Three true things

It's rare that I actually get to see the genesis of a meme. Kirsty's blog post of three true things she'd recently read in fiction really inspired me, and triggered a strong response from Genevieve of reeling and writhing and others too, and so this meme has emerged.

The idea is to post three true things you've read recently that are from fiction:

1.

"They were a family of Anglophiles. Pointed in the wrong direction, trapped outside their own history, and unable to retrace their steps because their footprints had been swept away."

– Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things, p. 52.

2.

"Our dreams have been doctored. We belong nowhere. We sail unanchored on troubled seas. We may never be allowed ashore. Our sorrows will never be sad enough. Our joys never happy enough. Our dreams never big enough. Our lives never important enough. To matter."

– Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things, p. 53.

3.

Outside the playground, in the open park, with the hill rising up in front of him and the sky beyond it, he felt like walking forwards for a long time with his eyes closed, leaving everyone behind, in order, for a bit, to have no thoughts. For years, before his children were born, he seemed to have forfeited Sundays altogether. Now the poses, the attitude, the addictions and, worst of all, the sense of unlimited time, had been replaced by a kind of exhausting chaos and a struggle, in his mind, to work out what he should be doing, and who he had to be to satisfy others.

– Hanif Kureishi, from his short story 'Hullabaloo in the Tree'.

As you can tell, I've recently re-read The God of Small Things some 10 years after I first read it. And I have enjoyed more about it now. I downloaded Kureishi's story off his website some time back and found it as I sorted through my desk this morning, and remembered how struck I was by it. So it pipped the Rushdie excerpt I originally thought to include. I've raved about Kureishi's story before. I actually found it hard to limit this meme to three true things, so I'll probably revisit this theme sometime.

I'm tagging Matthew Smith from Smithology (because I'm curious what truths he may find in the sci-fi he blogs about) and Mike Lynch from Nannygoat Hill.

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Another first

Following on from my first published piece of non-fiction is my first review! My remix story, published in the Remix My Lit project's anthology, Through the Clock's Workings, was mentioned in the review of the anthology in last Saturday's The Age A2 supplement (25 July 2009).

I was really surprised. I was reading the A2 in bed before going to sleep – trying to catch up on the paper I'd hardly had a chance to read all afternoon – when I came across the review of the anthology. I was pretty excited, I must admit. The review also examined the Remix My Lit initiative the anthology was published from, and remixing generally, so it wasn't much of a straight 'review', but I was amazed my story was actually mentioned.

I was hoping to just link to the review online and leave it at that, but of course A2 content is not online at all, is it? And while fearful that I'd appear frightfully boastful, I thought 'what the heck' and decided to publish the excerpt that mentions my story. Although, for sake of correction or accuracy, I would not dream of describing myself as a poet. I have to say, when I first saw the opening lines of the paragraph my name is mentioned in, my heart sank, but then I read on!

"…Some Remix My Lit efforts read like tame first year creative writing exercises. The best ones either develop the original in an intriguing new direction (as Amra Pajalic does with Cate Kennedy's Renovator's Heaven) or somehow intensify its emotional effect. For instance, Danielle Wood's story How to Domesticate a Pirate lyrically explores big themes such as marriage, domesticity and consumption. But in the hands of poet Mark Lawrence, words are radically stripped back and rearranged, producing an emotional subtlety I found far more moving than the original work."

Wow.

I don't necessarily buy into the reviewer's comparison of my remixed story and the original it is based on, but I appreciate the sentiments greatly. After all, it was the powerful emotion in Danielle's story that drew me to read it and remix it and play with it like on a riff at that live remixing event at Fed Square last year.

Still. Wow.

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Published

I am published.

Well, I've always wanted to finally be able to say that, and in terms of how the publishing world works, now I can. My short, short story 'How to Domesticate a Pirate [Live Fed Square Remix] has been published in the Remix My Lit anthology.

The anthology Through the Clock's Workings was edited by Amy Barker and published by Sydney Uni Press. You can buy it online from SUP (link above). There's an ebook of it floating around as well, but I can't find the link to it.

The anthology is part of the Remix My Lit initiative to encourage the creative exchanges, remixing and mutations of Creative Commons licensed creative works. Here's how they describe the anthology:

A world first! The first remixed and remixable anthology of literature.

This anthology of short stories is not some textual tome, frozen in time and space. It is alive, evolving organically in a constant state of flux. Why? Because each story is available under a Creative Commons licence, giving you rights to share and reuse the book as you see fit.

The stories are great They are excellent examples of what collaboration and creative sharing and remixing can do to creative interesting writing and works of art. I urge you to buy the anthology.

My story is a remix of a 'Remix My Lit' story by Danielle Wood, which is also included in the anthology. The stories and the whole anthology are published on the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australian license.

My remix was part of the live remixing event at Federation Square at last year's Melbourne Writer's Festival, which I blogged about. You can read the original version of my remix story as I'd published it on this blog then. I think the edited vesion in the anthology is better, though. It's short, but I had a lot of fun with it.

I'd heard much earlier this the year that my story had been selected, and it went through the editorial feedback process etc, but the publisher had asked contributors not to say anything publically until the launch. Well, I've just heard that:

Through the Clock’s Workings was launched at the Copyright Future: Copyright Freedom Conference at Old Parliament House (OPH) in Canberra on Wednesday 27th May by Dr Terry Cutler (Cutler and Co Melbourne).

