Notes from the Field (i)

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It’s been two months since I began my postdoc at UQ and I have loved getting up each morning to go into work. My office is on the eighth floor, but I have many visitors, particularly those of the non-human kind. A gecko made an appearance not long after I moved all my books in, but hasn’t been seen since. I hope he hasn’t perished, or been squashed by a door (his tail is a little bent; he may have already had a door encounter). Cockatoos and crows also perch outside my windows. My zanzibar, ever slow-growing, has graced me with a new shoot.

When I found out that my DECRA application was successful last year, I contacted Miles Noel, a graphic artist in Western Australia. The year before, when searching the internet for images for a presentation on Georgiana Molloy, I came across his portrait of her, which he created in 2013 for his SCI-POP portraits exhibition of Western Australian scientists. I’d long wanted to buy a copy, and now I finally had some cash. Conversations were had, art was made, and soon after I started work, the print was installed in my office. I like looking at it when I walk in, or drift away from my screen, musing.

I’ve been reading up on the history of south-west WA (and wished I was a robot with automatic uploads), and almost completed an essay on ecobiography, analysing Kim Scott’s Kayang and Me and Annamaria Weldon’s The Lake’s Apprentice. Following a conference at which I presented in early Feb, I found some new information on Georgiana’s husband (which I wrote about in this post), which has made me think much about extinction and massacres – topics on which ethnographer Deborah Bird Rose writes with clarity and urgency (such as in this one). I’m also helping to organise a work-in-progress conference for postgrads, which is enjoyable because I’m meeting new people and generating new ideas.

While it is mostly roses working at UQ, the coffee on campus is a great disappointment to me. There is only one decent outlet at which to forage, and that necessitates a long walk, which isn’t convenient on busy days, or hot ones, of which there have been many (climate change is afoot, the Reef has bleached and the pollies fiddle as we burn).

I have also struggled enormously with the lack of time to do my creative writing, and have been writing on evenings and weekends, which is wearing me down. I often worked six days a week before I began this job, but the pace wasn’t quite as intense. I’m hoping that I will adjust soon, and get into a rhythm.

For the next few months I'll be researching affect, and how stories and reading can shape our thinking – which is important when it comes to capturing people's attention and educating them about environmental degradation. I also have a trip planned to WA to do some research and to meet people involved in my project. So much to look forward to!

 

 

Twelve things I’ve learned over twenty years of writing

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In March 1996, I started my creative writing course at the University of Wollongong (illuminated above). My parents weren’t entirely sure what they were doing in sending me there (‘We did wonder,’ my father once said to me), but the careers advisor had recommended it, and I liked his recommendation and so, marvellously, it came to be.

I was a young and naïve deaf girl from the country. I found university so stressful that I stopped eating and lost six kilos in six weeks, but I adored my course. Writing rapidly became my raison d'être: it was a balm for the isolation of deafness; crafting beautiful lines pleased my sense of aesthetics; and puzzling over the structure of a novel, essay or poem was immensely satisfying.

But the life of a writer is very difficult – I don’t think many understand just how hard it is when they set out (I sure didn’t). So below I’ve cobbled together a few things I’ve learnt over the last two decades, not as a road map to publication, but more as lamps in the darkness on the road.

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1.     Writing take a long, long, long time. You’ll need patience, patience and more patience. It’s not just the writing itself, but finding the agent and publisher, then working with the editor. Even then it’s usually not until you’re a few books in that you even gain any traction.

2.     Find yourself a writing group. You'll feel less lonely and your writing will improve tremendously through constructive criticism and feedback.

3.     If you want to get published, you need a track record, which you can establish through publications in litmags and by winning competitions. Find every opportunity you can – write and submit and repeat. The litmag market in Australia is small, but not impossible. Try overseas as well. There are many competitions around - Aerogramme Writers' Studio have good listings of these.

4.     Subscribe to litmags (see #3). These are the life blood of Australian publishing and they are often how you get your foot in the door. If you can’t afford it, band together with some friends and get one subscription each, then share your copies.

5.     Install an internet blocker such as Self Control. Use it.

6.     Get a job. Most writers work like a dog for peanuts for a long time and it’s not enough to live on. A recent study from Macquarie University found that writers in Australia on average make $12,900 from their writing – and these are the more successful ones. T.S. Eliot was a banker and Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive. I've found stability and a flexible boss to be more important than my pay rate.

