Are you an artist (aspiring, working, ‘working’ or otherwise) in need of a little inspiration? Well, you might like to go back to school, to hear Neil Gaiman’s recent address to students at the Philadelphia School of Arts.
The whole address is well worth watching, but we’d like to share some selected highlights from his speech. (The headings are ours.)
When you start a career in the arts you have no idea what you’re doing. This is great.
People who know what they’re doing know the rules and they know what is possible and what is impossible. You do not and you should not.
The rules on what is possible and impossible in the arts were made by people who had not tested the bounds of the possible. And you can. If you don’t know it’s impossible, it’s easier to do.
If you have an idea of what you want to make, what you were put here to do, then just go and do that.
I wanted to write comics and novels and stories and films, so I became a journalist, because journalists are allowed to ask questions and simply go out and find out how the world works.
And besides, to do those things I needed to learn how to write, and how to write well. I was being paid to learn how to write economically, crisply, sometimes under adverse conditions, and on deadline.
I learned to write by writing.
You need to learn to be thick-skinned, to learn that not every project will survive.
A freelance life in the arts is sometimes like putting messages in bottles on a desert island and hoping that someone will find one of your bottles and open it and read it and put something in a bottle that will wash its way back to you: appreciation, or a commission, or money or love.
And you have to accept that you may put out hundreds of things for every bottle that winds up coming back.
If you make mistakes, you’re out there doing something.
Sometimes life is hard. Things go wrong. In life, in love, in business and in friendship, in health … and in all the other ways life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do: make good art.
Husband runs off with a politician? make good art … IRS on your trail? Make good art. Cat exploded? Make good art.
Make it on the bad days; make it on the good days too.
The moment where you feel that just possibly, you’re walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself, that’s the moment where you may be starting to get it right.
The things I’ve done that have worked the best were the ones I was least certain about.
What would be the fun in making something you knew would work?
People get hired because, somehow, they get hired.
People keep working in a freelance world because the work is good, because they’re easy to get along with and because they deliver it on time.
And you don’t even need to do all three. Two out of three is fine.
Nothing I did where the only reason I did it was for the money was ever worth it, except as bitter experience.
The things I did because I was excited and wanted to see them become a reality have never let me down and I’ve never regretted the time I’ve spent on any of them.
Winners of this year’s Prix Ars Electronica were announced this week. Celebrating artists and projects at the forefront of media experimentation and digital innovation, the awards are considered amongst the most prestigious and coveted in the field. Six Australians were acknowledged in the honours list.
In the Interactive Art category, It’s a jungle in here by Melbournians Isobel Knowles and Van Sowerwine (with programmer Matthew Gingold) was given an Award of Distinction. The piece – ‘a confronting tour of the fragile rules that organise our public lives’ – reflects the regular collaborators' preoccupations with creepy, unsettling scenes and playful representation.
Controlled by facial recognition, voice and pressure sensors, attackers morph into grizzly bears or crows; their victims can retreat into a turtle shell, or be subjected to the unwanted advances of snakes.
In the Hybrid Art category, Peta Clancy and Helen Pynor received Honorary Mentions for their piece The Body is a Big Place. Prue Lang scored the same for her system Un Reseau Translucide, which harvests dancers' kinetic energy.
Life as an artist can be a slog, and many practising artists choose to refocus their energy on the daily grind: a more regular job, perhaps, or a family, wondering what may have been.
Writing for GQ, Eric Puchner was wondering the same thing when he met his doppelgänger, a singer-songwriter named Kyle Field. ‘As a writer, I’d always been fascinated by the trope of the doppelgänger and its long literary life, from Dostoyevsky to Nabokov to Spider-Man,’ he offers. ‘I’d started wondering if there was someone out there who embodies not your worst self, but your freest one – a person who encapsulates everything you’ve ever dreamed of becoming.’
‘There was an indie-rock singer who lived in a house full of young Swedish women and an erotic photographer who looked like Jesus.’
The 99% Conference recently wrapped up in New York – its name not Occupy-related, but rather gleaned from Edison’s adage that ‘genius is 1% inspiration, and 99% perspiration’. With a broad focus and a diverse roster of speakers, the event generated a slew of suggestions for snaring the muse. They’ve posted a list of ‘key takeaways’ on their website, quoting figures such as Atlantic Senior Editor Alexis Madrigal, Radiolab co-host/creator Jad Abumrad and Harvard Business School Professor Teresa Amabile.
‘The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.’ Alexis Madrigal quotes Jeff Hammerbacher, an early Facebook employee.
One of the 99% Conference’s guests was Australian designer/illustrator Rilla Alexander of art and design collective Rinzen. Alexander was showcasing Her Idea, an adult-friendly picture book about the tension between ideas, focus and realisation.
Rilla Alexander’s richly illustrated Her Idea.
Best Made Co.’s ‘playfully dangerous’ tribute to Where the Wild Things Are.
On the subject of picture books, we couldn’t let this week go without a nod to the genre’s hero Maurice Sendak, who passed away on Tuesday aged 83.
Tributes to the iconic author and illustrator have been made far and wide, but perhaps the most unusual comes via Best Made Co. – a customised, coloured and spotted axe dubbed Max’s Axe.
Looking further back, a 2006 New Yorker profile entitled ‘Not Nice’ reveals Sendak’s early loneliness, raw wit and close ties to the mystique of childhood.
Questions of life and death did not elude Sendak. In interviews such as the one below, he spoke about living and dying, asking: ‘Why bother to get born?’
‘I have adult thoughts in my head, experiences – but I’m never going to talk about them,’ he says. ‘I’m never going to write about them. Why is my needle stuck in childhood? I don’t know, I don’t know. I guess that’s where my heart is.’
Tony Birch
Tony Birch is currently shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award for his first novel, Blood. Yet he’s best known for his short stories, which have been published in two collections, Shadowboxing and Father’s Day, and several anthologies. Tony teaches creative writing at the University of Melbourne.
We spoke to him for our Working with Words series, about teaching creative writing, finding your mentor on the page and dreaming of being Atticus Finch’s son.
What was the first piece of writing you had published?
I began publishing poetry, and published several poems with the 925 poetry magazine, out by collective effort press. My first short story, ‘Joy’, was published by antithesis at Melbourne University in 1991.
What’s the best part of your job?
Coming across a student who has a real passion for both reading and writing, who knows it is a long haul, and is driven by the quality of the work, and not their ego.
What’s the worst part of your job?
The fact that universities are driven more by metric outcomes than intellectual and creative development.
What’s been the most significant moment in your writing career so far?
Probably this year’s shortlisting for the Miles Franklin award for my novel, Blood. But personally, it was walking by Readings bookshop on Lygon Street and seeing my first book, Shadowboxing, in the front window.
