Canberra Writers Festival

Canberra Writers Festival 2023: 4, Into the Wild

/ whisperinggums / 15 Comments

How good was it that my two sessions today involved books my reading group has done this year, Debra Dank’s We come with this place, and, in this session, Robbie Arnott’s Limberlost. The session, subtitled “Robbie Arnott in conversation with Astrid Edwards”, sounded broader in ambit:

Robbie Arnott’s fiction is steeped in the wild: women return from the dead as walking ecosystems; mythic birds circle the skies; the water calls to us. In writing these sumptuous, near-sentient landscapes, he grapples with our most wrenching and necessary questions: eco-grief, stolen land and human frailty. 

Join Robbie Arnott for this intimate discussion about his abiding love for the natural world and how he brings it to life on the page.

But, Limberlost was the focus. For those of you who don’t know the participants, Robbie Arnott is the Tasmanian-based author of three acclaimed novels (Flames, Rain heron and Limberlost), while Astrid Edwards is a bibliophile, writing teacher, literary awards judge and host of the Garrett Podcast.

The conversation

I will start by saying this felt like the perfect session on which to end my 2023 Canberra Writers Festival experience. I’ll explain at the end, in case you haven’t worked it out by then. Edwards began by saying that behind the scenes she’d gleaned that the question Arnott doesn’t get asked enough concerned “craft” so she asked him to tell us all about it. Arnott simply replied that he likes talking about craft. So Edwards pressed on – but craft was in fact a major thread of the conversation.

Meanwhile, Edwards moved to the critical success he’d had, and whether public recognition has affected how he feels when he sits down to write. He was grateful for the accolades, he said, but he lives in Tasmania away from the literary scene. The main pressure is the one he puts on himself.

Edwards took the obvious segue, and asked him what this pressure means. Arnott referred to a Garrett Podcast interview with Michelle de Kretser who said that “literature lives in the sentences”. He can’t sleep he said until he’s “messed” with a paragraph. This “messing” includes things like reading aloud; going for a walk; changing it because it’s too active and then because it’s too passive; adding commas and removing them. He has spent long conversations with his editor about a comma! Here’s a writer I can love! Seriously though, this made sense because Limberlost wowed me with the tightness of the writing, by which I mean the way Arnott conveys so much in so few words.

After a brief discussion about his first novel Flames, we got to Limberlost, with Edwards asking him to provide a “high level intro”. Arnott described it as being about a young man and a pivotal summer in his life. It is set during World War 1, and he is conflicted about his dream to buy a boat. We flash forward at times to see how that summer affected the rest of his life.

Edwards then returned to the craft issue, saying she was interested in how he handled animals, time, and place, and how he positions himself as a settler writer writing about these things.

After reading from the opening of his novel, which introduces the whale motif, Arnott turned to how he writes about animals. He is fascinated by wild animals. They “yank us out of the civilised world we know when we confront them”. Edwards pushed a bit more about this, mentioning the quoll and Ned’s relationship with it, and how he treats the natural world with respect and honour. Arnott said that all the world is important, and Ned feels respect and connection with it, even if he doesn’t always have the language to express this.

Edwards then raised the logging scene, and how he goes about creating scenes like these. Arnott’s answer was another craft one. What he does is to think about the emotion of the scene, and the atmosphere he wants to create, before he writes the description. Then, here it comes – are you ready – emotion, or feeling, is what he aims for in his writing because it’s what he reads for. This issue underpinned much of the rest of the discussion.

Moving on to the next topic she’d heralded, Edwards asked him about structure and his use of time, about how we tend not to see critical events (like the boat’s destruction) but get Ned’s feeling. Arnott replied that he can’t write action, and quoted Amanda Lorry who said “I can’t read crime because I don’t care who did it”, which is pretty much how I feel. When I read or watch crime, I rarely try to work out who did it. I’m far more interested in the relationships and the ideas being explored. Arnott basically sai the same. He’s not interested in the action but in how people feel. He doesn’t formally plot his books. He knows where he wants to go, and from there he works it all out as he “walks and types”.

What, asked Edwards next, is he trying to share? He has a strong compulsion to write, he says. He sees novels as a two-way communication between author and reader; he likes this connection. He wants to know whether what he feels resonates with the reader. What does “this strange mess” he’s offered up mean to the reader?

Edwards then turned to the craft, and asked how he managed to make Ned’s father feel whole, even though he doesn’t do much. Arnott believes its by having him seen through Ned’s eyes. The novel is 3rd person so a bit objective, but it is through Ned. He surprises Ned. Arnott is interested in masculine tenderness. Edwards turned then to the war context. Arnott said that it wasn’t a war novel, but he needed to provide a context for the story so the reader wouldn’t hit “snags” in terms of understanding what was happening.

At this point Edwards reflected on Arnott’s various references to readers, and asked him how he conceives readers. With gratitude and happiness, he responded, as most people don’t read fiction. The usual response in his social circles, from men in particular, is “Yeah, mate, I don’t read fiction. It’s made up!” But Arnott likes having his mind messed up with made-up things!

The obvious question here, of course, is why. Does he think, asked Edwards, that fiction can do something? And here again was what made this session so special … Arnott said that fiction can expand our consciousness, can make us feel things. We come away a different person after reading it. In this way fiction shapes who we become.

Edwards then raised the settler writer issue, through the scene in which Ned’s university daughters confront him about living and working on stolen land. Ned, said Arnott, is a decent person, but there’s a gaping moral hole concerning living on land not his. It was important for him to be confronted with the idea. To ignore this issue would not be real. There is no moral closure about this in the book. It just sits there, but that’s life too.

Arnott said he had received lot of feedback about that scene in particular, and it’s been split on age: older readers have told him that the daughters were horrible, while younger readers like that part of the book. (Hmm… I guess the older readers who like it haven’t thought to tell him!) This led to a question about how he thinks about himself as a writer. He said he feels a strong responsibility to tell stories about land in a way that improves our country. There is a moral aspect to everything we do, particularly those of us who benefit from colonialism.

Edwards mentioned the eco-fiction genre, and wondered how he sees it. Arnott responded that he’s fine with the idea but doesn’t think about it when he is writing. His focus is emotion. Novels work well when “they rattle around inside you, when they shake you up”. Nonetheless, he is very anxious about this coming summer, and the potential for climate disaster. He wants to write more about climate change. He wants to write the emotion of it, not the facts, which his readers know anyhow.

Q & A

  • On whether there’s a trajectory in how his three books deal the environment but with different senses of place: each book’s place is explicit and deliberate, and it depends on what best suits the story. There is no supernatural element in Limberlost for example because it was not needed.
  • On writing male vulnerability, without being sentimental: he is interested male vulnerability, though everyone is vulnerable. He fears being sentimental, so tries to avoid it by using his sharpest, clearest eye to convey feeling. He focuses on what characters do, not on writing descriptive, interior monologue.
  • On his literary influences, senses elements of Winton and Flanagan: is a fan of both those authors. Loves Flanagan, particularly Gould’s book of fish which exploded fiction at the time. He also likes Annie Proulx, and Tobias Wolff, particularly his “beautiful book” Old school. (This just crossed my path recently as a book I’d love to read.)
  • On next book: yes he’s working on one.
  • On AI’s impact on the future of writing: he is reasonably concerned, but not about the sort of books he writes. It will affect people who write “content”, and it’s terrible for them. He remains hopeful for what novels can do for the world

My wrap-up

I hope you’ve worked out by now why I thought this was the perfect final session for me? It’s Arnott’s absolute commitment to fiction – to its ability to change us, and to its moral (but not didactic) heft. Encouraging and inspiring.

Canberra Writers Festival, 2023
Into the Wild
Sunday, 20 August 2023, 2-3 pm

Canberra Writers Festival 2023: 3, A Jewel of a Book

/ whisperinggums / 15 Comments

Which book you are presumably wondering? The session’s subtitle will give you a hint: Debra Dank in Conversation with Evelyn Araluen. The book, then, is Debra Dank’s We come with this place, which won a record four prizes in this year’s NSW Premier’s Literary Awards (as I described in my post).

The session description commenced with:

We come with this place is deeply personal, a profound tribute to family and the Gudanji Country to which Debra Dank belongs, but it is much more than that. Here is Australia as it has been for countless generations, land and people in effortless balance, and Australia as it became, but also Australia as it could and should be…

It described Dank as “a Gudanji/Wakaja woman” and Araluen as “born and raised on Dharug country [and] a descendant of the Bundjalung Nation”. If you read my second CWF post from yesterday, you’ll see that I have already “met” Debra Dank and Evelyn Araluen. That whetted my appetite for this more focused one-on-one session.

The conversation

Oh my, what a session this was in terms of complex ideas that challenge western world views being presented in a respectful but unapologetic way. After all, why should they be apologetic.

Araluen started by introducing Dank from the formal bio, and ending with the fact that her book had won “incredibly significant accolades”. The session’s title, she explained, had come from Tara June Winch’s description of it as “a jewel of a book”.

The session discussed several issues, but a recurring one concerned the book’s narrative style and how it reflects “Indigenous narrative practices” as Dank framed it. I was keenly interested in this because I have been aware of First Nations Australian storytelling (oral and written) as being different but identifying the difference has not been so easy!

