Gillian Polack's Blog, page 120
April 3, 2013
Felicity Pulman on 'A Ring through Time'
This is the special post I promised yesterday. Felicity Pulman's 'Ghost Boy' is a delightful timeslip novel and her new book 'A Ring through Time' makes a matched pair: Australia's colonial history, told through the eyes of modern children. I love 'Ghost Boy' - and I was very pleased to read it's matched pair. It's not a sequel and they're not a duology, but they really do make a good set. I keep telling her "You should do a third." I'm officially a bad influence, but I think everyone knows that now.
Gillian
A Ring Through Time, is billed as a ‘ghostly romance’ for young adults, and ghosts certainly feature in the story, but really, I’ve come to the conclusion that writing a novel is, in itself, something of a mystical process. Above all, I’ve learned that writers need to listen to and trust those hunches, those voices, those little shivers down the spine, because they come from the subconscious that, ultimately, knows so much more about your story than you do!
To illustrate this, I thought I’d share with you something of the process of writing my latest novel. It began when we first visited Norfolk Island over ten years ago. My husband, Mike, and I went snorkeling at Emily Bay. I strapped on my mask and put my face in the water, and I heard a girl’s voice say: ‘If only I could see my own life as clearly as I can see everything now.’ I had no idea who she was, or what had gone so badly wrong in her life that she needed to see it more clearly, but I made a note of what she said because I know that voices are a gift, even if you have no idea who’s speaking or what the hell it’s all about!
Because I knew that the voice was important, I began to take an interest in everything about the island. Norfolk Island is idyllically beautiful and it has a fascinating history, starting in the 1780s with the infamous First and later the Second Convict Settlements, and continuing with the settlement of the Pitcairn Islanders in 1856. This is an ongoing bone of contention between the descendents of the islanders and the ‘Australian contingent’, who embody the foothold kept by Australia on the island under the aegis of the Australian administrator. The islanders have their own parliament, but they believe that Queen Victoria granted the island entirely to them and they want full autonomy – a tension that I have hinted at in that part of my story set in the present.
While Mike was fascinated by the story of the Mutiny on the Bounty, those mutineers who found a home on Pitcairn Island and whose descendents are now the ‘first families’ on the island, my heart went out to those wretches who suffered unbelievable torments under a series of commandants on the island, in particular during the Second Settlement. I wandered endlessly through the haunting ruins, and scribbled copious notes and chucked them in a folder. Once home, and for various reasons, I embarked on the Shalott trilogy, followed by the Janna Mysteries, and the folder lay forgotten until, at a crossroads in my writing life, I decided to apply for a May Gibbs Fellowship. For that, I had to come up with a proposal and so I went looking for that long-forgotten file.
To my delight, I was successful and was granted a month’s writing in a studio in Adelaide. At which stage I started to panic. I’d written a synopsis of my proposed story for my application, but it really wasn’t resonating with me. But I had no idea what else to do. Mike accompanied me to South Australia so that we could cruise the Murray River before I started my time in the studio. I’d brought all my notes and what research I’d done with me, but reading the journal I kept at the time I see just how lacking in confidence I was.
One of our stops on the riverboat was at Swan Reach and we visited the museum there. I was immediately drawn to a display of (rather gruesome, I thought) jewellery made out of hair – mourning brooches and such. I can’t remember if there actually was a hair ring among them, but I ‘saw’ it anyway, and realised, with such a thrill of excitement, that this was going to be the key to my story.
Writing is an act of faith, I’ve always believed that. All I know is that, armed with first the ‘voice’ and then the ‘vision’, the story started to write itself – different from my original proposal, but so much better. By the time I left Adelaide, it was already half-done. More important, by then I knew exactly where I was going with it, and how it was going to end.
Once home in Sydney, I had a whole lot more research to do and decisions to make, and we also visited Norfolk Island once more. And let me pay tribute here to the islanders and to many others who were so generous with their time and their knowledge. All of this information helped to inform my story. The ghostly romance was based on the love affair between Alexander Maconochie’s daughter and her violin tutor. Maconochie was known as the ‘reforming commandant’, a man well before his time and a good man. Even so, when the romance was discovered Minnie Maconochie was sent back to England in disgrace! I suppose her tutor was also punished, but I found a reference to the fact that he subsequently made a name for himself as a musician in Sydney and in Hobart – a happier ending than poor Minnie who became her father’s emanuensis once he returned to the UK, and who died while still only in her 30s.
Two despots came after Maconochie ‘to impose order on the island once more’: Major Joseph Childs, under whose watch the ‘cooking pot riot’ occurred, and John Price, who hanged 12 men for it without allowing any clergyman or priest to be present, and who had them buried in an unmarked grave in unhallowed ground outside the cemetery – the so-called Murderers’ Mound’ still visible today.
I’ve based my character’s father on John Price, but called him John Bennett as Price didn’t have a teenage daughter, and what happened to Alice certainly never happened to any of his children. What I have done is used fictional characters to illustrate the past, interweaving them with an account of what convict life was like under Price, ‘a brutal, vicious sadist’, and portraying events such as the ‘cooking pot riot’ and the hangings that followed.
Alice and Cormac’s love was doomed from the start, and so is Allie’s love for Noah in the present day – unless she can solve the secrets of the past and lay those unhappy ghosts to rest.
Ghosts, mysteries, music, romance – these are the sorts of things I love to write about, and hopefully that you will want to read!
© Felicity Pulman, 2013
Gillian
A Ring Through Time, is billed as a ‘ghostly romance’ for young adults, and ghosts certainly feature in the story, but really, I’ve come to the conclusion that writing a novel is, in itself, something of a mystical process. Above all, I’ve learned that writers need to listen to and trust those hunches, those voices, those little shivers down the spine, because they come from the subconscious that, ultimately, knows so much more about your story than you do!
To illustrate this, I thought I’d share with you something of the process of writing my latest novel. It began when we first visited Norfolk Island over ten years ago. My husband, Mike, and I went snorkeling at Emily Bay. I strapped on my mask and put my face in the water, and I heard a girl’s voice say: ‘If only I could see my own life as clearly as I can see everything now.’ I had no idea who she was, or what had gone so badly wrong in her life that she needed to see it more clearly, but I made a note of what she said because I know that voices are a gift, even if you have no idea who’s speaking or what the hell it’s all about!
Because I knew that the voice was important, I began to take an interest in everything about the island. Norfolk Island is idyllically beautiful and it has a fascinating history, starting in the 1780s with the infamous First and later the Second Convict Settlements, and continuing with the settlement of the Pitcairn Islanders in 1856. This is an ongoing bone of contention between the descendents of the islanders and the ‘Australian contingent’, who embody the foothold kept by Australia on the island under the aegis of the Australian administrator. The islanders have their own parliament, but they believe that Queen Victoria granted the island entirely to them and they want full autonomy – a tension that I have hinted at in that part of my story set in the present.
