My Talk at Club Murdoch

Hello all, just a reminder that I will be speaking at Club Murdoch, Murdoch University (South Street Campus, Western Australia), about Elsewhere in Success and my writing process, on Tuesday September 3rd from 6pm-8pm. Light refreshments will be served. If you are intending to attend you can RSVP on alumnievents@murdoch.edu.au
Looking forward to seeing you there

Book Length Project Group Member, Margaret O'Brien's project on ospreys

 

Old Ma Osprey

Margaret O'Brien is writing a non-fiction natural history book focussing on one breeding season in the lives of a family of ospreys in Perth, Western Australia. Based on her own observations, the text is complemented throughout with the author's photographs of an osprey family in crisis.

Author and photographer Margaret O'Brien

Margaret sent me some pictures of the next generation of ospreys in the same nest. These ones won't appear in the book. Please note that for all photographs pertaining to this post the copyright is held by Margaret O'Brien.

Female osprey coming in for a landing. Adult female ospreys typically have a prominent bib of darker feathers across the chest, whereas the males have sparse markings or a pure white chest.



Mother osprey with 5 week old chick. This chick was the single survivor of three hatchlings from the 2010 nesting season. It fledged at 9 weeks. Judging by its large size, it was presumed to be female, males being noticeably smaller.

 

Male (at rear) and female osprey at the nest at the beginning of the 2009 nesting season. They are peering at an egg or eggs (unseen). Both birds incubate the eggs, though it is predominantly the female's role and the female always incubates overnight.

Close shot of the mated pair of ospreys on their nest at the beginning of the 2009 season. Ospreys mate for life, with sexual maturity occurring at 3 years of age. The female (front) is the larger of the two.



A family of Willie Wagtails have their own nest in the scrub at the base of the osprey's nest tree. They fiercely and persistently try to chase the ospreys out of their territory. The ospreys take the attacks as a minor irritation and never respond with aggression. Here, the Willie Wagtail zeroes in on the female osprey like a heat-seeking missile.

 

Adult female on one of the branches leading from the nest being pestered by a territorial Willie Wagtail.

Recently fledged osprey about to cop a Willie Wagtail in the neck

Female osprey with approximately one week old chick. Until they are 10 days old, ospreys chicks are unable to regulate their own body temperature and are totally reliant on their parents for thermoregulation.

Female osprey and chick on the nest. The iris of adult ospreys are pale lemon to yellow, whereas those of the chicks are more orange.

The male brings a live fish to his mate on the nest. Ospreys feed exclusively on live fish, which they catch by diving feet first and up to a metre into shallow water. It's a horrible death for the fish which the osprey anchors with its powerful talons and eats the still very much alive and struggling fish from the lips backwards. It's always very confronting to watch and more than at any other time, I need to remind myself of the timelessness of what I'm observing and that ospreys having been doing this for tens of thousands of years.

Juvenile osprey with partially eaten fish. This young bird hadn't long fledged; in this shot the fish was provisioned by its father. There is no evidence that fledglings are taught to fish by their parents. From my observations, the young birds start to gain some proficiency several weeks after fledging, though their first catches are invariably blowfish.

The 2011 nesting season was hugely successful, with three chicks fledged. The two on the right are presumed females (because of their larger size), with a presumed male on the left. Males are smaller and usually fledge before their female siblings, which is what happened with this trio. Expert examination and DNA testing is the only sure-fire way of determining gender of young birds. The sex of adults is more easily determined, the female being larger, with a more prominent band of darker feather across the chest.



I was on the river in my kayak when I saw this osprey patrolling for fish. It's talons opening and closing continuously, it made fine adjustments with its wings, rising and falling in the air and never taking its eyes off its prey before eventually plunging feet first into the water.

It isn’t only Willie wagtails that aren’t fond of ospreys. An Australian Raven and its mate (out of the picture) eventually succeed in driving this one out of the tree.

Osprey emerging from a dive. A fishing osprey is one of Nature's most spectacular sights, the water exploding for several feet around the bird, in part due to the displaced water, but in instances where it plunges into a school of fish it causes the school to scatter in a chaotic frenzy.

