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Micro-fiction writer Lydia Davis won the 2013 International Man Booker Prize yesterday. Celebrated in her native US, though less well known elsewhere, she has published several collections of (very) short stories, most of the stories no more than three pages long – and some of them as short as a sentence, or even a phrase.
Chair of the Man International Booker judges, Christopher Ricks, praised the way her inventive stories ‘fling their lithe arms wide to embrace many a kind’.
In 2010, critic Estelle Tang reviewed Davis’s The Collected Stories – which spans twelve years, four collections and almost 200 stories – for the Australian Literary Review. She’s allowed us to republish her in-depth appreciation here. Maybe it will whet your appetite!
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis Lydia Davis (Hamish Hamilton)
Reviewed by Estelle Tang
Joyce Carol Oates wrote that the short story’s ‘effect is rarely isolated or singular, but accumulative; a distinguished story collection is one that is greater than the mere sum of its disparate parts’. By this equation, The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis stands to stack up as great indeed. The collection spans twelve years, four collections and almost 200 stories. And Davis’s oeuvre does succeed against Oates’ metric, defying mere additive logic to constitute a rare, oblique investigation into our interiors. Not only do her stories flout the conventions of short fiction – Davis forces us to reconsider the meaning of both ‘short’ and ‘story’ – but they also render the relationship between reader and character one of intimate indeterminacy. One only need think of a microscope with the magnification set too high; it’s a marvellously clear view, but what are we seeing?
‘Break It Down’ opens with a man
staring at a piece of paper in front of him. He’s trying to break it down. He says:
I’m breaking it all down. The ticket was $600 and then after that there was more for the hotel and food and so on, for just ten days. Say $80 a day, no, more like $100 a day. And we made love, say, once a day on the average. That’s $100 a shot.
Here we have the ex-lover trying to settle accounts: sifting through memories, assessing their value, palming the change. The necessaries and the lovemaking are easily accounted for, but not everything yields so easily to such categorisation. The narrator (stripped of details like name and sex, constituted only by his or her thoughts, like most of Davis’ characters) begins to include jokes, touches, peaceful dreams in the reckoning, and it becomes apparent that the equation doesn’t really add up: ‘So, I’m thinking about it, how you can go in with $600, more like $1,000, and how you can come out with an old shirt.’
Davis’s earnest, assiduous accountants excogitate, not discuss. Direct speech is scarce, dialogue between two characters even more so. In the monologic ‘Story’, a woman has been trying to track her lover down after a fight; he has been to the movies with his ex-girlfriend instead of coming to visit her. They play phone tag and then she goes to his house, where she sees a car she doesn’t recognise. He comes out and explains why the other woman is there, but she doesn’t understand:
I try to figure it out.
So they went to the movies and then came back to his place and then I called and then she left and he called back and we argued and then I called back twice but he had gone out to get a beer (he says) and then I drove over and in the meantime he had returned from buying beer and she had also come back and she was in his room so we talked by the garage doors.
These internal to-and-fros are heartbreaking, because while the thinkers have put their trust in method and thought, time and time again they train their attention on the wrong object. In ‘Grammar Questions’, the narrator deliberates over how to conjugate a father’s imminent death: ‘In the phrase “he is dying,” the words he is with the present participle suggest that he is actively doing something. But he is not actively dying. The only thing he is still actively doing is breathing.’ Inquiry of this nature may seem cold and avoidant, but it’s clear that the ability of grammar to mirror life’s tracks – present and future and past tenses – is a reassuringly unassailable strand in the narrator’s fraying reality.
In these human experiments, Davis’s narrators impose a control of sorts: the plainest language you might ever encounter in literary fiction. It is as if, by paying each emotion the same courtesy of plain words and studied focus, the narrators might manage to get at the truth. Davis’s preference for plainness has also been observed in her translating work. In the New York Times, Peter Brooks noted that her 2004 translation of Marcel Proust’s Du côté de chez Swann (Davis does away with the ambiguous ‘Swann’s Way’ and titles it The Way by Swann’s) ‘strips away some of the fustian and fussiness’ of Scott Moncrieff’s original. One can, then, comfortably predict that Davis will be faithful to Flaubert, that famous seeker of le mot juste, in her forthcoming translation of Madame Bovary. Davis also admires the writing of Samuel Beckett for, among other things, ‘the plain, Anglo-Saxon vocabulary’; she related in a 2008 interview with the Believer magazine that she used to copy out sentences from his work.
But there’s lineage, and then there’s the singular simplicity Davis has made her signature. Take ‘Problem’, which casts people as variables: ‘X is with Y, but living on money from Z. Y himself supports W, who lives with her child by V.’ Davis’s sentences are so plain, the syntax so unassuming, that when a Romantic, though apposite, adjective surfaces (‘espaliered’, in ‘My Husband and I’), it catches in the maw like old toast. The unadorned account of ‘Problem’, however, presents troubling and complex facts: Y is supporting W, who is living with her child by V. X and Y don’t have children together. W is stuck in New York on account of her relationship with U, whose child lives in New York. It may be a story boiled down to its most basic elements – who does what, with whom – but the problem has by no means been solved, and may in fact have no possible solution. What seems like a simplifying approach actually serves to foreground the entanglement; there’s more to this story, infinitely more.
The Collected Stories contains four of Davis’s seven short fiction collections: Break It Down (1986), Almost No Memory (1997), Samuel Johnson Is Indignant (2001) and Varieties of Disturbance (2007). (She has also written one novel, The End of the Story.) 733 pages of stories shorn of decoration might seem like a tall order (even though the book is blurbed by heavyweights Jonathan Franzen, Dave Eggers, Oates and Rick Moody), especially in Australia, where none of the individual collections have been released in local editions. But Davis is also a convincing redefiner of the short-story form, offering endless surprising configurations across a confident body of work. In a time when readers of American short fiction bemoan the samey competency that can result from creative writing courses, the multifarious and controversial shapes of Davis’s fictions are undeniably exciting.
Notably, some sentences consist of just one line. Here is the entirety of ‘Samuel Johnson Is Indignant:’
that Scotland has so few trees.
Outrageous, certainly, if you believe that a story should have a beginning, a middle and an end. Or, if you hold, like Gerald Prince did in the 1970s, that a story should comprise at least three events strung together. ‘Samuel Johnson’, it might be argued, contains only one, or merely the second part of one. But there’s no denying the story’s one-two narrative slug. At the risk of explaining away the miniature’s charm, Davis does much here with little. The stentorian promise of a literary giant’s ire, the bracing colon, the understated denouement: it’s a pleasurable and coherent experience.
Some stories are haiku-like or epistolary; others bring to mind logic exercises or language classes. ‘This Condition’ is a list of aphrodisiacs, pock-marked with commas, and the Hitchens-tickler ‘Index Entry’ (‘Christian, I’m not a’) trades glances with ‘Foucault and Pencil’, which contains no definite or indefinite articles. As might be expected, this array of forms has its heroes and its lesser mates. Some of the shorter, more experimental pieces have the feel of being just ‘scales and arpeggios and five-finger exercises’, as practised by the narrator in ‘Glenn Gould’. For example, ‘First Grade: Handwriting Practice’ consists of the lyrics to ‘Were you there when they crucified my Lord’, with a little stage direction (‘turn over’) interpolated before the penultimate line. Diverting, sure, but it reads like an opportunistic epigram.
Nevertheless, as Glenn Gould would no doubt attest, and as Ernest Hemingway famously recommended, the five-finger exercise plays a material role in the performance of a masterpiece. The childhood classroom and pulpy paper called to mind by ‘First Grade’ speak to one of the most startling and funny pieces in the collection, ‘We Miss You: A Study of Get-Well Letters from a Class of Fourth-Graders’. The title doesn’t mislead: much like a sociological study conducted by a grammarian, ‘We Miss You’ is a dryly penned analysis of twenty-seven letters written to young Stephen, who has been in a car accident.
Stephen’s classmates have been enjoined by a doubtless well-meaning teacher to put their most comforting and enthusiastic thoughts to paper. These artefacts are subjected to absurdly objective textual analysis: ‘There is a tendency toward non sequiturs’. The unnamed ‘sociologist’ carries out this research with fastidious attention, and invests the most meaningless details with import. To his or her keen eye, each letter reveals its author’s personality through its tics, level of accomplishment and correctness:
Sally is even more specific, and her letter, though one of the briefest, carries the most powerful, and the darkest, emotional burden: “Hope you are feeling better. Your seat is empty. Your stocking is not finished.” This last sentence is followed by a period, but then, ambiguously, by a lower-case b, so that we cannot be sure whether Sally meant to continue the sentence or begin a new one when she goes on to say, again dwelling on darker possibilities: “But I don’t think it will be finished.”
Davis’s extraordinary commitment to formal experimentation is at its most salient in this, one of the collection’s longest and most strangely riveting stories. As the report goes on, its findings demarcated to four levels of subheadings (‘Overall Coherence’, ‘Formulaic Expressions of Sympathy’, ‘Compound-Complex Sentences’), the letters ever more closely scrutinised, the reader’s attention turns to the driving intelligence behind this odd endeavour. What is being studied, and who formulated the question?
In ‘A Few Things Wrong with Me’, the narrator is trying to ascertain what an ex-lover didn’t like about her. It’s an unpleasant task that brings to mind all her faults, large or small. Labouring at these difficult, unsolvable problems, Davis’s characters fumble through processes designed to procure answers. But there are no epiphanies here, no sparks of inspiration. The aim is far more humble than that. The narrator trusts that this kind of parsing, all this working out, ‘all the answers together may add up to the right one if there is such a thing as a right answer to a question like that’.
Estelle Tang is a writer, and an editor at Oxford University Press, a bibliotherapist at The School of Life and editorial advisor at Paper Radio. She tweets as @waouwwaouw.
Sam Twyford-Moore is the director of the Emerging Writers' Festival, which kicks off tonight with the announcement of the winner of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript. He’s also a writer and an editor, who has been published in Meanjin, the Australian and other places.
We talked to him about the importance of mentors, how he misses having to fight for someone to hear you, and why he believes you should write to engage and defy.
What was the first piece of writing you had published?
The Rock N’ Roll edition of Meanjin in 2006. I basically got lucky in as much as my non-fiction tutor at the time was Mark Mordue who was acting as guest editor and he was really encouraging his students to submit. Mark has this incredibly electric personality, and I was a deeply inspired him as a student – I remember I even started talking like him at some point. Mark was really passionate about his Newcastle roots, so I ended up writing a short memoir of a house party in the suburbs where I grew up on the Central Coast, the urban sprawl between Sydney and Newcastle. The subject matter probably makes it sound like a real piece of juvenilia, but when I go back to that piece I don’t cringe, instead I find something honest and I often think that I’ll never write that well again. I owe Mark a great deal.
What’s the worst part of your job?
It’s been great moving to Melbourne and finding such a strong and supportive literary scene down here, but I do sincerely miss Sydney and Newcastle. I miss fighting for someone to hear you, as perverse as that may read.
What’s been the most significant moment in your writing career so far?
Reading the works of people who have gone on to become great friends.
What’s the best (or worst) advice you’ve received about writing?
Kill your darlings is a bit of a joke. But I love the magazine!
What’s the most surprising thing you’ve ever heard or read about yourself or your work?
I noticed Tom Doig wrote, in reply to this question, about me writing a letter to Voiceworks calling him an anti-aesthete. Where the hell did I get that combination of words from? I wasn’t having any fun when I was writing that letter. I love that Tom claims the term and I hope I too one day I can join him in being labeled an anti-aesthete.
If you weren’t writing, what do you think you’d be doing instead?
I’m not really writing at the moment – running the festival has become a full-time job for the moment. But it’s great getting to be an advocate for so many writers, and I’d hope that what I’m doing will benefit me as a writer somewhere down the line. I have little doubt I’ll learn something from each of the close to 200 writers in the festival program. That’s an obscenely privileged position to be in.
There’s much debate on whether creative writing can be taught – what’s your view?
I learnt a lot from my studies in writing, but I got the most from connecting with other writers and I was lucky in that there seemed to be a culture of mentoring outside of the confines of the degree for the time I was there.
What’s your advice for someone wanting to be a writer?
Do it because you love it would be the typical advice – but I’d go further, I’d say do it because you love other writers and being in dialogue with them. Do it to both engage and defy.
Do you buy your books online, in a physical bookshop, or both?
Both. But I get in trouble when I buy books online, because my girlfriend works in a bookstore. Book Depository is a sometimes food in our house.
If you could go out to dinner with any fictional character, who would it be and why? And what would you talk about?
I don’t read much fiction (is that the same as someone saying I don’t own a TV?). Maybe the kid from Wayne Macauley’s The Cook, but we wouldn’t be talking, he’d be in the kitchen feeding lambs some milk before a sweet dinner.
What’s the book that’s had the most significant impact on your life or work – and why?
Robert Adamson’s autobiography had an incredible impact on me. I was reading it as I was coming home on the train from university from Sydney back towards the Central Coast, crossing his beloved Hawkesbury. If you haven’t done that train trip, it’s stunning, and the Hawkesbury glitters and surprises the whole way. I was reading way too much American fiction, and here was a book that evoked the suburb Wyong, such a banal place growing up, and it made it something poetic and immediate.
Sam Twyford Moore is the director of the Emerging Writers Festival, which runs from 23 May to 2 June. You can find out about all that’s on offer by visiting www.emergingwritersfestival.org.au.
The Emerging Writers Festival will be launched tonight at BMW Edge, in an event that includes the announcement of the winner of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript.
The Wheeler Centre’s Lucy De Kretser was recently a participant in the inaugural First Nations Australian Writers Workshop in Queensland. She reports back on her highlights, from writers as diverse as Alexis Wright, Kim Scott, Anita Heiss and Sam Wagan Watson.
On May 9 and 10 2013, emerging and established Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers from across Australia came together on the traditional lands of the Turrbul and Jagara Nations for the inaugural First Nations Australian Writers Workshop. The workshop was presented by the First Nations Australian Writers Network, established to foster a vibrant Aboriginal writing sector. The Wheeler Centre was lucky enough to participate in what were an inspiring few days of listening, learning and discussion at the State Library of Queensland.
From left to right: David Unaipon, Oodgeroo Noonuccal – Kath Walker, Kevin Gilbert and Jack Davis.
‘It’s about who we are and where we want to be’
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders have won some of the most prestigious literary awards in Australia, and yet as chair of the First Nations Australian Writers Network, Kerry Reed-Gilbert, joked in her introduction to the workshop, literature is often seen as the ‘poor cousin’ of the Indigenous arts. This is one of the reasons that the network was seeded in 2012.
‘The depth of talent and experience that exists within our community is extraordinary’ says writer and FNAWN working party member Cathy Craigie, ‘and it is now time for us to work together to strengthen our future’. In this spirit, the workshop began with a tribute to Indigenous writing greats of the past, David Unaipon, Oodgeroo Noonuccal (Kath Walker), Kevin Gilbert and Jack Davis.
‘It’s about who we are and where we want to be,‘ said Reed-Gilbert.
‘Into the right voice’: Alexis Wright
After a wonderful Welcome to Country by Shannon Ruska, we were treated on Day One of the workshop to an interview via live cross with Miles Franklin award-winning writer Alexis Wright. Dr. Sandra Phillips asked Wright about her writing process, her award-winning book Carpentaria, and her forthcoming release, The Swan Book.
Wright recalled that when working on the manuscript of Carpentaria, she overheard two old men in Alice Springs talking in the same style as her grandmother, and thought ‘[I’ve] gotta write it in our voice. How our people speak. How our Elders speak.’ This meant rewriting the the entire work from scratch ‘into the right voice’, but Wright felt it was worth it. She spoke candidly about her difficulty in getting the book published, saying that it had ‘Aboriginal written all over it in an industry that wasn’t really interested in those voices at that time,’ and credited Ivor Indyk at Giramondo Publishing with taking the risk and believing in the book. Phillips suggested that perhaps it takes ‘a small publisher to do the big books’ and Wright agreed that this might just be the case.
Her forthcoming release, The Swan Book, will also be published by Giramondo. Wright describes it as set in the future, with Aboriginal people still living under the Intervention in the north, in an environment fundamentally altered by climate change. ‘That concerns us too, as Indigenous people. It’s our country,’ she said. The book will be released in August.
‘Do people play ‘Indigenous tennis’?’: Herb Wharton
In the afternoon we were lucky enough to hear from some of Australia’s most esteemed writers, in a panel discussion involving Kim Scott, Herb Wharton, Dr. Anita Heiss, and Melissa Lucashenko as chair. The panel discussed what calling yourself a writer means, the label ‘Indigenous writer’, and whether or not these terms are important. Heiss explained that Indigenous people are dealing with boxes and labels all the time, and these are rarely helpful, going on to say that while she is proud to write ‘Indigenous literature’ she doesn’t refer to herself as an ‘Indigenous writer.’ Heiss quoted Uncle Herb, who once responded to the question about whether he writes Indigenous literature with: ‘Do people play Indigenous tennis?’
Uncle Herb read us a poem about Indigenous women drovers and told us about purchasing his first typewriter with an advance given to him by the University of Queensland Press. He also jokingly explained that his excuse for not writing ‘the most famous words’ yet is that it is too noisy where he lives, in Cunnamulla!
Uncle Herb urged that learning to read is just as important as learning to write, and revealed that his poems are ‘like an ungraded bush track’ before editing. Kim Scott agreed that reading is an important part of being a writer, and that writing groups are really important, ‘especially for Aboriginal writers, to nurture each other.’
‘I’m gonna write us in’: Anita Heiss
Anita Heiss
Explaining her motivation for writing, Anita Heiss said that when she read books by non-Indigenous writers, she didn’t see people like her reflected in the literature, and recognised this as a problem. Writing Indigenous people into the literary landscape is one of the reasons she decided to start writing. Kim Scott elaborated on this point, saying that ‘the conventional narrative [about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders] in Australia is something very like defeat’, which is not the truth of Indigenous experience. He believes that writing can be a process of decolonisation, a sentiment echoed by Melissa Lucashenko: ‘Every time an Aboriginal person picks up a pen … it’s always a political act.’
Later in the day, Maori writer Anton Blank explored these ideas further, saying that ‘the shadow of colonisation … positions us as the victim, [but] why not say I am powerful. I am amazing. I am free.’ He explained that in contemporary Maori writing a whole ‘continuum of experience is being represented,’ which is a positive thing. Picking up on Heiss’s point about not seeing herself reflected in literature, Blank suggested that often non-Indigenous writers are ‘scared to touch it, scared to write us in,’ which he sees as a shame and a missed opportunity.
