Gillian Polack's Blog, page 203
March 8, 2012
gillpolack @ 2012-03-08T16:23:00
I've added the pictures to Lucy's post (thank you kind person!). You have to click below the cut, because it's now a big post, but so, so worthwhile.
I've told my friends on Twitter and Facebook that if enough people want, I can post my evil Purim tale here. Speak now, if you want me to post it tonight.
My Purim has otherwise been entirely demolished by the migraine. Such is life.
I've told my friends on Twitter and Facebook that if enough people want, I can post my evil Purim tale here. Speak now, if you want me to post it tonight.
My Purim has otherwise been entirely demolished by the migraine. Such is life.
Women's History Month - Kaaron Warren, International Women's Day guest blogger
I first met the comic artist and photographer Anna Brown when I moved to Canberra. She was studying art at ANU, and we'd talk about ideas, inspirations and processes, often standing on the back step or over the compost bin.
I adored her sense of humour, her insight into human behaviour, and her ability to capture people on the page with a few strokes. I also admired the community of comic writers, which I first came across when she launched Northbourne and Glory Bound, an anthology of comics she edited and produced. It's a wonderful capture of life in Canberra as it is, was, should have been.
So I thought I'd ask Anna some questions about her art and her community.
Kaaron: Who are your role models in comics? And, given this is a blog series inspired by female artists, who are women you admire the most?
Anna: Some of my favourite comic artists are women and Australian to boot.
Mandy Ord, who is based in Melbourne, is a long time favourite. We studied together at the Canberra School of Art. Watching her progress has been really exciting. Walking in to mainstream book stores and seeing her work really inspires me.
I find that at the moment I admire people who can consistently get work done and contribute to the community.
I personally find that it is always such a juggle to fit in creativity and produce work even if the intention and inspiration is there. Having to also fit in time for a family, a job and other interests including occasionally sleeping can keep me away from the drawing board. So people who's output is steady, I find that totally inspiring.
Kaaron: How strong is the comics community?
Anna: I think that the people interested in comics really do support each other. I know of lots of informal and more formal groups that comic artists participate in. Things like monthly jams and weekend camps where artists get together to draw and talk about various comic related issues… I have found that these groups are very open and inclusive to whatever kind of involvement you want. There are always collaborations coming out. Social media and the internet has helped people reconnect and form tangible communities. So isolation (which when I was a young girl, went hand in hand with creating comics) isn't so much a factor for producers of comics.
Kaaron: What get's your goat- what makes you want to create?
Anna: I think I am inspired by other creative people and I want to create almost in opposition to the idea of living a life without creativity…So I'm inspired by musicians, writers and all kinds of art makers and in opposition to a hell of a lot of the people I am around day to day through work etc. I'm kind of horrified by the idea of an empty consumer existence with lots of spare time for watching Bondi Vet or Today Tonight…
There is something in me that makes me want to contribute to the creative dialogue. I continue to try to make time to produce bodies of work. Even at a trickle, I think that it all amounts to time well spent.
I feel really good about doing that in whatever way fits for me now. So whether that is through using illustration or photography or something else, it's more about getting the idea out there in whatever medium is most easily accessable.
With young kids, I returned to photography. It was something that I could do because it was outside of the home (without the kids). Drawing has been almost impossible for me, because I'd always done it in the home.
#####
You can see Anna's project Light vs Line, where comic artists draw self-portraits inspired by photos. I love the series. The artists are so funny and so honest about themselves.
You can find Anna and her work here: annnabrown.blogspot.com
I attended Anna's graduation and it was an interesting affair. I remember that her work impressed me a lot more than many others I saw there; in fact I was so inspired by the scene, it ended up in an early version of my novel Slights. Here's an excerpt:
Tony stood by his work and checked me out like I was his mother's prospective lover. Or perhaps his own.
"Are these your paintings?" I said.
"This is my work," he said.
"So there's no paint in them?" I said. I was genuinely amazed. I leaned closer. It looked like he had lined his bath with paper, covered himself with paint of three colours, then rolled about. The paper was crumpled, the paint smeared, and the creases of his skin seemed full of colour.
"This piece is my favourite," Margaret said. The painting she indicated was no different to the other three.
"Is there paint in this one?" I said.