7.     Create an online presence through social media and/or a website. Not only will it help potential publishers work out who you are and what your writing is like, but social media can alleviate boredom, loneliness and shyness. Once you are published, it’s a good way to maintain contact with readers. If it gets out of control, resort to #5.

8.     Read everything. First for enjoyment, then for craft. Take the piece apart to work out how the writer has achieved certain effects. If you can’t afford to buy books or don’t have enough space, join your local or state library.

9.     Jealousy is okay and to be expected. What is not okay is when it stops you cheering for your fellow writers. Don’t be petty; they have worked as hard as you and they deserve buckets of good wishes.

10.  Agents are not essential, but they are handy if you hate finance and fine print.

11.  Conduct yourself with grace at all times, even if rejection feels like a slap in a face and you’re having a hard time managing #9. Publishing is a small and subjective business, and everyone in the industry wishes they could publish more.

12.  Persist. If you get knocked down, it’s okay to sit in a puddle of tears for a while. Then get up and keep on going. The writers who get into print those who never give up. And if you love what do you, and you’d rather not be doing anything else, then of course you’ll get there.

 

On Gratefulness

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October is far and above my favourite month. The jacarandas are ablaze, lining the streets and cliffs in purple fires. The star jasmine is flowering too, staining the evening air as I walk to my boyfriend’s after French classes. There’s the joy of pulling on a summer frock and feeling it ripple against my bare calves, and of wrapping myself in a cashmere cardigan on still-chilly mornings.

And now there’s one more reason: after five years of unremitting hard work, of research in Australia and overseas, of writing and publishing, travelling to and presenting at conferences, and making applications (9 of them to 7 institutions in that time), I finally won a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award, one of 200 offered to scholars across Australia who have finished their PhD within the last five years. I’ll be based at the University of Queensland and I’ll be writing an ecobiography on 19th century botanist Georgiana Molloy. A biography is a work about a person, but an ecobiography is about a person and their environment – you can’t narrate the life of one without considering the other.

The relief that comes from the promise of financial stability is unparalleled. For five years I’ve survived on a part-time wage, supplemented with Australia Council grants and assistance from my parents. I’ve written one book and the drafts for two more (and a third will be done by Xmas), and I’ve worked so hard that I’ve relapsed repeatedly and tediously into illness.

‘Listen to your body,’ the psychologist said to me two years ago when I dipped down into depression. I’m ashamed to say that I haven’t always heeded her advice, but I am at least aware of driving myself to exhaustion. The problem is that there's too much to write and too little time. The problem is also deafness – the concentration fatigue that comes from everyday interactions.

My deafness was responsible for pushing me into writing and research – it was a job that didn’t require too much listening, but which satisfied me immensely. I tried to be a fiction writer when I returned to Australia, but I missed the stimulation and the crisp exchange of ideas that comes with academia, and knew I had to find a way back into it. However, deafness and the strain of listening left me too depleted after teaching to be able to write, and so I resolved to find a postdoc. It’s been an arduous process, but the set backs that come with being a writer prepared me for that. A knock down is irrelevant - you just keep on going. I’m hoping that now, with a new role, I’ll have a better work-life balance.

I’ve just finished importing all of the blog posts I’ve ever written into my new(ish) website. I started them in 2006, when blogging was taking off in the UK. I was appalled, as I tidied them up, at how negative I was in London; so ground down by homesickness & the lack of light that I couldn’t appreciate what was before me.

The process of making oneself happy is one of deduction, and I know now that I can never be away from Australia for long, but it also takes resolve. A friend of mine, whom I took from her calm demeanour to be a naturally buoyant person, once corrected me, ‘No, I make a conscious effort every day to be positive.’ I wish I had known that while I was overseas, but perhaps we never understand how unhappy we are until we have climbed out of it.

There is so much to be grateful for: the scholars at the university who helped me pull my application into shape; Queensland’s abundant, glorious sunshine; my family, who have supported and protected me but still allowed me forge my stubborn, difficult way ahead; my smart and funny boyfriend, with whom I am never bored; and the smell of jasmine that wends through the window on these still, spring nights.

 

Submission to Inquiry into Arts Budget Cuts

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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.