With its prey in its talons, the osprey climbs about 20' into the air where it shakes itself vigorously to shed its feathers of water. It then realigns the fish to face forward to reduce aerodynamic drag before flying to a favourite perch to eat it or to deliver it to the nest.

 

 



And another thing! ... politics rant alert (apologies booklengthers - back to things writing soon)

 

I have another concern, related to the mentality that has led to cuts in the Health Department - our current State Government thinking in relation to funding human services. Doesn't it make sense to work at the prevention rather than the patch-up end of things?

Are they swimming in complacency with the knowledge of another few years before an election????

So now the thing is to cut staff in SCHOOLS of all things, and even more ridiculous, teachers, and teacher assistants.

Was it the full moon? I just don't get it. Last time I looked (i.e. last week) the schools needed more teachers and teacher assistants in the classrooms, not less. Not fewer.

Maybe education just isn't important. That can be the only explanation it seems, for firstly turning down squillions offered by the federal government for education because they were batting for the other team, and now cutting the capacity for kids to learn, by reducing teaching and support staff in the schools.

It's people we're talking about here, first vulnerable people in the health system, and now kids. Just wondering if anyone cares up there at the big house on the hill.

Paper post from the Inaugural Elizabeth Jolley Conference held last Friday at the Esplanade Hotel in Fremantle

The Elizabeth Jolley Conference was linked to the Romance Writers Conference

Exploring women and modalities of power in fiction: escaping the straightjacket of genre into digital space

 

Lynn Allen

ABSTRACT

 There are many modalities of power: personal, professional, political, domestic, social, cultural, financial, knowledge, physical, artistic.  These different domains can be investigated in multiple ways in fiction. Indeed when it comes to exploring women and power, fiction can offer multiple perspectives and challenging insights that the ’proof’ concept in non-fiction makes difficult, if not impossible.  As many feminists have quoted, ‘the personal is political’ and often women find an irresolvable tension between a desire for external recognition and the need for loving relationships, between demanding social power and being the peace-keeper.

The categorising model of genre applies organising principles that militate against exploring the complexity of women’s power.  For whose benefit has the notion of genre been invented and propagated? Classification systems, whether for libraries or biological species, are not value free and in both those cases the origins belong in earlier centuries.

When writing my novel, Illusion, I became aware of the limitations of the idea of genre.  The novel does not fit easily into the category of political thriller, romance or literary fiction, far less the notion of chick lit. The more general women’s fiction was equally unappealing. I began to explore the idea of the digital space only to discover the genre taxonomy had migrated from the physical book publishing industry to the web, albeit with sub-genres .

 
This paper explores the idea of moving beyond genre in the digital space, asking what are the possibilities for women writers to use that space to challenge boundaries, to connect outside the limitations imposed by the publishing and bookselling industry and, in so doing, to enter a space where the ‘medium is political.’

Outline according to abstract

Intro slide

INTRODUCTION
 

Thank you for the opportunity to share some of my ideas with you today. They are part of a journey and I am happy to offer my questions and some of my tentative answers with a suggested model of the novel in digital space.

 

As Virginia Woolf said,
 

When a subject is highly controversial... one cannot hope to tell the truth.

One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold.

One can only give one's audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker.

 

 

POWER
 

There are many modalities of power: personal, professional, political, domestic, social, cultural, financial, knowledge, physical, artistic.
 

These different domains can be investigated in multiple ways in fiction. Indeed when it comes to exploring women and power, fiction can offer multiple perspectives and challenging insights that the ’proof’ concept in evidence-based writing makes difficult, if not impossible.  As many feminists have quoted, ‘the personal is political’ and women can find irresolvable tensions between the desire for external recognition and the need for loving relationships.
 

Women have always told stories. As Virgina Woolf said, ‘for most of history Anonymous has been a woman.’ But it is not their stories that become a culture’s canonical texts. The Iliad, The Odyssey, Gilgamesh, The Bhagavhad Ghita, The Bible – the pillars of knowledge are masculine. Women’s stories are more likely to be found underground in the spiritual realms. In these archetypal spaces, conflict and confusion can reign. It is these conflicts, these battles of will and seeking of identity that interest me.

