Tag Archives: Australian authors

Walter Mason on The Memory of Salt by Alice Melike Ülgezer

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memory of saltThe Memory of Salt
Alice Melike Ülgezer
Giramondo
9781920882907
August 2012 (buy)

reviewed by Walter Mason

One so rarely encounters God in modern Australian literature that it comes as a shock to see the word, especially so early on Alice Melike Ülgezer’s The Memory of Salt, an extraordinarily lyrical and original novel. The novel’s narrator, Ali, hears the name of God at the same time as she encounters a pointless and unexpected death. She realises that it is this call to the divine that has both swept her up in a mystical, though unconventional, devotion that comes close to defining her, and made her feel alien in a culture to which she has some claim.

Ali is an alien trapped between two different cultures. It is not just the conventional ethnic division, but the more profound divisions that fill this novel: divisions between secularism and faith, music and science, rationality and insanity. Her father, a carefree Turkish traveller, impresses her with his sense of freedom and his complete lack of attachment to the material realities of work, accommodation and even national belonging.

The Memory of Salt tells the story of her parents’ love affair, an ill-advised and doomed thing between a temporarily distracted middle-class Australian girl and a peripatetic Turkish Sufi. Theirs is a physically charged, intensely sexual attraction, and the intensity of their intentionally exotic love is played out in forbidden couplings in foreign hotel rooms, the call to prayer ringing in their ears as they fuck, smoke and doggedly ignore the impossibility of any kind of future together. Sex, too, is charged with a quasi-religious quality:

While they made love her body became a hymn calling out through the shadows and the fruit, through the streets and the lights… And as she spirited herself like an incantation across the city she became higher and higher until all the voices of all the children, and all the city lights were one.

The child of this mystical union, Ali, returns to Turkey to attempt to rescue her hopelessly stoned father, and while there she is drawn into the embrace of his family’s singular religion. A newly-pious aunt convinces her that this return to her ancestral religion is an act of grace and an exercise in destiny, and she urges the bookish and clever girl to read the Masnawi, the long, mystical poem of Rumi that addresses God as a lover and the ultimate source of being.

This is a rich and delicious novel. It brings to life modern Turkish Sufi culture in a unique and unexpected way, and is, in its own way, a particularly Australian literary artefact, blending cultures and experiences in a way that only this country and culture would seem to allow. While it demands to be read closely and attentively, it rewards with its sad and constantly surprising story. I think it marks a fascinating and important contribution to Australian literary culture, and shines some light on a world I have rarely encountered in books.

Disclaimer: I must declare that this book is published by Giramondo, a publishing house headed up by my erstwhile academic supervisor Ivor Indyk. And while I have complete faith in his academic advice, we don’t always see eye to eye in matters literary. In this case, however, I have been won over by the writing of Alice Melike Ülgezer, an author I am yet to meet, and this review represents my honest and uninfluenced opinion.

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walter3Walter Mason is a travel writer and speaker with a special interest in spirituality. His first book, Destination Saigon, was published by Allen & Unwin in 2010 to great critical acclaim. Walter has also featured in Vietnamese language broadcasts, and articles by and about him have run in the Vietnam Airlines in-flight magazine and other popular magazines in Vietnam. His book is sold in pirated editions in the backpacker districts of Saigon and Hanoi, where he is assured it’s a popular item. destsaigonDestination Saigon was named by the Sydney Morning Herald as one of the Ten Best Travel Books of 2010.

Trauma, kindness & starting with a bang: Jessie Cole on Darkness on the Edge of Town

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Jessie Cole

Fourth Estate, 2012
9780732293192
(buy paperback, ebook)

A woman crashes her car outside Vincent’s house. Vincent attempts to help the woman, and the baby in her arms, which may not have survived the crash. Rachel is her name and her arrival will have repercussions for Vincent and his daughter Gemma, and will draw attention (and judgment) in town. Darkness on the Edge of Town is Jessie Cole’s gripping and emotionally intelligent debut novel. Jessie and I have been getting to know each other for a little while now, sending missives from my urban jungle to her forest and back again, about animals, books, children, place, and more. I finally sent through a few questions to Jessie in order to introduce her, and Darkness, to you:

Darkness on the Edge of Town has ‘thrilling’ aspects, it moves along, it’s compelling, but I’d say it’s a character-driven novel. Could you tell us a bit about setting up the situation, and then letting it unfold? About pacing the story? How much of the whole story did you have when you began writing?

Good question! Firstly, the MS I’d written before Darkness was a very personal ‘family saga’ kind-of-story, set across several generations, and I decided after I finished writing it that I really enjoyed reading books that were more just a snippet of time. Stories that simply picked up in a certain part of someone’s life and stayed with them for a bit. I liked the immediacy of those stories, and the way they almost felt like they were told in real-time. And I suppose, I liked the smallness of them. And that was about as far as I’d gotten in terms of thinking consciously about what I wanted to write next. To be honest, I wasn’t sure I was ‘a writer.’ Only that sometimes I wrote.

darkness on the edge of townThen, the whole of Darkness came to me in a one big blast late at night. Beginning to end. Hit me like a whack across the back of the head. I have no real explanation for why or how that happened, but it was a very powerful moment and I knew from the outset that it was something special, something whole. It’s difficult to explain how a fully-formed story could come all-at-once, how it could even fit inside a mind in one instant, but it did. I didn’t think at all about setting up the situation, I just sat down and let Vincent talk. I imagined myself as a stranger in a pub who struck up a conversation with him. Him telling me his story— among all the noise and cacophony—and the story being just so hard and so strong he had to get it off his chest. The intimacy of it thrilled me. I wrote the first 20,000 words in a week.

