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.

On Journeys

I’ve made it back from India, where I was battered about with culture shock, but otherwise had an excellent time.  My red sony eReader was fantastic, and saved me carrying around the brick-size book five of Game of Thrones, and Edith Wharton’s The Reef which, even for a Wharton fan, was supremely disappointing.  I also read Willa Cather’s My Antonia, a recommendation from H., and loved the distilled descriptions of the American countryside.  I’ll write up my travels in another post, probably when I get to Parental Unit’s in a few weeks, as I remain waylaid by exhaustion.  In the meantime, I have a stack of books on my desk accruing library fines as they await reviewing for the Australian Women Writer’s Challenge, and it seems apt to pick out two which are about journeys.

I picked up Mardi McConnochie’s The Voyagers as she’d been mentioned in James Bradley’s blog, and I loved the cover.  It’s the story of Stead and Marina, who meet briefly while Stead, a sailor, has shore leave.  After three days, Stead leaves, and not long after Marina sails to London for her musical career, with Stead’s promise that he’ll meet her there at New Year’s Eve.  However, Marina’s career is thwarted, the second world war comes, and the lovers spend years trying to find one another.

It took me a while to get into the novel because the writing didn’t grab me, but once I reached the end, I found images lingering afterwards: Marina playing piano at a club in Shanghai, waiting for Stead while Singapore fell, trying to survive in Changi prison camp with an adopted baby.  There must have been a wealth of research behind those scenes but it was held lightly; perhaps almost too lightly, I thought, as I craved more detail and depth.

The story didn’t leave me with much to think about, aside from these rather beautiful scenes and one other aspect: Marina’s sister, Bea.  An artist living in Paris, she meets Marina in London and takes care of her for a while.  When Marina loses her place at the music school after Bea has done all she can for her, Bea’s patience snaps.  

‘I have to work,’ Bea insisted.  ‘My work is my life.  And that means making sacrifices.’

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Marina said.  ‘What have you ever had to sacrifice?’

Bea’s face crumpled a little. ‘I’ve made sacrifices,’ she said.

‘Like what?’ Marina demanded.  But Bea just shook her head angrily, refusing to be drawn on the subject.  (128)

In the context, the suggestion is that Marina has given up her own child in order to paint.

The internal conflict between an artistic life and motherhood is one that fascinates and concerns me, and I was disappointed that Bea’s story wasn’t returned to, or her dilemma elaborated on.  Instead, all we have of her dedication and sacrifice is Stead’s observation of her features:  ‘She was older than Marina, with a sterner cast of feature and a very determined jaw.  Her eyes were brown, sharp and serious’ (82).  However, this was Marina’s journey, rather than her sister’s, so perhaps I was expecting too much in this sense.

The story is also saved from becoming a predictable war-torn romance through its shifting narrative, moving between Stead and Marina’s voices, and backwards and forwards in time, with Stead’s search for Marina becoming a board from which to dive back into the past of Marina’s story.  Ultimately, Marina comes across as the more interesting character, her estrangement from music mirroring her loss of self which, in Changi, became a means of expressing a newer, tougher, woman: ‘something inside her began to unravel, and then to knit itself into something new’ (240).  Meawhile Stead appears well-meaning, but hopeless, and whose hopelessness, in causing so much heartache, becomes malign.

In all, although it was light, I really quite enjoyed this novel, and am tempted to look up some of McConnachie’s earlier works.

Tara June Winch’s Swallow the Air (2006) won the David Unaipon award, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Indigenous Writing and was shortlisted for the Age Book of the Year.  It’s a series of short stories narrated by May, a young Indigenous girl, as she grows into adulthood.  Her father has disappeared, her mother dies, her aunt is an alcoholic, her brother leaves home, and May sets out on her own.  Despite abuse, poverty and sadness, the world around her is rendered beautifully through Winch’s poetic writing.  Sometimes this is discomforting, such as in ‘My Bleeding Palm’, where a scene of violence is hinted at through the press studs down the side of a man’s tracksuit pants.  The popping sound they make reminds May of ‘Bubble wrap.  Lemonade burps as Billy and me push each plastic blister between finger and thumb, choking on each other’s laughter.  Popping giggles silence violence grunts’ (36).  The juxtaposition of lovely memories with the violence of the scene serves to heighten its horror, and far more effectively than if it had been described in detail.

