2013: My Year of Reading

Having recovered from the excesses of Xmas and New Year (always difficult for someone who can’t hold her alcohol, & who was given the flu by her brother to boot), I’m sitting at my desk to look over what I read in 2013. 

Those who follow this blog might know that I’m a contributing editor to the Australian Women Writers Challenge, an initiative established by Elizabeth Lhuede in 2012 in response to the lack of recognition for women writers in Australia (I have blogged on this previously).  I’m part of a team of volunteers who write monthly round-ups (and will soon be posting our annual round-ups) of different genres and fields, mine being diversity, short stories and poetry.  Over the year I helped organise a spotlight on Indigenous women writers, and women writers of diverse heritage, and this year I’m planning to arrange similar spotlights on lesbian writers and women writers with disabilities.

Through the challenge, I’ve come to know some wonderful readers and bloggers, including Elizabeth herself; Sue of Whispering Gums, a champion of Australian literature; Marilyn Brady of Me, You and Books who runs the Global Women of Colour challenge (of which I’m also a participant); and Annabel Smith, author of the charming novel Whisky Charlie Foxtrot.  For a writer who spend many lonely hours with just a laptop for company, such a community of writers and readers is a saving grace.

Below is the list of the books I read over the past year.  For the AWW challenge, I had planned to read 20 and review 10, and ended up reading 43 and reviewing 14.  I would have liked to have reviewed more, but time was at a premium.  Altogether my reading totalled 62 books, which is a bit disappointing for someone who needs to read to improve her craft.  On the other hand I did have a horrendously busy year, so this coming year I should be able to get through more.  My favourites were Merlinda Bobis’ Fish-Hair Woman (winner of the Most Underrated Book Award), because it was so different and poetic, Kirstel Thornell’s Night Street about the artist Clarice Beckett, and Kris Olsson’s beautiful memoir, Boy, Lost.  Others I really enjoyed were Michelle de Krester’s award-winning Questions of Travelfor its language, characterisation and almost 19thC sensibility, and Venero Armanno’s Black Mountain for being completely out of left-field (as I like being surprised).

This year I’m still aiming to read 20 books and review 10 for the Australian Women Writers Challenge.  I will most likely do more than that, but wanted to leave room as I’d liked to read more international literature this year, and return to my enduring love, nineteenth century fiction.

If you’d like to sign up to the Australian Women Writers Challenge in 2014, you can do so here. 

Books reviewed for AWW Challenge:

1.The Dark Wet, Jess Huon

2.The Romantic, Kate Holden

3.Making a Meal of It, Jui-Shan Chang

4.Purple Threads, Jeanine Leane

5.Nest, Janine Burke

6.Like a House on Fire, Cate Kennedy

7.An Opening, Stephanie Radok

8.The Beloved, Annah Faulkner

9.The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf, Ambelin Kwaymullina

10. Mullumbimby, Melissa Lucashenko

11.Boy, Lost, Kris Olsson

12. Mazin Grace, Dylan Coleman

13. A Beautiful Place to Die, Malla Nunn

14. Letters to the End of Love, Yvette Walker

Books read for AWW Challenge:

15. Matilda is Missing, Caroline Overington

16. The Fine Colour of Rust, Paddy O’Reilly

17. The Old School, P.M. Newton

18. The Scent of Belonging, Rosie Abbott

19. The Light Between Oceans, M.L. Stedman

20. The Railwayman’s Wife, Ashley Hay

21. Domestic Archaeology, Kelly Pilgrim-Byrne

22. Ghost Wife, Michelle Dickinoski

23. Electricity for Beginners, Michelle Dickinoski

24. Steeplechase, Krissy Kneen

25. The Inheritance of Ivorie Hammer, Edwina Preston

26. Whisky Charlie Foxtrot, Annabel Smith

27. Black Juice, Margo Lanagan

28. The Burial, Courtney Collins

29. The Girl with No Hands, Angela Slatter

30. Questions of Travel, Michelle de Krester

31. Siddon Rock, Glenda Guest

32. Carpentaria, Alexis Wright

33. Harmless, Julienne van Loon

34. The Sunlit Zone, Lisa Jacobson

35. The God in the Ink, Kathryn Lomer

36. Silent Valley, Malla Nunn

37. The Idea of Home, Geraldine Brookes

38. Night Games, Anna Krien

39. Stasiland, Anna Funder

40. Having Cried Wolf, Gretchen Shirm

41. The Fish Hair Woman, Merlinda Bobis

42. Moving Among Strangers, Gabrielle Carey

43. Night Street, Kristel Thornell

Others

44. Where Angels Fear to Tread, E.M. Forster

45. Adam Bede, George Eliot

46. We Are Not the Same Anymore, Chris Somerville

47. The Rosie Project, Graeme Simsion

48. Coal Creek, Alex Miller

49. Cairo, Chris Womersley

50. Bereft, Chris Womersley

51. Bel Canto, Ann Patchett

52. The Photograph, Penelope Lively

53. Black Mountain, Venero Armanno

54. Wrack, James Bradley

55. Beauty’s Sister, James Bradley

56. That Deadman Dance, Kim Scott

57. Eyrie, Tim Winton

58. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, Rachel Joyce

59. Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood

60. To the Islands, Randolph Stowe

61. Fairyland, Sumner Locke Eliot

62. The Signature of All Things, Elizabeth Gilbert

Review of Letters to the End of Love

Some people select their books in bookstores by reading the first page, but for me it’s often the cover, then I open the book randomly and check the quality of the writing.  With Yvette Walker’s Letters to the End of Love, however, when I touched the cover I immediately picked it up.  It was patterned with stamps and I loved the feel of the perforations, and it was altogether so pretty that I bought it.

Inside, the writing was tight and controlled.  Two pairs of lovers write letters to one another: Dmitri and Kathleen, who live in Cork in 1969, and Louise and Grace, who live in Perth in 2011; while John, in Bournemouth in 1948, writes unanswered letters to David.  The latter are worth buying the book for alone.  It’s been a long time since I’ve read such a beautiful evocation of love (with moving sex scenes, too), and the grief that comes from losing it, such as this:

The house felt strange, alien, and as I moved through it, passing your paintings at ever turn, a force began to gather within me, as if the meaning of everything were over and gone.  I found myself back in the drawing room.  The rain had quietly curled into the ocean for the night.  There was, as always, the sound of the sea (196).

