2015: My Year of Writing

Last year was pretty tiring, but thankfully much less hectic than the year before. As soon as I came home from Rome, I hit the ground running and put together an application for a Discovery Early Career Research Award through the University of Queensland, a process that just about killed me. Happily, the hard work paid off and in a few weeks I’ll begin writing and researching an ecobiography of 19th Century botanist Georgiana Molloy.

For the rest of the year, I was teaching and writing. Below is a list of my literary happenings.

Publications

In February, my short story ‘When the World Shivered’ was published in the Review of Australian Fiction, together with Nike Sulway’s ‘The Nature of Things’. I loved doing this collaboration with Nike, especially as I was moving into a new genre and was a bit uncertain of myself. You can buy both stories for less than the price of a cup of coffee!

In March my essay on Georgiana Molloy was published in the ‘Looking West’ edition of Griffith Review. This was the first time my writing had appeared in this Queensland journal and I was very proud, and even more so when I did a reading from my essay at Avid Reader for the Griffith Review Christmas party at the end of the year.

In May, my essay ‘“Can I Do My Words?” On the Poetics of Deafness’ was published in Cordite Poetry Review. This essay was about how deafness lends itself to creativity. It was a new area for me and one that I liked exploring. I was also grateful that the editor published one of my poems, as I’m slowly moving back into this field and feel a bit rusty as a poet.

I also had two more academic papers published, one on Rosa Pread in the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature titled ‘“I actually hear you think of me”: Voices, Mediums and Deafness in the Writing of Rosa Praed’. This looks at Praed’s use of sound in her novels, and how her attitudes towards listening and deafness influenced the trajectory of her daughter Maud’s life.

An essay on Georgiana Molloy and the implications of the naming system she used for the plants she collected appeared in the Australasian Journal of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology. This was for an issue titled ‘Encountering Australia, Confronting Catastrophe’ which came out of the conference at Prato, Italy in 2014 (you might have to create a login if you want to read the essay).

‘Hearing Maud’, a piece on how I found Maud Praed’s’s medical records and a letter she wrote to her doctor, and the implications of writing as a deaf person, was published online at Meanjin in December.

In January, Arts Queensland used me as a case study to show how I had used their funding for this research on Maud.

I also penned an article for Writing Queensland, the magazine for the Queensland Writers’ Centre, on opening lines and chapters. I also recently had one on endings published in the same outlet. It’s cheating a bit to include it in this summary but I like how they go together!

Awards/Funding

I taught creative writing at the University of Queensland for the first six months of last year, and just when I thought I would have to take my begging bowl back to the beleaguered coordinators for more work, I received a grant from the Australia Council for the Arts. Hooray! This bought me six months of writing time to write a young adult novel based on my short story ‘When the World Shivered’.

That process was both a blessing and a curse. While it was heavenly to have time to write, I realised that the project wasn’t going to be just one book, but three, as it was too complex to be contained in just the one book. So now I have added these books to my pipeline of novels to be written.

Getting these grants has absolutely saved my bacon financially and allowed me to progress and evolve as a writer. I was absolutely horrified when George Brandis butchered the Australia Council by taking away $104.8 million to create a new program, the National Program for Excellence in the Arts. Due to an outcry and a senate inquiry, this program never got off the ground (and Brandis was removed when Turnbull became PM). A third of the money has been returned and the rest siphoned off for a new program (still similar to the NPEA) retitled Catalyst. The money taken from the Australia Council to establish the Book Council of Australia has not been returned and there has still not been any word of what's happening with this council. Needless to say, my disgust with politics is complete, but at least Tony Abbott is no longer with us. You can read my submission to the senate inquiry here.

In April, I found out that my story ‘Old Honey’, which was longlisted for the Elizabeth Jolley prize last year, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. This totally knocked my socks off as there were 22 shortlistees out of 4000 entries. Although I didn’t make it to the regional shortlisting, the story that won the Asia/Pacific region was published in Granta and I thought it was absolutely lovely (you can read it here).

Conferences

My conference circuit was not quite as hectic as last year’s, thankfully. In February, shortly after I stepped off the plane from Rome, I headed to Armidale and presented a paper on writing about the Great Barrier Reef at the University of New England. The conference theme was ‘The Power and the Passion: Contemporary Australian Literature and Politics’. This was one of the best conferences I’ve ever been to – it was intimate, the weather was gorgeous, we travelled to Judith Wright’s homestead and I met Helen Garner. It was also good because I got to catch up with Parental Unit & their fur children.