Dank said in response to Araluen’s opening question that she hadn’t set out to write a book, so she was still developing her relationship with it “as a book”. She wrote it for her kids, and saw it as essentially a conglomeration of stories and events. Araluen picked up on this and talked about how the book comprises an interweaving of language, memory, time, and place. Critics, she said, have been trying to find a way to describe Indigenous storytelling by using words like “interweaving”. Dank saw this sort of interweaving as integral to “Indigenous narrative practices”, to Indigenous storytelling.

Araluen commented on how well Dank conveys the “embodied physicality of Indigenous experience”. This captured some of what I felt I’d gleaned from the book, though I didn’t quite have the words for it. Araluen read an excerpt from early in the book in which Dank shares a childhood memory

The sparks rose in the air and danced there – in celebration of a whole lot of things, I imagined. The deep hot red glow in the little hearts with their flaring skirts of blackened edges held my eyes. The embers twirled above our heads, in a dance on a sigh of wind barely there, and as I gazed upwards into the darkening sky, the just-appearing stars spotlighted larger ashy flakes. The bright burning cinders, exuberant and light, then faded to tiny pieces of black falling char.

Araluen loved the way Dank was able to go back into memory and narrativise that little girl.

Dank talked about how she always had access to books, but that her “childhood aesthetic” was always about country. She would do all her week’s correspondence school work on Monday morning and then “be gone with Dad”.

Araluen described the book as a “precious gift” that intricately captures experience. She commented on Dank’s interrogation of history. There is “no gratuitous, voyeuristic depiction” of what her father went through, for example, but we are conscious of the impact of history on him. She wanted to know how Dank navigated this.

It was at this point that the other main thread of the session appeared – the lack of representation of Aboriginal people, of the contribution they have made over the last 200 years (let alone the previous tens of thousands of years). It really gets up her nostrils! In historical photos, non-Aboriginal people are always identified, but never the Aboriginal workers. “We are not represented, we are not seen to exist, to be valid”, she said.

We then returned to narrative practice. The book comes, she said, from the less significant part of her PhD, so she didn’t feel bound by the conventions of literature. It wrote itself, just evolved.

The discussion then turned to language, multi-lingualism, and Dank’s research into semiotics and narrative structure, and the limitations that she observes.

Dank said that the issue of limitations motivated her. She is constantly vigilant about how language works in education, how Aboriginal students can “seem” incapable, and experience deficit in their education. She told us about discovering Umberto Eco who talked about the ways communities make sense of their surroundings. This is the basis of semiotics. Aboriginal people have their own languages, and these work differently on a semiotic level. The problem is that Aboriginal communication has been framed by, viewed through the prism of, western theories, but “we’ve been doing narrative longer than anyone else in the world” and it works because “we are still here”.

Araluen then talked about Dank’s style and structure, describing it as “eco-lyrical”, as having an environmental, seasonal underpinning. How did Dank find her writing language? Dank replied that she had always been a reader, and named her diverse influences – Funk & Wagnalls’ books, the Bible, Slim Dusty, Emily Dickinson’s poetry, Greek stoics (which fitted with the Scottish Methodist part of her heritage), and Toni Morrison. Araluen interrupted here with her description of the “bone-deep legacy of Beloved“, how it conveys the “physicality of memory”. Dank described Beloved as an unimaginable gift of a book, and that she got it. (Beloved is nowhere near my experience but I felt got it too. If ever a book could convey the injustice of slavery and racism at the deepest, most visceral level, it’s Beloved.)

Dank the said that Australian colonial authors, like Xavier Herbert, were also influences, in that they conveyed for her the “invisibilisation of a  people”. She got no sense of reality in what she was seeing. (This made sense to me. People talk about the importance of seeing themselves represented in culture – the arts, media, etc – which of course I understand, but Dank’s clarity about the implication of not seeing yourself, her sense that it’s not real to her experience, drove it home perfectly.)

Araluen talked about ecology, and how non-Aboriginal writers, going back to Lawson and Paterson, for example, have “f***ed up” representation of the land with their colonial and Gothic perspectives. Dank mentioned some “nice and convenient research” from the University of the Sunshine Coast which proves that Aboriginal stories document significant events on the land.

The conversation continued on how First Nations people understand country, on there being a “deep formal, absolute law around connection” to country, on understanding the earth and “our nonhuman kin”. Dank said that “country is not ever something I have the right to just wander casually across”. She talked about how we are “stuffing up ecosystems and habitats”, about mammal extinctions, and about fracking. Westerners do not understand how aquifers are connected, but the songlines do, she said. More Australians need to wake up to the urgency of the climate crisis. There was more, but I think you get the gist regarding the intense concern about what Araluen called “environmental violence”.

The formal part of the session ended with Dank reading from the beautiful “The business of feet” story in her book, which tells of her young son’s deep engagement with their country, and his awareness of the long history of that connection.

Q & A

  • On what sort of writer she sees herself having now published the book: she now feels like a writer; that is, the book is causing her identity to shift. She is becoming aware of the practice and process of writing, and wants to protect her non-genre writing practice. We come with this place is not a memoir. Dank added that she should thank the early colonial writers, because they made her sit up and say, “hang on, that’s not the truth”.
  • On what advice she would give to a Non-aboriginal teacher working with people from diverse linguistic backgrounds: start with the home language because that carries the student’s cultural being and it needs to be respected.
  • On what sustains Dank in the face of trauma: the real privilege of being alive, getting on with the business of living. Awful things are still happening, but there are also many things to remind her of the privilege of drawing breath. First Nations people are 4% of the population, but “this will aways be our country. It made us”, she said.
  • On what her perfect writing day would look like: a cup of Chai, and being on her own country with the aunties under a tree across the way being amazingly patient, then calling her when they think she’s written enough.

My wrap-up

This session might sound negative and critical of western culture, and it was in many ways, but Dank also admits to enjoying and drawing from both traditions. However, this book is about the culture that sustains her, the culture that she’s rightly passionate to see preserved and passed on, and that she believes can also offer something to the rest of us. This session was about how First Nations Australians are forging their own narrative practices, against a backdrop in which they have been invisible, unrepresented, for so long.

Canberra Writers Festival, 2023
A Jewel of a Book
Sunday 20 August 2023, 10.30-11.30am

Canberra Writers Festival 2023: 2, Celebrating the classics

/ whisperinggums / 19 Comments

When I saw the line-up for this session – Debra Dank, Evelyn Araluen, Ellen Van Neerven and Yasmin Smith – I was in. I have read and admired writing by three of these writers and was keen to attend that rare thing, an all First Nations panel.

Its topic was described as follows:

A new literary project sets out to change the way we tell the story of Australian literature. Join series editor, Yasmin Smith and a stellar panel of writers as they celebrate the first edition of First Nations Classics. Essential reading for all generations.

The discussion

The program didn’t, for some reason, identify the publisher of this new series, but it is the wonderful University of Queensland Press which, as the panelists said several times, has an excellent track record in publishing and supporting First Nations writing. I wrote about this series late last year, so loved having the opportunity to hear it discussed by those involved.

The session started with acknowledgement of country, and then with each writer briefly introducing themselves, which they did primarily by identifying the country they belong to. I love that these country names are now becoming so familiar to us all. We are all learning – almost by osmosis – the First Nations make-up of the land we live on.

Smith then talked about the inspiration for the series, about UQP’s “incredible backlist” of books across a range of forms, that are timeless and have a clear relevance now. She then asked the panelists what makes a classic. The responses to this age-old question were varied, thoughtful and provocative . Araluen commenced because, she said laughingly, the “eye contact” had come to her! I loved her response – it’s when a book shifts into a communal relationship! The idea of “classics”, she said, is related to “the cannon”, and idea which is a western concept loaded with values of the the city-state(Plato), beauty and artistry (Aristotle), and – haha – sexual innuendo (Shakespeare). For her though a classic is a book that’s ground-changing, and that people incorporate into their lives. Real classics live within communities, outside universities. They are classics because they are valued by the people they are for and from.

She also talked about the musicality of writing, such as Ruby Langford Ginibi’s Don’t take your love to town. Dank picked up this idea and talked about musicality and rhythm. These make a classic, they are the “thing that beats within all of us”.

Van Neerven talked about classics being stories that can be read and heard, and about her own early reading as a 19-year-old of writers like Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Samuel Watson, and Leonard Fogarty. These spoke to her, though they were not alway widely celebrated in their times. She talked about Jackie Huggans’ book Sister girl. Rereleased last year, it had sold more in the next two months than it had in its first 30 years. Black literature is now being read and recognised; young people are people inspired to add to the conversation; and the publishing industry is more open to black stories.

It was then suggested that classics have great characters, a strong voice, truth-telling, and good evocation of place. Araluen identified Jeanine Leane’s Purple threads (my post) as an example of great evocation of place. You can “feel its realness, authenticity”. Classics also embody a sense of honouring what came before.

Smith next asked the panelists to talk about the growth of First Nations literature since their careers began, to which Debra Dank’s laughingly said that she was surrounded by “gorgeous, youthful folk” but that she was the youngest in terms of a writing career. Her PhD was in semiotics, which is what motivated her. She believes not many non-Indigenous Australians are aware of the depth of black writing, of its amazing richness. Blackfellas tell stories differently (which I loved hearing because I have commented on it before, and hoped I wasn’t making it up!)

