Perth Writers Festival almost here!

I am so looking forward to the Perth Writers Festival this weekend, starting with the opening address by novelist, journalist and political commentator Ahdaf Soueif who witnessed the beginning of a revolution in Cairo's Tahrir Square and will reflect on what it means for an artist to bear witness to the Egyption start of what has been dubbed 'The Arab Spring' by media commentators.

There are some great discussions planned with Margaret Atwood, China Mieville (sorry, not sure how to put the accent on), Anna Funder, Philip Adams (hug), Maxine McKew, Dennis Lehane, Lawrence Norfolk, Loretta Napoleoni, Andy Griffiths, Alison Lester, Isobelle Carmody, Gus Gordon, Edward St Aubyn, James Meek, Robert Dessaux and many, many others.

The Festival runs over Thursday (schools day) right through to Sunday afternoon. Sunday is Family Day with  great children's and YA authors, some of whom are mentioned above. Many of the events are free, and BLPG member Glen Hunting will be donning the T-shirt and volunteering again, so look out for a tall man (with wild hair and a beard) who looks like he knows what he's doing! Last year we were volunteers in solidarity, but I'm having a break from it this year to focus on the Glass of Wine and a Good Book free event sponsored by Writingwa in the Juliet Tent from 2pm -6pm on Saturday, and featuring Western Australian writers.

Volunteering at the festival is a great way to see what goes on behind the scenes, and the best part is meeting the other volunteers, many of whom are also published writers, or students of the craft, so think about it for next year if you are in the vicinity. I'll be putting my hand up again, all being well.

Book Length Project Group Meets this Sunday 17 February

See those who can make it at on Sunday at Mattie's House from 10am -12.30pm. Bring something to read or discuss if you like, or we can free-form it.

First Draft (A continuation of my little experiment)

 

A couple of years after everyone went missing and was found again, the whole family moved into town. They loaded up the car – there must have been a car by then, before the Vanguard and after the truck. The three children squeezed together in the back, two boys and the girl, uncomfortable, but comforted by their proximity. Their father drove the corrugated dirt road into town, straight to the stone house with the verandahs all around and the ceiling fans suspended from high pressed tin ceilings.

She would have been about four by then. Her mother still kept her in a cot. They moved it onto the verandah for the cool, and at the end, above her head, hung the red chickens that her grandmother had made and sent from Perth. She loved those chickens, and her grandmother who brushed her hair to make it shine when she came to stay, but was only five when her mother sat her on her knee and told her that her grandmother had died. She remembers crying, has conserved the memory of the sharpness and depth of grief, feeling it fully and then letting it go. She fancies that she observes it like a scientist, that first grief, the intensity of feeling that a child can have, but really, it's gone.  The memory of her grandmother has been caught and pinned like an insect.  It has been drained of life. From time to time it is taken out and coveted, slid out on its tray, put back again, and then neglected. As the time has passed, its wings have fallen off. Perhaps it no longer serves its purpose. Life itself is good enough. Generations have lived and died in their a good-enough lives. A good enough life with a good enough mother and a good enough father. Her better than good enough grandmother was soon gone, leaving behind the red chickens, some birds and animals made from painted sea shells, and the miniature picture books that she had sent to them.

She would not be back. They were in another house by then. Time grows large for the child who places attention on everything new. Space and time is influenced by the landscape. The more it contains, the bigger it seems. To the child, hungry for learning, everything is significant and patterns are not fully formed. A new landscape beckoned. Back then, moving was fun. The love moved with them in any case. It didn’t seem too soon to have moved again.

Her father was an itinerant worker prospecting for gold, getting some work on stations, working at the power house. He was tall, thin, strong with naturally olive skin further darkened by the sun. She saw him anew when she looked back on the photographs of him as a young man.   Who was he, this man? He was not young when she was born - already in his forties, and the rheumatoid arthritis that he'd contracted in his twenties had already begun to take hold. He became visibly disabled, and people pitied him and thought he would die before them, but he didn’t. He kept a young spirit, right to the end, and lived until he was nearly ninety, in pain, and in defiance of his pain.  He loved to laugh. There must have been moments of joy. He might have lived long because there had been unfinished business.  Perhaps he couldn’t allow himself to die.  He lived on, until he could live on no more, finally allowing himself to drift away once the family was able to let him go. Those other men mostly died before him, the healthier, well-meaning men who visited and sat on the end of his hospital bed.

They were all younger once, living a life. Her father. She remembers her mother crying after they argued because he was going away again. She hated him for part of that day, because he made her mother cry. Now when her mother looks back on her life with him she says that they had a happy marriage. She says she still misses him, and that her own father was wrong when he advised her against the marriage, because the man she loved was twelve years older and divorced. She’s glad she didn’t marry her first fiance even though he was her own age and had plenty of money, because she'd felt trapped and found his mother domineering. Fate played a hand she thinks, although the content of that hand she has never revealed. Later when this first man's wife had died, and her own husband, this first one turned up on her doorstep. Her mother was already eighty by then, maybe more. He hadn’t seen her since she was twenty. “You’ve changed,” he said. “You used to be a slim little thing. What happened to you?”

