Next year...

Both teams fought hard but the more experienced Hawks prevailed in the end. Congratulations to both teams - only a couple of goals in it when the final siren sounded. "The Dockers have a future" said Dennis Cometti. They sure do. A young team with a great work ethic and a whole year to get ready for the next Grand Final. Garn the Dockers!

Garn the mighty Dockers...!

Freo, way to go, hit 'em with the old heave ho - we are the Freo Dockers.

All this to be sung with a hint of inebriation and just the one note - pick any.

Joking aside, nineteen years without a grand final makes the competition this year all the sweeter.

Go Freo!

Progressing the manuscript - confessions of a suburban writer

I have taken to handwriting, however clumsily, every morning when I get up, to simply progress the

plot of my new novel manuscript. In my pyjamas, in my dressing gown and old socks. With a cup of coffee at my side, usually growing cold as the stream of consciousness takes hold.

This stops me -

• overthinking things
• getting stuck in editing mode on my computer
• losing the plot
• overcomplicating the plot
• feeling those self-defeating emotions that accompany the process of writing a novel when inspiration is not forthcoming

It's still slow. I type it up and edit over the course of the day, between more cups of coffee and suddenly pressing tasks.

Yes it's working and the plot twists and turns still take me by surprise. I guess the trick now is knowing which paths to follow, and where I need to backtrack.

I wish you all the best, fellow writers, with your own endeavours. Keep writing.

Defending the Domestic Drama

The teacups in the room

A recent episode of Jennifer Byrnes Presents called "Pens and Prejudice" was filmed at the Sydney Writers Festival and featured a panel of writers and critics discussing the issue of whether women's writing, fiction in particular, was being unfairly overlooked by the big literary prizes, and whether there was a need for special women's prizes such as the Orange and the Stella. As always, it was a worthwhile talk with an excellent panel, although in the half-hour time slot allocated for the television program, much of the original discussion would have been edited out, I imagine.
 
The issue of subject matter made the cut though, with the consensus being that anything to do with the tiny details of domestic life, so-called 'misery' fiction, and 'thinly veiled autobiography' made the (female) arbiters of such taste, want to 'slit their wrists'.
 
Now I'm not in favour of pumping out fiction as a cynical exercise to jerk tears from voyeuristic readers and I'm not a fan of angst for its own sake, but I do wonder about the assumptions behind the literary denigration of such stories. Humour, lightness, and optimism doesn't seem to come in for quite the same level of criticism, although often these too, tend not to make the cut for literary consideration, being seen as somehow less, when I’ve always thought it would be quite difficult to pull off humour well.

A particular brand of female suffering tends to come in for the biggest hit though, and I am wondering why. Is the expression of issues of suffering through storytelling seen as unseemly perhaps, especially if the sufferer (the central character) is drawn as ill-equipped to rise above it? In reality, preventable and unnecessary suffering does exist, often exists behind closed doors, and is not always 'handled' with the stoicism or aplomb that we imagine it should be. Unselfconscious neuroticism and self-examination are ubiquitous; could be the defining feature of our age, in fact, and is not all bad, in that it - well - encourages self-examination. Isn't this, in itself, a fit and proper subject for storytelling? 
 

The flowers in the room

Effectively, what we are being told is that, if you are a serious writer and want to be considered as such, there are some subjects that you write about at your peril. And yet, these are, to my mind, valid subjects for literary exploration precisely because they are resisted. And they are meaningful, because what happens in the domestic sphere translates to good health, or ill, in the society at large. 
 
The now clichéd and pejorative term 'thinly veiled autobiography' seems particularly inaccurate, because anyone who has given the process of writing any thought at all understands that whatever emerges from an author's pen or keyboard is going to be both autobiographical and fictional; autobiographical in the sense that it is filtered through their particular world view and honed by their peculiar imagination (unless it is heavily plagiarised). Works marketed as autobiography are largely fictional, for the same reason. Perhaps we also need to be reminded that whatever is traditionally published is going to be filtered through a number of sensibilities before it reaches print. To imagine that any book that is accepted for publication is anything other than highly constructed is to ignore what goes on in the lengthy editorial process. 
 
And doesn't 'thinly veiled' autobiographical content (as distinct from the more respectful 'semi-autobiographical' content) imply that there is such a thing as 'heavily veiled' autobiographical content? Is this more commonly called realism, that brand of fiction that reinforces the existing social structures and power relationships of the private and the public, of what is acceptable (non-confronting) to bring into the public sphere and what is not acceptable (inconvenient to talk about)? It is assumed that in realism there will be some borrowing from reality - setting and so forth - but it seems that borrowing needs to be of a kind that does not challenge the reader’s existing world view too much.
 