What’s the best (or worst) feedback you’ve received about your writing?
The best is unforgettable and wonderful. A past student of mine, Julian Drape, told me that Shadowboxing was being passed around in his circle of friends like a favourite Gillian Welch album. The worst – which also makes me smile – is that my writing is depressing and bleak.
What’s the most surprising thing you’ve ever heard or read about yourself or your work?
That I was hiding my identity behind my fiction – clearly insinuating that my fictional characters had no life, or identity of their own.
If you weren’t making your living by writing, what do you think you’d be doing instead?
I make a living by teaching writing, not writing itself. I could never make a living writing, and don’t really want to. I’d worry too much about money, and my five children would have to save their scraps of toast rather than feed them to our loving Staffie, Ella. I don’t know what I would be doing, but given the choice I’d be riding the Tour de France.
There’s much debate on whether creative writing can be taught – what’s your view?
Well, the ‘debate’, if you can call it that, is so shallow and misinformed that it’s not really a debate. For instance, those who shit-can writing classes sometimes claim that it is the reason we are not reading fiction, Australian fiction in particular. That’s bullshit. My students have to read fiction every week, and analyse and come to understand what it is trying to do.
I have never taught a university class where students do not read some Australian writing, particular new and younger writers, who I always promote. The debate sounds more like a screech from a monkey cage. (Not that monkeys should be kept in cages – or chickens, birds, and even ferrets).
A good writing class establishes an atmosphere where students firstly learn to value reading quality writing, and gain knowledge from it. And then realising that a writing career is based on discipline, regular labour and a passion for curiosity, creativity and the shift from an idea to work on the page.
I don’t teach writing to get students published. Most will never publish. I teach to create a foundation for those who will continue to write long after they leave university, and to illustrate to each of my students that both reading and writing enhance both the intellectual and creative ability in all of us.
Those who continue to claim that creative writing cannot be taught seem to believe that it is a ‘natural’ talent, and that good writers are inherently ‘gifted’. Some are gifted and some may be naturally talented. So what? It’s only part of the story, and a small part of it. And so what if a writing student is not good enough to be published? Many of my students leave my class having a greater respect for what writers do. And they become better readers – for life.
What’s your advice for someone wanting to be a writer?
Always be reading. Find your mentors on the page. Write regularly. Accept rejection as an occupational reality. And if you don’t make it, ask yourself: is there another way to pursue your creative interest?
Do you buy your books online, in a physical bookshop, or both?
I will always buy a book in a shop, if I can. I only buy online if the book is not available in the country, and then if there is a delay in getting it from a local seller. I love the physical space of the bookshop, and can spend hours in them.
If you could go out to dinner with any fictional character, who would it be and what would you talk about?
It would be Atticus Finch. And I would ask him if he would mind if Harper Lee rewrote To Kill A Mockingbird, and I could be his son, and he would put a secure hand on my shoulder on that front porch of his, and he would say to me, ‘listen to me son. Hanging out at that river instead of getting your schooling, and smoking those cigarettes, and chasing after those private school girls, and cussing and fighting, that’s no way for a boy to grow up.’
He would then gently ruffle my hair with they same hand that took down that crazy dog with a single shot from his rifle and say, ‘you’re my oldest boy. You have to set an example for your brother, Jem, and your sister, Scout, and it needs to be a good example.’ We would then sit on that old porch in the quiet and heat and take in the scent of the night
What’s the book that’s had the most significant impact on your life or work – and why?
The answer is directly above (and obvious).
Tony Birch’s essay, ‘Not Writing a Novel: Recent Australian Short Fiction’, is the latest in our Long View series.
In this week’s Working with Words, we talk to writer, cultural historian and Long View essayist Maria Tumarkin about writing, the value of self-doubt and teaching creative non-fiction.
Maria Tumarkin: ‘Don’t fight doubt … Writers who do not doubt themselves are charlatans (with a few notable exceptions).’
What was the first piece of writing you had published?
An article on sleep called ‘Stranger in the Night’ published in Meanjin in 1999 by the wonderful Stephanie Holt, who also published my second piece of writing – this one was about a baby born in the eye of Cyclone Tracy – the following year.
What’s the best part of your job?
Undoubtedly, the best part is doing my own thing. I’ve always craved independence, which is why I hated being a child. I just love it that these days I am beholden to one.
What’s the worst part of your job?
Constantly worrying about money. When will it be possible for writers to survive in Australia? This is a rhetorical question, I know, but really, when?
What’s been the most significant moment in your writing career so far?
Deciding (not that long ago) that writing is what I do, that this is who I am.
What’s the best (or worst) advice you’ve received about writing?
Best advice: the difference between writers and non-writers is that writers write.
Worst advice: Do market research.
What’s the most surprising thing you’ve ever heard or read about yourself or your work?
That I am reluctant to divulge personal information in my writing. If only.
If you weren’t making your living by writing, what do you think you’d be doing instead?
Making documentaries, although I am not particularly good at teamwork.
There’s much debate on whether creative writing can be taught – what do you think?
I teach creative non-fiction at Writers Victoria once a month and it feels like an honest job. You recognise people, who have something important to say and you encourage them to say it. You treat people’s words and ideas with respect. You discuss books that will outlive all of us. You make sure you don’t pontificate or lecture. It really is okay.
What’s your advice for someone wanting to be a writer?
Don’t fight doubt. Accept it as part of the process. Writers who do not doubt themselves are charlatans (with a few notable exceptions).
Do you buy your books online, in a physical bookshop, or both?
70% from bookshops, 30% online.
If you could go out to dinner with any fictional character, who would it be and why? What would you talk about?
Hmmm…. I don’t know. I haven’t been reading much fiction lately, have been too excited by narrative non-fiction.
What’s the book that’s had the most significant impact on your life or work – and why?
In the spirit of evasion, let me tell you of a book that made a huge impression on me this year – it is Tony Judt’s Memory Chalet. By the time he wrote this book, Judt, who was suffering from a motor neuron disease, was completely immobilised. He would compose parts of the book in his head and then dictate them. It’s incredible. Similarly, Christopher Hitchens’s essays in his final year have made an indelible impression. Two great men, who wrote till the very last moment. You have to bow to that.
Maria Tumarkin’s essay, ‘A Sentimental Yoke’, on ‘unsentimental’ writing and why we praise it, is the latest in our Long View series, featuring long-form literary criticism by some of Australia’s best writers.
Romy Ash’s debut novel, Floundering, was shortlisted for last year’s Vogel Award; it’s published by Text this month. Her writing has been published in Frankie, the Big issue and Zen. We spoke to her for our Working with Words series.
