Best wishes for a happy Easter

Peace and love to all

BLPG Member Profile - Lynn Allen

LynnAllen.

Lynn Allen was born in the northeast of Scotland into a family that has lived in the region of Brechin for centuries. In the 1960s she migrated to Perth, Australia, where she now lives and works as an independent coach in systems thinking, a writer and executive educator.

During her more than 20 years as an executive in the information services sector, including the computer industry and 12 years as a state government CEO and State Librarian, Lynn has written many papers on leadership, strategy and the use of technology.

She has studied and loved the novel all her life, believing in the power of story to illuminate and explore the human condition. Her particular interests are how women tell their stories and how they are represented in literature. She considers herself a feminist and has an abiding interest in writing on the topic.

Lynn's novel, Illusion, is a contemplation of what can happen when a woman's integrity is challenged while working as a public servant in highly charged political environments.

Lynn is currently writing a novel that explores what highly educated, professional baby-boomer women might do after they leave paid employment. Is the world ready for this group of women and their wisdom? Are the women themselves prepared to generate another feminist agenda while facing questions of identity and ageing in unknown territories? What happens when they are forced to face secrets and decisions of the previous generation that haunt them and influence their lives?

Illusion: a novel of women, power and leadership in government

When the Scottish-born Elizabeth Wallace returns to Australia to take up her position as managing director of a major new government organization she could not have imagined the difficulties she would face.

What she discovers are power games in a highly politicised environment. The system is unwelcoming of women and she becomes mired in constant battles as she tries to achieve her goals. Her lack of understanding of the way government works as well as the complexities of the social network she is drawn into hampers her ability to read people's intentions. Hence she is constantly blind-sided by others' actions.

She has left a long-term lover behind in Scotland as well as a successful career in the corporate sector. With unfinished personal troubles haunting her and increased media scrutiny she begins to wonder whether she has made the right decision.

This is a novel that does not easily fit into genre. It tells one woman's story against the odds, navigating her career journey through the corridors of political power. There are lessons to be learned but, most of all, this is one woman's journey to finding her power.

Novel is available as a free ebook at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/57950

Book Recommendation - Reaching One Thousand

After I had been encouraged to read Reaching One Thousand, Rachel Robertson's memoir (subtitled A Story of Love, Motherhood & Autism) - encouraged for about the third or fourth time by different people - it jumped out at me while I was browsing in a Fremantle bookshop the other day, so I added it to my pretend basket, started reading that afternoon, and finished it the next day. Now that I have read this memoir not all that long after reading another that I reviewed on this blog, Maureen Helen's Other People's Country, I have discovered that I really do like well-written memoirs.

Rachel Robertson is a wordsmith, and teaches professional writing and publishing at Curtin University, so I guess I was always in good hands. I have a special interest in autism as a psychologist (not so much because of this) and because one of my loved ones has a similar identity - diagnosis?  (yes, mostly because of this). Something that Rachel Robertson has managed, that the professional paradigm does not do very well (although it strives for this), is to explore the relationship with her son, and autism itself, from a perspective of strength rather than deficit, and from a perspective of love, rather than clinical categorisation based on a rather vague notion of normality. In fact normality is more often understood by what it isn't, than what it is, and as such is difficult for anyone to attain. Even too much normality is sometimes construed as abnormal. Plus it's a moving target. Normality seems to shift around depending upon the ever-expanding list of abnormalities that it depends upon to gain its meaning. (Just to be clear - I'm speaking as a regular person, not as a psychologist).

The writer touches, but does not dwell, on socially constructed notions of normality as they impact upon ideas of autism and identity. More importantly this is a story of a mother and a son, as unique and as commonplace as any relationship between parent and child. Her son sounds like a great kid, by the way - smart, considerate and creative. As does her ex-husband, an involved parent, and this portrayal is just one of many examples of the ethical way in which Robertson manages the text.

Robertson also explores how the relationship with her son provides her with the great gift of enabling her to explore aspects of her own identity, and that of her parents - both gifted mathematicians - and to reach new insights. She shares these with the reader, and in the process this reader discovered more that was of help in appreciating and enjoying the uniqueness of those I love, than any scholarly paper might provide. I wondered about that too, the tendency for studies to focus on what was seen to be wrong rather than everything that is right. I suppose that is their purpose, to help out, but sometimes the too tightly controlled reductionist approach misses something vital. In statistics they call this - this chopping off something vital to fit the bed, or stretching it - Procrustean. In Greek mythology, Procrustes was the nasty innkeeper who made his customers fit the bed, and not the other way around. In this book, while due and genuine appreciation is given to the dedicated professionals working in the area who lend a helping hand, Robertson shows us that context has the most dramatic effect, and the way that we respond to our children, with love, courage, not too many preconceptions, and yes, enjoyment and a sense of fun, is ultimately what matters most. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the exploration of identity and relationship.

Post apocalyptic story - Episode Three

Three - Sky

 

The time came when Dalyon would divide his time between the swing and the trampoline.  The swing didn’t mind. It was bored by now and amused to see Dalyon bouncing up and down.

Ma joined him in the yard every day. At the swing she exercised her arms, pushing him and growing as strong as she could.

‘Push me high as the sky,’ he sang.

‘Push me high as the sky please Ma,’ she responded automatically.

‘Push me high as the sky please Ma,’ he sang, over and over again, and when he was flying he hung his head back and let the sky take him.  

Finally she brought him back with her mystery words.