I wonder about the internalised sexism that underlies the idea that the domestic sphere is somehow not worth writing about, if it is written about by a female writer. Strangely, when men write about the domestic as it impacts them (as is right and proper - men live there too), the result can be considered exemplary (if it is well -written, of course, and the well-written part is understood here - I am talking purely of a subject matter hierarchy). The Great Gatsby was a domestic kind of book, and so was Women in Love. Weren't they? Wonderful books from a male sensibility.
 


The elephant in the room

It would be interesting to look at why female writers have their own hierarchy as far as it comes to subject matter, and why epic is considered so much more valuable than the intimate, why violence is considered to be a better subject to write about than love, and why those who decide prizes for women's literature appear to feel that they must use the very same criteria to judge women's literature as those which have been developed over time to privilege those power structures that made it necessary to have the prizes in the first place. To be considered as good as the Man Booker, do the Orange and the Stella need to be the same?
 
At the beginning of the program Jennifer Byrne mentioned the elephant in the room. My feeling is that the elephant is still there. I think it will take some shifting.

 

The final of Tales from the Dark Mountain by Patricia Johnson - at least for now perhaps...

This is the last of the series of modern fairy tales by Patricia Johnson from her Dark Mountain series. The others have been posted on this blog here, here and here. All stories copyright Patricia Johnson.

Bendy Boys

Far away on the other side of the world a village rests on the face of a dark mountain. Early every morning when the villagers awake from their night time dreams they hurry out into the sunlight. Dressed for a day of work, they walk together to their fields.

The mountain is so high that its highest peaks disappear in the clouds. If anyone was to want to go to the village, they would have to walk for days up from the foothills below. The people who live there have their houses and their fields on a little plain that is level and fertile with a mountain spring running through it. They think they are lucky to live there.       

The villagers plant their crops and water and wait and one day the heads of little boys pop up out of the earth.  The villagers are surprised; they didn’t plant little boys. They already have their own children. The little boys are different to the village children. These boys are growing out of their fields. Their little heads wear  caps of a brilliant blue that fall softly over their eyes, and their eyes are  bright.          

The villagers are so happy and so proud, but the boys are buried in the fields and they must grow  before they can walk. Their bodies are unformed below the surface of the ground, but above ground their bright eyes are very bright indeed. They are almost popping out of their heads, always watching, learning and wondering.

One day when they go to the fields to see if the children have grown, the villagers  find their shoulders have popped out of the ground and growing from the shoulders are very long bendy arms. The little shoulders and long bendy arms wear little blue jackets that match their caps -  their caps which, because the boys have grown, no longer fall over their bright eyes. The villagers stand on the edge of the fields, pointing and admiring the children.   

Whack! One of those long bendy arms has reached out and grabbed a man. The child turns the man upside down and shakes him.  One two three, like someone shaking salt onto his dinner he shakes him and on three the long bendy arm bangs the man’s head onto the ground. He goes in up to the shoulders and his body stands up like stick pushed into the ground.         

The villagers all begin to run in different directions but they are too late. They hope the young monsters will just go away but long bendy arms are scooping them up everywhere, turning them upside down  and shaking them. Bright eyes are brimming with laughter as the villagers are banged like nails into the ground. There is uproar, there is mayhem in the fields. And then it is quiet.                                                                                                                

The  children erupt out of the ground like olives being squeezed out of a narrow bottle top, laughing and calling to each other in excited voices, ‘we won! we won!’ They dance and throw their blue caps in the air and fall about laughing at the way they land. They gather together in the centre of the field and dance a mad dance. The go faster and faster until they are out of breath and their long bendy arms are intricately entangled with each other. They pat their friends on the back but their arms are so long they don’t know who they are patting.

