Jane Rawson's Blog, page 4

From the Wreck: a launch

From the Wreck is officially out on 1 March (though I suspect its little face will appear in your local bookshop before that). But if you’re in Melbourne, come along to the launch, which is not until March 21. Details are here.

2016: my year in books, unnecessarily graphed

This year I started 90 books (this fact is untrue. For example, last night I started two books and stopped them within three chapters. I didn’t add them to this count. And I bet I read a couple more books before the end of the year) and finished 84 of them. Here is a picture of each of those piles of books.

If you would like to know which ones were best, you could read about my favourite books of the year.

Twenty-one of those books were published this year; 40 more were published since 2010. There was one book each from 2009, 2005, 2002, 1999, 1989 and 1973. I read two 19th century novellas: one from 1853 and one from 1898 (win a free book if you guess what they were. You don’t get to choose the book).

I had my usual ‘read more sheilas than blokes’ kind of year.

Next year I am going to do something about the geographic distribution of the authors I read. I will only read books from Ireland (more on that later), Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America.

Libraries are so good. Thank you so much to Footscray Library and Melbourne City Library for keeping me in books this year. If you don’t have a library card, you should get one. They let you read books for free. My book-buying dollars went mostly to indies this year – I didn’t break it down but that would primarily be Readings (online and in-store), Avid Reader (online), Paperback Books (the closest real-world bookshop to my office), Hill of Content (my second-closest real-world bookshop), Sun Bookshop (my neighbourhood bookshop) and some overseas small publishers whose books aren’t available here yet. The ‘Booktopia/Amazon’ figure is for hard-copy books; Kindles from Amazon are listed separately. Second-hand is mostly from my defacto neighbourhood bookshop, Savers Footscray (thanks for all the random $3 books, Savers).

I keep tabs of why I chose to read a book (if I can figure it out: it’s often random) in a (still-failed) attempt to figure out whether any of these fields matches ‘books I liked best’. I can reveal that liking someone’s twitter feed is no guarantee you will love their book. None of these categories guarantees anything, in fact, and I think I’ll stop logging them.

Most of the books I read this year I didn’t mind: they were quite nice and not in any way a waste of my time. As for books I didn’t like, it seemed I had a particularly bad run of slightly-speculative commercial fiction this year (authors from the US also rated quite badly). It seems this is a genre (is it a genre?) I don’t like.

I tried correlating ‘books I loved’ with other criteria and discovered that there was a 30% chance I’d love any given book, a 40% chance if that book had some hot buzz around it, 50% if the author was queer, 60% if the book was sci-fi or fantasy (both these stats were heavily influenced by my huge love for the three ‘Captive Prince’ books) and 100% if the book’s author was Irish: that was thanks to Beatlebone, Solar Bones and Pond (OK, the author isn’t strictly Irish but she lives there and the book’s set there). If anyone can recommend some queer Irish sci-fi, that would be great.

And now here are some categories that bear little or no relationship to one another and should never be grouped in a chart:

The best books, according to me

I don’t know if anyone noticed, but I’ve stopped using Goodreads to review books. I thought I might read in private for a while and see how that went. So far, pretty well.

Still, you have to tell people your favourite books at the end of the year, right? So, in no particular order, these were my top 8:

Solar Bones by Mike McCormack (2016)
Their Brilliant Careers by Ryan O’Neill (2016) (Aust)
The Dig Tree by Sarah Murgatroyd (Aust)
The three books of the Captive Prince series by CS Pacat (Aust)
Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson
Beatlebone by Kevin Barry
The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro
How to be Both by Ali Smith

I don’t know if they have that much in common – three Goldsmith’s Prize winners are in there, I think, and if Ryan O’Neill was published in England it’d probably be four – Their brilliant careers is one of the cleverest and deeply thought out Australian books I’ve read. So I suppose most of them are trying to do something a bit different with form, and mostly succeeding. They’re also an emotional bunch of books – Aurora, Beatlebone, The buried giant, Solar bones and How to be both all had me in sudden and surprising floods of tears. They all made me want to try harder and be a better writer. The Dig Tree achieved something I’ll probably never attempt – making a boring old story you think you know backwards into something fresh and intriguing and very, very entertaining. And The Captive Prince is that best of all things, a book that you cannot stop reading. Nothing else mattered while I was reading this series.