Smith encouraged Van Neerven to talk about her Heat and light (my post) journey. She started with her unversity days when all her reading was “so white”. She then talked about learning what she didn’t know, how to break rules, and what she wanted to say; and about being part of the black&write! program. When Heat and light, a hybrid book, was published in 2013, there was little queer representation in First Nations literature, and little satirical/futuristic/speculative writing in the black space. There has been significant change in both these areas over the decade.

Araluen talked about Purple threads, which, like much First Nations literature, doesn’t fit into a neat package. There was talk of “blackfellas evading classification”! She found it both an honour and a challenge to be invited to contribute an introduction to Leane’s book. She tried three introductions: a literary analysis on why the book doesn’t fit the usual prose categories, but this came from our impulse to name; looking at it within the framework of Leane’s life but this would tell people how to read it; and finally, a focus on the place. She drove to Gundagai (under Leane’s guidance) and immersed herself in the place. It was an immense privilege to step into someone else’s story. All the books she said come from particular contexts, but are now in conversation with each other.

At this point she made a shout out to the Festival’s Artistic Director, Beejay Silcox, for her diversity and inclusiveness this year’s programming.

Smith then noted that classics hold deep, rich history, and asked Dank if she had any favourites. Dank neatly sidestepped this (almost), saying that each book reflects different times and experiences. She did though name Herb Wharton’s cattle country book (Unbranded) and said Ruby Ginibi’s book is a classic. She’s relatively new to Van Neerven’s work which she sees as profound in a different way. She really couldn’t pick favourites, she said. they are life markers, they guide us.

Araluen wondered what the series will do for kids, and then asked Smith about her experience managing the process. Smith said it felt overwhelming, but it was all based on consultation and community. The challenge was working out who could speak to which book for the intros. It was also very hard to choose the initial 8. She was 19 years old when she first read a black writer, Tara June Winch’s Swallow the air. It gave her a sense of belonging; she could see herself. So, she wanted books “that spoke to ourselves as black writers and black readers … to community”.

Q & A

  • On a second series and the production process: There is a second series of 8, coming out next June (2024). The process was complicated: some were out of print, some pre-digital, so there was scanning, rekeying, retypesetting; there was designing the covers to make them collectible as a set; there was no editing of the works, but there was the commissioning of the intros. It takes a long time.
  • On getting the books into school curriculums: Some are already (like Heat and light) but they are trying to get them into the educator’s market. Some have teacher notes.

The panelists then asked each other questions. Araluen asked Van Neerven how she felt about Alison Whittaker writing her book’s introduction. Van Neerven said she’d been daunted by the whole process when her book first came out, but this time felt more in control. She liked how Whittaker contextualised the book from her own experience. She loved feeling her work had been cared for.

Van Neerven then asked Dank what she was working on now. Dank wasn’t sure it was wise to talk about, but she is reframing the other part of her PhD which is about black narrative, but she is having second thoughts about its form. The problem is it’s about to go to the printers! Araluen answered the same question, saying it will be some time before she tries poetry again! Her next book is from her PhD on desire, haunting and healing in literature and storytelling.

Van Neerven didn’t get to answer her own question. She was saved, she said, by “1700 [the session end time] staring at her”!

This was truly lovely panel, in which the panelists showed such respect for each other but also exuded a quiet confidence in themselves – and gave me some new things to think about. Beautiful.

Canberra Writers Festival, 2023
Celebrating the classics
Saturday 19 August 2023, 4-5 pm

Canberra Writers Festival 2023: 1, Canberra’s Biggest Book Club

/ whisperinggums / 17 Comments

A preamble

The Canberra Writers Festival is back in 2023, with a new Artistic Director, the writer and critic Beejay Silcox. The Festival’s theme continues to be “Power Politics Passion”, which, for this year’s Festival organisers,

begs big questions: What do we value? Whose stories are heard? How do we reckon with the past and imagine the future? It is our hope that CWF will provide a space to explore these questions, and to celebrate the heft and craft of Australian storytellers — a joyful collision of art-makers, big thinkers, big dreamers and readers.

I love the look of this year’s Festival program. It feels more diverse and more literary, without losing the political flavour that makes it uniquely Canberran.

Canberra’s Biggest Book Club

Canberra’s Biggest Book Club has been a regular Festival session, but I’ve not attended before, for various reasons, mainly to do with scheduling and location. This year, however, the stars aligned, including the fact that the featured book, Edwina Preston’s Bad art mother (my post), was one I’d read and was keen to see discussed.

The panel leading the “club” comprised Beejay Silcox, ABC’s The Bookshelf’s Kate Evans, and the author. The promotion for the session says:

There’s so much to unpick in this Stella Prize-shortlisted novel. Who gets to be an art-maker? At what cost? Whose artistic voices are valued, and whose are lost? These questions are as relevant today as they were half a century ago. That’s what makes this novel so vital and beguiling.

Because the session was framed as a “bookclub”, the format was that during the hour audience members could write questions on a piece of paper which would be collected by volunteers and handed to Beejay for inserting at intervals into the discussion.

Evans started by asking Preston for her “stuck in a lift” pitch for her book. Preston replied she wasn’t good at that but offered that it was about a female poet in the 60s coping with motherhood and a sexist culture.

Evans then asked Silcox, who had been chair of the Stella Prize panel that shortlisted this book, why this was the book she wanted us all to read. Silcox replied that the Stella books provide a core sample of the culture we are in right now, of the things we are thinking about. Bad art mother she said had urgency, and spoke to the collective history female Australian writers share. It was a YES on all levels for her – as a reader, critic and judge. I realised at this point that I like the way this woman thinks.

Evans then spoke to the point that this book had been rejected 25 times, and asked why. Preston said many reasons were offered such as it didn’t fit the “publishing cycle” (whatever that means), was likely to be commercially successful, didn’t like the voice of the child, not feminist enough …

This led to Evans to ask about her choosing a child’s voice. Preston said she had been thinking about Joy Hester and her son, and the idea of a parent giving up a child. The novel is not Sweeney’s story, but was inspired by that situation. She also thought later that a boy’s voice might offer an entry point for male readers. It also offered an opportunity to explore the sensitivity and vulnerability of male children. Silcox added that the use of the child’s point of view also provided an opportunity to explore different versions of mothering or parenting, through Owen’s perspective on all the people in his life. It’s a bit about urban family-making.

Next Evans moved to protagonist Veda’s antecedents, which included the Australian poet Gwen Harwood, whose letters Preston had read. This resulted in a fascinating discussion about Gwen Harwood, about women’s lives as artists, and about the role of correspondence in women’s lives. Preston talked about Harwood’s life, including the F*** ALL EDITORS acrostic poem scandal. Silcox talked about reading Harwood at school but knowing nothing about her radical side – and wishing she had. Harwood’s letters, we learnt, were brilliant, funny, scathing. She had a fighting, pioneer spirit, but she was also grounded by her children. Sometime around here, Harwood’s pointed poem “In the park“, was shared, including its last line, “They have eaten me alive”!

Preston talked about the challenges of being a woman artist and a mother. Veda feels she’s a bad mother while her son cuts her more slack. In Modjeska’s book Stravinsky’s lunch, said Preston, the artist Grace Cossington-Smith says that once her children left home, she had all the time but the urgency had gone. Veda faces a similar challenge when she has a weekend to herself.

Regarding her own time-management, Preston said she works best by writing in 1.5 hour blocks a few times a week. Working in short blocks means she always leaves something to work on next session. At this point we got an Audience Question, which was what surprised her most about her book. What an interesting questio. Preston’s response was not what I expected: she saw what her subconscious had created, how things she hadn’t explicitly planned had made the book work. This gave her confidence in her process. When asked for an example, she said introducing vegetarianism had opening up opportunities, like aligning meat-eating with masculine world views.

Another Audience Question concerned whose styles she admired. Preston had to think, but did say they included Jane Austen, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Harrower.

This provided a perfect segue to return to the idea of women creators, and a discussion that resonated with me. Do women, Silcox asked, need a room of their own? Preston talked about her PhD and her interest in women’s correspondence, which women tend to write in communal spaces. She contests the “room-of-one’s-own” myth. It’s a western, masculine view of art, she says. Interruptions are not a bad thing. Veda, however, subscribes to this “selfish artist” myth – as does Simone de Beauvoir. However, Preston asked, would de Beauvoir and Woolf have thought the same way had they had children? As someone who works happily in communal spaces, but has always worried about letting the sisterhood down, this spoke to me.

The panel then segued to the myth of genius, the sense that successful artists must be geniuses. Harwood was strong, but Veda is less strong, less sure, and destroyed herself. Silcox said that it was important to undermine these myths because it is hard enough “to carve a life on the page” in Australia without feeling you have to live up to these unrealistic ideas.

Evans then asked about Mr Parish, the man everyone loves to hate. Preston’s response was illuminating. He’s an archetype at the beginning, an early 20th century literary character, she said, but by the end he’s a human with fragilities and redeeming qualities.