Would have liked a bit more notice, but can't be too fussy, can I?

When I think of the idea that I am 'finally' a 'published' writer, I wonder what that means about the eight years and more that I have been writing, editing and publishing (and desktop publishing) in my previous and current jobs. Working in the community sector, I have written, co-written, ghost written, edited and published a lot of material for the organisations I work for, particularly currently. But I guess that doesn't seem to count as 'being published'. More than half the time, my name isn't put to much that I write. Not because I'm not proud of it, but because it's written and published under the organisation's name, or its leadership's. I'm okay with that. It's what I've signed up for. It's pretty much what 'communications' and much of project work is (and I'm finalising a really big one right now!). And I care about this work.

At times such as this, though, when a one-page story is published in an anthology and I'm publically credited as the author, and it is my first published piece of fiction, it makes me think of the reams of content I've written and edited that don't have my name to them. They are still my creative enterprise, and have a large part of me in them.

The image of the cover of Through the Clock's Workings is designed by Ali J and is creative commons licensed.

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If you were missing Sarsaparilla - fear not

If you've been wondering what happened to Sarsaparilla over the last couple of months, and wondered if what seemed like a summer hiatus was turning into a winter of neglect, fear not as Sarsaparilla will be back - prettier and better.

Sarsaparilla is a group blog on literature, the arts, culture and public comment from an Australian perspective, and which I recently joined as a regularly contributor late last year.

The team at Sarsaparilla thought a spruce up and re-design was warranted, but a few things broke in the process, meaning things were taking a lot longer than we expected to get it up and running again.

However, we've recently launched a temporary site, Sarsaparilla Lite, to keep our audience's hunger pangs at bay, and to satisfy our creative juices.

And it already displaying the Sars team's excellent insights into dance and performance, television, film, public art and literary awards, and I'm sure there's plenty more to come. So do enjoy this coffee and hot buttered crumpets before you get stuck into the full cooked brekkie.

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Shortlist for Commonwealth Writers' Prize

The Commonwealth Writers' Prize 2009 Shortlist has been announced, with a selection of writers across the Commonwealth nominated in the Best Book and Best First Book categories.

From Australia, they've stacked up Aravind Adiga of White Tiger-Man Booker fame against Helen Garner, Joan London, Christos Tsiolkas and Tim Winton for the Best Book prize. Wow. I don't want to be taking bets on this one.

They've also stacked up Nam Le (for The Boat) and a bunch of other firsties against Aravind Adiga again, this time for The White Tiger, for Best First Book. You'd think though, since Adiga won the Man Booker for The White Tiger that they'll lay of him for a while and let some other writers have a chance? Not that I'd put money on it, but I do hope that Nam Le wins it – I think The Boat is a brilliant collection of stories.

I don't get why Aravind Adiga is listed amongst those from Southeast Asia & Pacific. Wikipedia states he has dual Indian and Australian citizenship, but he lives in Mumbai now, so … what gives?

The shortlistees from Southeast Asia & Pacific for Best Book are:

• Aravind Adiga (Australia) Between The Assassinations - Atlantic Books
• Helen Garner (Australia) The Spare Room - The Text Publishing Company
• Joan London (Australia) The Good Parents - Random House Australia (Vintage Imprint)
• Paula Morris (New Zealand) Forbidden Cities - Penguin New Zealand
• Christos Tsiolkas (Australia) The Slap - Allen and Unwin
• Tim Winton, (Australia) Breath - Picador

I'm interested to see that a Malaysian author, Preeta Samarasan, has been shortlisted for a First Book Award too, for Evening is the Whole Day. I'm a little perterbed that it sounds like it's in the Arrundathi Roy-Amitav Ghosh-and dare I say it, Aravind Adiga mould, but I shouldn't be surprised considering current literary tastes.

I wonder when we will get past writers of Asian and African decent getting gongs for more stories of jungles, plantations, wild animals and bizarre families and cross-generational/cultural conflict, while white authors continue to be lauded for angst-ridden kitchen table dramas. I'm getting tired of how the empire is still enamored with the heyday of its plantations and coolies. Hm, is that too harsh?

The Commonwealth Writers' Prize website seems to be crashing, probably due to the heavy demand to see the shortlist, so check out Readings online's news of the 2009 Shortlist, including links to their reviews of the books where available.

I'm waiting to borrow White Tiger from a colleague. What will you read next? Anything from the shortlist?

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John Updike dies at 76

US novelist John Updike died on Tuesday, aged 76. He lost his battle with lung cancer.

The two-time Pulitzer Prize winning author was highly prolific, and wrote novels, short stories, non-fiction and verse. Updike was famous for his keenly observed, sharply rendered and insightful narratives of middle America’s domesticity and family life.

As he put it once, “When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.”

Updike also pursued a realism that placed sex and sexuality squarely in the middle of his characters’ lives and thoughts, just as they are in the centre of all our lives. Some thought he took the sex too far, though for different reasons. The prudish British dubbed Updike the ‘laureate of lewd’, while other critics nominated him – repeatedly – for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award.

However, it’s worth remembering that in the 50s and 60s, Updike was pushing the boundaries of moral prudery and taboo over sexuality in a country and time where many saw Rock ‘n Roll as the work of the devil.