What was the first piece of writing you had published?
It was a short story in Voiceworks magazine and I remember the acceptance letter coming by mail to my Brisbane house. I was so excited, and probably 18-19 years old.
What’s the best part of your job?
Being a writer means that you can live other lives/jobs through your characters’ eyes, or when researching a story. It’s a way for me to do everything.
What’s the worst part of your job?
Long hours at the computer.
What’s been the most significant moment in your writing career so far?
The publication of my debut novel Floundering.
What’s the best (or worst) advice you’ve received about writing?
The best: an edit should be brutal.
If you weren’t making your living by writing, what do you think you’d be doing instead?
Well, I don’t just make my living by writing. Sometimes I waitress, sometimes I cook for people, and I teach at the University of Melbourne. But for a while, as a kid, I wanted to be a geologist; I loved going on walks and looking at rock formations. I loved looking at the layers in a rock face – it’s like looking into the past.
There’s much debate on whether creative writing can be taught – what do you think?
Writing is a craft, it’s hard work, it requires practice and persistence; just having talent is not enough. I don’t see anything wrong with fostering talent and giving a writer a place to breathe through writing programs.
What’s your advice for someone wanting to be a writer?
Read, read, read, read.
Do you buy your books online, in a physical bookshop, or both?
I usually buy from my local independent booksellers, but if there’s something I can’t get there I buy online.
If you could go out to dinner with any fictional character, who would it be and why?
A dinner with Roald Dahl’s the Twits would be riotous.
What’s the book that’s had the most significant impact on your life or work – and why?
Wake in Fright by Kenneth Cook for its thirst-inducing prose and tight storytelling.
Romy Ash will be a guest in tonight’s instalment of our Debut Mondays series, along with Ailsa Piper, Bruce Scates and Oliver Mol. Come along to The Moat, 6.15pm – 7.15pm.
Toni Jordan is one of Australia’s most loved comic writers, with her sharply funny novels Addition (longlisted for the Miles Franklin) and Fall Girl.
Toni’s essay about humour in Australian fiction, ‘Dry As a Chip’, is the third in the Wheeler Centre’s Long View series of critical essays on Australian writers and writing.
What was the first piece of writing you had published?
A short story, ‘The Rise and Fall of Winston’, in the Romance Writers of Australia short story anthology, Little Gems (2006).
What’s the best part of your job?
Having the time and space to think and read.
What’s the worst part of your job?
Accounts, BAS, invoicing, statements, six months between paychecks. I had a normal job for 19 years and the lack of security and mountains of paperwork freaks me out.
What’s been the most significant moment in your writing career so far?
The Miles Franklin longlisting of my first book, Addition, made me think differently about my work and the best way to tell the stories I wanted to tell. When the going got tough for my characters, I had a tendency to wimp out with a cheap gag. The longlisting gave me the confidence to go places that weren’t necessarily comfortable and stare them down.
What’s the best (or worst) advice you’ve received about writing?
This is hard: I feel like I need different advice of every page of every book, because there’s always something new I have to figure out. My favourite quote is Ursula Le Guin’s ‘The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.’ I love this because it reminds me that it’s all about the reader and not at all about me.
What’s the most surprising thing you’ve ever heard or read about yourself?
Probably my top two are that I’m not a feminist because in Fall Girl my protagonist gets spanked during sex, and that I’m an ‘unconscionable disgrace’ who encourages people to disregard the advice of mental health professionals, because of the plot of Addition. I also got a postcard from a Jehovah’s Witness lady once, who told me it wasn’t too late to avoid going to hell. Phew.
If you weren’t making your living by writing, what do you think you’d be doing instead?
Before I started writing, I was national sales and marketing manager for a medium-sized company. I’d probably be still there.
There’s much debate on whether creative writing can be taught – what do you think?
I’m somewhat biased, because I wrote my first book while a student in a creative writing course, and I also teach creative writing one day a week. So the short answer is yes, it can. The long answer is: creative writing is both art and craft. The ‘art’ bit – ideas for characters, plots, premise, voice – can’t be taught. I don’t know where that comes from. The ‘craft’ part – how sentences work, how dialogue works, how structure works, how to convince a reader a character is real – can be taught. But to be published, you need both.
What’s your advice for someone wanting to be a writer?
Read more. Much more. If you’d rather listen to your iPod on the train than read, or you’d rather play Angry Birds than read, you’re not in love with words enough. I often ask people who are struggling to have their first book published this: what was their favourite Australian debut of the last 12 months? Nine times out of ten, they haven’t read any. Not one. They’re not really interested. And that’s okay. Writing drains enormous amounts of free time and energy. If you’re just doing it because ‘publish a book’ is on your bucket list, find something you’re really crazy about instead. Life is too short.
Do you buy your books online, in a physical bookshop, or both?
Online for the hard-to-find specific books that would see me running all over town, physical bookshops for the advice, surroundings and joy of being surprised by something I didn’t know existed ten minutes ago but now just must have.
If you could have dinner or a date with any fictional character, who would it be and why?
I’m having an Australian classics year, and I’m half way through Tom Collins’s Such is Life. Wow. Brilliant and a bit incomprehensible, both at the same time. I’d love to be camping by a fire under a clear sky and listening to Tom tell me stories.
What’s the book that’s had the most significant impact on your life or work – and why?
My first grown-up book was the Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes. I was probably 13 or 14. It must be three inches thick and it was the first time I was actually lost inside a book. Missed meals, day turned to night, the works. Once you experience that, you never stop wanting it again.
You can read Toni’s essay, ‘Dry as a Chip: A Journey Through Humour in Australian Fiction’ on our dedicated web page for The Long View.
Source: Abu Dhabi International Book Fair
Emerging Writers' Festival director Lisa Dempster has, in recent years, become a regular at Arab book fairs. Here, she reflects on her week with the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair 2012.
Travelling and literature have much in common – they educate, entertain and open the mind to the possibilities of the world. For the past week I have been enjoying the benefits of both, as a member of the press delegation at the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair.
Now in its twenty-second year, the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair brought together over 900 exhibitors from 54 countries, and showcased over half a million titles in 33 languages. Like Sharjah International Book Fair, Abu Dhabi serves a dual purpose as a trade fair and book market, and also offers publisher training and a diverse cultural program.
Spread across 21,500 square metres, the Book Fair offered a vast geography to explore, both physically and intellectually. While every literary festival is a reflection of its own unique culture, Abu Dhabi International Book Fair facilitates conversations that focus on the Arab world while also crossing boundaries to appeal to a global audience.
