Jane Rawson's Blog, page 7

The slow birth of a book

Back in a previous life, when I was environment and energy editor at The Conversation, me and my deputy editor James Whitmore had a brilliant idea. We decided the world needed a book that answered questions like ‘do I need to move to another country if I want to survive climate change?’. No one else seemed to have done it, and everyone still seemed to be talking about stopping climate change, as though that was something we could still do. Keen as we were to see emissions drop and climate change slowed, we thought it was about time someone started thinking about how to deal with the crazy weather, disruptions to the food system and distress we were pretty sure were heading our way. It turned out that someone was us, so we started thinking about it. Barry Scott at Transit Lounge reckoned the idea made sense, and we got to work.

We wandered around Australia talking to people who’d already changed the way they were living. We asked experts of all sorts about different scenarios and what might work to keep people safe and sane.  We were really grateful to the people who’d lived through floods and fires and told us what it was like. I was also deeply pleased to get three weeks at Varuna to work on the final draft, and we were both overwhelmed when Clive Hamilton agreed to write a foreword. Now the advance copies of the book are back from the printer. I feel nearly as weird as I did last time – I still haven’t worked up the nerve to open one and see if there are words inside. But part of the deal with writing a book is you tell people about it, so we’ve made a website (thanks to ace developer Jonathan Butler). We wanted a place where we could talk with readers about what’s in the book, and try to answer any questions we didn’t cover in print. We also have a load of references in the book, so we’ve put those online to make it a bit easier for you to click through and read the original sources if you’re interested.

The Handbook: surviving and living with climate change will be out on 1 September. You can have a look at the website now: www.survivingclimatechange.net (it includes a blog post about why we wrote the book). And if you like to use Goodreads, you can add the book here.

A happy panel

I just wanted to share this lovely picture from our ‘Bringing the Outside Inside’ panel about nature writing and the environment, held at Williamtown Literary Festival on the weekend. Willy Lit Fest is a real treat and we (me, Harry Saddler, Claire Dunn and Michael Green) had a great time talking about whether writing can save the world and how humans can remind ourselves we’re still wild.

Bendigo Writers Fest is nigh

…and it looks pretty damn interesting – loads of great sessions over the weekend of August 7, 8 & 9, including an evening with Nam Le, a great panel on fantasy, writers and philosophers chatting about the ethics of writing and Dani Valent interviewing Matthew Evans about the good life.

I’ll be appearing on two panels on the Sunday, ‘People I know’ and ‘A climate for change’.

People I know (12.30-1.30): Read Luke Carman, Jane Rawson and Nicholas Jose with care – these are fictions, remember! They talk with Kylie Mirmohamadi about how much their created characters rely on real people.

A climate for change (3-4pm): Some call it activist writing and dismiss it as ineffective. Others reckon writing about what matters to you is essential. With four different approaches to writing about climate, Iain McCalman, Alice Robinson, Anson Cameron and Jane Rawson talk to Gerry Gill.

The full program is now up at Bendigo Writers Festival and you should be able to buy tickets soon.

EWF & Letters to the West: a rant

Last week I did an event at the Emerging Writers Festival, called Letters to the West, where “The panel will reveal their relationship with the West through their missives. Will it be a love letter, a memory or a complaint? What does the West mean to them? Simply a location or an ideology, even a character in their lives?”. You can read more here.

I spent forever writing my letter, and got a heap of help from kind editor Patrick Allington, so it seemed a pity to just chuck the now-read letter in the bin. Instead, here it is. Sorry about the fury.

Dear the West,

How are you doing? Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and I can’t get back to sleep and I lie there and think about how strange it is, being so utterly alone. Does that ever happen to you?

Do you miss the East? Remember those guys? Their broad shoulders. Their distant gaze. Their hammers and sickles and over-the-top moustaches.  They sure could engineer a famine. Everything feels kind of empty and pointless now they’re gone, don’t you think?

We’re all flailing around a bit without them. Let me give you an example. Just the other week, commentator Annabel Crabb wrote that the Green party’s change of leadership had ‘a whiff of Moscow’ about it. She didn’t go on to explain what she meant, but I’m pretty sure she wasn’t suggesting the Greens were a bunch of bare-chested billionaire oligarchs with a passion for riding bears and shooting whales. I think she was calling them Communists.