The contemporary letters, by contrast, lacked this delicacy.  Perhaps it’s simply that Walker evokes the past more skilfully than the present.  Grace is a bookseller, and Lou, her partner, travels the world as an assistant to a celebrity.  Their relationship is faltering, and Grace writes to Lou as a way of working out what went wrong, and of remembering their history.  It’s a nice technique – using letters to pull someone closer – and it’s also used in the letters between Dmitri and Kathleen. 

What I liked most about these, as I also appreciated in the John’s letters about the history and ramifications of WW2, was the background of Russia prior to the war, pulled into the text through Dmitri’s brother.  There was also loss in these letters – two lodged in the past, and one forthcoming, in the future.    

The three strands are tied loosely through a Paul Klee painting, Ad Marginem, but are otherwise thematically linked through the ways in which letters attempt to recover something that is lost, or to cross a distance, whether it’s geographical or psychological, or the distance of death.

I found the book to be fine and distilled, but longed for more movement throughout the three parts.  Perhaps the author had aspired to do this by weaving the three narratives among each, but this didn’t really work for me - I sensed they would be more emphatic on their own, as three separate stories.  However, even if the book is a a little strained in its quietness, it’s still shot through with gold through the letters from John to David, and other, fine threads such as Klee’s sun, which ‘covered everything in a dark pomegranate light’ (10).

This is my 14th review for the Australian Women Writers Challenge. 

Australian Society of Authors Congress

I write this in between packing for Hobart (where there is to be a launch for Island magazine, in which the essay that I wrote for the Ridgeline Residency will appear), writing up an abstract for the ASAL conference next year, wrapping Xmas presents, mending my pearl bracelet, and contemplating with some dismay the shambles in my flat that has accumulated from another week of not-enough-sleep.  But I wanted to get this post out of the way, so I can clear up my desk.

As is becoming usual, this is a post about an event several months ago - the Australian Society of Authors congress in October, held for their 50th anniversary celebrations, which attracted some 200 authors.  This has turned into a pretty long post, and I’ve put it up mostly for my own reference, because the notebook in which this was written will go on a shelf shortly, as its been filled.

On the evening before the Congress I caught a bus into the State Library of NSW to hear Melissa Lucashenko deliver the Colin Simpson Memorial Lecture.  She began with the story of the three little pigs, and used this to explore three stereotypical depictions of Indigenous people: the doomed innocent (like the first pig who made his house of straw) who is a child of nature, beyond modernity and civilisation, and who, it was believed, would die out; the tragic Aboriginal, like that featured in The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, who was caught between two cultures and who, in transcending suffering, would lose their place in Aboriginal society (this is the pig who made his house out of sticks, who really tried to make it, but couldn’t); the third pig is the Indigenous person who has beauty, power, humour and land, who makes their house from bricks and is epitomised by the Indigenous man in The Tracker – this film offered a representation of Indigenous people that had been missing for two centuries.

Melissa also spoke of how art forms that involved collaboration, such as film, were usually more successful in their representations of Indigenous people, because the fiction writer was usually on their own, making things up.  She also noted it was the responsibility of the artist to ‘First, do no harm’, because the artist dealing with hurt and fragile people, and there’s a responsibility to at least get it right.  I really appreciated the lecture – Melissa was clear, smart, funny and informative — and a number of things that had been puzzling me about the representation of Indigenous people in literature began to fall into place.

The Congress was held at the National Maritime Museum over Friday 18th and Saturday 19th October.  I bought a coffee to drink (it was ordinary) while I wandered across the bridge to Darling Harbour, and saw that the monorail was being dismantled, and wondered what had happened to the idea to turn it into a bikeway.  Perhaps that had just been someone’s passing fancy, which is a pity.

In the lecture theatre in the museum, among model ships and an exhibition of Antarctica, I was overjoyed to find that the loop system was the best I had ever used, rivalled only by one in a tiny room in the Museum of London for a film on the 1666 Great Fire of London.  On that note, the bushfires broke out over the weekend, and the air was rimmed with smoke, which set off my hayfever.

I have pages and pages of scrawled notes in my journal, which are somewhat hard to decipher, but here goes for a few transcriptions.

What does the sheet material of free content mean for authors? asked ASA Executive Director, Angelo Loukakis, broaching one of the themes that would surface repeatedly throughout the two days.  It was taken up by Anna Funder, who expressed her disappointment at being asked to write a small piece for the Royal Academy’s ‘Australia’ exhibition for free.  She also spoke of the infiltration of Google in our lives (possibly this related to her research on totalitarian regimes but I’m can’t read what I wrote), and how writers need to carve out spaces untouched by Google, for although our souls have been stolen and sold, we still have the idea of the interior journey, and people need to live the lives of the individuals they read of.

Rosie Scott spoke of the Literature Board and its contributions to the diversity of Australian literature, but noted it could be dismantled in a matter of minutes by a politician’s whim – just witness Campbell Newman’s butchery of the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards.  She stated that ebooks represented 15% of sales overall and that, although the internet had opened up a readership and new means of funding such as crowd funding, this hasn’t really translated into an actual improvement.  In 2001 the median income of creative writers was $23,000; in 2008 it was $11,100.  Lucky I don’t need to eat much to get buy, and am a cheap drunk.  Although there is the problem of the frock addiction.  Writers are also being asked to do so much more themselves, such as writing their own blurbs and doing their own publicity.  One possibility, she suggested, was forming an international association of writers organisations, to help safeguard the private act of writing.

Jan Richards, Manager of Central West Libraries, was then on a panel with Richard Glover, who was taking time out from bushfire reporting.  If you want a literate society, Jan said, the best thing you can do is to teach kids how to read for pleasure.  Meanwhile, 50% of the Australian population are active members of their society, which was a marvellous thing to learn.  Richard brought up the internet, likening it to a giant echo chamber, in which its algorithms brought back the things you wanted to hear.  Reading, by contrast, is a means by which you walk into someone else’s world.  I’m not sure who said this (my scrawl doesn’t say), but at least 25% of booksellers have gone, but the kids books market is growing, and they want Australian authors, which will hopefully mean more kids reading for pleasure, as Jan advocated.  Jan also noted that the busiest days of the year for the libraries are just after Xmas, when readers come in wanting to know how to borrow books on their ereaders.  Meanwhile Jon Page, owner of Pages and Pages who engineered a Kindle amnesty this year (hurrah!), said that ebook sales in the US have plateaued at 30%, which means 70% of all sales are still physical book sales.

