Archive | November, 2011

JUMPING THROUGH AND MANAGING THE TANGLE: Verity La interviews Writing Australia’s Mary Delahunty

26 Nov

The unstoppable Mary Delahunty has been many things.  She’s been an award-winning journalist on the ABC’s Four Corners and 7.30 Report programs, as well as on commercial networks.  From 1999 to 2006, Mary was a Victorian Government Minister in senior portfolios, including education, planning, and the arts.  She has worked as a consultant in government, media, as well as in the not-for-profit sector.  On top of all this, Mary is the author of Public Life: Private Grief (Hardie Grant Books, 2010), which has been described as a love story and a political memoir.  Earlier this year, she became head of the new Writing Australia organisation.  Wisely – and appropriately – based in the ACT, Writing Australia promises to be a force of national literary goodness.  Verity La has been chatting with Mary throughout much of this year about her new Writing Australia gig, life as a writer, and what motivates her to keep charging ahead.  (Note: your humble Verity La scribe was involved in the early days of scoping out what a national writing organisation might look like.  Thought it best to be upfront about this.)

Nigel Featherstone: Writing Australia is an exciting new addition to the writing and reading scene in Australia. How has it come about?

Mary Delahunty: State writers’ centres have been established in all Australian capital cities since 1985 and have grown out of the recognised need for dedicated professional organisations in each state to represent and support writing, writers and literary culture. The centres have developed resources, services and support for writers at every stage of their development and across all literary genres. It is interesting to note that since the inception of writers’ centres, the number of practising professional writers in Australia has increased from 3,200 in 1987 to 7,600 in 2009 (Throsby Report).

The Australia Council’s Mapping Literature Infrastructure in Australia Report (University of Wollongong, 2008) identified the following:

  • difficulties for state-based organisations when they try to run cross-border or national activities but are unable to secure funding from other states.
  • short-term program-specific funding which causes stress in many literature organisations and mitigates against strategic planning;
  • inadequate human resources … Understaffing leads to managerial instability and hampers the ability of organisations to profit from new technologies and digital delivery of services; and
  • a perceived tension between audience development and skills and professional development.

In October 2009, an Expression of Interest to form a new Key Arts Organisation Writing Australia was developed.  The Writing Australia Working Group was formed in February 2010, comprising the directors of the five participating writers’ centres (South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria, New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory) as well as a representative from each of the funding partners, the Australia Council for the Arts and artsACT.  The Business plan was accepted and the Board set about establishing a company.

Writing Australia Ltd was incorporated in 2011, the National Director appointed, and the national office established at the National Library of Australia in Canberra.  The new national body formalises an existing collaboration and offers the opportunity for a much needed broad-reaching suite of national programs to service writers across the country.

The digital revolution has brought many changes to the worlds of reading, writing and publishing. The business model for publishing is in a state of flux and the ability for writers to earn income from their practice may potentially be more challenging, but the multiplication of e-platforms also brings a myriad new opportunities.  Writing Australia, in collaboration with the Queensland Writers’ Centre, can respond creatively to these trends, offering advice through its central web portal, online workshops and information on latest developments and play an important role in supporting the sector while it is grappling with the challenges. Information for writers available through the central web portal could include: print-on-demand, e-books, self-promotion through active blogging, social media, discussion groups, as well as the new financial and employment opportunities on offer in the digital world.

An established extensive national industry network will strengthen the national program and the profile for Australian writers and literature. Writing Australia aims to be nimble, cost-effective and national, an enabler of writers’ professional development, and a voice for the sector.

NF: Writing Australia really could be a significant shift to how Australian writing activity is organised and promoted. If the Letters to the Editor pages of a newspaper is, as it’s been said before, a town or city having a conversation with itself, a country’s writers, through their works of prose and poetry, is a nation having a conversation with itself. And you’re about to be at the epicentre of that conversation. How does it feel being in the literary hot-seat?

MD: It’s not often you get the chance to shape something from the ground up. At Writing Australia we’re grafting a new shoot onto the lush literary landscape of the nation. What a marvellous opportunity!

Words build bridges between ideas and it our writers who polish and publish them. Writers keep our stories alive and fresh, tell them in our own voices, astonish with insights about us and our place. Australia needs to nurture our writers and I’m honoured to be working now in this corner of the cultural canvass

I’m hoping that Writing Australia will be a voice for writers and writing, that it will lift writers’ profile, networking and arts practice exchange. As a long-time ABC journalist and first-time author I love words, writing, and ideas. I know how hard, disciplined serendipitous even bewildering the serious craft of writing can be.

When I published Public Life: Private Grief last spring I was both elated and relieved; when I read the writers’ wisdom in the visitors book at Rosebank, the residential writer’s retreat I set up with the Victorian Writers Centre at our farm in the Macedon Ranges, I understand all over again the space and place writers need to fall into the creative muse.

I admire writers, am in awe of so many of them, particularly when I interviewed leading Australian authors for the ABC Sunday Arts show on television all those years ago. I have worked with words all my life as a journalist, writer, arts advocate.  I am a long-time devotee of Australian literature and the power of the written and spoken word.

So, no surprise that I am chuffed to be part of this new national voice called Writing Australia, supporting writers, writing, and literary culture. By osmosis I will learn a lot and, I hope, give a lot.

NF: You mention that when Public Life: Private Grief was published last year that you were both ‘elated and relieved’. I wonder if you can tell us a little more about the writing of that book: your motivations, as well as how you found the process of going from idea to physical object.

MD: My motivation in writing this book was to understand the long dark nights, to interrogate loss and the unending absence, the dreadful missing, the nights and seasons that pass unshared. I wanted to face loss, grief and depression. I was coming out of a long bleak tunnel and I didn’t want to drop that thimble of happiness.  I was also intrigued by memory, those places and spaces where we glimpse parts of ourselves and others.  I wondered why certain memories glow luminous in our past. Nabokov aptly described these memories for me: That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. I was keen to expose a workplace where the dark arts of politics stop for no one and where personal stumbles are exploited by those scavengers intent on advantage.  An unexpected setting to understand the burdens of grief.

