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 Now the poses, the attitude, the addictions and, worst of all, the sense of unlimited time, had been replaced by a kind of exhausting chaos and a struggle, in his mind, to work out what he should be doing, and who he had to be to satisfy others.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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Friday Wrap again

Friday wraps are usually when I have so many things going on but don't get time to blog properly about them, and end up with a wrap up at the end of the week.

This time, despite covering a few items already this week, I just wanted to quickly share some things that caught my eye, or that I'm obsessing about at the moment. And I realise that many things I twitter about don't get covered in this blog, unless I do so on occassions like this.

This looks like a really interesting film, and I'm annoyed I missed out on the free tix. I may just put this on the plate for when we next organise baby-sitting and go out. We haven't been to a movie in such a long time…

Meanwhile, doesn't this:

"…droll comedy of manners that plays on the snobberies of the English aristocracy and the mistrust of all things American."

sound pretty much like half of every British movie ever made? It's from the distributor's promo blurb about Easy Virtue, the new film by Stephan Elliot.

As part of my recent preoccupation with walking long distances, I ordered Unforgettable Walks to Take Before You Die online, but am really disappointed they can't fill the order. Do I have to go all the way to Port Melbourne to get it? Perhaps I could walk…

I'm getting very, very tired Kevin Rudd's rhetoric. I find it done to death and increasingly hollow. Time to close the gap on your rhetoric, Kevin.

The portrait of Aboriginal (Yolngu) singer Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu by Guy Maestri has won the Archibald Prize today. It's amazing, and I'm looking forward to when the exhibition comes to Melbourne.

I'd getting my cholesterol tested – for the second time – tomorrow. It will be good to see what nearly a year of a drastically changed diet and (slightly) increased exercise (and no drugs) has done to dint the high cholesterol that bothered my GP. Fingers crossed.

It's Labor Day on Monday – a long weekend for the kids and I. I'm sorely tempted to take them to the Moomba Parade on Monday morning, but a couple of friends pooh-poohed it because of the crowds. Last year, I went alone to take heaps of photos, though only a few are online (I shot on film). Perhaps this year…

My bike has a flat – again. Frustratingly, it's the same tyre as the one I fixed the last time, so I've got to get it to the shop this weekend to get it fixed. It's been a while, and I've been missing riding a lot.

I'm procrastinating – again – from a heavy workload of writing and editing, with an impending deadline.

Isn't that enough for wrap? It's liberating how much one can cover by saying less about something. Have a good weekend.

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Autumn in my pocket

I've returned to writing in my writing notebook on the tram to work again, and this post begins from what I wrote there.

In my pocket is a light blue cotton handkerchief, the kind that is thick enough and large enough to wipe your face with without it scrunching into a ball, or blow your nose in without being sodden within three gusts – a handy feature for the impending cold-virus season. That's possibly because it is relatively new, and still has the fresh stiffness of new cotton. It has crisscrossing stripes of navy contrast along the edges that mark it as a man's handkerchief, and an upper-case 'P' embroidered in navy blue in one corner. It was my father's.

My father always had a handkerchief with him – every day, he'd put one in his left trouser pocket. (I've long long followed his habit.) Dad had quite a stock of them. My sister and I insisted that he have one just so for the funeral.

Each time I've been up to Brisbane lately, I return – on my mother's urging – with a small load of my father's clothes. This time, the load included a handful of these good handkerchiefs and a couple of pairs of new socks dad had not gotten around to wearing. They were still attached to their label.

Today, I'm wearing a light, grey cashmere jumper of dad's. Now I understand the love for cashmere – light, soft, almost luscious – and appreciate the premium put on them. I'd probably never afford cashmere myself. There was a time, some ten years ago, when my father could afford to buy them and appreciated their warmth and comfort in Melbourne's winter, however briefly he lived here. I found this jumper, along with another maroon cashmere and his chunky blue wool cardigan that I loved to see him in, stored in the bottom drawer of a dresser he hardly used. I wonder if he got to enjoy them much, considering how brief and relatively mild Brisbane's winters are. Though he'd been complaining of feeling the cold bitterly, especially in his hands and feet, in the last couple of years.