“Regular fair-goers love book fairs because each fair has its own character,” said Indian editor Vinutha Mallya, visiting the Book Fair as part of the international press delegation. “In Abu Dhabi, I feel like I am peeking through a pin hole camera, but capturing the expanse of the Arab book market. I feel like a tourist in a strange land, but being struck by something familiar.”
Although the processes and structures of the Arab book selling world may be different to India and also to my Western perspective, many of the discussions that arose from the Fair’s cultural and professional programs were globally recognisable. Key themes included identity, and how and why we tell stories in an increasingly globalised world.
Source: Abu Dhabi International Book Fair
Tishani Doshi, a poet and dancer who appeared as part of the Fair’s UK country focus, believes that identity is becoming an increasingly important question in a world where so many people move across the globe, living lives in a state of flux. Although her Welsh-Indian heritage and constant travelling has made her feel like a cultural outsider, she has embraced her otherness as she feels it has helped her as a writer.
At the end of the day, no matter where you are in the world, she says, you share what it is to be human. “The basic human questions are the same, whenever you ask them and whenever you ask them,” said Doshi. “Although our stories are each different, it’s also the same story that’s been going on and on.”
McSweeney’s-approved playwright Wajahat Ali also places importance on the commonalities of the human condition, describing his play The Domestic Crusaders as a universal family drama told through the culturally specific lens of his Muslim-American upbringing. When you strip away the layers, he says, people see universal family tensions and relationships. Embracing digital media in addition to his work as a playwright, Ali’s work speaks to the changing face of human identity in a digitised, post-911 world.
“For all the stories that have been told, there is a new way of telling them. The new generation represents a new world. We have messy languages, messy hyphenated identities,“ Ali explains, adding that global citizens are increasingly unwilling to reduce their cultures by pigeon-holing themselves or others. Instead, writing has the potential to explore and celebrate the mutable lives and identities of people around the world.
The Abu Dhabi International Book Fair is committed to developing its local publishing sector through various means, much of it industry focussed. In addition to publisher training and panels during the festival, the Fair works year-round to promote activity in the region to an international audience. Additionally, they run a subsidy scheme that supports the translation of books into or out of Arabic, meaning publishers who sell rights at the Fair can receive up to $10,000 towards the development of up to ten titles.
Source: Abu Dhabi International Book Fair
Readers and book-buyers are engaged through the Fair’s cultural programming, and of course publishers sell their titles direct to the public at the Fair. The importance of writers is also recognised through the presentation of two major literary awards during the Fair, the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (known as the “Arabic Booker”) and the Sheikh Zayed Book Award. However, less activity is focussed specifically on developing writers, which is vital to any robust publishing industry.
This year, the British Council ran several creative writing workshops with authors such as Marina Lewycka, Phillip Ardagh and Jasper Fforde. The Book Fair also ran a short story competition in partnership with a leading local newspaper. The winner, Katy Shalhoub, won an iPad – but, more significantly, her story was published on a full page in The National newspaper, an amazing outcome for a fledgling writer.
These kinds of opportunities for emerging writers to connect, learn and be recognised during the early stages of their career are vital to developing a healthy literary and publishing culture. It would be great to see these writer-development initiatives grow at the Fair in future years.
A book fair is not just a place to buy books, sell rights, network and undertake training – though those are important. A book fair is also a place and time where a unique group of people come together, learn from each other, and celebrate literature in all its forms. The Abu Dhabi International Book Fair was successful in bringing writers, readers and publishers together, sparking both local connections and global conversations that will continue to resonate in the Arab world and beyond.
The Wheeler Centre’s senior writer Jo Case stumbled on a goldmine of reviewing advice after she put a question to Twitter. Here, she shares her booty.
Don’t let anyone tell you Twitter can’t be a useful educational tool. I found this out when I decided, on a whim, to launch a last-minute appeal for wisdom into the Twitterverse, on my way to give a reviewing workshop to the next generation of critics (for the University of Melbourne’s student publication, Farrago).
I asked, ‘Anyone have pet hates or absolute loves when it comes to reviewing? Tweet me if so …’
Twenty minutes later, I checked into my Twitter account and found it full of 140-character gems, many of them from writers, editors and reviewers.
Here’s some reviewing advice worth following – or at least, debating. Please feel free to add your own thoughts in our comments!
Michelle Griffin, national editor, the Age, former Age deputy editor overseeing arts and entertainment
A critic should be interested in why something worked/didn’t work, rather than what they liked/didn’t like or approved/disapproved.
Don’t be boring. This is a piece of writing angling to keep readers who don’t have to read it. DON’T WRITE FOR THE AUTHOR.
Sybil Nolan, freelance writer and editor
Pet hate: Reviewers who start their review with the ‘I’ word. Yes, it’s all about them!
Reviewers should not assume the book’s editor has failed to spot and fix errors and style flaws: some authors reject/overrule advice.
Claire Corbett, author, When We Have Wings
Hate hate hate plot summaries. Reviews so short these days plot ends up taking up half the review. LAZY. HATE spoilers.
James Tierney, freelance writer
Find your own voice as a reviewer. There’s an impersonal ‘reviewerese’ that is hard to read, let alone remember.
Charlotte Wood, author, Animal People
Pet hate: Reviews that just tell the plot or events of a book, and don’t come out with an opinion.
Damon Young philosopher and author, Distraction
The bad: Snark without reason and eye for language. Snark without achievement. The good: Reviews that exemplify what they praise.
Helpful to distinguish between book written and book reviewer wants written. Not fair to judge using imaginary ideal.
Geordie Williamson, chief literary critic, the Australian
Neat selective quotation helps clinch points. [It’s important to have] the ability to read well at sentence level without losing a sense of larger context.
Jennifer Mills, author, Gone
Participate in the conversation the book is starting; don’t insult the editor; check your gender/cultural privilege.
Fiona Hardy, bookseller, freelance reviewer
Reviewing isn’t a place to show off your knowledge of long words and obscure references.
Ben Pobjie, television columnist, the Age
Make sure you’re informative about the book, rather than pure opinion; so people with different tastes will get a sense of it.
Tim Sterne
I like it when you can see the reviewer has made a real effort to meet the book on its own terms, while also bringing to bear his/her intelligence and breadth/depth of reading.
It annoys me when reviewers give no consideration of a novel’s stylistic qualities and focus solely on what the novel is about.
Patrick Cullen, author, What Came Between
As a reader of reviews, I’m almost always underwhelmed by the passage quoted as an example of the work. So, how to pick a good line? Basically, most quotes out of context don’t hold up. They’re not necessarily great sentences.
Peter Taggart, freelance film and theatre writer
I think reviews still have to be entertaining. Slamming work for being dull is hypocritical when the review is torturously boring. That’s probably really obvious, but the reviews I read follow the same structure.
