Incubating Writers

Nearly four years ago, I answered a call out from writer Michelle Vlatkovic, via the Queensland Writers Centre, for members to form a writers group. I’d been in Brisbane for a few years but was finding it hard to meet other writers. I walked into Avid Reader to find Michelle waiting for me at a table, a copy of the story I’d sent on the table before her. As we chatted over coffee, I found that Michelle hadn’t followed the now-standard approach of going to uni to study creative writing, but had immersed herself in community radio and not-for-profit organisations. Her writing was striking in its unconventionality - abstract but full of heart at the same time.

Since that meeting the group has grown and shrunk as people come and go but we still have four core members – Michelle, myself, Pamela Greet and Rose Anderson. Pam has just finished a PhD in creative writing at the University of the Sunshine Coast and has a wry, quiet but incisive way of writing, and Rose’s tiny fiction is off-the-wall and marvelous.

The group has grown us as writers. One of the first stories Michelle and I workshopped made its way into Griffith Review. With feedback from others (including, at one point, artist and writer Julie Kearney) my story Old Honey was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize and published in adda. Michelle’s work has been published in the Review of Australian Fiction, Southerly and Gargouille. Rose’s work has been read on Quart Short  and published in a fine line, The School Magazine and 4th Floor Journal.

We haven’t met much in the last year because I fell off my horse with full-time academia and Michelle and Pam have started an exciting new venture, Salon REaD.

In response to difficulty of finding publication in literary journals, which usually only have a select readership and are highly competitive, Salon REaD showcases the work of artists and writers in the Brisbane community. It’s about growing audiences and gaining exposure at a grassroots level. Michelle and Pam have hosted a couple of salons over the past year and it’s working: the audiences are expanding, artists are selling their work and writers are finding their feet. Poet Nic Addenbrooke for example, who read at the last salon, is part of this year’s Queensland Poetry Festival.

This Saturday I’ll be reading at Salon REaD5 with Pam and Stefan Jatschka. Artist Manu, whose chalk art is at the Burrow in West End, will exhibit his work. Music will be performed by Nigel Kimber Llewellyn of the Dustbin Hoffmans.

Art by Manu.

The salon will be held at 59 Ekibin Road Annerley, and entry is by a gold coin donation to community radio station 4ZZZ. Performances and readings at the salon will also be recorded for broadcast on 4ZZZ. Hope to see you there!

Read. Think. Speak. Vote.

Show us your arts!

You’ve had a long and tiring day at work. You catch the train home and take out your phone to watch a movie, but they killed off the script writers and set designers so it’s like watching charades when you’re drunk. You get home. You switch the kettle on for a cuppa and load up your laptop to play a game, but the coders have been sent home. On the TV, there’s only the news. The newsreader is monotonous because the speechwriters were sacked. You flick through a magazine. The photos look like something you might have taken when you were eight and the page layout reminds you of your gran’s scrapbook. You think about picking up a novel, but the writers were the first to go, because they were the most outspoken. There are no longer any novels. You sigh, sit on the floor with your tea and pick at the carpet.

Welcome to a world without creativity. The one which our Liberal government is engineering.

Those of you who follow happenings in the arts might have realised that things have been kind of awful over the past few years. The fact that I’ve had to write two submissions to public inquiries in under twelve months signals that artists and writers are under siege.

Last year I protested against the savage cuts to the Australia Council for the Arts, the national funding body for artists, and the establishment of the National Program for Excellent in the Arts, which wasted money by duplicating administration and has definitely not made its decisions with transparency, as with the Australia Council. The effects of these cuts have meant that many arts organisations, particularly those that are small, are struggling to remain viable. From little things, big things grow, but we’re never going to have the next Cate Blanchett or Patrick White if there are no fertile plots of earth from which to spring.

And this time I have written a submission on the Productivity Commission’s draft report on copyright.

The Productivity Commission is arguing that we should remove Parallel Import Restrictions. Currently, books are published in Australia by Australian publishing houses. If this restriction is removed, this means that cheaper editions by international publishers can be imported and sold alongside the Australian editions.

What’s wrong with that? I hear people asking. Surely cheaper books means more readers?

The problem is that it means less money for Australian publishers, which means they can’t afford to support as many Australian writers, which means fewer Australian stories. This has already happened in New Zealand – they removed PIR a few years ago and their literary industry has been decimated. The UK and the USA have, unsurprisingly, not gone down this route.

Fewer Australian stories also means less diversity. Over the twenty years that I’ve been writing, not only have I seen writers’ incomes dwindle (my own included), but publishers have become increasingly conservative and averse to risk. This often means that voices which are not mainstream are missing out.

Why should we care?

I have read time and time again how children love to see themselves reflected in books, particularly if they have a disability, are queer, or Indigenous, or have a migrant background. Melina Marchetta, author of Looking for Alibrandi and Saving Francesca explains this situation well (and her whole blog post on this issue is worth reading too):

If these copyright rules are changed, kids today are back in a world similar to the one I grew up in; reading fantastic novels about places over there, but needing something more. I wrote Looking For Alibrandi from a selfish place. I wanted to see me on the pages of a book, because I loved reading and I loved film, but I never felt that I counted outside my extended family and my high school friends. I wanted to be part of a bigger identity.

Imagine if this situation is replicated on a larger scale, and Australians can’t even see themselves in their books at all. If we want Australian stories, we need to nurture Australian authors.

