Welcome to the Kalymnos Workshop Journal!

We haven’t yet set off to Kalymnos (quite), so this is just to let you know what we will be doing there, and what this journal will record.

In December 1954, Charmian Clift, together with her husband and fellow-author George Johnston and their two children Martin (who had just turned seven) and Shane (two years younger) went to the remote and (at that time ) poverty-stricken Dodecanese island of Kalymnos.

‘How to say that we were looking for a mermaid?’ Charmian wrote in her journal-account of the family’s arrival. ‘How to explain that we were civilisation sick, asphalt and television sick, that we had lost our beginnings and felt a sort of hollow that we had not been able to fill up with material success. We had come to Kalymnos to seek a source, or a wonder, or a sign, to be reassured in our humanity.’

By the end of the summer of 1955, Clift’s journal observations about the island and its population of sponge-divers and matriarchs would be transformed into her first solo book, the classic memoir Mermaid Singing.

And now, seventy years later, in early April 2025, a small group of devoted Clift-readers will be following Charmian Clift’s footsteps to Kalymnos. While there, we will be visiting the places that the author wrote about in Mermaid Singing and in the novel Honour’s Mimic (also set on the island), and writing our own journal observations, which we will post on a daily basis into this website-blog.

Charmian Clift and George Johnston with Sevasti Taktikou, on Kalymnos summer of 1955.

We hope you will join with us in our explorations and discoveries, by reading our journal observations, published on this website. We will post a few introductory pieces before we leave, but the Journal proper will start after we arrive, in early April.