WRITERS ABROAD MAGAZINE: THE THIRD SPACE
In Memory of Doreen Porter
By Vanessa Couchman
I first met Doreen about five years ago, shortly after she joined Writers Abroad. It was quite
a coincidence that, of the 20 members scattered across the globe, two of us lived a mere
10 kilometres apart in Southwest France.
We met in a local café. Driving there, Doreen
encountered a family of hitchhiking Belgians. They had
lost their only set of car keys in a lake, so she gave them
a lift. This was typical of Doreen. It was also
characteristic that the story ended up on her French life
blog, narrated with her trademark humour.
She and her husband Gavin had moved to France
several years previously and she threw herself
enthusiastically into local life. She ran a popular writing
group and was a mainstay of a local women’s group,
Friends in France International.
Doreen was very talented and highly skilled, having
spent her career writing for and producing magazines. This experience proved invaluable to
us at Writers Abroad. She produced our biannual magazine so efficiently that we never had
to think about it, and she made a huge contribution to our anthologies. We would have
driven anyone else mad with our late submissions and dodgy formatting, but Doreen just
got on with it with her usual patience and professionalism.
She always had some writing project on the go. One of them was a plan for a book about
unusual hobbies. She was delighted that I knew someone who does Morris dancing and
immediately listed them for inclusion. In the spirit of pursuing curious hobbies, Doreen duly
joined the Society for the Preservation of the Apostrophe, although she eschewed the
Morris dancing.
More conventionally, she took up painting. I will never forget her account of how she
proudly presented her first masterpiece, a green pepper, for Gavin’s scrutiny. “Is it a frog?”
he asked.
This was Doreen all over. She had a sharp, dry, but never cruel, sense of humour and she
was frequently the target of her own jokes. Her wit infused her writing, which was often
killingly funny.
Doreen had many friends, both in real life and on social media. She was a fiendish player of
online Scrabble, a boundless fount of knowledge and a great supporter of other writers,
especially those just starting out.
You made yourself indispensable to us at Writers Abroad, Doreen. We miss you.
Here you will find a link to the David Essex song ‘It’s Gonna Be Alright’ that was played at Doreen’s
funeral. The lyrics are particularly poignant.
4 | May 2016