‘The train’s at the station now Daly,’ she said. ‘Slowing down, slowing down.’

‘What train the station?’ he said, sending her to a place where she could not speak. He fell back into his own silence.

She lifted him down, and there he stayed for a time dancing from one foot to another, until he noticed that she’d left a break in his construction of chairs and sticks and tin and rocks. His body let out the sound of his frustration, and he was off to fix it.

 Ma shrugged her shoulders, stepped over the low wall that he’d built to keep everything that was in, in, and everything that was out, out, and disappeared into the darkness of the house. He went back to his work.

Always, there was work to do, a never-ending going round and round and round.  The cat watched from under one of the fence chairs, ready to stay, ready to go, ready to stay, ready to go.  Dalyon’s song of words repeated and stretched out until they echoed back on one another and joined up with no breaks, no breaches. Stay-ready-go-ready-stay, ready-go-stay-ready-say-go, ready-say-ready-stay-ready, ready, go-stay, stay, stay, stay, stay-a-a-a-go-ready, stay, steady – until something, a movement or a thought, stopped the looping words and sent him spinning off onto another track, bouncing on the trampoline.  

She came back to watch his dance of twists and turns. ‘Listen to me Dalyon,’ she said. ‘Things change. That’s a good thing. You are growing bigger and stronger. The world will need you one day. One day you will need the world.’

He put his head over towards one of his shoulders, and smiled at the way that this song felt as it circled around inside his head.

*

On the morning of the day that the two men first came to see him, Ma was busy doing different things. He followed her around to watch. She washed the dishes twice. She went to the pantry-room and brought out some of the flour that was stored in the big drum. She gathered the eggs earlier than usual. The chickens squawked for a long time. She went back and fed them and poured some water for them. It was the wrong order of things, at the wrong time. Dalyon stood in the corner of the yard, covered his ears, closed his eyes and sang a long song to set it right. When he came back to watch she was foraging in the vege patch.   She found two ripe strawberries on the bush, brought them in, and placed them on a saucer. She lined up the cups without the chips, the teapot with, and placed them all on top of the small lace cloth made of blue hexagons bordered in white. Finally she stopped, stood back and looked at what she’d done. She spoke to him while she looked at the table.

‘Listen to me Dalyon. Two people are coming here today,’ she said. ‘Two men. Terry and Bob. I want you to be good. They will talk to me and drink some tea, and I am making cakes for them to eat. You can have a cake if there is one left. Don’t ask for it. You must sit quietly and listen to them when they speak to you, and do what they ask. Then you can have a cake. Will you do that?’

‘Yes,’ said Dalyon.

They came on bicycles. The tall thin man said, ‘Hello Dalyon. My name is Terry.’

The shorter man said nothing. He made a smile, lifted up his eyebrows and let them slip back to their starting point. His face was quite red and there was water coming out of him, his face and his neck. His light-coloured hair was damp, although there had been no rain. The other man called Terry had shiny black hair, black eyes, and small, neat fingernails. Both men had dark patches on their shirts under the top of their arms.

Ma made a smile with her mouth, rested one hand on the side of her neck, and lightly shook their hands with the other.  She had a feeling about her that made Dalyon feel scratchy. He wanted to run away and sit underneath the trampoline until they left, but he remembered his promise to Ma, and her promise to him about the cake. He watched her for signs of how he should learn the visit. She looked at the man with the neat fingernails, at his hands and at his head when he was turned to look at Dalyon, so Dalyon did that too. They all sat on chairs pulled up to the table. Dalyon had a cushion on his chair. The two men drank the tea that Ma poured, and ate the cakes. They sang a long boring song using flat, ugly words that had no music to them and provided no information at all. Dalyon sat quietly balancing on his cushion with his hands on his knees, watching as the shorter man took the last cake and lifted it to his mouth. When he brought his hand down to the plate again, half the cake was gone. He lifted the cake again, brought it part of the way to his mouth, and turned to look back at Dalyon who was watching the cake. He put the cake piece on the plate and put the plate in front of Dalyon.

‘Go on, eat,’ he said.

‘No,’ Ma said.

‘Yes go on,’ said the man.

She said, ‘Yes, go on then. Eat, boy.’ She looked at Dalyon and nodded.

Dalyon ate. The cake was good.

‘We will come once a week,’ Terry said. ‘Every Wednesday morning.’

‘What day is it today?’ she asked.

‘Wednesday.’

‘All right.’

That was how it started, these men who came to watch and instruct and change the way they did things. They gave her a calendar with a picture of a small yellow bird that Dalyon did not know, and she would cross off the days as Dalyon watched. At the circled day, Bob and Terry would come after Ma had collected the eggs and made the cakes. On the day of the last calendar cross, Ma would always say the same thing.

‘Tomorrow they come. Terry and Bob.’

He would dismantle his fence and tidy his room. The day after they had been he would put everything back in its place.  

One day they came on a day unexpected and he still had his fence up. She had no cake or tea ready. They said loud jagged words to her. Dalyon didn’t like that at all. It felt like the shirt he had put on once, with prickles stuck to its inside. He whispered a curse at Terry and Bob, turning away from them so that they couldn’t see him. Then he climbed up onto the trampoline and began to run around it in giant steps. He found an angry song coming through his mouth. He caught them in his lasso of sound, and tied them up.

‘I wish you didn’t come, I wish you didn’t come, I wish you didn’t come, I wish you didn’t come,’ he sang as he ran circles on the trampoline, round and round and round, and they stood there staring at him, dancing from one foot to the other. 