In my mind Vincent and Gemma and Rachel were all compelling characters in traumatic but oddly intimate circumstances, and I was enthralled by them. Part way through the book I realised that I was writing something with some elements of a thriller. This was not purposeful, it was just how it came out. I’m not much of a deliberate writer. I don’t like to plan or over-think things. I do know that when I write I am looking to be thrilled—to feel a kind of wave or nervous tremor of emotion or sensation—and I do use this as a guide to know I’m on the right track. I didn’t think about pacing, the story had its own momentum. I trusted it. At some stage I saw Sonya Hartnett speak at the Byron Bay Writers’ Fest, and she said something along the lines of: ‘I like to start with a bang and end with a bang and have lots of bangs in between’. And I realised that this was what I was doing with Darkness.

Although Sonya Hartnett does plot out her novels, with different coloured sticky notes for different characters or something like that, I’ve been told! That’s what works for her. It fascinates me how each writer approaches a book or a story so differently (and it can be different for each book, too).

Yes, everyone works very differently. Sonya Hartnett has written so many novels, she must have it absolutely down-pat! I guess I just meant that last comment about the bangs in terms of pacing. When I heard Sonya say that, I realised that’s what I was aiming for in the pacing of Darkness, even though I hadn’t really known it. And yes, I think each book is different. I like what Jonathon Franzen says about how you have to become the person who can write the book you want to write, and how with each book you probably have to become a new person.

The connection that forms between the two young women in Darkness, Rach and Gemma, adds a layer to the story. They each come alive a little bit, and maybe grow and make some sense of what is happening to them (separately and together) through their conversations. Could you comment on this aspect of the novel?

I’m very interested in the power inherent in the kindness of strangers. I think in some ways Gemma’s generosity towards Rachel is a bit of a surprise. Teens are notoriously self-centred and maybe—in the circumstances—it would be natural for Gemma to be quite hostile and territorial. But she isn’t. I think that’s because she’s got this wonderful mix of knowingness and openness; she’s also hungry for adult wisdom and it’s in short supply. People who’ve been deprived can start to bloom with the smallest smatterings of attention, and I think Rachel and Gemma give this to each other in as much as they are able. To be truly heard is a powerful thing, and a lot of the time we don’t give each other that gift. I suppose I wanted to show how a kind of openness to connection can build something worthwhile and healing between people, even in the least likely of situations. I’m also interested in the idea of family. In Darkness none of the three main characters are related by blood, but the bonds that they form are, in many ways, familial. In our culture ideas about family can be so narrow. So nuclear. I guess I wanted to question that a little. What makes a family? How do they form?

I want to ask about the small town Australian setting. It’s really as rich as a setting can be, with its history and tensions, and its rituals (thinking about Gem drinking Jim Beam and Coke from a bottle, fumbling in her friend’s bedroom). How is the setting integral to the story?

This small-town-question always leaves me a little stumped. I know that sounds ridiculous because Darkness is so completely a small town story, but it’s really hard for me to have a lot of perspective on that. I’ve lived in the same small town almost all of my life. It’s funny, when people come to visit who haven’t been to my place before, they always say something along the lines of: ‘Wow, you really live in the middle of nowhere!’ And I always reply: ‘What do you mean? This is the centre of the universe!’ Which is, of course, a joke. But in a sense it’s also true, in that it is the centre of my universe. It’s the only way of living that I really understand with any depth.

In terms of how the setting of Darkness is integral to the story, I suppose for the characters of Vincent and Gemma it is that ambivalent mixture of security and claustrophobia. That sense that they are ‘known’ by the people around them, which is in some ways affirming, but that they are also judged or pigeonholed by who they once were, or how their lives have played out thus far. In a small town the past is not a foreign country. It’s a tangible presence that everyone remembers. And on top of that is the way that the private can be translated in small communities. I mean, once you drive up your driveway in the country no-one knows what goes on inside your house. You have no close neighbours to listen to the rhythms of the household, so I think people make up stories about each other based on whatever facts are at hand, but often these stories lack subtlety, or even truth. Maybe the difference in the city is that people don’t assume they know anything much about the people around them, whereas in a small town more assumptions are made. In Darkness, Vincent struggled to communicate what was happening between him and Rachel. He knew that he’d never be able to explain, but that all sorts of judgments would be made. The friction between what is really happening in the private sphere and what the town at large assumes—and how these assumptions play out—creates a lot of tension in the story.

Just as an aside, I think our culture favours the ‘escape’ narrative. The story where we escape our past and start our lives anew. Makeover. Transformation. Alteration. Just look at how many films turn on that fantasy. Especially now, when moving is so accessible. In some ways it is seen as a type of failure not to leave your past behind. And it is almost a given that anyone with any prospects should leave a small town and make something better of their lives. But I don’t think it’s as simple as that. And I’m interested in stories about people who decide to stay. I’m not sure how apparent it is in Darkness, but I feel there is a different kind of bravery required to live with your past, and it isn’t something that is celebrated all that much.

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Check out Jessie Cole’s website.

The Australian Women Writers Challenge 2012: how did I go?

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awwc2012After completing the recent survey on the Australian Women Writers Challenge website I decided it was time I looked at my reading and reviewing of books by Australian women writers in 2012.

On the Overland website Jane Gleeson-White has declared 2012 the year of Australian women writers, and has provided a fantastic summary of the year in relation to the challenge, the Stella Prize, and the success of female Australian writers in prestigious literary awards. Founder of the AWWC, Elizabeth Lhuede, has also written an extensive report on the challenge for the Huffington Post.

Collective blog/reviewing challenges aren’t something I usually partake in. There are many demands on my reading already (for Uni, for specific festivals and events, for commissioned reviews) but I thought this challenge was important. Personally, in previous years where I’d recorded my reading, I had noticed a bias (about 60-70%) towards books by male authors. I’m not alone in that, it’s something that has been well recorded and discussed recently (and is one of the reasons Lhuede began this challenge). I wanted to consciously break that habit, and share reviews of some of the books I came across. I also probably don’t have to explain the significance for me, as a writer of fiction and nonfiction and someone who intends to have a future in this industry, to publicly address a bias such as this.