‘Bendy Boys! Bendy Boys!’ they cry. ‘We are the Bendy Boys.’ They begin to dance again. But there is trouble this time. Their arms are so entangled that boys keep falling down. They begin to cry. Boys turn red. They try to punch other boys, but their fists are a long way away; they cannot hit the boy they intend to. Instead they hit other boys. Those boys hit back. Long bendy arms are throwing punches everywhere., Little blue jackets are covered in dirt. There are split lips and bloody noses. There are all sorts of wounds.                                                

Blood starts to flow. It is everywhere. Blood, blood, blood. It mingles with the tears of the boys who are just caught up in the long bendy arms. The boys turn pale, their blue jackets covered in red, as their blood pours into the field. This does not stop them fighting. They go on and on until they have no blood left and fall onto the ground. They are a blue mountain of legs and heads and long bendy arms, silent, motionless. The boys cannot be separated as they are so entwined; they are all one mountain of blue.                                                                    

The villagers are still stuck upside down in the ground. They are like stiff pegs that stand tall and straight, that circle the mountain of blue. The wind blows, the mountain of blue shifts and sinks a little. Days pass and then one morning ‘Bluuurk!’ Straight up, high in the sky, pops one of the villagers and when he comes down, he is upright and smiling. He is alive. ‘Bluuurk!’ Another villager pops up, and then another and another. ‘Bluuurk! Bluuurk! Bluuurk!’ It is happening everywhere and soon the air is filled with flying villagers, somersaulting in the air and landing right side up and smiling.                                               

The villagers are so happy to be back. They look at each other, laughing over the pile of blue and begin to walk in a circle around and around the Bendy Boys. Around and around, tramping, swinging their arms in unison, they march. And as they march, they make a trench in the ground. They wear down a path and the ground where they walk gets lower and lower, and soon the blue pile of Bendy Boys is high above their heads. The villagers keep walking in a circle, round and round. Suddenly they hear a noisy scraping sound.

With difficulty they climb and clamber out of the deep trench. The circle of blue in the middle, looking like a cake that has risen in the oven, slowly turns and falls to one side. It stands on its curved edge and like a wheel begins to roll down the mountainside. Slowly at first, then faster and faster, it careers downward, a giant blue coin slicing through the thick forest of trees and right out of sight.        

When it is really gone and can be seen no more, the villagers look at the middle ground, underneath where that blue pile had been. What they see there is a great mound of gold coins, hundreds and thousands of them. They rush to the center and sink amongst them, each holding a coin up to the light to examine it, showing the coins to their neighbours and wondering at their good fortune.                                                                                         

It is a pool, a pond of gold. As the sunlight bounces off it, the light changes and a soft glow settles over everything. The villagers  are enjoying the feeling that they are swimming in gold, when they are startled to hear a great rattle like a huge bucket of nails being tipped out. The coins are falling away, and there is a rustle and a shaking of scales as a great head emerges from the centre of the pool of gold. A dragon’s head!! Silver head shining against the gold, it’s evil eyes heavy-lidded and unblinking, the dragon swivels round and with a great jerk the head darts skyward on a long neck.                                                                

The villagers panic and run up into the hills. The huge eyes of the dragon watch them until they are all gone, all hidden by the trees. The eyes flash malevolently as the head moves around the edge of the pool, gathering in the gold. The villagers are very afraid. They understand that they have disturbed something that they had no right to disturb. They pray the dragon will not attack them for their foolishness.                                                                 

The silver head glints in the sun. The eyes bore into the eyes of each of the villagers, sending a warning of unmistakable intent. Then very slowly the head spins, the neck begins to be swallowed by the earth, the gold pours  into a cavern of enormous size below, and the dragon and all of the gold sinks below the surface of the ground. There is no trace left of all that gold, of all that has happened. Not one coin shimmers in the sunshine.                             

The villagers are safe. And they have much to say to each other. But they have had enough; they are sick of adventures. They are ready to go into the mountain. They walk along gloomy tunnels, resting and travelling, and resting again. When they have gone far enough they lay down and cover themselves in furs deep in the earth where it is dark and quiet. For years the seasons come and go. They are part of the mountain that does not change and as they sleep the strength of the mountain enters their minds and anchors their dreams.

 

Book Length Project Member Profile Reg Parnell

I have four major writing projects on the go – two fiction, two non-fiction.

Last December I got an editorial critique on a novel I had been working on for years. Amongst much else, it let me identify some gaps in my writing skills. The work that had been critiqued, named Dunce is in the genre of literary nonsense; as such, it was not a good place to address the gaps in my skill set.

I decided to do two things – undertake a major reading exercise in all things writing, and write a ‘training wheels’ novel where I could apply a more standard set of writers tools. I reasoned that this would let me separate the special problems of writing literary nonsense from the broader deficits in my knowledge and craft. I intend to return to Dunce with my enhanced writers superpowers.

Linsay, my trainer novel, is about a 26 y/o woman who has problems with commitment and acceptance; her goal in life is to be a great painter. I have written 80,000 odd words in seven months, and plan to be finished by the end of August. Linsay has taken on a life way beyond my original intentions: my goal of developing and demonstrating a competent fiction writer’s skill set has been achieved, at least well enough for this story.