Emily Maguire, author, Smoke in the Room, Princesses and Pornstars
Hate it when the reviewer obviously has no knowledge of, or worse, contempt for, the genre of the book being reviewed.
P.M. Newton, crime writer, Old School
Yes. Famililarity with genre doesn’t mean giving it an easy pass. Particularly genre reviews that give plot summaries but don’t engage with ideas, or place the work within the range of the genre.
Kylie Ladd, author, After the Fall
Pet hate: When reviewer gets the genre wrong. My latest novel has some cricket in it but is contemporary fiction. One reviewer reviewed it in the same review as a non-fiction review collection of articles on rugby.
Rochelle Siemonowicz, publications manager, Australian Film Institute and film editor, the Big Issue
Dos and don’ts? Do stay until the end of the credits. Don’t eat in the cinema.
Do write beautifully and spell names correctly. Do place the film in context.
Do expend precious space pointing towards the best films instead of viciously ‘clubbing baby seals’!
Anthony Morris, DVD editor, the Big Issue, freelance film reviewer
Um, try to describe accurately what you’ve seen without giving away plot twists/spoilers? And not talk about yourself AT ALL?
Ben Hibbs
Determining if work achieved what it intended is important, including intended audience. No point reviewing blockbuster like arthouse.
The Wheeler Centre’s Long View series of luxuriously long review essays on Australian writers and writing gives some of Australia’s best critics the room to stretch out – and leap into the kinds of conversations about our literature they’ve always longed to have.
A new Long View essay will be published on our website every second Friday, from now until mid-July. The current essay is ‘Our Common Ground’, Geordie Williamson’s defence of Australian rural writing. Next fortnight, Toni Jordan will look at humour in Australian writing.
Philosopher Damon Young shares how fatherhood has changed him – as a writer, a thinker and a man. Changing nappies at three in the morning may be taxing, he says, but viewing the world afresh through a child’s eyes has made him a better philosopher and author.
I’m sitting at a cafe, laptop on the tiny faux-marble table, the dried corpse of an espresso beside me. This is my daily ritual; my confession and communion.
Every few days, a stranger stops, stoops down to my creased brow, and asks: ‘Are you a writer?’ The answer is ‘yes,’ with a half-smile that perhaps suggests I’m happy to say so, but weary of minutes stolen from my work.
I work in public not because I’m a poser (I am, of course), but because I have a three-year-old daughter at home. And on weekends, my school-aged son, too. While I can write in the study – with the noise of five stuffed toys yelling ‘Ipsy-Whipsy Spider’ and my son’s detailed deliberations on Boba Fett’s Mandalorian armour – I prefer the cafe. It is what Sartre rightly called a ‘milieu of indifference’. Aside from the odd curious soul, no one cares about my manuscript with its red crosses and editor’s quips, or my insane deadline.
I have two or three hours to myself – that is to say, two or three hours to think, write and earn a living. Then I will walk home, make lunch, take care of my daughter (a pink whirlwind), cook dinner, make tomorrow’s kindergarten and school lunches, clean the lounge – then juggle the balls known as work, marriage and leisure.
Cyril Connolly, in his Enemies of Promise, symbolised the relationship between parenthood and art with a single trope: the pram in the hall. ‘There is no more sombre enemy of art,’ wrote the English critic, ‘than the pram in the hall’.
There is some truth to this. Children certainly introduce a new conflict into the creative life: between parents, and within each psyche. Particularly for mothers – usually the primary caregivers – but also for committed fathers, kids require ongoing sacrifice: of hours and energy.
Even after a good sleep (note the ‘even’), I cannot think about the specifics of Plato’s Pythagoreanism and properly play Lego; cannot walk my son to school and dash off 800 publishable words for Fairfax; cannot wrestle with my motormouth daughter and have a conversation with my wife about William James and the psychology of character. I miss launches, festivals, panels, seminars – because I am chopping zucchini or trying to put pyjamas on a giggling, quacking sociopath. And then there is the logistical to-and-fro of marriage: many of my hours for work are purchased at the cost of my wife’s, and vice versa.
Some of this is rare, of course. Most couples take up the traditional division of labour: the man works, the woman stays at home. But even for mainstream families, the pram in the hall works its dark magic: the many minutes lost to homework, birthdays, school run; the intellectual fog of days conversing with an animated toddler, while part of the psyche longs for the asylum of quiet thought. At the very least, it pushes deeper the wedge between couples, as their daily rhythms and routines grow apart.
But Cyril Connolly was a bit soft. Children take their toll, of course. But if my career has suffered, my vocation has not. I am a better philosopher and author for my two monsters. Let me give a handful of examples.
Most obviously, I am more disciplined. I do not have the luxury of a full working day. My columns, books, radio interviews, talks – they are packed into short sessions of one to three hours. As a father of two, I now write more before lunch than I did in a day. I am more prolific, committed, judicious; less precious, dithering, vague. This is not simply because I don’t have the minutes to waste. It is also because in two hours I’ll be cutting out a cardboard Princess Leia or writing spelling lessons for my daughter, and I don’t want to have half my tiny mind still toying with Schopenhauer. I want to be genuinely there.
Fatherhood has also been rejuvenating. Not always physically: oddly, changing nappies at three in the morning can be taxing. But it has renewed my consciousness. First, by nudging me back to my own childhood: to forgotten zeal, haste, venom; to the incredible weakness of absolute dependence and its (seeming) arbitrariness. Second, to the astonishing facts of ordinary life, which are given for adults, but often irresistibly fascinating for children: insects’ zigzagging, human anatomy, the sensuality of sand. ‘The world is a bird with red, green and yellow feathers,’ wrote Nikos Kazantzakis. ‘How the child hunts this bird and tries to catch it.’ For me, children remove the bird’s camouflage.
As an author, parenthood has also been a psychological education. Someone once compared a baby to a hand grenade thrown into a marriage. But if this is so, it’s not simply because it is destructive, but also because it’s like a stun grenade: a bright flash, which suddenly (and perhaps painfully) sheds light on the psyche. It illuminates parts of oneself and others – spouse, parents, strangers – that were previously hazy or vague. It reveals tensions, impulses, biases, fantasies – and all with the intensity of higher stakes. To mix metaphors, children are floodlights into psychological architecture. Good philosophy, fiction and poetry can thrive with this confronting clarity.
These rewards are no obvious compensation when the household is sapped by quadruple influenza, or the weekend stolen by birthday parties. They’re tough to remember when the train ravings of a three-year-old have anaesthetised the mind.
But the literary virtues of parenthood are real, and I am – to get a little hip-hop for a moment – more ‘real’ for them.