So here are the books I have read (so far) by Australian women writers in 2012. See the hyperlinks for any reviews or interviews, and feel free to ask me about any of the others in the comments section below.

Sea Hearts by Margo Lanagan (young adult, review)
A Common Loss by Kirsten Tranter (literary thriller, review)
Careless by Deborah Robertson (literary/general)
Sweet Old World by Deborah Robertson (literary/character story, feature interview)
The Sea Bed by Marele Day (literary, review)
Cocaine Blues by Kerry Greenwood (popular, mention)
When We Have Wings by Claire Corbett (speculative, review)
The Fine Colour of Rust by PA O’Reilly (general/humour, review)
The Beloved by Annah Faulkner (literary, review [might need subscription])
The Book of Emmett by Deborah Forster (literary)
The Meaning of Grace by Deborah Forster (literary)
Knucked by Fiona Wright (poetry)
Bitter Greens by Kate Forsyth (historical, review)
Taking Shelter by Jessica Anderson (literary, classic author, review)
Taming the Beast by Emily Maguire (literary/general, mention)
The Fortunes of Richard Mahony by Henry Handel Richardson (classic, review)
Fishing for Tigers by Emily Maguire (literary/general, feature interview)
My Hundred Lovers by Susan Johnson (literary/general)
After the Darkness by Honey Brown (crime)
Nine Days by Toni Jordan (historical/general, review & ‘five facts‘)
Tarcutta Wake by Josephine Rowe (short fiction)
The Blood Countess by Tara Moss (popular/supernatural, mention)
All the Way Home by Kristin Henry (verse novel, review)
Hannah and Emil by Belinda Castles (historical, interview)
The Burial by Courtney Collins (historical, interview)
Sufficient Grace by Amy Espeseth (literary)
Whisky Charlie Foxtrot by Annabel Smith (literary/general, interview)
By the Book by Ramona Koval (memoir/nonfiction, do check out my feature interview with Ramona in the current Big Issue)
Darkness on the Edge of Town by Jessie Cole (literary/general/thriller, interview)
The Spider Goddess by Tara Moss (popular/supernatural, mention)
Black Spring by Alison Croggon (young adult, possible review forthcoming depending on Xmas madness)

I also read my friend Amy Barker’s excellent manuscript Paradise Earth, and I read many poems, short stories and essays by Aus women writers throughout the year in journals and anthologies.

fortunes of richard mahonySo far this year I’ve only read an abysmal 67 books in full (I have started a lot more…). 31 of them were by Australian women and more than half of them were by women in general, so I have done well at creating a positive bias this year. My absolute favourite book that I read this year was The Fortunes of Richard Mahony by Henry Handel Richardson. I wonder if I would have read Mahony if I hadn’t done the challenge? When The Lifted Brow asked me to review one of the Text Classics I deliberately went for a female author, and ended up with Mahony. It was worth doing the challenge for that alone: one of the best reading experiences I’ve ever had.

Will I be doing the challenge in 2013? Not exactly.The challenge has done the trick of making me more aware of my reading choices and has helped me discover some amazing literature. But I don’t need to do it as a challenge in 2013, I’ll just be more considered each time I face the pile. I’m also taking a month’s break from social media in January (!) in order to finish my thesis, and just to give myself some head space. So I’d prefer not to take on any specific challenges. I’ll have plenty of good reading to get on with for the Perth Writers Festival…

Please feel free to link to your own round-ups of the AWWC in the comments below!

Moments that transform us: AS Patrić on Las Vegas for Vegans

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I first met AS (Alec) Patrić when we were both participants in the Overland Masterclass for Progressive Writers, back in 2009. Alec is an incredibly hard-working, dedicated and talented writer. Since we met he has been published in almost every Australian literary magazine, has won prizes and has released two collections of stories. His latest is Las Vegas for Vegans (Transit Lounge). He is also working on a novel. I got in touch with Alec to ask him a few questions about his latest collection.

So I want to ask first about your process of discovery. Las Vegas for Vegans reaches far and wide in terms of subject, setting and style. Before we get to the philosophical and psychological elements, can I ask about the process of selecting and engaging with the material aspects of the stories? Why hotel rooms? Why insects and gods?

Until now I didn’t realise how many of my stories are set in hotel and motel rooms. Then there are stories set in a post office and a book shop, rooms in hospitals and shelters, a boarding school and an acting academy, an airplane toilet cubicle and even a spaceship. Those settings open doors to insects and gods, and vitally, the stories themselves. ‘The Eternal City’ takes place in a hotel room in Rome but that material aspect is fundamental to the story. It’s not just a location. I don’t think it could be set in a Melbourne flat. ‘Las Vegas for Vegans’ takes place in a hotel that looks out at the Mojave desert and that’s just as crucial to the characters and ideas in that piece. ‘The Mirage Inn’ revolves around a motel on the edge of the Simpson desert, but the difference between the two deserts is significant. In one, a character has more of a chance to find himself, and in the other, he’s likely to lose himself—one man wants to find his way home and the other wants the opposite. If a story is set in the family home, as with ‘Beckett & Son’ or ‘Daughters of Vesuvius’, it’s because family is the chief feature of those stories. Whenever I write a short story or novel, the first thing I look for is a vehicle for the characters and ideas I want to explore. If you’re asking me specifically, why a hotel room, my answer is because it strips a person down to a fundamental state of transition, and the ways we change, moments that transform us for better or worse, is what interests me most about the characters I’m creating or discovering in books when I’m reading.

I’ve always been fascinated by the ‘in-between’ space of hotels and motels, too, so I really enjoyed those stories. Out of the settings and characters in Las Vegas for Vegans comes a range of intellectual, philosophical and moral enquiries. At least as a reader I was faced with questions about love, family, society, history (and personal history), death and what may or may not come after; space, existence… Do you see the stories like this? Or do you think there is more of a single overarching concern?