‘Comedy is healing’: Sam Wagan Watson
Part of the workshop involved hearing international perspectives. One of these was offered by First Nations Canadian storyteller and comedian Sharon Shorty. Shorty is from the Tlingit, Northern Tutchone and Norwegian people. She discussed how she was raised with the storytelling tradition of her southern Yukon community. ‘Stories helped us survive, same as here,’ she said, ‘Minus forty [degrees] and forty [degrees] have one thing in common – they’re hard to survive!’ Shorty reappeared later in the day as ‘Grandma Suzie,’ sharing with us some of the traditional stories of the Raven clan and a comedy routine that had the room roaring with laughter over Grandma’s attraction to the fella on Australia’s fifty dollar note, Ngarrindjeri writer and inventor David Unaipon.
Later in the day, poet Sam Wagan Watson spoke about the power of humour, saying that one of his biggest influences was comedian Bill Cosby, who knew the importance of a good laugh. ‘Our mob do!’ he said.
‘But I’m Black/(And I write)’ Lionel Fogarty
Lionel Fogarty, who has written ten books of poetry, explained that the first writing he saw was in Cherbourg, with people writing letters to family and community in gaol, ‘We had an oral tradition until the authorities got involved. Then we had to write to the gaols.’ He described how being involved in political activism eventually led him to poetry, and read a poem by his son ‘But I’m Black’, asking the audience to repeat ‘And I write’ at the end of each line. An enthusiastic audience made this a powerful moment.
In her closing address, Kerry Reed-Gilbert described the three days gathered together for the workshop as ‘pure magic’ and I’m sure all who attended would agree with her. There was a lot going on – workshops, panel discussions, industry roundtables, brainstorming and networking sessions, but the real magic came from the sharing and generosity of participating writers – both established and emerging, who shared their work, insights, humour and warmth in abundance.
‘I think a lot about book cover design while I am reading, and thought it would be a nice exercise to recreate the covers of books once I finish reading them,’ she says.
To make things interesting – and so they’d fit together as part of a series, Volvoski set herself a series of rules to work within.
‘The rules were – green/black/white for color, Futura/typewriter/handwriting for text, and scans/drawings/photography for the image.’ As she admits, she occasionally breaks them.
We share some amazing (and innovative) eco-friendly buildings from around the world – from the world’s first vertical forest in Italy to a stunning mountain hut that generates 90% of its own power in the Swiss Alps.
Bosco Verticale, Milan
The world’s first vertical forest is being erected in the centre of Milan – the first of a pioneering new green architecture model that makes the most of limited urban land, while providing an improved atmosphere within cities. Plus, it creates an attractive and eco-friendly living space.
Each apartment hosts a small forest on its balcony – which filters out dust particles and brings down inside temperatures. And it only adds five per cent to construction costs.
The first Bosco Verticale will be two residential towers in the centre of Milan, hosting 900 trees, as well as shrubs and floral plants. On flat land, each Bosco Verticale equals 10,000 square metres of forest. The towers are 110 and 76 metres high, respectively.
Monte Rosa Hut, Switzerland
This stunning Swiss Alps building is now a tourist attraction – with its silvery aluminum shell, it is ‘reminiscent of a mountain crystal’. It operates as a restaurant and lodgings.
Photo courtesy of MySwitzerland.com
That shell isn’t just for show, though – thanks to thermal solar collectors and a photovoltaic system built into the southern facade, the hut is self-sufficient for over 90 percent of its energy needs.
Interior of Monte Rosa Hut.
Cor, Miami
Construction of the ambitious Cor project in Miami has been delayed due to the financial crisis, but the plans are impressive, and architecture experts are watching eagerly for when it is finished.
Four-foot tall and 24 stories high, it will be both aesthetically striking and impressively sustainable.
‘Everything is supported by cutting-edge sustainable technology like recycled tile floors, bamboo-lined halls, energy-efficient appliances and plumbing, and a grey-water processing system,’ writes Eluxe.
The rooftop garden (pictured) is designed for low water use – and the walls around it house wind turbines that will produce enough electricity to light the building’s interior common areas.
Sky Garden Home, Singapore
This gorgeous house is built on Sentosa Island, Singapore. The grass roofs, which cover each level of the house, lower internal temperatures and create a lush garden feel.
We share our favourite finds from the internet this week.
Jon Stewart and comedy in China
Jon Stewart has recently discovered that he’s a hit in China, from the millions of viewers who see his show in scattered internet clips. He recently joked that maybe he’s working the wrong continent, in a segment called ‘The Daily Show with Imperial Puppet’, peppered with China-specific jokes, seemed designed to push the boundaries. (‘What do you call a hundred Taiwanese citizens in a bathtub? Chinese! Because Taiwan does not exist independently.’)
The New Yorker tells why Stewart’s niche popularity ‘bodes well for the future of satire in China’.
Death threats to True Blood author Charlaine Harris
In a scenario that seems straight out of a Stephen King novel (specifically, Misery), Charlaine Harris has received death threats, suicide threats … and threats to cancel book orders … from passionate fans displeased with the romantic conclusion of her final Sookie Stackhouse book.
The True Blood love triangle, pictured in Rolling Stone.
Gatsby fever
It’s all about Gatsby this week … and opinions are divided on whether the film is a clever and faithful adaption of the book, whose beautiful surfaces and preoccupation with style over substance match Fitzgerald’s classic – or a travesty.
It’s ‘lurid, shallow, glamorous, trashy, tasteless, seductive, sentimental, aloof, and artificial. It’s an excellent adaptation, in other words,’ writes Joshua Rothman in the New Yorker, while the magazine’s long-running film critic, David Denby, hated it. ‘Luhrmann’s vulgarity is designed to win over the young audience, and it suggests that he’s less a filmmaker than a music-video director with endless resources and a stunning absence of taste.’
The Guardian agrees with Denby, calling it ‘ bombastic and excessive, like a 144-minute trailer for itself’. James Franco has defended the film, too. ‘Would anyone object to a production of Hamlet in outer space? Not as much as they object to the Gatsby adaptation, apparently.’
This is Water
David Foster Wallace’s famous commencement speech has been made into a short film. It’s very literal, and a bit distracting from the words, but it’s also quite beautifully shot and edited, and a worthwhile curiosity.
New ‘non-literary’ editor for New York Times Book Review
A new editor has recently been appointed to the New York Times Book Review – one with, according to the Guardian, ‘pretty much, no writerly or literary credentials’. Her gigs include writing a few non-fiction (apparently ‘non-literary’) books, being children’s book editor at the review, and blogging with the Huffington Post. There is speculation that her appointment may signal a shift in priorities for the editor’s position – from literary chops to the ability to make and raise money.
‘While the NYTBR has been at the very center of the book business in New York and has been the most influential voice in book culture for the better part of a century, it is surely hard to say quite what to do with this weighty history. Not to mention, how to squeeze a buck out of it.’
Sylvia Nasar is best known as the author of A Beautiful Mind, which the New York Times called ‘perhaps the best economics-related book of the past quarter-century’. In her latest book, Grand Pursuit, she traces the birth and progress of modern economics – from Dickens in nineteenth-century London to Amartya Sen in contemporary India.
She was recently interviewed by Allan Gregg about the book and its ideas.
Sylvia Nasar, interviewed by Allan Gregg.
‘For the first 200 years of recorded human history, for the bottom nine tenths of humanity, living standards never changed. The average Englishman in Jane Austen’s lifetime lived no better than a Roman slave.’
Nations could get richer – but the wealth of a nation made no difference to the average standard of living.
Charles Dickens: Journalist and observer
‘Dickens, like so many of the great Victorian writers, was a journalist and an observer,’ Nasar said. At the time he was writing, in mid-nineteenth-centry London, interest in economics was starting to spread.
‘People had started to look at social problems that previously had only been seen as political or moral or theological, and redefine them as economic problems.’
A Christmas Carol was ‘a critique of the pessimistic political economy that had prevailed up to Dickens’ lifetime’.
Marx, Engels and The Book of Revelation
Nasar called Freidrich Engels the ‘sugar daddy’ of Karl Marx. Engels, a fundamentalist Christian, was greatly enamoured by the Book of Revelation.
‘It was one of the grand narratives. And what it said was: The world will be split into two, there will be a final confrontation, evil and injustice will be triumped over, and history will end.’
This narrative is central to the pair’s 1848 bestseller The Communist Manifesto.
‘Modern society can’t work. It’s going to be cleaved in two. There’s going to be a final battle, and justice will prevail and the Christians will overcome the Romans and history will end.’
‘It was Biblical.’
Marx was ‘wrong’
Nasar said that not only were Marx’s predictions wrong, but his observations about the time he lived in were wrong too.
‘By the time he finished the first volume of Das Kapital, mid-Victorian England had gone through a 20-year boom that was unprecedented. For the first time in history, the average living standards of the bottom 90% were rising. Exactly what Marx said not only hadn’t happened, but could never happen.’
‘He never went to a factory floor. He didn’t know any British trade union people who were involved.’
Beatrice Potter Webb: Invented the welfare state
London was the world capital at the time. ‘Everybody who was interested in where society was going either lived in London or came to London. There was this incredible conversation going on.’
One of those instrumental to achieving economic change was Beatrice Potter Webb, the daughter of a railway magnate – whose sisters were all married to influential politicians.
‘That would seem to have been Beatrice’s destiny also, except that she wanted something different – a career, which was really unheard of, especially for an upper-calls woman.’
She was a social worker, then an investigative journalist – she went undercover to work in a sweatshop. She invented the think thank and – most significantly – the idea of the modern welfare state.
‘She took the young Churchill under her wing and basically gave him the political platform he and Lloyd George used in around 1908 to implement some of the first ideas associated with the welfare state.’
Joseph Schumpeter: The entrepreneur
Joseph Schumpeter is an economist having a real resurgence today – especially in the technological community.
‘His great insight was that nations really made their own destinies. That it wasn’t about what you had, or how old your pedigree was, or if you were in the North Atlantic – it was what you did with what you had.’
‘Ingenuity, being able to do more with what you have, is another way of saying raise productivity.’
It was about the culture of the entrepreneur – finding new uses for existing resources.
John Maynard Keynes: Getting the blood flowing
John Maynard Keynes is ‘the pivotal figure’ in Grand Pursuit, because his influence straddled the two biggest challenges to modern civilisation – two world wars and a depression.
Nasar says Keynes and Irving Fisher (a figure celebrated by economists and unknown to the general public) developed the idea of the economy as a whole – and looking at how it worked at one point in time.
When the Depression hit, ‘they knew what was wrong – it was as if somebody had a stroke. The flow of money had been disrupted.’
‘And they had a very clear solution, which they advocated in every way, shape or form – which was to do what Ben Bernanke, who is the head of the American Central Bank, and happens to be a great student of the Depression, is doing now. Which is to get the blood flowing again.’
Amaryta Sen: Overcoming Poverty
Nasar ends the book with the Indian Nobel Prize winner Amaryta Sen, whose ‘whole career is about overcoming poverty’.
‘This idea that was born in the 1840s is spreading – and continues to spread. And right now, the most dramatic changes are happening in India and China.’
Sen witnessed the Bengal famine as a boy, and the partition of India and the violence that accompanied that.
‘His whole economics has been a version of, It’s not what you have, it’s what you do with it.’
He observes that famines are not natural disasters – they’re not about a shortage of food.
‘There was no shortage of food in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, or Ireland in the 1840s, or even in Bengal during the war, or China in the Great Leap.’
‘It was that the people who starved in their millions had no access to food.’
Sylvia Nasar will be talking about the fascinating figures and ideas that have transformed society through economics next Friday 24 May at the Athaneaum Theatre. 6.45pm. Book now.
Colin Batrouney is a Melbourne-based writer. His second novel, Creative Writing for Beginners, was published by Affirm Press this month. He has occasionally worked in professional theatre as both an actor and director. He has never attended a creative writing course.
We spoke to Colin about getting fantastic feedback on his work from Wells Tower, why you should make sure your writing stays true to your gut intention, and why referring to someone as a ‘queer’ writer is ‘bullshit’ and sets up lowered expectations.
What was the first piece of writing you had published?
Years ago there was a national gay magazine called Outrage. In 1991 they decided to have a short story competition and I entered it with a story called ‘Fever’, and it won! The competition was judged by the late Peter Blazey and he ended up being very supportive of my work.
What’s the worst part of your job?
My day job is filled with very scary responsibilities – that’s not fun. But in writing, I guess the worst thing that can happen is ending up in a corner and not knowing how to write your way out of it. If it happens I tend just to pick up a book randomly on my desk and read someone else – that can help.
What’s been the most significant moment in your writing career so far?
Name drop alert! Getting fantastic feedback on my writing from the American writer Wells Tower. In a way, sharing my work with him and him reassuring me that I have talent and that my stuff was ‘wonderful’, was just what I needed, just when I needed it.
What’s the best (or worst) advice you’ve received about writing?
Not original, but the best advice I’ve been given is to just write it and to be sure that the writing stays true to your gut intention.
The worst advice I received was from an editor who said I needed to write things that engaged him – how was I going to do that? I didn’t even know him, and if I wrote things that ‘engaged him’ would they engage others, or, more importantly, me? Ultimately these stupid subjective questions are unhelpful and counterproductive.
Often one is given this advice by people who are more concerned with marketing than literature, and they are legitimate marketing challenges, but ones that need to be met by marketers and not writers.
What’s the most surprising thing you’ve ever heard or read about yourself or your work?
Someone once referred to me as a ‘queer’ writer. That was such bullshit. One is a writer, or not. Affixing a prefix like ‘queer’, ‘lesbian’, or ‘gay’ is like putting up a road sign for the reader that states ‘lower your expectations – special needs writing ahead!’
If you weren’t a writer, what do you think you’d be doing instead?
I would love to become an art historian specialising in the works of Doménikos Theotokópoulos, otherwise known as El Greco. I’m not kidding, and you did ask.
There’s much debate on whether creative writing can be taught – what’s your view?
I think writing can be taught, but those courses do not include a unit on ‘Acquiring talent’. Acting, writing, painting can all be taught but the trick with writing is to turn an idea, an impulse into prose that jumps off the page into the mind of a reader with the thrill of recognition. That’s not something as mundane as ‘creative’, it’s in another league and it’s what I aspire to. If there is a course that can teach that, I’ll sign up.
What’s your advice for someone wanting to be a writer?
Read. Read lots of great writing, and read all the time. Don’t just read fiction, read great essayists and poets too. Absorb as much writing as you can. Record things for yourself – ideas and impressions, even just words. Make it personal – always – write for yourself.
Do you buy your books online, in a physical bookshop, or both?
Both. I love bookshops, but they have to survive – they aren’t economically competitive, but they offer something that an online bookstore doesn’t; the weight, smell and feel of a book, lots of books. Physical browsing is such a great pastime and sometimes you get to pick up strangers, you just can’t beat it.
If you could go out to dinner with any fictional character, who would it be and why? And what would you talk about?
Ruth Wilcox, the matriarch from E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End. Like many of Forster’s women characters, she is strange, mysterious and wise. We’d talk about her family, particularly the men in her family and why they are so intractably stupid and tragically stubborn, this would lead us to a very rich vein.
What’s the book that’s had the most significant impact on your life or work – and why?
Patrick White’s The Tree of Man. You can open it anywhere and find writing that is completely distinctive, poetic, instinctive, direct, coarse and transcendental. I’ve read everything he’s written and it seems to come from a place of visceral imaginative power, hot-wired to his nervous system – completely awe-inspiring.
Colin will be talking about the transformative power of the arts at the Wheeler Centre on Wednesday 10 July, with Geoffrey Rush, Neil Armfield and Judith Lucy, in our event Treading the Boards.
The front page of today’s Age pictures a newlywed Altona couple, aged 25 and 27, as examples of the typical Australian, worried about rising costs of living.
They earn $130,000 a year between them, and ‘have a $420,000 mortgage, a $380,000 Pascoe Vale investment property they bought with another couple in July 2012, and plans to start a family’.
Social media has been buzzing today with reactions to the paper’s implication that the young couple – who have put off having kids due to concerns about the cost of child care – are archetypal Aussie battlers.
Just what constitutes middle class, middle income and genuine ‘struggling’ has been a hot conversational topic lately.
’We all think we’re middle class’
‘I don’t think most people have a sense of what the typical Australian’s income is,’ wrote the ACTU’s Matt Cowgill yesterday. ‘We all think we’re middle class.’
He shares some statistics that do give an accurate picture of ‘typical’ earnings. Among full-time workers, the average wage is $72,800 per year. But of course, the average wage is distorted by extremes at the top and bottom of the scale.
A more accurate picture is provided by the median wage figures. ‘If you earn half the median salary, your wage is in the middle of the distribution – it’s higher than 50% of workers, and lower than the other 50%.’
The median full-time worker’s wage was $57,400 in August 2011 (most recent figures). When you figure in part-time workers, this drops to $48,684.
The ‘privileged poor’
Last week, social commentator Rachel Hills hit a collective nerve with her Daily Life piece decrying the ‘privileged poor’, challenging readers to think twice about their place on the economic scale before crying ‘poor’, or ‘broke’ (as in too poor to take an overseas holiday, or go out to dinner).
‘In our grandparents’ generation, being comfortable meant knowing you would have enough money to eat and pay your bills, and usually enough to save and do some fun things on the side. Now, it seems to mean having enough money to do whatever you want, whenever you want, and never saying no to anything … and still having enough left over to put together a nest egg.’
For the more than two million Australians classified as living in poverty by the Australian Council of Social Services, ‘their challenges aren’t choosing between paying off their mortgage or paying for private school, but choosing between turning on the heating during winter and having enough to eat’.
Defining the ‘ultra rich’
Fairfax writer Peter Martin has recently written about the topic, too. He quotes an outraged reader, responding to his observation that ‘anyone earning more than $210,000 a year was ultra rich, in the top one per cent’:
‘Assuming a $600k mortgage (appropriate to this level of income) and two children in private school plus additional outgoings this leaves a balance of only $21k for holidays and other incidentals and/or saving.’
Infamously, Labor MP Joel Fitzgibbon recently claimed that families on $250,000 in his electorate are ‘struggling’. Martin suggests he is out of touch with the realities of struggling families – tax office statistics for his electorate show that the average income there is roughly $60,000.
This tunnel vision isn’t confined to the unfortunate Fitzgibbon, though, he says. ‘None of us get out enough.’
‘We tend to live near people who earn something near what we are earning. If they earn slightly more than us we think we’re behind. If they earn slightly less we think we’re ahead. But we don’t look far beyond them.’
