Chirruping

So.  I have joined Twitter.  Which I disparagingly referred to as Twatter before I signed up to see what was going on with the Qld Premier’s Awards fracas and stepped into a crowd of smouldering writers of withering wit, and couldn’t understand why I hadn’t done it before.  Here were my people!  Such clever, funny, witty writers having convos with each other, posting wry merriment and links aplenty to interesting articles, and (cutely) going a bit nuts during qanda.  It was like Facebook but with brains. It was recommended that I shouldn’t sign up while I was writing because it was distracting.  To a degree, that was useful advice. However, while I spent two lonely weeks glued to my desk doing a rewrite of my novel while all my friends were cavorting on their Easter hols, Twitter saved me from going mad.  There were other writers out there, also stapled to a table, also checking Twitter in their tea breaks!  That made me feel better.

While Stephen Marche charts the ambivalence towards social media in this article, I wholeheartedly endorse it.  But then, I’m deaf and rarely use the phone, so Facebook is how I keep up with my friends.  Likewise, as someone who finds it difficult to network (also because of said deafness), and isn’t properly affiliated with an academic institution though I still inhabit the academic world, Twitter is probably the first time I’ve ever felt connected to a community of thinkers and writers.

Should you be of the feathered kind, or if you’re new to Twitter and would like to take flight with the flock, I can be followed here: @ladyredjess, or click the link at the top right of this page.

A Jaunt to Sydney

Recently I was invited to fly to Sydney to attend the ceremony for the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship awards, as I had put in an application for the prose category.  The Scholarships, valued at $20,000 each, are awarded annually to artists age 35 and under in nine categories, which are offered over alternate years.  This year there were applicants for architecture, ballet, instrumental, poetry and prose. It was, to my delight, a cocktail event held at the Museum of Contemporary Art.  I zipped up my long, sweeping Sacha Drake silk halterneck which makes me feel like a heroine in a 1940s black and white film when I gather up the skirts, lashed on some red Dior lipstick, and wrapped my grandmother’s pearls around my wrist.  Despite having packed a hairdryer that took up most of my suitcase, I didn’t have time to use it because the plane had been delayed by bad weather, so I still looked bedraggled.

The rain continued, so the view of the Opera House and the bridge from the MCA’s terrace was somewhat grey, but it was a lovely event.  As I went on my own I met new people, including Rachel Quigley, who won the prose section a few years ago; Kate Middleton, the Sydney city poet; Bernadette Brennan of the University of Sydney, who was one of the judges for prose (along with Stuart Glover of UQ and Sue Martin of LaTrobe) and who I had passed at ASAL conferences but never met; Michael Barraclough, who won the architecture section and was off to the Architecture Association in London which, being affiliated with the London Consortium where I did my PhD, was where I sometimes passed boozy evenings in the bar; and Emma Schwarcz, an editor who had chucked in her job to write and who, along with myself, was shortlisted in our category.  Christopher Currie, author of the extremely polished The Ottoman Motel, was the well-deserved winner.  He was currently unavailable, Bernadette explained, because he was on his honeymoon and had no reception.  And then more connections emerged: Emma used to work for my publisher when they were at Hamish Hamilton, and I realized I’d had dinner with the wife of the poetry winner, Michelle Dickinoski, one cool evening in Auchenflower when strawberries were in season.

I stayed on at B&T’s in Surry Hills for a few days, looking after their pair of korats while B&T went on some insane bike ride in Canberra.  Being seven months old, the cats were still full of kittenish exuberance, which extended to chewing my hairbrush, jumping on my back and defecating in the tools beneath the staircase.  However, they were forgiven when I stumbled home extremely intoxicated after dinner with a friend and passed out ill in bed, and one of them curled up against my sore tummy and, when he finally finished his toilette, went to sleep.

I lived in Sydney for four years before I went to London, and was at Wollongong for three years before that and was often travelling up to visit my sister or friends, so I know the place well.  This was the city where I first fell in love, then left the man behind to go to London.  For years afterwards whenever I flew back, the places where we had been still breathed with memories of him.  This time, watching the good-looking men and stylish women in Surry Hills, and walking through Federation Way which I’ve always loved, with sunlight shining starkly through the Port Jackson figs and my forebear Patrick White’s old house just down the road, and being loved by so many good friends who are also overachievers and make me feel normal, I was sorely tempted to move back.

