Gillian Polack's Blog, page 197
March 29, 2012
gillpolack @ 2012-03-29T13:41:00
The joys of this time of year. Each year I assume that the extra energies spent explaining to the Canberra community the year before was a blip. Nothing big and nothing wrong, just trying to sort out meetings (work meetings) where the manager has decided to shout us lunch ... during Passover. I've sorted out what I will and won't do but this manager hasn't met Passover before and that's where it gets tricky. What's new to her is something I've made so many compromises on that my mother would be a bit horrified if I outlined them. Each year I have to run through the whole thing and explain the rules and show how far I'm bending them to be able to have that coffee and fruit platter and that really and truly a sandwich or a hot meal would be a problem. Especially a sandwich. The problem is, of course, that for Australian work lunches 'only a sandwich' is a phrase often used to persuade people to eat.
This year won't be as messy as other years, simply because Belconnen Community Services is sensitive and will listen. I've taught creative writing for them for five years and I have good experience of their wonderful people awareness. The problem is with me, and explanation-fatigue. For everyone else this is the first time they've encountered Jewish food laws. Any Jewish food laws, not just the specialist ones for Passover. For me, it's something I have to explain and explain and explain and be patient and friendly because for each and every questioner it's the first time they've ever asked those questions or (for most of them) even realised that there are questions that need asking. They shouldn't be punished for not knowing practising Jews and not being the first person to ask. In fact, it's good that they do ask and that they try to sort things out.
For me, though, it's the millionth time. There are not many Jews in Canberra and most aren't public about their Judaism. I get asked these things a lot. And this month is not an easy month for maintaining my cheer and giving Passover 101 yet again. I shall though, because it's important.
Compare this eternal newness with what happens on the phone to my mother. Yesterday we were debating whether the Sephardi 1/8 of me was allowed rice during Passover, or whether the Ashkenazi majority should rule. Rice is not one of the five grains. This means there's room for wiggle, I say. She says she has heard of a community that didn't eat pineapple for some years because the rabbi wasn't sure how to classify it. One errs on the side of caution, she says. I say "Rice! Maybe stir fried with onion and garlic. Rice!"
And we talked about modern Kabbalah and how it's linking closer and closer to areas of Judaism that have been influenced by evangelical Christianity. By no means all Kabbalah, but enough so that Mum's current lecturer is saying some truly daft things from a Jewish viewpoint. We dissect it historically and consider its relationship to the earlier texts and the Zohar's connections to Talmud and we work out that we don't want to be modern Kabbalists.
We discuss examples and anecdotes that Mum can use when she's giving tours at the Jewish Museum. And we swap the best recipes for a milchig lunch with three mutually exclusive sets of allergies present and then for the same group of family members for a fleschig Shabbat dinner. We talk about using up ingredients and how we are from being ready for Pesach and I admit relief that this year, my birthday doesn't fall on Pesach.
And that's my home Judaism.
We need Australian Jewish super heroes. They have a total advantage over most other super heroes. There's already such a difference between the private and the public life that secret identities will be a doddle.
This year won't be as messy as other years, simply because Belconnen Community Services is sensitive and will listen. I've taught creative writing for them for five years and I have good experience of their wonderful people awareness. The problem is with me, and explanation-fatigue. For everyone else this is the first time they've encountered Jewish food laws. Any Jewish food laws, not just the specialist ones for Passover. For me, it's something I have to explain and explain and explain and be patient and friendly because for each and every questioner it's the first time they've ever asked those questions or (for most of them) even realised that there are questions that need asking. They shouldn't be punished for not knowing practising Jews and not being the first person to ask. In fact, it's good that they do ask and that they try to sort things out.
For me, though, it's the millionth time. There are not many Jews in Canberra and most aren't public about their Judaism. I get asked these things a lot. And this month is not an easy month for maintaining my cheer and giving Passover 101 yet again. I shall though, because it's important.
Compare this eternal newness with what happens on the phone to my mother. Yesterday we were debating whether the Sephardi 1/8 of me was allowed rice during Passover, or whether the Ashkenazi majority should rule. Rice is not one of the five grains. This means there's room for wiggle, I say. She says she has heard of a community that didn't eat pineapple for some years because the rabbi wasn't sure how to classify it. One errs on the side of caution, she says. I say "Rice! Maybe stir fried with onion and garlic. Rice!"
And we talked about modern Kabbalah and how it's linking closer and closer to areas of Judaism that have been influenced by evangelical Christianity. By no means all Kabbalah, but enough so that Mum's current lecturer is saying some truly daft things from a Jewish viewpoint. We dissect it historically and consider its relationship to the earlier texts and the Zohar's connections to Talmud and we work out that we don't want to be modern Kabbalists.
We discuss examples and anecdotes that Mum can use when she's giving tours at the Jewish Museum. And we swap the best recipes for a milchig lunch with three mutually exclusive sets of allergies present and then for the same group of family members for a fleschig Shabbat dinner. We talk about using up ingredients and how we are from being ready for Pesach and I admit relief that this year, my birthday doesn't fall on Pesach.
And that's my home Judaism.
We need Australian Jewish super heroes. They have a total advantage over most other super heroes. There's already such a difference between the private and the public life that secret identities will be a doddle.
March 28, 2012
Women's History Month - Jack Dann
WHAT? ME? COMPULSIVE?
by Jack Dann
Anyone who has spent any time with professional writers will undoubtedly recognize their utter lack of compulsivity. The very idea that once we actually start a project, we're like a dog with a bone…well that's just a myth perpetrated by—
Okay, so maybe all of the above is a small exaggeration, and we are compulsive as hell. So what if we appear laid-back, somewhat bedraggled, and devil-may-care; so what if we sleep all day and work all night; so what if we procrastinate for hours, days, and weeks and watch more movies than Roger Ebert of the Chicago-Sun Times or read more books than Charles Van Doren? So what if we eat popcorn for breakfast?
We're creative.
We need time to daydream if we're to get the hard work done.
Of course we also rationalize and lie for a living.
Well, I don't; but then I'm the exception to the rule…although, come to think of it, I did recently read twenty-one novels by Patrick O'Brian in one go. (I did, however, take time out for food, sleep, and the obligatory brushing of the teeth.)
And now, once again, I'm engaging in what some might consider compulsive behavior: I'm reading (or rereading) all of Annie McCaffrey's Pern novels, one book after another. As of the time of this writing, I've read twenty in the Chronicles of Pern series; and I'm still going!
They are wonderful books and reading them now is my way of holding onto Annie for just a little bit longer.
#
Dim the lights.
Change the mood.
#
Anne McCaffrey passed away last November. She was a friend, role-model, mentor, and a force of nature. As I wrote in the January 2012 issue of Locus Magazine:
Impossible. Annie's gone. Just like that. A page turned. A whisper, a yearning, the thunderous tearing of memory, and I can't help but slide down the dark tunnels of recollection toward the squintingly bright light that was Anne McCaffrey.
Here is the place I land when I think of Annie.