‘Less room in your heart’
Does this tunnel vision matter?
Yes, argues Rachel Hills. ‘It makes it easier to look past the struggles of those who are genuinely struggling.’
‘When you’re declaring social bankruptcy over drinking cleanskin wine instead of $17 cocktails … when this becomes your vision of what “poverty” looks like – there is less room in your heart for those for whom poverty means having no choice at all.’
Peter Martin identifies another problem with our tendency to underestimate our privilege – most are keen to defend the interests of those above us, because of our own aspirations to ‘one day move up a notch or two’.
‘We think others earn more than they do, we aspire to earn more than we do, and many of us have no idea how well off we are.’
Last year, Patrick Ness won the prestigious Carnegie Medal for the second time, for his YA novel A Monster Calls, a heartbreaking story about cancer and loss, told through the metaphor of a yew tree that comes to life outside the bedroom of a boy whose mother is dying.
In his acceptance speech, Ness spoke passionately in defence of teenagers, taking issue with the UK government’s negative treatment and expectations of them.
Though his fans span all ages, and his latest book, The Crane Wife, is for adult readers, he is best known for his books for a young adult audience – especially his worldwide bestselling Chaos Walking trilogy, variously described as a dystopian love story with the atmosphere of a Western and ‘one of the most interesting fantasies ever published’. Ness won his first Carnegie Medal for The Knife of Letting Go, the first in the Chaos Walking series.
Patrick Ness giving his 2012 Carnegie Medal acceptance speech.
‘The worst thing our current government, and we as a culture, do about teenagers, in my view, is to only discuss them in negative terms – by what they can’t do,’ Ness told the Carnegie audience. ‘What they aren’t achieving, how much they don’t read.’
‘All it takes is to bother to meet a teenager or three and you’ll see that they’re the same interesting, curious, sensitive, smart, compassionate, funny, questioning, brilliant people they’ve always been – and yet we only ever hear about them in negative terms.’
‘I couldn’t have felt more different if I’d had a tail’
He went on to reflect on his own teenage years, and that universal feeling (which always seems utterly unique at the time) of feeling like you don’t fit, that you stand out in the wrong ways.
‘I was a typically atypical teenager – and I think that’s the secret of being a teenager, that there’s no such thing as a typical teenager. Even the popular kids feel different from everyone else. It’s the standard principle of a teenager to feel alone. And I was the gay, preppy, deeply anxious son of American fundamentalist Christians. I couldn’t have felt more different if I’d had a tail.’
‘I felt like nobody understood what I was going through. And I don’t mean that in a self-pitying way, but I literally had no evidence that anyone understood.’
‘I think to be a teenager is to yearn. I yearned for someone to tell me that I was going to be alright.’
‘I’m really writing for the teenage me’
It’s clear that this longing to be understood plays into the books Ness writes for his teenage readers. He outlined his aim to make sure each teenage character is ‘a complex creation who doesn’t always get things right but importantly, doesn’t always get things wrong’. He now receives letters from kids who, for many different reasons, are grateful to have discovered his books.
‘I’ve always said that I don’t write book for other people – that’s always a disaster. I only write them for myself, because paradoxically, that’s the only time people want to read them. So when I write for teenagers and young people, I’m really writing for the teenage me. The me that needed to be taken seriously, at least once in a while.’
We share some of our favourite finds from around the internet this week.
30 abandoned places that look beautiful
Take a coffee break and have a long look at these eerily stunning images of 30 abandoned places from around the world – most of them caught in the process of being reclaimed by the natural world. (Though a few of them seem more the result of beautiful photography than intrinsic beauty.)
Christ of the Abyss, San Fruttoso, Italy
Paid maternity leave: For and against
The internet has been buzzing with debate over Tony Abbott’s ‘women of calibre’ paid maternity leave plan. Eva Cox has asked whether feminist criticism of Abbott’s plan is personality rather than policy based. She believes that Abbott’s version of paid parental leave ‘meets so many traditional feminist demands’ and supports its basis that parenting leave is a workplace entitlement, rather than a form of welfare.
On Overland, Zoe Dattner takes a radically different point of view, arguing against the idea of paid maternity leave altogether, calling it ‘a toxic and potentially harmful idea’. She argues for employers to find ways to integrate children and family life into the workplace, rather than paying women off to go away and parent.
Rashida Jones in The Believer
There’s a terrific interview with actor, writer and film-maker Rashida Jones in the current edition of The Believer, which touches on the changing movie business, roles for women, why she doesn’t want to date actors, her writing partnership with her best friend, making Celeste and Jesse Forever and growing up as the daughter of Quincy Jones.
I do think that if we’d made this film ten years ago, we wouldn’t have gone through so many machinations. Executives are so into their ‘quadrant language’ that they don’t know what to do with a movie that is romantic, and has some comedy, and is also a drama. You can’t have movies like Broadcast News anymore because they’re like, ‘We have a romantic comedy here… and we have a drama over here… and we don’t know where to put this.’
Rashida Jones with Andy Samberg in Celeste and Jesse Forever.
Oprah’s Book Club: Good or evil?
Is Oprah’s book club saving literature as a pursuit for the masses, or trivialising great novels – and patronising reluctant participants like Cormac McCarthy and Jonathan Franzen? A New Yorker article looks at the growth (and approach) of Oprah’s book club, and asks whether the quintessentially female mark of approval of an Oprah’s Book Club sticker on a book’s cover might scare away male readers. (As Franzen famously feared.)
she seized on the novel’s dedication page and, leaning forward, asked [Cormac McCarthy] gently, ‘Is this a love story to your son?’
It was the quintessential Oprah moment, the kind that made the Book Club thrive and her critics cringe. She was taking a novel about the end of the world, one that includes an image of a baby roasted on a spit, and making it palatable for talk-show television.
Oprah Winfrey talks to Cormac McCarthy about The Road.
What would happen if gender roles in advertising were reversed?
This short video, made by Canadian university students, delivers a sharply effective (and occasionally chilling) message about how advertising persistently casts women as the lesser sex – in highly sexualised terms. It then cleverly reverses the roles in some of the ads it shares, including a topless man in suspenders suggestively licking a lollipop, kneeling on the floor wearing knee socks. The violent advertising images for high-end brands are especially shocking – like the Jimmy Choo ad featuring a woman lolling in a car boot in the desert, while a man beside her digs a hole.
Tom Doig is a writer, performer and editor who has been published in the Big Issue, The Lifted Brow, Sleepers Almanac and Voiceworks magazine (where he was once editor). His plays include Survival of the Prettiest, Hitlerhoff and Selling Ice to the Remains of the Eskimos. Tom is currently a PhD candidate at Monash University, researching the lived experience of climate change in Australia. Moron to Moron (Allen & Unwin) is his first book.
We spoke to Tom about multi-tasking nightmares, being an ‘anti-aesthete’ and why you can’t teach people How to Be a Genius.
What was the first piece of writing you had published?
When I was an undergrad at the University of Auckland in 1999, the student magazine Craccum published a news article I wrote about a kamikaze wolf blowing up the Auckland Sky Tower by crashing a biplane into it. The article was factually incorrect, but the editors were very indulgent.
What’s the worst part of your job?
If by ‘job’ you mean all the different administrative and money-earning things I have to juggle while simultaneously trying to write, that’s the worst thing: the juggling! Multi-tasking gives me nightmares.
What’s been the most significant moment in your writing career so far?
When I got the email from Allen & Unwin offering me a contract for my first book, Mörön to Mörön. That felt like it changed everything, because it did.
More recently, I just launched Mörön to Mörön in Alice Springs. Later that day I saw a boy of 12 reading it avidly in a cafe. I introduced myself to the boy – Max – and signed his book and we got a photo together etc; I actually think it was more exciting for me than for Max! We are now Twitter friends.
What’s the best (or worst) advice you’ve received about writing?
At the end of a full-year creative writing course at Auckland Uni taught by Witi Ihimaera, Witi told me that I expended too much energy trying to make people love me. Instead, he suggested, I should work to make them respect me. This advice was directed at my writing but also at my life. It took me years to work out what he was talking about, but now I think I get it.
What’s the most surprising thing you’ve ever heard or read about yourself or your work?
There hasn’t been much written about me or my work, so I’m not really sure. Back in 2006, just after I finished up as editor of Voiceworks magazine, a young Sam Twyford-Moore wrote a letter to the (new) editor calling me an ‘anti-aesthete’. This summed up my editorial philosophy perfectly.
If you weren’t a writer, what do you think you’d be doing instead?
I don’t consider myself to be exclusively a writer. I have worked on and off in arts admin and arts management and I have taught creative writing and I do plenty of freelance editing. Also I am a recidivist uni student, and I’ve just started a Journalism PhD at Monash. I also enjoy getting paid to dig holes. I imagine I will keep doing all these things and more till the end of my days.
There’s much debate on whether creative writing can be taught – what’s your view?
Creative writing can definitely be taught! I’ve had some great teachers, and I hope I’m an okay tutor. Pedagogy can make bad writers into mediocre ones and good writers into very good ones. Unfortunately, however, you can’t teach people How to Be a Genius.
What’s your advice for someone wanting to be a writer?
Write all the time. Write for yourself first and foremost; before you worry about getting published or keeping a blog, make sure you keep a journal and get to know your own voice and mind. Keeping a journal is as essential as going to the toilet; you should do it at least once a day.
Do you buy your books online, in a physical bookshop, or both?
Both. For years I resisted looking at abebooks.com.au, because I was worried I would get addicted. Now I am addicted. But in the early noughties I worked in a massive dusty second-hand bookshop and I still love browsing through random, badly categorised shelves, particularly in an unfamiliar town …
If you could go out to dinner with any fictional character, who would it be and why? And what would you talk about?
Benjamin Braddock, from The Graduate by Charles Webb. I’d like to hear Benjamin talk about his future, how he’s a little worried about it. I think we’d have a lot in common.
What’s the book that’s had the most significant impact on your life or work – and why?
It’s embarrassing to admit this, but probably The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe. I read it in high school and it made me want to become a writer. Exclamation! marks! and TYPOGRAPHY aside, Tom Wolfe showed me that you could write about real life but make it sound much, much crazier than any fiction.
Also, pretty much everything that Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński has ever written, but particularly The Soccer War. Kapuściński is a war correspondent, but his prose has more literary merit and is generally marvellous than most novelists.
Tom Doig will be one of the guests at next week’s Debut Mondays, in The Moat. He’ll be reading with Yvette Walker, Kate Belle and Naomi Armstrong. Monday 13 May at 6.15pm. Free, but please book.
Due to a technical failure, there will be no video of last night’s session with Anna Krien and Helen Garner. Luckily, we were there with a notebook and pen … please enjoy our account of last night’s stellar event.
A packed crowd gathered at the Wheeler Centre last night to listen to a charged meeting of minds – Helen Garner, Australia’s foremost writer of social reportage and Anna Krien, who seems to be her heir apparent. They were discussing Anna Krien’s new book, Night Games, on football culture and murky attitudes to women in this world of men, framed by a rape trial that posed its own questions about sex, power and the potential ‘grey area’ between rape and consent.
Garner was generous in her attention to and engagement with the book; the evening was a window onto a fascinating conversation between writers who clearly admire each other’s work.
‘One of the things I love about this book is its anxiety – it’s a wonderfully fruitful anxiety,’ opened Garner. ‘I don’t think anybody, especially a woman, could write a book on this subject without severe anxiety. You give it full measure. I approve of that and I admire it.’
‘It’s a wonderful book. It’s studded with little bursts of dialogue and eye-popping anecdotes that are threaded right through it. There are constantly shifting waves of empathy and revulsion and bewilderment and pity and rage. All sorts of powerful feelings go surging through this book.’
Garner said that she and Krien had spoken about the book before it was published.
A woman in a world of men
‘There’s a lot of analytical beams going onto the material from your eye, but a lot of it is turned on yourself, which I also greatly admire,’ she said.
‘You ask: What was I doing here? What was any woman doing in that world of men?’
‘What were you doing there?’
The book begins with Melbourne waking up to the news that two Collingwood players had been questioned by the sexual assault crimes squad, the morning after the AFL Grand Final. From there, it follows the trial of a junior footballer – a trial linked to the same event, on the same evening.
‘I get curiously close to the defendant,’ said Krien. ‘We actually, bizarrely enough, had a mutual friend. And I don’t really know if that turned out to be that great.’
‘For you?’ asked Garner.
‘For him.’
‘I guess I had an in,’ Krien said. ‘But at the same time, it was a difficult in, because I felt like the more I had access to him, the less I had access to her.’
Garner, of course, has been in this situation before. ‘The hardest thing with this kind of work, in my experience, is that you get access to one side and the other side slams the door,’ she reflected. ‘If it’s known – that you had access.’
‘It’s a huge stretch of imagination required – you’ve got to enlarge your imagination enormously – in a trial like this, to try to encompass both sides. I think you did pretty well, with this, but it’s hard to do.’
The gap is the complainant
‘There’s a gap in this book, and the gap is the complainant,’ said Krien. ‘I never actually managed to speak to her. I tried, quite desperately, to contact her on numerous occasions. And I really struggled with that. Because I had access to the defendant’s suffering, I had access to his family, and they were under enormous pressure. And I kept looking at the empty seats behind the prosecution, where there was no family, there were no friends, and I never saw her. She gave evidence in closed court.’
‘So I had nothing to compare Justin Dyer*’s suffering with. I didn’t want to put myself in her place. I didn’t want to use a younger version of me and my feelings when I was her age, trying to bounce off that instead.’
‘Why?’ asked Garner.
‘It would be disrespectful to her.’
‘I provided versions of what could have happened to her, but at the same time, it was only speculation. It was only imagination.’
’The grey zone between rape and consent’
‘A large part of the book is talking about that place which a lot of people would say doesn’t exist, but I think it does exist – and that’s the grey zone between rape and consent,’ said Krien.
‘The more I explored my experience, the more I spoke to other people, the more I felt affirmed that there is a grey zone between those two things. And I wondered if Sarah Wesley*, as I called her, found herself in that grey zone on that evening.’
‘I think you handled that problem with delicacy, and great sympathy,’ said Garner.
‘Everything people said about her kind of moved me in a strange way. People said things like she was smiling. And I thought: Yeah, when you’re in a horrible situation and you want to get out, you’re trying to keep your dignity and get out that door. And you might have a smile on your face. It might say, Well, I’m falling apart inside but I’m not going to show you that I’m falling apart inside. I’m just going to quietly walk out this door.’
‘I thought you gave full value to the pride of somebody who’s just been appallingly treated – or, as you crudely and rightly put it – treated like shit.’
A woman in the world of men
‘What was she doing in the world of men?’ asked Garner. ‘Using the word of men in quote marks, because your book does tackle the question of whether football is a world of men.’
Krien recounted the story of a 21-year-old girl who had ‘hooked up with a guy at a bar and gotten on well with him, probably pashed him’ and then swapped numbers. He was a VFL player.
‘I don’t even know if she knew that,’ said Krien. ‘From what I could gather, she was not interested in footballers. She was interested in this guy, though.’
She met up with him on Grand Final night – met him at a nighclub in South Melbourne. Drank, danced, went home with him. So far, so normal.
‘She went home with this guy and it turned out his housemate was home, and his housemate was a Collingwood player. And another Collingwood player was there – Dayne Beams – and a few other guys. And I guess this is when the night becomes more sinister.’
‘From here, it’s a little bit hearsay, but she met them, then she went to the bedroom of the guy she intended to go home with. And the other guys entered the bedroom whilst they were having sex. And then from here on in, this is where all the events become he said, they said; he said, she said.’
‘They say that she was up for it; she says she wasn’t. The policewoman at the trial says that she said she felt “compelled” to have sex with Dayne Beams – so she felt duty-bound, not forced but duty-bound. And then she says that she said no to the others.’
‘These were the complaints she made to police, but these weren’t where the charges were laid. The charges were laid where Justin Dyer, after seeing her come out of the bedroom, offered to go get a cab with her, and then he had sex with her – and he says that she had sex with him – in an alleyway.’
‘So, she was intending to hook up with a guy she’d met three weeks prior. And then suddenly – three, five guys later – she’s going home with someone else altogether. And by midday the next day, she was in the police station.’
A hierarchy of men
‘ One thing you said about Justin and the woman in the case is that they were two outsiders,’ observed Garner. ‘What did you mean by that?’
‘It was a really strange evening,’ said Krien. ‘And if you took a step back from the fact that there were some really serious complaints and charges being laid, it was a kind of ridiculous drunk evening.’
‘A ridiculous drunken night that all kept returning to that townhouse in South Melbourne. Justin Dyer knew Dayne Beams, but he didn’t really know the others. A lot of the witnesses didn’t know Justin and they didn’t know Sarah.’
‘There’s an incredible hierarchy of men in this book,’ said Garner. ‘There’s the football stars and their lawyer.’
‘That’s one of the reasons my ears perked up at this particular case,’ said Krien. ‘Because when there was someone to finally take the charges, it wasn’t who we in the media expected to see taking the charges for that evening.’
‘There was a police leak and there was this idea that something had happened in the bedroom, and there was this idea that John McCarthy and Dayne Beams were being interviewed and questioned. And then it came out that Justin was being charged, and that it wasn’t the bedroom episode that was going to be going to court – it was what happened in that alleyway.’
‘And then my ears pricked up because David Galbally QC, who’s Collingwood’s legal counsel, was defending Justin Dyer. And I had no idea how Justin Dyer could afford this QC. And Justin Dyer had nothing to do with Collingwood. He played for a VFL team, which was Coburg.’
’Dick whipped’
‘Why did you feel so much for Justin Dyer?’ asked Garner.
‘I was concerned that he was the scapegoat. At the same time, he had charges to answer.’
Krien said that she was hoping to coin a new term, ‘dick whipped’, for when men are persuaded into doing something to please their mates.
‘We’re talking about men behaving brutishly in packs here,’ said Garner, adding that Sarah Wesley’s experience was about male bonding – and even competition – not about her. ‘It’s not about the woman.’
‘Imagine having a good time, thinking this guy likes you,’ reflected Krien, ‘and then the slow, sobering realisation that this has nothing to do with you.’
‘This book is about men treating women like shit and women letting themselves be treated like shit. And that strange glacial space in between those two things.’
‘No one seemed to come out of that trial any smarter, any more enlightened about how these things happen.’
A strange gap in events
Krien talked about her frustration with the court system and how rape cases are handled. ‘The truth is, there are very few convictions in these cases, because all you need is a tiny element of doubt and you can’t convict.’