I was also delighted to find that the model for the abovementioned London Consortium has been picked up by the Writing and Society Research Centre of the University of Western Sydney to create The Sydney Consortium.  Their MA in Cultural and Creative Practice, taught and overseen by the superlative staff of the Writing and Society Centre,  is designed to create a dialogue between writing, the arts, and theoretical approaches to culture. This blend between the creative and critical is also the cornerstone of much of what I produce so I applaud the initiative.  It also signals a willingness to use writing to address, and become involved with, Sydney’s culture — an approach which Queensland’s premier clearly considers redundant.

I love Brisbane’s old Queenslanders, the gorgeous blue sky, lush palms and bougainvilleas, and the jacarandas opening in early summer and lining the river.  After working like a dog for some fifteen years, this is the city in which I have finally learned to relax and socialise (not something that necessarily comes easily to a deaf person).  I’ve always loved the arts scene here too – it seemed to symbolize the brightness and openness of the city, that it was a place that was moving forward.  But now the premier, having stripped our writers of their awards and foreboding the promise of more cuts to the arts, has signaled we are to become a cultural backwater again.  Of course the writers and artists of Brisbane will not be defeated and already my beloved Avid Reader is rallying to do something about it.  And at least, as I said to H., we are not in Stalinist Russia, where Nadezdha Mandelstam memorized her husband Osip Mandelstam’s poetry to preserve it, as to write it down was too dangerous, but still, I am so disheartened.

The Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards (or lack thereof)

I’ve been extremely unsettled lately, and have contemplated moving interstate more than once (basically I will go to anyone who can give me a postdoc).  With our premier having, as his first move in government, signaled his utter disdain for writers by axing the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards, this impulse has only strengthened.  In an attempt to address a budget deficit of approximately $4.6 billion, Campbell Newman has recouped $244,475 - the equivalent, as author of young adult fiction James Roy notes, of 5 cents in a thousand dollars.  Newman’s rationale is to ‘revitalise frontline services and lower the cost of living for all Queenslanders’.  However, TLC Books in Manly points out that the savings represent 18.3 cents per person in the state.  How, exactly, a saving of nearly 20c per person might help Newman’s proposal to lower the cost of living is a little beyond me. And what will Newman do with this meagre pouch of coins?  Plant some shrubbery and fill in some potholes, perhaps?  Do a little rebranding of logos?  Pay for some PR for damage control after having pissed off a community of writers who, when angry, tend to, uhm, vent through their writing?  Their ire had the topic trending on Twitter yesterday evening, blogs aplenty have sprouted, while Sharon Johnston has arranged a petition to have the awards reinstated, which I urge all to sign.

To sum up some of the blogs and articles I’ve been canvassing, Ben Eltham, writing in Crikey, notes that the move had little to do with money, and much to do with politics (namely, sticking two fingers up at his predecessors), while his sister, Queensland Writers’ Centre Chief Executive, Kate Eltham, indicated that his government has, in the same breath, broken an election promise.  Matthew Condon, author of Brisbane, writes that this will repeal the efforts of Queenslanders over the past 25 years to transform the state from a laughing stock into a vibrant literary and arts community.  Stuart Glover, University of Queensland academic, discusses the history and usefulness of the awards, concluding that Newman ‘has signalled that he doesn’t understand the way artists and writers help us make a civilized society, and the way they help us discuss and negotiate who we are.  Newman may not like to read, but he is mistaken to think that we should not encourage others to do so.’ Meanwhile journalist and author Andrew Stafford offers some much needed light relief.