Here…one last time, my dear friend. I've traveled back into youth when you were the very distillation of life and I was a young man you called "Tawny Lion":
#
It's 1969. I'm twenty-four years old, and it is a warm, dry summer day, a wonderful day, full of sun and possibility. I am visiting Anne McCaffrey at her home in Sea Cliff, New York. She has a grand old Victorian house with a kitchen on the fourth floor and enough cats padding across the landings and up and down the stairs to satisfy even a cat lady. I've gotten lost in that house before.
I'm sitting in Annie's tiny office on the first floor. Away from the noise. Paperbacks on narrowly spaced shelves cover the walls. The room is dark, almost mysterious, but secure. Anne sits behind her desk and looks at a row of books beside her. She stares hard at them, as if trying to think out the answer to a question. I imagine that if she finds the answer, she will never return to this tiny room again.
"These books are mine, Tawny Lion," she says to me. "It's as if every year is on this bookshelf. One day you'll be counting the years of your life by the number of books you've written. And that's what you end up with, a row of books, the years of your life."
Although it's a magical time of my life—everything bright and compacted—Annie has just come through a bad marriage. She is a tall, large-boned woman with a shock of white hair. She's Irish and used to be an opera singer. She always seems to know when I'm in need of a home cooked meal and some positive reinforcement. She is also the secretary of the Science Fiction Writers of America, an organization I've just joined.
I'm living in Brooklyn, New York, and trying to write and go to St. John's Law School at the same time.
I guess I'm in love with Anne McCaffrey.*
What makes these novels of Annie's such compulsive reading? Certainly, their narrative drive; but that alone would not be enough to turn these books (starting with The White Dragon) into New York Times Bestsellers. For me, it's Annie's characters: they grow and learn and endure; they share their joy, bitterness, adventures, and grief with us; they become people we really know…people who come to inhabit our lives and memories. These novels are family sagas on amphetamines, for the time span encompassed by this series is some 2,500 years. This is solidly based science fiction, rigorously worked out, and yet these interlinked novels also magically tap deep into the fantasy genre: There be dragons (albeit bio-engineered) in these books!
Annie combined her deep understanding of love, joy, and loss with an unmatched sense of story, genre, and mythic adventure to create…life.
And so here I am, compulsively reading and living these novels.
I guess I'm just not ready to let Annie go quite yet.
JACK DANN is a multiple-award winning author who has written or edited over seventy-five books, including the international bestseller The Memory Cathedral, which was 1 on The Age Bestseller list, and The Silent, which Library Journal chose as one of their 'Hot Picks' and wrote: "This is narrative storytelling at its best… Most emphatically recommended." The West Australian called his novel The Rebel: an Imagined Life of James Dean "an amazingly evocative and utterly convincing picture of the era, down to details of the smells and sensations—and even more importantly, the way of thinking." Locus wrote: "The Rebel is a significant and very gripping novel, a welcome addition to Jack Dann's growing oeuvre of speculative historical novels, sustaining further his long-standing contemplation of the modalities of myth and memory. This is alternate history with passion and difference." He is the co-editor, with Janeen Webb, of Dreaming Down-Under, which won the World Fantasy Award, and the editor of the sequel Dreaming Again. His latest anthology Ghosts by Gaslight, co-edited with Nick Gevers, was listed as one of Publishers Weekly's "Top Ten SF, Fantasy, and Horror" Picks for the Fall. It has been shortlisted for the Bram Stoker Award and the Aurealis Award.
Jack lives in Australia on a farm overlooking the sea. You can visit his website at www.jackdann.com and follow him on Twitter @jackmdann.
by Jack Dann
Anyone who has spent any time with professional writers will undoubtedly recognize their utter lack of compulsivity. The very idea that once we actually start a project, we're like a dog with a bone…well that's just a myth perpetrated by—
Okay, so maybe all of the above is a small exaggeration, and we are compulsive as hell. So what if we appear laid-back, somewhat bedraggled, and devil-may-care; so what if we sleep all day and work all night; so what if we procrastinate for hours, days, and weeks and watch more movies than Roger Ebert of the Chicago-Sun Times or read more books than Charles Van Doren? So what if we eat popcorn for breakfast?
We're creative.
We need time to daydream if we're to get the hard work done.
Of course we also rationalize and lie for a living.
Well, I don't; but then I'm the exception to the rule…although, come to think of it, I did recently read twenty-one novels by Patrick O'Brian in one go. (I did, however, take time out for food, sleep, and the obligatory brushing of the teeth.)
And now, once again, I'm engaging in what some might consider compulsive behavior: I'm reading (or rereading) all of Annie McCaffrey's Pern novels, one book after another. As of the time of this writing, I've read twenty in the Chronicles of Pern series; and I'm still going!
They are wonderful books and reading them now is my way of holding onto Annie for just a little bit longer.
#
Dim the lights.
Change the mood.
#
Anne McCaffrey passed away last November. She was a friend, role-model, mentor, and a force of nature. As I wrote in the January 2012 issue of Locus Magazine:
Impossible. Annie's gone. Just like that. A page turned. A whisper, a yearning, the thunderous tearing of memory, and I can't help but slide down the dark tunnels of recollection toward the squintingly bright light that was Anne McCaffrey.
Here is the place I land when I think of Annie.
Here…one last time, my dear friend. I've traveled back into youth when you were the very distillation of life and I was a young man you called "Tawny Lion":
#
It's 1969. I'm twenty-four years old, and it is a warm, dry summer day, a wonderful day, full of sun and possibility. I am visiting Anne McCaffrey at her home in Sea Cliff, New York. She has a grand old Victorian house with a kitchen on the fourth floor and enough cats padding across the landings and up and down the stairs to satisfy even a cat lady. I've gotten lost in that house before.
I'm sitting in Annie's tiny office on the first floor. Away from the noise. Paperbacks on narrowly spaced shelves cover the walls. The room is dark, almost mysterious, but secure. Anne sits behind her desk and looks at a row of books beside her. She stares hard at them, as if trying to think out the answer to a question. I imagine that if she finds the answer, she will never return to this tiny room again.
"These books are mine, Tawny Lion," she says to me. "It's as if every year is on this bookshelf. One day you'll be counting the years of your life by the number of books you've written. And that's what you end up with, a row of books, the years of your life."
Although it's a magical time of my life—everything bright and compacted—Annie has just come through a bad marriage. She is a tall, large-boned woman with a shock of white hair. She's Irish and used to be an opera singer. She always seems to know when I'm in need of a home cooked meal and some positive reinforcement. She is also the secretary of the Science Fiction Writers of America, an organization I've just joined.
I'm living in Brooklyn, New York, and trying to write and go to St. John's Law School at the same time.
I guess I'm in love with Anne McCaffrey.*
What makes these novels of Annie's such compulsive reading? Certainly, their narrative drive; but that alone would not be enough to turn these books (starting with The White Dragon) into New York Times Bestsellers. For me, it's Annie's characters: they grow and learn and endure; they share their joy, bitterness, adventures, and grief with us; they become people we really know…people who come to inhabit our lives and memories. These novels are family sagas on amphetamines, for the time span encompassed by this series is some 2,500 years. This is solidly based science fiction, rigorously worked out, and yet these interlinked novels also magically tap deep into the fantasy genre: There be dragons (albeit bio-engineered) in these books!
