Kate Evans

Canberra Writers Festival 2024: 6, The case for critics

/ Whispering Gums / 19 Comments

Presented in partnership with Sydney Review of Books and Radio National’s The Bookshelf 

This was my final session of the festival, and it felt the perfect choice after five sessions focussing on authors and their novels. The program described it this way:

Derided, disparaged and cursed to the heavens, book critics are depicted as literature’s grand villains – as frustrated creators and gleeful wreckers. But what do critics really do? And why are they necessary for a healthy literary ecosystem? James Jiang, Beejay Silcox and Christos Tsiolkas – a trio of Aussie critics – make the case for criticism. In conversation with Kate Evans and Cassie McCullagh (recorded for Radio National’s The Bookshelf).

Again there was no Q&A, because it was being recorded.

The session was conducted jointly by Kate Evans and Cassie McCullagh though the participants didn’t need much guidance as this was a topic they cared deeply about.

Cassie did the acknowledgment of country. The participants were introduced – author Christos Tsiolkas (who has appeared several times on my blog), Editor of the Sydney Review of Books James Jiang, and critic and Canberra Writers Festival Artistic Director Beejay Silcox. Then the discussion commenced. I considered using my usual headings approach but the discussion was so engaged and free flowing, that I decided breaking it up would lose some of the connections. So, I’ve bolded a few ideas here and there as a guide. And, I’ve put my own reflections in parentheses.

Kate leapt right with a question to Beejay about what happens when she “sees the whites of the eyes” of someone she has critiqued. This indeed had happened, Beejay responded, as she had loved one book by Christos and not another! But, if she can’t be honest she shouldn’t be doing the job. She doesn’t feel uncomfortable facing people if she has done her job properly, thoughtfully, respectfully.

Christos admitted that it can be difficult to receive criticism, but he also writes criticism. However, it’s film criticism, because as an Australian novelist he feels he can’t be objective about other Australian novelists. He has critiqued novelists no longer with us, such as Patrick White.

Beejay had been writing criticism out of Australia for seven years before she appeared on the scene, so she didn’t have that issue of being known. (In fact, some thought her name was a pseudonym being used by an author, and Christos was one of the suggestions for that author!)

James, who is ex-academia, believes reviewing living authors offers a “massive opportunity” because you can guide the development of the art into the future. Critical thought, in other words, gets sucked up into the culture at large.

Kate and Cassie, who use reviewers on their radio program, were interested in how you choose who reviews what. Debut authors can sometimes want to make a name for themselves and, for example, love to attack the sacred cows. So, their practice is to give these authors books from other countries to review. They are also conscious of hidden agendas they’d like to avoid, like friends or lovers who had fallen out! (I suspect that working for a national broadcaster that people love to criticise requires a different mindset.)

James, on the other hand, doesn’t mind a gung-ho critic. But he feels that increasingly in Australian letters there is the official story and the backroom chat, with the latter often not appearing in social media. He would like transparency, and wants these informal ideas to make their way into formal criticism.

Christos took this idea up, arguing that criticism is a conversation, an argument, but he likes to know the perspective of the critic, where they are coming from. He thinks Australians are scared of having the debate. He also thinks that to be a good reviewer you need to be a good writer. This came up a few times through the discussion, the idea that good criticism is a work in its own right.

Picking up the idea that Australians are scared of the debate, Beejay suggested that we are a comfortable country but criticism is inherently uncomfortable. She’s been told she is brave, but she’s not. She knows what bravery is and it’s not her. Rather, she is being honest. She worries for our culture if what she does is seen as “brave”. Criticism should open doors, but it is often mistaken for closing things down. (Thinking about bravery versus honesty, I wonder if it’s more about confidence. Confidence in what you think, confidence that you can present it clearly, and confidence that you can defend it.)

Christos talked about loving the American film critic Pauline Kael. She starts by asking what is the work doing, and how is it doing it. But, she has criticised – negatively – films that he loves. So, immediately he is in a conversation with her about why he loves the work, perhaps even despite her criticisms.

Writing schools, Christos said, should teach criticism and how to deal with criticism, because there is a sting to a critical review. He quoted Hemingway’s advice to young writers – don’t compare yourself to the present because you don’t know what will hold, compare yourself to the past. (This is probably good advice for critics too! So many works we read now won’t hold, for reasons that, admittedly, aren’t always due to quality.)

At this point, Kate asked what is good criticism. For her it is not about guiding her on whether to read a book or not. In fact, she said, let’s define criticism!

James suggested that criticism was ultimately a form of ekphrasis. The most interesting reviews are those that “recreate the object of scrutiny”, that “conjure the object”, for the reader. In other words, criticism explores the work itself rather than whether it is better or worse than some other work. So, probed Cassie, it’s not about evaluation but context? Not in a discrete way, James said, but you are evaluating all along. Every process of description contains evaluation. But it’s not plonking some assessment at the beginning or end. (I wrote YES! here, because I often worry that I don’t pronounce enough on my feelings about a book. Today’s session has encouraged me to continue with my preference for trying to work out what a book is doing, rather than focusing on whether I like it.)