Why would a modern woman like Ms Crabb have to hark back to the Soviet putschs of 1937 for a decent simile? It’s because the East was the last worthy enemy we had. Since you ran them out of town, the West, what have you offered us instead? Nothing. Sure, you tried to convince us Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was the new evil empire at least twice. And what is it now? ISIS? Boats? Imported frozen berries? Halal Vegemite? I can hardly keep track. Really, it’s no wonder that when Ms Crabb needed an aspersion, her first thought was the Stalinists.

Look, we want to believe you when you tell us ISIS threatens everything we stand for, we do.  But as a friend I feel I should tell you: you’re being a bit pathetic. I know: you’re lonely. I understand. You want there to be someone out there for you. An equal. A worthy combatant. A whole-hearted frenemy, someone as obsessed with you as you are with them. Someone who wonders what you’re wearing tomorrow and whether they can upstage you.

I really don’t think it’s been good for you, or for any of us, this being alone. We’ve forgotten how to imagine other ways of living. We’ve got no one to compare ourselves to any more, no one to push us to be our best selves. We’ve gotten lazy and narrow-minded and complacent. We can only see what’s in front of us and say ‘I want more of that’ – more free downloadable TV, more pulled-pork sliders, more peak-hour services on the Sunbury line – or ‘I want less of that’- less live export of animals, less murdering of women, less existential terror. When did we lose the ability to say, ‘maybe things would be better if we had this other thing entirely’? For example, why can’t we say, ‘maybe capitalism isn’t capable of giving us satisfying, dignified lives and it’s time to try something else.’

Seriously, let’s talk about capitalism, the West. Rolling it out across the world was the point of the whole exercise, wasn’t it? And now you’ve done it I guess you must feel pretty proud of yourself. But I’m not sure it’s turning out that great. Of course, if your intention was to give all the power and all the money to a tiny percentage of the population who would set about ruining the world for every other person and species for the rest of eternity then props to you: nice work. But if you were – like you said – more into freedom and democracy and a decent standard of living for everyone, a life where people could say and be what they wanted without losing their job and getting thrown in the gulag, where everyone could choose between sliced white and artisan spelt rather than moldy bread or no bread, well, I’m not sure we’re quite there yet.

Now that the East is gone, now that you’ve won, shouldn’t our lives be all about freedom and choice? But when we want an alternative way of living, what are our options? I guess we could ditch the iPhone and get a Samsung. Switch to Bonsoy.  That might help.

I mean, you’d have never settled for this travesty of freedom back when you had some competition, would you? You wouldn’t have shut off the water to poor neighbourhoods in Detroit or tried to set a six-month waiting period for unemployment benefits in Australia. Not back then; not when people could say ‘sure, they may not have CD walkmen or hypercolor t-shirts, but have you seen their incredible free healthcare? If this is the best you can offer me, maybe I’d rather be a Communist…’

Is this really how you wanted it to be, the West? Is this the future you were dreaming of when 28 years ago you heard Ronald Reagan demanding, ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’ I bet you were a bit teary-eyed back then, weren’t you. I bet you actually believed, for a minute, that it was going to be a bright and glorious future of freedom and wellbeing for all humans. Did you? Or is this what you wanted all along, the West?  A little club of rich mates owning both sides of politics and most of the media in pretty much every country on earth? A fancy new morality where pushing boatloads of people out to sea to drown is a great way to prevent drowning deaths? A society where slave workers are imported from Asia and raped by their bosses so we can have cheaper tomatoes? A populace that sees catastrophic melting of the polar ice sheets and thinks ‘well it’d be lovely to do something about it, but not if it means paying $2.50 extra on my power bill’? Is this really the absolute best you can manage, the West? Or do you reckon that now you’re running the entire fucking world you could maybe, I don’t know, try a tiny little bit harder?