He made no apologies for putting sexuality in the middle of his stories:

“I think taste is a social concept and not an artistic one. I’m willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else’s living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another’s brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.”

I think that some of Updike’s finest work is in his short stories where he explores small town life and burgeoning adolescent sexuality and angst with more restraint and nuance, yet great honesty.

His two Pulitzer Prizes for fiction were for his famous Rabbit series of novels (beginning with Rabbit, Run in 1961) featuring the middle-aged, middle class, middle America suburban antics of high school football hero turned car salesman Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. Some of his other famous works were The Centaur (1963), The Witches of Eastwick (1984), and The Widows of Eastwick (2008).

“Writers take words seriously-perhaps the last professional class that does— and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader*.”

— John Updike, Writers on Themselves (1986); Wikiquote

* Whoever that is...

Obituaries elsewhere
‘A Relentless Updike Mapped America's Mysteries’, The New York Times, 27 January 2009

'Rabbit is gone: Updike's wit, frankness remembered', ABC News Opinion, 28 January 2009

[The image is a Magnum one... shhh...]

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Up to Brisbane again

Not quite on the road, but I'm flying up to Brisbane again tomorrow afternoon to see my mother. My dad would have turned 70 on Wednesday, and instead of having a celebration, we'll be having a Catholic mass at Mum and Dad's home in his memory.

I'll be there the rest of this week, so without internet access at Mum's place I seriously doubt there will be much blog action here until Australia/Survival Day or after. Unless something especially strikes me and I try to post from my mobile phone. We'll see, you never know.

Until then, I particularly recommend Ampersand Duck's post on reading and traveling – in this case bushwalking – at Sarsaparilla. I'm printing it off as it will make some great reading while I'm flying. I really want to do more long walks and walking travels this next year and more, and &D's post in another inspiration for that.

In a similar vein, I'm also truly enjoying Tony Kevin's Walking the Camino: a modern pilgrimage to Santiago, which I gave my father for Father's Day last year in honour of his (then) upcoming September holiday in Portugal and Spain with Mum. When they returned, he told me he really enjoyed it, and we speculated on walking the Camino together in a few years when I'd saved the money. Mum recently told me he took me seriously, and that he'd read the book twice. I can see why.

What was a flippant comment in conversation with my father has now taken a new meaning. I'm aiming to do that walking pilgrimage when I'm 45, if not earlier. It's like my dad's holding me to it. And I'm holding myself to it.

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Wind in the Willows is 100

I have a number of abiding memories from reading Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows as a child and young teenager. Some strong themes stand out for me, in particular the spirits of discovery, adventure, fun and camaraderie that imbue the book, its critique of the excesses of wealth, and its celebration of idyllic country-river life.

Of course, as a teenager I also had a strong desire to one day be able to ‘muck about in boats’. It was only much later as an adult did I realise the extent that food was also a strong theme running both through the book and my experience of it. With this year being the centenary of the publication of Kenneth Grahame’s most famous and enduring work, I thought it worth while to revisit this theme in Grahame’s book.

In a writing class some years ago, we were all asked to bring some food with a literary theme to share, and to select and read in class a scene involving food from a pice of literature, to celebrate the final class of the year. One of my classmates (Hi, Heather!) read from a scene in the opening chapter of the book where Rat takes Mole on a picnic on the river bank in what is Mole’s first ever – and defining – experience of the River. She also brought every single food item listed by Rat to be in the picnic hamper to share at the party.

I just want to set the scene for you. The Mole has just seen the River for the first time, has just been befriended by the Rat, has just gotten into a boat for the first time, and is about to embark on his first ever River excursion with the Rat. During a quick stop-off at Ratty’s home on the river bank, Rat reappears “staggering under a fat, wicker luncheon-basket.”

‘Shove that under your feet,’ he observed to the Mole, as he passed it down into the boat. Then he untied the painter and took the sculls again.
‘What’s inside it?’ asked the Mole, wriggling with curiosity.
‘There’s cold chicken inside it,’ replied the Rat briefly;
coldtonguecoldhamcoldbeefpickledgherkinssaladfrenchrolls
cresssandwidgespottedmeatgingerbeerlemonadesodawater––’
‘O stop, stop,’ cried Mole in ecstasies: ‘This is too much!’
‘Do you really think so?’ inquired the Rat seriously ‘It’s only what I always take on these little excursions; and the other animals are always telling me that I’m a mean beast and cut in very fine!’

In case you had difficulty deciphering from Grahame’s writing what the Rat had packed, here it is again:
cold chicken, cold tongue, cold ham, cold beef, pickled gherkins, salad, french rolls, cress sandwidges (sic), potted meat, ginger beer, lemonade and soda water.

The only thing my classmate couldn’t manage to bring was the potted meat – if only because she wasn’t sure what it was – and she compromised with some paté. As you can imagine, we had a great end-of-year celebration that year.

My classmate’s passionate recreation of Ratty’s and Moles’ river-side picnic lunch rekindled my interest in The Wind in the Willows, and reminded me of other scenes involving food in the book. When Mole gets lost in the Wild Wood and Rat goes to rescue him, they take refuge from the snow, nightfall and dangers of the Wild Wood with Badger, whose hospitality includes an ample supper and a lovely breakfast the next day.