James Roy also discusses the response from the public at large represented in the comments sections of online articles and shows that many perceive writers to be bludgers and that the money should be put towards something more ‘useful’.  As he points out, ‘these views reveal a gross misunderstanding of how difficult it is to survive as a writer’.  Only a handful of writers can afford to live from their work, and often forgo the assumed trappings of middle-class life (car, house, superannuation and, god forbid, a regular income).  Literary awards, as Kate Middleton observes, may not seem like much, but for writers they represent a fortune.  This is why Newman seems so mean-spirited, and this is why I’m angry: $250,000 might cover the cost of one high-ranking staff member in his office, but it denigrates the aspirations of thousands of people who slog their guts out to produce stories that might, heaven forbid! be read by Newman’s frontline staff at the end of a long day.  It also stings that ‘no other events had been identified for the LNP Government's cost savings program at this stage’, most likely because, as John Birmingham has rightly indicated, Newman wasn’t going to lose any votes by attacking the arts community

However, the ramifications are far wider.  As Condon puts it, ‘What Premier Newman doesn’t seem to comprehend is that the awards are worth infinitely more than their dollar value. They speak to children dreaming of a career in books and writing, to working artists, to readers, to a community’s cultural health and to a national creative agenda.’

Writers don’t expect much.  We write because we love what we do, and because we can’t exist any other way.  To take away a set of awards that encourages us to write about who we are, to help others dream, to establish Queensland’s identity, to offer solace and pleasure, to give us some recognition that those long and lonely hours with next to no remuneration might be worth something, is a mean and hollow move.

And for me the dream is this: packing a suitcase so I can skip town to a place that values its writers more than a stretch of tarmac.

The Stella Prize

On International Women’s Day I finished up at work, caught the bus into town and walked down the main street of West End in my pale pink Alannah Hill shoes with bows, while my silk frock rippled against my calves.  At Avid Reader, I bought yet another copy of Anna Funder’s All That I Am for a friend, gratefully accepted a glass of wine from Fiona and sat outside to listen to a forum on the Stella Prize. Still in the making, the prize will award $50,000 annually to a woman writer with Australian citizenship, in any genre.  It is intended to raise the profile of women writers and increase their readership.

It was another humid Brisbane evening and the palpable indignation of the speakers and audience made things even warmer.  Here was Susan Johnson, whose writing I have always loved and whose blog I used to read when I was miserable in London, brandishing some thoroughly depressing pie charts from Vida showing the number of women’s publications vs men’s publications in respected literary outlets in 2011; here was Anita Heiss declaring from the audience, ‘I don’t want to be pigeon-holed as a black woman writer, I just want to be a writer’; here was Ben Law attending to the absence of women’s representation in culture through an anecdote of Triple J’s Hottest 100 of all time which showcased no female artists whatsoever; and here was Krissy Kneen saying that her sexy books are marketed with pink covers whereas a male author writing about sex has a more serious cover.  So, it was asked, do we need an award just for women writers?  Then consensus was that yes, we do.

To me, it was blatantly obvious after the discussion that evening that a culture exists in Australia which women’s intellectual and artistic contributions are diminished or made invisible, and that we need the award to draw attention to this.  Some might argue that market forces push women’s work to the margins.  Books such as Carrie Tiffany’s finely crafted Mateship with Birds, with its muted love story and gentle renditions of domesticity, would be completely swamped in a market that favours, as Mary Philip noted, the weighty non-fiction tome.  Yet if the readership isn’t alerted to the beauty of quiet texts such as Tiffany’s, how are these texts to gain the attention they deserve?

As someone who is disabled, I know full well that unless you get up and make a noise, nothing will happen or, more likely, people will walk on you.  If you don’t jump and shout, if you just accept the status quo, then society remains blind to its flaws.  Naturally, such challenging might result in stripping the status quo of its privileges, which is undoubtedly why, as Ben Law pointed out, when four male bands in a row win an Indie music award, it’s called a meritocracy, but when a woman is a winner, it’s a conspiracy.

The effects of such shouting were apparent that evening.  One member of the audience noted that she often bought books by female authors as gifts for her female friends, and books by male authors for her male friends.  She hadn’t realised it until that point, and from now on, she said, she was going to buy books by female authors for her male friends.  Consciousness raising might be a dated and unfashionable concept, but clearly it still works.