Anyway, sorry, god, bit of a tangent there. I was actually writing because I need to get my Northern Exposure box set back. Would that be cool? Mum and dad are leaving for Alaska in three weeks and they definitely want to watch it before they go. So if you could chuck it in the post that would be great. Or maybe we could have brunch? What are you doing next Saturday? Give me a call,

Lots of love,

Jane.

Image by Mark Seton/Flickr

Another adventure in reading

Image by Meiry Peruch Mezari/Flickr

You might’ve noticed I started up a readathon, Just Read, to raise money for the Indigenous Literacy Foundation (because it irks me there are people in Australia who don’t get the chance to read).

You might also know I’ve pursued a few different tactics to try to choose the best book, every time: just reading Australian women; making unnecessary charts of my year’s reading; only (allegedly) reading books I already own before buying or borrowing any new books. So far, nothing has cracked the mystery of how to only read books I love.

This time I’m getting people to pay me to read things. When I say ‘me’ I mean ‘the Indigenous Literacy Foundation’. I’ve asked people to chuck $30 their way and, in return, they get to tell me one book I have to read during June and July. I’ve ended up with a pretty eclectic list:

The Wife of Martin Guerre by Janet Lewis (chosen by Wendy Smith)
Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon (chosen by Ryan O’Neill)
Ash Road by Ivan Southall (chosen by Dani Valent)
The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson (chosen by James Tierney)
Fat, forty and fired by Nigel Marsh (chosen by Sinead Quinn Biskup)
Doctor Wooreddy’s prescription for enduring the end of the world by Mudrooroo Nyoongah (chosen by Reema Rattan)
My struggle #1 by KO Knausgaard (chosen by Misha Ketchell)
Speeedboat by Renata Adler (chosen by Gillian Terzis).

The main problem with this experiment is I’m not sure how repeatable it is. What if I love all these books without reservation – how do I continue to plan my reading this way? What if someone says ‘oh you really must read the latest Elena Ferrante’? Do I say, ‘sure, if you donate some money to this charity I will’?

Anyway, if it turns out this isn’t a long enough list to get me through Just Read, I’ll be asking for suggestions/donations again a bit later on.

A few appearances

Festival season is kicking off and I’m celebrating by getting on some stages and saying some stuff. For starters, I’ll be at Emerging Writers Festival, Footscray Edition, on Thursday May 28 reading a ‘Letter to the West’. Then, a little bit later on, I’ll head down to Williamstown for a panel on writing about the wild, where I’ll be interviewing Harry Saddler, Claire Dunn and Michael Green about whether they think we can discuss the environment without coming over all preachy.

Details of the EWF ‘Letters to the West’ event are here. Note that it begins at my usual bedtime so don’t expect me to be that glittering.

And details for Willy Lit Fest’s ‘Bringing the outside inside’ event – including ticket buying buttons – are here.

Some people don’t get to read, and that sucks

Heaven. Image by Robert S. Donovan/Flickr

If you’ve ever read this blog before you know how much I love reading. In fact, if you read this blog I’m guessing you love reading too.

I am incredibly lucky: I was born in a home where books where everywhere and reading was valued. My parents read to me and encouraged me to read and to write from when I was very small. They also read in front of me, all the time, as though it were a thing worth doing.

I am not especially good at the everyday business of living. I often feel uncomfortable and awkward and embarrassed, sometimes scared or angry, just dumbfounded by the ways the world can be. Reading is my comfort and my confidante and I cannot imagine what life��would be like to be without it. Horrible.

But even people who find the world encouraging and sensible often enjoy reading (or so I’m told). It’s entertaining. it tells you about things you might otherwise never have known existed. It can make you both smarter and wiser. You can imagine being places you can’t go or people you can’t be. And you can use it to impress people.

What if you had never had the chance to learn to read? What would life be like without it?

Image from Indigenous Literacy Foundation

Many Indigenous kids, particularly in remote communities, cannot get their hands on books. Here are some stats��from the Indigenous Literacy Foundation:

Indigenous homes, particularly those in remote communities, have fewer books, computers and other educational resources than non-Indigenous homes.
The gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students emerges early. Non-Indigenous students far out-perform Indigenous students in benchmark tests for reading, writing and numeracy in Year 3 and Year 5.
By the age of 15, more than one-third of Australia���s Indigenous students ‘do not have the adequate skills and knowledge in reading literacy to meet real-life challenges and may well be disadvantaged in their lives beyond school’.
In the Northern Territory, only one in five children living in very remote Indigenous communities can read at the accepted minimum standard.