She said she was gobsmacked watching the pre-trial talk between the lawyers and judge about what could and couldn’t be discussed during the trial. It seemed bewildering that the incident in the bedroom that night, with Sarah and the men she had sex with, had to be omitted, leaving a strange gap in the events of the evening.
‘Obviously what happened in that house precipitated what happened in that alley,’ she said. ‘I wonder if the jury members, if they read my book, would feel cheated.’
Krien wondered whether Justin’s case went to trial because it fit the stereotype of what rape looks like – it happened in an alleyway. The numerous legal reforms designed to make rape all-encompassing haven’t translated to the courtroom, she said. Juries still think of rape as something that happens beside the train tracks, or similar.
‘That’s why I’ve wondered whether courts are the best places to try these kinds of rape cases.’
Putting it behind him
The evening ended with an audience question about how the two main protagonists of the book are going now – Justin Dyer, the boy accused of (but not charged with) rape and Sarah Wesley, the complainant.
Krien reported that Justin is now doing well, with a long-term girlfriend and a job.
‘I also know that he doesn’t want this book to come out,’ she said.
‘Why?’ asked Garner.
‘It’s behind him now.’
‘He thinks,’ snorted Garner. Then she paused. ‘Actually, that gives me a shot of rage.’
There’s been a lot of talk about ‘sausage fests’ over the past few weeks, with the first all-female Miles Franklin shortlist sparking memories of the all-male lists of the recent past – which were given the meaty nickname. Writer Paul Mitchell tells why the term is not just confronting and demeaning, but risks reinforcing the idea that men are just their genitals. (‘Which many men think anyway.’) So, should we rethink our language?
The Age told me last Wednesday morning that this year’s Miles Franklin Literary Award has an all-female cast. I didn’t get time to wonder, however, if the Stella Prize had any influence on this, or why short fiction collections were again absent: I was too busy reading that this year’s list showed the Award had ‘fought back from its recent reputation as a “sausage fest”’.
A sausage fest. There’s probably no more demeaning way of describing the male in a group setting. A whole cucumber salad? Bit too wet liberal and far too hard and crunchy. A python pit? Gives the male too much potency and threat. A worm farm? Even if it that analogy shrinks the penis and makes it dirty, the worm is still pretty powerful, especially when it comes to eating the dead.
No, if you want to put down a group of men, sausage fest is best. Because sausages, generally, are low budget, used for meals when there’s not much else you can afford. Or you’re feeling uninspired in the kitchen. They’re disrespected. They’re usually rolled on the barbecue first, used as a snack before the real meal arrives. They’re sticky before they’re cooked. They’re all the same. They appear hard, but they’re soft inside. And, best of all, you can bite them, chew them, digest them, and crap them out.
I know the Miles Franklin Award was so described by women angry with the number of men populating the long and shortlists. I know that women have endured this kind of terminology for centuries. But I’m confident that today’s mainstream – and even non-mainstream– media don’t make a habit of employing a term for their genitals that’s equal parts supermarket aisle and football change room. (Even if some in parliament do.)
But the reporter put sausage fest in inverted commas. She was quoting those women who’d used the term to describe the previous Miles Franklin lists. Before these women did this, the last time I’d heard the term was when I was single in a bar. A bloke turned to me and said, ‘This joint’s crap. It’s a sausage fest.’ I agreed with his assessment, but even then I hated the term. I looked at all those men drinking their beers and thought, you know, deep down they may not want to be known only by their appendage. Even by other men.
We want men to be men. Whatever that means. In an age in which true gender equality, at least in the West, seems to be slowly getting closer every year, there are millions of words on pages and screens right now trying to figure that out. But we know what we don’t want men to be: mindless, violent (especially towards women), sexual predators, and concerned only with their physical prowess (or lack thereof).
So when highly intelligent women join in the gender stereotyping, even if it’s to assuage their righteous anger, their actions are unhelpful in the battle to change men’s attitudes to women. By using the aforementioned term, even as a joke – and even if it’s been effective as a wake-up call for those who choose literary awards lists – they contribute to reinforcing the idea that men are just their genitals. Which many men think anyway.
I have two boys. One is 13, the other three-and-a-half. I want them to grow up with a healthy attitude to their bodies, their sexuality and towards women. They are also both voracious readers. What are they to make of our literary community describing men with a term that belongs at a barbecue?
Do we want this image to continue? Do we want boys being told they’re mindless, pink and pudgy, vacuum-packed with stupidity, while also showing them that, hey, they’re linked together in this ridicule so they can feel strong in numbers?
If intelligent women tell boys their penises are on the same level as sausages (I really don’t want to disparage them here, there are some terrific gourmet ones, but they’re not exactly cuts of wagyu!) then that’s the way they’ll think about them. And that’s also the way they’ll treat them and act with them.
People with disabilities – and the everyday challenges they face – have been in the spotlight over the past week, as the national Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) has dominated headlines and political coverage. For Joel Deane, the political is deeply personal: his daughter Sophie has Down Syndrome. Last week, he attended a public high school open day, looking for a high school for his daughter – and was sadly reminded that discrimination is alive and well in today’s Australia.
Social progress, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.
For instance, we like to think that Australia is less racist than it was. Considering the heritage of terra nullius and the White Australia policy, there is some validity to that belief; after all, the Federation of Australia may have been founded on notions of egalitarianism and racism, but racism has since been superseded by multiculturalism. Still, none of that would have mattered to the four Indigenous Australians left standing by the side of the road by four taxis last week in Melbourne because of the colour of their skin.
The same applies to disabilities. We like to think that times have changed, that the institutions have been closed and people with a disabilities are no longer locked away from the world, but the truth is some are still living in institutions and hundreds of thousands are shut out of mainstream Australian life – treated as second-class citizens because they have a disability.
I don’t have a disability, my daughter Sophie does.
Sophie is 12. She was born with Down Syndrome; it hasn’t stopped her. She reads and writes, mucks around on the monkey bars, can be well behaved and badly behaved, runs like a billy goat, and is a budding photographer (her portrait of Julia Gillard was retweeted more than 400 times over the weekend).
Joel Deane’s daughter Sophie, at left, with prime minister Julia Gillard last week.
Sophie will be ready for high school in 2015 and, according to all the professional advice we’ve received, should go to a mainstream school.
With that in mind, my wife Kirsten and I went to an open night at a high school in the north-eastern suburbs of Melbourne last Tuesday night. It was not an enjoyable excursion.
This is the email I sent to the principal, whom I will call Ms M, last Wednesday.
I’ve been advised not to name-and-shame the school for legal reasons. The reason why I’m abiding with that legal advice is that the soft-shoe discrimination my family experienced at that unmentionable high school is not unique, but endemic. It could be your local high school. I refer to that unmentionable school as Discrimination High.
Ms M:
Consider this email a complaint, a wake-up call, a shot across the bows; whatever you like.
My wife, Kirsten, and I have three children. Our oldest two, Noah and Sophie, will be making the transition to secondary school in 2015. Sophie has Down syndrome.
Kirsten and I have been visiting secondary schools, looking for the right fit for both Noah and Sophie. To say your school was the wrong fit would be putting it politely.
Why is Discrimination High the wrong fit for our children? Let me count the ways.
The first reason it’s the wrong fit is that only three out of 1300 students have a disability – that’s less than 0.3 per cent.
I found that figure surprising given the nearest primary feeder school … has a large number of students with disabilities. ‘Why aren’t there more students with disabilities?’ I wondered. Then I mentioned to two staff members that Sophie has Down Syndrome and had my question emphatically answered.
The automatic response from both staff members (and, in case you’re wondering, this is the second reason why Discrimination High is a big nyet) was, ‘Does she have funding?’ For parents, this is usually a red flag, telling us that the school sees students with a disability not as a part of the community they serve, but a drain on resources unless there’s a bucket of money hanging around the child’s neck.
For the record, Ms M, yes, Sophie does have funding, not that it’s any of your school’s business until she enrols (don’t panic, she hasn’t and won’t).
Kirsten and I then had a more in depth conversation with a staff member we were referred to who, according to our guide, was the authority on how Discrimination High handled students with a disability.
This brings me to my third reason why Discrimination High is on my when-hell-freezes-over list of schools to send my children. This staff member spoke artfully, very artfully; finding new ways to tell us why our daughter was better off elsewhere.
She opened up by saying that Discrimination High was geared towards tertiary education (apparently tertiary education is verboten to people with a disability). She then said that Discrimination High was a mainstream school – emphasising mainstream, which made me wonder whether she thought Kirsten and I had contracted a learning delay (don’t worry, Down Syndrome isn’t contagious). On a serious note, by this stage your staff member had been made aware of the fact that our daughter already attended a mainstream school. The staff member then said, ‘You might be better going to a school with more community links’ … meaning outside mainstream education, employment and life.
Community links! That, Ms M, was a stroke of genius – I’ve never heard ‘community links’ used euphemistically before. I was stunned to silence. I felt as though I should make a run for the car while I could, but was persuaded by Kirsten to stay and hear your address. So I did.
You know what, Ms M, your address didn’t make me feel better.
You spoke a great deal about the new buildings that the school has; and how you had the power to expel students; and how a school over in China had heard about how great Discrimination High was and wanted to partner with you; and how the Education Department kept coming out to visit and film because your school was so ace (OK, you didn’t say ace, you said something about excellence); and you spoke about multiculturalism.
Curiously, you didn’t talk much about the teachers that make the school work. The school buildings seemed to be more important than the school culture. And, in case you were wondering, I love the new basketball stadium, too, (it reminded me of High School Musical) but, seriously, talking about the millions invested doesn’t make Discrimination High sound like a private school; it makes it sound like a cashed-up-bogan school.
By the way, I liked the bit about multiculturalism; I really did, Ms M. But it also saddened me. Let me tell you why. What saddened me (OK, annoyed, too) was that your school was failing to roll out the same welcome mat to students with a disability. That’s why Discrimination High may be multicultural, but it is not diverse because its student body does not reflect the mainstream (there’s that word again) community of which people with a disability are very much a part.
Let me tell you another thing, Ms M, Discrimination High is failing to meet if not the letter of, then the spirit of, the Disability Discrimination Act. Ever heard of that law? I suggest you Google it.
Have a nice day.
Joel Deane
Later that day I received an emailed reply from Ms M. She said she was disappointed I had ‘formed such a negative opinion of the school’ and invited me to visit Discrimination High’s website ‘for a more detailed outline of our college.’ No apology. No counter argument. No suggestion that there was anything worth talking about.
Legally, people can’t be discriminated against in Australia, but one thing I’ve learned as the parent of a child with a disability is that there’s more than one way to skin a cat.
Joel Deane is a poet, speechwriter and novelist. His debut novel is The Norseman’s Song. He has worked as chief speech-writer for Victorian Premiers John Brumby and Steve Bracks.
We bring you some of our favourite finds from around the internet this week.
Why Steven Soderbergh quit making movies
Steven Soderbergh (Traffic, Magic Mike, the Oceans Eleven series) has recently announced that this year’s Side Effects will be his last film; he blamed his decision on the way directors are too-frequently sidelined by studio executives who know money better than they know movies. ‘I think that the audience for the kinds of movies I grew up liking has migrated to television,’ reported the Guardian.
Last weekend, Soderbergh gave the keynote address at the 56th San Francisco International Film Festival – and delivered a rare (and scathing) behind-the-scenes insight into the state of the movie business, right now. You can read it online or watch it below.
Relevant reviews in the internet age
On The Millions, Michael Bourne argues that the traditional ‘play-by-play’ book review is now defunct. ‘In an age of instant information … anyone writing about books is … entering an ongoing conversation.’ He argues that these days, we can quickly and easily find out what a book is about – and what people thought of it – by accessing Amazon or Goodreads. What professional reviewers can offer is not opinion, but a deeper kind of sense-making, replacing traditional reviews with a kind of ‘ mini-essay using the book under review as the focal point of a larger, more interesting story’.
Sonya Hartnett’s Of a Boy now a film
Sonya Hartnett’s haunting, much-loved (and very Australian) 2002 novel has been made into a film, The Weight of Elephants – written and directed by New Zealand filmmaker Daniel Joseph Borgman. The setting is transported to New Zealand, too; the film is billed as ‘inspired by’ Hartnett’s novel.
Six novelists talk to Andrew O'Hagan about influence
Influence is a strange thing. For some writers, it’s a dirty word – something to avoid at all costs. Others wear it proudly, like a badge. Andrew O'Hagan recently spoke to six different novelists about their influences in mediums other than the page. There’s Kazuo Ishiguro on film, John Lanchester on video games, Colm Toibin on opera, and more.
Kazuo Ishiguro: Influenced by film.
The DSM and the creation of disease
There’s a growing unease in modern society with the line between disease and difference. In the New Yorker, Gary Greene, the author of a new book on the creation of the DSM, traces the historical roots of how we define disease – and how we gave doctors the power to decide. ‘The line between sickness and health, mental and otherwise, is not biological but social and economic,’ he writes.
Pepi Ronalds takes us on a tour of Melbourne’s locally-made comic book scene – up alleyways, behind hidden doors and down in the tunnels below Flinders Street Station.
I am yet to ride an elevator and walk though a basement in search of illustrated treasure, but for now, my hunting has me at the dead end of a Franklin Street laneway – feeling somewhat confused. I see wheelie bins, a few upturned milk crates. Two street artists are decorating the laneway wall in the 2pm light of a Friday afternoon. ‘Am I in the right place for comic books?’ I ask.
The artists point to a huge roller door that holds a tiny door within. I duck my head, narrow my shoulders and lift my feet to get into the warehouse beyond. I turn right and walk tenatively past higgledy artist studios until I find what I am looking for. It’s the Silent Army Storeroom, one of a handful of places in Melbourne where you can buy locally drawn comics.
Panel from Coma Toes by Jase Harper.
For the cost of a paperback I climb out with over a dozen handcrafted comics. Among them is Coma Toes by Jase Harper. This passport-sized publication in black and white takes me on a day in the life of a protagonist awoken from a long sleep. He steps outside to find an overgrown and abandoned town. The comic has virtually no dialogue (just one sigh). It’s delightful to watch this mellow, bearded character make the most of what becomes a not-so-lonely story.
Mr Ray’s Grave Thoughts by Marc Pearson.
Being alone is part of Mr Ray’s Grave Thoughts by Marc Pearson. It’s a larger book with more weight – a format that somehow mirrors the depth of its story. Pearson portrays Mr Ray with a round head and wriggly mouth in panels backgrounded by dotty, jiggly details. Ray’s moods are evoked through vignettes of everyday life and stylistic changes to the way he is drawn. This modest book captures all the loss, the oddness and banality of losing someone close. It’s a story that grounds me, and I take time to smell the roses before returning to the city on my hunt for more comics.
I’m now in the tiled and boxy lobby of a Lonsdale Street office building waiting for an elevator. An abandoned office-supplies pamphlet opens lightly by the gust blowing under the door. The elevator opens and I step into its gleaming interior. It spirits me upwards to All Star Comics, another source of Melbourne (and international) art.
Panel from ‘Panic’ by Brendan Halyday.
In the locals’ corner I pick up Brendan Halyday’s Graphic/Narrative No.1, which includes the title story, ‘Panic’. This is Halyday’s first chapter in what will be a multi-part series that explores his experience of anxiety disorder. ‘It can so easily start with the little things…’ he tells readers. The moment-to-moment and scene-to-scene transitions between panels effectively build the anxiety (along with details such as ragged panel edges and angst-filled lines). Halyday employs an ink-washy style that also brings warmth to his scenes. This is a story many will relate to and there’s something Australian about its settings. ‘Panic’ includes other stories based on the realities of everyday life.
Panel frm Strange Behaviour by Marijka Gooding.
Marijka Gooding’s graphic novel, Strange Behaviour also draws on stories from life, but it plays with perception and convention too. It’s narrated by Binks, a kind of six-inch Gooding who shares stories from Melbourne and beyond. ‘I often find myself an unsuspecting observer to some rather … STRANGE BEHAVIOUR,’ she says on the opening page. It’s behaviour she observes and retells with both curiosity and empathy. Melbournians will recognise scenes (and maybe even characters) in these stories. Just holding the larger-than-A4 novel (which is printed on heavy stock) makes me feel smaller – a little like Binks. It’s her I have in mind as I pass Hearns Hobbies (where one of her adventures is set) en route to Flinders Street Station. There, at Sticky Institute, I will find more comics for my treasury.
I head down the steps from Flinders Street into the relative darkness and slightly dank smell of the Campbell Arcade (Degraves Subway). Scanning past the tide of determined commuters, I look for the window of ‘Sticky’. I see the warm light glowing behind strings pegged with zines and comics. Once inside this bedroom-sized store, I spot more comic creations by our growing mine of local talent.
Panel from ‘Times Like These’ by David C. Mahler.
Coracle, by David C. Mahler, includes comics about moments, dreams, friendship and even philosophy. Mahler’s combination of words, subject and scenes intermingle sweetness and melancholy. Some stories are dialogue- or action-driven, while others work from poems and prose composed by Mahler. Illustrative detail (like craters on a distant moon) conveys sensitivity and brings energy to the pages. Mahler’s work cherishes moments, such as that described in the single-page story, ‘Times Like These’.
Not too far from Coracle at Sticky is Clint Curé’s (Q-Ray’s)Confessions of a Rookie Filmmaker. Now in its third issue, this autobiographical series shares tales of boyhood, love, fatherhood and growing up (in the context of Q-Ray’s interest in comics and film). It’s humorous and bold with swooning, cussing, and a lot of misadventure. ‘You’re never going to grow up!’ the mother of his daughter declares in a panel of ‘It’s more Complex than that’. His approach is honest and self-effacing. The stories are engaging, sometimes cringe-worthy, but certainly a lot of fun.
Confessions of a Rookie Filmmaker by Clint Curé.
My treasure hunt for comics has taken me on a great adventure through Melbourne. I’ve been along an alleyway, up an elevator and into a bedroom-sized shop in a basement. I’ve bought dozens of gems for my treasury (these are just six of them). Am I in the right place for comics? It certainly seems that way.
This Saturday, 4 May is Free Comic Book day. Both the Silent Army and All Star Comics will be giving away comics and holding in-store signings by local artists.
Kylie Ladd is a Melbourne writer and novelist whose essays and articles have appeared in the Age, Griffith Review, Sydney’s Child and O magazine, among others. She works part-time as a neuropsychologist. Her third novel, Into my Arms (Allen & Unwin) was published this month.
We spoke to her about the horror of waiting for reviews, getting her first novel published as a result of literary speed-dating at the Emerging Writers Festival, and why writing is a compulsion.
What was the first piece of writing you had published?