I don’t write stories with a theme in mind or to explore a philosophical idea or examine a moral, though I do feel gratified that you found yourself responding to those things in my book. I don’t want to educate my reader, but if there are those features you mention in Las Vegas for Vegans, they arise because what I’m doing is testing my own existence in each one of the stories. (I think that’s why writing can be so hard, even though it seems the simplest of activities—to sit comfortably at a desk and tap away at a keyboard). Despite the highfaluting rationale, the primary concern for me is always the dramatic potential of narrative and vitality of character. Hopefully, this translates to nothing more complicated than a great story and my motivation is as basic as wanting to be a compelling storyteller. Anything else is a bonus.

I was wondering if you could tell us a bit about your interest in flash fiction, or very short stories (of which there are a few in the collection).

A flash fiction might seem an exotic bird but they’re as common as canaries. Any three-minute song you’ve ever enjoyed is a flash fiction. Lyrics have word counts of 500 words or less and they open up the world through a window we call ‘story’. That’d be my technical definition of a flash fiction. Interesting articles in the newspaper might qualify as well, perhaps even a blog post or a weekend anecdote told at work Monday morning. And yet when we’re offered the same creature on a literary page it’s a dodo. A song has a singer and musical instruments (often an accompanying video) to help the story out the window, so it’s not easy getting the same story to fly off the page with so few words and none of those accoutrements. Creating a character, an involving narrative, satisfying beginning/middle/end—with tens of thousands of words—is a lot easier. That’s why many readers think the novel is the only place to find what they’re looking for. I don’t think we’re really interested in birds though; how big or small, how high they fly or how pretty the feathers. It’s still all about the song and what it does to our heart/mind/soul. The only question for me is whether that song gives us another way to fly.

It seems like you do want to play with different ‘effects’ though, in terms of what a story does to heart/mind/soul. Some of the stories in Las Vegas for Vegans are warm and tingly, like ‘Below Zero’; others have a kind of blank emotional tone. Numbness itself is a theme of the story ‘Measured Turbulence’. Are these tonal explorations deliberate? Or do you find it happens organically depending on what mood or state of mind you’re in when you sit down to begin a story?

It’s a lovely irony that the warmest piece in Las Vegas for Vegans is a story called ‘Below Zero’, but you’re right of course. It’s a flash fiction that is essentially a burst of love. It’s about falling for a person before they’re born. I wrote it when my eldest daughter was in the womb and I was delighted to be able to read it to her recently. Summer is almost three years old now. ‘One in a Million’ is at the other end of the spectrum, perhaps the coldest story in the collection. It’s about emotional isolation and so that blank tone was certainly intentional. That sense of ice-cold reality is what I wanted to capture. The emotional tone was primary. Tone is usually secondary to most other stories. ‘Measured Turbulence’ was inspired by Bunuel, Lynch and Fassbinder, and I have found in many of their films there’s a kind of placid tone that drifts along until very disruptive events storm through the narrative.

Tonal variation across a book (whether novel or collection) is vital to me. Many writers choose a narrative voice, rhythm, mode, and write in the same way in story after story, and often, novel after novel. That bores me as a reader. John Updike can be too persistently elegant in the same way that David Foster Wallace can be persistently pyrotechnic. As a writer, I want to do more than lull my reader into a narrative dream (or nightmare). I want to wake my reader up to an experience, jolt them with an idea, shock them with the warmth of an emotion, chill with a realization a few seconds later. And yet variation in tone is only valuable if it can open up the fissures of heart/mind/soul. A sentimental story like ‘Below Zero’ benefits from being very short—also from the brutal emotional tone of ‘The Mirage Inn’ which precedes it in Las Vegas for Vegans, and revivifies a reader ready to move on to the following story. ‘Boys’ is next, and I hope a reader at that point has no idea what might happen. Which is more true to life. And I suppose what I’m hoping is that I can offer a totality of experience with a book. One moment you have a careful hand to your wife’s womb waiting for a movement and the next moment the world breaks in with whatever comes next.

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Alec also interviewed yours truly in 2011 for Verity La, an online magazine he founded. If you like our banter, you might want to check that out.

The alpha brother: Annabel Smith on Whisky Charlie Foxtrot

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Fremantle Press, November 2012
9781922089144
(buy paperback, ebook)

Whisky and Charlie are identical twins, but they couldn’t be more different. Whisky is in a coma after a serious accident, and Charlie has to face up to the kind of brother—and person—he’s become. Whisky Charlie Foxtrot moves between the brothers’ earlier lives and their difficult present. It’s a great read; warm, multi-layered, moving, and satisfying. I asked the author, Annabel Smith, a few questions about the novel…

I’d like to ask first about the brothers. Very slowly throughout the narrative you reveal that, while Whisky is certainly no angel, Charlie may have also been pretty hard on him. Could you tell us a bit about developing the relationship between the brothers?

In my first draft of WCF I believed I was writing a book about a decent guy and his wanky, unscrupled ‘evil’ twin. I got to around Chapter seven (Golf) and Whisky was getting pasted. Then, my friend and mentor, Richard Rossiter, guided me to introduce a crisis into the story, to add drama in the relationship, and thus, Whisky’s coma was born. After that it became challenging to hold onto my idea of Whisky because it feels wrong to tell nasty stories about someone who is in a coma! As my perspective on Whisky shifted, so too did my perspective on Charlie. Charlie’s realisation—that Whisky might not be all bad and that he himself might have played a part in the demise of their relationship—was really my own realisation about the truth of their relationship.

It’s great that you’ve maintained that process of realisation for the reader. So when you decided to make a coma the crisis, how did you go about it? It seems like you’ve done research not just into the coma state but into the ways that people deal it.