There are some however, such as MJ Hyland and Sonya Hartnett, who are completely opposed to the idea.  Mention was made of the anonymity of Hyland’s name.  Are we, I wondered, returning to the days of Acton, Ellis and Currer Bell?  Concerns were raised, too, that such an award might trivialise women’s women by consigning it to a corner.  Yet, as another audience member pointed out, women can still win awards for both genders and besides, when was getting winning more money ever a problem?  Male authors might complain that they’re missing out, but given Vida’s stats showing how well they’re doing, I don’t know how strong an argument this is.

I’ve been reading a slew of Australian fiction lately, and I noticed that all of it, aside from Alex Miller’s awful Autumn Laing, was written by women: Gillian Mears’ Foal’s Bread, Eva Hornung’s Dog Boy, Anna Funder’s All that I Am, the abovementioned Mateship with Birds, Sophie Cunningham’s Geography and Bird, Kalinda Ashton’s The Danger Game, Melissa Lucashenko’s Steam Pigs, Janette Turner Hospital’s Forecast: Turbulence and Favell Parrot’s Past the Shallows.  I’ve been trying to work out if this is because I actively seek fiction by women or I just like their subject matter; most likely it’s both.  Given the quality of these books, I think that an award to encourage the production of more of them can only be a good thing.

And then, as we filtered back into the bookstore, P stepped through the doors, diverted me from Anna Krien’s Quarterly essay and we Jam Jarred across the road on a salad with chilli-flavoured popcorn.

On Creative Practice

My father's first studio was the laundry, with the rifles for roo shooting hanging on the wall, an old-fashioned meat mincer clamped to the bench and his sloping desk squashed against the door to outside. Often, bored during the school holidays, I sat on the washing machine and watched him paint. Once we looked through the windows to see Mum, who had just woken from a nap, yawning as she pulled out weeds near the tankstand. I, who must have been 6 or so, asked, 'How can she be tired if she's just had a sleep?' Dad replied, 'She's still waking up.' I found this an unscientific and unsatisfactory answer, but even then I sensed my father's moods and knew when a conversation wouldn't continue.

A few years later Dad built his own studio, and H and I would often go there after dinner to draw on the discarded pieces of cardboard from which he cut his mounts. Dad played LPs and tapes from musicals as he painted. H drew cartoons which he cut out and stuck on the wall in our bedroom next to his Halley's Comet poster. As with my piano playing, I became technically proficient and was able to copy anything, but I lacked H's imagination and flair.

My sister, brother and I all studied art at school, and later Dad left the farm to teach art himself, littering the house with art books and study notes. It was because of this education — formal and informal — that I was able to recognise the community of artists featured in Alex Miller's new novel, Autumn Laing, as being loosely based upon the Modernists at Heide. As I lay on my red velvet couch reading, I thought I was in for an exciting ride. However, as I turned the pages, I became increasingly disappointed by the lack of momentum and dull writing, and found myself skimming the text, which I rarely do. There was an absence of detail grounding the work and, breaking the most fundamental rule in the writing book, far too much 'telling' over 'showing'.

The novel is the memoir of Autumn Laing, written, she says, to put Edith, the wife of her lover Pat Donlon, back into the picture, to 'give her portrait the first place in this testament' (21). While attention is paid to Edith at first, the work is overtaken by Autumn's focus on Pat Donlon, relegating Edith and her art to the margins as she had been all along.

After Miller's perfectly pitched Lovesong, with its delicate rendition of how a woman's desperation for a child eroded a relationship, the depiction of infertility in this work was a caricature. Following 'a period of aggressive and exaggerated sexual behaviour' in her late teens (178), Autumn is unable to have children. When she finds that Pat Donlon is to father a child with Edith, her reaction is to knock over her wine glass and slam the door, while 'a moment later her wail came from the deep night, “I hate men!”' (210). Continuing in this hyperbolic vein, Autumn's carers, a nurse and her biographer Adeli, have breasts like 'great melons diving about like bloated water bombs' (185) and 'trembling balloons of naked flesh' (187), an unsubtle affront to Autumn's angularity and infertility.

Each of these complaints could of course be explained by the voice and biases of Autumn, but a writer who has published his tenth novel should be capable of shaping better sentences than 'I hated him. I wanted him to make love to me. To lose himself in a wild torment of passion for me' (369). Mills and Boon territory, indeed.