This morning in Melbourne, it is cool, grey and raining. It's probably closer to 14˚C than 21˚C in the range forecast for today. Autumn has announced itself dramaticaly, and I'm glad to be warm and snug in a fold of cashmere.

This morning, the online sponsorships and cash donations for my Shave for a Cure drive had past my $500 target! (As evident in the image of the fundraising meter.) Weighing up the pledges that have been made and the possibilities of another week of fundraising, I've decided to extend my goal by $200 – I'm now aiming to raise $700 for the Leukaemia Foundation by Friday 13 March.

I'd appreciate any help you can offer me to reach that goal, including spreading the word. And thank you to all of you who helped out, made donations, and spread the word.

In a week, I will have my hair shaved for Shave for a Cure. It will be a chilly affair, and I'm glad for my friend Lynn's offer to knit me a beanie to keep my head and ears warm! Thanks, Lynn! Meanwhile, keep warm. Or cool as your case may be.

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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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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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I have succumbed

And hence, I have succumbed to the lol-cats blog post.

It has been one of those weeks.

(Oh, and I've been very, very busy. Promise.)

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On the tram coming home from the city late this evening

There are a lot of tired people on the tram going home late from work. And still working. When do people ever let up?

Staring glassy-eyed into the middle distance, we are each lost to our own exhaustion, refusing to engage each other.

The ghostly back-lit screens beckon us, siren songs to the rocks of connectivity in every way but real. The full moon ignored till we briefly raise our heads to check we don't miss our stops.

After being 'on' all day, how much more can we smile and bob our heads at people who mean nothing to us?

When we can barely manage grunts and grimaces to our loved ones when we finally return home – if they are not already in bed.

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How to domesticate a pirate [Fed Square remix by Mark Lawrence]

From a Creative Commons licensed original by Danielle Wood, as part of the Remix My Lit project.

Get used to being caressed by hands that make you feel the same as the rough-hardness of deck timber.

Stand in a supermarket queue and pass judgement. You catch yourself despising a woman in beige three-quarter pants because she has filled her trolley with

• interest rates
• the car service
• defined benefit
• and your fabric softener.

And because, when she talks to her toddler, she refers to herself in the third person.

Who wormed the dog?

Else, else, else. There is nothing but else in your head these days, and else is all the language that is left between you and the man who comes home to you each night now in a suit.

When your husband comes out of the bedroom in the morning and asks you a question, grenades explode.

He only wants to know if you’ve ironed his shirt yet.

Will you push your canoe away from the rocks, over the aqua shallows to the navy depths where you couldn’t hear even if someone were shouting at you to come back to shore?

No, the nappies can’t last until Saturday.

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Live blogging from Remix My Lit at Federation Square

It's the Remix My Lit event at Federation Square, part of the Melbourne Writers Festival, and I've been remixing a story for the last half hour or so. It's a bit of a copy and paste job on chunks of a story that caught my eye, 'How to Domesticate a Pirate', by Danielle Wood.

There's free wifi at Federation Square, which has allowed me to log into the project's website: www.remixmylit.com to access the text of the story – saved me time of typing out the text from the sheets of paper they've handed out at the event.

Text is flashing on the big screen at Fed Square, over 'video art' and remixed audio, including readings of some of the stories. It is creating a great vibe, but I wish they'd turn down the volume - a bit hard to write...

Or it could be the icy wind pushing the people through the 'square'.

There doesn't seem to be very many people here for this event, thought there's the odd person who is clutching the sheets of paper - the printed stories by some really good Australian writers who've agreed to publish their new short stories on Creative Commons licenses.

I've emailed my remix story in, but I'm unsure if it will make it up on the big screen. Although this event finishes in a few minutes, the Remix My Lit initiative is going for a while longer, and all entries will be considered for their anthology.

I am going to post my remix next, but at the moment there is a journo from the ABC Radio National's Book show who wants to know how I found it and what I did for my remix. There appears to be more people here to cover the event (me included) than to participate.