Shall I write of the warrior queen or the keeper of the home: Athena or Penelope? Shall I explore the darkness or the bringer of the light: Persephone or the Vestal Virgin? The mother or the lover: Virgin Mary or Aphrodite? Goddess of birth and nature or destroyer: Diana or Medusa?
 

Women’s mythic heritage is rich and many of the tales explore the nature of feminine power. Power that destroys men and so the women must be punished: to speak of wisdom that no one can hear (Cassandra); to bring misfortune to men (Pandora and Eve); to fail to follow instructions, demonstrating an annoying capacity for disobedience (Lot’s wife; Eurydice).

Anne Summers has captured the equivocal norms in relation to Australian women in her book Damned Whores and God’s Police (1974, 1995, 2002). The recent controversies over the use of the word mysogny in Australia shows that we are yet to arrive at a comfortable place where women can discuss the unwritten and unspoken challenges that power presents. Why is a powerful woman in all her guises so threatening to men and, even more puzzling, to other women?
 

I wonder how many manuscripts that tackle these issues find an agent and then fail to get past the acquisitions editor? Are such texts not being written or is one of the problems the straightjacket of genre?

 

GENRE CONCEPT
 

Genre means ‘kind’ or ‘sort’ from the Latin genus. Genres are formed by conventions, traditions, biases, ideologies and serve as a means to structure things according to the dominant powers in a society.
 

Genre is essentially a taxonomy. In science this is useful. Taxonomies grow from agreed scientific research, they are reviewed and revised before the introduction of a new species.

Aristotle created the idea of categories of beings and things. Ancient categories of artistic work were few: epic, tragedy, comedy. Much later came the novel and short story.  To those were added more and more sub-genres.
 

For whose benefit was the notion of genre in fiction invented and continued? Classification systems, whether for books in libraries or biological species, are not value free and in both those cases the origins belong in earlier centuries. They were created by white anglo-saxon, Christian males from a hierarchical society where women had narrowly-defined roles and little liberty.
 

Genre is neither an old nor static concept. It is contextual over time and space. So is genre an unwritten social contract between publisher and reader? Will a reader be disappointed or delighted if a book is shelved in the fantasy section only to find it is detective fiction set in a suburb of Melbourne?
 

The broad genre, Fiction sits opposite Non-Fiction. Within the category Fiction itself we have Literary and General or Commercial or Mainstream, often with a section for Australia. If we extend the social contract to that between author and publisher, does the publisher’s decision about genre mean if the text is designated Literary rather than General the author should expect short print runs and less money? And readers should expect a more complex read in which nothing much happens?

 

What to say of the category of Women’s Fiction? Why is there not a genre called Men’s Fiction? And why do we need Chick Lit and now Boomer Lit?
 

The Romance genre is one of the oldest. What might we expect here? Women authors and readers? Unliterary? Formulaic? And who is doing the expecting?
 

I can’t go into the history of genre definitions here but it is safe to say that when Jane Austen’s books were published they were not seen as a genre. Of course, once you are long dead and well published and if your work survives you can join the eminent writers on the Classics shelves. If you are outstandingly successful these days then you become a genre in your own right.

 

GENRE IN NOVEL WRITING – MY EXPERIENCE
 

My novel, Illusion, available at smashwords.com, does not fit easily into a genre. Like most budding writers I attended workshops and listened to publishers lay down their law about what I had to do to pass through their hallowed gates. My text is not a political thriller, romance or literary and the notion of chicklit or boomer lit make no sense to me. The idea of women's fiction I find patronising and dismissive.
 

As I learned more about the e-book world I wondered whether that would be an option but what did I find? The genre-dominating world had migrated from the physical to the digital. True, there were more sub-genres but the logic was the same.
 

This taxonomy appears to be universal: it dominates the supply chain from agents to editors to publishers, booksellers and reviewing outlets as well as prizes.
 

While there are interesting pathways in search engines where keywords and tags can be used, I was still left with the question: where did my novel fit in the bibliographic universe? I hope for my audience to be the intelligent reader but there’s no genre for that.

 I was becoming increasingly convinced that the typical publishing route was closed to me, or perhaps I just didn’t want to knock on the door. The advice from workshops was not encouraging: decide your genre; first time novelists find it hard to get an agent; the novel should be a certain length; it's useful if as an author you are an interesting person and so on.
 