As a journalist – and before – I have always kept journals. In government these became private pages I could trust. They provided astonishing detail about Jock’s long dying and the parallel path of unrelenting politics. Good material but I was haunted by the thought of ‘just because it happened to me doesn’t make it interesting’!  Maybe every writer faces that demon.  I was determined to widen the frame so a reader could relate. After all we will or have all faced loss in some form and the buffeting waves of grief. The act of writing, the deep deep solitude, was a joy.

I love writing and am in awe of those disciplined enough to do it every day. Writing friends and mentors held my hand and one introduced me to the medium of meditation before writing. It’s a brilliant technique to turn down the rational controlling part of my brain and invite the muse in. Solitude is not loneliness. Solitude has been my teacher and friend ever since I hung over the farm fence, a skinny kid freckled from the hot Wimmera sun that urged the ripening of acres of wheat genuflecting gently before the Grampians. As the western sky blazed I waited til my brothers grew bored and left me there to gaze happily into infinity. The deep process of sustained writing is like gazing into infinity.  As the Poet Rilke says, It’s never too late to dive into your increasing depths/Where life calmly gives out its secrets.

The loving and detailed editing process was an eye-opener. I was shocked when I opened the first edited chapter and confronted what seemed initially to be brutal deletions.  I came to admire the perception of my editors while arguing successfully for restoration of a few precious passages. I will never forget the joy of seeing the galleys, the layout of my words as a book. Then, even more than when I saw and held the printed product, I knew I had written a book.

Now, I am always happy to discuss the ideas in Public Life: Private Grief but that work is done and another book beckons.

NF: You’ve done many things in your professional life: journalist, writer, politician, and now National Director of Writing Australia. Has there been an over-riding principle for how you’ve approached these various facets of your life?

MD: Curiosity. I’m an avid student of the human condition and in each of these roles I am privileged to be up close and personal with and to people who make a difference.  Of course, curiosity is not a principle, more a state of being. The principle that I hope has and does guide my personal and public life is fairness and an open mind to new ideas, views and information. In many ways a stubborn belief that everyone has the right to a fair hearing, a fair go. It mostly doesn’t happen but it is a powerful aspiration and I’m happy in my various roles to be an advocate.  For example, I was jolted to learn of the massive disparity in Australian Government funding for different arts forms. Half the Australia Council’s grant and project money ($83m) goes to music/orchestras/opera, while a meagre $7.7m goes to literature – the lowest of any art form funded. Yet stories told online, on screen, on canvass through games, mime or song are the genesis of cultural content. Whatever the form of expression or the distribution method, content is key and content starts with words, words building bridges between ideas.

Another guiding principle is optimism. When the window of opportunity opens, I don’t hesitate for long. I jump through and manage the tangle of the other side when I get there. It always works out somehow. Regrets, I have a few but never for want of trying.

Fists (Peter Farrar)

24 Nov

Car exhaust unfurls from my neighbour’s garage. I don’t know if they are committing suicide or smoking meat. I roll a cigarette. Have progressed well past a pack a day habit. My cigarettes burn down to wet tobacco and fingernails. If I eat with fingers there is sometimes an aftertaste of tar and smoke.

On Sundays I sit on my front path and read newspapers. The path straight to the west. I see by the setting sun. In the yard opposite a woman plods along and sweats behind a lawnmower. I flap the newspaper so hard the letters and pictures might scatter amongst my cigarette butts.

I turn straight to the classifieds. Russian women are willing to wed gentlemen. Compost can be delivered free. Investment properties are for sale in Norway. In the next section there is a photograph of Liz Taylor. Could her shoulders be that perfect? No freckles, broken capillaries, not even a faint thumb print from someone who refused to let her go just because the dance ended. Real Liz must be mostly bones by now, but her photographic memory is pristine.

My Sofia could sometimes look like Liz in that picture. Frightened and vulnerable her mother called it. That was what she shouted down the phone when I rang to see if Sofia was there. That’s what I had turned her daughter into she yelled. At the time I thought Sofia’s expression meant ignoring me. Not listening. Thinking of someone else. Finding another street like this that only looked different when the wheelie bins wobbled out and lined the nature strip.

I rip out the picture of Liz. I try not to crease her beautiful shoulders. I tear around her slight smile like Sofia’s. Her hands are not in the picture but perhaps they are balled into fists.

 

The List Grows (Emilie Collyer)

22 Nov

This is what you can’t do.

It’s a list that grows.

Like that taunt boys

used to write on blackboards:

the more you rub

the bigger it gets.

 

Pink bits proliferate.

Women with stern hair

write papers about how

porn is ruining us all

while the rest of us gape

at youth. They don’t

 

have a list. Yoko Ono

tweets about loving

old trees. It offers some

comfort until my friend

rolls her eyes and says

It’s okay for her,

she’s Yoko Ono and tells me

 

John and Yoko

weren’t that happy together

when he died.

It’s still a tragedy, I say,

the man she loved was killed.

I watched a documentary

 

about Mark Chapman,

the man who killed John Lennon.

I could understand his desire.

Unloved, he wanted to

take away from the world

a person everybody

 

loved. We all want that

sometimes don’t we?

The difference between

us and Mark Chapman

is that we don’t

all do it. The list

 

grows, of things we

can’t do or won’t do

or would have done

once. If the list were

a colour it would be red

or at least it would

 

have been when we

first wrote it.

Now it is faded, pink,

like those pink bits,

so ubiquitous they

lose their titillating

 

power and no matter

how hard we rub

it gets harder

to feel

anything

at all.