The Indigenous Literacy Foundation gets books for these kids��and helps them learn to read. I’ve started a readathon where you can read, raise money for ILF and give more people the gift of reading. It runs in June and July, you can read whatever you like and set your own targets for reading and for fundraising. If you struggle to find time to read as much as you’d like, you can devote two months to reading guilt-free – you’ll be doing it for a good cause.

To sign up, go to Just Read readathon. If you’d rather��sponsor a reader, you can do that instead. Over the next few months I’ll be posting reading suggestions as well as��guest posts from other readers. If you’d like to do a guest post, let me know.

Get reading, because you can.

What did I learn from TBR20? (Spoiler: I don’t know)

Books are consumer goods, just like dresses or DVD box sets or surround sound systems or these things. Making them��consumes non-renewable resources, no one ever bothers asking what conditions are like in the places where��they���re made, and masses of fossil fuels are used to ship them around the world. And like fashion, books can be art or they can be disposable rubbish. I know you already know that, but sometimes we talk about them as though they���re sacred objects, and that buying a new book every week is a wonderful, worthy thing to do but buying a new frock every week is wasteful and reprehensible.

Note: bookshops are excellent places full of fine people (image by snipergirl/flickr).

I own a lot of books. Many of them I���ve bought just for the consumerist rush. I picked them up in shops and stroked their covers, I wanted them so badly; I bought them all for my very own, then I took them home, put them on the shelf and never looked at them again. Now they���re just pieces of resentment, sitting there and making me feel guilty about all the reading I���ve failed to do.

So I signed up for #TBR20. The premise is, you read 20 books you already own before buying or borrowing a single other book. Now that I’ve finished, let’s see how I went.

On December 7��last year I started reading Cold Light by Frank Moorhouse. I had 19 other books lined up, ready to read (let’s call these ‘TBR-approved’). While I was reading Cold Light��I also dipped into Etgar Keret’s short story collection,��Suddenly a knock on the door (TBR-approved). I finished��Cold Light and picked up��Slow Water (TBR-approved). So far so good. The same day I surreptitiously slipped Jenny Valentish’s��Cherry Bomb into my handbag (TBR-forbidden). I had an excuse: I planned to give it to a friend for Christmas and just needed to check she’d like it. It was only a little slip-up and from then until January 24, things went swimmingly: Wayne Macauley’s��Demons, Patrick de Witt’s��Ablutions, Ryan O’Neill’s��Weight of a human heart, Elizabeth Jane Howard’s��Falling, Toni Morrison’s��A mercy, Brooke Davis’��Lost & Found, John A Scott’s��N: all read (Ablutions��abandoned partway through), all TBR-approved.

Varuna: my undoing (image by Rebecca Geach)

Then I went to Varuna and it all went horribly wrong. Oh look,��there’s Nicole Smith’s��Sideshow on the living-room bookshelf, I’ve been wanting to read that. Oh and Margo Lanagan’s��Black juice and Emma Donoghue’s��Frog music and Charlotte Wood’s��The children and Alison Croggon’s��Navigatio oh and James Bradley’s��The resurrectionist. I should read all of those. Plus I brought a few books on my Kindle in case I ran out of things to read (???), so I had to read Helen Macdonald’s��H is for hawk. At least I didn’t actually accrue any more (hard copy) books. Oh, until I got back home and there was a kindly posted copy of AS Patric’s not-quite-yet-released��Black Rock White City so I just had to read that…

February rolled around and I got back on that TBR bike. Best Australian short stories 2014 (TBR-approved), The book of strange new things (TBR-approved), Clade (TBR-approved except not really because I didn’t own it in December but I snuck it in to the list later because I needed to read it for a panel I was on) oh and then it all went haywire again. I had Andy Weir’s The Martian��(TBR-forbidden) on my Kindle and well I just somehow started reading it (I stopped halfway through. Got bored). Had to borrow Picnic at Hanging Rock��(TBR-forbidden) from the library to read for bookclub. Raced through Rose Michael’s The asking game (TBR-approved) then got waylaid by��J Robert Lennon’s See you in paradise (TBR-forbidden) and followed up with��an unexplained library borrowing binge: Trevor Shearston’s Game, Barbara Trapido’s Sex and Stravinsky and Jenny Offil’s Dept of Speculation, all TBR-forbidden.