Next was info on copyright, delivered by Trish Hepworth, Copyright Advisor for the Australian Libraries Copyright Committee, and Michael Fraser AM, Professor of Law at UTS and founder of the Copyright Agency.  Trish discussed how copyright was broken & needed to be reformed because it couldn’t keep up with changes, while Michael talked of how copyright helped writers earn a living from their work, and that ELR and PLR should be made into rights, and not be reliant on the whims of each minister.  

The final panel for the day consisted of Susan Johnson and Antony Loewenstein.  The latter noted how in places like India, the publishing industry has never been in better shape, and that it’s important to remember that the rest of the world is not the West.  He also discussed how, if someone wasn’t getting upset, you weren’t doing your job, and that if you want to be a original and interesting writer then you need to learn to accept criticism.  Susan, on a different tack, said that the job of a writer is to show how a character turns out, suggesting not so much provocation, as care for the reader.

I was too broke to go to the dinner that evening, but was delighted to hear that Belinda Castles, who was co-winner of the SMH Best Young Novelist with me, had won the Asher Literary Award for her novel, Hannah and Emil (which is on my reading list!)

The panel for the next morning was about commercialisation.  Sandy Grant, who founded Hardie Grant, talked about GAFA – Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon – who presided over cheap consumerism, where everything is sold cheaper and free-er.  Amazon, he continued, had a predatory price basis, in which they didn’t make any money, and which was corrosive.  60% of what Angus and Robertson and Borders sold was Australian literature, and now they’ve gone.  Australia’s biggest seller is also Amazon, but their Australian content is minimal.  In this climate, even good books are being rejected by publishers.  The books that do succeed, really succeed, and publishers are looking for a narrow range of breakout books.  He urged writers to look beyond our shores: Australia is a population of 22 million out of half a billion English speakers, so we must export to a wider, international audience, and turn the colonial tables around.  Meanwhile Steven Lewis quoted that 56% (I think of Amazon self-publishers) would rather sell their book cheaply or give it away than not be published – these are the people driving the perception that books are free.  He referred to them a ‘kamikaze authors’ which I thought apt  (and cute).

In the next panel, on trying to sustain oneself as a writer, Kate Forsyth delivered a brilliant, witty and memorable talk on her route to publication.  I loved her sense of drama, and what stayed with me was her unparalleled dedication to becoming a writer, which meant that she had once walked for an hour to the NSW Writers Centre for courses, because she was too poor to catch the bus.  Other advice she gave was that writers shouldn’t be a one-trick pony, and that writing takes time, humility, honest and hard, hard work.  Sophie Masson also had a number of useful tips: develop relationships with authors and schools; develop one’s craft; think about ways to market yourself; respect your readers and understand who your readership is; when approaching schools, be specific in your aims (for eg don’t waft on about themes like belonging); have some tricks up your sleeves to keep kids entertained in case you see them getting bored.

In the final session for the day, on the interplay between government and authors.  Stuart Glover (who managed to post his thoughts on the event in the same week it happened, unlike yours truly) discussed how publishing studies are starting to appear, looking at the flow of power between them.  He also mentioned the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards, and how the symbolic weight of canning them was far greater than the monetary weight.  There was a concern that the prizes were funnelling money out of the state, as only a handful of Queenslanders received them, and there had been the controversy surrounding the shortlisting of David Hicks’ book for the non-fiction award.  In light of this, having a structure outside of government, such as Screen Australia, would be helpful.  Sophie Cunningham, the chair, also noted how, in this world in which writers and artists have so little currency, people stop feeling brave about things because they’re worried about losing their funding.  Sometimes I wonder if Patrick White could only be as innovative as he was because of family money.

Aside from the fabulous venue and the stimulating talks, the best part of the few days was meeting and connecting with other writers such as WA author Natasha Lester (and here are her thoughts on the congress) and Cheryl Hardacre, which made me feel less lonely.  It was also wonderful to be in Sydney again, and H and I went to Clovelly, caught up with CousinA who lives near there, and snorkelled with gropers, which sadly weren’t the blue ones.

Back on the Horse

On my corkboard I have a postcard of a woman in evening gown, musing with a cigarette, ‘She could hardly wait to be back in the saddle again’.  I pinned it there to remind myself that, when I get knocked off, I need to brush down my gown and get back on the horse. 

The past eighteen months have been obscenely busy: I’ve edited and published a novel under intense pressure; travelled to New Zealand for a conference; fallen in love with a man and had my heart broken; travelled to India for another conference; done book publicity; thought I had patched things up with the man until he turned up with his new woman at a bar and sat her across the table from me; fallen apart; met innumerable deadlines for book proposals, essays, residency applications and postdoc applications; travelled to Hobart for a residency; travelled to Wagga for another conference; didn’t get the residency in Paris; fell apart again; didn’t have any luck with postdocs; despaired; then struggled on for another two months without a day off to get down a draft of my third novel.  Doing all this with a 75% hearing loss, and my body telling me to slow down with repeated bouts of flu and cold, hasn’t helped much either.

After the Griffith Review lecture by George Megalogenis a few months ago, in which I had to strain incredibly hard to hear because the loop system didn’t work where I was sitting (in the front row, and I sat there because loop systems generally don’t work and I needed to be near the front in case it didn’t), I bumped into a friend who is also deaf but raised as hearing, and is the only person in the world who makes me feel normal.  I found myself downloading my exhaustion and woes onto my poor friend until she said, ‘Jessica, you need to take a break!’  

Halfway home I ended up in a flood of tears, which didn’t stop until a few days later, and I realised something was quite wrong.  The exhaustion of trying to hear in that lecture in a room with shitty acoustics had pushed me over the edge.

On top of this, it’s been roughly a year since the publication of Entitlement, and it’s been what one might call a learning curve.  I never had second novel syndrome with writing this book, as I had the idea for it while writing A Curious Intimacy and had been wanting to get it onto paper for ten years.  However, I might have in its reception, as I wasn’t able to build on the momentum of A Curious Intimacy as I’d been in England doing my doctorate.  Also, once you publish a novel, the goal posts suddenly shift: instead of the wonder and surprise of a first novel, you realise exactly how far you have to go, and how hard you have to work, to be not just a good writer, but a successful writer as well (Chris Currie, author of The Ottoman Motel, talks about this on his blog Furious Horses).

In addition, literary fiction is doing badly in general.  Annabel Smith, WA author of Whiskey Charlie Foxtrot, bravely spoke out about what many of us think but do not say: our sales are poor, we don’t get paid enough, readers don’t value us, a conversation she continued at the Wheeler Centre’s site.