Annie combined her deep understanding of love, joy, and loss with an unmatched sense of story, genre, and mythic adventure to create…life.
And so here I am, compulsively reading and living these novels.
I guess I'm just not ready to let Annie go quite yet.
JACK DANN is a multiple-award winning author who has written or edited over seventy-five books, including the international bestseller The Memory Cathedral, which was 1 on The Age Bestseller list, and The Silent, which Library Journal chose as one of their 'Hot Picks' and wrote: "This is narrative storytelling at its best… Most emphatically recommended." The West Australian called his novel The Rebel: an Imagined Life of James Dean "an amazingly evocative and utterly convincing picture of the era, down to details of the smells and sensations—and even more importantly, the way of thinking." Locus wrote: "The Rebel is a significant and very gripping novel, a welcome addition to Jack Dann's growing oeuvre of speculative historical novels, sustaining further his long-standing contemplation of the modalities of myth and memory. This is alternate history with passion and difference." He is the co-editor, with Janeen Webb, of Dreaming Down-Under, which won the World Fantasy Award, and the editor of the sequel Dreaming Again. His latest anthology Ghosts by Gaslight, co-edited with Nick Gevers, was listed as one of Publishers Weekly's "Top Ten SF, Fantasy, and Horror" Picks for the Fall. It has been shortlisted for the Bram Stoker Award and the Aurealis Award.
Jack lives in Australia on a farm overlooking the sea. You can visit his website at www.jackdann.com and follow him on Twitter @jackmdann.
gillpolack @ 2012-03-28T17:29:00
I've mislaid my day's to-do list. This ought to be a shame, but I've spent most of the afternoon on insurance-related things anyhow, so I wouldn't've made much progress (my apostrophes today follow the Lewis Carroll rules, because I've seen too many false possessives) anyhow.
Because I'm about to go on a list hunt, I thought you'd like a rather special list. Here are links to all my guests from Women's History Month last year. http://gillpolack.livejournal.com/786705.html
Because I'm about to go on a list hunt, I thought you'd like a rather special list. Here are links to all my guests from Women's History Month last year. http://gillpolack.livejournal.com/786705.html
March 27, 2012
gillpolack @ 2012-03-28T09:05:00
I worked 2/3 of the way through my list, but the evening was a write-off. This might be because I was out from midday until 9 pm. Common, garden tiredness, in other words.
Just before I left, I found more stuff the thief took (80s clothes!) and when I came back I found the quote for the curtains (not reparable - but will the insurance replace the whole track and etc?). While I was out, I told my class that my next week's drama will be getting my eye checked and not coming home to anything wrong.
The reason for the afternoon out is that there's a conference this week at the ANU. It's peripheral to my interests for the most part, so I skipped all but one session. That session was on digital scholarly editing. There are some fascinating approaches and some rather big obstacles.
There were interesting things said about stubborn Medievalists - most of the projects have a very restrictive cultural paradigm they use to encode texts. Basically, there is the assumption of one text, in one language. There has been advance since I last went to an event of this sort, because different versions of the same text can now be compared using the computer, as long as the different versions are essentially that one, modern-style text.
It's a modern definition of a document. Scribal variants, dialects, Beuve de Hanstone in two languages - all of these have the be crunched to reduce (in the expert's words* they eliminate the 'noise'). An audience member complained about the obdurateness of Medievalists - why can't we agree to things? This same person asked if anyone had tried the new digital editing on a major work that had been created digitally. She suggested William Gibson. I suggested that 'noise' was cultural context (which was me being polite - what I think really happens is that when you eliminate key factors scholars look for in texts, like the difference between the scribes' dialects and the author's) you eliminate key information for interpreting it across dialect and language boundaries) and I threw the word 'copyright' at the person who wanted to take Neuromancer and turn it into a scholarly edition. A scholarly edition of Neuromancer would be awesome, but the moment I mentioned copyright other people said "Yes, it costs more if the work is not that old: both in time - gaining permissions and in fees." And yes, someone grumbled about writers wanting money. They grumbled quietly, but I was there and I pointed out that the need for income that writers (strangely) manifest is not that unexpected or uncouth.
In other words, I ended up being the spanner in the works - every workshop has one, but it's not usually so consistently me. The projects are great and they're coming a long way to address many cool things. Comparing versions and working out their relationship each to another. Adding pictures and amendments and notations and making the mark-up far more useful for scholars. But because the whole set of projects (not just one - all the ones that were represented on the day) start with the idea of a single base text, it has a limited cultural range. The Medievalist (who used to live round the corner from me) is closest to addressing these, but the only works he discussed were some of the most straightforward and 'modernised' Medieval texts known: Dante and Chaucer and Mallory. All known authors. All in early print editions. All the closest to standardised that a Medieval secular text can be without being unique.
So, the workshop was great, but hasn't any solutions for anything I do at this stage. And - pace the conference questioner who said that Medievalist are difficult on these matters: Medievalists are not being difficult. We admit that not all texts are created within the same cultural paradigms and we're working to find out how the MA actually worked, culturally. The set of processes described will actually set Medieval scholarship back, not advance it through the wonder of computing.
I reviewed a book the other week and it examined texts across language boundaries. The precise examination of a text word by word means you can't even do that across dialectal boundaries, much less across language. And yet these variants are inherent in so many Medieval texts. I once did a study (for the fun of it - I never got it published) of the Dialects in the Chretien poems. It made the reach of the actual texts precise and there were boundaries at which the stories started to change significantly. The computer paradigms would silence these cultural boundaries.
At the same time, the same set of concepts applied (as was demonstrated) to the work of Harpur (whose bicentenary is next year - which is very cool) is totally awesome as a way of showing how Harpur worked on a text. The computer-based analysis is fluid and powerful and a lot of fun.
I do find it sad that the design end of it uses a single cultural paradigm, however, that's based on the most studied set of cultures for texts. It's like Propp and tales all over again.
*I told this expert he looked familiar. We worked out he taught at a high school round the corner from where I grew up and lived right near my cousin's.
Just before I left, I found more stuff the thief took (80s clothes!) and when I came back I found the quote for the curtains (not reparable - but will the insurance replace the whole track and etc?). While I was out, I told my class that my next week's drama will be getting my eye checked and not coming home to anything wrong.
The reason for the afternoon out is that there's a conference this week at the ANU. It's peripheral to my interests for the most part, so I skipped all but one session. That session was on digital scholarly editing. There are some fascinating approaches and some rather big obstacles.
There were interesting things said about stubborn Medievalists - most of the projects have a very restrictive cultural paradigm they use to encode texts. Basically, there is the assumption of one text, in one language. There has been advance since I last went to an event of this sort, because different versions of the same text can now be compared using the computer, as long as the different versions are essentially that one, modern-style text.