Join us at the Wheeler Centre at 6.15pm tonight for What Men Really Think About … Fatherhood.
Series presenter Kim Tarrant will talk to journalist Martin Flanagan, educator and therapist Timothy O’Leary and father of five Kevin Fitzgerald. This is a free event, but bookings are recommended.
Working with Words is a series where we talk to writers about their work – and other bookish things. This time, we talk to Andy Griffiths, Australia’s most popular children’s writer.
Andy is best known for the comic pulling power of books like the Just series and The Day My Bum Went Psycho. But while his books are seriously funny, he’s just plain serious about the business of writing.
What was the first piece of writing you had published?
Well, if you want to go right back to the start it was in 1975, when I was 14 years old. Pursuit magazine, a Victorian education department publication which was distributed to schools across the state, published my short story, ‘Lost in Time’.
It was about being at a cricket game at the MCG with my dad and then, while attempting to buy three packets of potato chips and two cans of cola, suddenly finding myself transported 100 centuries into the future. It contained many of the same hallmarks of my work today … a first-person narrator (ie. me!) a believable everyday setting, a bizarre occurrence, some fun and games and then my desperate attempt to put things right again – but only making it worse in the process. It also contains my hopeless attempts at descriptive prose, which were no better then than they are today. My wife still laughs about my attempt to describe a complex time machine: ‘a room full of electronic controls, levers and switches – there was just about everything an electronics enthusiast could wish for’.
Nevertheless, I was paid ten dollars for my story. When they sent the payment, I initially thought it was a fine for an overdue library book called Lost in Time. Ironically, many years later when I submitted a story to Pursuit as an adult it was rejected. It took me a number of years after this to recover the pure storytelling voice I possessed as a 14-year-old.
What’s the best part of your job?
Having the time and freedom to follow my imaginative ideas and hunches and over many days, weeks and months watching them slowly coalesce into coherent characters, situations and stories – there’s nothing more exciting, satisfying or mysterious and I never get sick of this process.
I love nothing better than sitting down with a blank piece of paper and playing with words and ideas, challenging myself to come up with something new. The knowledge that you have to write something that you know is going to be read eagerly by many children – and the strong desire not to let them down – can really get the creative juices flowing.
What’s the worst part of your job?
Sitting down with a blank piece of paper and playing with words and ideas and NOT being able to come up with something new – especially when an urgent deadline is looming. Mostly I avoid deadline panics by being fairly organised well ahead of time (I usually know what I’m going to publish at least a year or two in advance), but there’s always surprises and last-minute schedule changes. I find my creativity works best when there’s plenty of time to revise, rethink and backtrack if necessary – I have to be relaxed so I can enter the playful state of mind I need to be in to create an entertaining story. My audience is too critical, and too savvy to go out with anything less than the best I’m capable of.
Of course, once a book is published I can always see ways I could have improved it … that’s the other worst part of the job!
Pippa Grandison and Patrick Brammall in Just Macbeth!: ‘Children are capable of understanding a great deal if you don’t patronise or talk down to them.’
What’s been the most significant moment in your writing career so far?
There’s been a lot, but maybe the one that comes immediately to mind was the opening night performance of Just Macbeth! by the Bell Shakespeare company at the Melbourne Arts Centre in September 2008. My wife Jill and I worked on adapting Macbeth for young people for almost three years. We wanted to fully involve them in the action and immerse them in as much of the original language of Shakespeare’s original script as we could get away with. Oh yeah, and it had to be funny as well.
It was an insanely difficult project and we gave up on it many times. But Bell Shakespeare were persistent and we always ended up going back to it. By the time it got to opening night, we were pretty sure we had something that worked, but there was no way of knowing until it was performed for real in front of a full house. Fortunately it worked. I’ve never sweated so much in my life.
It was significant for many reasons, not the least being that children are capable of understanding a great deal if you don’t patronise or talk down to them.
What’s the best (or worst) advice about writing you’ve received?
I had a number of great and inspiring writing teachers, such as Carmel Bird. They all gave me useful pointers and lots of encouragement, but perhaps the most practical advice I received was from Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg. She advocated vast amounts of writing practice.
Writing is a muscle, and like any muscle it gets stronger with use. In her book, Goldberg advocates doing a number of hours of timed writing practice each day. In these practice sessions, you set a countdown timer for a particular time and then write as fast as possible in order to evade the inner censor/critic that lurks in all of us.
By following this method you start discovering who you are as a writer and what subject matter and style really turns you on. It helped me to stop imitating other writers and find a voice that was all my own.
What’s the most surprising thing you’ve ever read or heard about yourself?
At the height of the controversy over The Bad Book – a book of cautionary tales gone mad – a feature article in the Herald Sun accused me of coming up with the idea for the book with my accountant as a way of swindling children out of their hard-earned pocket-money. I had to laugh at that one. Despite the success stories, if there’s one field that you DON’T go into to make money, it’s children’s writing. If you have a sincere desire to tell stories and entertain children and you’re willing to do that whether anybody pays you or not, then maybe you have a chance.
The Bad Book: ‘The Herald Sun accused me of coming up with the idea for the book with my accountant as a way of swindling children out of their hard-earned pocket-money.’
If you weren’t making your living by writing, what do you think you’d be doing instead?
I strongly suspect I’d still be the secondary English teacher that I was when I began writing funny stories to inspire my Year Seven English class to get excited about reading and writing. Either that, or a stand-up comedian. I employ a lot of stand-up comedy in my talks to children and I often think of my stories as extended stand-up monologues.
There’s much debate on whether creative writing can be taught – what do you think?
I think the principles of good writing can be taught – there are proven methods to improve a piece of writing. And I’ve had a lot of success at getting kids – and adults – to tell entertaining stories based on the events of their own lives.
The question of whether somebody is naturally suited to being a good storyteller, however, is a little more open I think. There are plenty of good writers who, for all their strengths, are not so great at telling story – and plenty of good storytellers who are pretty average writers. But in the end, I believe you get better at most things with a sincere desire to improve and the discipline to learn, study and practise.
In April 2013 I’m planning to publish a book called Once Upon a Slime: 50 Fun Ways to Write Stories … Fast! It will be a book of resources for school teachers, creative writing students and children to have fun with writing and storytelling.
What’s your advice for someone wanting to write books for children?
In a nutshell, I’d recommend that you write the sort of books that you loved to read as a child. And when you think you’ve done it read it out aloud to a small group and see if you have their complete attention. And if you don’t, be prepared to go back to the drawing board/writing desk for as many times as it takes. Did I mention persistence? Oh yeah … persistence!
Do you buy your books online, in a physical bookshop, or both?