You’re right, I had to understand coma both in a medical sense and also in terms of its impact on family and friends. For a long time, I wasn’t sure whether Whisky would recover from the coma or not. So I needed to know for how long someone could plausibly remain in a coma; what kind of therapy they would receive and other health threats they might face while in a coma state. In case Whisky woke up, I researched recovery, rehabilitation and the physical and mental implications of long-term coma states. In the event that he would not recover, I explored right-to-life issues and the euthanasia process. The last thing I wanted was for readers to pick holes in the science. So I gathered statistics, diagrams of the brain, explanations of testing procedures and diagnostic tools etc. I don’t really have a science brain so it was pretty heavy-duty reading for me!

I used both medical and anecdotal sources and came across some amazing recovery stories and also many heartbreaking accounts without happy endings. There are lots of forums on the internet for the loved ones of comatose patients and they were an excellent source of material. People contribute advice about things they’ve learned along the way, tips on what helps them get through; some just need an outlet to share their stories with others who understand what they’re going through.

As well as information that had dramatic possibilities, I gathered details that would help to make the story feel real, especially to readers who might have some knowledge of coma, all of which were collated into a giant tome which I printed out and carried round with me for months on end. I was so happy to retire that wad of papers, I can tell you.

I’d like to ask about using the phonetic alphabet to build the structure of the book, and to introduce characters and themes. I think it works so well. Did you have that in place from the beginning? Were there ever any issues adhering to it?

The alphabet was in place right from the start. It was a great springboard for giving me ideas about episodes in the twins’ lives. But it also posed some challenges. Any of the chapters with names (Charlie, Juliet, Oscar) were simple—they became character names. But ‘Yankee’ kept me awake at night. For a long time I had no idea how I was going to work that in. Others posed problems in terms of chronology. X-ray, for instance, was an easy idea to work in, given that Whisky was hospitalised, but I really wanted that information to appear earlier in the novel. I had to do some tricky manoeuvring, like using flashbacks, to make some of the chapters work.

You said you received some valuable advice from Richard Rossiter while writing the book. At what point do you show your work to others? Is it something you’d encourage all writers to do?

I was part of a writing trio (with Amanda Curtin and Robyn Mundy) while writing Whisky Charlie Foxtrot, so I started showing drafts to them almost from the start. I found it really helpful to have feedback at an early stage, when I was still uncertain about the voice, the style and whether the story was appealing or compelling to readers. Once I got on a roll with it, I had more confidence and felt less in need of ongoing feedback. After finishing the first draft, I sought more feedback, and from a wider circle. I think it’s critical to have perceptive readers whose feedback you trust to look at your work. If you can find the right person/people, they can support you when you lose faith in yourself, brainstorm a way through issues in the text, and notice things you can no longer see because you’re too immersed in the work. I have no doubt that the feedback I received made my book stronger and more satisfying to read.

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This post will be added to my tally in the Australian Women Writers Reading + Reviewing Challenge.

Dignified survival: Courtney Collins on The Burial

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Allen & Unwin
September 2012
9781743311875
(buy paperback, ebook)

When Courtney Collins’ debut novel The Burial landed in my pile last month, it went straight to the top. Set in the early C20th, it’s inspired by the story of Australia’s last bushranger, Jessie Hickman. Jessie has done something she can’t turn back from, and spends the majority of the novel on the run. It’s blood, bone, grit and earth, but peacefulness too—the quiet of the dead; of being underground or being far above the world, far up the side of a mountain. The peace of an unexpected friendship, or for the other characters, a respite from your obligations: a beautiful tattooed woman; a drug haze.

Warren Ellis providing a cover quote for this novel may tell you more than even the quote itself. The Burial slots in nicely with contemporary Aus Gothic works like Chris Womersley’s Bereft, Patrick Holland’s The Mary Smokes Boys and films like The Proposition, while being entirely different; entirely Collins’ own. I asked her a few questions about the novel…

I want to ask first about the tone, and aesthetic, of The Burial. I feel it was important for you to get that right. I see it as Aus Gothic, almost glamorously gritty. Could you tell us a bit about this?

Courtney Collins                                c/o A&U & Lionfish Media

I’ve been interested in the Gothic, more particularly, the Southern Gothic, for a while. Initially, it wasn’t deliberate. Then one day I identified that my all-time favourite writers—Carson McCullers, Zora Neale Hurston, Cormac McCarthy, were all writing out of that tradition. So I began to look at why that was drawing me in.

For me, those writers give voice to characters who might be judged at first glance as ‘oppressed’. Often coming from poverty or violence, they don’t necessarily rise above it, as much as continue to move through it in a way that is dignified and surprising. Take the teenage Mick Kelly in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, obsessive about music, longing for a piano and practicing for hours and hours a day, or Janie unashamedly sexual and aching for her own fulfilment in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Or John Grady Cole in All The Pretty Horses whose goodness comes from within, not from observing the laws or abiding the strictures of the day. You know, they’re all dancing to their own beat.

So The Burial has all of the tropes of the Southern Gothic—its full of hard-luck and derelict settings, racism and violence. There’s probably a whole thesis in how the Southern Gothic and the Australian Gothic differ (and it’s actually more satisfying to test it out in fiction) but I’ll have a go…

The way I think it is different is the relationship that settlers here have had with the landscape, and perhaps an abiding fear of it. Freud has an essay called ‘The Uncanny’ that describes it well, using the German word ‘unheimlich’, as in how the homely is made to be unhomely.

But I didn’t want to wall myself in with this idea. After all, the landscape invokes awe as much as fear. Besides, the characters are the thing. And they should rip right through it with no regard for the tropes of a genre!

Jessie is certainly ‘dancing to her own beat’ through the narrative, while being plagued by threat and danger. I suppose the term ‘survivor’ is too reductive, as you’ve explained the complexity of these kinds of characters above. But what drew you to her, specifically? How did she form?

In some ways, Jessie came to me fully formed. Jessie Hickman, the woman who inspired the story, was very, very good at escapes and true to form, in writing her there were times I found her illusive, and not wanting to be captured or conjured.

But there was a moment when we collided and in a sense I had to lend this character some of my own flesh and blood. And by that I mean I went through many experiences in my life while I was writing the book considering how Jessie would interpret events but more, how she would feel in this landscape or that and what would keep her spirit so tuned to life and surviving, when all around her, there is death.