While Mike was fascinated by the story of the Mutiny on the Bounty, those mutineers who found a home on Pitcairn Island and whose descendents are now the ‘first families’ on the island, my heart went out to those wretches who suffered unbelievable torments under a series of commandants on the island, in particular during the Second Settlement. I wandered endlessly through the haunting ruins, and scribbled copious notes and chucked them in a folder. Once home, and for various reasons, I embarked on the Shalott trilogy, followed by the Janna Mysteries, and the folder lay forgotten until, at a crossroads in my writing life, I decided to apply for a May Gibbs Fellowship. For that, I had to come up with a proposal and so I went looking for that long-forgotten file.
To my delight, I was successful and was granted a month’s writing in a studio in Adelaide. At which stage I started to panic. I’d written a synopsis of my proposed story for my application, but it really wasn’t resonating with me. But I had no idea what else to do. Mike accompanied me to South Australia so that we could cruise the Murray River before I started my time in the studio. I’d brought all my notes and what research I’d done with me, but reading the journal I kept at the time I see just how lacking in confidence I was.
One of our stops on the riverboat was at Swan Reach and we visited the museum there. I was immediately drawn to a display of (rather gruesome, I thought) jewellery made out of hair – mourning brooches and such. I can’t remember if there actually was a hair ring among them, but I ‘saw’ it anyway, and realised, with such a thrill of excitement, that this was going to be the key to my story.
Writing is an act of faith, I’ve always believed that. All I know is that, armed with first the ‘voice’ and then the ‘vision’, the story started to write itself – different from my original proposal, but so much better. By the time I left Adelaide, it was already half-done. More important, by then I knew exactly where I was going with it, and how it was going to end.
Once home in Sydney, I had a whole lot more research to do and decisions to make, and we also visited Norfolk Island once more. And let me pay tribute here to the islanders and to many others who were so generous with their time and their knowledge. All of this information helped to inform my story. The ghostly romance was based on the love affair between Alexander Maconochie’s daughter and her violin tutor. Maconochie was known as the ‘reforming commandant’, a man well before his time and a good man. Even so, when the romance was discovered Minnie Maconochie was sent back to England in disgrace! I suppose her tutor was also punished, but I found a reference to the fact that he subsequently made a name for himself as a musician in Sydney and in Hobart – a happier ending than poor Minnie who became her father’s emanuensis once he returned to the UK, and who died while still only in her 30s.
Two despots came after Maconochie ‘to impose order on the island once more’: Major Joseph Childs, under whose watch the ‘cooking pot riot’ occurred, and John Price, who hanged 12 men for it without allowing any clergyman or priest to be present, and who had them buried in an unmarked grave in unhallowed ground outside the cemetery – the so-called Murderers’ Mound’ still visible today.
I’ve based my character’s father on John Price, but called him John Bennett as Price didn’t have a teenage daughter, and what happened to Alice certainly never happened to any of his children. What I have done is used fictional characters to illustrate the past, interweaving them with an account of what convict life was like under Price, ‘a brutal, vicious sadist’, and portraying events such as the ‘cooking pot riot’ and the hangings that followed.
Alice and Cormac’s love was doomed from the start, and so is Allie’s love for Noah in the present day – unless she can solve the secrets of the past and lay those unhappy ghosts to rest.
Ghosts, mysteries, music, romance – these are the sorts of things I love to write about, and hopefully that you will want to read!
© Felicity Pulman, 2013
April 2, 2013
gillpolack @ 2013-04-03T08:42:00
I have an impossibly busy day and a migraine. I shall deal, but possibly not entirely with happiness.
I have a special guest post for you, but it must wait until post-migraine. Right now my main aim is to get through the list of things that cannot be postponed, which is quite long. It's not as long as it would have been if I hadn't continued puddling through it during Passover which is, I guess a bonus. And I've got the list two and a bit things shorter, already. I will make it! And eventually the migraine will stop and I will be smug. Until then, it's one step at a time, with weeble.
I have a special guest post for you, but it must wait until post-migraine. Right now my main aim is to get through the list of things that cannot be postponed, which is quite long. It's not as long as it would have been if I hadn't continued puddling through it during Passover which is, I guess a bonus. And I've got the list two and a bit things shorter, already. I will make it! And eventually the migraine will stop and I will be smug. Until then, it's one step at a time, with weeble.
March 31, 2013
gillpolack @ 2013-04-01T11:48:00
I have a pile of work to do today (for yesterday was not good, except when my oldest friend turned up and we chatted) abut I had to detour via the second Flycon guest chat that Sharyn's put up. It's so appropriate for WHM (now, alas, over). Like much of Flycon, it's almost all (maybe it *is* all) women. People appeared and disappeared depending on the various household crises and work calls as much as according to what timezone they were in. Some people chose anonymity or their LJ aliases. The topics ranged from which bits of the Alexiad ought to appear in SF to were-wombats. It's worth a look: http://www.eneitpress.com/news.php?news=116
In fact, all of the WHM transcripts are worth checking out (and I don't appear as much as I do in these first two - my appearance is, in fact, due to me being the emergency chair when the chair didn't turn up, and we had quite a lot of crises happening to chairs which meant that I didn't get much sleep at all during Flycon). There are still some up at SFF.net. Sharyn's putting up quite a few (as she gets time) and I'm hoping that AWriterGoesOnaJourney has the rest, but they're not online. Sharyn has the live chats, though, so we have, I think, all of them (Monissa and Pat recorded all the sessions for us). It'll be interesting to see if the whole of FLycon was as much a convention for women as it looks and as I remember - it may, however, be only those sessions.
I'd better get on with the rest of today. If I can demolish a heap of work, maybe it won't matter that it's a high pain day. I have a special teat this afternoon - my god-daughter is coming to visit! She heard that her mother was staying with me overnight during the Folk Festival and she wants to see me too. I only get to see L a couple of times a year, so this is a very, very special thing and I think I shall make her matzah latkes. I might let her parents eat some, too...
In fact, all of the WHM transcripts are worth checking out (and I don't appear as much as I do in these first two - my appearance is, in fact, due to me being the emergency chair when the chair didn't turn up, and we had quite a lot of crises happening to chairs which meant that I didn't get much sleep at all during Flycon). There are still some up at SFF.net. Sharyn's putting up quite a few (as she gets time) and I'm hoping that AWriterGoesOnaJourney has the rest, but they're not online. Sharyn has the live chats, though, so we have, I think, all of them (Monissa and Pat recorded all the sessions for us). It'll be interesting to see if the whole of FLycon was as much a convention for women as it looks and as I remember - it may, however, be only those sessions.