Evans followed this by asking what the other women characters brought to the novel besides their art. They represent, was the answer, different relationships to art, and different family roles. These include the “I don’t have a creative bone in my body” Ornella who is not an artist, but is the most reliable person in the novel. All these women examine the themes from different perspectives. Silcox added that they offered “a polyphonic version of women”. She talked about the cages around us and finding ways to unlock them, about how you have to map the cage before you can break out of it. The book is so relevant, so resonant.

At this point another audience question was shared. Referencing Veda’s letters to her sister, it asked why women are so self-critical. Self-criticism is good for an artist, answered Preston.

Evans returned to the correspondence in the novel which offers a different more intimate voice. Preston talked about the role of correspondence in women’s lives, and how correspondence offers writing practice. Unlike diary writing, it involves considering the recipient, and providing details not always necessary in a diary. The letters in the novel are also, added Silcox, one-sided, which invites us to step in and wonder what Veda’s sister might have said (and how Veda might have responded to that). Good point, I certainly remember thinking about how Tilde might have responded.

The next audience question concerned the fact that all the women artists in the novel end up being successful. Had Preston considered including an unsuccessful artist. She hadn’t thought of this, she said, but the artists were, in fact, all successful later in life, and in Veda’s case, after her death.

This led to a discussion about ambition in women, and how it tends to be used pejoratively, as an insult.

Then there was an audience question about not liking Veda. Preston wondered if readers would like her. This didn’t concern her, but she knew it would be an issue for some. Silcox threw in that women being likable is another of those issues women have to deal with.

Evans, referencing a previous comment by Preston, asked her why she knew Veda had to die. Her answer was that the book needed to be a tragedy, though she also wanted to resuscitate Veda posthumously. The novel couldn’t be triumphantly feminist because everything isn’t fantastic.

This led to a discussion about Veda’s action that precipitated her downfall, and about her husband, the restaurateur and philanthropist. Again, Preston’s response was fascinating. She commented that men taking on cooking (like celebrity chefs) and public philanthropy results in their being celebrated for the things – cooking and caring – that women do invisibly.

Evans then quoted from the letter to Tilde in which Veda ponders what sort of mother she is, and whether if it came to the crunch she would sacrifice her art for her child. Is this question – Would I? – the heart of the book, she asked. Preston talked about 19th century women novelists discussing the writing-versus-babies quandary, and the “menopausal theory literary production”. She doesn’t agree it’s either-or. You can do both together, but it is a real quandary many women artists grapple with.

Finally, Silcox asked Preston to think about the writer she was before and after the book. What had it taught her? To trust herself, she said, and the workings of serendipity in her writing. What a great lesson.

And so ended another excellent writers’ festival session. I loved it for the number of ideas that went in different directions to those I expected, like the room-of-one’s-own discussion. Good stuff.

Canberra Writers Festival, 2023
Canberra’s Biggest Book Club
Saturday 19 August 2023, 2-3 pm

Canberra Writers Festival 2022: (My) Session 3, Germaine Greer in conversation with Rick Morton

/ whisperinggums / 23 Comments

My third choice of sessions was also somewhat sentimental, because, with Germaine Greer now in her 80s, I wasn’t sure how many more opportunities I’d get to see her in the flesh. But, I was disappointed because, the night before the event, the following email was sent out:

Sadly, Ms Greer has had a fall though now released from hospital. She says she is fine but doctor’s orders are that she is not to travel. Ms Greer said “I am so sorry to let everyone down, I so wanted to be there with you and I would have, except my doctor and family would not allow. Since when have I been told what to do and agreed? Please accept my sincere apologies and I hope this Zoom thing will make it up to you.”

That sounds so Germaine (if I can be so bold as to presume to know her and to use her first name)! The good thing for her is that she is ok, and for us that she was well enough to still do the session. And, in a way, it was great because via Zoom Greer appeared to us in full larger-than-life glory – as you can see from the pic. Poor Rick Morton was quite dwarfed.

Anyhow, as I’ve done with the previous post, I’ll start with how the program described the session:

Almost 90% of the direct care workforce in residential aged care are women, as are 70% of people who live in residential aged care. Germaine Greer speaks frankly about why aged care remains one of the most pressing feminist issues today.

That’s what the program said! What we got was more amorphous than that, something that kept both Rick Morton and us on our toes. Anyone who has read or seen Germaine Greer will understand what I mean. It’s hard to describe exactly what we got, but I think I’d describe it as a charming almost-ditziness crossed with an acute intelligence overlaid with a deep sense of humanity.

So, here goes. Rick Morton was clearly chosen for the interviewer role because of his work in covering our recent Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety, and Greer as interviewee because of her recent one-year experience in Aged Care in Murwillumbah. (I must say that I was a little stunned – and then sort of thrilled – when I read about this experience a few weeks ago. It makes her so real!)

Morton introduced Greer, who needed not introduction really, and then launched into the aged care issue. Here, the fun started because Greer rarely directly answered the question. She talked about how she has ended up living with her brother (in the suburbs), that she’s been diagnosed with PMR, and she shared that she’s “more trouble than she used to be”! Really?

She then talked about selling her rainforest property, on which she’d planted “zillions of trees” in a landscape regeneration project. (It’s the subject of her book, White beech.) Eventually, we got to her taking herself to that Aged Care place in Murwillumbah. Morton then referred to the story I had read about Greer blitzing word-bingo there, always putting her hand up first! (Funny that!) Greer said that she kept telling herself to shut up, but she also felt that she owed it to Dimity, who’d put such work into creating the puzzles, to kick it along. (Fair enough.)

At this point, there was discussion about her Huntsman (spider) phobia and loss of cooking skills, before we returned to Aged Care.

Morton suggested that a fundamental problem regarding Aged Care is our attitude to ageing and our attitude to the elderly, at which Greer quipped that ‘Yes, everyone calls you ‘love’ or ‘darling’ but  I’m ”Professor Greer”‘.

Morton then said that in her book, The change, she had suggested that there are positive things about being “a scary old woman”. Greer, who is not afraid to change her mind, responded that now being 83, she’s reconsidering that positiveness!

However, she’s not about reassessing what she’s said in the past, she said. Instead, she’s focussing on trees and insects! She may not like spiders, but she does like snakes, which are “so sagacious and beautiful”. Morton suggested that this new passion for learning about trees and insects suggests she’s an autodidact. Is this a new phase in her life, he asked. She thought so, she said, until she found some old childhood papers which revealed an early interest in nature. 

After this little interlude, Morton returned to Aged Care, this time asking for her impression of staffing. This gave Greer a platform for her feminist position on women’s role as carers: caring has always been woman’s job, and these jobs are gendered. She referred to the Renaissance Courts, describing them as structured like a family. There, too, serving jobs were gendered. Even where the worker is male, the treatment is feminised. Those who serve are spoken to/treated disparagingly, and are paid a “derisive amount of money”. We import “a bunch of people from elsewhere”, like Indonesia and Nepal, she said, and pay them at the bottom of the rung, with no chance of progression.

Morton said that we don’t regard the caring job as important, and we don’t regard the people being looked after as important.

Greer said that she thinks about these issues all the time, though at this point her response seemed a bit tangential, as she referenced Sir Thomas More’s belief that the best way of living was in a college – you have bed, food, and laundry. All this house-business is too labour-intensive!

Morton then asked whether we need an ageing revolution. After an entertaining description of ladies who, released from the daily grind, discover golf in their 6Os, she went on to say that when you are older, “the world becomes your oyster – only if you are well”, and, added Morton, “have money”.

And again, we returned to Aged Care. Are you getting a flavour of this, possibly-frustrating-to-Morton but nonetheless fascinating, conversation? There were so many asides and digressions – like a big baggy 19th century novel, where you realise at the end that those digressions meant something. You just have to go with it! So, here, she talked about the domestic staff in Aged Care. They tend to be older women and they are doing the heaviest work. (Then they become ill). The government is wasting the goodwill of these people.

Morton responded by asking how do we care for the people, many of them women in their 50s and 60s, who do the caring. Again, Greer’s response seemed tangential. It’s about how we live, she said, “there’s too much house”. Houses use up time and money. Think Thomas More, think more about communal dwelling – and she then shared some communal living experiments she knew of.

She also said, re “nursing homes”, that she doesn’t like the term “home”. There should be specialised housing for specific needs. And shared another example, this time a Welsh plan for single mums which involved women helping each other. They never last, she said, because a war or something happens and they are the first to go! That is, these social initiatives are always the lowest priority, even when they work. Can we think of ways where we don’t leave women struggling?

Morton noted that all this stems from our western individualist culture, but there are other more collectivist cultures. Greer agreed and returned to the Welsh example, where the men saw what was happening, and “felt left out” so they initiated a security group and patrolled the grounds. This, thought Greer, was rebuilding family in a different shape.

Then we turned to more a more traditional feminist stance – the need to get men away from the position where they can exert strength over weaker members of family because if they can they will.

Morton returned again to Aged Care asking her whether she’d go back to a residential aged care facility. Greer said she dreaded losing her mobility, and is enjoying the suburbs and getting to know her family, but knows it won’t last forever.

Morton asked her whether she thinks about death. She’s not afraid of death she said, she’s more afraid of living too long, and of not paying back! He asked her to assess how her life has unfolded. She said that she “spends a fair amount of time in a rage”. We are so mean to each other. But she doesn’t think in terms of mistakes. She’s a fatalist.