A story about a baby elephant escaping from the zoo that was awarded the coveted centre-page spread in the school magazine when I was in Grade Three. My teacher, Mrs Whitla, was so proud that someone from her class had nabbed it instead of the usual Grade Six suspects that she awarded me 20 house points. It’s still one of my career highlights.
What’s the worst part of your job?
Needing a real job to fund it! I work as a neuropsychologist two or three days a week so I can write without worrying about how the bills will be paid on the others … The other horror is waiting for reviews. When I have a new novel out (like now) I make my husband go through the books sections in the papers each weekend while I stand flinching in a corner covering my hands with my eyes.
What’s been the most significant moment in your writing career so far?
Attending the literary speed-dating event at the Emerging Writers Festival way back in 2006 – my first novel, After The Fall, had been rejected about 40 times, but got up thanks to that. Also being Highly Commended in the 2011 Federation of Australians Writers Christina Stead Award for Fiction for my second novel, Last Summer. I honestly feel that I exhaled a little as a writer after that. I hadn’t been completely kidding myself.
What’s the best (or worst) advice you’ve received about writing?
Zadie Smith’s essay ‘That Crafty Feeling’ is an absolute must-read for both aspiring and established writers. Often come back to this line in particular: ‘It’s such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick is yourself.’ It’s true.
I think pretty much all writers go through stages of hating their work, particularly their first drafts, but you have to try and believe to keep going. No-one else is going to do the work for you, and no-one else can write what you can.
What’s the most surprising thing you’ve ever heard or read about yourself?
Hearing Helen Razer introduce me to a large ABC audience as “that brazen strumpet, Kylie Ladd” when she was interviewing me about Naked, a collection of essays about infidelity that I co-authored with Leigh Langtree. My small children were listening in. There were a lot of questions to be answered that night.
If you weren’t a writer, what do you think you’d be doing instead?
Still trying to be a writer. Being very grumpy about not being a writer. Making everyone else around me miserable because I wasn’t a writer. I do honestly enjoy my psych job – it stretches a different part of my brain, and gets me out of my head and my house – but that was a choice. Writing wasn’t. Like most writers I know, it’s been a compulsion for as long as I can remember.
There’s much debate on whether creative writing can be taught – what’s your view?
I teach two-day creative writing courses a few times a year, so I have to say yes! That said, I genuinely do believe that the practice and principles of good writing can be taught: how to think about voice and character and structure, how to create realistic dialogue, how to edit yourself, amongst others. After that, though, it’s up to you – up to the talent, and far more importantly, time and dedication you bring to the endeavor.
What’s your advice for someone wanting to be a writer?
There are five things I always tell my students right at the start: Read, both widely and forensically. Write what’s in you, not what you think the market wants. Don’t panic: everyone cringes when they first read their work back. Find your own way: There are no rules as to, say, whether you should plot or just dive right in, edit as you go or when you’re finished- everybody does it differently. And finally, just write. WRITE. Stop checking Twitter or thinking about dinner and get the words on the page.
Do you buy your books online, in a physical bookshop, or both?
A bit of both. I’ll never fall out of love with the sensory experience of being in a physical bookshop (All those colours and covers! The smell of fresh ink!), but the ease of ordering online is appealing too. I particularly love Booktopia, an all-Australian site that offers free shipping about once a month if you’re a member (membership is also free), great prices, regular sales and really gets behind Australian authors and publishers.
If you could go out to dinner with any fictional character, who would it be and why?
Jay Gatsby. I’ve always had a bit of a crush on Jay. Oh, who am I kidding? I’m madly in love with the man- as another hopeless romantic myself, how could I resist his longing, his loyalty; the sheer size and scale of his dream? Gatsby under the moonlight, stretching out one lonely hand to the green light at the end of a dock on the opposite side of the Sound … we’d drink champagne and gin slings and work out how to arrange an ‘accident’ for Tom Buchanan.
What’s the book that’s had the most significant impact on your life or work?
My all-time favourite novels are The Great Gatsby, The English Patient and Beloved, simply for what they do with words, the way they (as my 13-year-old son would say) use language like a boss. In terms of my own actual writing though, I am inspired by authors such as Joanna Trollope and Anne Tyler, who work with the everyday, as I do, who make magic out of ordinary people in ordinary suburbs. That’s real skill.
Kylie Ladd’s latest novel, Into my Arms (Allen & Unwin) is available now.
The Miles Franklin shortlist for 2013 has been announced – and in a reverse of the much-talked-about ‘sausagefests’ of 2009 and 2011, all five of the shortlisted authors are women.
This is the first ever all-female shortlist.
There have been four all-male shortlists since 1987 (the first year that shortlists were released) – in 1992, 1994, 2009 and 2011.
This historic event coincides with the first awarding of the Stella Prize, established to increase recognition of Australian women writers. We asked Aviva Tuffield, chair of The Stella Prize, whether she thought it had any influence.
‘If we were being self-congratulatory, we’d like to think that the Stella Prize has had an impact on making all prize judges and literary editors aware of their unconscious biases,’ she says. ‘However, we have no evidence of our impact on the Miles Franklin, obviously.’
‘It does seem to have been a good year for women’s fiction.’
Richard Neville, speaking on behalf of the Miles Franklin judging panel, said the novels shared a common theme. ‘The five novels … are at a surface level all about family – the searching for their comfort, the crises when they fail, escaping their pervasive grasp, or the despair when they do not seem possible – but more deeply, these books write about the intersection of people’s lives with national, indeed international, stories and ideas.’
Sophie Cunningham, a member of the Stella Prize board and chair of the Literature Board of the Australia Council, is struck not by common themes, but by ‘the incredible breadth of women’s writing on that shortlist’. Having read four of the five books, she commends them all as ‘superb’.
‘It’s a very strong shortlist,’ she says.
On gender terms
Simon Lewis, speaking on behalf of the Trust company (who administers the award) commented on the gender issue in his congratulations. ‘The shortlist demonstrates how strong Australia’s pipeline of female literary talent really is, as witnessed with last year’s Miles Franklin winner, Anna Funder, as well as by the growing number of first time female authors included in the long and shortlists in recent years.’
Christopher Koch
“There isn’t a doubt that if you were to look at the 2013 field on gender terms, the female contingent was the more robust – although that said, there were some male writers that probably deserved to be on the longlist, from Christopher Koch to Michael Sala,‘ says Martin Shaw, books division manager at Readings Books Music & Film. 'Do we put the judging decisions then down to politics or aesthetics? Naturally the latter …’
‘There wasn’t talk of too many glaring omissions of novels by men on the Miles Franklin, although I’m sure individual publishers would each have their lists,’ says Aviva Tuffield. ‘Personally, I did expect to see Christopher Koch on the Miles longlist. Next year’s shortlist would, I’d imagine, be different, as there are new books by Tim Winton, Christos Tsiolkas and Richard Flanagan in the works.’
Not related to ‘makeover’
Patrick Allington
We also spoke to Patrick Allington, whose novel Figurehead was longlisted for the Miles Franklin in 2010; he has written at length about the award (and its limitations) for an Australian Book Review fellowship.
‘While the Miles Franklin Literary Award does seem to be in the midst of a carefully constructed makeover – it’s a work in progress – I’m also wary of the implication that the judges might be “in” on some PR ploy or even that they are using the shortlist to overtly respond to pressure, real or perceived, he says.
‘I’m pretty sure, for example, that the fine literary scholar Susan Sheridan (now one of the Miles Franklin judges) needs no help to understand the rich and storied but under-recognised contribution that Australian women writers have made to our cultural landscape – including the Miles Franklin Award’s serious under-recognition of women novelists over the decades.’
Backlash?
Kerryn Goldsworthy
Reviewer Kerryn Goldsworthy, a former Miles Franklin judge, says a backlash may be on its way ‘from certain affronted men who’ve never got their heads around the concept of the level playing field, and will complain about there being no male writers on the list. My answer to them would be 'Miffed, are you? Good, now you know how we felt’.'
‘Prizes are all about making the near-invisible (so much terrific writing is published with barely a mention in our media) visible to a wider audience,’ reflects Martin Shaw. ‘No contemporary book judge can be unaware of the historical foreshortening of perspective as to which gender produces the most significant literature. So it bodes well for the future of Ozlit, and its critical recognition, that the playing field is becoming ever more level.’
It’s that time of year again, where we welcome a new batch of writers to our Wheeler Centre hot-desks. And a wonderfully varied crowd it is.
There’s a singer–songwriter venturing into memoir, a poet seeking refuge from a Duplo-strewn house, a Zimbabwe migrant writing about her experience, a Werribee writer defending her much-maligned suburb, and a freelancer planning to split her time between several assignments.
All of them will work on their writing projects at their own Wheeler Centre desk for the next two months. Thanks to the Readings Foundation, they also receive a stipend of $1000 each.
Let’s meet the second round of Hot Desk Fellows for 2013.
Angie Hart
Angie Hart, former lead vocalist and co-collaborator of nineties pop-band Frente, is working on a series of short memoir-essays on her life as a touring musician.
‘I had never been in a band, I had never travelled overseas, I hadn’t written a song before I joined Frente, I didn’t know how to be famous, and I had no concept of moderation,’ she reflects.
Angie has been writing and performing songs for over 20 years, but she describes her reading for the inaugural Women of Letters event as ‘the most humbling experience I have had for a long time’.
She has been writing ever since, including for Liner Notes, Going Down Swinging and the Wheeler Centre’s own Erotic Fan Fiction.
L.K. Holt
L.K. Holt is working on her third full-length poetry collection, This is Mars, which will be published by John Leonard Press. Her first collection, Man Wolf Man, won the 2009 Kenneth Slessor Prize, as part of the NSW Premier’s Awards.
‘After my son was born, he and I came to the unspoken agreement that he was the centre of the universe,’ she says. ‘Nineteen months later and our house is the templum of this new celestial cult: devotional objects, burnt offerings and Duplo are scattered on the floors of every room.’
She says that the hot-desk fellowships will impose regularity on her writing schedule, and provide fresh surroundings to inspire her. She looks forward to mixing with writers of different genres as she works.
Meleesha Bardolia
Meleesha Bardolia’s short story about her experience of returning to Zimbabwe, which she left thirteen years ago, has blossomed into a novella-in-progress.
Waiting Upon Arrival has two strands, and two voices: 25-year-old Leeza, on holiday in a place that was once her homeland, and ten-year-old Leeza, growing up in Zimbabwe and reacting to the devastating news of a move to Australia, for political reasons – and then adjusting to her alien status in her new ‘home’.
Meleesha plans to use her time at the Wheeler Centre to examine the gaps and intersections between those two voices.
‘I think a story like the one I’m itching to tell is not only personal but also political,’ she says. ‘After working at the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre over the last year and observing the debates that occur in the media and academia about refugees, I think the line drawn between resident and alien needs to be blurred.’
Fatima Measham
Fatima Measham is a social commentator and feature writer who lives in Werribee. She is working on an essay in defence of her suburb – ‘a literary attempt to subvert prevailing perceptions of Werribee as “the place where your poo goes”, as one so-called friend gleefully told his child’.
She will explore the district’s rich indigenous, pastoral and migrant history, and its ‘natural endowments’, and will reflect on the assumptions people make about such places and those who live there.
‘No one within my close circle of family and friends is a writer, or even vaguely in the arts,’ she says. ‘Nor have I ever been part of a writing community or been mentored by a literary sage. So when I’m not feeling like an alien, I feel like an impostor.’
Fatima has been published by The Drum, National Times, The Big Issue, Eureka Street and other publications.
Pepi Ronalds
Pepi Ronalds is a freelance writer of non-fiction articles and essays – thus she finds her imagination captured by different assignments at any time. She’ll be working on a number of projects while at the Wheeler Centre.
Firstly she plans to extend her story, ‘After Shock’ (about the 2011 Japanese earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown). The extension comprises a long term, long form project documenting the stories of individuals living in Northern Japan as they deal with the ongoing aftermath of the disaster.
As an enthusiastic freelancer Pepi will also be researching and writing various articles for other publications including Kill Your Darlings (she’s a 2013 columnist on Books and Writing for Killings), Outback Magazine and Southpaw. Throughout her time at her hot desk, Pepi will continue to research and post articles about writing on her blog: Future of Long Form.
Anna Goldsworthy’s first book, the memoir Piano Lessons, has been released in the US and Korea, adapted for the stage, and is currently in development as a film. Anna’s writing has appeared in the Monthly, the Age, the Australian, and Best Australian Essays. Her new memoir Welcome to Your New Life is now available and her Quarterly Essay On Women, Freedom and Misogyny will be released in June 2013. She is a concert pianist who records for the ABC Classics label.
We spoke to Anna about killing your darlings, why good writing is a way of thinking, writing down good ideas, and being in love with Marcel Proust.
Anna Goldsworthy, photograph by Nicholas Purcell.
What was the first piece of writing you had published?
I think it was a piece about evolutionary psychology for The Adelaide Review. I’d read Robert Wright’s The Moral Animal and taken it very personally. The only way I could see my out of despair was to write about it.
What’s the worst part of your job?
That first draft when you’re operating only on faith, or delusion.
What’s been the most significant moment in your writing career so far?
The publication of my first book, Piano Lessons.
What’s the best (or worst) advice you’ve received about writing?
My father always said ‘it’s the fish John West leaves out that makes John West the best.’ I’m a fish-murdering zealot. I’m sure I get too much pleasure out of killing my darlings.
What’s the most surprising thing you’ve ever heard or read about yourself?
There was a lovely review of Piano Lessons in which the author claimed to have seen me at a function in Melbourne with dashing Italian husband (my partner is Irish) and our bilingual twin boys (at that stage I had one monolingual child), ‘effortlessly seguing from Italian to English’. Someone else tweeted that they had seen me tandem feeding newborn twins while rehearsing a piano concerto (as you do). Still no twins, but a strange pattern emerges.
If you weren’t a writer, what do you think you’d be doing instead?
Spending more time with Chopin.
There’s much debate on whether creative writing can be taught – what’s your view?
I think the tools of the trade can be taught, but good writing is a way of thinking as well as a way of writing.
What’s your advice for someone wanting to be a writer?
Read constantly. Also, don’t imagine the good ideas will visit a second time, if you neglect to write them down.
Do you buy your books online, in a physical bookshop, or both?
I still prefer the physical artifact, but I often lack the patience to make it to the bookshop.
If you could go out to dinner with any fictional character, who would it be and why?
Marcel from In Search of Lost Time (if he is indeed a fictional character). Because I am in love with him.
What’s the book that’s had the most significant impact on your life or work – and why?
Helen Garner’s The Children’s Bach. I heard Helen reading from it at Adelaide Writers’ Week when I was a child, and her voice was so direct that I felt I understood it (though some things perplexed me – why would girls fall to their knees before men in toilets? Was it a type of prayer?). Her voice resonates through a lot of Australian writing, including my own. It is difficult to shake it off: it is so candid and musical and disarming.
Shauna Bostock-Smith reflects on her family’s past, and the way personal stories are shaped and interpreted – and the importance of acknowledging both the bad and the good in Aboriginal history. She asks: How can ancestral knowledge empower us in the present? And what are dangers do victimhood pose to collective Aboriginal self-esteem?
IN AN OCTOBER 2011 edition of The National Indigenous Times, Dr Chris Sarra called for ‘fellow Indigenous Australians to take control of their own lives.’ Dr Sarra has accused some Aboriginal community leaders of conspiring with mainstream Australia to cast Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the role of victims.
He lamented that too many Aboriginal people ‘interiorised’ this to the extent that some consider the victim status as part of our culture. Both Dr Sarra’s statements, that mainstream Australia has cast Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the role of victims, and that Aboriginal people have ‘interiorised’ victimhood as part of our culture, can be validated by the following experiences my father had.
My father is a Vietnam veteran who has worked tirelessly for the recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australian Defence Force Veterans. He worked closely with the Returned and Services League (RSL) to organise an annual ceremony to honour and commemorate the active service of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Defence Force members both past and present.
When interviewed by a newspaper reporter, my father was asked if he experienced any racism when he was in the army. In his usual larrikin vernacular he said, ‘There was no “black” or “white” in the army, because each soldier thought of himself as green. We were all mates. Occasionally someone would call you a black bastard or something like that; but it was nothing that a good smack in the mouth wouldn’t sort out!’
When the article was published, however, the journalist portrayed my father as the victim of racism by reporting that ‘when George was in the army, he was called a black bastard and smacked in the mouth’, rather than portray him as a strong Aboriginal man who stood up to occasional racism. This interview took place quite recently.
Another situation that again involves my father is a prime example of the ‘interiorised victimhood’ cited by Dr Chris Sarra.
My father also volunteered as a Murri Court elder (an Aboriginal elder who attended court hearings of Aboriginal offenders). On one occasion he attended the court case of an Aboriginal burglar who had broken into houses at night. A woman who was home alone awoke to find him ransacking a chest of drawers looking for valuables. In court, the man complained that he was being victimised by police because they were always checking up on him.
He added that he and his incarcerated brothers were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder brought about by the continual round of institutionalisation they have experienced at the hands of whiteman. My father asked him, ‘What about the trauma that you have inflicted on that poor woman? How frightened is she when she locks herself in every night? Haven’t you institutionalised her?’
In The National Indigenous Times, Dr Chris Sarra stated that ‘While history has no doubt dealt Aboriginal people a questionable hand, there is no need to wallow in it such that it cripples us from acting. When one is busy being the victim or booting the victim, very rarely does one stop to ask: What am I doing to contribute to underachievement?’ Dr Sarra believes Aboriginal leaders must stop seeing Aboriginal people in the usual way and see what they have to offer. ‘We do have to be accountable for our actions. It’s time to assert our place in the nation.’
I am a novice historian researching family and Aboriginal history, and even at this relatively early stage of my academic path, I am constantly amazed at how ancestral knowledge can empower us in the present.
Before researching my family history, I had always assumed the lives of my grandparents and other Aborigines on missions were sad and miserable, governed as they were by white oppressors. Several archival discoveries, however, have completely dissolved this assumption.
Early in 2011 I travelled to the Mitchell Library in Sydney to view a collection of papers, photographs and personal items belonging to two missionaries affiliated with the United Aborigines Mission (UAM), Mrs Alma Smith and Mrs Alva Atkins. They were mother and daughter missionaries who spent many years of their lives ministering to my ancestors and other Aborigines at Box Ridge Mission, near Coraki in northern New South Wales in the early 1900s.
Searching through personal diaries, journals and address books I was surprised to find that Mrs Smith kept in contact with my grandmother well after she had married and left the mission. The collection also contained photographs my grandmother had sent to Mrs Smith of my father and his siblings at various times in their childhood. This tangible evidence of an obvious affection between these two very different women clearly contradicted my previous ideas.