I'd better get on with the rest of today. If I can demolish a heap of work, maybe it won't matter that it's a high pain day. I have a special teat this afternoon - my god-daughter is coming to visit! She heard that her mother was staying with me overnight during the Folk Festival and she wants to see me too. I only get to see L a couple of times a year, so this is a very, very special thing and I think I shall make her matzah latkes. I might let her parents eat some, too...
March 30, 2013
Women's History Month - Sharyn Lilley (and Flycon)
Sometimes, getting seen is purely technical. Knowing where to go, what to do. For the very first Women's History Month (in 2000), two of us spent a lot of time on what the three of us spent so much time doing at Flycon: we walked participants gently through what seemed obvious. "What is a mouse?" asked one of our guests, that first WHM, "And why does my computer have it?" "How are you getting this place to do things?" I was asked often at Flycon, "And how do I even get started?"
One thing I noticed when other attendees and I were chatting was how many people who came just for an hour or so were there because they had young children and could get an hour at their computer when they couldn't get out to a normal convention. We had students, we had young mothers, we had new writers feeling the water. There were a higher proportion of women being active than I see at live cons.
Sharyn wasn't the only ill committee member, but, as she points out, we simply had to get it done. And we could, for no-one noticed how bad we looked or knew when we emailed each other "Am being raced places for medical reasons - can you take over?"
If there are more posts this WHM, I'll bring them to you (there are people who have yet to report in, but they may decide not to post, given the date), otherwise, this is not a bad note to end on, because women fen both old and new congregated at Flycon. I keep meaning to analyse panels and chats for women's involvement, but my general impression was that, because Flycon borrowed its structure from Australia's online WHM celebrations, it mimicked it a bit, which meant that women had very strong voices. Participation reflects structure and history - normally this leads to quite different results to Flycon's.
Flycon came about owing to a throwaway line in a conversation on lj talking about how many different conventions there were around the world, and how the tyranny of distance meant most of us could never get to them. In this particular case we were talking about Worldcon. “I wish there was a way we could have a real online convention,’ Sherwood said,’ but most of the fun bits come from the socialising between panels.’ Now fandom on the scale of the Internet was new to me, but as a specific fan for decades, I was used to the committees and knew the sheer hard work required to keep even a local book club going, so it wasn’t without trepidation that I replied “Well, if you are serious, I know how it could be done.” ...
I was, of course, leaning on the work of others. Gillian Polack had been a prime mover in setting up and help run the back of house at online conventions with Women’s History Month; she’d parleyed her knowledge from those sessions into the wonderful Conflux mini-Cons. What I was proposing was a three day world wide web Con. We put out a call for volunteers, and I kind of ever-so-gently coerced Gillian into being part of the core committee. She and Sherwood brought in Paul, Monissa and friends for the real time chat sessions; Pamela made the wonderful Flycon logo and set it so we could have the globe showing our own part of the world. Nyssa set up forum space for forum sessions; I organised an lj page for the Ball, and set about contacting authors to fill the sessions.
The idea of a Flycon Ball came from cyber celebrations in the purple zone, we used to regularly set occasions where we’d all gather on the forum, and be whatever character we’d set for ourselves. We had Solstice Balls, Halloween Balls, any excuse to gather as a group. You had to keep refreshing the board as conversation flew thick and fast, and I usually provided the cyber food – a menu with foods to cater for almost every taste. For Flycon I devised the following menu:
Snacks:
Mini pizzas, including vegetarian option
Soft pretzels
Nachos, with guacamole
Mini Quiches
Cheese platters
Salmon and cheese canapés
Strawberries Harlequin (white and dark chocolate)
Toffee grapes
Bowls of Belgian truffles
Mains:
Lasagne (beef, chicken and vegetarian varieties
Chicken parmigiana & pumpkin parmigiana
Chicken in cabernet and dark chocolate sauce
Steak Normandy
Paella
Three cheese tortellini, in a tomato, white wine and basil sauce
(all served with salads and wedges)
Desserts:
Chocolate Bavarian
Mud Cake, soaked in Irish Whiskey, with raspberry coulis& whipped cream to serve.
Home made ice-cream, dark chocolate, honey, mint choc-chip, rum and raisin & macadamia nut flavours.
Chocolate Platters
Orange cheesecake
Sherry trifle
Apple Danish
Sticky Date Pudding
Tia Maria flavoured Chocolate roulade
(I admit to being glad it was cyber food and I didn’t really have to cook all that, though every dish was drawn from my recipe book collection – not quite as extensive as Gillian’s collection but still somewhat impressive)
But that was still to come, back at the coal face ... as in all committees dealing with any big endeavour, real life intervened. For me, I was still collapsing without warning with the heart issues, and two of my children were going through the diagnosis process for their autism. I know the others all had their own major health/life issues going on, but our core committee were mostly all used to what being on a committee entailed, so we stayed on track throughout it all. When one of us couldn’t do something, the rest of us picked up the slack. It was exhausting, but it was exciting too. We had such an incredible list of guests. Far too many to list everyone, but a small selection of those included:
Lisa Mantchev
Tony Shillitoe
Rob Hood
Megan Lindholm
Marty Young (who opened it)
James Enge
Kate Forsyth
Elizabeth Moon
Kate Elliott
Alma Alexander
Marie Brennan
Sarah Zettel
Jennifer Fallon
Pati Nagle
Dave Freer
Julia Rios
Jack Dann
Sara Douglass
Chaz Brenchley
Sonny Whitelaw
James Enge
Kaaron Warren
Devon Monk
Sarah Zettle
Simon Haynes
Karen Miller
Jeri Smith-Ready
And I remember Gillian falling apart in a fangirl moment when she got to introduce Geoff Ryman. Yes, that would be Gillian the unflappable committee member; Gillian the former team captain of a University of Melbourne debate team, member of a Grand Finalist Australasian Inter-varsity debate team; Gillian the squeezing fangirl. Although, to be fair, I remember opening my emails one morning to find responses from thirty authors whose works I had admired for years, and in Roberta Gellis’s case, my own personal fangirl moment, decades!
I co-ordinated the program across multiple time zones, if you wish to retain your sanity, this is something I do not recommend, I didn’t have any sanity to save, however, and thankfully I had help with that close to the date from someone used to working with spreadsheets. I was dealing with concussion and lack of sleep, and that was only going to get worse. Someone asked about workshops, I’d had an idea you could do this well with a private chat room, a course for writers was an idea I’d toyed with for Eneit Press. I had the space available, and I like being proven right so I was delighted when the Flycon workshops, one for poetry and a fairy tale workshop, worked so very well.