Truthfully, when I finished writing the book, I felt bewildered by her absence, after being in her company for so long.

I rarely hear a writer admit that, about becoming attached to their character/s. What about the setting? Have you spent much time in that kind of landscape? And how did you recreate the era?

I’ve spent some proper time in the country. I grew up in a small country town in NSW and then after years of living in cities I began to really yearn for more space, for life in the bush. A lot of the novel was written where I live now, in an old postmaster’s cottage on the Goulburn River in Victoria.

Living here it’s not such a stretch to imagine the world of the novel. We still have to chop wood for fires, try to grow our own food and find ways to manage the isolation of it. It’s not until I drive into Melbourne that I actually notice how dusty and covered with dog hair I am.

Sounds lovely. I love the opening, with Houdini, and how it sits in the back of your mind throughout. A trick, a narrow escape and a gruesome surprise… Can I also ask about the unconventional choice of narrator, who comes in just after this?

When I had my first go at telling this story, I tried to tell it from Jessie’s first person p.o.v. I had her prison mugshot staring down at me and I laboured over the telling for about a year. It didn’t work at all. It was a first drawn out attempt and it was a failure. The reason it failed was because I was trying to put poetry and whimsy into this woman’s mouth yet what I was discovering about her character was that she was a woman of few words. Jessie is all about action. And in ways she was hardened. So to me, the baby was part of that buried self, that innocent trusting self that was so far from the Jessie that we meet. Thinking back, it was my first tingling moment, actually understanding what other writers talk about when they say they ‘discovered the voice’ of their novel. After acknowledging the failure and then pressing on came the voice of the kid. It was an insistent voice and my way of capturing it was to write it and then speak it aloud as the measure. It was a call to its mother. It had to be lyrical. It had to be sweet to the ear.

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This post will be added to my tally in the Australian Women Writers Reading + Reviewing Challenge.

Home, strange home: Fishing for Tigers by Emily Maguire

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Picador, 9781742610832
September 2012 (buy paperback, ebook)

A version of this article was originally published in The Big Issue no. 415.

Somewhere around the six-week mark of Emily Maguire’s 2008 visit to Hanoi, she realised she was in love: ‘Actual love—the kind where you wake up smiling in anticipation, and you fall asleep deeply, deeply happy every night,’ she says.

Maguire was working in the English translation department of a Vietnamese publishing house as part of a residency through the cross-cultural institution Asialink, and says falling for the city took her entirely by surprise.

‘I’ve travelled quite a bit and I can find something to appreciate or enjoy about almost everywhere I’ve been, but I’ve never had the experience of loving a place like that’. Hanoi became the setting for Fishing for Tigers, the acclaimed author and journalist’s latest novel.

It’s the story of thirty-something Mischa, who has been living in Hanoi for six years, bearing the scars of an abusive relationship. She is satisfied, living day-to-day, in Vietnam. Then an ex-pat friend introduces her to his 18-year-old Vietnamese-Australian son. Cal is attractive, idealistic and kind. Mischa and Cal explore the city, exchanging ideas. They also begin to explore each other.

‘Mischa is not in Vietnam during a time of war, but she is, like Thomas Fowler [of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American], resistant to the idea that anything going on around her is her business,’ Maguire explains. ‘She thinks of herself as outside of Vietnam’s social and political history and present circumstances. She thinks of herself as a disinterested observer, but Cal forces her to face up to her own complicity.’

Emily Maguire

Cal causes an awakening in Mischa, as do the stories of the Vietnamese women Mischa encounters through her work. ‘Vietnamese history—ancient and recent—is full of stories about incredible female warriors and Mischa admires them even as she recognises that the on-paper veneration of powerful women does not carry over to their lived experience,’ Maguire says. ‘The truly impressive thing about Vietnamese women warriors is that they sacrificed themselves for the good of their people. Mischa has been, necessarily, very self-centred for years… But [her] intensifying relationship with Cal forces her to think about herself again as someone whose actions and words affect others.’

This is compounded when Mischa’s sister back in Sydney becomes very ill. For Mischa, Maguire says, ‘that tension between self-protection/fulfilment and care for others becomes kind of unbearable.’

In Fishing for Tigers, Mischa and Cal’s relationship is treated with maturity, as are the other complex, charged bonds between characters in Maguire’s novels Taming the Beast (2004), The Gospel According to Luke (2006) and Smoke in the Room (2009). It’s plausible that the characters are drawn together, and their age difference is not sensationalised. Concepts of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ are explored as being both separate, and fluid. Maguire herself feels ‘powerfully tempted’ to stay in Vietnam whenever she is there, but says she also misses her family back in Sydney. ‘If I’m away, I’m missing them painfully and if I’m home, I’m yearning to be gone. Still, it’s a nice tension—being pulled between love and wonder and back again.’

In the character of Mischa, Maguire is investigating a more extreme and disorienting form of tension between competing ideas of home. Mischa has come to Vietnam to remove herself from a damaging situation. ‘Home has been kind of a horror for her,’ Maguire explains. ‘But even as she comes to love Hanoi, she doesn’t “belong” there in any real sense of the word. She doesn’t speak the language or have more than a shallow understanding of the culture,’ Maguire continues. ‘And yet, in terms of feeling a sense of rightness with where she is… then that’s Hanoi. It doesn’t make sense, it shouldn’t be true and yet it is. She feels right being there and that’s that.’

Cal’s background provides contrasting ideas of belonging. He is overwhelmed by many aspects of Vietnam, including what he perceives as commercialisation and Westernisation. In the scene where Mischa and Cal visit the Cu Chi tunnels, an underground network that once served as a base for Viet Cong guerrillas, Cal, disturbed, asks: ‘What kind of country turns this kind of shit into a goddamn tourist park?’ Mischa’s reply is: ‘Every kind.’

