Debra Stewart - Whose Memoir I Will Still Write

If you think about it, life is just like a book. Every day is a new page, and every beginning is a next chapter. The people that you surround yourself with are well-developed characters, each with their own plot line, their lives intricately spun; a web in which they are the centrepiece. Like characters in a book, it’s almost too easy to lose yourself in the motions of everyday life, a routine which is only disturbed by a breaking of the fourth wall, if something comes along and acts like a microscope through which you are allowed to observe your own life objectively. In the case of my story, this ‘something’ was in fact, a someone; someone who understands all too well the beauty that a story can bring into life. As the owner of a bookstore herself, Debra Stewart lives in the beauty of the written word, and in the space of one room in a bookshop that she herself had built, she holds the prospects of a thousand different stories.

I first came to know Debra through her stunning collection of books, which has captivated me for hours on end without fail, every time my family has vacationed in Clarens. Our last holiday was no exception, and this time, I took my grandmother (a fellow book-lover) with me. After poking around for a while, my granny approached the person who sat behind the desk at the counter, an elegant woman with a thick braid of black hair streaming down her back. “I hope you can help me. I’m looking for a specific author, but I can’t remember her name...” my granny began. “She’s family of Princess Diana, I think,” she continued, rather elusively. The woman behind the counter began to think, her eyes faraway and narrowed in concentration. As I was thinking to myself that this was a rather vague description, reaching for my phone to Google the answer, the woman replied, “You’re thinking of Barbara Cartland, aren’t you? I haven’t got any of her books, but I’ve got one about her artwork,” and with that, she stood up and scurried off, picking out a book from one of the corner shelves and bringing it to my granny. Needless to say, I was very impressed.

This was my first experience of Debra, despite having visited her bookstore many times before. The day afterwards, I walked over again, and asked if we could sit down and talk for the blog. I arrived at her house, which is connected to the bookstore by an annex, at about 17:00 in the afternoon. I only stepped out again at 21:30, with the tremendous sense of understanding life a little bit better and a voice note that was three-and-a-half hours long. What happened in between is still a bit indefinable to me, but somewhere within the chapters of moving to Clarens and her newly-discovered love of traveling, I felt like I was reading a book that had yet to be written. When we said goodbye at the door, Debra remarked: “And now you know my whole life story. You can write a memoir with all that I’ve told you!” You never know… maybe one day, I actually will.

“I’m a storyteller, that’s my archetype. I think I got it from my granny, who had the time and wisdom to be able to sit and tell me stories. It was a wonderful childhood,” Debra began to explain the root of her love for stories. She moved to Clarens with her son, James, and her late husband, leaving Johannesburg and a high-power job in the printing industry behind for the magic of a picturesque town. Together, she and her husband opened a small bookshop called ‘Bibliophile’, aptly meaning “a person who collects or has a great love of books”. Being bibliophiles themselves, they found great appeal in nurturing the power of stories.

The road wasn’t without its ups and downs though – Ken, Debra’s husband, still had his own printing company in the city, staying in Johannesburg during the week, and commuting to Clarens over weekends. After being diagnosed with very advanced cancer a few months prior, Ken’s untimely death in 2004 was a great tragedy both to her and her young son. The sad thing about tragic occurrences though, isn’t that they occur, but the fact that life necessitates the need to continue. Life will plunder on regardless of a person’s suffering, and in this vein, Debra and James found themselves continuing with their lives in Clarens. Debra sustained her husband’s legacy through the bookstore, and James eventually finished his school career by means of the Cambridge home schooling system.

Another very interesting page out of Debra’s book is not in reality, but rather in the virtual realm – Facebook, to be exact. Debra started the ‘Bibliophile Writer’s Support and Social Group’ to help people from all walks of life receive writing advice and assistance from professionals in the South African writing industry. Here, aspiring authors are invited to post their writing on the page and receive feedback from fellow group members. This makes the world of writing much more accessible to everyone, especially those who don’t know how to go about the process – dealing with anything from actually writing, to editing and finally publishing. She is also currently busy formulating writing workshops in Clarens, where professional writers and editors will present courses about all of the different stages of writing, over the span of a weekend.

In recent years, Debra also cites that traveling has played a large part in her life, allowing her to see familiar places through the eyes of a tourist. "I think the trip that has been the most impactful on my life was when I went to visit my parents in Belgium. They were holidaying in Spain at the time, so I flew over to see them. We drove through France and Provence on the way back to Belgium, and they kicked me out to stay with a friend in Bonne,” Debra laughs. What follows is the story of an impromptu rendezvous, from Bonne, to Burgundy and finally ending up in the City of Love. “I’d been in Paris before more than once, so it was quite reminiscent for me to go back there. I spent three days, just walking in the streets and being a Parisian. I was in my element!” From there, she returned to stay with her parents in Belgium, but with wanderlust in her heart and a Parisian state of mind, she caught a plane to Prague on an impulse. In shoes that were totally unsuitable, she and another friend spent two days exploring Prague on foot. Debra affirms that she’s never walked that much in her life, but also that she had never had such a good time before. “The whole trip was hugely impactful, because it was the young life that I should have had, that I finally, nearly ten years after my husband died, went and had.”

And so, Debra’s life has been filled with magical tales, meeting many stalwarts in the writing industry and having had countless amounts of books passed through her hands in the many years that ‘Bibliophile’ has been open. She has, quite literally, built the bookstore up by herself and spent countless amounts of hours cultivating the selection of reads until it has become stellar. I’ve read many, many books through the years that I’ve frequented her bookshop, and although I have had some thrilling adventures between the pages of the books that I have bought there, the most truthful, raw, and poignant story that I have ever taken away with me from the ‘Bibliophile’, is the story of Debra’s life.