I began to ask myself some questions:
 

·         who does genre serve?

·        who did I think my readers might be and how best to reach them?

·        why set out on a traditional publishing route when all the advice was not to bother?

·        why do we as writers assume that only the 'best' literature gets published and self-publishing is inferior (they call it vanity publishing as if the publisher's authors have no such characteristic)?

 

 

 

BEYOND GENRE INTO DIGITAL SPACE

 

As I studied publishing on the internet and explored how publishers were using the space, I began to wonder if there was a deeper set of questions to ask. What are the possibilities for women writers to use that space as a subversive activity - to challenge boundaries, to connect with each other and readers in ways unrestricted by the domination of the publishing and bookselling industry?
 

If we continue with the same genre categories then subconsciously or consciously are we not participating in the perpetuation of the same problems we have in the physical world?

If the main transaction is between author and reader through the centrality of the text then what would I have to do to keep all middle-men out of that relationship?
 

I should mention at this point that I am excluding the topic of making money from my writing. I think producing and sharing a text are totally different transactions to selling the experience. Chris Anderson's book Free explores the concept of saleable versus free products and interactions.
 

Many studies have shown that women are not the drivers of content on the Internet, especially in spaces like Wikipedia. However, it is true that many women writers have embraced the internet and have their own voices. Blogging, social media, interactive websites - all provide the author with an unmediated voice and contact with readers, but many more authors have their pages on publishers’ websites so they have travelled the well-worn path to traditional publishing first. It is interesting to note some of the authors who have migrated the other way. In June 2013, 5 of the top-selling e-books were self-published. So, these days Margaret Mitchell could have published Gone with the Wind herself and avoided 38 rejections.

I began to muse on the idea that if both gender and genre were barriers to getting published either electronically or physically (as these are controlled by the same mindset as the traditional publishers) what would happen if we pretended there was a tabula rasa? An as yet barely imagined and uncolonised digital space?

I am conscious that I am speaking to genre writers but bear with me. Dispense momentarily with the notion of genre, the notion of a publisher other than yourself and the notion of a novel as a single continuous text to be read linearly. The internet frees us to think in this space but it takes a bit of mind-boggling effort. Will genre become a self-fulfilling mental model if we never challenge it? Will women’s voices always be defined as the ‘other’ if we do not give them primacy in a new space? Or, even better, we create that space and be the powerful players in it.

 

 

CarrieTiffany, author of Mateship with Birds (2011) said the following:

‘To write – to take the work of reading and writing seriously – you must spend a great deal of time alone in a room. … For women to spend time alone ina room, to look rather than be looked at … It means doing something with your mind rather than your body. (quoted in A.Goldsworthy. Unfinished business: sex, freedom and misogyny. Quarterly Essay, no 50, 2013.

 

BORN DIGITAL NOVEL – WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?
 

We are witnessing bookshops closing, publishers merging, sales of e-books outstripping paperbacks on Amazon's kindle alone, multiple reading platforms that are mobile and always on, competing immersion experiences like downloads of film, gaming and TV shows. What is the future of the novel in this space? And how will we ensure that women's voices thrive in this space? And how will we create experiences that enable the slow read as well as the dipping in or even a serialisation experience as well as the added extras that typically come with digital media, whether those are access to websites, conversations with the author, free or for sale additional extras.
 

My first novel, Illusion, is a traditional novel: a linear text with parts and chapters designed to be read sequentially. It is 200,000 words long (so no publisher would be interested, I was told); it is a first novel (even less able to get published); is about women, power and leadership in the WA public sector (boring on at least four fronts, I was told); and I am an older woman with an older woman as my protagonist (may as well give up altogether).

I published Illusion myself as an adventure so I could learn about electronic formats and the processes needed. It is on smashwords.com and I can't speak too highly of the manuals that are provided to help authors load their work. It's had more than 2700 downloads and I have done little marketing save adding details to my email signature and a short note on my professional website and mentioning it in my various professional roles.
 

Now, I don't know whether it's been read but then I wouldn't know that if it were a physical book. I have had several emails from around the world telling me they enjoyed it.