‘Don’t say that Dalyon,’ Terry said. ‘That’s not good.’

But it was the best he could do. He closed his eyes and wished very hard as he ran the familiar track.

‘I wish you didn’t come,’ he sang, circling round and round and round.

*

Beyond the perimeter of house and the fence that stayed with the house, in the vast and disturbing forest it seemed that other houses and other fences might hide amongst the trees. Sometimes Dalyon thought he could hear the faint sound of children’s voices in play, carried far across the still air. When he closed his eyes he would see a thin rise of smoke from a fireplace, moving like a vertical strand of cloud, tracking its way from the surface of the tree-tops to the edge of the blue, touching the boundary and spreading across until it became the slightest whisper, and faded away to nothing.

He thought Ma might be able to say something about the things he was seeing.

‘Where are those boys? Girls-and-boys,’ he said, remembering a sound chain in story she had read him. She pretended not to hear as she stirred the cake mixture.

She heard. She asked Terry and Bob about other houses and children when they came. She asked them at the part just before they were leaving, when they were eating cake and drinking tea, and feeling round and harmless. Bob stared into his tea and gave no news of others. Terry ate another cake. They pretended not to hear.

Dalyon could speak louder than she could with her frightened little song. He would ask them again, in his own way, looking at them right at the face. It hurt him to do that, but they liked him to try. They would give him a small glass ball to hold for awhile, each time he did. The glass ball had a black double triangle, and another ball inside.

’Where are boys-and-girls Terry-and-Bob, Bob-and-Terry where, where, where? Boys-and-girls and birds in trees, tree-birds singing gaw-aw, la, la, ah-oh.’

He said it looking at them right in the face, hard and loud. He waited for them to give him the ball to hold, but they didn’t. They looked at each other, picked up their hats and their backpacks, and left.

Perhaps they failed to understand what he was trying to say. He had his own language, using words that came into his head and felt right in his mouth, rather than those that others suggested, those harsh sounds devoid of music. Maybe it was that he was small and they were large. It seemed that all but him were large. He was the odd one out, except for the cat which made itself even smaller by creeping around all day on its hands and feet.

Bob and Terry would make themselves small by sitting down as soon as they could after they arrived. After spending some time watching him do his tricks on the swing and the trampoline, they would sit and eat and drink with her at the table. They would speak to her in low sleepy tones.  She sat with her mouth in a smile, wanting them to leave, as much as she waited for them to come with their presents of food and papers. They would go on and on, filling the room with a low buzz.

After a while other movements would join Ma’s smile. Her face would tighten and her eyebrows would stand closer together. This happened so much now that she had two lines that stayed between her eyebrows even when she slept. Dalyon knew this from watching her face by moonlight, once when the moon was big.

When Terry and Bob went away the time that Dalyon asked about the children, Ma sat with him. He felt her needing something from him, crowding in on his work.  It spoiled his concentration.

‘Don’t look. Go away. Go away,’ he said, and out of the corner of his eye he saw her face make a strange shape.  

‘I don’t want to’, she said. 

It became a game then. ‘Go away, go away, go away Miss moo-moo.’

She tickled him and made a funny laughing song.

‘What did you say? What did you say? What did you say?’

This made him laugh.

Sometimes she would close him up in her arms and rock him gently until he fell asleep. She would sing to him in her small dancing stream voice, so delicate and fragile that he would be afraid to move in case it broke.  When the singing came to its end she stroked his hair and said words that he felt as soft feathers against his cheek.

‘Where do you think you got such black shiny hair my baby? Such black eyes? Such pale skin. Where did you come from my little one, my child? Not that one, I hope. Oh, I hope you have learned enough. Have you learned enough? I love you Daly, so much. So much. What will become of us my son, my poor little one? Will you remember me? ‘

She sang to him again, a song filled with soft reds, purples and blues, as his eyes and body grew heavy.

The Sinkings

The Sinkings – Amanda Curtin       Published 2008 University of Western Australia Press

Part One – declaration of my own subjectivity as a reader

Sometimes I come to books late, and feel that in this I am somehow always lagging behind. As books are part of a marketplace, I get the feeling that there is the implication of a use-by date.  If I stumble upon a book in a timely manner, great! But as a rule I’ve tended to be slow to read and slow to respond, and because of this I must resist the urge that tells me not to respond at all, because what I am saying might be construed as old news.

I have to add that I am as interested in process as in product, and, for me, often the means is the end. It's the story within the story I like best. And what will remain six or twelve months down the track? That’s important in a book – that I can learn something new, or deepen my understanding of something old.

I wanted to preempt my ‘take’ on Amanda Curtin’s debut novel The Sinkings with this declaration–reviews inevitably involve a personal response to the work. Emotional connection is as important as intellectual connection in a novel, and our responses to the books we read are necessarily subjective and informed (often challenged) by our own  dearly held beliefs and values. The other thing that might be worth stating is that I am responding to this book about six months after reading it. From an objective point of view this book is beautifully crafted. Just as importantly, six months after reading The Sinkings, it continues to hold a place in my heart. I am not sure why, but there it is.

Part two – my take on the book

The Sinkings is set in two time periods, the nineteenth century and in contemporary times. When the dismembered human remains of a murder victim are discovered at the Sinkings near Albany, Western Australia in 1882, they are initially believed to be those of a woman. Subsequently they are identified as those of Little Jock, a former convict.