 

 

On Exhaustion

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People never ask me what it's like to be deaf, or what I find hard about it. As I lost most of my hearing when I was four and had some speech therapy, my speech is fine, and people don't realise I have a disability until I tell them. Even then, they don't realise how bad it is, because I seem to listen so well. And because I am polite, and hate people making a fuss, I rarely remind them to speak clearly.

It's not the isolation that's difficult – I’ve found ways around that through writing, reading and a small circle of close friends, though it took me a good twenty years to learn the social skills I needed to make friends, and those twenty years were excruciating. Nor is it the inconsideration of people who assume that you’re rude or simple because you haven’t heard them; I accept that I don’t have a visible disability and that, for the most part, people aren’t deliberately unkind. Nor is it the cultural apartheid of cinemas and performance venues that don’t care enough about their deaf patrons to ensure working loop systems, or even to install such systems at all, such as the Cineplex cinemas in Brisbane. On asking the manager at Hawthorne why they didn’t have a hearing system, I was told that the movies they showed were blockbusters, which were so loud that deaf people can hear them. I would have laughed if I wasn’t so angry; it’s quality of sound, not loudness, that makes the difference. Meanwhile, the headphones at Palace Centro are patched up with duct tape, and those at Palace Barracks were broken for months. When I complained about the latter and pointed out that it was discriminatory, I was told that I was being ridiculous. I never went back. I have taken my money elsewhere and I watch films at home, or only go to screenings with subtitles, or watch dance performances that don’t require listening to words.

These are irritations and, like cuts and scratches, they always heal and fade. But the one thing I can never get over is the perpetual exhaustion. I have 25% of an average person’s hearing, and I rely on this bit of hearing and lipreading to get by. I can’t hear with loud background noise, nor in a group larger than three, and even then that’s hard. And as I’ve lost one sense, I’m constantly alert to compensate for it – to check someone’s face in case they’re speaking to me, to strain to hear the words in a sentence and match them with body language, to read lips and put the words into context, to work out how to get some information at a train or bus station when I can’t hear the overhead speakers. The energy necessary to maintain this level of vigilance is enormous.

These past few months I’ve been teaching creative writing one day a week at the University of Queensland. The classes were small enough for me to hear without passing round the transmitter of my FM system (which is like a small walkie talkie for deaf people), though I asked students to use it when they were reading because their heads dipped down to their papers and I couldn’t read their lips. I had to be completely alert so that I could hear their contributions and respond to them. It made the discussions a bit stilted as I could only hear one person talking at a time, but I figured they were adult enough to deal with that.

I loved my students. They tried hard, they listened to the lectures and my tutorials, and they improved in a very short time. Teaching creative writing also helped me to remember my own knowledge about writing, and to refocus on the nuts and bolts of my craft. However, I was so tired by the semester’s end, and so frustrated that I hadn’t had any energy to write, that I resolved to stick to my other, two-days-a-week admin job and write, even if that meant living on baked beans for six months.

Then I was insanely lucky enough to get funding from the Australia Council to work on my young adult novel, When the World Shivered, and the future isn’t looking quite so grim - a huge and unutterable relief. I've only had a handful of days off since February, and this means that I can have evenings and weekends off.

This novel will be based on my short story of the same name, which was published in the Review of Australian Fiction. The novel about the relationships between children with disabilities and their animals. I started thinking about it when I went to the Artists with Disabilities conference in Sydney last year, and watched people with their carers. The carers were people who wanted to be there and who were paid for it, but what would happen, I wondered, if a person with a disability was matched with someone who wasn’t temperamentally suited to caring? I was lucky as I grew up because my brother has a generous disposition and likes an audience, so he was happy to relay information to me that I missed (albeit often elaborated upon; the Whites are nothing if not performers). But what if I hadn’t had that kind of sibling, if my sibling was someone who just wanted to be left alone and not have to look after someone else?

I started thinking about companion animals, and dogs, and how we have domesticated them, which can also be seen as a way of keeping them close to us without their will. Do dogs really want to be dependent on us? Do horses want to carry people around? These are the kinds of ideas I’ll be exploring in the novel. I’ll also be reading books about animals and humans (if you have any recommendations, leave them in the box below!), and I’m about to write a post on Helen McDonald’s H is for Hawk. With luck, given my tortured schedule, I should have it up later this week.

I’ve also finally got back on the bandwagon with my author newsletters. If you’d like to be on the mailing list for these, you can sign up here.