Marsupial mole

My non-fiction works are a WA travelogue with a difference, and a book on the marsupial mole, based on an original journal from the beginning of last century that reports a study of the mole.

The Australian Society of Authors National Congress

I'll be heading off to the National Writers Congress held in Sydney from Thursday 17 October to Saturday 19 October this year. The Congress is the first held by the Australian Society of Authors. It will explore the changing landscape for writers and will discuss ideas and answers to guide the future of authorship in Australia.

There is an illustrious line-up of authors and industry professionals speaking, including a plenary addresses by Anna Funder, author of All that I Am, winner of the 2012 Miles Franklin Literary Award, and Tom Keneally winner of the Booker Prize for Schindler's Arc, and of many other literary prizes. Take a look at the links provided. Would love to see you there!

A post courtesy of BLPG member Reg

John Gardner on Writing

   If I could only have two books by writers on writing, they would be John Gardner’s On Becoming A Novelist and his The Art Of Fiction. The following description of the nature of the writer comes from page 34 of the 1999 Norton edition of the first book above.

   “Another indicator of the novelist’s talent is intelligence – a certain kind of intelligence, not the mathematician’s or the philosopher’s but the storyteller’s – an intelligence no less subtle than the mathematician’s or the philosopher’s but not so easily recognized.

   Like other kinds of intelligence, the storyteller’s is partly natural, partly trained. It is composed of several qualities, most of which, in normal people, are signs of either immaturity or incivility: wit (a tendency to make irreverent connections); obstinacy and a tendency towards churlishness (a refusal to believe what all sensible people know to be true); childishness (an apparent lack of mental focus  and serious life purpose, a fondness for daydreaming and telling pointless lies, a lack of proper respect, mischievousness, an unseemly propensity for crying over nothing); a marked tendency toward oral or anal fixation or both (the oral manifested by excessive eating, drinking, smoking and chattering; the anal by nervous cleanliness and neatness coupled with a weird fascination with dirty jokes); remarkable powers of eidetic recall, or visual memory (a usual feature of early adolescence and mental retardation); a strange admixture of shameless playfulness and embarrassing earnestness, the latter often heightened by irrationally intense feelings for or against religion; patience like a cat’s; a criminal streak of cunning; psychological instability; recklessness, impulsiveness and improvidence; and finally, an inexplicable and incurable addiction to stories, written or oral, bad or good. Not all writers have exactly these same virtues, of course. Occasionally one finds one who is not abnormally improvident.”

There you have it. Make a little allowance that this came from the 1970’s – allowance only in the way that thoughts are expressed. Gardner is describing the serious literary novelist, not the much more desirable commercial animal.

 

Guest Post - Emily Paull on the Joys of Book Blogging

The delightful Emily Paull has agreed to do a guest post for us this weekend. If the quality of her blogging is an indication, it won't be too long before we're seeing her work displayed in the best bookshops. Thanks Emily. Hope you can get along to the Book Length Project Group sometime when work doesn't call you away.

Book Blogging: More than Just an Awesome Way to Get Free Books

by Emily Paull

I have been blogging now for about five years, and one of the things I have discovered is that you get about as much out of it as you put in.  In the early days of The Incredible Rambling Elimy, I made a point of blogging every Tuesday, even when I didn’t feel like I had anything to say.  It was just good to have that regular outlet… emphasis on the out.  I keep a journal, but nobody is ever supposed to read that.  I can write what I want.  Keeping a blog is different.  You have to think about your audience, in a sense, if you want people to come back and read your work again and again.  Yes, this is still true if the only people in that audience are your Grandparents.  (Hi guys!)

True, there have been moments when I should have just kept my mouth shut.  Anyone else remember that post in which I listed Stephenie Meyer among my idols because I was so amazed that all these teenage girls loved her so much?  Yeah…  But I think it was Foucault who said that ideas change, and it’s important that you learn and change your thinking over time.  By not deleting my Stephenie- loving drivel, I’m holding myself accountable to that.

But why book-blogging specifically?  Why is that so great for an emerging wrier to get involved in?

Well first of all, it’s fun.  I love to read, and I love to talk about what I’ve been reading, and having a book blog basically allows me to do this on a weekly basis.  It’s usually a labour of love, unless I am reviewing something that I just didn’t connect with, which happens, and is pretty much totally dependent on where my head is at.  You know, unless the writing is terrible.  Once I dropped the weekly format, I found myself at a loss for what to talk about for a while, and I thought ‘Well, what do I enjoy?  What am I good at?’ and the answer was reading. 