Willa Sampson is struggling with her own grief, and feelings of guilt associated with the loss of her child, who has gone away and ceased contact.  Her daughter Imogen was born with a mixed male and female chromosomal profile. Willa has been pressured by the well-intentioned medical personnel and her husband into making a quick decision with regard to her child’s gender identity, and into agreeing to surgery for the baby. This results in years of traumatising medical and surgical treatment, psychological distress, family and social distress, and in time, the departure of her adult child, and her husband.

Willa, now living alone with her cat, becomes obsessed with researching Little Jock’s story, which she first came across in an article in Past Lives ‘A strange case of murder and mutilation’ by George Sullivan twelve years earlier. Now that her daughter is gone she pursues this research relentlessly, possibly in the hope that it will offer up some sort of clue or answer to her beloved daughter’s story. Unlike her own child, Jock was born in an era when such surgical options were unavailable, when social expectations were different and gender roles were apparently more clearly delineated. Thus we have the engine of the story, and the reason for the obsessive dedication with which Willa pursues Little Jock’s story as she traces the documented fragments of his life back to Scotland, and ultimately Ireland, in her quest to understand possible alternatives that might have been available for her own child. And this is where the real story lies – in the gaps where research ends and Willa’s interpretation and emotional investment takes hold. For one thing, the quest for understanding identity (her own, her child’s, Little Jock’s) is never complete, and the more she digs, and the more details are uncovered, the more complex (less clear and further away) the picture becomes. It is the problem of essentialism, in pursuing a definative answer in attempting to tie down social reality  – there is an infinitely retreating destination. The more closely one looks, the more layers one sees. Ultimately it seems that it is only love that can be the enduring facet of this story, the story through-line, and acceptance – or more than that – celebration, of the unique human life – her own, her child’s, and that of the incredible person who was (Willa's) Little Jock.

Some novels carry a reader mostly along on the surface and give a great ride. I love novels like that. Others draw the reader in, and change something, although one is not always clear about what that is. I believe The Sinkings is one of those. I needed somewhere quiet to read this novel, to be absolutely alone with it. Once it caught me I couldn’t stop reading until the end. Then there was the inevitable feeling of loss when the book was finished. I think most readers understand what that is like. It is a breach that is not easily filled by just any other book.

 

BLPG group member profile - Jenni Ibrahim

As a child I was an avid reader and sometimes thought of becoming a writer. But I thought I would have nothing interesting to say because my life seemed uninteresting. My life was boring because it seemed to be happening in a similar way to many other people. So many other people – my sister, my brother, my parents, my school friends, our neighbours. Who would want to read about that? To become a writer I would need “real life experiences” and this assumption subconsciously drove me for much of my life. At 13 it never occurred to me that the others around me might experience things differently. In my mind I had no unique voice or story that could be of any consequence to anyone else.
As I grew older I became busier with the things that fill your life –study, social life, family life. Writing too, but rarely fiction. In fact I had sometimes struggled with the short creative essays required in lower secondary school. Then I veered into studying science and my creative self went on a very long holiday. My days were filled with lectures, assignments, lab work, swotting, and then the long task of writing a PhD thesis in psychology. The only fiction I wrote appeared in holiday job applications.

Then at last study was over. Work, marriage, motherhood and more work filled my days to overflowing. I now look back on a life far from ordinary. At 21 I was not going to marry someone from a grey Australian suburb, but instead settled on an ambitious, bright Malay man from a small green and brown village in Perak, Malaysia. The prospect excited me no end. A young man who laughed outwardly -and seethed inwardly - at the Australians he met who thought Asians lived in trees.

After five years together in Australia we moved to his country. I am emigrating, I reflected, as I boarded the plane one wintry Melbourne day. Forever was the deal. It didn’t bother me. In the 1960s and early 1970s politics in Australia stunk. Too many narrow-minded conservatives voting for narrow-minded conservative candidates. In spite of the big change of government in 1972 that had seemed impossible the previous year.

The irony of my views of Australia didn’t occur to me then. Not until well after I began a journey as a strongly opinionated woman settling into married life with a strongly opinionated local, his extended Muslim family and the wider Malaysian society - which was anything but simple or dull. Now I was the outsider and he was the insider. Language learning was a priority – oh, and how to peel tiny 2cm red onions, lots of them. I was not adjusting to the life of an expat, but learning how to assimilate into Malaysian life as a permanent resident.

After nearly two decades together, our marriage dissolved and I faced a task I had never expected. Assimilating into Australian life after a 10 year hiatus. I worked, I single-parented. Now that phase is over, I am ready to write but I’m very frightened. For I have had an interesting life. More than enough to inspire me to write. All I have to do is do it. And through the Book Length Project Group I find I'm not alone.

Good website and blog - Jennifer Crusie

Jennifer Crusie's website has a wealth of information for writers. I would highly recommended it. Take a look at this link. Jennifer Crusie is a best-selling romance fiction writer, with Masters degree in literary criticism, and an impressive range of essays on the practicalities of writing, publishing, agents, as well as essays that (for example) interrogate the assumptions that literary critics sometimes have of romance fiction.

Episode Two - my post-apocalytic story

 

Two – Swing

It was between day and night, when colours glow. The surrounding forest was noisy with the broken-up arguments of pink and greys, birds with no interest in glowing colours, preferring to spend twilight squabbling over night perches. Ma stood with Dalyon looking up at the sky, trying to see the first star. 