‘Aurora’ had to go back to the library

 

 

I loved a lot of books this year – it’s been a great reading year. The rest of my favourites, according to my secret and private spreadsheet, were:

Fever of Animals by Miles Allinson (Aust)
Autumn by Ali Smith (2016)
Old Filth by Jane Gardam
Illywhacker by Peter Carey (Aust)
Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich
Waiting by Phillip Salom (2016) (Aust)
Pond by Claire Louise Bennett
The Bonobo’s Dream by Rose Mulready (2016) (Aust)
The Notebook Trilogy by Agota Kristof 
Hold Still by Sally Mann
The Island will Sink by Briohny Doyle (2016) (Aust)
Wood Green by Sean Rabin (2016) (Aust)
Riders in the Chariot by Patrick White (Aust)
Dying in the First Person by Nike Sulway (2016) (Aust)
Those who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante

Because I’ve been keeping a secret and private spreadsheet, I will still be thrilling the world with this years ‘Books I read, unnecessarily graphed’ in the next couple of weeks: something to look forward to.

Real people, made-up books

I’ll be talking about From the wreck at this La Trobe University symposium, on a panel with Ilka Tampke (Skin) and Kate Mildenhall (Skylarking). It’ll be held at the university’s city campus and it’s free, but you do have to book.

Symposium: December 2016

Literary works have long taken historical figures as their subjects. Recently, a term has emerged to describe this approach and to group associated scholarly research: biofiction. The topic has fea…

Source: Symposium: December 2016

So many novellas, all in one place

If you’re in Melbourne and love being read to, come along to this event:

Viva La Novella Readings at The Wilde 

Presented by Seizure.

Winners of the Viva La Novella Prize will be reading from their books. Join us for a drink and a listen to the next generation of unique Australian literary voices.

Featuring:

Marlee Jane Ward reading from Welcome to Orphancorp

Jane Rawson reading from Formaldehyde

Christy Collins reading from The End of Seeing

Jane Jervis-Read reading from Midnight Blue and Endlessly Tall

Julie Proudfoot reading from The Neighbour

Nicole Smith reading from Sideshow

Rose Mulready reading from The Bonobo’s Dream

Entry $2 for a chance to be in the door prize: a full set of Viva La Novella books, which includes:

The Bonobo’s Dream by Rose Mulready, Populate & Perish by George Haddad, Welcome to Orphancorp by Marlee Jane Ward, Formaldehyde by Jane Rawson, The End of Seeing by Christy Collins, The Neighbour by Julie Proudfoot, Sideshow by Nicole Smith, The Other Shore by Hoa Pham, Blood and Bones by Daniel Davis Wood, Midnight Blue and Endlessly Tall by Jane Jervis-Read

Thursday 15th December

The Wilde

153 Gertrude Street, Fitzroy

(the number 86 Tram with get you almost to the door)

6.30 for a 7 o’clock start

Mysterious, beautiful, and a book

My new novel, out in March, now has a cover and a blurb and all those other book-like things. You can also pre-order it from Transit Lounge. Peter Lo, Transit Lounge’s designer, is a brilliant person – this cover feels just how my book feels to me.

From the Wreck – the history of a history

On 6 August, 1859, the steamship Admella was wrecked on Carpenters Reef, about 1km off the coast of South Australia. It had left Port Adelaide the previous day, making its regular trip to Melbourne. One hundred and thirteen people were aboard – 84 passengers and 29 crew. For more than a week the wrecked and broken ship was stuck on the reef, its inhabitants slowly dying from hunger, thirst and exposure. Many attempts were made to rescue them, but terrible weather and bad luck meant every effort failed. Finally the wreck was reached by a lifeboat from Portland, Victoria: 24 people had survived the eight-day ordeal. Among them was George Hills, my great-great-grandfather. George had been washed off the boat during the first moments of the wreck, but was rescued by Soren Holm, an able seaman from Denmark; Holm drowned soon after while trying to reach shore and raise the alarm.

After his rescue, George, who was 24, married his fiancée Eliza Ridge; they had eight children including their youngest daughter Sarah, who was the mother of my grandmother, Nancy Bradley. George Hills died in 1916 at the age of 83.

Since 2009 I have been trying to write the story of George Hills. Richard Flanagan has spoken about those family stories that just nag at you until you get them written – his resulted in ‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North’, which I really didn’t like and which made me wonder if writing ‘the story that needs to be written’ is a bad impulse and that I should give it away.

For a while I did, but then last year I decided to start all over again and rewrite the story from the perspective of an alien creature, seeking refuge on Earth after her own planet had been ruined by human terraforming. Suddenly I started caring a lot more about the whole thing – as well as a story about trauma it became a story about learning to treasure these sweet little lives we’ve each been given, with all their awfulness and disappointment and smallness. It also became a story about our relationship with other species, one of my favourite obsessions.

I know it’s traditional to wait until a book is published to acknowledge others’ contributions, but the way I see it the main thing is finishing the book, not getting it published. So I would like to note that I had so much help getting to the end of this project. My husband, Andy, is amazing – he really gets why someone would bother to waste their life plugging away at a piece of art that may never matter to anyone else. He also noticed that octopuses are probably from another dimension: that was very helpful.