Another assumption of mine was that Aboriginal people were powerless victims who had no choice but to accept the rules of the dominant culture. However, recently I discovered a letter my grandfather had sent the Aboriginal Protection Board that provided evidence to the contrary.
My grandfather became a single father with three daughters when his wife deserted them. He arranged to leave the girls at the mission with a non-related Aboriginal woman so that he could travel for work, and he sent money to her for their upkeep. In the letter dated 30 October, 1944, my grandfather informed the board he had taken his children away from Coraki to live with his brother and sister-in-law in a remote country town. He complained that his children were ‘being ill-treated and were doing women’s work such as scrub floors and so forth [sic].’
The woman was neglecting them and making false accusations to the board that she was not receiving financial support from my grandfather. My mother and her sisters would have stood out as prime candidates for removal, and my mother’s family firmly believe that my grandfather’s choice to take them from the mission meant that they avoided being part of the Stolen Generation. These defiant acts, plus his refusal to allow my Aunt to accept Aboriginal Protection Board assistance for her education, were clear indicators he was certainly not a powerless victim of the dominant culture.
There is a well-known saying that ‘knowledge dispels fear.’ For me, researching family and Aboriginal history, investigating stories, unearthing facts and seeking knowledge has had the interesting effect of dispelling sadness.
Delving into the memories of my mother and sister raised questions about my own perception of the past, and an unexpected result was that I was able to put down the burden of sadness that I had carried for decades. Similarly, when the inspection of the individual lives of my ancestors yielded evidence of consensual accommodation, stubborn resistance, and choices that illustrate a degree of independence in the way that they lived their lives, the sadness that I had previously felt for them dissolved.
From my own personal life experience I now understand how important it is for Aboriginal Australians to ensure that future generations have a balanced view of our history, lest we perpetuate Aboriginal victimhood or negatively affect their collective self-esteem.
There are many good, ‘against all odds’ stories to be found about Aboriginal survival and resilience when researching Aboriginal history. Private stories from my grandparents’ time of Aboriginal peoples’ kinship and solidarity in looking after each other, to wider, more public stories of early Aboriginal activists like William Cooper and Jack Patten clearly illustrate a strength of character that we, today’s Aborigines, can take pride in. I am certain that by providing our youth with such stories we empower them.
In the closing paragraph of his book Telling The Truth About Aboriginal History (Allen and Unwin, 2005), Bain Attwood suggests that if ‘anyone is going to take pride in what is truly good about their nation’s past, they must also be prepared to accept what is truly bad in it.’ He went on to say that:
‘Acknowledging the bad does not diminish the good. On the contrary: telling the truth about Aboriginal history can actually help us to pinpoint what was good in the past, the conditions that enabled this good to be achieved, and the lesson this has for us today.’
Conversely, from an Aboriginal perspective, acknowledging the good in Aboriginal history does not diminish the bad. It just adds to the broader scope of knowledge that I believe is key to Aboriginal empowerment.
In a metaphorical, almost biblical way, knowledge provides a better view of the overall journey of Aboriginal people. Knowledge helps us to look back to see the rocky, exhausting road our ancestors have travelled, but it also places us on higher ground where we can see not just where we have come from, but also the best way forward.
I picture myself empowering my daughter by taking her by the hand and leading her to the higher ground, where she can tread sure-footed and confident, with an unobstructed view of where she is going.
This is an edited extract from the essay, ‘At That Time in History: Aboriginal Stereotypes, Victimhood and Empowerment’ in Griffith Review: Women and Power, which is published this week and available now.
Game of Thrones is the hit show of the moment – and holds the dubious honour of producing some of the most pirated television episodes ever. It’s rare to hear a bad word about it, especially on social media. So when we overheard film and television critic, HBO aficionado and genre fan Anthony Morris looking for a critical article somewhere that might help him understand why he doesn’t like Game of Thrones, despite being someone who absolutely should (on paper), we asked him to write it himself.
I’m not sure when I first realised the relationship I was having with Game of Thrones wasn’t working out. There was no ‘I kicked in the screen when Ned Stark died’ or ‘I just can’t stand another scene where Jon Snow stands around pouting’ or even ‘wow, the CGI on those dragons is a bit crap, am I right guys?’ moment. Which is a problem, because this is meant to be an article about how Game of Thrones and I have never quite clicked, and a solid example of what I’m talking about would be handy right now. Maybe it’s a sign of just how ambivalent I am towards the series that I can’t even nail down exactly why it doesn’t work for me.
It’s not that I’m not a fantasy fan. In my teens I read The Lord of the Rings a half dozen times in two years, and from there I read everything fantasy-shaped I could find, from The Mists of Avalon to The Sword of Shannara, going back and forth between Julian May’s quasi-science fiction Pilocene Exile series and Stephen Donaldson’s guilt-laden Thomas Covenant books, before finally ending up with Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, which was so good it spoiled me for all other fantasy fiction. I ran a handful of half-hearted Advanced Dungeons & Dragons campaigns, owned a stack of Steve Jackson’s Fighting Fantasy books, and read up on heraldry – I was in about as deep as you can get without trying to make a suit of chain-mail out of ring pulls from soft drink cans.
And Game of Thrones was from HBO. The explosion of quality dramatic television series coming out of the US post-The Sopranos is hardly news. I didn’t know the original George R.R. Martin novels, but a long-form fantasy series as good as Deadwood or The Wire? Sign me up.
Fantasy (like science fiction) is a genre in ongoing conversation with itself, where current stories take up elements and arguments from previous stories to expand upon or refute. It seemed fairly clear to me from the start that Game of Thrones wanted to take the clichés that had built up around the fantasy genre since Tolkien and rub their noses in the dirt.
In reality, ye olden times were muddy and bloody and full of brutality, where the ideas of honour and gallantry were honoured almost entirely in the breech and only the harsh and brutal – the bad guys in any other series – would have survived. Having drifted away from fantasy in part because of my disinterest in the clichés, the idea of a series that would expose them to the harsh light of reality cheered me no end.
Of course, Game of Thrones doesn’t really want to bring reality to a fantasy world. It slaps a bit of mud on it and piles on the nudity, but beneath it all, the clichés still tick over. The brave knight might be a woman, the cunning hero might be a dwarf, the wise ruler might be an ocean away waiting for her dragons to grow up, but deep down all that’s changed is the casting. Still, that’s hardly a fatal flaw.
What was more deadly to my enjoyment was the utter seriousness with which it took itself. Like the Batman films, which daren’t crack a smile lest we realise that hang on, we’re watching a movie about a guy who dresses up as a bat, Game of Thrones is a basically silly concept (Dragons? Giants? Snow zombies? Assassins made of smoke? How do all these poverty-stricken medieval types manage to make such fancy costumes? What good are all those castles doing on top of crags in the middle of nowhere?) that can’t acknowledge its silliness for fear the whole structure will collapse.
Fantasy (and science fiction for that matter) requires a lot of world-building, and if you don’t take world-building seriously, the whole thing falls in a heap. In a drama set in the real world, you can mine humour from the way the world is or the way that people act. In a fantasy, doing that only draws attention to the fact that the world isn’t like this, and people aren’t like that. So getting laughs out of dragons or the wacky uneven seasons or the way all the endless sex slaves are really hot is out: Game of Thrones does the best it can at wringing laughs out of character interaction and physical bungling, but most of the characters are too thinly drawn for even that. (Tyrion only gets to be witty because that’s his thing.)
Ah, the characters. Producers Dan Weiss and David Benioff are often praised for their casting; a less charitable reviewer than I would suggest that’s because the casting has to do almost all the work when it comes to making the characters live. Many only get a handful of lines per episode, when they even appear in every episode; in situations like that, a suitable face will take you a lot further than the ability to bring a character to life through words and gesture.
This dour sourness – this teenage idea that the only way to be taken seriously is to be serious – mistakes length for depth. We’re up to season three now and fans of the books are saying things like ’ooh, it’s about to get really good now‘ (okay, it’s more like ‘This season’s set to be disaster porn – book fans are especially excited about season three because they cannot wait to see terrible things happen to important characters.’ Deadwood, which for mine is one of the best television series of the current age, only had three seasons. The Wire, which is the best series of the current age, only had five; likewise with Breaking Bad. Mad Men is set to finish with its seventh season. Meanwhile, we’re told that Game of Thrones is probably going to cover the events of George R.R. Martin’s third book in its third and fourth seasons.
If the rest of the books (five have been published, with at least another two to come) take up that much television real estate, we’re talking about a twelve-season series. That’s a soap opera. Killing Ned Stark in season one when he looked like the main character and Game of Thrones looked like a fantasy version of The Sopranos wasn’t a shockingly bold narrative twist; it merely turned the series into an endless horror movie where anyone can die at any time. But you can’t sustain that tension over twelve years; you can’t sustain it over twelve episodes. Eventually you become numb to the horror, and what then? What is Game of Thrones actually about?
The fantasy elements are downplayed so as not to distract from the realism of the show; the realistic elements of the show are sketched in over-the-top fantasy clichés. Individual stories are interesting, but they’re only handed out in bite-sized portions, while the big picture feels like a vast novelisation of a fantasy war-gaming session, where armies clash to and fro across a landscape that’s just lines on a map. It’s a skinfest soap opera aimed at people who are really into costuming and swords.
I’ll keep watching though. I don’t want to miss the part where the snow zombies eat everyone.
Anthony Morris is DVD editor of the Big Issue. He is also a freelance film and television writer who reviews regularly for Empire and other publications.
We asked Year Eleven student Billie Tumarkin to explore what Anzac Day means to her generation. She dabbled in some amateur psychology with friends and reflected on Anzac Days past. What did she find? Mixed messages about the day’s meaning, history lessons that bored rather than enlightened (‘like chewy meat’) – and the idea that if we want young people to engage with the past, we need to bring it to life in more imaginative and resonant ways. ‘You have to give us more than poppies and cookies.’
I ask some friends if I can play a game of word association with them. Everyone is worried – word association is something psychoanalysts use when delving into the unexplored corners of a deranged mind. It takes a lot of persuasion and a tiny bit of deception, but I get there.
Not so many years ago when I was in primary school, learning about what happened at Gallipoli took up our entire history quota. Once I reached high school, every time World War I came up, patriotism got the better of us and the Anzacs were virtually the only thing on the menu. (This led to one of my favourite dumb-blonde moments: a girl behind me, with wide eyes and a you-put-something-on-the-test-that-we-never-studied look, raised her hand ten minutes into the ‘Impacts of WWI’ exam and said, ‘Miss, what’s an impact?’)
In any case, the Anzac stories we commemorate have a tendency to fall out of our heads, along with trigonometry and the phonetic alphabet, the moment they’re no longer assessable.
Quick Game of Word Association #2
Shoes – ‘Feet’; Purple – ‘Barney the Dinosaur’; Eggplant – ‘Bulbasaur’; Anzac Day – ‘Biscuits’
In a slight contradiction to common sense, Anzac Day is the celebration of a battle lost. Maybe that is why the day sits funny with young people. We aren’t really celebrating anything, are we? ‘Our boys’ fell into disillusionment, they died, they never really came home.
What are you going to do on Anzac Day?
– Sleep.
– Get drunk.
– Oh, the Dawn Service, I always go.
– Oh, the Footy, I always go.
– Finish all this work I have to do.
– It’s Anzac Day on Thursday? Seriously!?
We are reflecting on not just the Anzacs, but anyone who fought for their country – we know that. But we are busy. We live in a state of constant happening. And I could play therapist and say that the youth culture of ‘getting f-cking pissed’ is merely a subconscious honouring of ‘our boys’ being just like us – the legal age to fight for your country is also the legal age to drink.
But that would be bullshit. Gallipoli was almost a century ago.
Quick Game of Word Association #3
Stick – ‘Stone’; Pole – ‘Dance’; Time – ‘Clock’; Anzac Day – ‘Poppies’
Halfway through last year I found myself in Ypres, Belgium, at a World War I cemetery. I was there with my school’s European Tour Choir, performing at an annual Belgian memorial service commemorating the missing and the dead.
While I walked through endless rows of bones, the lyrics to one of the songs we were to perform haunted me. We are the dead. Short days ago, we lived, felt dawn, saw sunsets glow. Loved and were loved. And now we lie in Flanders fields. And as we all stood silent among the poppies, holding ourselves tight against the cold wind and the cold thoughts, not so far away I could hear two very loud teenagers. Just a young couple – part of some school excursion. They sat, consumed with each other, making out against a hedge that guarded a row of graves, and laughing. So loudly. All I wanted to do was slap them, make them aware, look around themselves – for when speaking with the dead, should we not remove ourselves from our little lives and enter into a place of timelessness?
Back home in Australia, it occurred to me that I was being unfair to this blissfully ignorant (and woefully unattractive) couple. Because the dead didn’t fight for us to stop time and mourn them; they fought so we could live, and live free. And, though it felt obnoxious and crude, this couple, in their saliva-exchanging glory, were doing just that: living.
On Anzac Day, we live – and so what if the majority of young people spend their day in a combination of sleeping, eating and drinking?
Quick Game of Word Association #4
Sky – ‘Up’; Walking – ‘Ground’; Name – ‘Word’; Anzac Day – ‘Help’
I am a bad history student: I can’t dot-point the past. The rigid structure kills me. When I study history, I fall into it. But Anzac Day bores me. A lot of Australian history is like chewy meat – too much time chewing over the same understandings that the rest of the world came to a century, or ten, ago:
Wars are not an adventure.
Wars are not glamorous.
Wars do not get you all the ladies.
My twelfth birthday was celebrated in St Petersburg, where I saw a film about a young girl in the 900-day Siege of Leningrad. Old women, men, tiny children, me – watching the story of a girl who hid herself in a cupboard to survive. And I, cliches and all, have never cried so much in my life. This was real history.
Babi Yar, with its shocking monument to the 30,000 Jews massacred; the Jewish Museum in Berlin, with its haunting architecture – these are memorials you cannot hide from. Anzac Day makes you feel like something important happened 100 years ago. These memorials make you feel like something important happened now.
If you want the past to resound with a generation to whom it is entirely foreign and unimaginable, you have to give us more than poppies and cookies. We are told, on Anzac Day – those of us at private schools get told it all the time – ‘You don’t know how lucky you are.’ Well, then, if we don’t understand, help us.
If you want silence, if you want attention, demand it, or we will just go back to our homework and cheap beer. After all, it’s a lot easier to commemorate the fallen from our bedrooms.
BIllie Tumarkin is a journalist at The Under Age and a Year Eleven student.
Our Intelligence Squared debate will argue on both sides of whether Anzac Day is More Puff Than Substance at Melbourne Town Hall on Tuesday 30 April, 6.30pm.
In the midst of a stellar advertising career, Greg Foyster came to the realisation that the work he was doing had grave consequences for the health of the planet. He became a walking contradiction, spending weekdays writing ads promoting petrol-guzzling V8 cars and weekends researching the dire impacts of climate change.
In this edited Lunchbox/Soapbox address, Greg discusses how advertising promotes discontentment with what we have in order to sell us stuff we don’t need – and how the resulting waste is choking ecosystems and causing dangerous climate change.
Why do we need a new and improved argument against advertising?
The first reason is that we now know much more about the environmental impact of consumerism than we did in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s or even in the 1990s.
The second? In the last five years in Australia, the advertising industry has taken on a new public image. Margaret Zabel, CEO of The Communications Council, has said that The Gruen Transfer has been ‘a great tool in promoting the industry to future new employees’.
Gruen and advertising as fun
Of course, The Gruen Transfer was never intended to be a cheerleader for consumerism. But from the very beginning it had little leeway to seriously question the role of advertising in society. Any strong criticism would have angered advertising agencies, leaving the show without willing commentators.
The Gruen Transfer also focuses on individual ads; a true critique of advertising needs to consider its overall impact on society, culture and the environment.
Advertising’s new public image troubles me. As a former employee of the industry, The Gruen Transfer reminds me of conversations I had within the walls of advertising agencies, where social issues – such as the link between fast food marketing and obesity – were acknowledged, and then dismissed with a clever joke. The message, never explicitly stated, was that advertising is just a bit of harmless fun, so we shouldn’t worry about it too much.
Indeed, advertising is fun. The chance to get paid to come up with zany ideas was what attracted me to the industry in the first place. So while my friends sat in university lecture halls learning about history or philosophy, I spent my years of higher education staring at jam jars and sauce bottles, trying to write taglines that captured the emotional essence of kitchen condiments.
Once I graduated, I spent about five years working full-time in the industry. But as I progressed in my career, I started researching climate change, and I learned that the root cause of many environmental issues was overconsumption in developed countries. To put it simply, people in rich countries like Australia are using up more resources than the planet can replenish.
Advertising and overconsumption
As someone who worked in the advertising industry, I felt personally responsible for promoting this overconsumption, and so I left my job.
Afterwards, I started researching my former profession, and I learned that the public has always had a healthy distrust of advertising. Throughout history, advertising has been criticised for a long list of social ills, including promoting materialism, reinforcing warped sexual stereotypes and cultivating discontent in order to sell more stuff.
So before we get to that new and improved argument against advertising, let’s look at the old arguments and see if they still apply.
Creating desires (and inventing body odour)
Advertising creates desires. This might seem obvious, but it’s an important point because people in the marketing industry sometimes argue that advertising only responds to desires consumers already have.
However, as the The Advertising Age Encyclopedia of Advertising explains, in the 1880s businesses began to recognise that advertising could create desires to fuel a new consumer economy. ‘People bought articles they did not know they wanted until advertising told them why they could not live without it.’
In 1958, economist John Kenneth Galbraith published The Affluent Society and argued that advertising’s ‘central function is to create desires – to bring into being wants that previously did not exist’.
An advertisement for Lynx deodorant. The company’s global vice-president recently said that advertising created the market for deodorant as a product.
Let’s look at an example. In 2008, the global vice-president for Axe deodorant, which is marketed as Lynx in Australia, told The Times newspaper that in the UK before World War II people didn’t use deodorant; it took up-front advertising to educate consumers about unacceptable body odour. ‘The sense of paranoia created the market,’ he said.
The Unilever executive explained that one strategy for expansion was to make Asians self-conscious about their body odour. ‘Asia is a market we have never really cracked. They don’t think they smell …’
This isn’t to say that humans don’t smell, or that we don’t sometimes want something to mask our odour. The point here is that, through paranoia, the advertising is seeking to create a market where none existed before.