‘Look at the clouds,’ she said, ‘how they are lit from underneath. I love that. When you see the first star you can make a wish.’

She began to sing a song he hadn’t heard before. 

‘When you see a falling star, catch it in a silver jar, and everything your heart would wish, will come to you.’

She said, ‘it’s a very old song Dalyon, very beautiful. My mother used to sing it to me, and her mother sang it to her. And her mother. Once people believed such things, and perhaps they were true. Do you think so?’

She put her hand to his chest. ‘Your heart is in here,’ she said.  ‘If you put your hand here you can feel it beating.  Pom-pom, pom-pom. When you feel a wish come into your heart, and you see that first star, the wish will come true. Here Dalyon, I’ll show you.’

Ma put his hand on his chest. Something was moving in there, living in him. This creature inside his chest might want different things from him, things he did not know.

‘Dalyon doesn’t want that wish,’ he said. ‘Go away heart!’

‘Why not? Why don’t you want that wish?’

Dalyon couldn’t say. He ran off to play on the swing until darkness fell. There was no trampoline then. 

Night came and they went inside to eat, wash, and move steadily towards bedtime. He arranged the toys, chose the purple alligator to hold through the night, saw pictures of children at bedtime. The bedtime children lived in two old story books that Ma had when she was a girl. She sang her songs – one about stars and another about the moon. Then her kiss, her disappearance. There would be the soft drift of sleep until morning, because tonight the moon was thin.

Sometimes when it was big, that restless moon woke him up, wanting to play. He would change what he did on those nights. He would go outside to fly his swing and sing for the moon. The cat would come and find him there. It would lie down to watch, just past the reach of his coming and going feet. The cat knew the right place to lie. The moon, the swing, Dalyon and the cat would all make a line. In the morning when the early sun woke him, he would be lying on the ground with the cat next to his head.

Ma would be asleep. He would go back to his bed until she came for him.  She would ask about the grass seeds in his hair and on his pillow. He would wonder about them too. She would brush them away. That was the way of things. All things in the universe had a natural swing and rhythm, back and forth, back and forth.

*

 

The sky was an even grey, the day that the black cockatoos appeared in the tree with the deep red feathery flowers that hung in cylinders above the clothesline. Ma came after they had landed, but she did not see them. She began to hang the faded clothes in tidy connected rows, clipping them together, not looking up far enough. She was looking at her feet and at the broken basket of bundled damp cloth when the first flower dropped.

Dalyon had seen them first. He sang to them in their language.

‘I wish I were a red-tailed black cockatoo,’ Dalyon’s song said. ‘I wish I were sitting on that branch of the red flower tree with a flock of friends and a heavy cracking beak chopping off the flowers one by one with one eye on her hanging out the washing. It’s fun to see how she jumps as the first flower falls and she looks up to see Dalyon eye to eye, hers all bare and glowing and Dalyon’s small, sharp and neat like a black beetle. This bird here is called Dalyon.’

Dalyon clicked off another flower, and another. Dalyon and the flock worked together dropping the red flowers at her feet. She stopped what she was doing and watched them. They stayed awhile for her. Together in the tree, Dalyon and the flock formed a large feathered cloud, a black thundercloud, mysterious and magician-magnificent. Dalyon stretched out his wing and his tough leathered leg, and she stared, unable to move, a wet towel hanging loosely from her hand with its corner dangling in the dirt. It formed an enclosed space with her rounded arm and her curved body, and the ground growing red with fallen flowers. Dalyon displayed his long sharp claws and drew them back into hiding. She had soft fingers, no claws, and limp arms that grew strong when she carried a load. The entirety of her grew strong as she lifted her boy or used her body to shield him from the sun.

Dalyon did not speak. The flock was silent. The day was as still as a picture in Ma’s storybook. They were here in this light, in this tree, drawn in thick pencil against the smooth grey sky. Now they lifted off as one big dragon-bird made up of smaller parts. They could break into pieces, and they could come together. 

Ma held her breath. Now Dalyon could feel her breathing.  He could feel her sadness at his leaving. The air held and lifted the flock high so that the small house below, with its narrow yard and lines of junk, became smaller and smaller, and the trees closed in around it. Beyond this place there were only trees, some living and some dying, in the vast unsettled forest.

Dalyon flew low over the forest, just brushing the tops of the trees. That was when he saw something of interest, half hidden amongst the undergrowth. It was metal and fine netting, a thing to jump on. It was something that a boy needed to help him grow strong. Perhaps Ma could go and get it for him.

 Dalyon sent the thought, and Ma was shown the thing that she must do. It filled her head as she gazed out beyond the fence to where the trees went on and on. The thought that she must leave came into Ma’s mind, and it stuck there like a prickle in her brain, irritating her every time she stopped being busy and sat down to think. It made itself into an annoying dream when she fell asleep at night and stayed with her in a repeating loop of mind pictures after she woke in the morning.

*

Now Dalyon forgot all about what he had seen. He returned to being a boy and went back to building things, lining them up all along the fence around the house. He chased and caught the cat, and put that in the line, but it kept running away.  He brought it back again and again. Finally he gave up and went back to more cooperative objects.  Life was predictable, the way he liked it, but still he kept feeling that things would change. There was a missing piece in his understanding somehow. Perhaps it was the cat. He placed it in a sack and put it squirming into the line, to discover that it was not the missing piece after all. He released the cat and sat down in the place where the sacked cat had been. He stayed like that as the sun moved through the sky, with his eyes fixed on the locked gate. Ma saw him as she looked out from the kitchen window, and her heart broke for him.