It's a modern definition of a document. Scribal variants, dialects, Beuve de Hanstone in two languages - all of these have the be crunched to reduce (in the expert's words* they eliminate the 'noise'). An audience member complained about the obdurateness of Medievalists - why can't we agree to things? This same person asked if anyone had tried the new digital editing on a major work that had been created digitally. She suggested William Gibson. I suggested that 'noise' was cultural context (which was me being polite - what I think really happens is that when you eliminate key factors scholars look for in texts, like the difference between the scribes' dialects and the author's) you eliminate key information for interpreting it across dialect and language boundaries) and I threw the word 'copyright' at the person who wanted to take Neuromancer and turn it into a scholarly edition. A scholarly edition of Neuromancer would be awesome, but the moment I mentioned copyright other people said "Yes, it costs more if the work is not that old: both in time - gaining permissions and in fees." And yes, someone grumbled about writers wanting money. They grumbled quietly, but I was there and I pointed out that the need for income that writers (strangely) manifest is not that unexpected or uncouth.
In other words, I ended up being the spanner in the works - every workshop has one, but it's not usually so consistently me. The projects are great and they're coming a long way to address many cool things. Comparing versions and working out their relationship each to another. Adding pictures and amendments and notations and making the mark-up far more useful for scholars. But because the whole set of projects (not just one - all the ones that were represented on the day) start with the idea of a single base text, it has a limited cultural range. The Medievalist (who used to live round the corner from me) is closest to addressing these, but the only works he discussed were some of the most straightforward and 'modernised' Medieval texts known: Dante and Chaucer and Mallory. All known authors. All in early print editions. All the closest to standardised that a Medieval secular text can be without being unique.
So, the workshop was great, but hasn't any solutions for anything I do at this stage. And - pace the conference questioner who said that Medievalist are difficult on these matters: Medievalists are not being difficult. We admit that not all texts are created within the same cultural paradigms and we're working to find out how the MA actually worked, culturally. The set of processes described will actually set Medieval scholarship back, not advance it through the wonder of computing.
I reviewed a book the other week and it examined texts across language boundaries. The precise examination of a text word by word means you can't even do that across dialectal boundaries, much less across language. And yet these variants are inherent in so many Medieval texts. I once did a study (for the fun of it - I never got it published) of the Dialects in the Chretien poems. It made the reach of the actual texts precise and there were boundaries at which the stories started to change significantly. The computer paradigms would silence these cultural boundaries.
At the same time, the same set of concepts applied (as was demonstrated) to the work of Harpur (whose bicentenary is next year - which is very cool) is totally awesome as a way of showing how Harpur worked on a text. The computer-based analysis is fluid and powerful and a lot of fun.
I do find it sad that the design end of it uses a single cultural paradigm, however, that's based on the most studied set of cultures for texts. It's like Propp and tales all over again.
*I told this expert he looked familiar. We worked out he taught at a high school round the corner from where I grew up and lived right near my cousin's.
March 26, 2012
Women's History Month - guest post from Alma Alexander
Born into a world that was poem and story, wrapped in swaddling cloths of words and dreams, I could only become what I became - a herder or words myself, a writer, a teller of tales, a seeker of dreams.
But one does not end up walking this road by accident. Sure, there was family involved, at the earliest of times - people whose blood I shared, and who loved me, and who saw me reaching for the moon and tried to pluck stars from the heavens to put into my grasping little childish hands. However, once you're put onto your own two feet and you start stumbling forward by yourself, you discover others along the way - others whom you may or may not have met, but who influence your journey in a hundred small ways.
And they are legion. Some of them are role models, some of them eventually become friends, some of them you get a chance to tell how important they and their lives and contributions were in the shaping of your own existence, and some of them remain forever beyond your reach. They are many. Here, in the context of the Women's History Month, are a few who mattered to me.
When I was a child, my family had several of those "collected works" stacks of books, five or eight or ten novels by a single writer issued in neat serried ranks of identically bound novels which look so good and organized on a bookshelf. One of "our" writers was a woman named Pearl S. Buck.
I knew little about her, back then. It would be a while before I found out that she was a winner of the Nobel Literature Prize. But that never mattered, and neither did the fact that at seven or eight or nine years old (which was the age at which I first picked up her books) I may have been way too young to understand everything that was in there. I understood better, later, when I re-read the favourites of my childhood - but when I was a girl nothing in my house was ever forbidden to me, and I devoured Pearl Buck with a voracious appetite. I think her set had some nine books in it. I read them all, some several times. Her exotic worlds and the women who inhabited them were rich and strange to me, these may have been "real" books but to me they were (at least in that very beginning) as much fairy tales as Hans Christian Andersen's works were. Pearl Buck was perhaps the first writer - the first WOMAN writer - to teach me that there was wider and bigger world out there that I knew, and it was she perhaps at whose feet I can lay my hunger for knowing that world as I grew older. I haven't actually gone back to her books for a while. Perhaps it is high time I returned there for a visit to the vistas of my childhood country.
But, partly, she began it.
Later, others stepped up to take their place in the ranks.
People have heard me tell the story of my encounter with Lynne Reid Banks, back when I was fifteen years old and she came to talk to my English class at school. I was already a "writer" by then, and by that I mean that I was an inverterate scribbler who already had at least two finished novels under my belt by this age and was deep into the next one. But I was yet to be a WRITER, the kind that lives by it, because I was an innocent and I knew nothing about the practicalities of the matter. Until Lynne Reid Banks came to our school, and told it like it was. She spoke of the joys of her world and her art - but she also told of the frustrations, of the fear, of the lingering anxieties, of rejection, of long agonizing waits for a word (any word) from a publisher, about the blood and the sweat and the tears that went into what only looked on the surface to be a perfect finished draft. And she told all of this with the light of angels in her eyes, and it was clear to me that there was nothing else that she wanted to do with her life except this, that there WAS nothing in life except this, and the fifteen-year-old me sat up with the same light kindled inside of me and said to myself, "Yes. This. I want this." And from there on I wrote for a reader other than myself, I began writing for the world. It was this moment that made me who I am today.
Later, when I began to be asked interview questions about my own work , I often tell people that I would like to be Ursula Le Guin when I grow up, and that is actually rather no more than the truth. I deeply admire her passion, her spirit, her mind, her imagination, her articulate and deeply felt writing (and that, no matter whether she is writing YA novels or scholarly essays on the craft of writing. I have devoured both, with different but equal pleasure). She has taught me, and continues to teach me, grace, and wisdom, and quiet power. This was a writer whom I had the pleasure and the privilege of meeting in person several times and the woman is just as wonderful as the writer is. And all I can say is, live long and prosper, great lady, and may there be more words still that will flow from your pen which I can drink like an elixir and let them enlighten and enchant me.
And may I beg the indulgence of including somebody whom many people - perhaps most people reading this piece - will probably never have heard of.