Members of my family – particularly my mum and my uncle Andrew and cousin Cath – had  already done so much of the research legwork before I even started, and cared enough about the story of the Admella to make me see its potential. My mum has read this novel in all its forms and the final version is probably her least favourite, so it would be nice if a real historical novelist would write this story for her in proper historical novel form: thanks! Marlee Jane Ward listened to me thrash the idea out of my head and into some kind of storyish form and said it was something that would work. Jane Ormond, Rose Mulready and Bridget Weller have been, as always, my stalwart writing companions. Charlotte Wood and Alison Manning ran a two-day workshop that helped me get my brain in the right shape to write this thing. My late uncle John – who knew about Australian history – fixed my terrible historical errors, encouraged me to keep going and shared a lot of plates of cheese-on-toast with me. Rose Mulready, Rose Michael and Patrick Allington all read drafts and made the thing so much better than it would otherwise have been.

I finished the final version in July. In August, Transit Lounge agreed to publish it. I am so grateful that Barry Scott, Transit Lounge’s publisher, exists and will take on strange genre-smearing work like mine. Here’s his description.

“Jane Rawson’s From the Wreck (May 2017) tells the story of George Hills, who survived the wreck of the Admella steamship off the South Australian coast in 1859. He is haunted by the  spirit of a fellow survivor, Bridget Ledwith. Both real and transformative this is a novel imbued with poetry and feeling: a woman from another dimension seeks refuge on Earth and a little boy holds the entire history of another planet in his head. Like Walter Tevis’s The Man Who Fell to Earth it evokes an existential loneliness.”

The writing bit is over. Here comes all that other bit.

 

2016 Snapshot: Jane Rawson

Thanks so much to the Spec Fic Snapshotters and to David McDonald in particular for including me in this year’s lineup: I’m flattered!

Australian SF Snapshot Project

Interview by David McDonald.

Jane Rawson is the author of the novel, A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists (2013 Transit Lounge), which won the Small Press Network’s 2014 ‘Most Underrated Book’ Award, and co-author of The Handbook: surviving and living with climate change (2015 Transit Lounge), a practical, personal guide to life in a climate-changed Australia. Her novella, Formaldehyde (2015 Seizure), won the Seizure Viva La Novella Prize. Her short fiction has been published by Sleepers, Overland, Tincture, Seizure, Review of Australian Fiction and SlinkChunkPress.

You’re someone who seems comfortable moving between the worlds of literary and genre fiction, with stories that combine a number of styles, and awards and other recognition across different fields. Did you start trying to write certain types of stories and find different elements creeping in, or has this blend always been there?

I have always just wanted to…

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Jump in the Lake

I haven’t been blogging much lately. It would be fairly ridiculous to think anyone would have noticed, but just in case you have it’s because I’ve been trying to finish a novel (I’m almost there) and write a few short stories.  Also, I haven’t had anything very thrilling to say.

So apologies, but this is a self-promotion post to tell you I’ve got a new short story out this week, and another coming out in September, and I’d be delighted if you would read them.

The first is in Review of Australian Fiction. It’s called ‘Lake’ and if you thought ‘The Last Idea’ was too creepy then probably you shouldn’t read it. As well as being creepy it’s also pretty bloody weird, so I’d be really interested to know if you could even make sense of it. On top of that, it’s definitely the story I’m proudest of – it nearly broke my brain writing it, and when I was re-reading it the other day I realised it’s an inadvertent tribute to my literary hero, Edith Campbell Berry.

You can either buy this individual issue, which also features a story by my ace pal and co-conspirator Rose Michael, or you can subscribe (once the RAF site is repaired) and get a whole bunch of issues. Review of Australian Fiction comes out twice a month, each issue is two stories (one by an ‘established’ and one by an ‘emerging’ author), and you can download it to all your standard digital devices, including Kindle. They publish all kinds of stories from the most literary of realist fiction to the kind of nuts stuff that Rose and I write.

My second story will be in Funny Ha-Ha, a newish Australian print magazine that publishes, you guessed it, funny stuff. Australian literature is tragically low on funny stuff, but Funny Ha-Ha is doing its utmost to rectify the situation. The magazine is self-funded by its editor, so if you want to help make sure the September issue actually comes out, you can pre-order a copy here (they have stickers too).

(The image is of Lake Kaindy in Kazakhstan – you can read about it here.)

Short story, short post

Hello, I have a new story out, on a website that lives somewhere on the internet. They are SlinkChunkPress, and my story is ‘The Last Idea’. Go here if you would like to read it.