*

Ma struggled against the press of her journey for two nights, but on the third day she rose at the first light and placed food and water on the low table. She told him to eat when he was hungry, and to drink when he was thirsty. She said she would return when the sun had left the highest part of the sky and was sitting on the line of trees that he could see from the top side window that wore the curtains made of broken lace.

There was another story. She might not return at sunset. If this story happened, he was to put his pyjamas on and brush his teeth. He should go to bed then and sleep. If she was late, she would make camp and come back in the light. If she did not come back the first day, she would come back the next. If she did not come back by dark on the second day he was to go to the pantry where the flour drum was, and find the package that she had tied under the lid. He was to open it up and look inside. Then he would know what to do next.

She made him promise to stay. He promised. She left, and he heard the click of the door as it locked down. He climbed the stairs to watch her leave the yard and follow the animal path that came at length to the tree that always slept, even when small animals ran upon its back. The path ended by the bowing tree that belonged to the pink and greys. 

Dalyon closed his eyes and watched as she found her way through the scrub. He saw the thorn bush where she scratched her arm and heard the curse that she said. He watched her hair fall down around her face, and how she moved her arm quickly like she did, and he saw her pull the band from her hair and throw it away. He heard the rustle of the undergrowth and felt the eyes that watched her as she crashed her way through the forest, always adjusting her path back to the line she had chosen, after she had been diverted by rocks and trees and spiders.

When she reached the grasses by the river he decided he was hungry and remembered her instructions. He ate. After he had eaten he noticed he was thirsty and he drank the sweetened water that she had left by his plate. Ma unwrapped a parcel of food that she had brought with her. She ate dried fruit, took a long drink, refilled her bottle at the river, and wrapped the parcel again. Dalyon went back up the stairs, sat in the corner by the lace window, and closed his eyes. Ma was walking along the river now, searching for the crossing place.

This was when the sun began to move faster than she could. He waited for her to turn back, but she didn’t. She kept on. He knew that she would not be back by the time the sun reached the line of tree tops. He went downstairs and constructed a strong line of objects starting with the low table. He made sure that the edges met one another and that the wall met the line at the other end.  He counted the things he had lined up, many times. The sun was moving down the sky. He swept the floor and rearranged the odd assortment of chairs that was the kitchen furniture. The sun was dropping lower. He climbed the stairs and put on his pyjamas. He brushed his teeth. He gave some food to the cat. He took down the book in which there lived two lost children. The children were called Hansel and Gretel. They came upon a witch’s cottage made of food and killed the witch by pushing her into the fireplace. He showed himself the story, shouting at the witch to get in that fire and not come out. He sang a song about an old man who played nick-knack on his drum, and nick-knack on his shoe. The cat crawled its belly out from under the bed where it had slept for most of the day, and settled itself at his feet, purring loudly. Dalyon pulled the curtain back, saw that the moon was thin, and went to sleep.

Ma was sleeping too, beside a fire she had made in a clearing by the river. Mosquitoes bothered her in the night. She thought about her boy alone in the house. She thought that she was searching for him, forcing her way through bracken which kept grabbing at her arms and pushing her back.

He felt he was being squeezed. There was pressure, and a shock of dry air, as his head emerged from darkness into the brightest light. He felt himself torn, separated from a world that held him close. He shivered on a rough surface until he felt a touch and found himself lifted and held against warmth and softness which moved in waves beneath his fragile body. A form, light leaking around the edges, shadow and a shower of fine strands focused shards of light, drew him out and anchored him in this place. The skin on his forehead tightened as it dried and the gentle pressure of surfaces traced and informed him of the limits of his body.

Dalyon sat all through the next day on his bed, sometimes swaying and sometimes shaking the restlessness from his body with a loud shout. He closed his eyes and watched as she returned bit by bit. She was dragging the heavy thing tied together with vines, behind her. Sometimes she stopped to rest.  As she came closer to the river he saw that an animal was tracking her. He looked harder. The animal was big. Sometimes it walked tall like Ma, but with heavier, stronger steps, and sometimes it loped along on four, using its bent over hands to give it an extra push along the ground. It had hair all over, strong teeth and big hands with sharp claws. It was smart. It was hungry. If Ma did not come that night Dalyon would take the package tied to the lid of the drum that held the flour. He did not know what else.

He watched as the tracking animal closed in. ‘Go away! GAAH!’ he shouted, but it kept going. He closed his eyes and shouted right into the beast’s ear. It stopped then, and sniffed the air. Ma dragged on. The tracking animal looked around and that was when Dalyon saw its children, following a little behind, tumbling over one another, playing. It waited for them to catch up. It was about to go forward again when it looked back, seemingly straight at Dalyon. He stood up on his bed and jumped at it.

‘Go away!’ he yelled. ‘Get!’ His jump made him fall on the floor. The cat scampered out from where it had been sleeping under the bed and ran off.

The tracking animal shook its head. It had not seen him. It had caught something else on the wind and began to lope away in another direction. Dalyon saw that it had been distracted by a dead kangaroo. The kangaroo had a round belly and was lying on its back, stretched out and stiff. It had its mouth open, and flies spun around its head. The tracking animal come upon it, sniffed at the carcass and the ground around it. As its children caught up, it began to tear at the side of the dead kangaroo with its claws and sharp teeth. When it had changed the kangaroo into meat, it moved aside to let its children eat. Ma kept going, faster now, looking behind her, then head down, leaning into the wind.