Here’s another example, this one from my girlfriend. You might have seen this ad on TV. It’s for a pad called Carefree Acti-Fresh that women are supposed to wear between periods. No, it’s not an incontinence pad. Its only purpose is so women feel and smell ‘fresh’ every single day of the month.
There are several products like this one, and they’re marketed at the general public, not at women who have health conditions. If they take off, they have the potential to create a new social norm. Eventually, it will seem normal for woman to wear pads all the time so that they can feel ‘fresh’, whatever that means. Again, a sense of paranoia is creating a market.
The culture of discontent
One way advertising creates new desires is to promote discontent with what you have. The best examples of this come from the late 1950s.
During World War II in the United States, industry expanded to supply the army, and factories exited the war with massively increased manufacturing capabilities. At first consumers absorbed the excess production by buying new appliances, but in the mid to late 1950s, industry began to worry that consumer demand would crash, leading to another economic depression.
This was known as the ‘crisis of distribution’ and the solution was to make hyper consumption a way of life. In 1955 US retail analyst Victor Lebow wrote in the Journal of Retailing:
‘Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption …We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever increasing pace.’
This is a simple but accurate description of the consumer economy since the 1950s.
One strategy for increasing consumption was ‘psychological obsolescence’, which involved making things appear out of date or untrendy after a few years. Cars, such as the GM Cadillac, developed stylistic quirks like tail fins, tempting consumers to replace their vehicles just to keep up with changing fashions. Advertising’s role in this was to promote the new products as superior to the old ones.
‘Cars, such as the GM Cadillac, developed stylistic quirks like tail fins, tempting consumers to replace their vehicles just to keep up with changing fashions. ’
Another strategy was to use social pressure to drive consumer demand. This is the ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ theory we’re all familiar with. But the concept is actually more powerful and pervasive than trying to outdo your neighbours. It applies to the whole of society – as everyone around you consumes more, you must do the same, not just to get ahead but simply to keep your current position.
For example, if you work in an office and all your co-workers start wearing expensive suits, pretty quickly your own clothes will look shabby in comparison. You’re forced to buy something new just to maintain your current status.
One way modern advertising increases social pressure to consume is through showing ‘aspirational’ images of affluent people enjoying luxury goods. This makes the public aim for higher and higher levels of material consumption.
Much of the aspirational imagery doesn’t actually relate to the product being sold. For example, an image of beautiful and scantily clad women on a yacht may be used to promote a car.
Aspirational advertising always shows images of wealth above what the average person can afford – that’s why it’s aspirational. In response, consumers feel discontent with their more modest belongings. Aspirational advertising uses this discontentment to promote an attitude of endlessly striving for greater luxuries.
Further away from happiness
But, despite its alluring images of the good life, advertising actually takes you further away from true happiness.
It does this by promising happiness it can never truly deliver. Sut Jhally, professor of communication at the University of Massachusetts, writes that although each ad sells a different product, the consistent and explicit message of advertising is that ‘commodities will make us happy’.
But quality of life surveys show that, beyond a certain level of comfort, it is social values such as love, friendship, autonomy and self-esteem that are more important for lasting contentment, not material values, such as economic security and success.
In fact, psychologist Tim Kasser has drawn on decades of psychological research to show that ‘the more materialistic values are at the centre of our lives, the more our quality of life is diminished’.
And so we have what in marketing terms is called a ‘bait and switch’. Advertising lures us with images of our non-material desires and then tells us they can be fulfilled through material goods.
We want love or romance. We get perfume. We want acceptance or status. We get branded clothing. We want autonomy or independence. We get a sports car.
As advertising does this, it draws us away from the things that really satisfy us, which are social values, and it gives us the things that can’t really satisfy us, material objects.
Car ads provide a good example of false promises. Again, we want independence or autonomy. We see an ad of a shiny new car on an open road, conveying a sense of freedom. We get the car…
… but instead of the freedom of the open road, most of the time our experience is the opposite – we’re stuck in traffic.
Although a car might give us some autonomy and independence, it will never match up to the exaggerated images in the ad.
Coke and commercialising relationships
Another way advertising takes us further from true happiness is through commercialising social relationships.
This strategy is usually subtle, but a recent Coke campaign was shockingly explicit. In the lead-up to Christmas, the soft drink brand printed common first names on its labels, transforming a bottle of Coke into a bottle of ‘Chris’ or ‘Kylie’ or ‘Luke’. A television campaign then asked consumers to ‘Share a Coke’ with someone of that name, tapping into the affection we feel for close friends and family. The ads ended with the tagline ‘open happiness’.
Like so many ads, the underlying message of the ‘Share a Coke’ campaign was that material objects – in this case a fizzy brown liquid – could fulfil social desires.
Assimilating the counterculture
At this point we should talk about how the industry responds to such criticism. One way is by assimilating the counterculture.
For example, in the 1960s a countercultural movement began to attack Western society’s emphasis on materialism, and advertising was portrayed as a profession for conmen and ‘waste makers’. The industry responded by using the language and symbols of the counterculture to sell products.
Coca-Cola tapped into the peace and love movement by launching an ad with people of different races standing on a hill singing the tune ‘I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing’ while holding bottles of Coke.
Now, some people in the advertising industry argue that consumers are more marketing savvy these days, and they’re not so easily duped.
But it’s also possible to market to people sceptical of marketing. In the 1990s, Generation Xers were increasingly sceptical of overblown claims that a brand could deliver status or social acceptance. Sprite tapped into this anti-marketing sentiment with the tagline ‘Image is nothing. Thirst is everything’. The target audience loved it. According to a former president of The Coca-Cola Company, the brand grew at double-digit rates for the next three to five years.
Ecological destruction from overconsumption
So those are just some of the old arguments against advertising. Critics have pointed out that these arguments have their roots in the 1950s and they take a social or moral approach, making them vulnerable to accusations of subjectivity. But there is a more modern argument against advertising, and it’s based on evidence of ecological destruction, making it scientifically tested.
As you’ve probably heard before, things aren’t looking so good for planet Earth. By geological standards, humans have only been around for a short time, but we’ve already cultivated one quarter of the Earth’s land, dangerously exploited 80 per cent of world marine fish stocks, increased the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by over 30 per cent and multiplied the species extinction rate by as much as 1000 times. What’s more, the biggest and most damaging changes have occurred during the consumer boom of the last 60 years.
The root cause of ecological destruction from resource use isn’t overpopulation, but overconsumption. Overconsumption isn’t some vague term I made up – it refers to a level of consumption beyond what the Earth can sustainably replenish. For example, if everyone on the planet wanted to live the lifestyle of the average Australian we would need 3.7 Earths to supply resources.
Disproportionate resource use is also linked to climate change. The director of the Princeton Environmental Institute has calculated that the richest 500 million people in the world emit half the world’s fossil fuel carbon. Put another way, the world’s richest seven per cent of people are responsible for about 50 per cent of carbon dioxide emissions.
The same logic applies to species extinction from habitat loss. Those people who consume the most place the greatest demand on natural resources, and therefore cause the greatest destruction.
It’s advertising that helps to create desires to drive this overconsumption. Advertising does this through commercialising social rituals, encouraging impulse buying and a culture of bargain hunting, plus the previously mentioned strategy of linking social desires with material objects.
And so, far from being just harmless fun, advertising plays a crucial role in driving environmental destruction.
I’m not the only one who has come to this conclusion. Sut Jhally, professor of communication at the University of Massachusetts, has written: ‘Simply stated, our survival as a species is dependent upon minimizing [sic] the threat from advertising and the commercial culture that has spawned it.’
At this point, you might ask: Can’t advertising be part of the solution? I would say yes, it can. What’s required is cultural change and, as experts in mass communication, advertising agencies could promote the transition to a genuinely sustainable culture.
‘Most green marketing is … greenwash’
Environmentalists have drawn parallels between the transition we need to make over the next few decades and the rapid mobilisation of effort in the US and UK during World War II, when propaganda was used to promote growing home vegetable gardens. Advertising agencies could do the same thing today, aiding the transition to a local food economy.
The Australian advertising industry has also run social campaigns in the past, such as the Grim Reaper AIDS ad, and the recent black balloons ad for energy conservation.
However, the reality is that most green marketing at the moment is greenwash. For his book Greenwash, Australian author Guy Pearse tested the carbon footprints of 150 big brands, including Walmart, Virgin, Coca Cola, Unilever and Levis. He had this to say about the results: ‘Not one of these companies can yet say the emissions caused by their products each year is falling.’
The major problem with greenwash is it pretends to promote sustainability while actually reinforcing consumerism. Although ‘green’ products may require fewer resources or use less energy per item, they are still pushed onto consumers with the same breathless urgency.
We’re changing the products, but we’re not changing buying habits or the economic system. What this means is that we’re heading for a future where shoppers buy an unsustainable amount of sustainable products, and ecosystems collapse despite our good intentions.
But it’s worse than that because, as I explained before, advertising works to assimilate the counterculture, and that’s what’s happening with the modern environment movement.
Greenwash copies the language and symbols of sustainability – the colour green, words like ‘eco’, phrases like ‘a better world’, images of trees and leaves – but it uses them to promote more consumerism, and in the process the symbols lose their credibility. People stop trusting them. And without trustworthy symbols, the environment movement can’t communicate as effectively as before, so it loses momentum.
This means that not only is advertising part of the problem, but, through greenwash, it’s subtly undermining the solution.
So that’s the new and improved argument against advertising. To help it stick in your mind I’ve decided to come out of retirement and write a snappy slogan that sums up everything I’ve just said.
Advertising. Same old tricks. All new consequences.
This is the edited transcript of Greg Foyster’s Lunchbox/Soapbox address, Against Advertising, given at the Wheeler Centre last Thursday.
The Wheeler Centre Lunchbox/Soapbox addresses are hosted every Thursday at the Wheeler Centre, 12.45pm to 1.15pm. Admission is free, BYO lunch.
Krissy Kneen is a Brisbane-based writer and bookseller. Her memoir, Affection, was published in 2009 and shortlisted for the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award and the ABIA Award in 2010. Krissy is also the author of the erotic adventure, Triptych, which was published in 2011. Steeplechase is her first non-erotic novel.
We spoke to Krissy about writing horrible reviews in your head, writing what frightens you most, and being adopted by J.D. Salinger’s Glass Family.
What was the first piece of writing you had published?
It was in The Australian Horror and Fantasy Magazine. It was a horror story about a night watchman in a museum and an African statue comes to life. I was only 14 and the editor thought I was an adult and I felt very pleased with myself.
What’s the worst part of your job?
I get very distressed about how my writing will be received. I always go through a soul-destroying few months of thinking I have written the worst book ever and writing horrible reviews in my head that say how terrible the writing is. I am pretty sure I will one day have a stroke whilst waiting for those first reviews to come out.
What’s been the most significant moment in your writing career so far?
The day I got the phone call from Mandy from Text accepting Affection and offering me a contract was the best day in my entire life. I think that moment turned everything around for me.
What’s the best (or worst) advice you’ve received about writing?
The best advice came from Rick Moody’s memoir. Write what frightens you most. I think he was quoting someone else, but really writing something that is safe is not going to help you move forward at all. The things that scare you are the things that are going to dig deepest into your psyche as a writer.
What’s the most surprising thing you’ve ever heard or read about yourself or your work?
I am getting used to being quoted in the same breath as 50 Shades of Grey but at first I found it difficult to put my work into the same basket as E. L. James.
If you weren’t a writer, what do you think you’d be doing instead?
I have always wanted to do something with fish and science. I have at times threatened to retrain as a marine biologist or even a pond-keeper. My latest thing is that I would really like to do the scientific drawings for marine life. I am great at that fine copying in pencil and I would love to sit and watch fish amongst a room full of geeky biologists. I love the ocean. I see myself doing this in a glass-bottomed boat.
There’s much debate on whether creative writing can be taught – what’s your view?
I think you can teach the practice of writing. You can teach about mistakes to avoid, and work practices that will help your craft. Just studying writing will make someone take the job seriously and help you to see what the industry involves so you don’t have false hope of becoming famous or rich.
What’s your advice for someone wanting to be a writer?
Read and write. That is the main trick. Keep reading in an area that relates to your own work. Read things that inspire good writing from you. Then put the time aside to write. Don’t send anything out till you think it is ready. Make sure you get advice before you do.
Do you buy your books online, in a physical bookshop, or both?
I mostly buy physical books but some research related books don’t exist in print form and so I do order some of those online.
If you could go out to dinner with any fictional character, who would it be and why? And what would you talk about?
I would love to have dinner with J.D. Salinger’s Glass Family. I would love to be a part of their big, vibrant, smart family. I would just generally chat with them and argue and start philosophical debates. I have always longed for a really close and supportive bunch of family members and I wish they would adopt me.
What’s the book that’s had the most significant impact on your life or work – and why?
Ray Bradbury’s R is for Rocket made me want to be a writer. I fell in love with sentences reading that book when I was nine or ten. Then my politics was cemented when I read George Orwell. 1984 dictated the kind of book I wanted to write. Those two books were the building blocks for me.
Steeplechase by Krissy Kneen (Text Publishing) is available now.
The first ever Stella Prize for a work by an Australian woman writer was awarded last night, to Carrie Tiffany for her novel Mateship with Birds.
Carrie Tiffany: ‘The Stella is important because it helps to address the imbalance in attention given to the writing of male and female authors in Australia.’
In a surprise – and very generous – move, Tiffany announced that she had given back $10,000 of her $50,000 prize money to be distributed among her fellow authors on the shortlist. (Despite, she said, having ‘heavy creditors’.)
‘This is selfish too,’ she said. ‘Because when you give writers money, you’re actually giving them time. And if I can hasten a little the next books from these women, well why wouldn’t I?’
Tiffany told the crowd that the event was special for her in many ways; two of the women on the shortlist had been instrumental in making her career happen.
Her first novel Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living had been ‘rejected by every publisher in Australia’ before it won the inaugural Victorian Premier’s Award for an Unpublished Manuscript in 2003 – it was subsequently published by Picador, and became an international success.
‘I later learned there was one judge, a woman who literally beat the other judges into submission,’ Tiffany recalled. ‘That woman was Cate Kennedy.’
Once published, that novel was launched by a ‘dear friend’, a writer who had agreed to launch the book ‘only if she liked it, which is how it should be’. She did like the book, and gave a warm speech that Tiffany has often looked back to for comfort over the years. That woman was Michelle de Kretser.
Helen Garner: ‘Every girl who writes needs a bucket of cash’
Helen Garner was the guest speaker for the evening, before the prize was announced. As is her way, she gave an unexpected – and generous, and insightful – talk; instead of celebrating the concept of prizes, she talked about the ‘terrible anxieties’ they provoke in the potential contenders and their ‘bizarre effect … on people’s idea of their own worth’.
She also spoke of ‘the undeniable fact that every girl who writes needs a bucket of cash to be thrown over her at least once in a lifetime so she can soldier on, and even to make her feel for a while that it’s been worth the torture’.
Garner said she would steer clear of explicitly defending the existence of a prize for women’s writing. But she did talk about the need for its existence, referencing a former writer-husband who told her ‘women can’t be artists’ and gender issues to do with cover design.
‘How wonderful it would be if one day, such a prize no longer had any use. If doctors and lawyers no longer said to me, 'Nice to meet you Helen, my wife’s read all your books.’ If designers no longer reflexively put a vase of flowers on the front of a woman’s book, even a book that is about hypodermics and vomiting and rage.'
‘We know in our hearts that women can write, can be artists,’ she said. ‘But we’re so easily disheartened and sabotaged, even by ourselves.’
‘Every book on the shortlist was a genuine contender’
Kerryn Goldsworthy, chair of the judging panel, said that the prize received almost 200 entries.
‘Not only was it difficult picking a winner, but it was extremely difficult picking a shortlist,’ she said. It was difficult picking a long list. In fact, by the time we got down to the last 25 books, we were really struggling. And it just got harder as it went along.
‘Every book on the shortlist was a genuine contender for the award. They are all original, they are all excellent, they are all engaging.’
But she reserved special praise for the winner, Mateship with Birds, for its ‘beautiful writing, humour, meticulous craftsmanship, inventive structure, and broad and generous point of view’.
Carrie Tiffany: ‘The Stella is important because of the times’
‘The Stella is important because it fetes and honours the work of Australian women writers,’ said Carrie Tiffany, while accepting the award. ‘When I sit down to write, there is an anchor that keeps me in place, and that anchor is all of the books that I have read. And on my desk just this morning, there were books by Christina Stead, Judith Wright, Thea Astley, Elizabeth Jolley, Shirley Hazzard, Beverly Farmer, Alexis Wright, Drusilla Modjeska, Helen Garner. My sentences would not have been possible without the sentences of these women, and the others I have read and continue to read.’
‘The Stella is important because it helps to address the imbalance in attention given to the writing of male and female authors in Australia. I think also the Stella is important because of the times that we live in. To write, and to take the work of reading and writing seriously, you must spend a great deal of time alone in a room. You must take yourself away from being looked at.’
‘And yet the pressure for women, I think young women in particular, is to be constantly available for a kind of sexualised visual consumption. To be preened and styled, tanned and exercised, toxically enhanced. The pressure for this has never been greater. For a woman to spend time alone in a room, to look rather than be looked at, means rejecting some of this pressure. It means doing something with your mind rather than your body.’
‘And I hope the Stella can demonstrate to young women that this too has its rewards.’
Tomorrow night, join us for A Prize of One’s Own, a discussion about The Stella Prize – how it came about, the judging process and the shortlist. (And winner!).
Kristina Olsson’s mother married aged sixteen, madly in love with a too-charming older man. After they moved far from her Brisbane family, he turned abusive, starving and badly beating her. As she sat on a train bound from Cairns to Brisbane, poised for escape – her baby boy in her arms – her husband boarded, snatched the boy, and threatened to kill them both if she followed him.
The boy, Peter, grew up longing for his absent mother and abused by his father, compulsively running away to find her – spending time in children’s homes and on the streets as a result. Meanwhile, Yvonne was told by authorities that her child would be better off growing up with his father, so she built a new family and tried to bury the grief that always threatened to break the surface.
Kristina Olsson’s book seeks to explain the tragic loss at the heart of her family, with great empathy, insight and intelligence. She also draws poignant and telling comparisons between the experiences of her one family and Australia’s history of stolen children.
We interviewed Kristina about the detective work of piecing together the story, re-imagining her mother, and why this book was the hardest thing she’s ever written.
Your book is a family memoir but places your mother’s loss of her child – and the indifference she met from authorities when she tried to reclaim him – in the context of Australia’s history of stolen children. How did you weave that personal and wider cultural history together? And when did you realise that would be integral to the book?
