Royal Literary Fund: Renu in conversation with Sita Brahmachari & writes On Finding Freedom

What does freedom mean when a life has been changed by trauma, disability and the expectations other people place upon the body?

In On Finding Freedom, Renu joined writer Sita Brahmachari for a conversation about creative life, identity and the ways artists make room for possibility, and she also contributed A New Normal Aria, a piece that sits inside the complicated territory of becoming.

“A new normal” is a phrase people often offer after life-changing events, and it can sound tidy, as though one version of life is simply exchanged for another, but my own experience has been far less orderly: after the accident in 2017, Renu did not step cleanly into a new identity or a settled future, but had to meet a changed body, a changed voice and a world that often became less accessible precisely when I needed it to open.

Art gave her somewhere to hold that complexity without forcing it into a lesson, and in conversation with Sita, freedom became less about escaping what has happened and more about creating honestly from within the life that now exists.

That idea runs through The Burgundy Book, too, since the project is not a story of returning to who she was before the accident but an attempt to approach the unopened book of the future with curiosity, asking what can still be made, sung and lived.

The conversation and creative work were produced through the Royal Literary Fund and can be heard online.

 https://writersmosaic.org.uk/contributors/renu-arora-at-writersmosaic/