Aside from allowing me to recognise the loose skeleton upon which Autumn Laing hung, my father's creative practice has been instrumental in showing me how to become, and to live, as an artist. Although he doesn't have the all-consuming passion and ambition that I do (for he would, ultimately, prefer to be renovating houses than painting), his art does seem to tug at him the same way that writing never leaves me alone.

At home for Christmas, when he was painting and I was writing, we came out for coffee (or rather, he heard me in the kitchen and came out for someone to talk to).

'It's so boring,' he complained. 'Why do we do it?'

'Because it's a vocation,' I replied.

The word comes from the Latin word vocare, meaning 'to call'. It's a voice you can't ignore. Certainly, if I don't write, I start to feel a bit shitty and ill, and other writers I have spoken to feel this way as well.

Dad also taught me the importance of a single-minded dedication to a cause. His father once said to him, 'There's no such word as can't', and he relayed this to me in turn as I was growing up, as he did the phrase, 'If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.' For a stubborn little girl who always wanted to be the best but was sometimes thwarted by a disability, these mantras helped drive me on. Even now, when I despair that my friends have houses and cars and I am walking away from the white picket fences and down the dusty road to post yet another grant application, I remind myself that I can never lose faith in my capacity to succeed. To do so would be to give up my raison d'être.

In a piece of poetic dovetailing, my father's art supports my own, for my parents help to put a roof over my head so that I can work part-time and keep writing. Likewise, my childhood on the property he worked with his brothers has given rise to almost all my themes, and the character of the artist/farmer has appeared in at least one short story, and will feature in novel #6.

Dad's paintings are available here. If you're stuck for gifts for weddings, birthdays or generally esoteric occasions, these will fit the bill. Plus Mum keeps at him to clean out his drawers, so divesting them of paintings is always helpful for household harmony.

Latest Favourite Things

It's almost Friday, at the end of another week of writing (a poem and first draft of an essay), work (report writing for a research project), running, dancing, skating and sceptics group. I just can't ever seem to get enough sleep and am about to cry with tiredness, so to get through to the weekend, I thought I should post (a la The Sound of Music) some of my latest favourite things:

1. Morning runs on writing days.
2. My giant sun/rain umbrella with clouds on the inside.
3. My latest acquisitions from Nude Footwear, being some subtly shiny Endless Love peep toes which I shall pair with my Collette Dinnigan frock, and Silverdrops in pink which I will wear with my floaty Sacha Drake dress. Every time I find a new Nude style on StyleTread my heart beats a little faster.
4. The silhouette of the kentia palm against the cream blinds when I stagger up at 6am. There has to be some kind of reward for a non-morning person getting up this early.
5. My new rollerblades. It's hard to look like a girl in skates, helmet and knee, elbow and wrist pads, but I have sourced socks with tiny bows and stripes, and I'm looking for a cute t-shirt to match.
6. My KeepCup from A&S, so I can drink coffee and do a little for the planet.
7. My new phone which, according to H, is like having a Ferrari and driving it around in a paddock. He said the same thing about my laptop and I ignored him then too.
8. Smelling of chocolate when I use Palmer's cocoa butter moisturiser.
9. The hullaballoo of fruit bats along the creek as they unfold themselves for evening flights.

Almost the weekend …

On Heroines

Lately I have been reading the Game of Thrones series, with a break to canvass Ron Rash's Serena, and now I find myself hankering after more feminine characters.

“All Game of Thrones has is fucking and fighting,” I complained to a bloke.

“What's wrong with that?” he replied.

Ahem. The clashes and cavorting aside, the series is brilliantly plotted, with jabs of wit and good characterisation in parts, which is why I read the first volume in three days over New Year and am hankering for time to finish the next one. However the representation of the female characters is getting a little tiring. There are maidens who love knights and jousting, mothers who try to guide their sons as they grow into kings, whores aplenty, and tomboys. It is the latter who are the only ones who seem to have any autonomy; the others are caught within the conventional power structures of Medieval culture to which the writer hearkens back. And yet, even these tomboys seem to be no more than female versions of men. The only woman who seems realistic in the whole text is Daenerys, who is forced, by circumstance and the land with which she interacts, to change from a timid girl dominated by her brother into a woman who is sexually confident, resourceful, and loyal to her lover.