In the middle of the year I was invited to present at a workshop on Amateur Knowledges at the University of Wollongong. This was prior to the annual Association for the Study of Australian Literature conference, which was combined with two other literary organisations to make a Literary Studies Convention. I presented on vernacular criticism in the context of online blogging and the Australian Women Writers Challenge.

I did my undergraduate degree in English and Creative Writing at Wollongong and it was odd to be back on campus again. I also stayed with a wonderful writer, Cat Sparks, who with her partner took me out to dinner with Richard Harland, who had been one of my lecturers for Forms of the Imagination (and whose delivery I still vividly remember!).

In September I travelled to Sydney for the National Writers Congress, which was a wonderful opportunity to meet other writers and see what's happening in the industry. I wrote up my observations of the congress in this post.

Later in the year I made a jaunt to Noosa to present on Rosa Praed and mourning at a one-day Death Studies conference organised by the University of the Sunshine Coast. I loved all of the papers that I heard and wished that I’d been able to stay to hear all of them, but I had to leave early to get home to finish some work.

Research

My research this year revolved mostly around my young adult novel (well, now series) When the World Shivered. As I moved into a new genre – young adult – I needed to read up on young adult fiction. I realised how important plot and action are, and when I read Veronica Roth’s Divergent series I also realised that I wanted a strong female protagonist – not just mentally strong, but also physically strong. I want to show that people with disabilities are physically capable, but not necessarily in the ways we expect them to be.

Teaching and Workshops

The course that I taught at the University of Queensland was on Narrative. I really enjoyed teaching and my students were great. In classes I showed them how to take apart texts to see how the author had created particular effects with character or language, and facilitated workshopping that was (I hope!) sensitive and constructive.

I also presented a workshop for the Queensland Writers Centre at Goondiwindi on Writing Historical Fiction, which went very well. I was surprised though that there weren’t more participants, and I realised that I could have helped the QWC with their marketing, which I will do in future. The life of a writer is always a learning curve.

The Australian Women Writers Challenge

I continued with my rewarding role as contributing editor in the area of diversity for the Australian Women Writers Challenge, which was established in 2012 to redress the bias in gender reviewing and raise awareness of Australian women’s writing.

I organised a spotlight on Australian women writers of ethnic heritage in May, which featured guest posts by author and graphic novelist Queenie Chan, Marisa Wikramanayake and Maxine Beneba Clarke.

Then in October I arranged a focus on lesbian/queer women writers, with posts by Francesca Rendle-Short, Lee Winter, Tricia Dearborn and Inga Simpson.

I was also pleased to feature a guest post by Gayle Kennedy, author of the wonderful and funny Me, Antman and Fleabag.

This year I’m planning to arrange a spotlight on writers with disability, as well as more posts by Indigenous writers.

The Year Ahead

My creative writing will probably slow down dramatically this year, as I’ll only be working on that for one day a week, on Sundays. However, from experience I’ll be a more efficient writer, as the less time I have, the more I do (which is why I like to keep myself under pressure!).

I’m planning to get back to my poems and to write a novella based on my experiences in Rome. I’m currently rewriting my memoir on Rosa and Maud Praed (it wasn’t working as it was too academic). That will be finished by Easter, and then I’ll return to The Sea Creatures. Frankly I can’t wait; I’ve missed that novel terribly. The draft for that should be finished by the end of 2016, and in 2017 I’ll return to When the World Shivered.

2016 is going to be busy and fabulous!

Submission to Inquiry into Arts Budget Cuts

RE: Impact of the 2014 and 2015 Commonwealth Budget decisions on the Arts

Dear Madam/Sir,

My name is Jessica White and I’m a writer and researcher based in Brisbane. As of next year, I will have been writing for twenty years. My first novel, A Curious Intimacy, was published by Penguin in 2007 and won a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist award, was shortlisted for the Dobbie award for debut women writers and the Western Australia Premier’s awards, and longlisted for the international IMPAC award. My second novel, Entitlement, appeared in 2012, also published by Penguin. My short fiction has been published in a range of literary journals, including Southerly, Island, Overland and the Review of Australian Fiction. I was recently shortlisted for the 2015 Commonwealth Short Story Prize which attracted nearly 4000 entries from around the world.

I am also a researcher and non-fiction writer. My PhD at Birkbeck College, University of London, was funded by a scholarship from the University of Melbourne. I have been shortlisted for the Calibre essay prize and Peter Blazey Prize for life writing, and my essays have been published in Griffith Review, Southerly, Island and Cordite as well as national and international academic journals.

I have been deaf since I was four, when I lost most of my hearing to meningitis. My disability was responsible for my decision to become a writer and it has also strongly influenced my subject matter and style. I am passionate about giving space to voices which have been overlooked, including those of people with disability.