In my favourite chapter, 'Dolce Domum', food is also the social lubricant that makes Mole’s rediscovery one winter evening of his own home the warm and joyful experience it is. First we have Rat displaying his optimism and can-do attitude to rustle up a tin of sardines, a box of captain’s biscuits, a German sausage and some beer from Mole's stores for his and Mole's supper. When the local young field mice out caroling turn up to sing at Mole’s front door, Rat soon packs off two of them with a shopping basket and strict instructions for more provisions to cater for the impromptu event. The joy with which Mole sits down with his guests to a table laden with food later that evening is a significant marker of the importance of food in hospitality and 'house-re-warming' – not only in Grahame's experience of country England of that period, but for all cultures everywhere, I'm sure.

I don't want to delve to far into what experiences influenced Grahame's book, or his idealisation of country life, animals or rivers in England. And I don't particularly want to get into the theory that suggests that food and food scenes in children's literature take the position of sex and sexuality found in adult literature – other than to mention in passing (heh!).

This is more an opportunity, instead, for me to pay homage to a book that had a big impact on my early life, and remains a favourite for various reasons – food being one of them. It is also a book that has survived a hundred years quite well, considering the popularity of the plays based on it performed at Melbourne's Royal Botanical Gardens each summer, the television shows based on it, and how children are still taken with the adventures of Mole, Rat, Badger, Otter and, yes, even Toad.

The guardian.co.uk and Telegraph.co.uk have great articles on Kenneth Grahame and the book to mark the centenary, and offer some fascinating insight into Grahame and what inspired and motivated him in writing the work.The Guardian piece has the bonus of publishing my all-time favourite EH Shepard illustration for the book, which I've not shown here only because it is still under copyright. It's the one that pretty much summed up the book for me as a child. EH Shepard's illustrations are generally considered the favourites and most identifiable with Grahame's book. The illustration above (not by Shepard) was published with the Telegraph piece.

As the weather warms up and our thoughts turn to the wonderful possibilities of picnics and barbecues and their associated foods, or just enjoying the gardens, rivers and creeks near us, I hope the Wind in the Willows offers you some inspiration. I know it will me. Perhaps I'll even make it out to the Fairfield Boathouse on the Yarra River to muck around in boats.

Cross-posted at Sarsaparilla.

[Note: sorry, I've just noticed the image was not displaying - I've fixed that up. Updated 9.42am Friday 16 January 2009]

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A lucky but well deserving chook

Nam Le has won the Dylan Thomas Prize for young writers for his story collection, The Boat. Congratulations, Nam!

According to the folks at the Dylan Thomas Prize, the prize is to "recognize the best young writer in the English-speaking world and ensures that the inspirational nature of Dylan's writing will live on." They mean writers under 30. That's very nice, but the £60,000 would come in very, very handy too. That's AUD$140,000! From what I gather from this morning's Radio National Breakfast show, it is one of the richest and most prestigious literary prizes for young writers globally. You can hear Nam Le talking about this prize in his usual self-deprecating style to Radio National's Fran Kelly this morning – if you hurry and before RN take the audio off-line.

Nam Le has certainly made a splash in Australia and around the world for his first book, The Boat, a collection of short stories – some of which are short in name only. He drew a very big crowd at this year's Melbourne Writers Festival, and his packed-out conversation with Sophie Cunningham was transmitted live by satellite to the Edinburgh Festival of Books, and I believe The Boat was one of the highest selling books at the Festival. It is certainly one of the highest selling books of short stories in recent years.

And he's been winning a slew of awards, honours and prizes. Yet, however much prizes such as the Dylan Thomas claim to celebrate the best, they are pretty much just competitions, and there are many, many young writers out there slogging it and coming within Cooee of the Dylan Thomas. Even Nam Le is pretty low-key about the significance of this recent prize. As he told Fran Kelley on RN this morning, literary prizes are a chook lottery, and he happened to be the lucky chook this time.

Nonetheless, he is a good writer, and he deserves it. But for all the talk of Nam Le's talent, which I sincerely admire, his emergence from the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop, his rise to fame with The Boat, and his success as fiction editor of the Harvard Review, I think it is important to take some perspective in remembering where he came from.

No, I don't mean so much Australia, where he grew up, or Vietnam, where he was born and from which his family fled by boat when he was a three-month-old baby (although the Dylan Thomas Prize strangely describes him as a "critically acclaimed Vietnamese writer" rather than an Australian writer...). Though I do think that for a Vietnamese refugee boat person to be a good writer and make it good on the Australian and world literary stages is a great achievement to be celebrated.

What I mean is where Nam Le's stories were first published, and where we – Australian readers particularly – first encountered him.

I first heard of Nam Le when I was blown away by his story 'Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice' in The Best Australian Stories 2007, edited by Robert Drewe. Before that, its first Australian publication was in the magazine Overland, and before that it was published in the US Zoetrope: All-Story.

And I don't mean it lightly when I saw blown-away by that story when I read it last Christmas. So I am truly grateful for Drewe picking the story for the collection, though he would have been foolish not to. And I'm very grateful that Overland published the story first in Australia. In fact, of all the previously published stories collected in The Boat, only 'Love and Honour…' had been previously published in Australia.