And our guests blogged a lot about it, this one made some extremely tired committee workers smile gratefully: http://bookviewcafe.com/blog/2009/03/14/report-from-flycon/
And I’ve put up one of the chat sessions from Flycon, I’ll be posting more over the next few days, but I started with Jennifer Fallon’s chat because Jen’s work led me to the purple zone, where she was our Evil Overlady; I was always a fan, but her work led me to active fandom, and her chat had so many purple zone regulars attending it. http://www.eneitpress.com/news.php?news=115
Flycon remains a sleep deprived, pain-filled (the core committee was too small to allow dropouts, so I had to operate through a migraine caused by the latest concussion) blur. Several things stood out for me though: the late Sara Douglas talking about potting cats; Jennifer Fallon and Dave Freer talking about lions in Alice Springs; and an in-depth discussion on cosmic horror.
I made some very good friends working on Flycon. And we keep being asked if we are going to do it again. And it remains a really good idea. We should ... some day.
March 29, 2013
gillpolack @ 2013-03-30T16:17:00
I had plans today, but they have been scuttled for I reacted to the medication I took for my migraine. This time, I still have part of the migraine, plus I have the reaction, so I guess that's the end of this medicine for me. It got rid of so much of the pain I was carrying, but it replaces it with... you really don't want to know. And this time, it didn't quite replace it. Additive stuff. So I'm not going to the folk festival, or making clothes with Donna, or chatting with Sharyn or even chatting with Mum, for every activity I do is punctuated in an unseemly fashion. At least I like bedrest and I'm almost at the stage where I'll be able to read. My mother was sympathetic until I told her about me being good and not eating chocolate. "You should have had the chocolate," she said. "At least you wouldn't have had the migraine."
So, anything I promised today is now due tomorrow. And anyone who wishes me Happy Easter without giving me chocolate is in my bad books. I can't eat the chocolate for two days (I can't eat much of anything for two days, I suspect), but I have definitively proven that I need it for medicinal purposes.
So, anything I promised today is now due tomorrow. And anyone who wishes me Happy Easter without giving me chocolate is in my bad books. I can't eat the chocolate for two days (I can't eat much of anything for two days, I suspect), but I have definitively proven that I need it for medicinal purposes.
March 28, 2013
gillpolack @ 2013-03-29T09:36:00
I still want to sleep. My dreams lead me in interesting places. This morning, for instance, I woke up thinking of the very different fiction of Melissa Lucashenko, Anita Heiss, Yaritji Green and Ambelin Kwaymullina. Their writing is so very different, each from the other. Only Heiss is 100% clearly not writing spec fic.*
I'm obviously not reading the right critics, for I've seen many arguments for reading Indigenous Australian writers, and they are all theoretical arguments. Here we have four writers, three of whom are arguably within a single genre, and yet...where is the analysis? They're changing our literature. I want to know why. I want to know how. And I really want to do it the lazy way, with someone else doing the work. I want to read the brilliant study and nod my head and go "Yes, but..."
Obviously laziness isn't going to happen instantly. This isn't an analysis, however, it's just an introduction. I still hope that there is an analysis out there and that it's passed me by and that someone will direct me towards it.
Alphabetically, the first writer is Heiss. Since I haven't read her novels, I can't comment on them except to say that she herself calls them chick lit, which is a clear genre indication. Heiss is one of the group of people who were accused by Andrew Bolt as not being black enough, and this led to the court case, which she and the others named won. It also led to her autobiography "Am I black Enough for You?" It's hard to discuss Indigenous writing without discussing Heiss, for this reason. She is both charming and an activist and she explains very clearly what she thinks, how she feels and gives paths into her views for those of us who wish to understand. This is why I'm talking about her here, even though she doesn't write speculative fiction. Heiss is almost impossibly lucid and is very easy to ask questions of. She's setting the groundwork for new conversations.
The other three writers, between them, are also setting groundwork. They're setting the groundwork for expressions of culture and for fictional narratives that are not based in majority Australia's view and they're using mainly speculative fiction as their fabric. Kwaymullina writes about a hopeful post-apocalypse way up north. Green takes traditions from Central Australia and they reach us gradually for she filters them through tradition and respect when she uses those cultures** and writes quite differently when she moves into more mainstream spec fic. Lucashenko is the most experienced writer of the three and I've come to her work most recently. Also, I've only read one novel by her, because the PhD and Aurealis reading overtook me. In Mullumbimby reality is complex, taut and the narrative occupies that almost-invisible dividing line between literary and speculative fiction. She communicates insiderness and political divides through solid characterisation - I dare anyone who reads Mullumbimby to see land rights as a simple issue.
One of my goals for the year is to read more by all four writers, for they are a force for literary good in this country. There is not one Indigenous people in this country - there are many. The cultures are current and rich and I don't know nearly enough about them. And my post-dream*** resolution is to find out who else is out there, writing spec fic. I know two of the writers and could simply ask them, but this whole train of thought has me wondering: who else is 'known' (in the wider sense ie whose work would you recommend to me)? Anita Heiss is 'known' and two of the three of my writers have made Aurealis short lists (the third I have edited) which is how I, myself, encountered their writing.
This is a political question. It doesn't matter how brilliant a literature is and how astonishing a talent a writer possesses. If the rest of the world doesn't see it, then none of this informs change: I want to get a handle on how widespread the change is and who is informing it.
I'm only half making sense this morning. I'm not yet quite awake. Would work wake me up? I guess. I shall make some coffee and open a file and demolish three big tasks by lunchtime. Somewhere along that road, I shall wake up.
*she writes chick lit - I've only read her non-fiction and her poetry, too, which means I have exploring to do
**when I say 'filters them through tradition and respect' I mean that literally. She doesn't just use: she asks permission. She taught me that the first thing I should look for in the acknowledgements is evidence that the permissions have been granted where they ought to have been. "I respect these traditions that are not my own" is not nearly as good a statement as "I asked Auntie such-and-such, custodian of this."
*** I really did wake up with the taste of a literary dream on my tongue. I've since had breakfast and my tongue has no idea why I had a literary dream. It wants to remember the taste.
I'm obviously not reading the right critics, for I've seen many arguments for reading Indigenous Australian writers, and they are all theoretical arguments. Here we have four writers, three of whom are arguably within a single genre, and yet...where is the analysis? They're changing our literature. I want to know why. I want to know how. And I really want to do it the lazy way, with someone else doing the work. I want to read the brilliant study and nod my head and go "Yes, but..."
Obviously laziness isn't going to happen instantly. This isn't an analysis, however, it's just an introduction. I still hope that there is an analysis out there and that it's passed me by and that someone will direct me towards it.
Alphabetically, the first writer is Heiss. Since I haven't read her novels, I can't comment on them except to say that she herself calls them chick lit, which is a clear genre indication. Heiss is one of the group of people who were accused by Andrew Bolt as not being black enough, and this led to the court case, which she and the others named won. It also led to her autobiography "Am I black Enough for You?" It's hard to discuss Indigenous writing without discussing Heiss, for this reason. She is both charming and an activist and she explains very clearly what she thinks, how she feels and gives paths into her views for those of us who wish to understand. This is why I'm talking about her here, even though she doesn't write speculative fiction. Heiss is almost impossibly lucid and is very easy to ask questions of. She's setting the groundwork for new conversations.