I stared in 2010 with a series of word vomit style rants called Thoughts On which was a way of collecting my thoughts about the books I had to read for uni.  There were a lot in that particular semester because I was doing two major literature units and I think I had to read seventeen books in twelve weeks, plus analysis.  At first, I was thinking that no one was going to want to read it, but I did it anyway because it was better than not blogging.  Then I remember getting a Facebook message from a friend of a friend who told me she was really keen to read Devil’s Cub by Georgette Heyer after reading what I’d said about it.  First thing I thought was ‘This is weird.’  The second was ‘I could get used to this.’  It was wonderful.

And I kept going from there, supplementing my own writing with blogging about the books I’d been reading.  One of the main things people say about learning to write is that you have to read a lot, and this practise really forces you to read critically.  You have to think about what makes you as a reader tick, and what works and what doesn’t.  Good writers borrow but great writers steal- and book bloggers learn how to borrow and steal by reviewing.  I’ve found this kind of blogging the most stimulating for me, because I am very conscious about blogging about my own writing.  Someone once said that a lot of modern writing is just navel gazing and I don’t want to do that.  I don’t want my author platform to be all about my writing life, because I’m not published yet, and I am pretty sure that most readers out there don’t care about me (yet), but book reviews are something my people (book reading people) care about and it connects me with the kinds of readers I hope will one day be interested in my book.  I do occasionally blog about my writing, and lately I have been blogging about reading and bookselling issues, but since last year, when I did an Honours thesis on Western Australian writing, and got my job at a bookstore, the reviewing has had a definite focus to it. 

Book blogging has also given me the confidence to approach authors and publishing types and say, “Hi, I’m Emily.  I’m a writer, a book blogger and a bookseller, and I’d love to chat.”  I hand them my business card, and sometimes they offer me books to review, sometimes I get an email address out of it, and sometimes these people even read the blog and leave a comment.  That feeling that the network is growing give me hope.  Maybe one day I’ll introduce myself to the person who will publish my book in this manner, but for now, we will have to wait and see.

The right to represent

When it comes to writing, a fairly important question is what to write about. What do I have the right to write about? What do I want to write about? What doesn't get written about, and why?

I don't have the answer, but do believe that representation in the form of stories has power. It can influence perceptions, beliefs, and the way in which we experience reality. Old news you might say, and it is, but knowing this doesn't alter the unremitting struggle that goes on to win hearts and minds over to a particular cause through persuasive rhetoric. It seems like a never-ending competition.

During an election, the stakes are high, and it's difficult to know what is really motivating particular politicians, and if they win power, what the effect of their ability to control the wheel will be. Those big things, policies and laws do matter, because they change lives, the trajectory of lives, and sometimes even whether those lives will continue or not. That's a lot of power in the hands of a small number of people who are sometimes lacking a little bit of insight, who might have vested interests that conflict with those of the people they purport to represent, and who are sometime less than kind. On the other hand, there are some good and dedicated people in there, in the mix. I think, hope, they are mostly that. We can't rely on the old media to tell us which is which, because they too have vested commercial and personal interests. Perhaps we all do.

I don't want to get big "P" Political here. It's not my place and I don't have a crystal ball. I don't know what is best in the grand scheme of things. The machinations are complicated and sometimes the counter-intuitive leads to good outcomes for people. My own vote will go to the parties that I think care for the people and for the world. But we each have a right to make up our own mind about these things. Each time. They're political parties, not football teams.

So, what is the place of a writer in all of this? That is a question we can presume to ask. What kind of issues and characters can we explore in our works of fiction? Do the issues need to be those that directly affect us? Do the characters need to be of our group, our class, gender, race, nationality, experiential base? Some might say yes - write about what you know, and how can you really know unless you have experienced something? Polemical writing in fiction is bad writing, some might say.  There appear to be some unstated no-go areas, which act as a way of closing down any further understanding.  And if you write about love, good outcomes, for example, don't expect to be taken seriously.

My concern here is that the tools of representation are not evenly distributed, although the Internet might be helping. Even so, formal education and the space and support in life to write, maybe even the luxury to consider the bigger picture, is not evenly distributed. This is the problem with saying we need to write what we know. Who will speak up for those whose voice is absent? We are all connected after all, and we can write about our relationships with others. A related question - what responsibility do we have to be conscious of the likely outcome of the words we send out there?

My feeling is that ethics matter. What we write about matters. Our responsibility as writers is to try to tell the story well, with good research, and with a good heart. And to listen and be prepared to change our views.