"What happened to you?" she said.

(c) Iris Lavell 2013

Thanks

Thank you to all my friends, family, neighbours and colleagues who attended the launch of Elsewhere in Success yesterday, for your support and good wishes for the success of the book.

To Andrew and my family for their support and practical help.

To Aki for bringing her camera to document the day.

To Trisha Kotai-Ewers who very kindly provided the FAWWA venue of Mattie's for the launch, to Pat Johnson who worked away in the background, and to Peter Bibby who did so much after the event.

To Georgia Richter and Claire Miller from Fremantle Press for their support of this event and for everything they have done to help make this book a success.

To Clive Kicker and Dymocks for attending the event to ensure that books were available for those who wanted to purchase one.

And a big thank you to Dr Chris McLeod who launched the book after mentoring me through the years. And for doing such a great job.

The book is launched and sailing away on its own. Anything positive that happens with regard to this publication from now is a bonus.

Now, back to the writing.

Next meeting of the BLPG is next Sunday (17 January) at Mattie's, 10am.

Book launch reminder

You are all welcome to my book launch tomorrow at FAWWA premises, Mattie's House, 4.30pm. Light refreshments will be served and books will be available from the Dymocks table. I can sign for you, if you like. Looking forward to catching up with those who can make it.

Iris

First draft

I've just started something new based on my earliest memories, and I'm playing around with how identity is formed and the slippage between the real and imagined. At this stage the writing seems to have a kind of unconscious logic that is driving it forward. I thought it might be interesting for the blog to track how it develops, to document something of one person's creative process. I'll put other excerpts on from time to time. Here is a sample of the first draft writing just started - part of the first chapter maybe:

She wasn’t lost. They thought she was, but she wasn’t. She had only wandered a little way from the truck because the others had gone, too impatient to sit and wait for their father’s return from checking the fences.  “Stay here,” they’d said. It was already late with shadows slanting across the landscape, cooling the ground which scratched and slid under her leather sandals as she found her way through the spinifex to the other side of a spidery tree, and further in, until she reached the ant hill. It towered above her.  She had seen them as the landscape moved past, when she had knelt up on the seat to watch through the window, the boys pointed them out, named them for her. Now she picked up one of the rocks scattered around, the ones sometimes caught in the act of turning to glass, and she hit the side of the hill to see what would happen. A piece broke off and life was uncovered. Ants began hurrying their eggs across the cut that she had made, to safety. She felt shame then, sorry for the damage she had caused.

Jackie tracked her and returned to the truck to report. “Why didn’t you bring her back?” her father had said. Jackie would have shrugged and looked away. “I didn’t think you’d want me to.” Nothing more. What could be left unspoken was better than words. But in this moment emotions were raw from anxiety at the emptiness they had found upon their return, her brothers knowing they had disobeyed, and making excuses, and her father had spoken sharply. After Jackie found her, everyone clammed up. Her father must have been worried because of what had almost happened in the weeks before, and because she was so young, but not because he was afraid of the landscape. He’d been born in this country in 1911. Burnakurra. His mother had been born in this country, sometime in the eighteen hundreds. She knew it too. And her mother. Who knew where she’d been born? It was difficult to track the records. Once, years later, she’d pressed her mother for information. “Where did they get their looks from?” Her mother looked cagey. “They might have had Chinese ancestors,” she said. “Their people came from Bendigo.” Father’s father, a red-headed barrel-chested man, had half-walked there, half ridden a bicycle, looking for gold. He found it too.  So her father knew this country like people know their local neighbourhood, and like people know and don’t know their mother. He could easily disappear back into this country. His father is buried there. And others. There is a picture of him as a boy – aged ten or eleven – lying on his stomach on a home-made raft, on a dam. He is naked. That’s how it seemed, free and easy like that. They did bombies into the water. But right now the man was implicated in the potential for what might have happened if his daughter had gone missing. He loved her dearly, of course.

Grace. When you look it up it has something to do with being absolved despite your own imperfections. Made clean again. The child was found. No harm was done. Jackie led them back to the place. Her father picked her up and carried her, but the memory of the fortnight before was fresh in his mind. It had been only two weeks since the boys had gone missing, lost all day in the bush, with the whole town after them. The trackers were able to tell part of the story, but not all. Finally they were found by chance. The boys were older than her of course, three and five. They kept their shoes on, kept to the shade where they could, didn’t drink from the sheep troughs, kept an eye out for snakes, and were found about this part of the day, just before darkness fell. Her father had taken a bicycle and ridden out.  And ridden. He was searching for some kind of clue. When they were found he couldn’t be contacted. No mobile phones in those days. There’s still no coverage out there probably. He came back well into the night to the good news, a candle in the window, the sign, so her mother says. He was thoroughly exhausted. His early onset rheumatoid arthritis flared up and he stayed in bed for days. 