I suppose the shadow of lost children was always there. I’d done some work with the Forgotten Australians and with Sisters Inside, and seen the knock-on effects of the separation of mother and child close-up. But the question of ‘why didn’t anyone help her?’ became more urgent as I learned more of my mother’s story, and led to that wider context. I saw our family story was emblematic. There were so many lost children across the decades, and we averted our eyes from them all.
Writing the book, you had access to your half-brother Peter’s public records (police, courts, social workers) and you were able to interview him. Yet writing your mother’s experience was harder, wasn’t it? How did you go about entering her story?
I began with surviving family members, and the memories of my aunts, my father and my sister. But even they couldn’t access the deep trauma and grief my mother had suffered and that she carried with her, always. That kind of suffering cannot be documented, there is nowhere to go for a record, so I had to move beyond biographical or journalistic questioning and try to re-imagine parts of her life, based on the stories I was told and my own experience not just as my mother’s daughter but as a woman and a mother myself.
The story at the heart of the book – your mother’s story of her baby being taken from her as she sat on a train, poised to escape her abusive husband – is one she ‘never told’. You write that you ‘conjured it, guessed it from glances, from echoes, from phrases that snap in the air like a bird’s wing, and are gone’. What kind of power did a story like that hold for you? And how hard was it to reconstruct – and then share – it?
This was the one that nearly got away. I’d always understood I couldn’t write this story; there were too many prohibitions around my mother’s life. Instead I wrote novels that featured boys who were a bit odd, or missing, about a woman who buried the grief of losing a child with broken china in her garden. So in a sense I’d been writing my mother’s and Peter’s story always, trying to assemble it from those echoes, those birds’ wings. Still, when Peter asked me to write the story six years ago it took me some time to feel I was entitled to.
You write about the many ‘concessions I had to make, truths I had to acknowledge, before the story revealed itself, gave itself up, settled into its shape’, referring to the way certain events in the family story had been collectively understood, including by you. What did that process of seeing things anew involve?
This question is at the heart of my own inheritance. That is, of the silences and the ‘looking away’, of the lack of entitlement I felt to the story in the beginning. It took me a couple of drafts to see I had to break an invisible forcefield around knowing. There were so many things we weren’t supposed to know. But entering the story with a whole heart meant I was finally able to look at my mother as the woman she was, and at my own experience.
Your mother is an extraordinary character: passionate and driven, naïve and knowing, tenacious and fragile. Most strikingly, she is a survivor who has managed to build and nurture a new family, despite the horror of her first marriage and losing her son – which must have taken enormous courage. How was it to write your mother? And were you hoping to pay her tribute, in a way?
I certainly wanted to honour her strength, her courage and the things that survived in her: the love she was still able to show, despite everything, her compassion for others, her tenacity. But it wasn’t easy at all. How do we ever get our mothers right on the page? Especially those who have suffered so much. It’s audacious even to try.
One of the extraordinary things about this book is the way that it reveals the complexities of your family’s experience; it resists casting characters as all good or all bad; you even make attempts to understand the cultural motivations driving the undoubted villain of the story – your mother’s abusive husband. Was that important to you, to show the complexities of your experience?
Yes, it was important. But that’s part of the writer’s job, I think, burrowing into uncertainty, negotiating the blurred lines. I also wanted to give my mother the dignity of volition, not to bind her to victimhood. She was passionate and driven, and in the early days of that unfortunate relationship she was happy, making her own choices. I wanted to try to understand that, and that meant trying to understand Mick, and what made him.
Your book hints at the difficulty your mother sometimes experienced raising Sharon, a child who was fathered by her abusive first husband – and was the sister of the son she had lost. While your mother was devoted to Sharon, there are moments where she seems concerned by those reminders. Was it difficult to write these sections? What made them important to the book?
Not difficult, but unnerving, I suppose. There were so many light-bulb moments for me as Sharon explained her particular relationship with our mother. Sharon lost part of her identity too when her biological father stole her brother; I think she struggled to assemble a sense of herself. She, of course, was the link between my mother and Peter and her old, cruel life, but she also represented the life Peter might have had. It was yet another string of sadness, of potential lost.
This is such a taut and lyrically told story, a family memoir that spans decades and yet is beautifully contained. How much work was it to craft this complicated story – one that encompasses so much material – into the taut book that it is? Was there much writing that you lost in the editing process?
It was the hardest thing I’ve ever written. There were countless drafts over nearly five years. And yes, a cache of paragraphs and longer pieces fell out. It’s always difficult to lose material – I mourn some of it still! – but I had a perceptive publisher and a brilliant editor who saw the shape of the story clearly. I’ll be forever grateful for their care of it.
Boy, Lost by Kristina Olsson is published by UQP, and available now.
John Martinkus has been a war reporter for a decade, covering East Timor, Iraq (where he was abducted, and released) and Afghanistan. He defends the continued celebration of Anzac Day not as a way of celebrating war itself, but of ‘remembering and understanding the shared experience of what Australia’s service men and women are asked to endure for what is perceived as the public interest’.
When I was a schoolboy in Melbourne in the early eighties I used to commute through Flinders Street Station on my way to school. Often, along with some of my more badly behaved schoolmates, I would miss a few trains and hang around under the clocks smoking illicit cigarettes and generally getting up to no good. There was often a man in an old army great coat standing across the road outside Young and Jacksons, often with an old long neck bottle of beer in his hand. He had campaign medals pinned to his coat but also usually traces of vomit and spittle crusted to the thick double breasted wool as well. Regularly he would shout at the passing commuters, ‘You don’t f _ kin understand’, or ‘You have no fkin idea you c _ts’. Being stupid boys we would dare each other to go and ask him what he was talking about. He would bellow with drunken rage at us ‘The War! I am talking about the war!’. The commuters would avert their eyes and eventually I remember a man giving me a sharp talking to and telling me to move along and leave the man alone.
After a decade of covering Australia’s deployments in East Timor, Iraq and Afghanistan I am starting to understand that man and his ravings. Whether it is the clearing out of fetid sweet smelling remains of murdered East Timorese rotting in the tropical sun or the cleaning up of the pieces of victims of yet another Taliban Improvised Explosive Device, the men and women of the ADF have had experiences in the last decade that will permanently affect them and change them. I know the moral ambiguity of the Iraq deployments weighed heavily on many of our soldiers as they manned checkpoints and had to make the – sometimes life or death – decisions about whether a fast-approaching car was a suicide bomber or a family racing a badly wounded relative to the hospital. Or whether a car approaching a convoy erratically was yet another VBIED (or, Vehicle Borne Improvised Explosive Device) … or simply a bad driver in a malfunctioning vehicle – and to make that decision about whether or not to shoot.
Then there are the small teams of infantry and engineers flung out through the moonscape of Afghanistan’s Uruzgan province to live and work on small patrol bases with Afghans they can neither trust nor rely on to fight when the Taliban attack. We all know that four of Australia’s casualties have come at the hand of Afghans who are supposedly our allies. It is a figure that, sadly, is likely to rise as we draw down our troops. In short, whatever the politics, our society has asked our defence force to shoulder a very heavy burden since that first deployment to East Timor in 1999. We have a whole generation of soldiers, airman and sailors who have seen and been in situations that those who live a civilian life in this country are likely to never have to endure. Whether you supported the involvement of Australia in the wars of Timor, Iraq and Afghanistan or not, the fact is that we as a society, required these people to go and work in these environments with all the physical and mental risk that entailed. Yes the ADF is now comprised of volunteers and the argument will be made that they made that choice to join in a time of war and should accept the consequences of their service. But I think, having shared some of the horrible experiences of these conflicts, that Anzac Day should be maintained as a day for the participants of these conflicts to get together, reflect and relive the good and the awful experiences they have shared – essentially, in the service of their nation.
Anzac Day is not about jingoistic patriotic posturing. It is not about which political party supported or opposed which deployment, operation or invasion. Anzac Day is about remembering and understanding the shared experience of what Australia’s service men and women are asked to endure for what is perceived as the public interest.
In October and November 2011 I went to Afghanistan as the Official Australian War Cinematographer. My brief was to produce a series of documentaries that reflected on the Australian experience of the war in Afghanistan. I went to patrol bases and on helicopter missions and to the main Australian base in Tarin Kot. But out of all the footage that I collected, the most powerful (to me) were two simple interviews.
One was with a corporal who had survived an IED attack on his armoured Bushmaster. He described how the rear gunner had been flung out and over the vehicle by the force of the blast. The corporal described how he and the only other unwounded member of the crew had found the gunner and dressed his wounds as they called for an evacuation helicopter. He talked of that hour feeling like an eternity as things moved in slow motion, as is common when you are in severe shock. He spoke rapidly – but with precise descriptions of the blast and their attempts to stabilise the wounds of their comrade, all the while expecting a Taliban ambush.
I’ve seen that same intensity countless times during my years covering wars: in the statements of refugees, of victims of bomb attacks, of victims of coalition shootings in Baghdad and in some instances in myself after witnessing the same events. It is quite simply trauma. That will stay with that young corporal for the rest of his life and he will need people to understand that for him to come back from that experience and continue to live.
The second most powerful interview I did was with an explosives expert whose job involved cleaning up the aftermath of suicide bombings. The dead children he had to clear away came back to him often in his dreams as his own children back in Australia.
To share and understand the experiences by ordinary soldiers of this current generation – that is why Anzac Day should be observed. Hopefully one day there will be no more generations of Australian living who have had to live with the memory of war. Maybe then Anzac Day can be consigned to history. But with more than 20,000 Australians having served in Afghanistan alone since 2001, that time is a long way away.
And unless we want to see another generation of veterans cracking up and yelling at passersby in drunken rages, about how they don’t understand, we should allow those veterans the chance to share and remember their experiences together – on that one day of the year.
John Martinkus will be arguing against the proposition that Anzac Day is More Puff Than Substance in the Intelligence Squared debate at Melbourne Town Hall on Tuesday 30 April, 6.30pm.
The lead article in the current Kill Your Darlings is by its deputy editor, Hannah Kent … who shot to worldwide fame last year when her debut novel, Burial Rites, was the subject of an international bidding war and pulled in advances rumoured to total well over a million dollars.
Hannah writes about her path to publication, the editing process (fascinating stuff), and the weirdness of sudden success – including the heightened expectations that come with it.
On being a woman writer in a post-sexist age
Prompted by her longlisting for the Women’s Prize for Fiction (formerly known as the Orange Prize), for her novel The Red Book, Deborah Copaken Kogan writes frankly about the way being a woman has influence her coverage by the media, and her experience working within it – as a former photographer in conflict zones, producer at NBC and as a writer.
Nearly every review refers to me as a stay-at-home mom. One such article is entitled ‘Battlefield Barbie,’ which calls me a ‘soccer-mom-in-training.’ I look nothing like Barbie. My kids don’t play soccer. The general consensus is that the book is good, but I suck.
Ryan from The Office gets seven figure book deal
Actors are the new writers. Literally. The latest to score a book deal is B.J. Novak, who plays intern-turned-boss-turned-intern Ryan on the US The Office. Novak has also been a regular writer on the show since its inception, so he clearly has some writing chops.
B.J. Novak has just signed a two-book deal.
He’s following in the footsteps of fellow The Office writer Steve Hely and castmate (and writer) Mindy Kaling.
Novak has a two-book deal; the first will be a collection of stories to be published in 2014; his agent has compared them to Woody Allen.
Russell Brand’s Guardian article on the death of Margaret Thatcher has been doing the rounds of the internet this week. He proves himself a surprisingly fine writer; this is as wise and sad and insightful as his posthumous piece on Amy Winehouse a few years back. (Though very different.)
The blunt, pathetic reality today is that a little old lady has died, who in the winter of her life had to water roses alone under police supervision. If you behave like there’s no such thing as society, in the end there isn’t. Her death must be sad for the handful of people she was nice to and the rich people who got richer under her stewardship. It isn’t sad for anyone else.
Micro-fiction writer Lydia Davis 
These internal to-and-fros are heartbreaking, because while the thinkers have put their trust in method and thought, time and time again they train their attention on the wrong object. In ‘Grammar Questions’, the narrator deliberates over how to conjugate a father’s imminent death: ‘In the phrase “he is dying,” the words he is with the present participle suggest that he is actively doing something. But he is not actively dying. The only thing he is still actively doing is breathing.’ Inquiry of this nature may seem cold and avoidant, but it’s clear that the ability of grammar to mirror life’s tracks – present and future and past tenses – is a reassuringly unassailable strand in the narrator’s fraying reality.
Sam Twyford-Moore is the director of the Emerging Writers' Festival, which kicks off tonight with the announcement of the winner of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript. He’s also a writer and an editor, who has been published in Meanjin, the Australian and other places.
Wright recalled that when working on the manuscript of Carpentaria, she overheard two old men in Alice Springs talking in the same style as her grandmother, and thought ‘[I’ve] gotta write it in our voice. How our people speak. How our Elders speak.’ This meant rewriting the the entire work from scratch ‘into the right voice’, but Wright felt it was worth it. She spoke candidly about her difficulty in getting the book published, saying that it had ‘Aboriginal written all over it in an industry that wasn’t really interested in those voices at that time,’ and credited Ivor Indyk at 
The 
Tom Doig is a writer, performer and editor who has been published in the Big Issue, The Lifted Brow, Sleepers Almanac and Voiceworks magazine (where he was once editor). His plays include Survival of the Prettiest, Hitlerhoff and Selling Ice to the Remains of the Eskimos. Tom is currently a PhD candidate at Monash University, researching the lived experience of climate change in Australia. Moron to Moron (Allen & Unwin) is his first book.
What’s the best (or worst) advice you’ve received about writing?
A packed crowd gathered at the Wheeler Centre last night to listen to a charged meeting of minds – Helen Garner, Australia’s foremost writer of social reportage and Anna Krien, who seems to be her heir apparent. They were discussing Anna Krien’s new book, Night Games, on football culture and murky attitudes to women in this world of men, framed by a rape trial that posed its own questions about sex, power and the potential ‘grey area’ between rape and consent.
‘There’s a gap in this book, and the gap is the complainant,’ said Krien. ‘I never actually managed to speak to her. I tried, quite desperately, to contact her on numerous occasions. And I really struggled with that. Because I had access to the defendant’s suffering, I had access to his family, and they were under enormous pressure. And I kept looking at the empty seats behind the prosecution, where there was no family, there were no friends, and I never saw her. She gave evidence in closed court.’
Krien recounted the story of a 21-year-old girl who had ‘hooked up with a guy at a bar and gotten on well with him, probably pashed him’ and then swapped numbers. He was a VFL player.
There’s been a lot of talk about ‘sausage fests’ over the past few weeks, with the first all-female Miles Franklin shortlist sparking memories of the all-male lists of the recent past – which were given the meaty nickname. Writer Paul Mitchell tells why the term is not just confronting and demeaning, but risks reinforcing the idea that men are just their genitals. (‘Which many men think anyway.’) So, should we rethink our language?
No, if you want to put down a group of men, sausage fest is best. Because sausages, generally, are low budget, used for meals when there’s not much else you can afford. Or you’re feeling uninspired in the kitchen. They’re disrespected. They’re usually rolled on the barbecue first, used as a snack before the real meal arrives. They’re sticky before they’re cooked. They’re all the same. They appear hard, but they’re soft inside. And, best of all, you can bite them, chew them, digest them, and crap them out.
People with disabilities – and the everyday challenges they face – have been in the spotlight over the past week, as the national Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) has dominated headlines and political coverage. For Joel Deane, the political is deeply personal: his daughter Sophie has Down Syndrome. Last week, he attended a public high school open day, looking for a high school for his daughter – and was sadly reminded that discrimination is alive and well in today’s Australia.
Kylie Ladd is a Melbourne writer and novelist whose essays and articles have appeared in the Age, Griffith Review, Sydney’s Child and O magazine, among others. She works part-time as a neuropsychologist. Her third novel, Into my Arms (Allen & Unwin) was published this month.
What’s the best (or worst) advice you’ve received about writing?
The Miles Franklin shortlist for 2013 has been announced – and in a reverse of the much-talked-about 
It’s that time of year again, where we welcome a new batch of writers to our 
Angie Hart, former lead vocalist and co-collaborator of nineties pop-band Frente, is working on a series of short memoir-essays on her life as a touring musician.
Fatima Measham is a social commentator and feature writer who lives in Werribee. She is working on an essay in defence of her suburb – ‘a literary attempt to subvert prevailing perceptions of Werribee as “the place where your poo goes”, as one so-called friend gleefully told his child’.
What’s the most surprising thing you’ve ever heard or read about yourself?
Shauna Bostock-Smith reflects on her family’s past, and the way personal stories are shaped and interpreted – and the importance of acknowledging both the bad and the good in Aboriginal history. She asks: How can ancestral knowledge empower us in the present? And what are dangers do victimhood pose to collective Aboriginal self-esteem?
Early in 2011 I travelled to the Mitchell Library in Sydney to view a collection of papers, photographs and personal items belonging to two missionaries affiliated with the United Aborigines Mission (UAM), Mrs Alma Smith and Mrs Alva Atkins. They were mother and daughter missionaries who spent many years of their lives ministering to my ancestors and other Aborigines at Box Ridge Mission, near Coraki in northern New South Wales in the early 1900s.
Game of Thrones is the hit show of the moment – and holds the dubious honour of producing some of the most pirated television episodes ever. It’s rare to hear a bad word about it, especially on social media. So when we overheard film and television critic, HBO aficionado and genre fan 
We asked Year Eleven student 
In the midst of a stellar advertising career, Greg Foyster came to the realisation that the work he was doing had grave consequences for the health of the planet. He became a walking contradiction, spending weekdays writing ads promoting petrol-guzzling V8 cars and weekends researching the dire impacts of climate change.
What’s the best (or worst) advice you’ve received about writing?
‘The Stella is important because it fetes and honours the work of Australian women writers,’ said Carrie Tiffany, while accepting the award. ‘When I sit down to write, there is an anchor that keeps me in place, and that anchor is all of the books that I have read. And on my desk just this morning, there were books by Christina Stead, Judith Wright, Thea Astley, Elizabeth Jolley, Shirley Hazzard, Beverly Farmer, Alexis Wright, Drusilla Modjeska, Helen Garner. My sentences would not have been possible without the sentences of these women, and the others I have read and continue to read.’
John Martinkus has been a war reporter for a decade, covering East Timor, Iraq (where he was abducted, and released) and Afghanistan. He defends the continued celebration of Anzac Day not as a way of celebrating war itself, but of ‘remembering and understanding the shared experience of what Australia’s service men and women are asked to endure for what is perceived as the public interest’.