As I’ve been overseas, and generally taken a long time to build up a network of writerly friends in Brisbane since my return to Australia, to realise this was quite a shock.  So what I had hoped might be a diversion from the mounting pressures of the year instead began to contribute to them.  

However, I took myself to my GP to find a psychologist and had the very good fortune to be referred to one who suited me from the start, a practical woman who introduced me to Thomas Moore’s Care of the Soul which, with its emphasis on storytelling, and on interpreting Greek myths as a means to understanding human motivations, was a helpful book for a writer to read.  And, like a skilled masseuse, she loosened the knot into which so much of my stress had been tied, and I calmed down almost immediately.  I also went on a much-needed holiday and research trip with H to Far North Queensland for my third novel, which is set in a tropical town up there and is about sea creatures.  

Annabel, and the other authors she mentions (and the many more who are out there), are of course quite right to be upset at how little authors are paid.  It goes without saying that I too would like to earn more for my work, but the stress occasioned by trying to get to this point has been so awful that I’ve just taken money out of the equation.  I write because it’s as necessary as breathing, and it’s the reason why I’m on this earth.

During the year, I found myself writing a short story titled ‘Black Soil’, about a woman who has a messy, unresolved history.  At the end of the story she takes some soil from a riverbank and, sitting at her potter’s wheel, moulds it into a vase.  While workshopping the story, it was pointed out that the girl had taken her distress and formed something from it, and I realised this is exactly what has happened to me this year.  Although many of the events have been scarring, they’ve also made me tougher.  Now I’ve leapt back onto my steed, and I’m galloping towards the next goalposts with wind-tossed hair, in my silk gown and pearls.

Brisbane Writers Festival 2013

Due to my perennial problems with procrastination and daydreaming (which, as I have long maintained, have been shown to be an essential part of the creative process), I now have a backlog of posts to write and put up, including my thoughts on the Brisbane Writers Festival at the beginning of September.

The unseasonal heat of that month (well, I don’t think we can refer to anything as ‘unseasonal’ anymore, due to climate change) hadn’t yet begun, so on the Friday I put on my  long-sleeved, yellow, black and white Sacha Drake dress and ventured to a panel titled ‘On Whose Authority’, about writing on Indigenous issues by Indigenous and non-Indigenous authors.  To make sure I could hear, the nice audio people let me in early and put my FM system on the table before the speakers.  I sat and admired the plants in jars decorating the stage until people filed in. 

Anita Heiss, looking gorgeous with long, sleek hair, interviewed Melissa Lucashenko, an award-winning Indigenous author of five novels, and Jacqueline Wright, author of Red Dirt Talking, which won the TAG Hungerford award.  Melissa had won the Deloitte Fiction award at the  Queensland Literary Awards the previous night for Mullumbimby, and her delight was palpable, which was lovely.  Anita was a vibrant interviewer, with intelligent and incisive questions about whether non-Indigenous authors should write about Indigenous people.  Melissa stressed that they shouldn’t, but there were exceptions such as Jacqueline’s novel, which was set in the fictional town of Ranson, and featured a 40-year old anthropology graduate student who wanted to transcribe oral histories about a massacre that occurred.  Jacqueline had worked for a number of years as a teacher and linguist in the Pilbara and Kimberly on Indigenous language, interpreting and cultural programmes, and had done careful research on her book.

When the panel finished, I was somewhat confused.  I could understand the need for research and sensitive depictions of Indigenous people, particularly in the face of stereotypical and degrading representations by non-Indigenous writers over the last two centuries or so, but what if a novel contains Indigenous characters who aren’t the main focus of the work?  For example, Alex Miller’s Coal Creek contains Indigenous characters – should he have relayed their individual histories too?  And if non-Indigenous people aren’t to write about Indigenous people, then we’re missing part of the commentary about our relationships.  And if that commentary can’t be interrogated, then where is the space for dialogue and moving forward?  Some of these questions were answered by Melissa when I went to the Colin Simpson Memorial which she gave in Sydney (more of this in a post I’ll write on the Australian Society of Authors Congress), but I’m still unclear about others, and need to do more reading and thinking.

As I rose to leave the session, the lady sitting next to me asked, ‘Are you a reporter?’

‘No,’ I shook my head.  ‘I’m deaf, so I have to sit up the front to hear.’

‘I saw you go in early, so I thought you would be the person interviewing them.’

I explained I was a novelist, and she said it was her first writers festival, and I said I hoped she enjoyed the rest of it.

The next day I put on one of my favourite Leona Edmiston frocks and went to see Seaman Dan, a Torres Strait Islander who sang and wrote songs.  I figured it would be too hard to use my FM as there were too many people on the stage (Kate Evans, the interviewer, Seaman Dan and Karl Neuenfeldt) but I hoped I would be able to hear by sitting in the front row. 

Another friendly lady came and sat beside me.  ‘Oh,’ she said brightly, ‘are you a Gold Member too?’

‘No, I’m just deaf,’ I replied.  ‘So I have to sit close to the front to hear.’

We got talking.  She was a teacher and enunciated properly so I could hear, which I appreciated.  I explained I was interested in Indigenous literature and culture, and she had taught kids on Thursday Island when Seaman Dan was singing his songs.

‘And I thought he was old then!’ she quipped, and I laughed.

As it transpired, I couldn’t hear much of what Seaman Dan said, but that was okay, because I’ve ordered his book, Steady Steady, to the library.

Then I had a coffee and sat under the trees by the river and started Coal Creek, and then walked through the Quilts exhibition at QAG to listen to ‘A Sense of Wonder’, a panel between James Bradley, Ashley Hay and Bianca Nogrady on how to educate communities on science, and whether science fiction has a role to play in science communication.  I sat at the front, again, and got talking to the couple who sat next to me (for someone who is a bit shy and very poor at initiating contact, it was lovely to come across so many friendly people), who talked to me about the beauty of deep sea diving.  The fellow was also a marine geologist (I had no idea such professions existed) and gave me his email address in case I needed help with my current novel, which is about sea creatures.

James’ The Resurrectionist is one of my favourite novels, and Ashley is one of my favourite people, so I thoroughly enjoyed the session, which canvassed the alien nature of sharks and cats, and astronomy in Game of Thrones.  Towards the end of the session, a man put up his hand, rustled his program and informed us that we were on the wrong track, and why were we not talking about wonder?  I thought to myself that we had been, as science is inherently about wonder and surprise.  

A few weekends later, at a book chat with Ashley at my local bookstore, Books@Stones, I mentioned this session in the context of how I love science because of this wonder.  The light bulb moment that come when someone explains a theory, or how things fit together, is the same as when I read a poem and get to the last line and there’s a ping, and I think, Oh! So that’s how it works.