Back in the last fading years of the last century (ye gods that sounds so very very old, but it isn't, not really, just do the math...) a novel by the name of "Letters from the Fire" was published in New Zealand - a thoroughly modern epistolary novel, written in emails instead of letters, emails exchanged between my own character and that written and personified by a man who lived in the United States of America - and whom I would eventually marry. The novel dealt with the NATO bombing campaign in what was the last crumbling dregs of Yugoslavia, the land of my birth; it told of shattered lives, smashed buildings, destroyed bridges, despoiled rivers, stolen land. To me, it was a deeply personal story - but that full power of it could perhaps be obvious only to somebody who also shared my background, who shared my Slav heritage. It was with a sense of utter shock and surprise, then, that I received a phone call, a little while after this book was published, from a woman I did not know, a New Zealand writer who was born in Dargaville in New Zealand to settlers from the Dalmatian coast back in 1915.
She was eighty four years old when she called me, a complete stranger to me, and she said to me, "You don't know me, my name is Amelia Batistich and I am a writer. I just read your book, and I had to call to tell you that I thought that this book is the 'Bridge on the Drina' of our times."
'Bridge on the Drina' is a seminal book for me and mine, and its author, Ivo Andric, ALSO received a Nobel Literature Prize in his own turn (and here we close the circle, back to where we started, back to a Pearl Buck and her own laurels...) Being compared to Ivo Andric was breathtaking to me, and humbling, and I think I probably began crying right there on the phone. But we met, after that call, Amelia and I, and although our encounters were very few (I moved to the States not too long after this, in order to marry that aforementioned collaborator of mine on "Letters from the Fire") but during that time Amelia Batistich became something of a second beloved grandmother to me, and we sat in her kitchen at her small kitchen table and she gave me praise, and advice, and love, and pride.
She died in 2004, and I mourned her like one of my own. Sometimes, love is just enough. Hers was not a large fame, but that which she gathered she treasured and received with humble gratitude and appreciation. She was a warm and giving soul, a wonderful woman, a writer from the very heart and soul of her, and someone who gave me a huge gift which I still carry with me to this day. God Speed, Amelia, it is always good to remember you, and may you have found your rest and your peace.
I have no doubt that there are still great women waiting to be discovered on my life's journey, which is not yet done. I look forward to meeting them. To those who offered me words or visions or praise or encouragement or a hand along the way so far, thank you, all of you, and I forget none of you - the reason I stand where I stand is because you walked the road before or beside me. I salute you.
BIO:
Alma Alexander was born in Yugoslavia, grew up in Africa, and went to school in Wales. She has lived in several countries on four continents, and is quite comfortable in the new continent of cyberspace. She was living in New Zealand when she met a man on an Internet bulletin board for writers, married him and moved to America.
She now lives with her husband and two cats in the Pacific Northwest, in the city of Bellingham (directions to her home include the phrase "Aim for Canada and just before you get there, turn right"). Her office looks out onto cedar woods, and she has frequently been known to babysit young deer left just outside her door while their mothers vanish off on some urgent deer errand.
Website: www.AlmaAlexander.com
Blog: http://anghara.livejournal.com
Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/alma.alexander (Facebook Fan
Page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Alma-Alexander/67938071280 ) Goodreads author page: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/36343.Alma_Alexander
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AlmaAlexander
Amazon: http://amzn.to/p0ikzy (Kindle store) or http://amzn.to/mQrHkc (Alma Alexander Books)
Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/anghara
Other: 30th of every month: www.StorytellersUnplugged.com
But one does not end up walking this road by accident. Sure, there was family involved, at the earliest of times - people whose blood I shared, and who loved me, and who saw me reaching for the moon and tried to pluck stars from the heavens to put into my grasping little childish hands. However, once you're put onto your own two feet and you start stumbling forward by yourself, you discover others along the way - others whom you may or may not have met, but who influence your journey in a hundred small ways.
And they are legion. Some of them are role models, some of them eventually become friends, some of them you get a chance to tell how important they and their lives and contributions were in the shaping of your own existence, and some of them remain forever beyond your reach. They are many. Here, in the context of the Women's History Month, are a few who mattered to me.
When I was a child, my family had several of those "collected works" stacks of books, five or eight or ten novels by a single writer issued in neat serried ranks of identically bound novels which look so good and organized on a bookshelf. One of "our" writers was a woman named Pearl S. Buck.
I knew little about her, back then. It would be a while before I found out that she was a winner of the Nobel Literature Prize. But that never mattered, and neither did the fact that at seven or eight or nine years old (which was the age at which I first picked up her books) I may have been way too young to understand everything that was in there. I understood better, later, when I re-read the favourites of my childhood - but when I was a girl nothing in my house was ever forbidden to me, and I devoured Pearl Buck with a voracious appetite. I think her set had some nine books in it. I read them all, some several times. Her exotic worlds and the women who inhabited them were rich and strange to me, these may have been "real" books but to me they were (at least in that very beginning) as much fairy tales as Hans Christian Andersen's works were. Pearl Buck was perhaps the first writer - the first WOMAN writer - to teach me that there was wider and bigger world out there that I knew, and it was she perhaps at whose feet I can lay my hunger for knowing that world as I grew older. I haven't actually gone back to her books for a while. Perhaps it is high time I returned there for a visit to the vistas of my childhood country.
But, partly, she began it.
Later, others stepped up to take their place in the ranks.
People have heard me tell the story of my encounter with Lynne Reid Banks, back when I was fifteen years old and she came to talk to my English class at school. I was already a "writer" by then, and by that I mean that I was an inverterate scribbler who already had at least two finished novels under my belt by this age and was deep into the next one. But I was yet to be a WRITER, the kind that lives by it, because I was an innocent and I knew nothing about the practicalities of the matter. Until Lynne Reid Banks came to our school, and told it like it was. She spoke of the joys of her world and her art - but she also told of the frustrations, of the fear, of the lingering anxieties, of rejection, of long agonizing waits for a word (any word) from a publisher, about the blood and the sweat and the tears that went into what only looked on the surface to be a perfect finished draft. And she told all of this with the light of angels in her eyes, and it was clear to me that there was nothing else that she wanted to do with her life except this, that there WAS nothing in life except this, and the fifteen-year-old me sat up with the same light kindled inside of me and said to myself, "Yes. This. I want this." And from there on I wrote for a reader other than myself, I began writing for the world. It was this moment that made me who I am today.
Later, when I began to be asked interview questions about my own work , I often tell people that I would like to be Ursula Le Guin when I grow up, and that is actually rather no more than the truth. I deeply admire her passion, her spirit, her mind, her imagination, her articulate and deeply felt writing (and that, no matter whether she is writing YA novels or scholarly essays on the craft of writing. I have devoured both, with different but equal pleasure). She has taught me, and continues to teach me, grace, and wisdom, and quiet power. This was a writer whom I had the pleasure and the privilege of meeting in person several times and the woman is just as wonderful as the writer is. And all I can say is, live long and prosper, great lady, and may there be more words still that will flow from your pen which I can drink like an elixir and let them enlighten and enchant me.