And here is the crux of my rant. If it weren't for Overland publishing that story in Australia – and going on publishing more and more Australian stories each edition – and Robert Drewe picking it up in time to be packaged by Black Inc for a whole lot of Australians' Christmas/Summer reading last year, I wonder if I would have heard of and been impressed by Nam Le as I was. And I wonder if his writing would have made such an impact on me as it did.

And I wonder if I would have liked The Boat as much as I do.

Seems to me we need more magazines and places for short stories to be published – and read – here in Australia. Otherwise, we may miss the next Nam Le. Or worse, miss their stories.

Cross-posted at Sarsaparilla.

[Image: Nam Le at the Mossman Library, Queensland. Photo by Mossman Library, used under Creative Commons license]

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Covering the Writers Festival online

Pavlov's Cat's comment on my recent post has prodded me into getting off my proverbial and posting an update on the Writers Festival. I've spent far too long stewing on Nam Le's and Salman Rushdie's session on Sunday night, so I should get cracking and put fingers to keyboard and post on them. Soon. I promise.

Meanwhile, a number of other writers are posting and writing on the Melbourne Writers Festival. Travel blogger Hackpacker posted briefly on last Sunday's session by David Sedaris. It was quite humourous by all accounts.

I'm waiting, hopefully, for Melbourne editor, writer and blogger Sophie Cunningham to post on her Festival experiences soon. I enjoyed her interview with Nam Le on Sunday evening. Meanwhile, you can see the lovely pages Sophie typeset and printed, from which she'll be reading two poems by Anna Akhmatova at the reading at St Paul's Cathedral this Sunday for the Festival.

Meanwhile, Gen at reeling and writhing also lists other bloggers posting on the Festival.

A Melbourne writer and review whom I know, Gillian Essex, is reviewing a number of sessions at the Writers Festival and the reviews are being published on the Melbourne Writers Festival website. Unfortunately, rather than publishing the reviews as web pages, the Festival media people, in all their rather strange wisdom, are publishing the reviews as PDFs for download. Duh. The best thing about this though is that the reviews are insightful and delightful. The reviews can be downloaded here.

Despite the relatively archaic option of publishing PDFs, it is good that the MWF team has taken steps to embracing the web. However, it doesn't really compare to such achievements as the Adelaide Festival of Ideas being blogged – with official encouragement – by Adelaide bloggers such as Pavlov's Cat.

Perhaps next year the Melbourne Writers Festival will formally support bloggers to cover the event, or publish its own blog. I'm putting my hand up for that.

If you know of anyone else covering the Festival online, do let me know so I can compile a post on them.

Update
Retailer Readings Books Music Film, one of the sponsors and official bookseller of the Writers Festival, also has a festival blog on their website. It looks like their blogger is the editor of their newsletter. [Updated Thursday 28 August 12:25 pm]

[Image by Andrew_1000 (cc)]

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Melbourne Writers Festival this week

I'm going to some of the sessions of the Melbourne Writers Festival, which opened yesterday. I missed out on the opening address – Germaine Greer's keynote sold out pretty early, I gather, but it would probably be enough to read the extended essay and follow the broo-ha-ha in the media.

I'm unable to go to as many sessions as I'd like, but I'm fitting in what I can manage under the demands of juggling caring for children with my partner, work and school.

Also cost was a factor – prices went up this year, despite earlier promises of a more expense-friendly festival with its move to Federation square. I was pretty annoyed that they did away with the discount for those buying five tickets or more, and replaced it with an early bird discount, which ended on 2 August – twenty days before the festival began! That wasn't much help to those of us who had to wait for paydays and to scrape together the money, or chronic procrastinators, or busy people who don't check out programs or purchase tickets that early – and I fit all those categories...

So what am I paying my hard earned money to attend? I'm going to hear short story writer and literary editor Nam Le (of The Boat fame), and watch Salman Rushdie on the big screen – beamed live from Edinburgh. Both are tomorrow night – and I mean 'night'. The festival is pushing events later and later to squeeze more in, though it could be more to do with international timelines and the satellite connection with the Edinburgh Festival (the session with Nam Le is being shown at the Edinburgh Festival by satellite).

I'm also looking forward to hearing Chloe Hooper, Gideon Haigh and Nicolas Rothwell discuss the essay and compare writing non-fiction books and articles (Saturday 30 August). I love a good essay, and am a fan of the art writing essays. I really enjoyed Hooper's essays on the Aboriginal death in custody on Palm Island, on which her new book Tall Man is based. Haigh is also an established essayist and non-fiction book author, so there will be a lot to hear and think about. I think I've only read a couple of Rothwell's articles in the papers, but I'd like to hear what he has to say.

I'm looking forward to these sessions. I'm also going to try to make it to some of the free Festival events where I can, including the Creative Commons-licensed creative writing re-mixing events (more on that in a later post - promise).

If you're going to be at the Writers Festival at any of the times and sessions I will be, and if you feel like it, drop me a comment and we could meet for a coffee.

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Children's book honours kicks off children's book week

The Children's Book Council announced this year's winners of its annual children's book awards this afternoon. Melbourne author Sonja Hartnett won the award for book of the year for older readers for her latest work, The Ghost's Child (published by Penguin Australia).

This tops off a fantastic year for Hartnett, who earlier won the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, the world's richest award for literature for children and young adults.