It was late when she returned. Her hair hung around her face in coiled wet strings. She had dirt on her clothes, lines of dirt on her face, and old cuts on her arms where blood had dribbled and dried in a small series of red-black bumps. She took a long drink, gave him food and drink, kissed him, and went to bed to sleep for a long time. The next day she rose when the sun was already in the middle of the sky. She spent the rest of the day working on the thing. Dalyon stood by to fetch what she asked. When she was looking away and busy in her work, he glared angrily at it. He did not like this thing. He made days of circles around it before he gave it a chance to show what it could do. For a long time the swing and he went to war against the trampoline, jumping out at it when it wasn’t looking, claws exposed, and they called it many bad names.

Book Length Project Group Profile Writer PJ Johnson

In Tasmania

Pat has always been interested in writing, but never seemed to get around to it until a few years ago. She completed a Diploma in Creative Writing at Curtin Uni and got involved in the Perth writing community where she has been an editor for dotdotdash magazine and works for the Fellowship of Australian Writers Western Australia (FAWWA).
She has published both poetry and short stories. At the time of writing she is working with writer and free lance editor, Lisa Litjens, on a full length novel about a clash of wills with mining at its heart. With a  working title of Black River Red Sky, the story involves a young, flawed and idealistic environmental activist who is trying to prevent mining on a Kimberley station, where the owner has been badly hit by the GFC and needs to get income from anywhere to keep the property going.
The next step, finding the right publisher, will involve learning a whole new skill set.

In support of no child in poverty

Up a tree and bear-ly hanging on!

A former Australian Labor Prime Minister, Bob Hawke once famously said that no child in Australia would be living in poverty by... well so long ago now that it doesn't matter. The aim is for things to improve in societies, and it is important to begin at the beginning. Childhood.

Ok, off-message a bit with regard to the purpose of this blog, but everything is connected and a parent with primary school aged children, trying to raise those children on their own, is perhaps now being punished for being in that position in the first place, treated as an easy target, a sin-carrier, a scapegoat. The latest policy with regard to financial assistance for sole parents and their children reinforces all of this, but will not help parents to raise themselves and their families out of poverty or social disadvantage. People end up in sole parent families for all sorts of reasons, and very few fit the common perjorative stereotypes popular in some quick-grab media stories.

This weekend a grass-roots movement is protesting the latest (significant) cuts to the already tiny allowance available to sole parents in order to raise their children. They are placing bears all around the place - look out for them in your Australian town or city. It's a peaceful awareness-raising exercise.

A single policy decision can affect one or more generations of a country's citizens and can have a detrimental flow-on effect to everyone. Yes, work is good, but when a parent is trying to care for the needs of young children with little or no other family support, more help is needed, not less. Give a man or woman a fish and you feed them for a day, teach them to fish and you feed them for a lifetime. But if you give them a decent feed and enable them to get to the fishing spot, they will be able to think more clearly and have a much better chance of success at feeding their families for a lifetime, and of ensuring that the next generation thrives.

Abandoning First Draft for the Post Apocalyptic... for now

Here's a first draft of another kind. I don't think memoir writing is for me at the moment, so here is a voyage into an imagined future instead. I promise this will go further (because it already has!). I have scheduled a new segment to go on at about this time each week.

Again, I am simply playing with an idea here. I think with speculative fiction one begins by creating a world.

For now, the setting is an isolated house located in a dying or recovering forest. I thought the story could be told from the point of view of a child:

One

           ‘Once upon a time,’ stories often began, ‘there lived many, many people in the world.’

Ma stopped talking for a moment and sat very still, looking in the direction of the open window with the curtain that moved its corner back and forth, in small flutterings. Dalyon lay tucked in his bed with his purple alligator, waiting for the way that the story would tell itself this time.

‘This was the time before the final Great War. The people didn’t have enough to eat, and they didn’t have enough to drink, and many fell ill. Even the air was not safe to breathe. In those days there were many bad things happening in the world, Dalyon. The earth was suffering too, so it tried to do whatever it could to heal itself. It shook, and it vomited, and it sweated, melting ice and snow that had covered its mountain tops for a very long time. There are some places where people used to live, that are covered with water now, and other places where great cities once stood. Some have been buried beneath the flowing mud. Some collapsed when the earth shook, and they stayed that way. And then there were the wars that raged across the surface of the Earth. It was a very hard time for people, Dalyon, and it seemed for a time that nobody would survive.

The people talked and talked about different ways to make it better, but they could not agree upon a proper course of action. So in the end they did nothing. It was easier to talk than to change the way things were done. They went on doing the same things they’d always done, which were the things they had become very good at. They were very good at making money, at arguing, and at killing one another. Almost everything that they knew and made was taken and used for waging war. When it was all over, most of the people were gone.’

‘Gone,’ Dalyon echoed.

‘Yes Dalyon, lost to the earth. They were no longer. It seems that people weren’t as big and as important as they thought they were. The Earth was bigger and more important. The people had forgotten that the Earth is a living thing.’

Ma’s eyes were staring into the distance far, far away. She continued to speak about the Earth as a living thing. ‘The Earth is our great mother, but sometimes I think she is a heartless mother.  Or perhaps she was just very sad. I think she must have wanted to start again, to clear herself of whatever had made her sick, which was greed and war, and bad feeling. As it turned out, wars were nothing compared to the way the Earth could fight back. In the process she destroyed many. Eventually things settled down. Some families were lucky enough to survive in small pockets.’