At times the lusciousness of the language becomes a little irritating because the metaphors jump around a bit, as with the first chapter, ‘Swallow the Air’, where a dead stingray is likened to ‘a plastic raincoat sleeping on the stone’, ‘a fat man in a tight suit after a greedy meal’ and ‘an angel fallen’, while its tail is a ‘garden hose’ and its blood oozes ‘paint like liquid, the colour of temple chimes’.  There’s just too much going on.  At other times, however, the imagery is controlled and works efficiently, such as in the lines ‘We find sherbet-coloured coral clumps, sponge tentacles and sea mats, and bluebottles – we bust them with a stick’ (22).  This operates almost at the level of poetry, with the run-on lines and alliteration stopped abruptly by segmenting the sentence with a dash, mirroring the whacking of bluebottles.  Winch’s characters are also wonderfully delineated through moving stories, such as her mother scrimping to buy a set of saucepans from a travelling salesman.

This is May’s story about finding herself, her mother’s people, and her home.  By the end of her journey she understands that ‘The land is belonging, all of it for all of us.  The river is that ocean, these clouds are that lake, these tears are not only my own.  They belong to the whales, to Joyce … to Billy, to Aunty, to my nannas, to their nannas, to their great nannas’ neighbours.  They belong to the spirits’ (183).  It’s a testament to the will of Indigenous people that they struggle to rebuild their families fractured by white settlement, and they try to recover that wholeness described by May, and that they continue do so after centuries of ill-treatment, as an old Indigenous man says to May when describing the abuse perpetrated by Catholic priests on ‘the little fellas … Who’s gunna speak up for em little fellas?  Other people don’t understand, when that bad spirit happens to family, it stays in the family, when we born we got all out past people’s pain too.  It doesn’t just go away like they think it does’ (170).

Both May and Marina show their readers that, by journeying through difficult terrains, and by persisting despite heartache, one can reach a stronger sense of self.  Incidentally, both books are a great read if you’re ever on the road, or in the air.

On Creative Writing Courses

Recently, in Southerly’s blog (which I always enjoy reading), I came across a post by Belinda Castles on the value of creative writing courses.  Belinda is author of Falling Woman, The River Baptists (which won the Vogel, and was awarded Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist in 2008), and Hannah & Emil, recently released by Allen & Unwin.  I’ve put this novel on my reading list but, given the amount of writing/paid work/travel I have to do between now and the end of the year, I probably won’t get to it until Christmas.  

In her post, Castles, who is a teacher of creative writing, gently refutes some of the comments made by Lisa Pryor in an article titled ‘A novel idea turns creative writing into an academic racket’.  Pryor refers to an article in The Guardian containing advice from writers, in which none of them suggest doing a creative writing course to get ahead.  I was surprised to find I had this self-same article rattling around in a box beside my desk, for H had sent it to me while he was still in England.  I have asterisked little bits, viz. ‘Have regrets.  They are fuel.  On the page they flare into desire’ – Geoff Dyer; ‘If you have to read, to cheer yourself up read biographies of writers who went insane’ – Colm Toibin; and ‘It’s doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction’ – Jonathon Franzen (Franzie, you must know this downright wrong).

Pryor speculates that these writers’ failure to endorse creative writing courses is ‘because they know that if you can't work out what good writing is by reading widely, if you need it spelled out slowly with the benefit of a circle of plastic chairs and a whiteboard, you lack the mettle to be a great novelist.’   Her complaint is largely regarding ‘the baggage that goes with luring writers into universities’.  Although she has no problem with writers striving to get money any way they can, she concludes that ‘[s]tudents may not realise when they enrol that that the greatest contribution they will be making to writing is providing charitable financial support to the writers who teach them.’