That story became part of family history, as comforting as a meal, disaster averted. Sometimes they dined out on it. One day in the middle of her mother telling the story someone said, “You must have been a bad mother.”  Her mother stopped dining out on the story then. Perhaps there was an element of truth in the ill-conceived comment, but not the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Nothing but the truth is that everybody is a bad mother some of the time. All mothers. Even an exemplary mother is a bad mother from being too exemplary. Truth was she was a good-enough mother. There is the phrase that a psychoanalyst called Donald Winnicott coined: the good enough mother. As far as I know, nobody has coined the phrase: the good enough father – but I could be wrong. Most fathers are seen to be good enough, if they are regular guys. If they don’t do bad things.  If they are relatively neutral. Mothers have always been required to meet higher standards, because of the pedestal that supports them. Now things are changing, it seems.

Maybe this mother wasn’t coping well. Maybe she wasn’t keeping a proper eye on them because of the displacement. She suffered illness. This wasn’t her country. She’d been brought here. One day she collapsed weeping in the red dirt because her clothesline laden with wet sheets had fallen onto the ground. Jackie came and helped her fix it then, because he knew she belonged somewhere else, where there was greenery and dampness. Still, she was the mother. It was her job. Her fault.

That second time, with the girl, they were in their father’s care. That time it was their fault. The father. The children. The girl herself should have done as she was told. They all felt this. She felt this. Even so, there was a trace of self-flagellation about the father for a while – a shadow that soon faded. The story told later didn’t place blame. Neither of the stories placed blame. They were anecdotes. He might have taken it out on Jackie, speaking sharply. “Use your initiative!” But Jackie had been encouraged not to use his initiative, and to follow orders. Jackie was too well-mannered to speak sharply back. He was philosophical. It was a job. It kept his family fed for another couple of years. Besides, he didn’t mind the anger. At least it wasn’t patronising. It was understandable. The love. The investment of time and effort.  All’s well that ends well. The boys were found. The girl was found. Other children went missing and eventually turned up again. Jackie’s own children. They learnt to fend for themselves. It was necessary. All’s well that ends well.

Memories are rehearsed, or untended and allowed to die. That time with the ant hill she experienced something that she held to all her life. Later she thought of it as a kind of revelation.  At the time it was beyond words, and later, destroyed by them. It was something to do with the way that life was connected. She transferred that memory as her body changed and replaced itself, the memory of a feeling that she’d once experienced. Sometimes a child has clear vision. Then it is gone. But she remembers knowing that she experienced it once –a glimpse into the mystery of life. She knew once that even ants glow with it. And that they are sentient.

The word came later, a container for the memory, but like all containers served not only to contain, but to separate – to protect, preserve, prevent. Her own wandering away became a family story, and it dated the experience for her. She would have been no more than two years old – too young to know anything, or to be a philosopher. And this is why she knows that human beings have souls, and so do ants, or maybe that they all are souls, and that having is neither here nor there.

(c) Iris Lavell 2013

 

The Courage to Get Naked

The Three Graces

There could be a discrepancy between being an acceptable social human being, and being free to be a writer. To be an acceptable social being is to grease the wheels of social interaction, to be considerate of the feelings of others, to avoid speaking up in certain situations, to know when to speak up in others, and to choose one's words and actions with at least some care. It might be said that writing fiction requires some of the same. Choices are made - what to write, what not to write - but there are different rules and expectations. If we are to do our job properly, we have to be prepared to take the risk of being seen without our social costume, or of being such good actors, of the fiction ringing so true, that we appear to be stripped bare. While we might take comfort in the disappearance of the author, I think s/he is often present in the mind of the reader. There is always the question of whether the writing is autobiographical. Does it represent the author's own belief systems and attitudes? I think the answer is that all beliefs and attitudes are possible, and that by taking on an empathetic orientation, it is possible to play with these on the page.  If a human attitude, emotion or belief is possible, then it is possible to try it on within the writing context. It does not mean that we choose this combination of beliefs within our private lives.

 

What lies beneath? I think that as writers we need to be sufficiently courageous to examine what lives below the external social self and to look at conventional wisdom from new and unusual angles, sometimes unflattering ones. This means that if enough people read our work, someone is likely to be offended, so it's best to get that out of the way at the outset. The craft requires an attitude of unflinching observation, objectivity, subjectivity, and above all, a loving commitment to authenticity.    In the intimate relationship between the page and the reader, in the context of the fictional narrative, truths are explored and potential lives examined. In the process, a writer might well compromise his or her persona as a likeable social being. Or s/he might become more authentic. At the beginning of this journey, I think it is likely to be something between the two.