The last session I attended was Ashley’s interview of Alex Miller about his new novel, Coal Creek, which they had for sale at the bookstore.  I bought a copy the afternoon before and had read most of it by the time I reached the talk.  What stayed with me was Alex’s meander into writing as a profession (he was bored) and his statement, ‘You never get over what happens to you in your childhood’, and how our subconscious is the well from which writing springs, two ideas with which I emphatically agree.  I finished Coal Creek that evening and loved it, and I would write a review of it except that I left my copy of Parental Unit’s.  In short, it was tight and well-constructed, yet almost dreamy in tone, and all that aside I would have (cough) bought it for the cover alone (a brooding rural bloke with a nib in his mouth).  I hadn’t been that impressed with Miller’s previous novel, Autumn Laing, which was too loose in places, so I was very happy to find him back in form with Coal Creek.  All in all it was a great festival, and my brain was grateful for the nourishment as well.

Review of A Beautiful Place to Die

I picked this book up because of the focus on Australian women writers of diverse heritage that I’ve organised this month over at the Australian Women Writers Challenge.  I was interested, too, that Malla had emigrated from Swaziland when she was 11, and I wanted to see what, if any, Australian influences were in her work.  The novel is set in South Africa in 1952 and is distinctly South African, but as Malla comments in her guest post for the AWW Challenge, moving to Australia gave her the opportunity to become a writer.

And thank god for that, because A Beautiful Place to Die is a fantastic read.  It follows Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper as he investigates the death of an Afrikaner captain.  What fascinated me as I read was how the race of characters determined how much, and what, the reader could learn through Cooper (and what Cooper himself let the reader know, in a clever twist at the end).  This stance is signalled in the opening page with the image of ‘a group of black farmworkers [who] stood along a rise with their backs towards [Cooper].  The hard line of their shoulders obscured what lay ahead’.  The passage of information is also mirrored in the paths around the town that only black people can travel along – an aspect of South Africa that I knew nothing off.  Although that’s not saying much, as even my knowledge of the circumstances of apartheid in South Africa is pretty hazy.

I was also interested in the time the novel the novel was set — not long after WWII — and the character of Zweignman.  Being a Jew, he has an ambivalent status in the community, for he is white, but also German.  Both he and Cooper are marked indelibly by the war, and both struggle to either escape or confront its psychological effects.  I’ve read very little fiction set in the 1950s, let alone in South Africa, and the book has prompted me to broaden my reading.

If you want a page-turning and carefully-plotted story with tight, clean writing and engaging characters, this book won’t disappoint.  There are another two in the series (which are currently on my eReader) but be warned – if you start, the dishes will go unwashed and the dogs unfed, and you might miss your bus stop too!

Book details: Nunn, Malla.  A Beautiful Place to Die.  Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 2008.

Borrowed from Brisbane City Council/Bolinda ebook Library.

This is my 13th review for the Australian Women Writers Challenge. 

A Talk for ANZCED

It’s been a while since I posted in this beleaguered blog, as I’ve been gallivanting around the country.  H & I travelled to far north Queensland so I could do research for my next novel, then we dashed to Parental Unit’s as our mum was unwell, then I had a week back in Brisbane, then flew to Sydney for the Australian Society of Authors congress.  More on these excursions later.  In the meantime, I wanted to pick up where I left off in my last post.

I finished up at the ASAL conference early and caught a cab through various paddocks to the Wagga Wagga airport with the lovely Lydia Weaver, who organised the conference in Wellington last year.  From there I flew to Sydney and thence to Brisbane, caught a cab home, changed into my favourite frock from San Francisco and my red boots from London, and caught another cab to the convention centre, where I was to deliver a talk to attendees of the Australian and New Zealand Conference for the Education of the Deaf.

I was raised as a hearing person because we lived in a remote area, so attending the local primary school was the only option.  I never learned sign language, aside from some finger spelling that my itinerant teachers taught me, so to be in a room full of people who were signing, on a balmy Brisbane evening no less (which was wonderful for thawing out after Wagga), with the lights of the wheel and the city beyond, was magical.

After the welcome to country by an Indigenous woman, there was a talk by Karen O’Reilly whose mother Carol O’Reilly was an incredibly strong deaf woman who had travelled around collecting stories by deaf Australians.  She compiled two books, Deaf Australian Stories, which are available for purchase.  I then gave my talk, the transcript of which is below.

It was a morning in early summer, on our property in northwest NSW.  I was nearly four years old, and lay on the pale blue trampoline beneath our apricot tree.  My head, neck and shoulders were awash with pain.  The light chill in the breeze scraped against my skin and the sunlight, normally soft and dappled, speared through the green leaves of the tree.  Everything was abnormally bright, with a photographic crispness.

My mother appeared at the side of the trampoline.  ‘How are you feeling?’ she asked.

I shook her head, unable to answer.  

My mother stood there for a few minutes more, unable to dispel a strong sense of disquietude.  Then she went inside, changed her farm clothes for a skirt and blouse and collected her handbag.  She found my shoes and scrawled a note for my father.

Back at the trampoline, she wriggled the shoes onto my feet.  ‘We’re going to town,’ she told her, ‘to see the doctor.’ 

‘Okay,’ I said quietly.

The local doctor in Gunnedah was a family friend.  When he saw me, after the half hour trip into town, his movements became quick and urgent.  He suspected meningitis, and I was to go to Tamworth Base Hospital immediately.

My mother drove for another hour over poor tarmac roads.  Sweat formed beneath her hands and the steering wheel became sticky.  She watched me through the rear vision mirror.  I had closed my eyes, but whether from tiredness or pain it was impossible for her to tell.

At the hospital in Tamworth, she watched in horror as, holding me down, the doctor drove a needle into my spine.  The results confirmed it was meningitis.  The doctors gave me a massive dose of antibiotics to kill the infection, and after that there was nothing for it but to wait.  In the morning, my eyes opened, and the adults held their breath.  I blinked: ever-combative, I had won.

A few weeks later, however, my parents realised that something wasn’t quite right, for I kept asking them to repeat things.  We went back to the local doctor, and then to an audiologist in Tamworth.  Hearing tests confirmed that I was severely-to-profoundly deaf, with no hearing in my left ear, and half in my right.