The other three writers, between them, are also setting groundwork. They're setting the groundwork for expressions of culture and for fictional narratives that are not based in majority Australia's view and they're using mainly speculative fiction as their fabric. Kwaymullina writes about a hopeful post-apocalypse way up north. Green takes traditions from Central Australia and they reach us gradually for she filters them through tradition and respect when she uses those cultures** and writes quite differently when she moves into more mainstream spec fic. Lucashenko is the most experienced writer of the three and I've come to her work most recently. Also, I've only read one novel by her, because the PhD and Aurealis reading overtook me. In Mullumbimby reality is complex, taut and the narrative occupies that almost-invisible dividing line between literary and speculative fiction. She communicates insiderness and political divides through solid characterisation - I dare anyone who reads Mullumbimby to see land rights as a simple issue.
One of my goals for the year is to read more by all four writers, for they are a force for literary good in this country. There is not one Indigenous people in this country - there are many. The cultures are current and rich and I don't know nearly enough about them. And my post-dream*** resolution is to find out who else is out there, writing spec fic. I know two of the writers and could simply ask them, but this whole train of thought has me wondering: who else is 'known' (in the wider sense ie whose work would you recommend to me)? Anita Heiss is 'known' and two of the three of my writers have made Aurealis short lists (the third I have edited) which is how I, myself, encountered their writing.
This is a political question. It doesn't matter how brilliant a literature is and how astonishing a talent a writer possesses. If the rest of the world doesn't see it, then none of this informs change: I want to get a handle on how widespread the change is and who is informing it.
I'm only half making sense this morning. I'm not yet quite awake. Would work wake me up? I guess. I shall make some coffee and open a file and demolish three big tasks by lunchtime. Somewhere along that road, I shall wake up.
*she writes chick lit - I've only read her non-fiction and her poetry, too, which means I have exploring to do
**when I say 'filters them through tradition and respect' I mean that literally. She doesn't just use: she asks permission. She taught me that the first thing I should look for in the acknowledgements is evidence that the permissions have been granted where they ought to have been. "I respect these traditions that are not my own" is not nearly as good a statement as "I asked Auntie such-and-such, custodian of this."
*** I really did wake up with the taste of a literary dream on my tongue. I've since had breakfast and my tongue has no idea why I had a literary dream. It wants to remember the taste.
gillpolack @ 2013-03-28T23:36:00
I nearly forgot to blog today. It was that kind of day.
It started early, with housework. I caught up with all my housework by 8.20 am, which is when the guy came to fix my stove. I was terribly impressed with him. He came early, he refused coffee, he left early and he smiled. I was less impressed with myself, for once he was gone I did just an hour's more work and then crept back into bed.
A wrong number woke me up soon after and I never felt rested, the whole day. The reason for the crawling into bed again turned out to be incipient weather, and that weather turned the day into a distant drift. I know I talked to my mother and to Sharyn (and they were lengthy calls) and I caught up on much email, and I read a book, and I did some insurance stuff (for the burgulation chase isn't complete) and I began a book for review (but didn't finish it) and I began a manuscript evaluation (but didn't finish it) and the rest of the day is a mystery. Except that when I did lots of emailing, that included much administrative stuff, some of which was urgent. So maybe I didn't waste the day. Maybe it just feels like it.
The weather's almost past, so tomorrow I'll finish that review book and that manuscript evaluation and a few other things. I'll also send out a search party for my missing timesense. If it drifts near you, please send it home - I'm missing it.
It started early, with housework. I caught up with all my housework by 8.20 am, which is when the guy came to fix my stove. I was terribly impressed with him. He came early, he refused coffee, he left early and he smiled. I was less impressed with myself, for once he was gone I did just an hour's more work and then crept back into bed.
A wrong number woke me up soon after and I never felt rested, the whole day. The reason for the crawling into bed again turned out to be incipient weather, and that weather turned the day into a distant drift. I know I talked to my mother and to Sharyn (and they were lengthy calls) and I caught up on much email, and I read a book, and I did some insurance stuff (for the burgulation chase isn't complete) and I began a book for review (but didn't finish it) and I began a manuscript evaluation (but didn't finish it) and the rest of the day is a mystery. Except that when I did lots of emailing, that included much administrative stuff, some of which was urgent. So maybe I didn't waste the day. Maybe it just feels like it.
The weather's almost past, so tomorrow I'll finish that review book and that manuscript evaluation and a few other things. I'll also send out a search party for my missing timesense. If it drifts near you, please send it home - I'm missing it.
March 27, 2013
Women's History Month - Satima Flavell
When we were emailing about this, I noticed something odd about the stories friends were telling me. Men privilege themselves more easily in their fan narratives. They are a part of the story, always. Women privilege themselves in different amounts, depending on their country of origin and age (Australian women over forty are very bad at making themselves a central part of their stories about fandom, in my experience), but very few of them see themselves as central to the fan narratives and to fan history.
This feels very wrong to me. It means it's much harder than it ought to be to establish women's actual place in fan history. It's far easier to write narratives about people who say "I was there and this is what I experienced" than about people who were there but say "This is the experience of the time." We know our place and our stories. We know what lies behind the general narrative or the broader context. The reader, however, does not. I would love to see more narratives where women accord themselves the dignity and privilege of valuing their own stories and sharing them.
When I was 17 and a fresher at Sydney Uni, I once stuck my head into a meeting that turned out to be a Science Fiction club. They appeared to be all male, and very geeky: genuine card-carrying, anorak-wearing geeks-with-spectacles. I fled.
Not that I didn’t like SF—I read Asimov and Clarke religiously—but it was, in those days, largely a male preserve. I didn’t notice a single woman at that meeting, and there were very few women authors. No-one wrote theses on the genre back in the early 60s, at least not at Sydney. I doubt such a proposal would have been countenanced.
That experience put me off SF groups of all kinds. Over the years, I would occasionally see an item in the newspaper with a photo of SF fans dressed up as their favourite characters, which simply reinforced my belief that all fans were somehow touched in the head!
Nevertheless, I loved the genre and read widely within its broad spread. As the seventies dawned and the feminist movement gained momentum, I realised that some of those old-time writers such as EE ‘Doc’ Smith were misogynists. I’m sure they would have vehemently denied it, since they were simply reflecting the standards of the time, but I became more selective in my choice of library books. Sadly, women SF writers – with perhaps, the exception of Mary Stewart – were not represented in any library I frequented, so it was some time before I discovered such writers as Anne McCaffrey and Ursula LeGuin. However, I still had no contact with fandom.
When I first began to write fantasy, over a decade and a half ago now, I read that some women wrote under male pseudonyms because, especially in ‘hard’ SF it was almost impossible to sell works by women. Readers of hard SF were perceived to be mainly of the male persuasion, and everyone knew that men would not read books written by women!