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Writers festival supports live poetry publishing via Twitter

As if to chastise me for my previous complaint about the Melbourne Writers Festival's use of archaic online tools to engage with its participants, I was reminded of a rather exciting multi-platform digital initiative the Festival is supporting: short poetry published via Twitter – and so to your mobile phone.

RMIT creative writing students and staff are publishing very short poetry via Twitter – very short because Twitter only allows 140 characters (that's characters, not words) under its format. I think the shortness of Twitter updates is a great discipline and some of the poems so far have been quite fun. And very clever:

A guide dog soaked my leg in pee. His seeing eyes grinned up at me. The blind man laughed until he cried. I think they saw the funny side.
– by Andrew Masters

A number of the poets have gone with the haiku form, and I admire them for trying. I would love to learn to write in that form.

Heavy air rasps across a bruised sky, the spinifex shivers. A swarm of grass seeds dances with sandy red soil. Storm comes.
– by Raphaelle Race

If you're a Twitter user, you can subscribe to the poetry 'tweets' and elect to have them sent to your mobile phone via SMS – thus making it multi-platform. I'm loathe to get any Twitter updates via SMS to my mobile, so I'm preferring the slow method of checking my tweets via the web and various other clients.

Although the grunt and know-how is obviously coming from the RMIT students and staff, MWF should be congratulated for supporting such a novel medium. Would be nice if they gave it a bit more prominence on their website and program in future.

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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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George Orwell blogs from beyond the grave

Very hot in the morning. In the afternoon sudden thunder-storm & very heavy rain. About 50 yards from the gate the road & pavement flooded a foot deep after only 1 1/2 hours rain.
Blackberries beginning to redden.

And so observes George Orwell of the 12 of August – 70 years ago.

Not exactly 1984, but you get an idea of how he was spending his days or what preoccupied him just before war broke out throughout Europe.

If you don't want your literary giants to end up having feet of clay, you may not want to know too much about their intimate inner lives – or even the mundane details of their daily lives. I mean, how much can knowing whether they had clean underwear that day, or how much rain fell, tell us about what they had written and published?

Unless of course they're dead and you can't grill them in one of those banal email interviews – you know, the ones where various 'celebrities' are asked what they are 'excited about' or reading/eating/watching/listening to.

Perhaps that's why the George Orwell Prize is republishing every entry from George Orwell's diaries from 1938 to 1942 – starting with 9 August 1938 – to mark the 70th anniversary of his diaries. According to the editors:

each diary entry will be published on this blog exactly seventy years after it was written, allowing you to follow Orwell’s recuperation in Morocco, his return to the UK, and his opinions on the descent of Europe into war in real time. The diaries end in 1942, three years into the conflict.

The blog's publishers deserve to be congratulated for bringing Orwell's domestic diaries to a new audience and for breaking out of the mould of (re)publishing another overpriced, thinly illustrated and poorly annotated dead-tree tome in time for the Christmas glut. Publishing each diary entry in blog post format in 'real time' also strikes me as quite a novel move.

But I do wish they had tried to push the boundaries of blogging a little further for something this promising. For instance, instead of using the predictable convention of labelling blog posts with tags that only prosaically describe their content (for instance, 12 August's post was tagged 'blackberries, fruit, weather'), they could have used tags to set the context for the original diary entries, such as where Orwell was when he wrote them, or whether he was suffering ill health or enjoying recovery.

There also appears to be a lot of debate over what the title of the blog should be, with a number of commenters complaining that it the title should be 'The Orwell Diaries' not The Orwell Prize. Perhaps the Prize lost a copyright battle with the copyright holders of Orwell's diaries, but you'd think they could have come up with something far more descriptive of the diaries themselves.

For all the early excitement about these posts, let's remember these are his "domestic diaries", and his curiosity here, as the editors say, was "focused on plants, animals, woodwork, and – above all – how many eggs his chickens have laid", rather than anything so earth shattering as the state of political writing in Britain.