This is my first memory.  My second memory is of sitting on the hospital bed with my father as he read me a story about Strawberry Shortcake, although I couldn’t hear him well and it was hard to follow what was happening.  My third memory is of pulling a cardboard box of coloured letters from their place beneath the dresser and of pestering my mother, ‘Can I do my words?’  These three memories, strung together, can be read as a narrative for my own move towards writing.  Meningitis caused my deafness and subsequent retreat into books for solace, which in turn, encouraged me to write.

From an early age, I consumed books obsessively, not just because I enjoyed reading, but because it was easier to move into other worlds than to interact within my own.  My parents had decided to send me to the local primary school at Boggabri, because I was too young to be sent to boarding school in Sydney, and my father was a farmer who couldn’t leave the land.  I had two itinerant teachers, Mr Tony, who was there until Year 2 (I never learnt his last name), and Mrs Tibbits, who helped with my speech therapy.  I remember both these teachers strongly, and rather than feeling stigmatised by them, they made me feel special, and contributed to my self-esteem.  Mrs Tibbits also recognised my skill with writing, and arranged for me to put together a magazine which involved visiting the local police station and interviewing the policeman, who showed me a crop of marijuana seedlings he had appropriated.

I was raised as a hearing person, but because I couldn’t hear much, I constantly felt inferior to my noisy, extroverted, siblings and cousins.  I also didn’t really learn any social skills until my 20s.  As socialising was difficult, I would pick up a book instead of making conversation.  As I grew older, it was only a short step to writing my own voice.  On visiting a careers adviser as I neared the end of my schooling, I was told that I needed a creative outlet to express my frustration with being deaf.  I was amazed that he had sensed my isolation, but perhaps I shouldn’t have been: many Deaf people who belong to a community could express themselves with sign language, but I had no one I could talk to about being so out of place.  As soon as he mentioned creative writing, I knew this was what I wanted to do.  

To my surprise, I found the careers advisor was correct.  I started a double degree in English and Creative Writing at the University of Wollongong, and began writing in a journal, literally pouring my self and my difficulties into page after page, and all the time improving as a writer of short stories, poetry and novels.  In 1999 I spent a year on exchange at the University of California, Berkeley, and a year later graduated with first class honours from Wollongong.  I then won a scholarship to undertake my Masters in Writing at the University of Technology, Sydney, where I wrote my first novel, A Curious Intimacy.  This was published by Penguin in 2007 and won a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist award, was short listed for the Western Australia Premier’s awards and the Dobbie award, a prize for first time women writers, and was longlisted for the international IMPAC award hosted by Dublin City Council.  Just prior to this, in 2004, I was offered the Sir Arthur Sims Travelling Scholarship by the University of Melbourne to undertake my PhD at the University of London.  My second novel, Entitlement, was released by Penguin in September last year, and is available for sale here tonight.

I’m convinced that these successes wouldn’t have been possible if I wasn’t deaf.  As socialising was such hard work, it was simply easier to focus on my academic work.  Deafness has also influenced the themes that I write about, in both my fiction and non-fiction.  I often write about people who have been marginalised, such as lesbians, refugees or, as in Entitlement, with Indigenous people, for I feel that, as a person with a disability who is also articulate, both in writing and speech, I have a responsibility to speak on behalf of those who do not have a voice.  My third novel, which I’m writing now, is also influenced by my position as a woman who is neither completely hearing, nor completely deaf, and I’m using the figure of a mermaid to explain what it is to be like to be situated between worlds, for a mermaid is neither human nor animal, and belongs neither to the sea nor the land.  

Thus, while deafness has been for me something that is exhausting, isolating and frustrating, it has also been the source of immense creativity and success.  It is also true that, without my teachers for the deaf, Mr Tony and Mrs Tibbits, I would not have received the encouragement I needed to take this path.  So I’d like to thank all of you for your work, and for helping deaf children to realise their dreams.

After the talk, a lady came up to me with Mr Tony’s surname written on a piece of paper, and to my delight I recognised it.  I then sold a whack of books, which was also wonderful.  It was a delightful evening, and I’m so grateful to have been given the opportunity to talk to teachers for the deaf about their amazing work.

Chintz and a Conference

I’ve been meaning – a phrase which I fear is becoming too much a part of my lexicon of late – to write this post for months, but was waylaid by a swathe of postdoctoral applications, which sadly came to naught.  However, they did help me to refine my research topic, and I’m going back to the drawing board to regroup my battalions and launch another attack next year.

After flying back north from my residency in Hobart, I had three days in Brisbane before flying out again, this time to Sydney.  From there, H and I drove to Bowral with an old uni friend who was leaving to go to business school in London, to have a weekend with another bunch of uni friends.  H had booked a house which had floral chintz on every available surface, a variety of fake flowers stuffed into vases and, mysteriously, a finished jigsaw puzzle in a frame.  It wasn’t the sort of place where you would want to come home drunk with the dizzies, but it was fantastic to catch up with our friends and their varied lives.  We drank and ate, did crosswords, played Scrabble (I lost, and sulked), walked into town in the rain (passing a store that sold onesies), and sourced some excellent coffee at a cafe which had a hangover from the Raj.  At the end of the weekend, I went on to Canberra with some other friends, though we stopped first to have a look at Berkeleouw Books in a barn.

In Canberra I worked on my conference paper, drank coffee at a lovely French café, caught up with a friend I’d studied creative writing with, and met her two kids.  Then my friends left me in their favourite morning café (there is a theme here, yes), until it was time to catch a Countrylink bus, then train, to Wagga Wagga, where I was attending the annual Association for the Study of Australian Literature conference (this was in Wellington last year).  I loved the green and wintry landscape outside, even thought it was cold and wet, and I was still defrosting after Tasmania.   

When I stepped from the train at Wagga, which had shunted painfully slowly along the tracks, I bumped into my friend and poet Nat O’Reilly, who I’d met at the conference in Hyderabad last year, and we made our way down the main street to our respective hotels.  

The theme for the conference was ‘Country’.  That evening, after a welcome to country from Wiradjuri Elder Aunty Isabel Reid and the presentation of the ALS Medal to Michelle de Krester, Brain Castro gave the Barry Andrews lecture.  Brian spoke of Patrick White’s defence of his work, which AD Hope referred to as ‘sludge’, but which was seminal for his attempts to incorporate that language of the refugee.  He referred to Voss as an emotional exploration of repression, and spoke of the uncanny, the repressed and the unhoused, as being that which drives us to create, something I identified with.