I don’t want to bore you. It carried on in much the same way until last week when I finished my final��TBR-approved book, Anna Tambour’s��Crandolin. Between reading the first and last of my 20 approved books I read a total of 38 books. It wasn’t a total failure – almost all the forbidden books I read I read for a purpose (bookclub, had to discuss them on a panel, wanted to ask the author for a favour…) and all but one of them I either borrowed from the library or bought as e-books (so not totally undermining my secondary aim of not wasting resources by buying hard copy books I wasn’t going to read).

Why does everyone think this book is awesome? (Image by Eric Peacock/Flickr)

I want to read books that change my brain and my heart and my life. I’m always searching for the amazing book that will make me see the world in a new way. I can’t resist the promise of the shiny, super-well-reviewed book. And then I’m usually sad (see right). So the main thing I wanted to know was, would I be just as happy reading the books I already had as I would reading the books I thought I wanted? Let’s look at the stats.

One-quarter of my TBR20 books were five-star reads. That’s pretty great. Another seven were four-stars. I abandoned three books.

Of my forbidden books, one was five stars, eight were four stars and two were abandoned. On the other hand, most of those TBR20s were books I had bought thinking they were books that would make all the difference. How did the random, acquired-who-knows-where, don’t-even-know-why-I-have-it books go?

EJ Howard’s Falling: pretty good, three stars, it’s no Cazalets.
Wayne Macauley’s Demons: pretty good, three stars, I like his short stories better.
Toni Morrison’s A mercy: four stars, but not as amazing as Beloved.
Annamarie Jagose’s Slow water: four stars, really pretty great but not life-changing.
Etgar Keret’s Suddenly a knock on the door: five stars, totally unexpected, made me so happy.

Three��of the four other five-star, life changing books – Cold Light, Life &��Fate, N – were books I had bought assuming they would be amazing. And they were.

So what did I learn from this exercise? Finding a brilliant book can happen from a superb recommendation or totally by chance. You may as well stick to second-hand books and the library because there’s a good chance you’ll find what you’re looking for there. And maybe every now and then, when you get a recommendation you just can’t resist, get down to the book shop.

Disclaimer��You should totally buy loads of books at your local��bookshop at least once a week and maybe more often than that. Bookshops are great. So are books. Authors and booksellers make money from you buying books, and authors and booksellers have been scientifically proven to be utterly excellent people. Buy books.

��

Short story: We saw the same sky

My short story,��We saw the same sky, published in the current��Overland, is now online and free to read. I wrote the first draft of this story in response to a story prompt provided by the gorgeous small publisher, Tiny Owl Workshop. They were sourcing stories for an anthology,��Unfettered (which I believe will be published soon), based on illustrations by Terry Whidborne (including the one I used, ‘Swallows‘). It was also a response to a report that claimed��then-immigration minister Scott Morrison had told asylum seekers on Manus that “even in your dreams, you are not going to make it to Australia“. Oh yeah, ScoMo, I thought: how exactly are you going to stop them dreaming about Australia?

Anyway, the result was We saw the same sky. Thank you to Jen Mills for doing such a great job editing and improving it and to Overland for publishing it. (And while you’re there you should read Wayne Macauley’s kick-arse story, A comment about free market forces.)

Don’t mention the war

Anzac Day has been bugging me for years. This year I thought instead of annoying my friends with my incoherent ranting, I would try to get my ideas in order and write them down. I did. Then Overland saw fit to publish them, in the form of an article. If you’d like to read it here it is: Don’t mention the war.��There’s nothing in there about Woolworths, in case you wondered.