 

ONE DAY IN ENGLISH – an extract from Bite Your Tongue by Francesca Rendle-Short

17 Nov

One day in English things did go haywire.

The teachers must have known exactly who Glory was the day she arrived. News would have travelled fast around the staffroom like the puff of cigarettes. Miss Keynote might have even announced something: I’m going to have to say something. Just watch. After all, her English syllabus was under threat. Give her to me and I’ll tell her what’s what. In any case, one afternoon after lunch, she swept into the English classroom all puff, hot and red in the face: ‘Stand up, girl.’

Glory and Lisa sat in the back row, as they always did. Their uniforms were a mess. They had been fighting each other through lunch, play fighting in the quadrangle in the sun. They had tried to be the first to rub orange quarters through the other’s hair, to see how far they could go before getting caught.

‘Stand up, girl. Do you hear me?’

There was something different about the way Miss Keynote spoke this afternoon, how her body swivelled into the room. You could almost feel the heat she was giving off. This mattered more than anything: it was about Miss Keynote herself, her sense of self and identity. Her voice shook too, as she nailed the words in place.

The air prickled with heat and Glory’s skin pricked with the sweat of her body. Everyone guessed, without it being said, which girl Miss Keynote was referring to. This was the confrontation Glory had been waiting for. But for some reason and unpremeditated at that, she let the words hang in suspension. Glory insisted, in her own silent way, that Miss Keynote reveal herself more, with more.

She did.

‘There are some parents in this school,’ Miss Keynote elaborated, ‘who think they know best how to educate young people, who are adept at the theory and practice of modern teaching, who dare to want to take our place.’ She said the word dare as she would strike a high C if singing an aria. All throat. A lifted soft palette. Quintessential control.

‘Your mother, Glory. I’m talking about your mother. She says the sort of education we are giving our pupils is defilement, do you hear?’ Miss Keynote pointed a stick of yellow chalk in Glory’s direction. She was casting out evil spirits with this move. ‘Now stand up girl when I say,’ her voice wobbled on this command, betraying something else: did Glory detect nervousness?

‘Your interfering mother thinks she knows best.’ Snap. The chalk broke in two, fell and bounced on the wooden floor between her legs like something rude. ‘She dares to interfere in Our Literature. She says it is sex-saturated. You’ve only got to read the letters to the papers—‘Mother Disgusted with School Books’, ‘Immoral Books Third-Rate Gutter Trash’, ‘Be Wary of Homosexuals’.’ Miss Keynote must have learned the lines by heart. ‘Your mother says you are not allowed to read the book Improving on the Blank Page. Dr Joy Solider says you are not allowed to meet the wicked Holden Caulfield under any circumstance. She says that these books—books on our very own reading list, do you hear?—are pornographic.’ Miss Keynote was flying now all around the room, full throttle.

When the girls heard the words sex, homosexual and pornographic, they started to snigger. Miss Keynote made a mocking face like a clown.

‘And she’s saying these things in public, on radio, for everyone to hear!’

With a flourish, she tugged at her hair and to the surprise of everyone, yanked off the black curly wig she was wearing to reveal grey wisp pulled back neatly in a maroon velvet bow.

‘What do you have to say for yourself girl? Stand up when I tell you!’

None of the girls knew Miss Keynote wore a wig. Until then they’d always seen her with it on, had always thought this teacher had luscious black hair, the sort you put into hot rollers each night. Not this smooth, straight greyness. Everyone gasped. They’d never seen her like this, in the flesh so to speak, in such a theatrical act. There was something almost obscene about it, Miss Keynote disrobing in public and mouthing those rude words at the same time. They shouldn’t be watching this sort of thing but they loved it. Their very own peepshow. It was exhilarating.

That was when Miss Keynote started to laugh. But it was a very different laughter to the sort Glory was used to. It was an us-and-her laughter kept for special occasions and the girls wanted to join in.

Poor Glory wet her pants. She was all sweat behind the knees too where the elastic garters squeezed her folds of skin. She tried standing tall—thinking, hoping and wishing this would pass quickly.

Glory couldn’t look anywhere except stare straight ahead. She was paralysed, stunned. Holden Caulfield? She didn’t really know who he was yet; she thought the reference was to some kind of car. Pornographic? That didn’t sound good.

Suddenly, Glory astonished herself. Instead of being submissive and compliant, waiting for the next command, Glory banged down the lid of her desk. It thudded into the commotion of laughter and exclamation, wood smashed against wood. MotherJoy would have been proud—wouldn’t she?—if it were true the things Miss Keynote was saying. It was like an explosion.

Everyone in the class held their breath. What would Miss Keynote say next? She stood, mid gesture, unsure how to proceed. She tipped her head as if thinking up a plan, smoothed down the line of hair on one side of her face, the maroon velvet ribbon the only extravagance. She had flawless skin, faintly red heart-shaped lips.

If this were a duel, it should be Miss Keynote’s turn to respond. But before the teacher said anything Glory pulled words from deep inside her throat and out across her tongue through nearly clenched teeth.

‘Children don’t go to school to learn to think,’ she blurted out. ‘They go to school to learn to spell, do maths.’

Glory amazed herself with this utterance. She turned pink. What made her dare challenge this particular teacher, like this? Was it with the same spirit that drove her to stand up for Jesus? There was no going back. It was that quiet, you could hear the ladies in the tuckshop faraway cleaning up. Then Miss Keynote spluttered in response: ‘Where on earth did you get that idea?’

All Glory kept thinking for the rest of the day was that perhaps, for this one crazy, heart-choking moment, she had rescued her mother. She knew how to resuscitate a body, didn’t she? She was a Bronze Medallion, owned a cute metal badge with her name engraved on the back. It was an act of allegiance, surely, not madness. A composition—an intervention—of love.