I’ll love bookshops and paper books until the day I die, but I must admit I’m enjoying e-books – especially for non-fiction. I prefer to buy them through Booki.sh, so that I’m still supporting an independent bookshop.
(NB: Of course, as the proud author of my first and recently published digital-only book, Andypedia: A Complete Guide to the Books, Stories and Characters of Andy Griffiths, I may be open to accusations of a conflict of interest on this subject. I stand accused.)
What’s the book that’s had the most significant impact on your life or work – and why?
The Catcher in the Rye. I never got over the surprise and delight of the idea of an unreliable narrator. And Holden Caulfield is one of the most funny, sad and complex of all unreliable narrators!
Andy Griffiths is one of the guests for our Children’s Book Festival, a big day out of free fun held on the lawns of the State Library of Victoria on Sunday 25 March. You can check out the full program here. Andy will be signing books at 1.40pm and 3.40pm.
Andy was one of the 12 guests for this year’s Wheeler Centre Gala, Stories to Believe In. You can watch his talk here. His next book, the much-awaited Just Doomed!, will be released in April.
Today, we launch our new long-form review series, The Long View. Wheeler Centre director Michael Williams explains the thinking behind the series.
One of the most frustrating things about working at the Wheeler Centre is coming up with names for things. Now, a few months into our third year of programming, we’re doing at least half a dozen events a week, with numerous series and programmes, each of which needs a snappy name to give an idea of what it is and why it exists. It’s harder than naming a child (how much easier it would be if that panel series could be called Henry, or that lecture Persephone) or a rock band (I’m reserving the name Dewey Decimal, just in case). It can be tear-your-hair-out material.
In launching our new fortnightly series of current affairs events we agonised for weeks, trying to come up with a name that captured everything we wanted from it. We know what it is: a series that moves beyond the limitations of contemporary media, resists the glibness of the 24-hour news cycle, the inanity of constant commentary and opinion. A series that presents a more measured, more considered, more deliberative alternative. In The Fifth Estate we finally found that title: one that we feel captures the ambition and the complexity of the project.
But along the way, one of the ideas we kept coming back to was that of the ‘long view’, a concept that underpins so much of what we’re trying to do with the Centre. A long view denotes the luxury of perspective; of a broader context.
In establishing the Wheeler Centre, our team has constantly had to think about both our short term priorities and programming, and also the longer term goals and visions for what we’re trying to achieve. We believe passionately that the role of a Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas should go beyond merely housing our six resident organisations and coming up with a public programme of events. We believe there are other gaps to be filled and conversations to be held, and that there are ideas to be promoted and explored in ways other than through people sitting on a stage talking.
In 2010, we held a week-long series of events exploring the state of arts criticism in this country. Considering the worlds of books and theatre, music, visual arts and cinema, our panels reflected on the ways in which a limited or constrained critical culture held back our artists and our arts. One of the recurring themes was the shortage of outlets for long-form criticism and reviewing, a form of cultural commentary that all our panellists identified as essential for supporting rich artistic expression.
The week was provocative, thought-provoking and ultimately – as all good events seem to do – left us with a palpable sense that there was work to be done. There are amazing reviewers and critics in this country, doing extraordinary work in both conventional media outlets and through new and emerging channels. But the fact remains that the opportunities for publication of this criticism are becoming fewer and farther between. Newspaper sections devoted to arts criticism grow increasingly thin. Dedicated and specialist magazines and journals are finding the publishing environment ever more perilous.
So it’s with delight that we announce that, with the support of Copyright Agency Limited (CAL), we’ve commissioned ten long-form pieces of literary criticism for publication on this website over the next few months.
We think adopting a long view when it comes to considering and discussing the world of books, writing and ideas frees us up to dig deeper, to better understand the context into which new voices are publishing and the nature of the tradition to which they belong. We will feature contributions from critics and novelists, journalists and academics, encouraging readers and critics to take the time to consider our literature with a little more depth.
Plus, it gives us the chance to resurrect a name we otherwise weren’t using. So it’s win/win.
In The Long View’s first essay, Brilliant Careers: A Quintet of Australian Writers, Elisabeth Holdsworth reflects on Henry Handel Richardson, Christina Stead, Shirley Hazzard, Helen Garner and Delia Falconer.
We share five of our favourite links to news, reviews or articles that we’ve discovered over the past week.
The whimsical Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year was first awarded in 1978, to Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice. The shortlist for this year’s prize has just been announced, with contenders including Cooking with Poo, Estonian Sock Patterns All Around the World and The Great Singapore Penis Panic: And the Future of American Mass Hysteria. The full list, and explanations of just what these books are about, is at the website of The Bookseller, the book trade magazine that awards the prize.
The Thai cookbook Cooking with Poo is up for Oddest Title of the Year: ‘Poo’ is Thai for crab and the chef’s nickname.
Recently, we shared a Ron Charles video, ‘Sh*t Book Reviewers Say’, poking fun at typical reviewers' clichés, like ‘Kafkaesque’.
This week, the Guardian ran a blog by Jonny Geller, an agent and managing editor at Curtis Brown, who confessed ‘I think I might have done something really stupid on Twitter’. Using the hashtag #publishingeuphemisms, he translated the real meanings of the phrases publishers use when they’re rejecting authors. Among them: ‘this is too literary for our list’ (it’s boring); ‘the novel never quite reached the huge potential of its promise’ (your pitch letter was better than the book); and ‘sadly we are publishing a book similar to this next spring’ (it too has a beginning, middle and end).
Want more? Last year, a US website published the euphemisms used by some of the business’s most influential, like Bloomsbury’s Peter Ginna (‘acclaimed’ = ‘poorly selling’).
Jonny Geller: Sharing his secrets on Twitter meant ‘I had robbed myself of my tools.’
Next Thursday (8 March) is International Women’s Day. One of the hot topics of last year was the underrepresentation of women in the literary pages – sparked by statistics gathered by US organisation VIDA. One year on, VIDA has posted an update, looking at the past year in books pages and lit mags. Sadly, we’ve still got a long way to go, baby.
Website Flavourwire did its own math and estimated that ‘the vast majority’ of the publications’ statistics hover ‘at around 25% female, 75% male’. For example, in the London Review of Books, 29 of the book reviewers were female and 155 were male. Of the books reviewed, 58 authors were female while 163 were male. And in the New York Times book review section (one of the lesser offenders), 368 book reviewers were female and 448 were male; while of the authors reviewed, 273 were female and 520 were male.