But there’s an awareness that grows in Cal, especially once he visits the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City (which most of the characters still call ‘Saigon’): ‘He doesn’t want to think of Vietnam’s history as his, but it absolutely is,’ Maguire says. ‘His life is what it is, because his grandparents chose to take their kids and become part of the diaspora.’

As with Maguire’s other works, both fiction and nonfiction, the style is natural and elegant but the essence is deep. There are questions here of not just where but how and with whom (if anyone) a person can belong. And there are even bigger questions regarding one’s place in existence. The characters are memorable and the descriptions of place have the ability to stir longing in the reader.

Maguire has been back to Vietnam for at least a month every year since 2008. She’s seen significant changes in even this short time and, as her relationship with the city deepens and her experiences gain context, she begins to notice more, or see the same things differently. Now, the very familiarity of the place works on her: ‘[When] I arrive now I have this whole physiological reaction as soon as I hear and smell and breathe Hanoi. I feel lighter and happier and ultra-alert,’ she reflects. ‘I head out on long walks without a map and I feel alive and alert and weirdly, impossibly, home.’

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This post will be added to my tally in the Australian Women Writers Reading + Reviewing Challenge.

Treasures from the past: Belinda Castles on Hannah and Emil

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Belinda Castles is the author of Falling Woman and The River Baptists (for which she won the 2006 Australian/Vogel Award). Her latest novel is Hannah and Emil, which traces two characters across Europe, the UK and Australia and charts their complex struggles, and the love that pulls them through. Emil fights for Germany in WWI but is forced from his home with the rise of Nazism in the 1930s. Hannah is independent, talented and resourceful. As a child she longs to be an adult, and as an adult she bravely faces the challenges thrown at her. Hannah and Emil’s childhoods make up the early chapters, they are completely vivid and absorbing and help us, as readers, to understand their decisions later on.

I’ve been lucky enough to meet Belinda a few times as we are/were both members of the Writing and Society Research Centre at the University of Western Sydney. We were also at the same conference in London last year. I thought I’d get in touch with her to ask her a few questions about Hannah and Emil…

I know that the story of Hannah and Emil emerged from the story of your grandparents. What did you first find out about them that led to your interest and research, or is it something that’s been in the back of your mind for a long time?

I had always found my grandmother Fay an interesting figure. She was a widow and translator, living in a large flat in West Hampstead surrounded by books, papers and typewriters. She still travelled for work when I was a child. Dad told us that when his father Heinz died, he learned two things about his parents that he had not known before. Fay told him that she was Jewish, meaning that so were her sons: Dad and my uncle. The other thing she told him was that Heinz had had a German wife and son before she met him, and that the son had grown up to fight in the Hitler Youth Army. This pair of secrets, along with the many other intriguing things I had learned about their lives, seemed magnetic. Whenever the subject of the war came up, those secrets were what I thought of.

Their stories do give us a unique perspective (in terms of English language literature) on war, particularly WWII. Emil’s experiences of persecution and discrimination, and the way these experiences distance him from those he loves, makes up much of the narrative. Can you tell us a bit about this struggle? And perhaps about some of the research you must have done on refugees of this era?

I got the impression, perhaps from my father, perhaps from pictures, that Heinz was a loner. His experiences in the First World War, his political opposition to the Nazis, his losses and his ultimate exile from Germany set him apart from others, in my mind at least. It seemed from my reading about the men who came to Australia on the Dunera that the camp at Hay, although unusual in its vibrant intellectual and cultural life, was like other institutions. They may be sociable places, with some of that sociability enforced, but there’s also loneliness, made sharper in this case by the strangeness of the landscape to Europeans and the worry about all those they had left behind. For my character Emil I felt that even when he is among those he loves, and although the people he loves are deeply important to his sense of himself, he is always on some level alone. Perhaps that’s why I gave him a friend on his journey—Solomon Lek. Sometimes the people who go through the same things we do hold a special place, because we don’t have to explain to them what has happened to us. They know because it’s happened to them too, and so there’s no danger of being misunderstood.

Hannah is such a well-drawn character. From her childhood on she is liberal-minded, independent, smart, creative. You’ve talked a bit about finding your grandmother Fay an interesting character. Can you tell us a bit more about developing Hannah’s story? Did you have fun doing it?

It was different to writing the character of Emil. I knew my grandmother for one thing and I remember her as forthright, talented at languages and intellectually engaged. She was fairly crotchety in old age but I was given various documents that stripped away the frustrations of old age and revealed what she might have been like as a girl and young woman. It’s a strange gift to have your memories of someone supplemented in this way. Her unstoppable momentum was in these documents but also her youthful idealism and unwavering loyalty to my grandfather. It was very moving to me to read her memories of childhood, coming back to her fifty years later, as her more recent memories failed her. And in letters to friends in Australia after she had returned to England she remembers when she was ill her friend Valentine climbing in her window with chicken soup and then washing and hanging out the nappies. It felt like discovering treasure to have such moments survive and find their way to me.

One of the reasons I love reading novels is that you feel that you come to understand a person who is not necessarily the most perfect of beings on the outside, because you get past the awkward surface of people. Writing Hannah was that process magnified. I did feel very moved by my grandmother’s life as I learned about it and imagined it into a new form. I felt enriched and expanded by the process.

I’m sure she would be so proud of you, too. The warmth of your discoveries comes through in the character. Finally, there are some stunning images in the novel, particularly of people and bodies: the darkness at the soldiers’ throats comes to mind. These descriptions give the story such resonance. Could you tell us a bit about creating these images? Are observation and note-taking part of this process? Do the images come before or during writing, or even in the rewriting?

Thanks, Angela. Well, during writing I suppose. I am not a big note-taker, although when I’m in the middle of something bits and pieces come to mind and I write them down. But it’s a very enjoyable part of writing to find all these moments waiting for you. That feeling of: I didn’t know I knew that! I think all writers enjoy that. It’s why days with writing in them are better than days without writing in them. Always something new.