Extract courtesy of Spinifex Press.

WRITING IN THE GAP BETWEEN – an interview with Francesca Rendle-Short

15 Nov

Francesca Rendle-Short has been many things in her life: radio producer, editor, art gallery worker, and mother of two now-adult children.  She has a Doctor of Creative Arts from the University of Wollongong.  ‘My mother would have been appalled!’  Recently Rendle-Short relocated from Canberra to Melbourne where she is Program Director of Creative Writing at RMIT University.  As well as Bite Your Tongue, she is the author of the novel Imago (1996) and the novella Big Sister (1989), and has written for the stage.

Despite her blazingly fierce commitment to writing and language and ideas, Rendle-Short is the kind of woman who describes her students as “so cute!”, and I remember one particularly intense conversation a couple of years ago during which she jotted down notes with a pen attached to what can only be described as a foot-long aerial with a fluffy pink pom-pom on the end, the sort of flourish a film-maker might give to a ditzy, Paris Hilton-like character, someone who is all style but no substance.  Except Francesca Rendle-Short is all style and all substance, with a good dollop of complexity thrown in.

Bite Your Tongue mixes fiction and non-fiction as it explores growing up in Queensland in the 1970s with a mother who, driven by an intractable religious faith, developed a ‘death list’ of books to burn, a list that includes The Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Lord of the Flies, amongst many others.  By all accounts, Angel Rendle-Short was most effective, fronting major public meetings and getting politicians to listen to her and – what’s more – take her seriously.

Through her extensive campaigning to have these books struck off school curricula because, so she believed, they were rotten or pornographic or both, Angel Rendle-Short brought shame and embarrassment and confusion to her children, who simply wanted the space to be, well, children.  One of the most harrowing sections of Bite Your Tongue (which the author describes as a story about ‘unbiting’) is when MotherJoy, Rendle-Short’s name for the mother character in the fictional strand of the book, uses a dead pig’s head to explain the female reproductive system.*

Let’s take a heady dose of courage and go exploring.

Nigel Featherstone: Congratulations on Bite Your Tongue (Spinifex Press, 2011). It’s a brave and original book, a tough book, being an exploration of the weight of a highly religious but terrifyingly conservative mother on her children. It’s been out for a couple of months now. Even though you’ve used the prism of creative memoir, how has it been for you as a person to make this story public, which is exactly what ‘being published’ is all about?

Francesca Rendle-Short: Do you know, I’ve always wanted to ‘make this story public’ as you put it. There is something delicious about making work, about writing – you want to share it, like a really good meal. From when I first started writing I knew that I wanted to write for an audience, for readers, and with this book it was no different. Why else do it; it is as simple as that. Why write? The wonderful Joan Didion, who I was listening to this morning as it happens in an astonishing new short film of her reading chapter 2 from her new memoir Blue Nights, says it this way, famously: ‘Writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.’ She also says: ‘I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking … What I want and what I fear.’

Writing this book gives me voice. It helps me work out what I am thinking about my mother, about being her daughter, her child, about the things that went on in my family, in my house, at my school, in the city I grew up in. It’s a story about trying to get close to her. Daring myself. She was so very scary. Loomed over me. I was very afraid of her. Like Joan, I wanted to write about wanting and about fear. I wanted to write about softness too, and laughter. I wanted to give the small frightened but joyous girl in me space to sing her own song. And I wanted to give her a stage to sing on with me as her first audience, and then allow others to listen in. Write it with others in mind. Translate. Connect. Reach out. To touch. Speak to. Perhaps, and I’m thinking this as I write here to you (knowing it too has audience), if I could do all of this in front of others, publicly, about this very particular story of her hatred and fear of books and writing, of all the books that we all love to bits and pieces – all those 100 books she wanted to burn – then it is a way of silencing any reproach. It protects. It saves.

It’s hard too. I know I’ve put it off. It’s taken me to now. Because in writing about my mother – doing the very thing she hated the most – I am writing about myself.

NF: That’s such a strong statement Didion makes, but of course she’s right. Speaking of strong statements, recently I read in an interview with Ernest Hemingway in The Paris Interviews: Volume 1 (2006). The interviewer asks ‘A fundamental question: As a creative writer what do you think is the function of your art? Why a representation of fact, rather than fact itself?’ Hemingway replies, ‘Why be puzzled by that? From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all the things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?’ I immediately thought of Bite Your Tongue and its form of creative memoir. I was wondering if you had any thoughts on Hemingway’s observation. And also on the fact that – irony of ironies – through having this book published you may well have given your mother immortality.

FR-S: Immortality. My. Such a gigantuan concept (is gigantuan a word?). That’s what she yearned for: immortality in the arms of her saviour. So indeed. Is my mother now turning in her grave, back on earth? Don’t you love that expression – turning in her grave? Angel often used it as an expression of ultimate condemnation. As I mouth the words, even today, I immediately conjure up someone who has been dead a long time, lying deep in the earth, all bones and rattle, and probably cloth too, turning slowly over. I think she would do more than turn turtle, don’t you think, in this case, if we’re talking about immortality, being published, in Hemingway’s words ‘truer than anything true and alive’. She’d be doing an Eskimo roll to right herself for sure – isn’t language fabulous – all splash and hubbub and contortion and unsettlement.

No, I don’t believe in any afterlife. Just had to add that. And I don’t mind thinking about the dead or talking about the dead either. I don’t find it disrespectful in the way it is sometimes talked about; rather, it expands the mind and heart. I’m quite interested in the science of bodies – what happens after we die, how we decompose, what we become, how nothing can disappear; how even the smallest particles of dust can’t be swept away, they just move somewhere else, into another state – become soil in which to grow things. It’s the law of conservation of mass: nothing in a closed system can be created or destroyed. Not sure where this might lead us metaphorically, mind. Or in terms of invention. Although, doesn’t Ecclesiastes say, there is nothing new under the sun.