Christos suggested that the best way to show you care about the art is to ask why it doesn’t work.

Kate then got to the nub of the word “criticism” which people tend to understand as something negative rather than something more analytical. Beejay took this up, saying that people want to ask about the negative, the “bloody”, but she also looks for awe. It’s about opening a book and being prepared to be drawn in, of watching a mind at work. (This is what most intrigues me when I’m reading: What is the mind behind this doing? Where is it going? Why is it doing this?) Her greatest fear is that she will lose the capacity for awe, to be amazed.

Christos said that it can be hard to write about what gives you the awe. (It can be hard to write about the opposite too, though, methinks?) Beejay suggested that the best critics bring doubt, not certainty. They offer “a (their) theory” about the work.

Christos talked about having trust in the critic (and he gave an example of a music critic he trusts, who works in an area he knows little about).

Asked about bringing in expertise, James made the interesting statement that he wants to estrange experts from their expertise. He talked about the difficulties of public writing – and used The Conversation as an example. Experts tend to dilute their writing for the public so that it ends up being “high advertising” for the university. He wants to get away from that. Good public writing might change the style – from academic – to make it interesting, to engage the reader, but shouldn’t dilute the content. SRB will accept essays from 3000 to 10000 words. He gave the example of a 10000-word essay by a poet on the poetics of videogames. There was a mismatch between the subject (video games) and perspective (a poet) but the the result was something good.

On this expertise issue, Beejay commented that many feel they need to have read everything relevant to be able to comment, but she doesn’t believe that’s so. Christos suggested it was partly generational, and came out of the post-modern era. He had to wash it all off when he left university. (I understand this.)

Beejay on the other hand was a lawyer, not an academic. She left the law, and thought academia was solipsistic, not willing to have conversation. She found criticism by accident. Books saved her life, and now she’s giving back to them. She’s jaded about academia.

James, however, grew up with working class parents, and was looking for where he could go to have the conversations he wanted. He found it in an English seminar. The classroom environment taught him to edit his own writing. (Kate commented that Michelle de Kretser’s latest novel, Theory and practice, feeds well into this discussion.)

The conversation then moved on to the focus on the latest thing, and how to not be “just recent”. Christos said the best festival panels for him are those where they discuss influences and books loved. We need to find space for this because there is the danger that some of what we focus on is just fashion, and that we are being influenced by the language around us. He wishes there were more spaces for reflective pieces. (Being involved in the Australian Women Writers blog, and a Jane Austen group, I don’t disagree with any of this!)

Beejay loves reading favourite writers on how they became who they are. She criticises Australia because she loves it, but we are anglophone and protestant. We have an incredible critical legacy and we forget it. Rodney Hall, for example, has a large body of work but only one book, besides his latest, can be bought in bookshops. Critics can keep older work alive, and the more alive our discourse, the more alive our culture.

Christos agreed, and talked about a community radio session that focuses on the things we love. (The damage done by academia is that there’s no love.)

Cassie wondered about pulling punches, and talked about being told to pull one. Beejay had never pulled punches, but she knows which punches she wants to make. James offered a different angle, suggesting that some things are interestingly bad, whereas others can be good but dull. There’s much good but dull publishing he suggested. Christos talked about being told he should have pulled a punch when reviewing a promising young woman because what she was doing was important. What he’d written was “fair but not right”!

Returning, it seemed, to the idea of evaluation, Kate grapples with “stars”. She’s not good with binaries, but if you’re not binary, are you being nuanced or wishy-washy. (I feel her pain!) Beejay suggested that how she feels is almost irrelevant to the reader, it’s how she thinks that’s important. Feeling can impact thinking, but she has written positive reviews about things she didn’t care for.

Cassie then asked about spoilers. For Christos, to do justice to a work, to get to a conversation about it, he assumes you are interested in the whole, in how it works. James gave the example of classical tragedies. We all know how they are going to end. But then, he said, he is more of a voice and style rather than a plot person. (Yes!) Criticism is an ethical activity, and you need to be brave about owning your idea. (I think I might have missed how this related to spoilers.) Beejay talked about having the trust of her reader and working out when to share what. Criticism is the tip of the iceberg. There is a lot of effort and care beneath it. (This discussion of spoilers missed a significant point that wasn’t addressed at all during the discussion which is whether there is a different between Review and Criticism. I feel there is, and that in reviews spoilers are generally not what readers want, whereas with criticism it’s as Christos said, it’s about the whole and you can’t do that without talking about the end.)

And that was that … have you made it to the end? If so, do you have any thoughts to share?

Canberra Writers Festival, 2024
The case for critics
The Arc Theatre, NFSA
Sunday 27 October 2024, 12-1pm

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

/ Whispering Gums / 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