I work professionally in the field of creative systems thinking and have a thinking methodology that I teach and use in consulting, called ariadne (for more info see 361degrees.com.au). One day a friend suggested to me that the ariadne workbook could be an app so I explored apps.

I had been asking myself, what would a 'born digital novel' look like? I then asked myself what would a novel look like as an app? One day I found Touchpress [www.toucpress.com], a very interesting publisher that is producing apps as amazing experiences, such as T.S.Eliot’s The Wasteland.

 

Here we have a text that can be read as a long poem, but we also have images of WHAuden's annotations, audio readings of the poem including by Eliot himself, detailed footnotes explaining the symbology and mythical references etc.
 

What genre does this app fit into? Poetry; literary criticism; performance; English cultural studies; classical studies? All together in this one app, and being added to as we speak - a living, organic object that can be viewed from many perspectives and is open for expansion and easy downloaded updates.
 

Other options that could be included in this ebook/app space are text-to-voice; hyperlinks to related websites; expanded dictionaries and footnotes; pictorial experiences; interactive commentary or collaborative story-building, to name but a few.
 

My journey has been to explore the e-book as linear text with my first novel but now I am exploring a wider and richer experience for the readers of my second novel but am thinking about how to produce that as I write the first draft. To be self-conscious about the process as well as content, being open to possibilities yet uncreated is a different - and perhaps mind-splitting and certainly more time-consuming - experience. This is, to take a concept from my thinking methodology, a truly emergent process on multiple levels because not only do I not know how my story will end; I do not know what formats it will take.
 

For me, 'born digital' does not mean that I type my first draft on a computer. In fact, I write my first draft by hand in notebooks in coffee shops. What I am doing is gathering what one author calls my pre-writing and my research into packages as I work. I am also keeping a writer's journal on the processes and ideas that come up from research, conversations and reading. The question that keeps bothering me is: if we were to look at the available media and invent the idea of a story-telling and story-sharing space what would it look like?

Without Gutenberg in the 1450s we would not have had the idea of widely available books. In those days widely available meant the church and rich families for these were enormously expensive objects. It would not be till the 18th and the 19th centuries that the popular novel would be born, dependent on cheaper production and a readily available literate populace. We now have a digitally literate populace. Yet, when giving away his books, Ian McEwan commented in The Guardian in 2005:

 

Cognitive psychologists with their innatist views tell us that women work with a finer mesh of emotional understanding than men. The novel - by that view the most feminine of forms - answers to their biologically ordained skills.  … Reading groups, readings, breakdowns of book sales all tell the same story: when women stop reading, the novel will be dead.

(http://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/sep/20/fiction.features11)

 

The novel has been seen often as woman's domain, and women are still the majority of novel buyers and readers. Interestingly older women are embracing e-book readers at a fast rate. Interesting too that as you go to writers festivals you find the majority of speakers are men and the majority of the audience are older women. I’ve also noticed what seems to be a disproportionate number of novels have a child or a male as the protagonist. So why are there so few novels published where the central character is an older woman? Are they not being written or not being published?
 

Thus, if older women are increasingly happy with their ipads, Kindles and ebooks, would they be open to new digital experiences - and I don't mean facebook and twitter. I mean a slow read/extended read/discussion-deep experience. Women build communities wherever they go so what of global digital communities built around novels of ideas and change. Could this be where the feminine principle would re-emerge, through women's stories. But perhaps I wax too lyrical.

 

THE NOVEL AS APP
 

I'd like now to turn to the idea of the novel as app.
 

Let's look at a definition of an app. Simply defined it usually refers to application software that is a small specialised program you can download onto your smartphone or tablet or computer. While in the past they have been generally used for officework, databases, process control or design, with the rise of mobile technologies they have become smaller programs with more intuitive interfaces.
 

An app of the type I want to talk about will typically have some content provided, some facility for adding content and some kind of interactive experience. Regular updates may or may not be included as well as connections to other apps and websites.

However, the word app is bothering me and if we are to create a new space then it needs its own language. To show you how my thinking has evolved to date, I will share with you a diagram of what I call a “Story-Sharing Space’ for my second novel, whose working title is Emergence.

 

Let me walk you through a series of spaces that attempt to describe the multiple levels of this space, using systems theory:

 

Firstly, the Text Space. Here is the manuscript with seven parts with chapters that can be read sequentially as a traditional text.
 