Which brings us to invention: ‘You make something through your invention… and you make it alive’, quoting Hemingway again. What higher praise for fabrication than that? To make something come alive, live, breathe. Especially when you write about those things that would ordinarily lock you in a space of silence and shame – just move it into another state. Let the light in.

I’ve just finished reading Jeanette Winterson’s new book, her autobiography entitled Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? I love this book for lots of unsurprising reasons – her mother burned Jeanette’s books for one, her candidness for two about the life of writing and writing her life starting with her first book Oranges, and the fact that her mother, like mine, ordered her daughter’s book in a false name (as Angel did with my first book, Imago), to name three. In Why Be Happy? Winterson talks about the power of stories and the belief she has in fiction because ‘that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced.’ The beauty with writing, and the beauty about writing in the particular way I’ve chosen to write Bite Your Tongue as a ‘semi-fiction’ as one reviewer describes it, is that we can make a choice as to what to include and what to leave out and how to frame the ‘unbiting’. Stories, whatever they are, will always be partial, by definition, a version of what could be told, an invention. Figuring out those choices is the responsibility of writing and also its pleasure.

There is something else in this equation – the reader, and what the reader brings to the work. As Jeanette Winterson puts it: ‘When we write we offer the silence as much as the story.’ She adds later: ‘The facts are, after all, only the facts, and the yearning passionate side of you will not be met there. That is why reading ourselves as a fiction as well as fact is so liberating.’

Intervention by invention.

Freedom.

Which is why my mother would have been appalled.

You are right – it is a very nice irony.

NF: Onto more a prosaic matter. Writers – particularly novelists – often say that with each book they have to relearn the task of writing, almost as if they’re starting their writing career from scratch. Have you found that with Bite Your Tongue? If so, could you tell us how the writing process of this book has been different to the writing of your previous work? Perhaps this isn’t such a prosaic matter after all!

FR-S: At the recent opening to the Melbourne Writers Festival (in 2011) at the Town Hall, Jonathan Franzen talked about the idea of re-inventing the writer’s self with every book. About it being an imperative. That you have to become a different and new person in order to write a different and new book. Or, to put this the other way, with each book there is an emptying out; you wonder what’s next.

I suppose it’s different for each writer and it must depend on what book you are writing, but for me, I can’t really compare my two, there were so many differences. Like two different species or planets – universes. It’s funny, too, I can’t remember what the first experience was like, as the second has now eclipsed it. Process is process is process – it moves you on, changes you as you go. (And I’m a slow writer.) My interests are always with what is happening now, what I am writing at the present moment, where my thoughts are heading. It’s a bit the same with books: my favourite book is the one I last read, or thereabouts.

In fact, I’d be hard pressed, really, telling you what the process with this current book was except to say I just had to keep writing one word after the other. There’s nothing glamorous to it. There wasn’t one thing I did; there were all sorts of methods. Writing without looking back. Writing what I most feared, what I was really afraid of writing. Rewriting to pare things back. Reimagining (and so rewriting) whole slabs of text. Rearranging sentences and paragraphs and sections as a way of rewriting and recasting. Transposing text – I LOVE transpositions – it’s the way to uncover and be surprised by the poetic. Rewriting my rewriting from memory. And so on. Again and again and again and again. It is a task, you’re right. There is no shortcut to doing this thing called writing.

Ah……………………………………. and then a good lie down.

NF: I love that idea of writing being a process of putting one word after the other. I’m also interested in that good lie down. Some writers suggest that they finish one book and get straight into the next. For example, if Trollope finished a novel halfway through a writing session (he wrote between 5.30 and 8.30 every morning), he’d simply start another. Other writers say that novels are heavy things to carry around, so they need a fair bit of time between books to recover. What’s your take on this? And yes there’s a hint of a sub-text: do you have an inkling about where you might want to go next as a writer?

FR-S: As a writer I think you are always ‘carrying something around’. You can’t escape it really. Then there is the idea of practice, of making it happen; that idea of routine is important, isn’t it? Practice so that it’s normal and not strange. Giving the carrying around space and weight and vista in your life to give it the chance to make it into something. Do you know I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because there is all this talk about us being time-poor in our modern society. Some writers talk about ‘unplugging’ their gadgets in order to create more thinking and creating space. I heard the other day about an app or something that can ‘glue’ your machine up for a time (is this just story?) so that you really can get into it, whatever the ‘it’ is. Breathe. We are drowning in screen and screen culture – I know I am – it’s almost impossible not to be in some way. White noise. It chokes us. Email is the worst offender. The challenge creatively is to create space enough to imagine and dream and think-through – to lose yourself to your work. Get hooked. Get lost.

Saying that, I’m not like Trollope writing for three hours in the wee smalls before everyone else is up. I envy him that. You can do that, can’t you?

I’m more of an interstices girl myself. I write in the gaps between things. (Love this word: interstices meaning ‘between closely spaced things’ or ‘space between’ and that’s where I like to put myself.) (There’s also that word ‘interstitial’ meaning that empty space or gap between other spaces that are full of structure or matter.) Writing (for me) is about learning to empty myself into the emptiness.

So what’s happening now?

Little projects and a big lurking one, too.

I like doing the little ones. It’s a bit like doing scales – as a musical form, beautiful in and of itself. Such pleasure. Even this little bit of writing here talking to you falls into this category. Another is that I am about to embark on writing collaboratively with a wonderful photographer who works from a mobile phone – a collection of poetic postcards from/to Rome – writing here in a square format, writing black and white, writing light and shade. It will be a terrific summer project. I’ve got a project about ‘Pineapple Girls’ and the Pineapple Cannery in Northgate, Brisbane, on the hop. And, of course, there is the writing that I do as an academic – papers and performances and essays and so forth. I love the puzzle of all these small works, how they challenge me intellectually and creatively.