These are early days yet in the diaries, and thus the blog. But this hasn't stop the flurry of activity and commenting on the posts, as readers express their approval, or otherwise, or just their hopes that things spice up a bit as he goes along. But thin as the content may be, you can't keep a good internet wag down. Commenting on the entry from the 12th, one reader said:

Oh what a cliffhanger. Are the blackberries going to ripen before the rain spoils them? Can’t wait to know!

When our literary giants are dead, we seem want to know as much about them as we can – especially if one is writing a thesis, biography or another article about what was going on behind the scenes of their third book/essay/collection.

Or perhaps our preoccupation has something that resonates with our current predilection for the minutiae of other people's daily lives – whether it is in blogs, myspace, facebook, twitter updates, text messages, instant messaging or chat – and, admittedly, as bloggers we are all complicit in this. Perhaps it is not so current, since before blogging and text the larger appetite was for published diaries and collected letters.

I think this is going to get bigger, and more diaries are going to be published online like this. And would you believe it, another mob are doing exactly the same with the diary of Samuel Pepys, beginning almost exactly the same day – nearly three and a half centuries earlier.

Why are we hungering anew for the inner lives of diarists and letter writers, especially literary ones? With the inundation of our senses with reality television, celebrity gossip and in-depth profiles, you'd think we just want to curl up in bed with a good book and not care about the life of the author behind the book. Perhaps, after all, we feel somewhat reassured that even our literary greats are just people like us.

George Orwell, August 10:

"Drizzly. Dense mist in evening. Yellow moon."

[Image of Orwell is from Wikipedia; photo of pig sculpture by me; the Orwell Prize website also has a great gallery of Orwell photos]

Cross-posted as a guest post at Sarsaparilla. (Thanks Sarsaparilla!)

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Writing is Like Shepherding Smoke – Revisited

Emunctory's comment this week about being a 'nerd herder' prompted me to hunt up an old post I'd written nearly four years ago when I first started blogging. Reading back over that old post, I was quite pleased with it and decided to 'repost' it.

For a while now I've been thinking of going over some of my old posts and republishing them. Admitedly, I'm hoping I can get a few more responses and reactions from readers now than I did then – or just getting people to read it in the first place (I had no readers when I first started blogging back then…). A bit of a retrospective, I guess, though I hope you don't think this premature, or arrogant.

This was inspired by Tim at Sterne dusting off some of his old blog posts and reposting them in the hopes of giving them a new audience. (Thanks, Tim.) Bear in mind that four years since I wrote this post, I've got a second child, moved house, and got a new job, and have been blogging and writing for four years more, so things are different. And yet amazingly still the same. I hope this sparks something.

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It's Like Shepherding Smoke

I have an old newspaper cutting that haunts me. It’s an article by American writer Walter Mosley, pinned to the corkboard on the wall next to my computer. He says:
“If you want to be a writer, you have to write every day. The consistency, the monotony, the certainty, all vagaries and passions are covered by this daily reoccurrence.” Bugger. I have enough trouble scraping together the time, energy or determination to sit down and write each week, without the added guilt that I’m not doing it each and every day!! Do I really want the additional burden of feeling I’m more of a failure because I don’t write every day, as so many writers, writing teachers and writing books insist? No thanks.

I think it’s fine for writers who like to get up at 5 am and write before they go to work, but I like my sleep, and its enough of a battle to haul myself out of bed and get coffee in my veins, breakfast down my son’s throat and water down my back each morning.

After a long day trying to stop myself from quitting my job, picking-up enough pieces of my self-dignity, or trying to leave my simmering anger at the front door and not bring it into my home to infect my family (not successfully often enough), the last thing I’m thinking of is writing for my self. I find it difficult to summon the enthusiasm and creativity to face the computer or a piece of paper to give my thoughts, ideas and emotions shapes through words.

I prefer the contemplative act of peeling ginger and cutting up vegetables, as I prepare dinner for the family, to worrying about whether my ideas are worth anything or what words to use. And you can’t eat words.

But the ideas churn away. Sometimes in my forethoughts, other times at the back of my mind, they settle into the friendly rhythm of washing, peeling and cutting vegetables. Cooking is strangely contemplative, like when Buddhist monks click through their rosary beads as they meditate on the wheel of life, or when the older women of the Catholic church bend over their rosaries as their words meld into a droning contemplation of their sorrows and hopes.