Q&A

The Q&A was a bit wild like the interview, but I’ll try to dot point:

  • On the younger generation re-discovering The female eunuch: She’s grateful, she said. She was lucky to be born at that time when all this was coming to the fore. She hopes we get better at looking after women’s health.

Then she threw in another idea, identity, which she says is a non-existent problem. Morton asked what it mattered to her if someone has an identity. She responded that there have been five biographies about her, and she’s never met any of those subjects in her life!

  • On the sex vs gender debate being so toxic. Again, Greer answered her version of the question: she doesn’t get why domestic violence is sexualised, have we forgotten elder abuse, why are people’s lives as difficult as they are, and we haven’t got far with women!

She then returned to identity. Identity is not the issue that is causing the problem, she said. At this point I wrote in my notes that Greer was the portrait of a woman aways thinking, connecting, and questioning – and that she also had a lot of ideas she wanted to share.

Meanwhile, our questioner clarified her question, which concerned our inability to debate sex vs gender without toxicity, and people shutting down the debate? Greer responded that sex runs the planet, and that gender is fun, because you can make it up! Oh dear … she knew exactly what she was doing here, because she then said that “part of my job is to get hate mail”.

  • On outliving one’s time, and being valued: she returned to the communal/village idea where old people have a place. People she said need places to get to know each other.

  • On getting the balance right (re “having it all”): “buy 57 hectares of forest” she said.

  • On where satisfaction comes from. She doesn’t know the answer, but suggested it’s when you find your work.

Then, she ended with:

Mistrust me if I present myself as having them [the answers, she meant].

As another attendee said, as we were leaving, “just when you think she’s a bit demented, she goes boom!” That’s Germaine!

Canberra Writers Festival, 2022
Germaine Greer in conversation with Rick Morton
Saturday 13 August 2022, 2-3pm

Canberra Writers Festival 2022: (My) Session 2, Her last words: The inspiring life and legacy of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

/ whisperinggums / 10 Comments

My second choice of sessions was, partly, sentimental, because Ruth Bader Ginsburg is such an inspiration for feminists like me and I also wanted to see ABC journalist Fran Kelly strut her stuff in person. I wasn’t disappointed. The session was subtitled, Amanda Tyler In Conversation With Fran Kelly, and was framed as follows:

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s passing last year — just as her book, co-authored with her former law clerk Amanda Tyler — was heading into production, was met with a public outpouring of grief. Tyler shares RBG’s optimistic vision of a just society and a ‘more perfect union’.

This is slightly incorrect, and stems from the fact that the session had been scheduled for last year’s cancelled festival. Ginsburg, “the notorious RBG”, or just RBG as I will call from here on, didn’t die last year, 2021, but in 2020. As a result, Ginsburg and Tyler’s co-written book, Justice, justice: Thou shalt pursue: A life’s work fighting for a more perfect union, instead of being relatively new off the press has now been out for well over a year. That, I think, changed somewhat the session’s focus from the book (though it was still the cornerstone of the discussion) to something wider – to RBG’s legacy and America today, as much as the book itself.

This session, unlike my first, was in the largest space in Kambri, and it was packed. RBG has a huge following. I have written briefly about her before, in a Literary Week post where I mentioned seeing the documentary RBG. I wrote that RBG “is a fascinating woman with an inspiring capacity for clarifying the complex”.

This was another engaging session, in a different way.

Amanda Tyler and Fran Kelly, Manning Clark Hall, August 2022

Kelly leapt right in with a big question: given RBG’s “wonder-woman status”, did Tyler feel pressure working on this book with her! Well yes, admitted Tyler, even though she’s in her late 40s now! But working with RBG was “so special” and the work was so important.

Regarding RBG’s health, Tyler said, answering another question, that yes, they were aware that “her death was coming” but RBG had tried so hard “to stay alive through the election and to the inauguration” so that, hopefully, a Democrat would win and be responsible for her replacement. (Those of you who follow American politics will appreciate all this.)

Kelly asked what Tyler saw as RBG’s most important role or characteristic. She responded that RBG recognised that she was talented and she used her talent not to make money but to make the world a better place. This was a point she would make to young graduates whenever she spoke at graduations. This theme of improving the world, improving America, improving the lot of others, recurred throughout the session.

RBG had graduated at the top of her class but couldn’t get a job in a law firm – because she was a woman. This resulted in her ending up in the court system, which, Tyler said, turned out to be a good thing. (As it was for Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman to serve on the US Supreme Court. RBG was the second.)

Next up was discussion about RBG’s early court work. Her first gender law case was Moritz v. Commissioner in 1970, concerning a man who’d been refused a tax deduction for hiring a nurse to care for his elderly mother, a deduction he would have received had he been a woman. The important thing about this – besides that the law also discriminated against men – is that when the case was won the Government appealed, which got it to the Supreme Court.

RBG fought many sex discrimination cases during the 1970s – her favourite being the Stephen Wiesenfeld case. All this, said Tyler, would have made her significant even if she’d never been appointed to the Supreme Court.

The discussion identified many of RBG’s skills and strategies. She had a capacity for consensus; she chose multi-directional cases; and her superpower was taking cases as a litigator to the Supreme Court.

Kelly asked whether RBG was disappointed about being “the great dissenter”. Tyler, as she was wont to do, answered in a round-about way. (Is this lawyer style?) RBG, she said, wanted to be a judge, she wanted to be in public service. And, she did write some great majority decisions. But yes, she was disappointed to be in the minority at the end of her Supreme Court career. She wanted to leave a “road map”.

Kelly then asked what she thought of her celebrity status, “the notorious RBG”. No one would have predicted it, Tyler said, but it was the result of her dissent in a Voting Rights case – Shelby County vs Holder. Tyler quoted RBG from this case:

Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.

RBG loved, said Tyler, that she was inspiring a younger generation. She also saw the significance of an older woman becoming a superstar!

Then Kelly got to the sensitive question: should RBG have stepped down earlier to prevent what ended up happening – her replacement being chosen by Trump and the Republicans. Tyler replied that during Obama years, she was given clean bill of health, she was in her stride, and Republicans had hold of Senate so she felt they may not have supported the “right” replacement.

Tyler then turned to something that she mentioned many times during the rest of the session, the vote. She said that exit polls in the 2016 election (the Trump one, of course!) found that the no. 1 reason Republicans gave for voting was the Supreme Court, but this was barely mentioned by Democrat voters.

Tyler hadn’t answered Kelly’s question! So she pushed a little more! Tyler said she believes that RBG (like most people) anticipated Hillary Clinton would win.

Kelly turned to the Supreme court’s overturning of Roe V. Wade. Tyler said – meaninglessly, really – that if Hillary Clinton had won everything would be different! She said that she thinks RBG would be “apoplectic” at what was happening, because RBG believed that true gender quality depended on women having control of their reproduction.

There was more discussion about this, and then Kelly turned to the fear that other rights could fall, as hinted by Justice Clarence Thomas. Tyler does fear that rights like contraception and same-sex conduct, for example, are at risk. It is, she said, a difficult time for this county that sees itself as “a country of opportunity”.

Kelly asked whether this can be stopped, to which Tyler returned to her mantra: the vote. People must vote “as if we care about these issues”. The issue is the Senate and the filibuster rules, and she’s not seeing enough impetus for changing Federal law. The problem is that the US is becoming less unified – life is becoming increasingly different from state to state. So, for example, the abortion law changes are causing young women to seriously think which state they choose to go to college in. All this risks entrenching the spilt in American society.

The current Supreme Court is young, so will have its current make-up for decades. Biden has considered a commission to look at expanding the number of justices. Congress could do it but there are obvious ramifications to this. Another idea is that of staggered terms, but this requires changing the Constitution.

Kelly asked about RBG’s “striving for a more perfect union”. This, said Tyler, comes from the Constitution. It invites ongoing struggle and effort to improve American life. RBG saw there was so much to be done. The Constitution, said Tyler, is based on people being able to live their lives “based on individual capacities”, but the equality implicit in this is not enshrined.

Kelly asked Tyler for her favourite RBG quote – there are many out there – but Tyler responded with a personal experience. When, as a nervous new mother she was planning to return to work, she asked RBG for advice. The email response was one line: “Where there’s a will, there’s a way”. Love it.

Finally, Tyler commented that RBG lived a balanced life, and loved opera.

Q&A

The Q&A covered a few issues which I’ll just dot point:

  • Compulsory voting: Tyler is interested in this idea, but said even just making election day a public holiday would help. Kelly, said, what about a Saturday (as we do)!
  • Conflict of interest issue in Supreme Court (eg re Clarence Thomas’ wife): the Supreme Court is not bound by same rules of ethics as the rest of court system. Thomas has not recused himself so far in conflict of interest situations.
  • RBG’s advice for new generation of law students: Tyler gave two: Don’t just think about the courts, also think about electoral and legislative arenas; and Play the long game.
  • ERA (Equal Rights Amendment): RBG wanted this in the Constitution.
  • Favourite moments with RBG: both related to opera!

Tyler said that in her last conversation with RBG – August 2020 – RBG expressed concern about how the pandemic would affect the world’s children. Even at the end of her life, Tyler said, RBG was thinking about others and the future.