The big one lurking – carrying me around – is writing my father. (This seems so obvious a next step doesn’t it, after writing my mother in Bite Your Tongue?) I’m not sure how this will turn out. I’ve already written little pieces about him, as you know (you published ‘My father’s body in nine drawings’ in Verity La, for example). Of course my father is lurking in Bite Your Tongue, both as ‘my father’ and as the fictional Onward. I don’t want to say too much more (because any new direction is always so tenuous and nascent) but what I can say is that I am curious about who he is or was (he died last year). He’s a bit of an enigma, to be honest. I’m interested in him as a writer (he published 18 books), as well as his medical work (he was a paediatrician in Brisbane). I’m also intrigued by his commitment to, and belief in Creationism. His fundamentalism. His particular sort of Christianity. (And the current debates around fundamentalism and Creationism versus evolution.) How often my father thought my mother went too far, but how she too thought he was extreme at times as well. How he hated confrontation but exercised such authority throughout his life, demanded it.

Or maybe I’ll change direction altogether and write crime or something…

***

*This introduction is borrowed outrageously from another piece on Francesca.  Luckily I wrote it, so I can borrow outrageously without a speck of grit on my conscience.

Thoroughly modern poets in triptych: review by Mark William Jackson

12 Nov

On my bookshelves, after my chronologically ordered issues of Overland, Meanjin, Going Down Swinging etc., after my poetry collections, alphabetised by poet’s surname, sit the anthologies in no particular order other than size. An anthology could easily get lost in the melee, unless it is read frequently. I can always put my hand on my copy of Penguin Modern Poets issue 5 featuring Gregory Corso, Lawrence Felinghetti and Allen Ginsberg. The Penguin Modern Poets series of books were published between 1962 and 1979 to introduce contemporary poetry to new readers. This was a first as, before Penguin, poetry was published in obscure chapbooks or expensive hardcovers.

The Triptych Poets series, published by Blemish Books, returns to this tradition. An annual release started in 2010, issue 2 was released on 6 October 2011 and features the work of Stuart Cooke, Bronwen Manger and Ouyang Yu. From the Blemish Books website, ‘We’re hoping to highlight the contrasting and often complementary nature of contemporary poetry.’ This goal is certainly achieved in issue 2.  Three very different poets that work well together; the anthology flows beautifully.

Paying homage to Neruda and Chilean poetics, Cooke’s poems are steeped in surrealism but he also retains a grip on an Australian tone. These combine to create a unique voice.

In ‘Sonnet to Rain (son del silencio)’ Cooke draws the image of a dry land:

Hushed metal crescendo hear the cowbells clang

ing occasionally for the hell of it as if f
alling spirits weren’t caught by anyone but picked

 up from earth by hard white hands it’s

hard, yes, to talk about the dust, about what

Cooke’s enjambment is jarring and breathless, the lines are roughly iambic, the standalone ‘f’ at the end of the second line doesn’t count as a foot but adds to the stammering, thirsty drawl of the poem.

The combination of the two tones is evident again in ‘The Love Song of Judith and Pablo’ where text is taken from Judith Wright’s ‘The Man Beneath the Tree’ and Pablo Neruda’s ‘Oda a la Bella Desnuda’ (the author’s translation). Cooke takes from the two poems and marries them wonderfully.  However, what I found most amazing, aside from the perfect flow that is achieved, is what the lines chosen reveal about the poet. Like a child of divorced parents it is difficult to live, and indeed, love, two countries. Cooke merges lines from Wright’s first stanza:

Nothing is so far as truth;
nothing is so plain to see.
Look where light has married earth
through the green leaves on the tree.

And the first line of her last stanza:

Oh, love and truth and I should meet,

with Neruda’s first lines:

With chaste heart, with eyes pure

and the closing lines of his second stanza:

Your eyelids of wheat
who discover
or close
two countries deep in your eyes

to create a longing for the two countries that hold his love:

Oh, love and truth and I should meet
with a chaste heart, with pure eyes
holding the sea-music. Nothing is so far
as truth: your eyelids of wheat revealing
or hiding two deep countries
in your eyes – love for which the wisest weep.

Bronwen Manger’s section of the anthology takes is into the reality of Australia. In ‘Kinglake 2011′, for example, the memories of the Black Saturday bushfires remain two years later, but the signs of rebirth are beautifully illustrated, especially in the opening stanza:

The charred stakes of former trees are now haloed
in soft green leaves, each cell a vial of sunlight
glowing out defiant optimism. The secret heartbeat
of this old land is too young & too foolish
to stay sombre.

In a nice twist, Manger provides an ode to St. Kilda (‘St.Kilda’), a love/hate relationship sounds too balanced as Manger shouts from the start:

This place,
gaudy as an open wound,
wears its weather beaten halo
askew.

and continues with such barbs as ‘regurgitated out/onto the footpath’, ‘shadeless, limbless trees/strain into a stricken sky. Fevered/ cafes sweat people with brass skin /and concrete eyes.’  But the close provides a knowing smile to the face of the reader:

But I found one night
once, years ago we
laughed immortal and absurd,
disbelieving and joyful in some vineless
Vineyard.

We laughed;
and St Kilda,
I forgive everything.

While reading Ouyang Yu’s section he immediately jumped into my favourite poets category. Yu writes in the deceptively simple, yet multiple interpretive Chinese style. Short poems are titled only with numbers, they read like a softly moving creek, and flow like a comfortable conversation. Yu shares his thoughts, such as:

8.

unless you want
to be
the greatest of obscure authors
waiting to be discovered
for the rest of your death

I adore the humour in the work:

33.

it’s now time for commercial break, we’ll be right back:
buy poetry bye poetry buy poetry bye poetry buy poetry bye

and:

34.

to think of some of my favourite writers
to think of how forgotten they are
unlike shakespeare who is being exploited without getting paid

Yu uses Chinese characters, which cannot be copied here, but are mentioned purely because they are interesting in that they don’t need translation; they offer a mystique to the poetry, a licence to interpret as you see fit.