And may I beg the indulgence of including somebody whom many people - perhaps most people reading this piece - will probably never have heard of.
Back in the last fading years of the last century (ye gods that sounds so very very old, but it isn't, not really, just do the math...) a novel by the name of "Letters from the Fire" was published in New Zealand - a thoroughly modern epistolary novel, written in emails instead of letters, emails exchanged between my own character and that written and personified by a man who lived in the United States of America - and whom I would eventually marry. The novel dealt with the NATO bombing campaign in what was the last crumbling dregs of Yugoslavia, the land of my birth; it told of shattered lives, smashed buildings, destroyed bridges, despoiled rivers, stolen land. To me, it was a deeply personal story - but that full power of it could perhaps be obvious only to somebody who also shared my background, who shared my Slav heritage. It was with a sense of utter shock and surprise, then, that I received a phone call, a little while after this book was published, from a woman I did not know, a New Zealand writer who was born in Dargaville in New Zealand to settlers from the Dalmatian coast back in 1915.
She was eighty four years old when she called me, a complete stranger to me, and she said to me, "You don't know me, my name is Amelia Batistich and I am a writer. I just read your book, and I had to call to tell you that I thought that this book is the 'Bridge on the Drina' of our times."
'Bridge on the Drina' is a seminal book for me and mine, and its author, Ivo Andric, ALSO received a Nobel Literature Prize in his own turn (and here we close the circle, back to where we started, back to a Pearl Buck and her own laurels...) Being compared to Ivo Andric was breathtaking to me, and humbling, and I think I probably began crying right there on the phone. But we met, after that call, Amelia and I, and although our encounters were very few (I moved to the States not too long after this, in order to marry that aforementioned collaborator of mine on "Letters from the Fire") but during that time Amelia Batistich became something of a second beloved grandmother to me, and we sat in her kitchen at her small kitchen table and she gave me praise, and advice, and love, and pride.
She died in 2004, and I mourned her like one of my own. Sometimes, love is just enough. Hers was not a large fame, but that which she gathered she treasured and received with humble gratitude and appreciation. She was a warm and giving soul, a wonderful woman, a writer from the very heart and soul of her, and someone who gave me a huge gift which I still carry with me to this day. God Speed, Amelia, it is always good to remember you, and may you have found your rest and your peace.
I have no doubt that there are still great women waiting to be discovered on my life's journey, which is not yet done. I look forward to meeting them. To those who offered me words or visions or praise or encouragement or a hand along the way so far, thank you, all of you, and I forget none of you - the reason I stand where I stand is because you walked the road before or beside me. I salute you.
BIO:
Alma Alexander was born in Yugoslavia, grew up in Africa, and went to school in Wales. She has lived in several countries on four continents, and is quite comfortable in the new continent of cyberspace. She was living in New Zealand when she met a man on an Internet bulletin board for writers, married him and moved to America.
She now lives with her husband and two cats in the Pacific Northwest, in the city of Bellingham (directions to her home include the phrase "Aim for Canada and just before you get there, turn right"). Her office looks out onto cedar woods, and she has frequently been known to babysit young deer left just outside her door while their mothers vanish off on some urgent deer errand.
Website: www.AlmaAlexander.com
Blog: http://anghara.livejournal.com
Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/alma.alexander (Facebook Fan
Page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Alma-Alexander/67938071280 ) Goodreads author page: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/36343.Alma_Alexander
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AlmaAlexander
Amazon: http://amzn.to/p0ikzy (Kindle store) or http://amzn.to/mQrHkc (Alma Alexander Books)
Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/anghara
Other: 30th of every month: www.StorytellersUnplugged.com
gillpolack @ 2012-03-27T10:22:00
I'm now fully back in the Land of the Lists. I have a big list for today and a growing list for tomorrow. If I can do all the things on both lists, then some of the piling [pressure (from life having gone intersting and me not having been able to do everything at once) will be relieved.
I can't find my stash of butchers' paper for worldbuilding, and my students are learning about worldbuilding tonight. This once, they will learn about worldbuilding using the back of my proof-reading printout of a bunch of essays. They will work in pairs instead of larger groups. This actually works: it's a very big class. At this stage I don't know if the thief stole the butchers' paper (which would be strange because my much nicer map-drawing paper is still perfectly in evidence) or if it simply got buried under something and has not yet been excavated. (I stopped excavating for a couple of days after discovering the last set of losses - I needed to achieve something useful, rather than add to the increasingly strange list of missing objects.)
The great thing that happened yesterday was that I got my perspective back. This fortnight has been unusual and stressful, but, in the scheme of things, I and my friends have been through so much worse. I was explaining to the woman who came to quote for the fix of the curtains that the wonder of being us (middle-aged and female) is that these things are nothing compared with what has already been. She agreed with me wholeheartedly - we coped with that, and we can cope with the current garbage the world flings with us. We swapped stories of dying and dead relatives and about life dramas for about fifteen minutes after she'd done the measurements. It was the opposite of "We'll all be rooned, says Hanrahan," for we worked out what has tried to ruin us and how it failed. If we got through that then March 2012 is nothing.
This is why I'm back to making lists. If I'm not going to turn into Hanrahan, I do need to get control back and meet deadlines and all that kind of thing. And lists are good. When I cross everything off a list, I can recycle that list, which is just lovely.
Today I have a workshop on matters digital. Some weeks ago Sharyn said "You need this." Yesterday I was thinking "It's all too much - I shall skip it." But today it's on my list and therefore do-able. And I shall be much more myself when I'm back in learning mode. Learning, writing, teaching, researching - I need them all if I want to be happy. I am determined to be happy - life's too short to admit of alternatives.
I can't find my stash of butchers' paper for worldbuilding, and my students are learning about worldbuilding tonight. This once, they will learn about worldbuilding using the back of my proof-reading printout of a bunch of essays. They will work in pairs instead of larger groups. This actually works: it's a very big class. At this stage I don't know if the thief stole the butchers' paper (which would be strange because my much nicer map-drawing paper is still perfectly in evidence) or if it simply got buried under something and has not yet been excavated. (I stopped excavating for a couple of days after discovering the last set of losses - I needed to achieve something useful, rather than add to the increasingly strange list of missing objects.)
The great thing that happened yesterday was that I got my perspective back. This fortnight has been unusual and stressful, but, in the scheme of things, I and my friends have been through so much worse. I was explaining to the woman who came to quote for the fix of the curtains that the wonder of being us (middle-aged and female) is that these things are nothing compared with what has already been. She agreed with me wholeheartedly - we coped with that, and we can cope with the current garbage the world flings with us. We swapped stories of dying and dead relatives and about life dramas for about fifteen minutes after she'd done the measurements. It was the opposite of "We'll all be rooned, says Hanrahan," for we worked out what has tried to ruin us and how it failed. If we got through that then March 2012 is nothing.
This is why I'm back to making lists. If I'm not going to turn into Hanrahan, I do need to get control back and meet deadlines and all that kind of thing. And lists are good. When I cross everything off a list, I can recycle that list, which is just lovely.