Novelist Kirsten Tranter wrote for us last International Women’s Day on how the issue has played out in Australia. On 8 March this year, we’ll be publishing an update from her on what’s happened in our literary pages and on our prize circuit in 2011 – and what happens next. Stella Prize committee member Christine Gordon will deliver our Lunchbox/Soapbox at 12.45pm on the same day, on the topic Feminism is Personal. And in the evening, war conflict reporter Eliza Griswold will talk about her book The Tenth Parallel in another free Wheeler Centre event, at 7.15pm. Bookings recommended.
Bookslut’s Jessa Crispin said of the 2011 VIDA count, ‘London Review of Books, you break my goddamn heart’.
Lionel Shriver is always happy to wade into controversy. In the lead-up to International Women’s Day, she’s published an article on why, though ‘on a strictly definitive level, I am a “feminist”’, she’s uncomfortable with the label.
‘On the connotative level … the word gives me the willies … Self-confessed feminists are, it is broadly accepted, humourless, earnest, touchy, on the lookout for slights, sexless, and probably ugly. They are party-pooping pills who don’t know how to have a good time or take a joke. They are a big drag. Little wonder that younger women these days run a mile from the word.’
Shriver believes that feminists should be focusing on the big issues, like ‘genital mutilation, forced marriage, honour killings, and marital rape’ rather than being ‘tight-arsed and prim’ about things like raunch culture.
Lionel Shriver: A feminist ‘on a strictly definitive level’, but says ‘little wonder that younger women these days run a mile from the word’.
Tim Parks has a terrific piece on the New York Review of Books blog about the professionalisation of writing as a career, from the advent of studying (rather than simply reading) books in the 20th century, through agents, writers’ festivals and finally the 21st-century expectation that authors will promote themselves on Facebook and Twitter.
Parks traces the explosion of creative writing courses (and would-be authors) from the 1980s onwards back to studying books: readers ‘supposed that if you could analyse it, you could very probably do it yourself’.
Tim Parks asks: ‘Since when did being a writer become a career choice, with appropriate degree courses and pecking orders?’
Working with Words is a new Wheeler Centre web series, where we’ll talk to writers and publishing folk about their work and other bookish things. We kick off with Hilary McPhee, one of Australian writing’s most beloved and respected figures.
Hilary McPhee co-founded McPhee Gribble Publishers (with Di Gribble) in 1974. McPhee Gribble was one of the first publishers committed to nurturing Australian writers and writing; it launched the careers of Helen Garner, Tim Winton and many other successful Australian writers. These days, Hilary is an editor and writer.
What was the first job you had in publishing – and how did you get it?
Ancient history. Penguin Books was still at Ringwood when I was taken on as their first ever editorial anything. I then blew it by living with the MD and the parent company made it clear I had to leave. I started again writing stuff for McKinseys, then Heinemann rescued me for a year before Di Gribble and I started McPhee Gribble in 1974.
What was the best thing about working as a publisher?
Two things for me: working face–to-face with authors for as long as they needed it. And being able to think up books that were needed and persuade authors to write them.
What was the worst thing about working as a publisher?
The treadmill of having to dream up non-existent books for three-year forecasts: when McPhee Gribble was seeking investors during a big recession and later at Penguin and Pan Macmillan for the international companies’ three-year plans.
What’s been the most significant moment in your career so far? And why?
I didn’t ever think of myself as having a career, so can’t really answer this. I thought more of having something marvellous to do during the day.
What’s the best (or worst) advice you’ve received about the publishing industry?
Worst advice: Don’t publish fiction. Stick to books about ballet and horses.
Best advice: Remember that everyone in publishing in New York and London knows everyone else.
What’s the most surprising thing you’ve ever read or heard about yourself?
That I’m tough and really scary.
If you weren’t working in the world of books and writing, what do you think you’d be doing instead?
Anthropology and archaeology.
There’s much debate on whether creative writing can be taught – what do you think?
Writing can be taught, creative is something else. Short-term gigs are the best, I think. Mavericks are better than career academics. But it depends utterly on the writer – as student and as teacher. The ones that bother me produce a sameness to the work (and to the acknowledgements).
What’s your advice for someone wanting to break into publishing?
Work for as many parts of the industry as you can and work for peanuts.
If you could date a fictional character, who would it be – and why?
Edith Campbell Berry from Frank Moorhouse’s great trilogy. I adore the scale of her ambition to fix the world, her readiness to take huge risks with herself, and the portrait of the times from the 1920s to the 1970s.
If you could have dinner with a fictional character, who would it be – and why?
I’d rather have dinner with Frank, so I could try to get a glimmer of how he did it.
Hilary McPhee will be appearing in a free event at the Wheeler Centre this month to talk about her latest book, Memoirs of a Young Bastard, the edited diaries of celebrated film-maker Tim Burstall. The diaries provide a window into the past – and paint a stark portrait of the language of sex and gender conventions in 1950s Australia, an area of study close to McPhee’s heart.
Hilary McPhee’s Memoirs of a Young Bastard (in conversation with Wendy Tuouy) will be held on Thursday 23 February at 6.15pm at the Wheeler Centre. The event is free, but bookings are recommended.
Earlier this week, we tweeted the news that Penguin’s general publishing department is now accepting unsolicited manuscripts, in a new initiative titled, ‘The Monthly Catch’. Submissions are restricted to the first week (1-7) of every month, starting on 1 February.
It’s been six years or more since Penguin last accepted unsolicited manuscripts; previously, they considered only those represented by agents.
We knew this was pretty interesting news, but were surprised by just how interested our Twitter followers seemed to be. (There’s a reason Melbourne is a City of Literature, it seems. Lots of writers.)
We spoke to Penguin publisher Ben Ball to discover the thinking behind the company’s new embrace of the unknown and unfiltered.
‘Perhaps the main reason is that the digital world is bringing us closer than ever to readers, and therefore aspiring writers,’ said Ball. ‘We want to be an even more active part of that community.’
‘Our relationship with agents is of course vital, but although we haven’t accepted unsolicited submissions for the last few years, we’ve had a long and successful history of discovering new authors directly. So this is part of our past as well as future.’
Is there any kind of project Penguin are on the lookout for? “Nope,’ Ball told us. ‘We want to discover new things we like, and want to be surprised. We look for books of the highest quality, but we’re a broad church when it comes to subject.’
All manuscripts will be carefully read and assessed, though only successful submissions will be responded to.
Submissions should be sent according to strict (but easy to follow) guidelines, which can be found – along with full details – on Penguin’s website. Most importantly, perhaps: don’t send hard copies. They’ll only be recycled.
As we’ve reported before, other large publishers have their own versions of The Monthly Catch: Allen & Unwin has accepted manuscript pitches from aspiring writers every Friday for years. And last year, Pan Macmillan announced their own version of The Friday Pitch – Manuscript Monday (10am–4pm).
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