The depth in the deceptive simplicity is highlighted here:

45.

all i need to do

to prove eternity doesn’t

exist

is to strike this

life-thin

match

Last quote from Ouyang Yu:

52.

how many people does one make love to all his life
how many friends does he make
how many enemies
how many strangers does he
encounter how many pigs
or cows does he eat
i had a head-on collision with this question
when my car reached the end of the freeway

I wish I could go into more detail here – these three poets deserve reviews in their own rights as each section of this anthology is a worthy collection in itself. Suffice to say, the Triptych Poets Issue Two holds its own in the tradition of the Penguin Modern Poets series, allowing the reader to compare three very distinct voices that combine to flow in one wonderful collection.

Triptych Poets: Issue 2
Blemish Books,100pp, $15

Wayne Macauley Interviewed by Ryan O’Neill

5 Nov

RYAN O’NEILL: A few years ago you made a comment about Australian short stories that could be just as well applied to Australian novels, namely that ‘the stuff that gets published… is, for the most part, stylistically and structurally conservative social realism.’ With your latest novel, The Cook the narrative voice, with its unique approach to punctuation, immediately announces a stylistically experimental novel. How did you go about capturing the voice of Zac, the narrator, and were you ever worried that Zac’s voice would alienate readers more used to stylistically conservative narrators?

WAYNE MACAULEY: ‘Experimental’ is a very relative term, isn’t it? In my case, given that I am writing in the early part of the 21st century, as opposed to the early 20th, with high literary modernism now nearly a hundred years old and post-modernism already looking a bit fat and middle-aged, to write a two hundred-odd page novel of unpunctuated sentences in the interests of capturing the rise and fall of a character’s thoughts is, let’s be honest, actually a bit of a conservative thing to do—and probably something a so-called edgy writer like myself ought to be ashamed of.

I don’t consider my work experimental, in and of itself. What is experimental about it, I guess, certainly in the Australian literary context, is my willingness to mess with form in the pursuit of an idea. In this instance the idea of a rudderless young man as the apogee of a fast, liquid, shape-shifting, centreless modernity; a mind that thinks like society functions (or malfunctions): rapidly, superficially, vainly, disconnectedly. If in pursuit of this idea you end up getting some readers offside—well, what can you do? Writing is not a popularity contest. I’ve certainly never set out to deliberately alienate a reader—and I hope I never do—but that doesn’t mean I want to kiss them on the forehead and tuck them in for beddy-byes either.

As for Zac’s voice, specifically, its tone and cadence and so on, I’m still not completely sure where it came from. As a writer I obviously prepared myself, took notes, tried things out, attempted to relate the work in my own mind to the works of other great writers I knew and loved, but in the end, as with any piece of creative work, you eventually have to close your eyes and jump in the deep end. This I did for a bit over a year. For the year or so following I used what skills I had so far learnt to turn the consequences of my floundering into The Cook.

RYAN O’NEILL: You mention that when writing The Cook you attempted to relate your novel to the works of great writers you love. Can I ask you about your literary influences, both Australian and international?

WAYNE MACAULEY: I’ve been asked this question a number of times and every time I answer it I feel like I am being reductive, quoting a handful of writers as if they will somehow ‘explain me’. But my reading has been extremely broad and varied over many years, with fiction playing an important but not definitive part in it. So this time I have decided to make my list of authors more comprehensive (which, when I think about it, is the only really honest way to answer your question). This list, chronologically ordered, describes the authors on my shelf that I still turn to for inspiration or comfort, or most often to snap me out of my lethargy and remind me what great writing is: Heraclitus, Plato, Montaigne, Cervantes, Pascal, Defoe, Swift, Voltaire, Sterne, Lichtenberg, Kleist, Schopenhauer, Gogol, Kierkegaard, Dosteovsky, Tolstoy, Nietzsche, Stevenson, Conrad, Hamsun, Walser, Kafka, Orwell, Beckett, Gombrowicz, Camus, Bernhard, Murnane, Coetzee, Sebald.

The idea of literary influence is a strange one, and something I still have trouble wrapping my head around. On the one hand I freely acknowledge the influence of all these authors on my work but on the other I want to protest that, no, what I’m doing is original and always has been. Somewhere between these conflicting feelings, I suppose, is the truth underlying the journey every writer takes towards finding their own voice: we are right to acknowledge our influences but wrong to be slavish to them.

RYAN O’NEILL: The Cook is very much a portrait of the artist as a young man, with Zac gradually mastering, and becoming obsessed with, succeeding in the culinary arts. While there are many elements of Zac’s progress that could apply to any artist, whether a writer, a poet or a sculptor, such as his delight in his first successes, his feeling of a found vocation, and his intense craftsmanship, it seems to me that in the artistry explored in The Cook there is an inherent criticism of Australia’s attitude to the arts. This country’s recent obsession with ‘the art of cooking’ in shows such as MasterChef and its imitators, and the concurrent phenomenon of celebrity chefs is in stark contrast to the continuing marginalisation of much Australian writing and filmmaking. While Zac becomes a great artist, I would maintain (and I confess that I am a food philistine) that the art form he excels at is essentially a transitory and empty one. The human body passes criticism on all food, no matter how good it is, by eventually excreting it. In the end, Zac’s idealisation of the art of cooking and what it can achieve eventually destroys him and others. I’d like to ask how much the choice of Zac’s vocation was influenced by the MasterChef fad, and if this choice was indeed a criticism of Australia’s general attitude to the arts.