Secondly, The Expanded Text Space. Here are textual objects referred to in the novel but contained in greater detail than possible in the text. Here are found notebooks, letters, speeches, bibliographies of one of the characters, a short story written by one of the characters, backstory from the first novel, Illusion, if the reader hasn’t read that book, synopsis of events between the two novels. These items can be read or ignored or dipped into at different times. They could all be read before reading the text.
 

Thirdly, The Supplementary Text Space. Here are found items that would normally be used by the writer to make sense of the story’s finer details. Character list; chronologies; lists of organisations; locations; houses; films or books or music referred to in the text.

Fourthly, The Author Space. Here the author can include whatever she wishes. Audio; video; website; notes on processes of writing; commentary on real events; books found useful during research.

Fifthly, The Reader Space. Here are possibilities for interaction between author and reader; between reader and reader; conversations on any items in the first four spaces. This is a dialogic space. A ‘Narrative Commons’ for one text and one author that could indeed be added to include all the authors work from multiple spaces.

 

 

CONCLUSION

 

I would like to conclude with my own note of caution. Maybe all this will just be a circular adventure and like TS Eliot says,
 

 ‘We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.”

― T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

I have an iPad and a Kindle but I also buy books from around the world as well as locally. Whatever new spaces evolve we need to remember the essence of is still story, and women’s stories – telling, reading, listening and sharing. Nevertheless, as Marshall McLuhan said, ‘the medium is the message’ – and the new media are worth exploring to see how we share new messages as well as the old stories that are crying to be told. 

Maureen Murdock suggests, ‘Because so much of womens’ truth has been obscured by patriarchal myths, new forms, new styles and a new language must be developed by women to express their knowledge. A woman must find her own voice.’ (The Heroine’s Journey: womens’ quest for wholeness. Shambhala, 1990)

 

What I suggest is women can create new narrative commons to achieve that.

 

 

For a diagram on the digital spaces described in this paper, contact the author at LAllenIllusion@iinet.net.au

 

Writer in Residence Update

Mattie's House after a morning of productive writing

An appeal about recent decisions by The State Health System

Seems to me from recent news on the TV that the Western Australian Health System is in some kind of crisis. When health systems go into crisis, when decisions are made to cut costs by reducing staffing levels, which seems to be the strategy, it seems to me that people die as a result. The sad thing is that many of these people are young, and many of them young men who with a little bit of help could go on to do great things, and be good people to have around.

I have a psychology background and my first novel has undertaken some small exploration into mental health issues in one of the protagonists. The novel that I am currently working on deals with families coping in the two speed economy that is the reality of life in a mining boom state. So it is likely that this one will also deal with mental health issues in some form or other. It's something I believe in strongly, the need for people to be provided with sufficient support to be able to get back on their feet. One in five people experience mental illness at some stage in their lives. That means just about every family is touched by it. For the pragmatic politicians out there, that is an awful lot of voters.

When assistance for mental health is reduced, everything else suffers - the rate of crime and incarceration goes up and this creates an increase in suffering which spreads out to affect a lot of people. The employment participation rate goes down. For those who only see things in economic terms, it also costs an awful lot of money, and expenditure that would be unnecessary if the health system was fixed first.  

Those politicians who think only in terms of single issues, tied to short term economic gain or saving, and refuse to contemplate the broader ramifications of their decisions, are doing the country a disservice.  Politics is a hard job, I suspect, but this one needs to be rethought. Surely.

Book Length Project Group Member Charles Page

 

One of the writers in our Book Length Project Group network, Charles Page, had his latest book Wings of Destiny featured in Writer Robert Drew's regular Weekly article in The West Australian Weekend Magazine this week. The book is one worth reading for anyone interested in well-researched Aviation History.

 

 

Charles Page

 

Published books - Vengeance of the Outback, Wings of Destiny.
 

He is presently working on first draft of "The Kimberley Triangle", a non-fiction  story of aviation incidents, larger than life characters, searches and rescues, lost bullion, and strange coincidences in NW Australia.

An example of how truth can be stranger than fiction. Now at 51T words, aiming for about 70T,  plus maps and photos.