Canberra Writers Festival, 2022
Her last words: The inspiring life and legacy of Ruth Bader Ginsberg: Amanda Tyler In Conversation With Fran Kelly.
Saturday 13 August 2022, 12-1pm

Canberra Writers Festival 2022: (My) Session 1, Writing the precipice

/ whisperinggums / 10 Comments

A preamble

After a long pandemic-caused hiatus during which it didn’t, like many others, “pivot” to an online format, the Canberra Writers Festival is back. Unfortunately, it clashed with a time we could visit our Melbourne family, so the best I could do was reduce that trip by a day so I could at least attend some Saturday sessions. Sunday, the festival’s last day, was long ago booked – an afternoon theatre booking to see the Sheku Kaneh-Mason Musicians. Life is just too busy.

So, with just one day, what to attend out of a plethora of choices, given they are held over several venues on either side of “the lake.”(Those who know Canberra know that “the lake” is a major mental divide in Canberra, as much as a physical one. We laugh about it, because it is ridiculous, but it’s there!) The point, though, is that I didn’t want to book sessions that would involve a lot of travel.

As I have written before, the Canberra Writers Festival’s tagline is “Power Passion Politics”, but I mostly seek the more literary focused ones. I found one on Saturday morning at ANU’s new-ish Kambri Centre, so decided that would be my venue. There were still choices to be made, and you can see what I decided in this and the following posts …. though in another twist of fate, a late important appointment saw me missing my last booked session of the day, Chloe Hooper with Richard Fidler. Darn it! The choices were hard, as there were many interesting people to see and hear, but that’s Festival life.

Writing the precipice: Panel discussion with Kathryn Heyman, Chris Hammer and Diana Reid

The moderator was Nicole Abadee, a writer and podcaster about books, a literary judge, and a literary event moderator. She ran the panel more as a interview-each-author style rather than a free-flow discussion between the panelists. Both styles have their advantages, and in this case we did hear some excellent ideas from each of the writers.

The panel was titled “Writing the precipice”, which the program described as:

Our best-selling authors reveal how they tackle their characters’ pivotal moments when they stand on the precipice of life-changing disclosures and discoveries, and how they navigate the decisions beyond.

After introducing the authors and their latest works – Kathryn Heyman’s memoir Fury, Diana Reid’s campus novel Love and virtue, and Chris Hammer’s crime novel Treasure and dirt – Abadee asked them to briefly set the scene of their books, and then got into the nitty gritty!

Heyman was a little uncertain about Abadee’s suggestion that she’d actually stood on the precipice from her childhood. Heyman didn’t really see it that way, though she had, she said, grown up in poverty in a single-parent family.

She was keen to focus on the idea of “precipice” which she defined as “an edge that you can fall or leap from”. It’s a moment where everything is lost, but, paradoxically there’s everything to gain. She felt that, despite growing up in the underclass, her cleverness opened doors. Class is an issue that she and others mentioned and to which we returned later in the panel.

Abadee was keen to follow the childhood precipice point, saying that she was referring to the fact that both Heyman’s father and step-father had been violent. While agreeing with this, Heyman returned to her precipice idea. She said Fury is about making decisions that from the outside look dangerous. It is set in the context of her having faced major and minor bombardments as a female. 

Fury is not about Heyman’s assault, but about what she did after the court case. However, Abadee briefly explained that Heyman had been assaulted by a taxi driver, had reported it to the police, but the taxi driver had been acquitted. Heyman said that her experience of the social justice system had been brutal, and that she’d realised that the places where she should be safe, she was not. She returned to the precipice idea. Basically, she said, it’s about what is there to lose. There is nothing to do but leap. This she did, into something that looked dangerous – taking a job on a boat as a cook, with four strange men.

Why put herself at harm, is the question she gets frequently, but she said that she was physically, psychologically, mentally on a threshold, and decided to look at it differently, at how would it be if she were “one of the boys”?

Abadee quoted back to her her reference to a Larkin poem from which she’d taken the idea that when you are removed from the familiar, you perceive things differently, and thus perceive yourself differently. In other words, when removed from what you know you can transform yourself. Like in a story, you can rewrite yourself. She wanted, she said, to build “physical and psychological muscle”.

While at sea she was frequently in danger, but not from the men – from the bad weather and the crew’s incompetence! She came back changed.

She ended on an interesting point. She’d come to realise, she said, the value of naming the mess, naming the trauma. Stay with me here … she said books had taught her to name seabirds by learning to see their differences. And so, she learnt “to put language to the precise trauma”. If you can name it, she said, you become bigger than it.

Reid was asked to start by talking about the friendship between the two women protagonists in her book. Michaela is from a single parent family in Canberra, and finds herself in a Sydney university residential college where most of the residents are well-to-do, with private school backgrounds. One of these is Eve, who is self-confident, articulate, and a model for Michaela.

There are, she said, some fundamental philosophical questions behind the novel, one being the idea expressed by Gore Vidal which is that is it not enough to succeed, that to succeed, others must fail. Michaela comes to see this. So the book is about a rivalry more than a friendship.

Reid said much contemporary literature is about women being supportive but there are toxic relationships too. She clarified, though, that this book has a very particular context – a competitive academic environment, in the male-dominated subject of philosophy. Unfortunately, Michaela equates success with male attention, and thinks getting an older man to love her would endorse her as a person.

Abadee asked her about the prologue which, Reid explained, is written in third person. It’s a sex scene in which the woman is so drunk she remembers nothing. That woman, it turns out, is Michaela, who is the first person narrator of the rest of the novel. This incident becomes a critical point between the two women. Here is a precipice. Eve tells her she should report it.

This situation said Reid, goes to the power of storytelling as process of invention: I don’t remember it so it’s not in my story. When Michaela is encouraged to report, she’s being asked to put it in her narrative. The tension exists in her being deprived of her autonomy, her ability to control her narrative. What is the impact for her versus for feminism of telling the story. Who has the right to tell the story?

Regarding Eve, the question is whether she’s a good person or just looks like one. Is it ok to betray a friend for social good? Reid saw Eve in terms os performative activism. She ultimately leaves the place better, but there is tension between being morally correct and feeling superior, about not using “morals as sticks to beat other people down”. Although Eve does good work, she does it for herself.

Another philosophical question Reid explores then concerns the definition of goodness. Does it reside in your impact on the world or your reasons for doing so. Is it less “good” if you do it for yourself?

Later, Reid commented that her book came partly out of self-criticism (with Eve being an exaggerated her) and out of observation.

When we got to Hammer, Abadee noted that each of his novels starts with a hook. His latest, Treasure & dirt, opens with a miner being found dead, crucified. All his protagonists, she suggested, are on a precipice.

Hammer said that his openings are typical of crime books: you need to capture people as quickly as you can. The discussion then focused on the detectives, Ivan and Nell, who are both flawed, both on a precipice.

They are not hands-off detectives. He said there are plenty of crime books where the detective mechanistically solve crime, with much violence and sex involved. And there are those cosy crime novels where you know nothing about detective. However, he is interested in how characters change. Both his detectives find their careers at risk, are unsure about their status in police force. Will they throw the other under bus to save themselves?

Hammer described the different issues confronting each of the detectives – creating the precipice each is on – and said that solving the crime is important to both their careers. Each is on a career precipice, but also important is how they see themselves. They have choices. Hammer said that as a reader he likes to immerse himself in the characters, to think what he’d do. He likes to write such characters.

Heyman then said that all the books deal with class and shame, and asked the writers to talk about class. Heyman simply said, class plays a huge role, and that in addition to “class” and “shame”, the three books are all about “characters in extremis”.

Reid made two points about class. One is that moral judgements depend on context. Eve finds it easy to judge but finds it hard to acknowledge her power over Michaela because of her class. The other is that universities are places of privileged people who go on into privileged roles. What they see as culturally normal thus becomes the norm affecting everyone. Great point. Heyman added that people from the underclass and billionaires have a freedom because they are outside the middle class which establishes the norms.

Hammer said that his novel is set in a hardscrabble place, but that there are two powerful, rich men in it. Will they get away with massive illegality? Will Ivan and Nell, who are there for a homicide, do anything about it?

Abadee, picking up the shame thread, referred to Heyman’s title, Fury, and her idea that the best antidote to shame is anger. Heyman said that shame breeds in silence, in buying into others’ stories of who you are. It doesn’t do well when out in the open. By contrast, fury has energy, so the idea is to convert shame to anger (and energy).

Reid said shame involves lack of control; it arises when others judge you by facets of yourself you can’t control.

Hammer said that Nell is found in a compromising situation. She feels she’s been duped, but as a young woman in male-dominate police force, she has to decide whether she will fold or stand up.

An insightful session, which found some fascinating coherence between three very different books.

Canberra Writers Festival, 2022
Writing the precipice
Saturday 13 August 2022, 10-11 am

Monday Musings on Australian Literature: Canberra Writers Festival 2019 Recap

/ whisperinggums / 15 Comments

Just when you thought it was safe to return to my blog, I’m at it again, talking about this year’s Canberra Writers Festival. However, if you are like me you are intrigued about what other readers and festival goers like, so I thought I’d share what the Canberra Writers Festival sent us subscribers.