The next day Jeanine Leane, author of the wonderful Purple Threads, gave the Dorothy Green lecture.  She described how whiteness in literature defines itself by what it is not, and how landscape, when it is peopled, becomes ‘scape’.  She talked about the representation of Indigenous people in twentieth and early twenty-first century literature, referring to Drusilla Modjeska’s foreword to Katharine Susannah Prichard’s Coonardoo, in which Modjeska writes, ‘The point about Hugh is that he is a decent man’.  Does this then mean, Jeanine prompted, that Aboriginals are only allowed less decent men?  In A Fringe of Leaves, she notes how White drew on colonial subjectivity in order to represent Indigenous people in a degrading way so as to use them as a foil to Ellen Roxburgh, and pointed out that none of the Indigenous characters speak for themselves.  And in Kate Grenville’s The Secret River, which is a ‘transmission text’ because it is so widely read that its ideas are transmitted to many, Grenville uses the word ‘them’ to refer to Aboriginal people, effectively distancing them, and depriving them of identity.  Indigenous literature, by contrast, is a way of writing country back, and here my notes sadly ran out – I think I might have had trouble hearing by this point.  

That evening I gave a reading at the Thyme Out restaurant with Jeanine, Michelle de Krester and Brian Castro.  I read first and was, as I said, somewhat starstruck by being in such the illustrious company.  Brian’s reading was entertaining, though his voice was soft and hard to hear.  Michelle de Krester joked that her book, although entitled Questions of Travel, was difficult to travel with as it was so long, so instead she had a ‘rather grubby piece of paper’ which she unfolded with delicate fingers.  Her reading was wry and clear.  Jeanine read from Purple Threads, which was set in the country around Wagga Wagga as this was Wiradjuri country, her own.  She selected a passage about the seasons turning, which extends over several pages and is one of the most beautiful parts of the book.  To hear its rhythms in her voice, in the country that was her people’s, was moving and beautiful. 

And the next day was a keynote by Alison Ravenscroft who talked about ‘sense’, as in making sense and in our sensations.  She discussed the deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie, who feels vibration through the soles of her feet, and how for people who don’t listen to music in this way, their bodies don’t know how to read and write music – they are deaf to it.  She tied this to an experience she’d had in the Indigenous homeland of Utopia in the Northern Territory, in which, sleeping by a fire slightly apart from two Indigenous women she was with, instead of sleeping between them, she had experienced a moment of inexplicable, unparalleled terror, and wondered if there was a force that only the Indigenous women could hear because they were attuned to it through their cultural practices.  My notes get a bit incoherent at this point, but she mentioned that in undecideability is the possibility of moving forward.  We cannot know, and we cannot ever be certain about other forms of knowledge, so rather than resolving it, we should let it remain.  

Amidst all these fine lectures, which were like manna to my starving brain, there were a number of other wonderful papers, including Brigitta Olubas on artist Ian Howard; Julie Montgarrett on her artistic practice, which included embroideries that are incomplete, like unfinished sentences; Beth Driscoll on Clunes Book Fair; Nat on non-Indigenous belonging in Winton’s Cloudstreet (the novel offers a fantasy of reconciliation), Carroll’s The Time We Have Taken (on the role the suburbs have played in dispossessing Indigenous people) and Entitlement — and his inclusion of my novel pleased me no end.  My own paper on fantastical representations of country towns was yet another last-minute affair, but I pulled it off alright, and received some good feedback.

There was also an excellent reading from poets in a shed with a ute parked in it, which was attached to a pub.  These included Nat, Derek Motion, Keri Glastonbury and Lachlan Brown.  I also met some wonderful & friendly women from the Booranga Writers Centre, which published a poem of mine many moons ago in FourW.

I had to leave early on the last day, to catch a plane back to Sydney, then to Brisbane, where I happily absorbed myself in the latest edition of Country Style.  Even if I’m now a city girl through and through, I’ll never forget my roots, not least because they influence every aspect of my writing.

Review of Mazin Grace

Chapter One of Mazin Grace is titled ‘Minya wunyi wonganyi’, the Kokatha words for ‘small girl talking’.  The small girl is Grace Dawn, and the opening of her narrative signals that this is a novel about naming and identity: 

My name is Grace.  Grace Dawn.  That’s ‘cause I was born just as the jindu came up over our Kokatha country on Koonibba Mission.  Papa Neddy gave me my name.  Said if it’s good enough for Superintendent to call ‘is girls Charity and Hope, it was good enough for me to ‘ave a Bible name too.

The first three sentences tie Grace’s language to the place she was born: jindu(Kokatha for ‘sun’), Kokatha country, and Koonibba Mission, and the influence of the mission and her Indigenous culture is mirrored in her language, a mixture of English and Kokatha, which in turn reflects who she is: an Indigenous girl raised on a mission, trying to find out the identity of her father.

To begin Mazin Grace is to be thrust into the wide circle of Grace’s family.  I found trying to negotiate the family relationships, at the same time as reading the language - which incorporates Kokatha words - to be confusing at first, but at the same time I liked it, as it reminded me of my own incredibly loud family – whenever my sister comes home at Christmas, there are dogs barking and kids yelling, while she shouts over the top of everyone, with expansive arm gestures.  When things calm down, I can finally figure out what’s going on.  When I persisted with this book, and adjusted to flicking back to check the list of Kokatha words, I came to love the rhythm of Grace’s sentences.  I eventually learned enough of the words to read easily, which seemed to me a lovely way to get to know a culture, that is, through a novel.

The mix of languages also indicates Grace’s protection of her Indigenous culture amidst the strictures of the Mission: ‘Sometimes, we say lotta things quiet-way to each other without opening our mouth and they don’t know what we sayin’.  We gotta talk like that sometimes, ‘cause them walbiya mooga [white people] on the Mission won’t let us use Kokatha wonga either.  We gotta talk English’ (9).  At other times they use sign or body language, and this strategy, of talking ‘safe-way’, is even more important when the ‘welfare mob’ (10) come, because it helps them to talk without being heard.  Indigenous language isn’t just a means of communicating, but a way of surviving.

This isn’t a plot driven work, but rather revolves around Grace’s journey from child to young woman, and her search for her father.  Being fairer than other kids in the mission, she is taunted for her skin, which this makes her feel ashamed, as she says, ‘I can’t scrape the whiteness outa me.  I can’t scrape out that shame of who I am’ (228).  I was surprised that there was racism within the community itself, but I could empathise with this sense of being neither one thing nor another as, not being completely deaf, I belong to neither the worlds of the hearing or the deaf.

Grace is a spirited character who frequently gets into trouble for speaking her mind, and I liked her independence.  This attribute becomes important later on when holds the family together when they run out of money and food.  By the time she heads off to school in Adelaide at the end of the novel, you know she’s going to be okay. 