Today I have a workshop on matters digital. Some weeks ago Sharyn said "You need this." Yesterday I was thinking "It's all too much - I shall skip it." But today it's on my list and therefore do-able. And I shall be much more myself when I'm back in learning mode. Learning, writing, teaching, researching - I need them all if I want to be happy. I am determined to be happy - life's too short to admit of alternatives.
Women's History Month - guest post from Donna Maree Hanson
My name is Donna Maree Hanson and I'm a Canberra-based author, who actually lives across the border in Queanbeyan, NSW. I've known Gillian Polack for a number of years now, and I was very happy to be invited to be a guest blogger during her women's history month.
This post is about a woman writer, who originally wrote as a man. Her name was Katharine Burdekin and she wrote under the name Murray Constantine in 1937. This reminds me of another author, who also inspired me and also wrote under a man's name, James Tiptree Jr. I was introduced to these authors by Lucy Sussex, a well respected Australian writer.
How did Lucy Sussex introduce me to these authors?
When I first started out writing creatively, way back in late 2000, I sent my embarrassingly rough draft of my first novel for a manuscript assessment. Lucy Sussex was the assessor and it was her commentary about feminist science fiction (that I had no idea I was writing) that introduced me to the works of James Tiptree Jr (Alice Sheldon) and that there was an award every year all science fiction (speculative) writing that discussed gender issues.
I heard about Katharine through Lucy Sussex's short story 'Kay and Phil' , which appeared in A Tour Guide To Utopia, a collection of short stories by Lucy Sussex published by Mirrordance in 2005. In this story, she has two deceased authors discussing their respective approaches to writing a Nazi dystopia. One is Burdekin and the other is Philip K Dick. I was fascinated by Katharine Burdekin's story, well, how Lucy portrayed it. So I ordered the book.
Swastika Night is a very chilling tale, both because of when it was written and the terrifying future that it examines. I was also puzzled that I hadn't heard about this book and this writer previously. I had heard of 1984 by George Orwell, then a futuristic dystopia. (I read this in 1975). Why hadn't I heard of Murray Constantine or Katharine Burdekin? Why did Katharine Burdekin need to write under another name, a male name?
Swastika Night portrays the world 700 years or so in the future, where the Nazi fascist dream has evolved. In this future, Hitler won. The hate of the Nazi regime has ripened. Having rid the world of Jews and Catholics, the hate refines itself. Women are kept like beasts in camps. The men are mostly sexual predators and prey on young boys. I can see perhaps why a woman writing this in 1937 would have a hard time publishing a story like this at that time. This was a time when the West apparently did not know what was happening in Nazi Germany, but apparently Burdekin did. I'm not an historian but still I wonder. I would like to peel pack time and peer into this nasty wound in history.
This story is not an easy read. It is dark and devastating. 1984 is dark too, but its truth is more palatable than Burdekin's. She pointed a finger with a sharpened nail and ripped.
I think modern readers should read Swastika Night, because when it was written it was profound. The war had not been won. She was seeing into a bleak future. A world dominated and changed by fear. A future where no one wins.
So there you have it—an early female speculative fiction writer who dealt with social criticism. I thank Lucy Sussex for pointing her out to me in her short story 'Kay and Phil'. I thank the universe for Alice Sheldon.
If you want to know more about Donna and her writing, she keeps a writing blog at http://donnamareehanson.wordpress.com
This post is about a woman writer, who originally wrote as a man. Her name was Katharine Burdekin and she wrote under the name Murray Constantine in 1937. This reminds me of another author, who also inspired me and also wrote under a man's name, James Tiptree Jr. I was introduced to these authors by Lucy Sussex, a well respected Australian writer.
How did Lucy Sussex introduce me to these authors?
When I first started out writing creatively, way back in late 2000, I sent my embarrassingly rough draft of my first novel for a manuscript assessment. Lucy Sussex was the assessor and it was her commentary about feminist science fiction (that I had no idea I was writing) that introduced me to the works of James Tiptree Jr (Alice Sheldon) and that there was an award every year all science fiction (speculative) writing that discussed gender issues.
I heard about Katharine through Lucy Sussex's short story 'Kay and Phil' , which appeared in A Tour Guide To Utopia, a collection of short stories by Lucy Sussex published by Mirrordance in 2005. In this story, she has two deceased authors discussing their respective approaches to writing a Nazi dystopia. One is Burdekin and the other is Philip K Dick. I was fascinated by Katharine Burdekin's story, well, how Lucy portrayed it. So I ordered the book.
Swastika Night is a very chilling tale, both because of when it was written and the terrifying future that it examines. I was also puzzled that I hadn't heard about this book and this writer previously. I had heard of 1984 by George Orwell, then a futuristic dystopia. (I read this in 1975). Why hadn't I heard of Murray Constantine or Katharine Burdekin? Why did Katharine Burdekin need to write under another name, a male name?
Swastika Night portrays the world 700 years or so in the future, where the Nazi fascist dream has evolved. In this future, Hitler won. The hate of the Nazi regime has ripened. Having rid the world of Jews and Catholics, the hate refines itself. Women are kept like beasts in camps. The men are mostly sexual predators and prey on young boys. I can see perhaps why a woman writing this in 1937 would have a hard time publishing a story like this at that time. This was a time when the West apparently did not know what was happening in Nazi Germany, but apparently Burdekin did. I'm not an historian but still I wonder. I would like to peel pack time and peer into this nasty wound in history.
This story is not an easy read. It is dark and devastating. 1984 is dark too, but its truth is more palatable than Burdekin's. She pointed a finger with a sharpened nail and ripped.
I think modern readers should read Swastika Night, because when it was written it was profound. The war had not been won. She was seeing into a bleak future. A world dominated and changed by fear. A future where no one wins.
So there you have it—an early female speculative fiction writer who dealt with social criticism. I thank Lucy Sussex for pointing her out to me in her short story 'Kay and Phil'. I thank the universe for Alice Sheldon.
If you want to know more about Donna and her writing, she keeps a writing blog at http://donnamareehanson.wordpress.com
gillpolack @ 2012-03-26T18:40:00
The burglary just keeps on keeping on - it has an especially long-life battery. What looked like minor damage to the curtains (when they were dragged open - two lots of curtains) turns out to be unfixable. And the firm I got my teaching backpack from don't make them right now (wrong time of year, I suspect) - I shall give Nicole back hers and use tote bags until they *do* make them again, I think. And... and... lots more ands.
I've reached the stage where sorting out what's wrong and right is seguing into cleaning for Passover. This week was so not the week I'd planned for this. I have bought my last bread before Passover and bought my last everything except Pesachtic food and milk. At least my place will be beautiful by the end of it.
Things are improving and they will improve more. Right now, though, I'm beyond tired and can't think that far. I think this calls for a night-mostly-off.
I've reached the stage where sorting out what's wrong and right is seguing into cleaning for Passover. This week was so not the week I'd planned for this. I have bought my last bread before Passover and bought my last everything except Pesachtic food and milk. At least my place will be beautiful by the end of it.