But, I’ll start with my 7 posts, and their popularity (by number of hits):

Interesting. The two which specifically featured local authors and/or local subject matter were the most popular, despite my international readership. Maybe some local authors shared the link and a lot of hits were local? Anyhow, these were followed by the two most literary sessions I attended – Tara June Winch and Brian Castro. This doesn’t surprise me, given my “brand” here. And then the last three, which had about two-thirds the hits of the top post, are a mixed bag of, generally, more popular subjects.

Before moving to the Canberra Writers Festival’s report, I’d like to point you to a post written by one of this year’s New Territory bloggers, Shelley Burr. She wrote on the Wonder Women panel (which featured Australian historical fiction novelists.) You’ll have to read her post to find out who they were!

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Now, were my most popular posts reflected in the most popular sessions attended? Sort of. The Canberra Writers Festival wrote that the “Top Ten” sessions “include”:

  • Simon Winchester in conversation with Richard Fidler
  • Capital Culture
  • Never Never
  • Defining Moments – True Crime Panel
  • For Whom the Pell Tolls
  • You Daughters of Freedom
  • Best of the Best: Book Club Favourites
  • Women, Men and the Whole Damn Thing
  • Is Hate Our New Normal?
  • David & Margaret

I’m not sure how to interpret this, because they say “the top ten include“, but there are ten here, so I’m presuming these are the top ten? Let’s presume they are, and that they are in order (though I’m surprised that the session featuring Behrouz Boochani from Manus Island is not in the list.)

Anyhow, certainly Simon Winchester was in a 300-seat theatre and was sold out. Capital Culture was sold out too, but in a smaller space. I’m intrigued that three of the sessions I chose were in the top four of the Top Ten, though what that says, I’ll leave to you. It’s interesting, though, that the most popular session, by this list, was not my most popular post. A couple of other sessions listed here – such as Never Never, about “the role that the bush plays in our collective imagination” – were ones I had to miss because of clashes. I didn’t mind missing You daughters of freedom because I had heard Clare Wright speak about her book last year.

It’s clear that the Festival’s “political” slant works well for the organising committee, with sessions on George Pell (including David Marr), Gender (including Gillian Triggs), and Hate (also including Gillian Triggs) all being popular.

The Canberra Writers Festival email also told us the best-selling books at the festival:

  • Capital culture (ed. by Suzanne Kiraly) (I bought this)
  • On disruption (Katharine Murphy) (I have given this as a gift)
  • Cardinal: The rise and fall of George Pell (Louise Milligan)
  • On patriotism (Paul Daley)
  • Brain changer (Felice Jacka)
  • Unbreakable threads (Emma Adams)
  • Just add love (Irris Makler)
  • On indignation (Don Watson)
  • Plots and prayers (Niki Savva)
  • Leading lines (Lucinda Holdforth)
  • You daughters of freedom (Clare Wright) (I have reviewed)

Hmmm … I haven’t heard of some of these, but it’s interesting, given the signing line I saw, that Exactly isn’t listed here. Given there were different booksellers at different sites – including, the NLA bookshop, Harry Hartog and Dymocks – it’s possible that this list does not concatenate across all the booksellers? Anyhow, it’s also interesting that the little “On…” books published by Melbourne University Press are doing well. I recently posted on Stan Grant’s On identity, from the same series.

As for my purchases, I am way out of step. Besides Capital culture, I bought Brian Castro’s Blindness and rage and Simon Winchester’s Exactly (for Mr Gums). I also bought Brian Castro’s After China during the Festival, but at Muse. And, I already had some of the books I heard discussed, including Nigel Featherstone’s Bodies of men, Karen Viggers’ The orchardist’s daughter, and Tara June Winch’s The yield.

All this is fascinating, but the best thing is that the Festival, now in its fourth year, appears to have done well with good pre-sales and, they say, “significant impromptu attendance”. This augurs well for its continuation. And that, of course, is what we want.

Canberra Writers Festival 2019, Day 2, Session 3: In our backyard

/ whisperinggums / 19 Comments

Suddenly it was my last session! How quickly the two days went. The reason I chose In Our Backyard is obvious. It was described as “Get up close and personal with four of Canberra’s literary gems”, and was moderated by ABC journalist, Emma Alberici.

It was a warm-hearted session, characterised by a sense of respect between the writers made most evident in their friendly banter and genuine interest in each other.

Alberici introduced the four writers:

  • Nigel Featherstone, novelist, Bodies of men (my review)
  • Karen Viggers, novelist, The orchardist’s daughter (my review)
  • Kathryn Hind, novelist, Hitch
  • Patrick Mullins, political biographer, Tiberius with a telephone: The life and stories of William McMahon.

Four very different books, said Alberici, so she suggested they start with their book’s genesis.

Genesis

Karen Viggers, The orchardist's daughterKaren Viggers: Is passionate about Tasmania, wilderness, freedom, empowerment, forests, and friendship. Her novel is about three outsiders in a small timber town, and explores how people create bonds and belonging in such places.

Patrick Mullins: Did his PhD in political biography at the University of Canberra in 2014, but hadn’t written one. He looked around and Billy McMahon was there for the taking (with “good reason” he added!) Researching McMahon, he became intrigued by the disconnect between the reputation (the derision) and the reality (twenty plus years covering all major portfolios as well as prime minister.) Further, his unpublished autobiography indicated he had a divorced-from-reality view of himself, which suggested themes about the myths we can create about the past.

Kathryn Hind: Enrolled in a creative writing masters in the UK. She had to write something. She looked to her  experience of travelling around the world alone for a year, during which she found that she needed, as a young woman, to be hypervigilant, always. Suddenly, Amelia and her dog by the side of the road appeared to her. Neither she, Amelia, nor she, the author, knew what would happen to her!

Nigel Featherstone, Bodies of menNigel Featherstone: Wanted “to piss off Tony Abbott”. Seriously though (or, also seriously), the book resulted from a “strange decision” to apply for an ADFA (Australian Defence Force Academy) residency in 2013, despite having no interest in war. Of course, the residency did come with $10K! Featherstone’s overriding interest was to explore different expressions of masculinity under military pressure. Eventually, he found two books in the ADFA Library: Deserter, by American Charles Glass, which explored desertion as an act of courage, and Bad characters, by Australian Peter Stanley, which included the story of a soldier who, during World War 1, had been caught in a homosexual act, been found guilty, and never turned up to board the ship to take him home to prison! There’s my novel, he decided. Had he had any reaction from ADFA to the book, Alberici asked. No.

Place

Given the narrow “backyard” framing of the panel, Alberici took it upon herself to broaden the theme to “place” in general. Suited me. I love hearing authors discuss place.

Karen Viggers: All her stories come from a spiritual connection to place. (I follow Karen on Instagram and can attest her love of place!) She gives her place a fictional name, because she, like Tara June Winch said in the morning, didn’t want to impose her views on real towns (but it is set in the Geeveston/Huonville/Hartz Mountain region of southern Tasmania). She wanted to focus on different types of violence, besides physical, including psychological and economic control. In small towns people know this is going on and can’t pretend they didn’t know. She also wanted to bring back park ranger Leon from a previous book. And, most of all, she wants people to visit, love, and support Australia’s places.

Book coverKathryn Hind: Believes her senses were heightened because she started writing in England, when she was missing Australia. She couldn’t do physical research so would “drop a pin on map”. She named real places. She didn’t feel she had to capture exact their reality, but the timings of Amelia’s journey had to be right. I love that she used online traveller reviews to inform herself. For example, a review of a hotel in a little town mentioned being kept awake by trains shaking the walls at night. She used that! She wanted to truly test Amelia to bring out her strength.

Nigel Featherstone: Hadn’t been to Egypt, so had some initial creative concerns. Then he realised that 1940s Alexandria no longer exists, which that freed him to rely on research. He knows very well the other main place in the book, Mt Wilson. He also talked about writing by hand (which astonished journalist Emma Alberici!) He has gradually learnt that writing is a whole of body activity.

Book coverThen it was Patrick Mullins. He was tricky in terms of “place”, so Alberici asked him about the title. Mullins admitted that his publisher chose it – using Gough Whitlam’s description of McMahon’s scheming by telephone. Mullins’ own title is the subtitle. Alberici asked if he had any cooperation from the family. None, said Mullins, though he sent messages and did have coffee with one member. So, he couldn’t access the 70 boxes of McMahon’s papers at the Archives. He understood, he said. Children of politicians have crappy lives, and, anyhow, it freed him from feeling beholden to the family. Silly family, eh? Fortunately, he had access to one of McMahon’s autobiography ghostwriters who had seen the papers. The most startling revelation, he said, responding to another question from Alberici, was that McMahon was “more admirable than we would have thought”. He racked up several significant achievements, including taking us to the OECD, and showed impressive persistence/resilience.

Q&A

It was a quality Q&A. The first questioner asked the writers to share the best part for them about writing:

  • Viggers loves the first draft, the joy of going on the ride, and taking the tangents. She also loves those rare moments when the words start to sing!
  • Featherstone found it a hard question, but said one part is when you feel you have written a good sentence, one that feels alive. (One that sings, perhaps?) This happens about once a month, he said. He quoted novelist Roger McDonald, who says that writing is putting sentence after sentence after sentence.
  • Hind’s favourite moments were making discoveries in her own work, the moments when you forget to eat and drink, the moments when you feel “this is what I’ve done”, and when you know your novel so well you can defend it against an editor (albeit her editor was great, she hastened to say.)
  • Mullins gave a non-fiction writer’s answer: It’s when you get access to material, when you find that special piece of information, the little details.

