An excursion down Gill Avenue (Profile)
By Jason Jonathan Joseph

A stroll down the avenues of Gillian Mary Rennie’s perspective of Gill is like a mapping a single ray of lights path through a prism. There are many avenues of Gill, and more often that not, Gillian doesn’t shed too much light from her torch on her life...

But Gill “seek(s) your guidance and infinite wisdom”. As a light bearer to aspiring writers she keeps her own torches flame alight by fuelling it from what she learns from her students everyday. “We are all agents of teaching and learning,” Gill says while her class of third year writing students try to pick the lock to her secrets, her story, her personal truth.

Gill’s journeys have taken her down many paths. Gill travelled to Los Angeles in November 2010 where she became a Getty Fellow for her contribution to Arts Journalism. For Gill, “the writer’s job is to say something in a fresh way.” She proved this with her Fairlady magazine profile on MaMbeki for which she received the Mondi Award for Profile Writing in 2006.

Gill has also written and edited for Cue, the newspaper the Rhodes University School of Journalism produces for festivals such as The National Arts Festival and SciFest yearly, for about 10 years. “And that’s how my relationship with Rhodes started,” says Gill who now teaches fulltime at Rhodes.

“I read. I walk. And I write. However I do none of those enough,” says Gill. “I walk to write,” says Gill, “I write to see what I think and I write to make sense of the world, my world...

In her world Gill is married to herself in a “loyal and faithful” relationship, and “I like coming home,” she says. At home two cats await her, and are her reason – or at least their hungry bellies – for her waking up in the morning.

But for days when nothing can get us up, we all need a crutch to help us on the road. When all else fails, “there’s three things, and their rankings vary from circumstance to circumstance: Friends, therapy and whiskey... (but) chocolate is the baseline. Chocolate is ever present,” says Gill. “One or two or all three of those elements, keep me upright, in manner of speaking... I’m still on my feet,” and that is her greatest achievement, she says with a grin. “I’m still here,” Gill says, “there are some things that I am pleased I’ve done. But everything I could’ve done better... I want to live my life more and more better.”

Something else Gill wants to do is “write something a reader can’t stop reading.” Something a South African audience cannot start reading – unless they get a German copy – is Out of the Shadows: What the Trc Achieved, published in September 1999 by Trans-Atlantic Pubns. Gill co-wrote this with several other writers. A solo project, though, that Gill is working on, is a book about stories that can “only happen in South Africa” she says. One of the working titles is inspired by a line of poetry from Emily Dickinson: “It was not death, for I stood up”.

Gill is not only still standing; she is still walking and walking. She shares just enough to let you see what she want you to, “I actually don’t want to share,” she says coyly. “It’s about finding a prism that allows you entrance into an individual,” says Gill, “this prism will shed light.”