Things are improving and they will improve more. Right now, though, I'm beyond tired and can't think that far. I think this calls for a night-mostly-off.
March 25, 2012
gillpolack @ 2012-03-26T10:18:00
This morning is another of those mornings where the last little while catches up. I did too much yesterday (but oh, it was worth it!) and I didn't sleep much last night (I dreamed of various threats - these dreams will pass when they're ready) and I'm not where I want to be with almost anything.
I was feeling sorry for myself until I was dressed (feeling sorry for oneself is such a waste of energy, especially when there isn't much energy in the overall package) and then I realised: I don't go back to the hospital for checking until next week. Today I get to have coffee with two dear friends. And another has threatened coffee later in the week.
Friends got me through last week and the week before and it seems that friends are getting me through this week. I am very, very fortunate in my friends.
Also, I shan't do quite as much today. I was so chuffed about my eye behaving a bit better that I forgot that the rest of my body needed a bit of attention. That's the trouble with crises, one forgets the chronic illnesses. Still, I crossed things off lists yesterday. And I shall cross things off lists today. And - in a mere ten minutes - friends!
I was feeling sorry for myself until I was dressed (feeling sorry for oneself is such a waste of energy, especially when there isn't much energy in the overall package) and then I realised: I don't go back to the hospital for checking until next week. Today I get to have coffee with two dear friends. And another has threatened coffee later in the week.
Friends got me through last week and the week before and it seems that friends are getting me through this week. I am very, very fortunate in my friends.
Also, I shan't do quite as much today. I was so chuffed about my eye behaving a bit better that I forgot that the rest of my body needed a bit of attention. That's the trouble with crises, one forgets the chronic illnesses. Still, I crossed things off lists yesterday. And I shall cross things off lists today. And - in a mere ten minutes - friends!
Women's History Month: guest post from Lisa L Hannett
Beauty often appears in unexpected places. Not just in famous galleries, or on Parisian runways, or spread across the landscape in breathtaking vistas — sometimes really beautiful things can be found in drab, infrequently used university tearooms, hung in a corner where busy academics are least likely to notice them.
An image of two crows, for example, rendered in thick black lines and deep grooves. One a flurry of motion, feathers scribbled upwards, winging its charcoal way toward the edge of a large rectangular frame; the other quiet, a beige echo of the bird above it, sharp beak and wings gouged into the rust-coloured background. A composition so simple — the wood bisected into two sections: above and below, day and night, before and after, presence and absence — and yet so striking. While working on my PhD, this picture drew me to that god-awful tearoom every day, despite its lack of spoons, its pervasive scent of microwave dinners. The crows were part of the university's collection — all the artworks on campus were — but unlike the rest of them, there was no identifying plaque on the wall, no indication of who had made these frenzied creatures, this incredible expression of flight and stillness. Just a name scrawled in the corner: Rita Hall.
'I love that picture,' I mentioned to my partner one day as we sat eating our lunches beneath the crows. (Love didn't exactly cover what I felt about it, though: I coveted those birds. In my mind, I'd already smuggled them out of the building and hung them on my living room wall.) 'I wonder how many others she made before she died.'
I don't know why I assumed Hall was ancient. Maybe it was because I'd spent such a long time studying sagas written by authors who'd been dead over a thousand years. Maybe it was because the work looked a bit dusty, a bit forgotten, a bit old. Maybe I hadn't had enough coffee that day.
My partner looked at the artist's signature, then turned back to me, grinning.
'Rita Hall lives out in Goolwa,' he said. 'You can visit her studio any time you want.'
Soon after we'd had this conversation, the South Australian Museum hosted a retrospective exhibit of Hall's work: Rita Hall: Museum Studies 1969-2009. It was like finally talking about her that day, after quietly admiring her work for so long, had made her real. Before, she was just a name written in a looping hand on the corner of an image I adored. Now she was a South Australian artist, living. Now she was 40 years' worth of stunning drawings, etchings and paintings, most of which focused on a subject I couldn't resist.
Dead birds.
Rita Hall's long history as an artist unfolded as I strolled through the huge exhibit. Here was evidence of her training at the South Australian School of Art in the late 1960s. Here proof of her mastery of printmaking over the past four decades, learning and teaching at the Adelaide Central School of Art, at TAFE, at UniSA. Everywhere hints and snippets of the Adelaide Hills, of regional shades and tones, of the distinctly Australian wildlife that surrounded her as she worked. I walked from curio cabinet to museum drawer, viewing the specimens from the SA Museum's ornithology collection that Hall had captured so beautifully in her paintings and drawings; gleaming reds, blues, blacks and whites on the gallery's walls. It was an amazing exhibit: bold, powerful and controversial. Yet the artist herself, standing in the corner quietly watching us observing her life's work, was humble and sweet and blushed modestly when I gushed about her paintings. (Yes, I gushed. I couldn't help it. The collection was amazing.)
In an essay written to accompany this exhibit, Hall explains that her interest in the SA Museum's birds was not scientific but artistic. "The notion of making paintings out of birds which pretended to be alive seemed absurd in the presence of so much complexity and beauty, and in the way they were presented as skins … I reasoned that the skins, like many other objects in the museum, already carried their own meanings, their relevance for scientific study and their own histories."
There are many metaphors we can read into these paintings, prints, and drawings. Ideas of the brevity of life and memento mori, of collections and collecting, preserving and memorialising the dead, holding on to the past, labelling and categorising and fitting things into boxes, the impact humanity has had on the natural world — so many 'messages' can be read into these images. In one respect it's the contrast between the stillness of these still lives and their brash meanings that makes them so fascinating. On a completely different level, they are superb because they present something macabre and make it incredibly beautiful. The brushstrokes, the vibrant tones, the texture of paper and canvas, the softness of feathers captured in Conte and ink and paint are all gorgeous, even though the subject matter is (arguably) bleak.
It's this juxtaposition of the awful and the sublime that I love so much about Rita Hall's art, and which makes it resonate with the South Australian setting in which she lives and works. She captures the harshness of life and death, but also conveys a sense of majesty in her subject matter, a sense of survival. Even after the birds themselves have died, their skins remain intact and their colours brilliant. These are images of hope and perseverance, wrapped up as little parcels of death.
Definitely my kind of beauty.
Lisa L Hannett hails from Ottawa, Canada but now lives in Adelaide, South Australia -- city of churches, bizarre murders and pie floaters. Her short stories have been published in Clarkesworld Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, Weird Tales, ChiZine, Shimmer, Electric Velocipede, and Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded, among other places. Her work has appeared on Locus's Recommended Reading List 2009, Tangent Online's Recommended Reading List 2010, and has been published in the Year's Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2010. 'The February Dragon', co-authored with Angela Slatter, won the 'Best Fantasy Short Story' Aurealis Award in 2010. Her first collection, Bluegrass Symphony, was published in 2011. Midnight and Moonshine, a second collection co-authored with Angela Slatter, will be published in 2012. You can find her online at http://lisahannett.com and on Twitter @LisaLHannett.