This may well have been true in the past, but there are signs that things are changing – have changed, in fact. I finally plucked up the courage to go to an SF convention in 2003, and there I met not only plenty of female fans, but female authors as well. Two guests of honour were female, Fiona McIntosh and Lynn Flewelling. I attended all their panels, and realised that yes, women can do this stuff too! Lee Battersby set an exercise in one of his panels, and we read our work aloud to the guests of honour in another panel. I was bowled over when the two women GOHs made a point of stopping me afterwards to tell me that I really must write that book!
So I did, and now I’m working on two sequels with a view to self-publishing sometime before I die. In the intervening years, I have seen more books by women coming onto the market, and guess what – some men are reading them! Female fen are legion. There is now a more equable balance between the genders – that meeting I walked into in Sydney over fifty years ago would be far from typical today. What’s more, both women and men now write theses on every aspect of speculative fiction, and at some institutions you can take units centred on it. SF is now ‘respectable’, and while some women still write under male pseudonyms, the practice is less common that it was even ten years ago.
I would go so far as to say that I’ve experienced less sexism within fandom than in any other activity I’ve undertaken. I have no doubt that it exists, since it is a perennial weed that will probably never be uprooted completely, but despite reports that there are fewer female writers published than male, especially in the short story field, I am sure this is changing and will continue to change. Keep writing good stories, ladies, and keep submitting them. I look forward to seeing an anthology of hard SF in which women authors outnumber men!
March 26, 2013
gillpolack @ 2013-03-27T17:28:00
Today I taught my students how to write a boring press release. I taught them how to write an interesting one a few years ago and today it dawned upon me that their skills were incomplete. Now they're far more balanced as human beings and have learned how to make the press look at something and not see it, which is terribly important. (This is, of course, a skill I possess from my time as a public servant. We were, quite seriously, taught how to write press releases that the press would pass over in favour of something apparently sexier.)
I did a bunch of messages and I came home and then everything caught up with me. Either I have done too much this week or I'm coming down with something. I suspect the former, simply because I did the seder (forgetting only a few things, like cleaning the chairs) and most of the Pesach preps and I did all my usual work as well. Maybe not quite all, but a lot. And my body was getting over the flu shot. So I think I'm tired.
I'm not taking the whole rest-of-day off, but I'm certainly not going to vast amounts with it. I've done two hours computer work and two hours teaching and had a meeting and run a bunch of messages, so if I can get three hours more work in, that will do.
The meeting means a bit more teaching with my favourite students. One of the emails means more teaching (which I will blog about separately, for there are still places in the course). And all this means that I should be financial until the end Of June, despite some serious and unexpected expenses.
I'm chomping on the bit about other news, but there is due process to be observed and besides, it might all fall through. So, instead, I will point out that Ditmar voting is now open and ask that all eligible folks please, please vote for their favourite works. If your favourite works aren't on the final ballot and you didn't nominate them, then remember this and remedy the situation next year. This year, vote. Now. Vote early, but just once.
The Ditmars work best when lots of people vote, not just a few*.
All the other awards lists are juried. Some fab reading on them, too, and some lovely art. It's a good year to be a consumer of Australian spec fic. A very good year.
*I so want a slogan that goes something like "Vote - help make the Ditmars uncontroversial." We need a large pool of voters. All awards reflecting popularity in the wider community need large pools of voters.
I did a bunch of messages and I came home and then everything caught up with me. Either I have done too much this week or I'm coming down with something. I suspect the former, simply because I did the seder (forgetting only a few things, like cleaning the chairs) and most of the Pesach preps and I did all my usual work as well. Maybe not quite all, but a lot. And my body was getting over the flu shot. So I think I'm tired.
I'm not taking the whole rest-of-day off, but I'm certainly not going to vast amounts with it. I've done two hours computer work and two hours teaching and had a meeting and run a bunch of messages, so if I can get three hours more work in, that will do.
The meeting means a bit more teaching with my favourite students. One of the emails means more teaching (which I will blog about separately, for there are still places in the course). And all this means that I should be financial until the end Of June, despite some serious and unexpected expenses.
I'm chomping on the bit about other news, but there is due process to be observed and besides, it might all fall through. So, instead, I will point out that Ditmar voting is now open and ask that all eligible folks please, please vote for their favourite works. If your favourite works aren't on the final ballot and you didn't nominate them, then remember this and remedy the situation next year. This year, vote. Now. Vote early, but just once.
The Ditmars work best when lots of people vote, not just a few*.
All the other awards lists are juried. Some fab reading on them, too, and some lovely art. It's a good year to be a consumer of Australian spec fic. A very good year.
*I so want a slogan that goes something like "Vote - help make the Ditmars uncontroversial." We need a large pool of voters. All awards reflecting popularity in the wider community need large pools of voters.
March 25, 2013
Pesach and my family
Last night's conversation turned to how the mighty have fallen.
I was explaining how meagre the Pesach table was compared with that of my youth. I was entirely full, but had only eaten half the meal of lo, these years past. I never used to eat the full meal then, either. I would skip fish, hors d'oeuvre and dessert and cake. Sometimes I'd skip soup. I'd still be guilty of overeating. So what did the Pesach table of my childhood look like? What was the seder of my childhood like? (the one at home, not the one at my grandparents')? This my recollection - other family members may well have different memories, for it changed depending on how religious daughters became and in what direction their religiousness took them, and how far different patriarchs and matriarchs imposed their will on proceedings.*
Unlike some families, we didn't standardise texts. We used the family books and they were many and varied and historied, just like the members of our family. Grandma's was the ornate one with hand-tooled leather binding and if it wasn't at her place, she would look around and ask for it until it arrived. At the other end of the scale were the ones left over from military service in WWII, which matched the others so badly in format that I didn't put them in places unless it was necessary ('necessary' in this case meant more than 18 people at the table, which only happened every second year). The other ones I didn't hand out unless it was necessary were the ones my mother and her brothers got for Sunday school. They were hard to read and had some ritual differences.
Mostly, I was the one that put the Haggadoth out and worked out who sat where. This was (I was informed quietly, later, when someone else took up the task and had thought that Grandma and Linda should sit next to each other, which resulted in... an interesting evening) because I tended to remember who was talking to whom, who was thought entertaining by whom, who needed someone next to them who could say "We're up to here in the Hebrew" and "This is what happens next" and so on. I don't know when this started, but I was doing it by the time I hit high school, so it seemed to me I had put the Haggadoth out forever.
One of my uncles was wonderful for helping us sit in places that were assigned for he always asked in a very loud voice "Where do you want me?" This saved us from much fractiousness. My payment for it was always having at least one person near me who I actually wanted to talk to. Before this time and after this time, Pesach was more of a trial.