I remember reading a press report of the awards ceremony in Sweden in May where Hartnett commented that children's writing, and children's authors, are not take as seriously in Australia as they are in Europe (despite hunting, I couldn't find the story online). I'm uncertain how telling an indicator of this it would be, but it would be interesting to see if The Age's Saturday arts, books and culture supplement, A2, will cover the Australian Children's Book Awards winners in its edition tomorrow. Or how much.

Bookwitch has a story on Hartnett's Swedish prize adventures and her writing.

Here are the other prize winners for this year's Children's Book Awards:
Carole Wilkinson’s Dragon Moon won the prize for Younger Readers, while Aaron Blabey’s Pearl Barley and Charlie Parsley won Early Childhood Book of the Year.

Meanwhile, Matt Ottley’s Requiem For A Beast won the Picture Book of the Year, an award Shaun Tan won last year for The Arrival. The Children's Book Council (and various booksellers) have to keep reminding buyers that the Picture Book of the Year is not necessarily suitable for all age groups – as picture books are not just for young children!

What I found pretty interesting about this year's awards is that the winner of the Eve Pownall Award for Informational Books was a book about books – Parsley Rabbit’s Book About Books, by Frances Watts and illustrator David Legge.

I haven't come across it before, but the ABC Shop’s website describes it this way:

“Celebrate the joy of reading and begin a lifelong love of books with the delightful Parsley Rabbit and his pesky little brother, Basil. Lively and entertaining, it features a remarkably clever and handsome rabbit and is full of fun, flaps to flip and questions to share. Parsley introduces children to books - from the cover, to the imprint page to the title page, formats, style and more - and takes the reader on a hilarious and stimulating journey through the world of books. An absolute treasure of a book for children from 3 – 7 years."

What a wonderful way to introduce children to the art and process of making and enjoying books, and not just reading them (or having them read).

And a wonderful way to kick of this year's Children's Book Week (also a CBCA initiative), which starts tomorrow. It is a week of activities that lots of book stores, schools, libraries and authors and illustrators get into each year to encourage the joy and wonder of books in children and to celebrate books for children and young people. But this is not just something to be left to teachers, librarians, authors and illustrators.

This year, I'm going to buy a couple of children's books for my two sons and add them to the long lists of books they enjoy reading/having read to them each evening.

What are you going to do for Children's Book Week this year?

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Page 123, sentence 5

I'm home with my older son who's home sick from school, so I finally have time to do this book meme thing Kirsty of Galaxy tagged me for.

The meme works this way: you pick up a book closest to you (in this case, my bedside as Kirsty has stipulated), turn to page 123, and blog the fifth sentence.

If I had done this meme earlier this week, I would have been blogging Stephen Jay Gould's Dinosaur in a Haystack, but as it is, this is now on top of my pile (because I'm actually reading it): Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red.

Page 123, sentence 5:

A city's intellect ought to be measured not by its scholars, libraries, miniaturists, calligraphers and schools, but by the number of crimes insidiously committed on its dark streets over thousands of years.

If so, Melbourne's doing pretty well, then.

Oh, and I really am enjoying the book.

Should I tag or not? Or take a leaf out of Ampersand Duck's book (heh heh) and not "do the tag thing" and say, "Follow your dreams".

Hmm. I'm going to tag unique_stephen from Emunctory, Helen of Blogger on the Cast Iron Balcony, Gen from reeling and writhing, Tim from Sterne, and Ariel from Jabberwocky after all because I'm curious about what books they've got near them.

I would like to tag Mike from The Peasants are Revolting, but his wife has just had a baby, so I doubt there's much time for reading in his house at the moment, and the last thing he needs is a meme to do. Congratulations and all the best to you and your family, Mike!

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A feeling for sun, sand and a book

Sophie Cunningham's Sarsaparilla post on how the location and moment of reading a book can indelibly affect one's experience and memory of the book is fascinating. Her recollection of reading Johnathon Fanzen's The Connections in Sri Lanka is well worth reading, if not only for the great photo she took leaning out a train window!

I was inspired to share my fond memories of reading Peter Høeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow on the beach one hot summer holiday - 10 years ago! I so enjoyed that trip down memory lane that I'm sharing here what I wrote in the comments to her post.

The writing and the plot left a big impression on me, but the main memory is of the odd juxtaposition of reading a story set in the dead of Denmark’s winter, while enjoying the heat and sunshine of a Queensland beach holiday.

I had spent six months working as a temp in the public service in suburban Melbourne (and hardly the headspace to read anything decent). I was not long out of university and this had been my first full-time, 5-days-a-week job and I was desperately in need of a holiday. At the end of my contract I went up to Queensland to visit family.

I picked up a copy of Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow at my sister’s house, and took it on my well deserved backpacker’s holiday to Noosa on the Sunshine Coast. So there I was caught up in what I thought was a ‘whodunit’ (it ended up with more layers than a trifle) set amongst the cold and dreariness of Denmark and the icy expanses of Greenland.

Meanwhile I was seeing sunspots from too much sun while lying on the beach reading, which made it hard to focus on the page at times, and feeling really hot while reading of ice and snow. That is my abiding memory of the time. I read about baking bananas with sugar and ground cinnamon to ward off the cold, and tracking footprints in snow, while feeling hot sand on my skin and cooling off in the surf, taking walks through lush, sub-tropical forest, and encountering rosellas, bush turkeys and other tropical birds, and lizards.