In 2013 I was the recipient of my first ever grant, $5000 from Arts Queensland, to further my research on 19th century Queensland novelist Rosa Praed. In the course of that research, I located new archival material in England relating to her daughter Maud, who was deaf. This included a 17 page letter Maud wrote to her doctor and, given the history of the suppression of the voices of the deaf, this find was of immense significance. My research on Maud has been woven into a memoir which will help general audiences understand the history and impact of deafness, which is surprisingly little known.

This grant gave me much-needed recognition, particularly in Queensland where I was a relative newcomer. In 2014 I received my first grant from the Australia Council for the Arts ($9,820) from their Artists with Disability programme to write a novel, The Sea Creatures, which is almost completed. In June 2015, I was fortunate to receive a New Work grant from the Australia Council ($15,750) to write a young adult novel, When the World Shivered. Both of these books are about disability, and once they are published I will take them into schools and use them to prompt discussions about disability, and to show that the lives of people with disability are of worth. I am not using these grants to write esoteric pieces of art, but to help knit together our social fabric.

I have been applying to the Australia Coucil for funding since 2008 and these grants were from my 11th and 13th applications respectively. Although they are not large grants, their impact on my life cannot be understated. They have given me the time to write and mean that I do not have to take on additional teaching work to survive (something that, because of my disability, makes me too exhausted to write). They have given me financial stability, which means that I can think about having a family before it’s too late (something I’ve put off because the life of an artist, let alone one with a disability, is precarious at the best of times). They have also allowed me to become financially independent of my parents, who supported me repeatedly while I found my feet as a writer and learned to manage with a disability.

My tenacity in applying for these funds came from desperation: without that money, I would not have been able to write. I have heard many artists say that they have been put off by the competitiveness of the Australia Council’s application process for funding, and I don’t blame them; it is no easy thing to be rejected year after year. Yet I often wonder about these people, and the books they would have written or the art they would have created. How much more culturally enriched would Australia be if the Australia Council had the money to fund these artists?

You can see, then, that George Brandis’s cut of $104.8 million from the already-tight budget of the Australia Council will have huge ramifications, not least by limiting the voices of emerging writers and those with disability. The arts in Australia are in threat of becoming homogenised.

In addition, the new funding mechanism, the National Programme for Excellence in the Arts (NPEA), does not have the same arms-length peer review process as the Australia Council and decisions will be up to the Minister. These undemocratic overtones are alarming, but not unsurprising from a government whose language ever more closely resembles the doublespeak of George Orwell’s dystopian novel about totalitarianism, 1984. In 2014, for example, there was a budget crisis, but in 2015 the Arts Minister thinks it fit to waste money but duplicating administrative processes through the NPEA.

In 2012, Anna Funder won the Miles Franklin Literary Award for All That I Am, a novel about the insidious creep of Nazism in the 1930s. In her acceptance speech, she criticised the then Queensland Premier Campbell Newman who had just binned the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards (one of his first acts of parliament). ‘I have spent my professional life studying totalitarian regimes and the brave people who speak out against them,’ Funder said, ‘And the first thing that someone with dictatorial inclinations does is to silence the writers and the journalists.’ It is telling that there is no mention of literature or writing in the NPEA guidelines.

I have been deaf for as long as I can remember and I know what silence and silencing can mean. Artists reflect the culture that is around them. A government that hobbles the creativity of artists by cutting off funding is a government that does not want to listen to what is said of the society it moulds.

After World War Two, my relative Patrick White returned to Australia from England. In 1958 he published an essay, ‘The Prodigal Son’, in which he wrote of his experiences of returning. He commented, ‘In all directions stretched the Great Australian Emptiness, in which the mind is the least of possessions.’ Given the attenuation of the Australia Council through budget cuts, and the meagre amounts offered to artists in general, we are at risk of returning to the culture of which Patrick White wrote. Furthermore, what chance does Australia have of finding a new Nobel Prize for Literature winner when the NPEA guidelines make no mention of literature or writing? How will we find the emerging voices of Indigenous people, migrants, people with disability, or queer/gay writers when many of these minorities, as you can see from my own experience, are just struggling to get by, let alone make their art? Is the voice of Australia to become one that, as Patrick White was panicked to find, merely exalts the ‘average’?

As an emerging author with a disability, the Australia Council has irrevocably changed my life. It distresses me deeply that so many other artists may not have the funding they need to practice their craft or acquire recognition. I urge you to reverse the cuts to the Australia Council – it is so little money, and yet to Australia’s artists and Australian culture, its worth is inestimable.