And now I hear a people clamouring to ask: why should taxpayers pay for artists? To which I reply: give me an industry which is not supported by the government in some way – what of mining, farming and manufacturing, for example? The investment in artists is miniscule (the Australia Council granted approximately $200 million in 2013/14), but the payoffs are huge: the GDP of the creative sector was valued at $86 billion in 2014. I appreciate that artists and writers are not the whole of the creative sector, but they make a significant contribution, and their prizes, grants and training are taxed, unlike sportspeople who also contribute to the entertainment industry, but get a free ride.

These cuts are indicative of a wider contempt for freedom of speech and expression. As I watch the Liberal government in action, I keep returning to novelist Anna Funder’s words when she accepted the Miles Franklin award for All That I Am (a novel about the encroachment of Nazism) the same day that Queensland Premier Campbell Newman axed the state’s literary awards: ‘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.’

Tellingly, in the new National Program for Excellence in the Arts there was no mention of funding for writers, and the cuts to the Australia Council are already having ramifications. In the recent UNESCO report on climate change, every mention of Australia (and the appalling state of the Great Barrier Reef) was excised. Journalists are referred to the police, and doctors and teachers are gagged, for speaking about asylum seekers and detention centres.

It isn’t difficult to join up the dots. In this current political climate, writers and readers are threats. As Richard Flanagan said in his speech at the Australian Book Industry Awards on 19th May 2016, ‘Who benefits from ignorance and silence other than the most powerful and the richest?’

A person who reads is a person who is informed. A person who is informed is a person who can challenge and argue. A person who challenges is a person who participates in democracy. Quelle surprise, then, that Turnbull, who has retreated miserably from his bold pitch for ideas and innovation, is invested in killing off the people who provide differing viewpoints: Australia’s writers.

The answer, as Richard Flanagan said, is simple: ‘If you care at all about books don’t vote Liberal at this election. If you care at all about what books mean, don’t vote Liberal. If you value how books can enrich lives, don’t vote Liberal. If you think Australian books matter to an Australian society, don’t vote Liberal.’

I will be voting for the Arts Party, even though I usually vote Greens. The party was set up in 2013 to support the arts industry & has the endorsement of luminaries such as Bryan Brown. Australia's writers have also spoken out angrily against the threats to our industry, and have the support of huge international names such as Jonathon Franzen and Jeanette Winterson.

You can also make a submission to the Productivity Commission. Submissions close on Friday 3rd June. You can make a submission here. You can also register to attend a public hearing.

Above all, though, we need to continue to read and to buy Australian books and support Australia’s authors. As Charlotte Wood, author of The Natural Way of Things, said in her acceptance speech for the Stella Prize:

It often feels to me that we have entered a new dark age – an age in which science is rejected in favour of greed and superstition, in which our planet is in desperate need of rescue; an age in which bigotry and religion are inseparable, and presidential candidates promise to punish women for controlling their own bodies. I feel that in the midst of this gloom we need art more than ever. Art is a candle flame in the darkness: it urges us to imagine and inhabit lives other than our own, to be more thoughtful, to feel more deeply, to challenge what we think we already know.

Read. Think. Speak. Vote. 

Disorientated

It feels as though I’ve been blown off course, and my usual faith in myself is failing me. I’m wondering if a girl who is a feminist, who has (almost) four degrees to her name, and more than her fair share of looks, style, libido and confidence is destined to scare off every eligible man who comes her way. But then I found an article in the Sydney Morning Herald which said that brains in women are an asset, not something detrimental, as centuries of patriarchy would have us believe. So maybe there is a way to navigate myself back to happiness.

Yesterday mum, dad and I went to the Hayward Gallery to see Antony Gormley’s Blind Light. I liked the figures captured and tangled in wire, and the upright men standing like calm sentinels, watching over the city from bridges and buildings. If I’d been in better spirits I would have stayed outside in the sun to watch them for a little longer, but I was tired again, and I tend not to get much out of art, despite dad being an artist and art teacher. He stalled in a room full of concrete blocks that represented the dimensions of various people, and said it was interesting how the artist had taken something organic (people) and made it inorganic (concrete blocks) and put it in an inorganic structure (the gallery). I blinked, as this would never have occurred to me, and realised that art is to dad what literature and poetry are to me. Apparently some of the blocks were eager or sad, but there were no discernible characteristics of eagerness or sadness, each block being the same slab of concrete with wood whorls on the outside and a few holes poked in it to represent orifices. The blocks stood close to one another like people in a city, which irritated me, as crowds in a city are wont to do, because I could not fit myself and my handbag through the slabs to get out for a coffee. While mum and dad dawdled, I sat in Starbucks and read Lionel Shriver’s The Post-Birthday World which, every time I pick it up, bludgeons me with its clichés and obviousness. Success seems to have poisoned Lionel’s writing.

The drawcard of the exhibition was the room full of fog, outside of which a little queue had formed. A lady was standing patiently by the door, holding a laminated sheet of paper which warned that those prone to claustrophobia or who were of a nervous disposition ought not to enter the room. Since I fell into both those categories, I held mum’s hand as we went in. Immediately, we were enveloped by a cloud of thick fog and, startled by the suddenness of it, I swore extravagantly. After a few steps I was completely surrounded by whiteness and I panicked and cried, ‘Where’s the wall?’ I stretched my arm to the right and found it, and when I calmed down I thought I’d walk a bit further, but as soon as I couldn’t see anything except that whiteness I chucked it in, and told mum I wanted to get out. Since my sight orientates me, helps me keep my balance (which was screwed by meningitis) and helps me to interact like a normal human being (by lipreading and watching body language), to lose that sense – to be blind while seeing – scared the shit out of me. I cannot cope without bearings, as opposed to M who, finding the fog calm and meditative, told me she could walk around in the box for hours.