That experience of where and when I read the book has stayed with me as much as, if not more than, the book’s settings, characters and details, (I even experimented with baking bananas with cinnamon and sugar with mixed success that following autumn). I can’t think of any other ‘when and where’ of reading - in my experience - that can match it for me.

The photo above is one I took of a massive grass-tree at Noosa Hill during my last family holiday up in Queensland. I didn't have a camera with me on that Noosa holiday 10 years ago so I've no photos from then. No sun or sand, but you get the picture.

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Happy New Year!

The problem with wracking your brains to come up with the ideal blog post to open the new year with is that you think of a number of possibilities, discard each one as too insignificant, vow to not resort to an exegesis on New Year's resolutions, and then wish you had thought to compile your lists of favourite things from 2007 (books, music, movies, blog posts, outings, etc) before the year was out!

As things get desperate, you wonder if you should resist the temptation to compile lists of things you've got planned for the week/summer/2008/the rest of your life – then give the whole thing up as too hard/obviously cheating and not blog for a whole week!

So, the lesson is there is no ideal blog post to open the year. There is only the days coming one after the other as the year moves on. And in realising that blogging is, if anything, about cheating, here are some lists:

What I'm enjoying about this summer

• cooling off at Williamstown beach last Friday evening after a beastly hot day, especially getting there early enough to get good parking and leaving as the hoons started to mass in the car park
• sweet, ripe peaches – white or yellow
• cherries in season – not air-flown from North America
• lovely, crisp blue skies
• leftover fruitcake from Christmas
• the cool change blowing through the unit, rather than past the front or back doors
• the cricket – India actually gave Australia a fight at the SCG, leading to some pretty exciting viewing, especially…
• watching Andrew Symonds play
  
• fresh basil
• ripe tomatoes
• the fact that Victoria's bushfire season has had a slow, and relatively uneventful, start this year (touch wood)
• drinking more white wine that red
• blueberries
• it being extremely quiet at work since I started back last Wednesday
  

What I'm hanging out for this summer

• a chorus of cicadas – I haven't quite figured out the necessary change in temperature, humidity or pressure that inspires them to sing, but I'm hoping a change in geography later this month (see below) will allow me to hear them
• the beach – we're going to Phillip Island for a week later this month, and I can barely wait
• a bbq
• local Victorian tomatoes
• gelati from my favourite gelati shop in Lygon St, Carlton
• getting new tyres on my bike and starting riding again
  

What I've been enjoying reading recently

• As mentioned earlier, Phillip Pullman's His Dark Material's trilogy, the first of which The Golden Compass is on based
• The Best Australian Essays 2007 – the standout is Gillian Mears's 'Alive in Ant and Bee'
• Pavlov's posts on proofreading, Christmas and memes

What I'm listening to over and over

• Radiohead's In Rainbows – which I had downloaded as soon as it was available, and pretty much haven't stopped listening to
• Red Hot Chili Peppers' Stadium Aracadium
• an eclectic mix Michael Franti, Lenny Kravitz, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Rickie Lee Jones, and a bunch of other laid-back grooves, including a couple of free downloads I found last year but, to my frustration, can't remember where
• the guitar-driven, joyful rhythms of music from Mali

What I'm enjoying looking at
my favourite creative commons photos from flickr (and my own), many I've published here over the past year and a half. I've imported them into my iphoto library and onto my ipod to view on the tram. They are, in particular: this, this, this, this and this.

What is inspiring me

• Ampersand Duck's lists – I'm going to do more lists. I may even share a few here
• Unique_Stephen's fantastic photo of his son – I'm going to take a serious crack at photography this year
• Kirsty's first sentence from her first post of each month of 2007 – I'm going to work on my opening sentences. It will also be instructive to go back through my posts and see how many begin with apologies for not blogging in a while. I will change that in 2008!
• joyfully, more than I can think of to write a long list!
  

And though it seems rather late, I do wish you a Happy New Year!

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Happy Holidays!

A belated Merry Christmas to those of you who celebrate this holiday. As you can imagine, I've been a bit busy with the family celebrations, and enjoying being on leave on these warm summer days.

Then again, if I eat another mince tart, piece of fruit cake (which I made, BTW) or morsel of roast fowl, I'll explode.

Hopefully, regular blogging will resume – when I get sick of lying about reading the Best Australian Essays 2007, Best Australian Stories 2007 (Christmas presents from my partner Shelley) and Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy (lent to us by Shelley's mother). Or when my family get sick of me lying about reading (whichever comes first).

I've finished the first of Pullman's trilogy, from which the film The Golden Compass was adapted. I'm looking forward to seeing how they've treated for the big screen. If it gets any hotter, a darkened, air-conditioned cinema will offer inviting relief.

I hope you're enjoying this holiday season.

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A feast for readers and writers

The programme for the 2OO6 Melbourne Writers Festival is now out with this morning's Age newspaper. It will run from 25 August to 3 September. The programme is also online here.

At first glance, these are the stand-outs: Tim Flannery (The Weather Makers) will give the keynote address on global warming, Helen Caldicot on nuclear weapons, Dava Sobel (Longitude etc) on the stories behind science, and music and musicians at the Festival!

I really hope to attend as much of the Festival as I can, and post live reports here where possible! Stay tuned.