Ma stopped talking. She forgot that she was telling a story and sat quietly on the side of his bed with her eyes flicking back and forth, and with drops of water forming on her brow. She had got stuck on the part of the story about the small people in small pockets.

Dalyon didn’t mind. It gave him time to think of the small families in small pockets. He thought of the family in his own small pocket. He thought he could carry the small family around in his pocket, and he could take it out to play whenever he wanted, then put it away again.  He thought about the little people clinging to his hair as he swung back and forth on his swing. He thought about the small family sitting around his bed when he couldn’t sleep, telling him stories about all the small pockets where they had sheltered from the wars and the Earth’s sickness.

Ma rested her hand on his arm. She had more of the story to tell. 

‘Now the world has many places separated by seas which are made of very deep water. The water is so deep that if you stood in it, it would be over your head. If you put this house in the water, the water would go over the top. If you stacked many houses like this one on top of one another, the water would go over the top of them all. The water in the sea goes on and on. It is spread out over a very big area, Dalyon, much bigger than the distance that you would have to travel to pass through the forest of trees that lives around this house. The water fills the spaces between the different lands. People used to travel across it in boats that floated on the water, and in planes that flew like birds above the water.  People were very clever at making things like this to travel far, and to travel fast, but they weren’t clever enough to know how to live in peace. When the wars, and all of the other things that happened, passed, there were… in the whole wide world there were just a few thousand, perhaps ten or fifteen thousand. People. That sounds like a lot, I know, but it isn’t many. They were all spread out in places, on land separated by water and by mountains. I was one of those people, Dalyon. I lived with my father and my mother in a small house at the bottom of a mountain, far, far across the sea. They moved there before I was born, to get away from all the trouble. They tried, but they didn’t quite escape. There was something in the air, they said, left over from the war. When I was still small, not very much older than you are now, my mother died, and soon after that my father died, and then I lived by myself until I was grown into a young woman. I didn’t feel alone Dalyon, not really. My mother seemed to be there to teach me and to watch over me. I felt she was still there, although I couldn’t see her. Perhaps I could hear her. Then I couldn’t. She’d gone.’

Ma had been sitting on the edge of Dalyon’s bed, but now she stood up and walked to the window. She pulled it closed with a bang, and the curtain fell still and silent. She turned back, looked at Dalyon, and smiled. ‘You know what happened next, don’t you? One day a man came walking down the mountain.’

‘Papa Terry.’

‘Yes, Dalyon. He brought you to me. Then he brought us here.’

Ma came back to sit on the side of his bed before she spoke again.  Now her voice was soft, and she sounded as if she were asking a question. Dalyon searched, but he couldn’t find the answer, so he couldn’t tell the question.

‘The man brought others too. Not here. Somewhere. I don’t know where they are now. He found them and he saved them, you see. We all came here by boat. After we landed, we went our separate ways. I went into training for a year. You won’t remember. Do you? I hardly remember it myself. They seem to – ah,’ Ma shook her head. ‘No. It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

She let her eyes drift over Dalyon’s face. ‘There is one thing I do remember very clearly – my first sight of you, and how I felt then, so strange, as if I had met my destiny. When I first saw you, you were such a tiny baby, all bundled up against the cold. He told me you were very special, Dalyon. All children were special, but you were a special boy. They said you would have a different way of thinking. They knew this would be so from a test that they did on your blood. That is why they chose me to be your mother. Perhaps I am different too. Difference is a good thing – it can make us strong, you see. The people as a whole are stronger, with difference. They said that before the war, people were afraid of anyone who was different and that they liked everyone to be the same as them. Once there were many languages, but by then there was just one, called English. Other languages were forbidden. People were afraid to speak them, even at home. People were watching – the people who liked everyone the same as them. They wanted to destroy everyone else. That was a very bad thing. Now we are not like that, praise to the Great Mother. War and Mother Earth made the world change. Everything changed. People changed. Those that were left. Now we are all part of the Great Mother’s experiment, you see.’

Ma’s voice grew quieter as she said those last words, and she stopped speaking again for a time. As Dalyon waited he held the purple alligator up to see how it looked against the dimming light coming through the space between the window’s curtains.   Most of its colour was gone now and just its shape could be seen outlined by the space around it. Ma’s face was an outline too. There was some light coming through the curls in her hair. Dalyon looked around the room. The colour was seeping out of everything. Even the story that Ma had been telling, seemed to have been drained of colour. After a while she spoke one ending to the story she had been telling. She laid her body down on his bed with her face next to his ear, and she spoke it in a whisper.

‘I tell you this story so that you will remember one day, and think about how to make the world safe for the children of the future. The whole story has been written down in a book so it won’t be forgotten. I want you to remember that book, Dalyon. Do you understand? I hope you can.’

Dalyon still did not know what Ma was asking, so he said nothing. Ma sat up again, wiped her hands over her eyes and her face, and let out a slow breath. She spoke the second ending to the story in a loud, cheerful voice.

‘So that is how you came to live here with me, as my little boy. This place used to be called Australia. We were brought here because in this place the land is very, very old and magical, and because it has survived. It sleeps peacefully here. Now all the wars are over and the earth is healing. There is nothing left to fear. We came, and now we will live happily ever after,’ said Ma.

She bent over to kiss him then, and to stroke the hair away from his face. ‘Go to sleep little one,’ she said.  ‘The moon is thin tonight.’