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This post will be added to my tally in the Australian Women Writers Reading + Reviewing Challenge.

Bits & bobs: Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, Kibble & Dobbie

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As you may have seen, my Melbourne Writers Fest pre-festival blogging is in full swing. I’ll be cross-posting some of the longer posts over here, but do check in on the blog for Steph Convery and Mark Welker’s posts, too, and to find out more about the festival. And please do come along to the FREE Morning Read sessions, hosted by yours truly!

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I haven’t had a chance to blog about some recent awards, so I’ll try to sum them up (and link to others’ posts) now. It was very cool to hear that Foal’s Bread by Gillian Mears (see my notes on the book) won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction. Here’s a full list of the winners:

Fiction: Foal’s Bread by Gillian Mears
Poetry: Interferon Psalms by Luke Davies
Nonfiction: An Eye for Eternity: The Life of Manning Clark by Mark McKenna
Prize for Australian History: The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia by Bill Gammage
Young adult fiction: When We Were Two by Robert Newton
Children’s fiction: Goodnight, Mice! By Frances Watts, illustrated by Judy Watson

Sue Terry attended the PM’s Lit Awards post-announcement panel. There’s a great write-up of it on her blog Whispering Gums. 

View the official website for the awards here.

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I announced the winners of the Kibble and Dobbie Awards, which ‘aim to encourage Australian women writers to improve and advance literature for the benefit of our community’, on Twitter and Facebook. It’s still strange to me that these awards don’t get very much attention. The Kibble Literary Award recognises the work of an established Australian female author and is worth $30,000. This year the award went to Gail Jones for her novel Five Bells. I’ve read all of Jones’ books and I think the award is well deserved, she’s a unique, lyrical, elegant writer. My favourite work of hers is Dreams of Speaking.

The Dobbie Award for a first-time published author (worth $5000) went to Favel Parrett for Past the Shallows. I haven’t had a chance to read this yet. Chair of the judging committee Professor Robert Dixon said Parrett’s novel ‘is a superbly written, raw and realistic story. She successfully paints a moving account of the emotions that exist in a Tasmanian fishing family’.

Find out more about the awards here.

Parsley and blood: Bitter Greens by Kate Forsyth

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April 2012
Random House
9781741668452
(buy paperback, ebook)

I love a good historical novel: the ability to contrast past and present, to be absorbed in a world that’s (mainly) unfamiliar, and to experience vastly different circumstances, pressures, and social customs. Kate Forsyth allows us to taste, smell and feel 16th Century Italy and late 17th Century France in Bitter Greens. What does it feel like, in these eras and places, to sit for an artist, to go hunting, to be locked up with the fleas in the Bastille, to be pregnant? Bitter Greens revolves around three female characters who are, in many ways, restricted, but who celebrate their small freedoms. We have Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de la Force, a true historical character—one of the first writers of literary fairy tales and historical fiction (much of it written while she was locked-up in a nunnery). She is known as the author of the story ‘Rapunzel’. Besides giving Charlotte-Rose her own narrative, with plenty of sass, intrigue, romance and danger, Forsyth embeds within it a fleshed-out version of Rapunzel, and within that, the story of the witch in that tale.

The Rapunzel story is about a girl called Margharita, who was promised to the witch during desperate circumstances at her birth. The witch and courtesan Selena Leonelli (or ‘La Strega’) comes for her when she is seven years old, renaming her Petrosinella (meaning ‘little parsley’). She puts her in a home until she is old enough be of use to her.

My favourite story was that of Selena, the witch. How does one become so fearful and desperate that they turn to dark magic? And how do they learn it? The ensuing tale is rich, dark and plausible.

Forsyth has obviously conducted much research and, as mentioned, she brings the senses of history to life, the good and the bad (though the bad is often more fun): the stenches, the cold, the blood. One of the main themes is entrapment, particularly for women, but men also suffer duties to parents, royalty and religion. Margharita, thinking about why her parents might have given her away, wonders if being taken in by La Strega were simply another choice (of few): ‘She could have been sent into service, apprenticed to a craftsman, enclosed in a convent or, in time, married—all of these were different types of imprisonment.’ This theme is echoed throughout the book. Charlotte-Rose, for example, is at different times trapped into roles in the court of the French king (due to a lack of funds, her bloodline and her ‘heretical’ Huguenot background): she is thrown into jail, she becomes involved in courtships because the ‘walls’ of marriage may at least allow her time to write, and she is physically locked up in the nunnery: ‘I had thought I could bend the world to my will. I had thought I could break free of society’s narrow grooves, forging a life of my own desire. I had thought I was the navigator of my soul’s journey. I had been wrong.’

Charlotte-Rose begins to work with Sœur Seraphina in the garden at the convent. In one scene the bees in the garden act as a metaphor for the sexual politics of the time. Seraphina has to explain to Charlotte-Rose that there is no ‘king bee’, but a queen, who spends all her life within the hive. Charlotte-Rose is amused: ‘Why, it is said that the beehive is the best example of how a kingdom should be run, with all the workers serving the king. And we’re always [at court] being preached sermons about how His Majesty the King must rule with sweetness and the sting, just like the king bee’.

There are moments of relief, for the three main characters, from their walls: moments of passion, nature, art, songs, secrets and stories. And a bit of magic.

I enjoyed Bitter Greens. I liked how rich (and also fecund) it was. There were a few moments where I had to suspend disbelief, such as when no one notices a particular character is not just ‘getting fat’… but it didn’t matter too much because the central stories are fantastical anyway. The book reminded me a bit of Angela Carter, but otherwise I haven’t read many more like this. Despite the fairly feminine cover I really think this book would be enjoyed by both men and women, just as Forsyth’s fantasy books are. It’s a juicy book that places you in the mind and bodies of these historical (and fictional) women.

This post will be added to my tally in the Australian Women Writers Reading + Reviewing Challenge.