Another question concerned characters “taking over”. Does this happen, and how did they feel about it? Viggers said that for her it’s less that the characters dictate and more that the publishers want her to go deeper, while Hind said that there were times when she wished Amelia would tell her more! Amelia divulging much, even to her author! Featherstone gave the answer of the session. He said that around draft 20 (of the 40 he wrote), he pretended he was a journalist and interviewed his main characters. He asked them to give him an object that represented them, and to tell him a secret about themselves, which he promised not to put in the book. They did, and he didn’t!

Another asked for the best piece of advice they’ve received. Featherstone said it was “to write about what makes you blush”, while Viggers said it was “to get it down, then get it right.” Her husband also says that writing is not about inspiration but getting “bum on seat” and doing it. Hind said her tutor told her that she writes very plainly, which upset her – until he added, “a bit like Tim Winton”! That’s ok then! Mullins said he’d been told that a book about McMahon would be short. It’s not, it’s nearly 800 pages. So, his response was, don’t follow advice!

A good place to end my report of my Canberra Writers Festival. Phew. To those still with me, thanks for following along!

Canberra Writers Festival 2019, Day 2, Session 2: PM’s Pick (Brian Castro with Genevieve Jacobs)

/ whisperinggums / 19 Comments

Book coverPM’s Pick, featuring the multi-award-winning Brian Castro, was another must-attend session. The night before, while dining at Muse, I checked to see whether they had any Castro in their classy little bookshop. They did, including a second-hand copy of his fourth novel, After China. I snapped it up, and as I did, bookseller Dan reminded me that he’s “very literary”. I know, I said! He is also very reclusive, making this a not-to-be missed session. And it was free, my original payment being refunded when they found a sponsor. Woo hoo!

The session was titled PMs Pick in reference to the fact that Castro won the 2018 Prime Minister’s (PM’s) Literary Award for Poetry for his verse novel, Blindness and rage: A phantasmagoria: A novel in thirty-four cantos. Even the title is scary, but Lisa (ANZLitLovers) has tackled it.

Castro and JacobsCastro conversed with local ABC radio presenter Genevieve Jacobs. It was a smallish audience, and a quiet conversation, but provided some fascinating insights.

Castro, like Gerald Murnane whom he referenced a couple of times during the conversation, is a self-described recluse. This event is the first he’s done, he said, for three years! I didn’t know that when I booked it, but I’m doubly glad now. The worse thing when he’s writing, he said, is having to be “a social gadfly”, so he hides away, except that he needs to talk to his students at the University of Adelaide where he teaches creative writing.

I’m going to focus on what I learnt about Castro and his ideas (not quite in the order in which the conversation went), and end with a reference to Blindness and rage.

Firstly, why does he live in Adelaide? Hong Kong-born, he has been Australian-based since going to a Sydney boarding school when he was 11 years old. He called himself a fringe-dweller, explaining that he doesn’t, exactly, live in Adelaide but in the Adelaide Hills. Before that, he lived in the Dandenongs on Melbourne’s fringe, and before that in the Blue Mountains just west of Sydney.

He likes the provincial life, which he doesn’t see as negative. It’s also something that Lucien Gracq, his fame-seeking protagonist of Blindness and rage, comes to value.

Then, there’s his job. He teaches creative writing, but he’s not convinced it’s a worthwhile thing to do. (Should I be sharing this?!) Universities, these days, he said, are factories. What do you do with a creative writing degree? Maybe get work in publishing? He has had just two writers win awards over the years he has been teaching. Creative writing has become an industry, but it pays his way, given his novels are not exactly best-sellers!

Indeed, he had quite a bit to say about the writing life, some of it in response to the Q&A, including how tough it was to get that first publisher when he was 32. Winning the Vogel award did it. He has been lucky, he said, and is particularly so now because his publisher, at Giramondo, is also his friend. One of the lessons he has learnt over the years is to accept disappointment! Cheery, eh? His early days were very difficult, because if you want to write, you must invest everything in it. However, reality starts to hit when you start to age, and need to shore up something for retirement. It’s difficult for literary writers in Australia, where returns are small. Only five Australian writers, he said, really live off their writing.

Various gems regarding what he likes to write and read came out during the conversation. For example, he thinks we should read for mood not plot. I relate to this, because this is exactly what I most remember about the books I’ve read. I rarely remember the story, or character details, but I remember the tone and/or how the book made me feel. He’s also most interested in metre and rhythm, which makes sense, because these contribute strongly to mood. He talked about hearing Homer in the original ancient Greek. He didn’t understand it, but the rhythms “electrify the brain even if you don’t understand it”.

So, he “always pays attention to the language first. The plot will come, if it comes.”

Castro described himself as a “short writer”. Long novels don’t appeal to him. He quoted WG Sebald who didn’t like 19th century novels because you could see “the engines grinding” in them! He also said, which won’t surprise you, that he’s not interested in linear narratives, though he recognises there are different tastes and preferences.

Interestingly, for someone seen as a “very literary” writer, he also questioned “grandiose notions of high literature”. He loves works you can read on multiple levels.

Jacobs, of course, asked him about winning the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry, wondering whether he was surprised. Yes, very – though, when he resisted attending the Awards Ceremony, having previously experienced the bad end of such events, he was told-without-being-told that he should be there! Neither he, nor Gerald Murane, who also won that year (for fiction), wanted to attend.

Regarding winning, it shuts you up for a while he said! He’s having a year off, waiting until he retires. On whether winning has an impact on sales, he simply said his books don’t sell well. His publisher told him he was publishing Blindness and rage for posterity! (Hence Castro working as a professor!)

And regarding the mushrooming of literary awards and whether they support literature, he said Yes and No. Some people can win big money and disappear. However, money does help you buy time, which we’ve heard here before. But then you have get back to the desk. How you high jump that desk is the challenge he said.

The issue of translated fiction also came up. I sensed that Castro (like me) has a love-hate relationship with it. Love, because many of his favourite writers (like Sebald, for example) don’t write in English and he’s not fluent in all the languages of the authors he reads. But hate because he misses “the textures, colours, flavors when read in translation”. Castro said there’s a huge swathe of literary works that haven’t been translated. It came out, in the Q&A, that his novel, After China, had been poorly translated into Chinese, and that they had omitted the first chapter because of the sex!

Blindness and rage

Book coverNow, I should say a little about Blindness and rage. Inspired by Virgil, Dante (the 34 cantos of his Inferno), and Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, it tells the story of writer Lucien Gracq who, told he is terminally ill, goes to Paris to finish the epic poem he’s writing and to die there. He joins a secret writers’ society, Le club des fugitifs, which only dying writers can join. It publishes an author’s last unfinished work, but not in his/her name. This reflects Castro’s own view that the work is all, the writer doesn’t matter! He doesn’t think fame helps anything.

Castro said that he reads a lot of literary biographies for pleasure, but he inserts writers in the novel to mock. He particularly mocks what he sees as the glorification of French intellectuals, which has been “going on for too long”, he said. Lucien finds them, mostly, arrogant and dismissive. Jacobs commented on the many allusions in the book, and asked whether he expects us to leave the written page? No, he doesn’t expect us to go read the authors, but, he’s a “fictioneer”, and doesn’t mind if people check Wikipedia’! (Harumph!)

The novel chronicles Lucien’s gradual recognition of what’s real in life, from his initial desire to seek something “vainglorious”. It does this, I gather, with a good deal of irony and humour, undermining, along the way, various literary traditions and assumptions.

I haven’t read Blindness and rage yet, but I’m now intrigued. Anything that looks at the lives of writers/artists – that questions who they are, what they are about – intrigues me, particularly when in the hands of someone as clearly provocative as Castro. And as humorous! Castro said he didn’t set out to be humorous but the PM judges noted it, and he admitted that gravity needs a touch of lightness. Jacobs suggested that the undercutting of seriousness, such as can be found in the book, is very Australian. Castro seemed to accept that, but added “also democratic”!

And, of course, there was a reading – of Canto XXX, which starts:

It may be a fact that
if you’re dying of thirst
in the desert
you do not call for whisky
and all you want is water
which may drown you
in full irony.

Canto XXXI has a verse which starts “To be able to write is not to say anything/but to put small things together”, which do, in the end, I’m sure, say something!

Q&A

There’s not a lot to share from the Q&A, besides what I’ve included above. One struggling writer of science fiction asked about finding publishers and agents, which didn’t feel quite appropriate for the forum.

Another asked – and this made me smile – how she could find a copy of After China! Luckily, Castro was able to say that Wakefield Press is republishing it. And another asked whether he would consider doing a reading (for audiobooks) of Blindness and rage, like Seamus Heaney did for Beowulf. Castro seemed intrigued and not totally negative about the idea.

The session ended as quietly as it started, but I left feeling glad I’d spent time with such a writer, and wanting to read Blindness and rage.