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Australian literature vs Australian publishing - what about the writing?

It's not supposed to, but it amazes me when so many blogs converge on the same topic, and almost take the same angles. There's been a flurry of blog interest over The Weekend Australian's stunt to show up Australian publishing.
The paper sent the third chapter from Patrick White's novel Eye of the Storm to 12 publishing houses and literary agents (with the title changed, characters' names altered, under a false name that was an anagram of 'Patrick White') as a sample chapter for a manuscript to be published. 10 rejected the sample chapter – some rudely – and two hadn't been heard from after over two months.

I found out about it on the ABC's arts blog Articulate, then found a piece by Tim Stern on one of my recent favourite group blogs on Australian culture, Sarsaparilla, while Sarsaparilla regular and author Kerryn Goldsworthy posted a piece on her blog, and it cropped up on Larvatus Prodeo, and Overland reviews editor Jeff Sparrow wrote on it for a lefty group blog Leftwrites. That's five blogs, and only the tip of the iceberg, I imagine!

What's common amongst these blog writers is their conclusion that the publishers' and agents' rejection decisions were overwhelmingly commercial – they couldn't sell such a manuscript today. For instance, Kerryn Goldsworthy decries:

"the unambiguously, unashamedly and exclusively commercial agenda behind some of the rejections."

Whilst most noticed that commercial interest was a major motivation behind this – and most other – publishing decisions in Australia, their responses to this reality differed. They ranged from the 'what do you expect, publishing is a business' to the 'how terrible, this is why Australian literature is in the doldrums' type responses. Jeff Sparrow notes:

"Publishers are not guardians of literary quality. They are businesses – and, in that sense, the White hoax shows what happens if you reduce culture to market forces."

Notwithstanding discussions of changing tastes and styles in literature over 40-odd years, and whether established authors will get their books published despite the condition of their manuscript (JK Rowling's later work in her Harry Potter enterprise is a good case in point), there was also close attention on how some publishing figures rejected the manuscript because they thought it poorly written or needed signficant development.

The 'author' was urged to develop their writing skills. One even suggested the 'author' join a writers' centre to get help with polishing their manuscript before sending it off for publishing. This is about publishers out-sourcing their editorial development, but not paying for it: authors are expected to work with their colleagues or pay their own editors to get their manuscripts to publishable level.

While this reflects the cost-shifting, cost-cutting, commercial nature of multinational and independent publishing in Australia, it is easily forgotten in our responses to current publishing. They will no longer pay for editors to work with authors to get a book idea or manuscript to the publication stage. Unless they are publishing a celebrity of course – where they provide a ghost-writer/editor, but what the publisher is selling here is the name, not the book.

So, the thing I'm learning is, if I were a half-literate Australian cricketer, I would get a book published, but if I were someone who had been working on a novel or work of literary non-fiction for over a year, then I should join a writers' centre and don't call a publisher till I were famous. Or dead. (Oh, hang on. Patrick White is dead. Scratch that.)

No wonder so many authors are now writing for blogs.

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A great kid's yarn

I've raved about the joys and importance of reading to your kids before, but I haven't personally suggested what to read them before. I love Alison Lester's books, and I think she's probably one of the best children's book illustrators AND writers in Australia. And that is no easy feat.

For one, not many illustrator-writers get published. They're either one or the other. The handful who do are usually big names in kids' publishing, or are illustrators who break into writing (seldom the other way around). Alison is one of those illustrators with a beautiful eye for detail, great sense of colour, and writes well. Are we there yet? is my favourite – I haven't tired of reading it to my son, who's five-and-a-half, since I bought it for his birthday last year. It's a great way to introduce Australia to a child, and it certainly encourages a sense of adventure in adult and child alike.

I'd heard a little about the book, but what convinced me to buy it was that it was short-listed for the Australian Children's Book of the Year awards last year. In fact, Are we there yet? won the Picturebook category in 2005. When you're standing in a bookshop surrounded by brightly coloured children's books unable to decide which to get, it makes a big difference to know that certain books have been highly recommended – or won an award. It makes it easier to support Australian children's writers and illustrators (who are very good!), and not go for the easy option of the kid's cartoon/merchandise/toy tie-in story book. (However much these have their place on a child's bookshelf, they don't really match well thought out, well told, and well illustrated home-grown picture books.)

If you're wondering what to get a child this year, the 2006 Australian Children's Book of the Year shortlist is here. Its awards cover young adults, early readers, early childhood, picture books and 'information' books. If you want a better idea of what the books look like or are about, check out Readings' coverage of the Awards here.

And remember, when reading to your kids – read early, read often and read for fun.

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Birthday goodies

Yesterday was my birthday. I turned 36.

I was a little too busy to post to the blog yesterday, because we had a small barbeque to mark the occasion. It was our first bbq using our new (second hand) bbq, and our first in our new (well, we've been here a year so maybe not so new) home.

It was fun, but tiring. That's me on the right of the photo, about to blow out the candles on my birthday desert. My mate Liam's in the background. He gave me one of his prints as a present. Very nice. I wish I could fit it on my scanner so that I can share it with you...

In the morning, my partner, Shelley, and son, Jacob, gave me my presents: The Essential Rice Cookbook and some cologne. Both are very yummy!

So was my delicious chocolate birthday desert that Shelley made me!

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