The Oxford English Dictionary gives the definition of “heroine” as “a female hero”, the word being the feminine version of the Latin hero. The role of the heroine, then, is automatically shackled by its relationship to a man, and a woman becomes valorous, and validated, by engaging in actions that have traditionally brought acclaim to men, viz., poking someone off their horse during a tournament. Given this, how can a woman be admired outside of such an equation, particularly given the long history of dismissal of areas in which women have excelled, such as crafts and cooking? This is something that I think about as I work out the sequel to A Curious Intimacy, which I'll write two novels down the track: how can I create a character who retains her sense of femininity, yet is physically and mentally strong at the same time, in a harsh environment?

Rosa Praed managed it, to a degree, with Fugitive Anne (1902), in which the protagonist Anne, escaping into the desert from her violent husband, collapses near the conveniently placed camp of the explorer Eric Hansen, who has amorous (and of course noble) designs upon her. He revives her by wiping her brow with a silk handkerchief so that Anne, in a state of extreme sensory deprivation, 'was filled with delight at the touch of this fine material to which she had for so long been a stranger' (117). Anne then rallies around and sturdily follows Eric on his explorations, despite being a small woman who seems to wear out easily.

Anne's character works because Praed imagines how a woman would respond in extreme conditions. For a woman, even if she gallivants around the countryside sticking her sword into things, is still not going to think in the same way as a man. She would see the world differently – there would be more attention to the details of things, for example, or she might occasionally want a brush for her hair, or she might get stroppy or nostalgic when she was menstruating. You can't just put a woman in coat of armour and expect readers to believe in her.

This is why I was troubled by Serena (2008) as well. The novel pivots on the character of Serena Pemberton, a woman who marries George Pemberton and moves to the North Carolina mountains to build their timber cutting empire. Stepping — far too efficiently to be believed — into the rural world of the 1930s, she establishes her authority over the timber cutters by winning a bet with a man who spits at her feet. Thereafter, her acquisition of an eagle to kill the rattlesnakes and her ruthless murder of opponents via a sidekick whose life she saves, lends her a mythical air among the workers. She carries out her tasks with elegance and serenity, as her name declares, not even showing much emotion when she miscarries her child of eight months. When she attempts to have Pemberton's bastard child killed, it is suggested that her motivations for doing this are not so much maternal grief, as a reaction to Pemberton's disloyalty, demonstrated through his partiality to the boy. If she does feel grief, it is submerged by throwing herself completely into her plans to expand to timber cutting in Brazil. Serena acts too much like a man to be believed.

Part of the reason for this sense of distance is that we are not privy to her voice or her internal thoughts, as opposed to the focalisation of the character of Rachel Harmon, who bears Pemberton's bastard child and who interacts beautifully — and realistically — with the natural world. I expect the writer was using this technique to create a woman who would impress his readers through her loftiness, but the effect, for me, was one of estrangement.

I think the reason for my attraction to the figure of a female botanist and explorer is because I can create a strong woman who still retains a sense of femininity through her delight in the flowers she collects. I never felt like I achieved this in A Curious Intimacy, because so much of the novel had a domestic focus. I also found, whenever I gave readings of the book, that the scene I always turned to was when Ingrid went into the desert to collect flowers. I realised that, even after changing the point of view three times and cutting out a third of the novel, this was the book I should have written – one that followed Ingrid on her explorations between Adelaide and Busselton while she thought about the lover she'd left behind. The sequel, then, will follow Ingrid's journey back into the bush as she collects flowers and recalls the women she has loved, and Ellyn as she sets up a life in Sydney.

I wish that there was a new word altogether to describe these kinds of women – not just the female version of a brave man, but a woman whose sensibility renders a world that is imbued with femininity, even if that world might be perilous. Until then, we're stuck with the prosaic heroine, to wave around like Adam's rib.