The novel is a fictional account of Coleman’s mother’s childhood at the Koonibba Lutheran Mission in the 1940s and 50s.  The Author’s Note at the end describes how Coleman came to write the novel, and the way in which she chose to write it, and I think it’s worth buying the book for this account alone.  It’s describes the devastating impact that colonialism has had upon Indigenous people, and how writing the novel was part of the healing process for Coleman’s mother, who was ‘able to reclaim a little bit of my past that has been denied me’ (242).  

This makes it saddening to read Coleman’s thanks, in the Acknowledgements, to those who make the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards possible.  Mazin Grace was the winner of the David Unaipon Award for an unpublished manuscript by an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander writer in 2011.  ‘Without this award, Grace’s voice may not have been heard’, Coleman writes.  Campbell Newman canned these awards as one of his first acts as Queensland Premier in 2012, which indicates his disinterest in hearing the voices of writers.  As Anna Funder, author of All That I Am, said of his actions: ‘I have spent my professional life studying totalitarian regimes and the brave people who speak out against them … And the first thing that someone with dictatorial inclinations does is to silence the writers and the journalists.’  Fortunately, the University of Queensland press was committed to retaining the David Unaipon Award, and with the help of some dedicated Queenslanders, the Queensland Literary Awards was formed.  The recently announced winner of the David Unaipon Award for this year was Ellen van Nerveen for Heat and Light.  Judging by the readings of her work that I’ve heard at Avid Reader, her book will be a stunner.

Book details: Coleman, Dylan.  Mazin Grace.  St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2012.

Borrowed from Brisbane City Council Library.

This is my 12th review for the Australian Women Writers Challenge. 

Review of Boy, Lost

I was late when I walked up to Kris Olsson’s book launch a few months ago in April (I’d missed the bus), and there was standing room only at the back of the café, while people milled on the footpath, smoking.  It was autumn but, being Brisbane, it was still too warm for the jeans and boots that I was wearing.

Kris was launching her latest book, Boy, Lost, a memoir about her mother Yvonne who, as a young ingénue, was swept off her feet and carried up north by a man who turned out to be brutal.  Just as she found enough courage to escape from him and to head back to Brisbane with their son, Yvonne’s husband tore Peter from her arms on the train.

The memoir is an imagining of the circumstances of Yvonne’s life, while charting the impact of that missing child upon Yvonne and her other children.  To open the book at random is to be entranced by the surety of Kris’ writing, even as she describes distressing moments:

When you have five children and there are only four beneath your roof, running about the yard, then four is not enough.  I wonder now that she didn’t explode more often.  Not just in the privacy of her home but outside, at the corner shop, the doctor’s surgery, in the street, anywhere there were children and idle conversation and someone blithely asked her: And how many children do you have?  The betrayal of numbers, whatever her reply (p. 159).

Some readers and critics might quibble with the fictional elements of memoir, but all memory is, in one way or another, a fiction – we can never reconstitute memory exactly as it happened.  My impression of this work is that Kris, through conversations with family members and attention to photographic records, evokes personalities and events with sensitivity.   

Throughout the narrative, which moves from present to past and back again, her use of detail grounds the era with which Yvonne’s trusting personality fused, and in which she tried to get herself back together.  She goes to the public trustee’s office to get help from the law, and the man tells her, ‘after what his father’s done to keep him, he’ll be treated like a prince.  He’ll be a doctor or a lawyer.  He cocks his head.  Or the child of an unmarried waitress.  Is that the kind of life you want?’ (p. 75).

The irony of such sexism manifests through Peter’s downward trajectory of illness, running away, and the erratic affection of his father.  He grows into adulthood and has a family, but is still destabilised by the loss of Yvonne, as she is by the loss of him, even after they find one another.  When I saw Peter at Kris’ launch, I couldn’t hear what he said, except for the words ‘boy, found’, and perhaps that was enough, for his presence was amazing – it showed that, although the fractures in the family couldn’t heal neatly because of all that had been lost, he was back again, and he was real. 

When Kris launched my novel (a year ago, today), my mother asked, as Entitlement was somewhat autobiographical, if Kris used autobiography in her own writing.  I’d had no idea that Kris was writing this book at the time, and she diplomatically answered that, by about the third novel, you began to get an idea of what a writer’s themes and obsessions are.  Certainly, her acclaimed novel The China Garden, has echoes of Boy, Lost, and having written two-thirds of the first draft of my third novel, I’m also finding a reflection of the themes of my previous two novels: love, belonging, and dead children (and yes, I’m disturbed by this too).

Kris is a deserving recipient, along with Angela Slatter and Patrick Holland, of a 2013 Queensland Writers Fellowship, which were awarded to three Queensland authors.  When you read the following, you understand why:

There are children in the mango tree.  Limbs against limbs, skin on bark.  They are hiding, or they are presiding, or they are reading or fighting, among the hot green and leaves singing.  It is summer, their chins and fingers run with mango juice.  They climb, they splay over branches, hands and feet reaching for safety – they are testing solidity, a sticky embrace (p. 165).

Kids, mangoes, summer: it’s quintessential Queensland.

The Fellowships were established in the wake of Campbell Newman’s butchery of the literary community by, as his fist act of office, hacking away the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards.  Perhaps, given the outcry, the government realised that Queensland needs and appreciates its authors, as these fellowships are a partnership with the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland.

When Newman carved the funding, the tireless efforts of Claire Booth, Dr Stuart Glover and other hardworking and dedicated souls in our literary community meant that the awards survived.  Through corporate sponsorship, and a crowd-funding campaign on Pozible, the awards are now the largest collection of independently managed literary prizes in Australia.  Boy, Lost has been shortlisted for the University of Queensland Non-Fiction Book Award in these collection of prizes.   However, the QLA still needs funds to support more writers and have another Pozible campaign on the go, which closes in three days.  I urge all readers to give generously to get the funding across the line, and to support Queensland’s writers.

As I was at the back of the café at Kris’ launch, I was too far away to hear or read lips or generally follow what was going on, but if I’d been sitting at the front, I would have missed the innumerable people who were wiping their eyes as she spoke.  This is an exquisitely written, moving piece of work and, even though I’m totally biased, it deserves to win at the Queensland Literary Awards on Wednesday.

Book details: Olsson, Kristina.  Boy, Lost.  Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2013.

Purchased from Avid Reader.

This is my 11th review for the Australian Women Writers Challenge.