauma down and get over it. In time I learned to philosophise my experience and believed my grieving done. I assumed the chronic health conditions, anxiety, depression, inability to find belonging were symptomatic of not striving hard enough, not being worthy enough.

But when a new relationship failed 35 years later, my cultivated façade crumbled to expose a cavernous grief that had laid curled in on itself for decades, buried under social norms and desperation to belong. This time the only way to survive was to return to the original grief.

Between Two Waves is a memoir/creative non-fiction that follows my journey into adult orphanhood and the consequence of becoming untethered from family, home, society, safety, and identity. I look to the fictional orphan, an oft-used literary trope, to make sense of my story. I slip under the heavy covers of trauma: back to the room where I was raped weeks after my parents and brother’s deaths; back to the black soundless terror of sibling abuse; into the unrelenting shame of being alone and vulnerable. In search of answers, I turn to neuroscience and learn the physical, psychological and relational consequences of trauma. This is where self-forgiveness begins.

Seneca wrote, ‘…this will not be a gentle prescription for healing, but cautery and the knife.’ I learn to sit with my grief and let it course its way through my body. It is brutal yet beautiful. It is redolent with love. I discover others on the same journey—Nick Cave, Joan Didion, Elizabeth Gilbert, people I meet in cafes—and their stories travel with me.

I discover pain is its most excruciating at the liminal point of surrender. Once we yield, we are safe and can explore the nature of grief—how we experience it, how we heal.  I start swimming at dawn in the bay near my home. I immerse myself in nature—its currents, its waves, its rhythm—and allow it to hold me, instruct me, speak to my grief. Through the weeping violin of Beethoven’s String Quartet No 13, I travel the waves of sorrow and yearning. In the words of Tennyson, Alice Seabold and Rilke, I find redemption. I discover the indigenous philosophy of Dadirri—listening deeply to the deep—and allow it to carry me home. 

Between Two Waves is about the redemptive power of being present with our grief, becoming unflinchingly kind to ourselves and opening ourselves to love even when it hurts.

Beyond Silence - essay synopsis

Following is the synopsis for my essay Beyond Silence. Open to publisher enquires.

• Braided essay (personal/investigative)

• 3800 words

• Final Edit

• Previously accepted but not published by Meanjin

Beyond Silence - grieving among others, is an exploration of grief and the consequences of mourning in a society uncomfortable with its presence. Opening with an account of losing my parents and brother in a boating accident at 19, I share my experience of finding myself alone, without family and unable to find a place where my sorrow was accepted. I endeavour to counter some of the entrenched misconceptions about how we grieve and the solace sought from others.

I draw on neuroscience, literature, western and First Nations philosophy to illustrate the nature of grief, and western society’s dissociation from it. Grief is silent, it cannot be hurried, it will not bend to the demands of personal or societal expectations.

I call on the works and insights of writers and philosophers including Seneca, Joan Didion, Nick Cave, and Dr Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann to illuminate our experience and how we might each learn to sit with sorrow—whether our own or another’s—and listen beyond the silence.

Beyond Silence will appeal to readers of essayists such as Mark Tredinnick and Nardi Simpson.  

The Undoing - essay synopsis

Following is the synopsis for The Undoing - The hidden paradoxes of victim-survivor behaviour. Open to publishers.

• Braided essay (personal/investigative)

• 7600 words

• Final Edit

• Editor: Katia Ariel

In October 2019, at an end-of-year board dinner of a reputable private club in Melbourne Australia, I was subjected to a misogynistic harangue by a male colleague who decried the slew of ‘fake’ rape cases before the courts. He surmised it was evident when a woman had made a false accusation and enumerated his theory. I was guilty of every charge.

This personal essay explores the prevailing myths about victim-survivor behaviour and how they pervade our culture. I counter each of my colleague’s assertions by sharing my story and drawing on sexual assault statistics, research, and commentary (including trauma specialists Bessel van der Kolk and Gabor Maté, and poet Gregory Orr). I travel deep into my own trauma and inexplicable behaviour following my rape. Behaviour that had led me to doubt my own account until I better understood trauma survivor behaviour. This essay attempts to uncover what remains buried under victim-survivor shame and enduring social constructs and then asserts what needs to change.