Dad had his favourite Haggadah (because it had a joke Mum hated, with good reason) and I had mine. It was the same edition as Dad's, but I loved it for the footnotes and the end notes, so he and I were always on the same page. No-one else was. When we got exegetical (which was never as often as I would have liked or for as long as I would have liked) a lot of our interpretations rested on the various differences in edition and translation. There was one edition that was easy to follow (and of which we had a few copies), so I put one of those out for someone who had really good Hebrew and the rest were for guests and for family who didn't like reading the Hebrew (this meant that the family member with good Hebrew could give page numbers at apposite moments). The ones with the best pictures mostly went to children.
I also shared in laying the table for many years - Les took that over when he married Mum, which meant that the Haggadoth were different and the table was different and the way of running the evening was different - so these are my pre-1989 memories.
We'd read round the table. Two of my sisters read in Hebrew, as did one of my aunts. I would use Hebrew when I wasn't too embarrassed (I've always been shy of languages other than English in public, and far shyer in front of my family than elsewhere). For instance, for the Grace after Meals, the psalm that starts off the full version - Shir ha'Maalot, which now starts with the melody for Waltzing Matilda in my household, for it scans perfectly, I blame Alan Shroot for this, but the tune we used pre-1989 was Hatikvah, for that also scans perfectly for that particular psalm - I don't know the words for Hatikvah, but I certainly can sing Shir ha'Maalot. And now I've skipped to the Grace after Meals (and tangled a sentence) - and you haven't had the meal. Let me backtrack.
We used an Orthodox Haggadah in a fairly Anglo-Australian fashion, with the Hebrew read slowly and mostly somewhat stiltedly and the English read with much drama. Also with many asides. Uncle Theo and I competed for evil asides, until I was told off (Uncle Theo is the youngest son, I am the middle daughter - he got away with a lot more than I did!).
The actual meal comprised:
Boiled potato and egg - dipped in salt water, in memory of crossing the sea and of the tears that led up to the exodus.
Charoseth with matzah - representing the forced labour prior to the exodus - and yes, for anyone who doesn't know, Pesach is all about historical interpretation, which is why I love it so.
Chopped liver - representing... nothing - but it's good on matzah and it's family tradition - I'll be making my chopped liver when I run out of leftovers from last night, which I might do by the weekend, if I eat a lot.
Gefilte fish - normally made at Grandma's because killing myself and the other two allergic rellos is not in the Pesachtic scheme of things. One year Grandma insisted on making it at Mum's and Mum lost me to my bedroom - for the smell was causing anaphylactic shock - and Mum never let her do that again, for it meant we were all way behind and I was on sleep-inducing medication for the whole of Pesach. It was after this that Grandma worked out she could make gefilte chicken for the three of us who couldn't eat fish, and she brought the two dishes in with much ceremony. I hated the gefilte fish on so many levels. Every single year some cousin or guest would scold me for not helping clear up the dishes, and I was too polite to say then, as I would now, "I'm too young to die."
Chicken soup with kneidlach - this later became 2 types of soup. Dad instructed us to go round the table asking everyone if they wanted to be a lady, a gentleman or a pawnbroker. This resulted in the right number of kneidlach for everyone.
Hors d'ouevre - this was more a palate cleanser. Often it was asparagus or avocado with some sort of sauce. Since my favourite sauce for avocado was mango and ginger, this is the sauce I made whenever I was allowed to do this course.
Main course - chicken and beef and maybe one more meat roasted or braised or done in other ways (not lamb, for it was Pesach and we had a tradition of not eating the sacrificial beast in memory of the destroyed Temple), roast vegetables (at least 3 types), at least 2 different varieties of salad.
Dessert - often a stewed fruit of some kind.
Post dessert - platters filled with chocolate and fruit and nuts, at least two types of cakes, macaroons, biscuits. We had black tea and coffee with this.
During the seder itself we had our four glasses of wine, and with dinner we had wine and fruit juice and water (and I do wonder when people say to me "I thought Jews were prohibited alcohol" - it really means they don't know much about Judaism.).
Notice how much of this is coeliac-friendly. This was so that my great-uncle could also overeat. None of the cakes or biscuits had flour, for instance. The only dishes with gluten were the kneidlach and the matzah.
When we had eaten just as much as we could and then a bit more, we returned to the Haggadah and finished it. We found the Afikoman and traded it for 50c or a book (once I got two books! that was a very strange Pesach, though, for other reasons), we read, we watched for Elijah, we drank more wine and said all the right blessings and made all the right wishes, and we sang.
My favourite bit near the end was when someone innocent was sent to open the door for Elijah (who is going to come round and drink wine at every single Jewish table, and let us know in advance of the end of days - a drunken prophet is far more Jewish than a violent warning of apocalypse) and Dad would drink the wine (very quickly, and not even the most suspicious door-opener caught him) and would ask the door-opener "Didn't you see him walk past you?" One year someone was at the door at that instant, and became the butt of Elijah jokes until another family joke evolved.
We were much better on the singing than on the long religious texts, but each year we debated whether we should read every single word. One year one of my sisters and I said "We can't always skip the boring bits for which we have no tunes - we have do do the whole thing at least once. So we did. Dad fell asleep...
Another year my sister and cousin and uncle got out their guitars (one of my cousin-the-musicians) and sheet music appeared and the music went funky and half the night, but Grandma was so disapproving of the musical instruments (Orthodox Jews don't *do* musical instruments on religious days, for they might possibly be work) that we went back to just singing. It's so, so long since I've done all the songs - and yet they're one of my favourite bits. I find I can't make myself force my non-Jewish friends into singing in any language but English (save for the chorus of Dayenu, which I have no trouble at all forcing people to sing, for it amuses me).
I don't know if this explains Pesach (as Mit asked) or if it's just a string of half-intelligible reminiscences. I had fun remembering, though.
*why have one matriarch or patriarch when a family can have many, I ask you?
I was explaining how meagre the Pesach table was compared with that of my youth. I was entirely full, but had only eaten half the meal of lo, these years past. I never used to eat the full meal then, either. I would skip fish, hors d'oeuvre and dessert and cake. Sometimes I'd skip soup. I'd still be guilty of overeating. So what did the Pesach table of my childhood look like? What was the seder of my childhood like? (the one at home, not the one at my grandparents')? This my recollection - other family members may well have different memories, for it changed depending on how religious daughters became and in what direction their religiousness took them, and how far different patriarchs and matriarchs imposed their will on proceedings.*
Unlike some families, we didn't standardise texts. We used the family books and they were many and varied and historied, just like the members of our family. Grandma's was the ornate one with hand-tooled leather binding and if it wasn't at her place, she would look around and ask for it until it arrived. At the other end of the scale were the ones left over from military service in WWII, which matched the others so badly in format that I didn't put them in places unless it was necessary ('necessary' in this case meant more than 18 people at the table, which only happened every second year). The other ones I didn't hand out unless it was necessary were the ones my mother and her brothers got for Sunday school. They were hard to read and had some ritual differences.