Castles acknowledges these criticisms, but notes that her own experiences weren’t in accordance with them.  While undertaking her PhD in creative writing, she was stimulated and challenged by her peers and the variety in the work they produced, while her contact with academics the ‘careful supervision of long projects is an echo from the old days of close and continuing involvement with publishers’.

Pryor writes that there is a risk of creating homogenised writing if writers are formed in universities, but Castles suggested not, writing that ‘There is an incredible spark that comes from being in a room with people from many different backgrounds writing about fascinating and urgent subjects.’  

You cannot teach someone to write.  In my opinion, the only way to become a good writer is to read incessantly, write obsessively, and observe.  However I do believe that creative writing courses are good starting points, most certainly for me.  I was a young, sheltered country girl with a disability – there was no way I could have taken a year out and starved myself to write a novel.  In fact, the disability was largely the reason why I decided on creative writing, as a careers advisor suggested I needed some way of processing my frustrations.  I enrolled in Creative Writing at Wollongong and, because I wasn’t getting enough stimulation, took on a Bachelor of Arts majoring in English as well.

What I learned in that undergraduate degree was discipline and exercise.  John Scott was my prose teacher in second year and Tony Macris in third year, while Alan Wearne my poetry teacher in my second, third and Honours years.  John was often lugubrious, but sometimes dropped gems into his musings.  ‘I suppose if I wrote the way a professional footballer trained,’ he trundled, ‘I’d be way ahead of my game by now.’  

I took that on board, and I wrote and I wrote and I wrote.  After the summer between second and third years, he asked, ‘Have you been drinking or something?’

‘No, just writing,’ I replied, a little embarrassed.

Tony Macris and Alan Wearne also exposed me to different genres every week, so that my writing became elastic as I tried out new forms.  I wish I still had the luxury of time and money to practice like this.  As Belinda writes, ‘For three years, my real job was being a writer. If you have the chance to do the same, and know that you will do something valuable with that rare time, space and encouragement, take that privilege, and make something with it.’

This was largely why I did the Masters at the University of Technology, Sydney.  I finished at Wollongong with first class in double Honours and a university medal, so I could have gone on to a PhD, but I knew that if this happened I wouldn’t be able to write my novel.  So I agree with Pryor that academia is one way for writers to stay alive and write, for I had an Australian Postgraduate Award to write that book.  Castles also observed that writers move in and out of academia.  In my case, my movements are prompted finances (ie I have to teach when I run out of money, which I’ll need to do next year as I’m flat broke, which also means I won’t be producing much work) and boredom (I thrive on the stimulation of new ideas, and universities are where I find them). 

Yet one thing neither Castles nor Pryor comment upon is the possibility of creating professional networks through universities.  Through my Masters course I made a good friend who put me in touch with an editor, who put me in touch with my now-agent.  I’m still in contact with another two friends from that course, and they have both provided invaluable feedback on my novels.  In turn, I also workshop their work, and let them know about any publishing opportunities that I come across.  

Castles also notes that she learned to frame her criticism in writing workshops, a trait which helps her as an editor.  I would argue this is definitely a benefit of such courses, but for me, the real means by which I learned to analyse and review texts was through my BA in English Lit.  I also love the mental acrobatics of literary criticism, and to date my tutoring has been in this field, rather than creative writing.

Thus I was delighted to be asked by Elizabeth Lhuede to participate in next year’s Australian Women Writers challenge by keeping an eye on texts and reviews about diversity.  I’ve almost finished a review of several books by Indigenous and white women writers about Indigenous subjects, and will write another on diversity in the 2012 Challenge by the end of November.

Finally, I was left thinking of a comment author Louise Doughty made in her non-fiction book, A Novel in One Year. (Interestingly, Doughty canvasses the same arguments in the above two articles in their UK context here). I’ve lost the reference to this (or rather, it’s in one of the many folders in my bookshelf), but essentially she was saying that people take up tennis or piano playing because they enjoy it, so why should those who want to write be any different?  Those who want to go on to succeed as writers or winners of the Australian Open will, because that’s what they were born to do, regardless of their circumstances.