However much I resent them, Mosley’s words haunt me because they ring true. He warns writers that the very nature of writing is like shepherding smoke: you get your initial ideas down in words, but when you return to them later they have lost their resonance and life, their taste and sense; you wonder why you were so excited about them when you first wrote them. Mosley insists that writers must return over and over again to bring together those “flimsy vapours” and to “brush them, reshape them, breathe into them and gather more.”

This resonates with me because the dozen or more ideas for this blog have dissipated, and now remain elusive, because I hadn’t written them down straight away, or tended them like the fragile ideas and memories they are. Time passes and each day is another I don’t get my ideas on these pages. If I don’t do this to share with others, then I need to just for me. If only to learn Mosley’s lesson of attending to my ideas each day, because “reality will begin to scatter your notions; given two days, it will drive them off.”

But not ever day. There’s dinner to cook, laundry to fold, a child to read to, scraped knees to tend to, arguments to resolve, there was something on TV to catch …

First published Friday, September 24, 2004

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Bingo!

As part of her practice of the fine arts of procrastination (and very productive and useful procrastination, I might say), Kirsty at Galaxy has linked to this great collection of corporate jargon and cant on the BBC website – 'Fifty office-speak phrases you love to hate'. I love it.

My favourite ones to hate are real viruses in Australia – 'going forward' (number 20) and 'at the end of the day' (number 30). Both make my skin crawl, and the later makes me wonder if they really mean at sunset. (As in, when the sun goes down, I will turn into a word-wolf and tear out the throats out of language zombies.)

But I shuddered at another one that's new to me: number 39, 'cascading'; or for the tautologically compulsive, number 40, 'cascading down'. What?

It supposedly means "to communicate or disseminate information, usually downwards". For me, it's the beer under that brand name, and the stuff that comes out the other side an hour later.

I'm looking forward to playing my first game of meeting jargon bingo next week, though my colleagues don't tend to use such crap jargon – the benefits, I guess, of working outside the corporate sector.

'Go forward' and poke fun at the pinstripe suits.

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On a winter's night…

Winter is doing strange things in Melbourne currently. One day, it is all foggy mornings and grounded or detoured aeroplanes, the next it's sunny afternoons followed by rain clouds chased over the ranges. All the same, there is something quite lovely about they way this city faces winter. Lots of people get into the winter mood around here, and incorporate its features into not just their dress and cooking, but into art, writing, and more.

I took this photo of a hand-drawn leaf a couple of weeks ago. It is part of an extended artwork on the glass wall of the local municipal library near my work. It is a lovely meditation on plane trees and the way they lose their leaves for the cold weather, if a bit melancholic.

Winter's melancholy can play havoc with many of us, but then there is always something to cheer us up. Like the sun breaking through the clouds, or burrowing into bed with something lovely to read, such as the latest issue of Meanjin – the first under the stewardship of their new editor Sophie Cunningham. It's worth reading, from all reports, and not just because it features work by the wonderful bloggers Ampersand Duck, and Laura Caroll, who are also behind Sarsaparilla.

Winter is also a great time for a big hearty stew or soup, or maybe a curry, and a nice glass of red. I know what I'm picking up from the shop on the way home.

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Winter – Wordless Wednesday (No. 5)

It has been a while since I've done a Wordless Wednesday, but it thought I'd try again, seeing that I actually liked some of the photos I took at a family outing to a park in Brunswick on the weekend. It has been cold here this last week. Winter has truly set in.

Last night I went to the forum 'Growing up Asian in Australia' last night, held to mark the launch of the new anthology of writing by writers of Asian descent – about growing up Asian in Australia – edited by Alice Pung, and I've had Hanif Kureishi on my mind .

Wouldn't you know it, his website has a story with a tree, children, an 'Asian' father and a park. Oh, and an errant ball. I recommend you read his story 'Hullabaloo in the Tree' to go along with the photo. I will blog on last night's panel when I have some time later this week.

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