Mostly, I was the one that put the Haggadoth out and worked out who sat where. This was (I was informed quietly, later, when someone else took up the task and had thought that Grandma and Linda should sit next to each other, which resulted in... an interesting evening) because I tended to remember who was talking to whom, who was thought entertaining by whom, who needed someone next to them who could say "We're up to here in the Hebrew" and "This is what happens next" and so on. I don't know when this started, but I was doing it by the time I hit high school, so it seemed to me I had put the Haggadoth out forever.
One of my uncles was wonderful for helping us sit in places that were assigned for he always asked in a very loud voice "Where do you want me?" This saved us from much fractiousness. My payment for it was always having at least one person near me who I actually wanted to talk to. Before this time and after this time, Pesach was more of a trial.
Dad had his favourite Haggadah (because it had a joke Mum hated, with good reason) and I had mine. It was the same edition as Dad's, but I loved it for the footnotes and the end notes, so he and I were always on the same page. No-one else was. When we got exegetical (which was never as often as I would have liked or for as long as I would have liked) a lot of our interpretations rested on the various differences in edition and translation. There was one edition that was easy to follow (and of which we had a few copies), so I put one of those out for someone who had really good Hebrew and the rest were for guests and for family who didn't like reading the Hebrew (this meant that the family member with good Hebrew could give page numbers at apposite moments). The ones with the best pictures mostly went to children.
I also shared in laying the table for many years - Les took that over when he married Mum, which meant that the Haggadoth were different and the table was different and the way of running the evening was different - so these are my pre-1989 memories.
We'd read round the table. Two of my sisters read in Hebrew, as did one of my aunts. I would use Hebrew when I wasn't too embarrassed (I've always been shy of languages other than English in public, and far shyer in front of my family than elsewhere). For instance, for the Grace after Meals, the psalm that starts off the full version - Shir ha'Maalot, which now starts with the melody for Waltzing Matilda in my household, for it scans perfectly, I blame Alan Shroot for this, but the tune we used pre-1989 was Hatikvah, for that also scans perfectly for that particular psalm - I don't know the words for Hatikvah, but I certainly can sing Shir ha'Maalot. And now I've skipped to the Grace after Meals (and tangled a sentence) - and you haven't had the meal. Let me backtrack.
We used an Orthodox Haggadah in a fairly Anglo-Australian fashion, with the Hebrew read slowly and mostly somewhat stiltedly and the English read with much drama. Also with many asides. Uncle Theo and I competed for evil asides, until I was told off (Uncle Theo is the youngest son, I am the middle daughter - he got away with a lot more than I did!).
The actual meal comprised:
Boiled potato and egg - dipped in salt water, in memory of crossing the sea and of the tears that led up to the exodus.
Charoseth with matzah - representing the forced labour prior to the exodus - and yes, for anyone who doesn't know, Pesach is all about historical interpretation, which is why I love it so.
Chopped liver - representing... nothing - but it's good on matzah and it's family tradition - I'll be making my chopped liver when I run out of leftovers from last night, which I might do by the weekend, if I eat a lot.
Gefilte fish - normally made at Grandma's because killing myself and the other two allergic rellos is not in the Pesachtic scheme of things. One year Grandma insisted on making it at Mum's and Mum lost me to my bedroom - for the smell was causing anaphylactic shock - and Mum never let her do that again, for it meant we were all way behind and I was on sleep-inducing medication for the whole of Pesach. It was after this that Grandma worked out she could make gefilte chicken for the three of us who couldn't eat fish, and she brought the two dishes in with much ceremony. I hated the gefilte fish on so many levels. Every single year some cousin or guest would scold me for not helping clear up the dishes, and I was too polite to say then, as I would now, "I'm too young to die."
Chicken soup with kneidlach - this later became 2 types of soup. Dad instructed us to go round the table asking everyone if they wanted to be a lady, a gentleman or a pawnbroker. This resulted in the right number of kneidlach for everyone.
Hors d'ouevre - this was more a palate cleanser. Often it was asparagus or avocado with some sort of sauce. Since my favourite sauce for avocado was mango and ginger, this is the sauce I made whenever I was allowed to do this course.
Main course - chicken and beef and maybe one more meat roasted or braised or done in other ways (not lamb, for it was Pesach and we had a tradition of not eating the sacrificial beast in memory of the destroyed Temple), roast vegetables (at least 3 types), at least 2 different varieties of salad.
Dessert - often a stewed fruit of some kind.
Post dessert - platters filled with chocolate and fruit and nuts, at least two types of cakes, macaroons, biscuits. We had black tea and coffee with this.
During the seder itself we had our four glasses of wine, and with dinner we had wine and fruit juice and water (and I do wonder when people say to me "I thought Jews were prohibited alcohol" - it really means they don't know much about Judaism.).
Notice how much of this is coeliac-friendly. This was so that my great-uncle could also overeat. None of the cakes or biscuits had flour, for instance. The only dishes with gluten were the kneidlach and the matzah.
When we had eaten just as much as we could and then a bit more, we returned to the Haggadah and finished it. We found the Afikoman and traded it for 50c or a book (once I got two books! that was a very strange Pesach, though, for other reasons), we read, we watched for Elijah, we drank more wine and said all the right blessings and made all the right wishes, and we sang.
My favourite bit near the end was when someone innocent was sent to open the door for Elijah (who is going to come round and drink wine at every single Jewish table, and let us know in advance of the end of days - a drunken prophet is far more Jewish than a violent warning of apocalypse) and Dad would drink the wine (very quickly, and not even the most suspicious door-opener caught him) and would ask the door-opener "Didn't you see him walk past you?" One year someone was at the door at that instant, and became the butt of Elijah jokes until another family joke evolved.
We were much better on the singing than on the long religious texts, but each year we debated whether we should read every single word. One year one of my sisters and I said "We can't always skip the boring bits for which we have no tunes - we have do do the whole thing at least once. So we did. Dad fell asleep...
Another year my sister and cousin and uncle got out their guitars (one of my cousin-the-musicians) and sheet music appeared and the music went funky and half the night, but Grandma was so disapproving of the musical instruments (Orthodox Jews don't *do* musical instruments on religious days, for they might possibly be work) that we went back to just singing. It's so, so long since I've done all the songs - and yet they're one of my favourite bits. I find I can't make myself force my non-Jewish friends into singing in any language but English (save for the chorus of Dayenu, which I have no trouble at all forcing people to sing, for it amuses me).
I don't know if this explains Pesach (as Mit asked) or if it's just a string of half-intelligible reminiscences. I had fun remembering, though.
*why have one matriarch or patriarch when a family can have many, I ask you?