WAYNE MACAULEY: In the notebook I kept before and during the writing of The Cook there is an entry that reads, simply: Worship of the superficial. I know that in the writing of the book I was trying to explain this idea to myself—how in contemporary society the deep, complex and profound is increasingly sneered at while the superficial is worshipped. Or more correctly, a society in which the superficial is treated as if it were the profound. This situation, of course, in the first instance, is comic gold, and has been since the time of Aristophanes. When people take the shallow and ephemeral seriously they give themselves the illusion of status and power (Don Quixote taking up his lance in the cause of knight errantry, the Emperor without any clothes) but they also leave themselves open to ridicule. But the idea of the superficial parading as the profound also speaks in a very serious way to what contemporary society has become. We are increasingly infantilised. Like a small child we grab at this and that, have a quick taste then move on. We have forfeited our critical judgement and with it our sense of irony. We can’t see any more how childish and stupid we look, because childishness and stupidity have become the norm.

I think this new cooking phenomenon—and here I’m talking about the high end of the business, rarefied fine dining for the credit card rich—is shallow and ephemeral. It has also, unfortunately, because of all the things I’ve outlined above, been allowed to take itself so seriously that a satirist need only alter the perspective very slightly for the whole thing to look ludicrous. The phenomenon is comic, but at the same time, in a world where one in seven of our fellow human beings cannot feed themselves, deeply, deeply shaming and tragic.

As to how this may relate to the status of the Australian artist, it is probably drawing a long bow. Disenfranchised Zac’s determined pursuit of the perfect dish might indeed equate to the marginalised artist’s pursuit of the perfect artwork, but I think The Cook throws its net a bit wider than that. Yes, I think the arts are by nature marginalised in this country when compared to say TV or sport, but the mantle of martyr to the cause of marginalisation doesn’t sit easy with me. I don’t think we as artists are any more hard done by than anyone else—and there are plenty of people far more hard done by than us. In my earlier novel, Caravan Story, I satirised the so-called arts industry and its commodification of culture, but I think I reserved the most poison in my pen for that novel’s principal character, a writer by the name of Wayne Macauley, who during the course of the book comes to believe that by writing to order he might one day win approval and financial support from those above pulling the strings. A marginalised artist with delusions of grandeur is a writer’s comic gold, too.

RYAN O’NEILL: Finally, I’d like to ask you about the nuts and bolts of your writing process. Graham Greene’s slow and steady five hundred words a day eventually led to a considerable number of brilliant novels and stories. Proust liked to write in bed at night, while Nabokov wrote his later novels on index cards while standing up. Some writers are more comfortable having several pieces of work on the go at once, whereas others must concentrate on one thing at a time until it is finished. Earlier, you mentioned that The Cook took a number of years to write. Could you take us through that process in a little more detail? Do you have a target number of hours/words that you try to write every day? Were you often distracted by other projects, or did you deliberately take time off from The Cook in order to refresh yourself? Did you need a fallow period after finishing The Cook or did you begin work on a new story/novel straight away?

WAYNE MACAULEY: I work early mornings and when I’m working on a specific project I write a minimum of a page a day. For five months of the year I have a full-time day job. During this time I get up at 4.30am and am at my desk at 5.30. At 9 I finish writing and ride my bike to the pool and have a quick swim before I start work at 10. For the other seven months my day job is part-time, starting at 1. During this time I get up at 7, start at my desk at 8, ride my bike to the pool at 12, swim, and have a half-hour for lunch. I do this five days a week—I rarely, if ever, work on the weekends. Outside the hours described I try to avoid my desk completely, although I will on a Friday evening often open a beer and put on some music and sit there for a while thinking about what I’ve done and what I’ll do next and maybe even make a few notes. Each weekday morning when writing a first draft I read what I have written the previous day and edit and change where necessary then refer to the note I have left for myself on the verso page the previous morning to point the way for that day’s work. I write freehand in cheap lined notebooks. I don’t use a computer until the work is finished, then I type it up, like a stenographer. That marks the end of the first draft. Then I print it out, date stamp it, and the next draft begins. The first draft of The Cook took fifteen months to write. Redrafting and editing to final proofs took another fourteen. I don’t take many breaks between writing if I can avoid it and if possible I always try to have something on the go. But The Cook was an intense and exhausting book so I have been taking it a bit easy since I finished.

If that all sounds boring that’s because it is. The external life of the writer is truly, truly boring. (Can there be anything more boring than someone getting up every day at the same time to go and sit at a desk…?) It is the internal life that’s interesting, of course, but that’s precisely the life we never get to see. I know my internal life’s best chance of birthing a book is by surrounding it with a firewall of regularity and routine, but the process by which a novel emerges from that internal life is still a mystery to me. I am as little able to explain it as I am of explaining bees.

 

 

Wrinkled Time (Gabrielle Bryden)

1 Nov

 

Madeleine L’Engle

wrinkled time.

 

crumples, crinkles, dips

waves, ripples, loops

stringy twirls

oscillating tendrils

freewheelin’ in non-linear time

 

Breath ceases,

baby cries for the first time,

life circulating.

 

No straight lines in nature.

 

If you think you see one,

crystals spring to mind,

take a closer look

and you’ll find it gone -

Mandelbrot had a fractal theory.

 

Look intimately at a spider web

to see a straight thread

between two points.

 

Human-made straightness,

requires extra energy.

 

If there are no straight lines in nature,

why would time deviate from straight?

 

Spherical earth rotating,

sun circulating.

 

Rotund moon held tightly

in ring-shaped trajectory.

 

Electron spin,

atomic, molecular orbital.

 

Sound waving gently through the air,

light bending with the squeeze of gravity.

 

Dingy shaped red blood cells floating

in plasma streams and rivers.

 

Lost girl stumbling in the dark,

finds herself back where she started.

 

 

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