I could think of nothing else to say. Tony's friends had gathered around at one remove, watching me, waiting for my next mistake. It reminded me of something I had long forgotten, something I did not understand as a child, something I had not connected when my mother died and when I died too, just for a moment. It had happened to me at seven. And it happened to me at eighteen. I was alone, in another place, and people watched me, watched my chest rise, looking for signs of life.
I left my circle of admirers and wandered the studio, gazing into the paintings—no, the work—but remembering my own terrible scenes.
Kaaron Warren, recently nominated for a Bram Stoker award for her story "All You Can Do is Breathe", has been publishing fiction for twenty years. Kaaron Warren is an award-winning author with six books in print. Her three short story collections are The Grinding House, The Glass Woman and Dead Sea Fruit. Her novels are Slights, Walking the Tree and Mistification. She has a fourth short story collection, Through Splintered Walls, coming in June from Twelfth Planet Press.
She has recently been named Special Guest for the Australian National Science Fiction Convention in 2013.
She blogs at http://kaaronwarren.wordpress.com/ and can be found on Twitter @KaaronWarren
I adored her sense of humour, her insight into human behaviour, and her ability to capture people on the page with a few strokes. I also admired the community of comic writers, which I first came across when she launched Northbourne and Glory Bound, an anthology of comics she edited and produced. It's a wonderful capture of life in Canberra as it is, was, should have been.
So I thought I'd ask Anna some questions about her art and her community.
Kaaron: Who are your role models in comics? And, given this is a blog series inspired by female artists, who are women you admire the most?
Anna: Some of my favourite comic artists are women and Australian to boot.
Mandy Ord, who is based in Melbourne, is a long time favourite. We studied together at the Canberra School of Art. Watching her progress has been really exciting. Walking in to mainstream book stores and seeing her work really inspires me.
I find that at the moment I admire people who can consistently get work done and contribute to the community.
I personally find that it is always such a juggle to fit in creativity and produce work even if the intention and inspiration is there. Having to also fit in time for a family, a job and other interests including occasionally sleeping can keep me away from the drawing board. So people who's output is steady, I find that totally inspiring.
Kaaron: How strong is the comics community?
Anna: I think that the people interested in comics really do support each other. I know of lots of informal and more formal groups that comic artists participate in. Things like monthly jams and weekend camps where artists get together to draw and talk about various comic related issues… I have found that these groups are very open and inclusive to whatever kind of involvement you want. There are always collaborations coming out. Social media and the internet has helped people reconnect and form tangible communities. So isolation (which when I was a young girl, went hand in hand with creating comics) isn't so much a factor for producers of comics.
Kaaron: What get's your goat- what makes you want to create?
Anna: I think I am inspired by other creative people and I want to create almost in opposition to the idea of living a life without creativity…So I'm inspired by musicians, writers and all kinds of art makers and in opposition to a hell of a lot of the people I am around day to day through work etc. I'm kind of horrified by the idea of an empty consumer existence with lots of spare time for watching Bondi Vet or Today Tonight…
There is something in me that makes me want to contribute to the creative dialogue. I continue to try to make time to produce bodies of work. Even at a trickle, I think that it all amounts to time well spent.
I feel really good about doing that in whatever way fits for me now. So whether that is through using illustration or photography or something else, it's more about getting the idea out there in whatever medium is most easily accessable.
With young kids, I returned to photography. It was something that I could do because it was outside of the home (without the kids). Drawing has been almost impossible for me, because I'd always done it in the home.
#####
You can see Anna's project Light vs Line, where comic artists draw self-portraits inspired by photos. I love the series. The artists are so funny and so honest about themselves.
You can find Anna and her work here: annnabrown.blogspot.com
I attended Anna's graduation and it was an interesting affair. I remember that her work impressed me a lot more than many others I saw there; in fact I was so inspired by the scene, it ended up in an early version of my novel Slights. Here's an excerpt:
Tony stood by his work and checked me out like I was his mother's prospective lover. Or perhaps his own.
"Are these your paintings?" I said.
"This is my work," he said.
"So there's no paint in them?" I said. I was genuinely amazed. I leaned closer. It looked like he had lined his bath with paper, covered himself with paint of three colours, then rolled about. The paper was crumpled, the paint smeared, and the creases of his skin seemed full of colour.
"This piece is my favourite," Margaret said. The painting she indicated was no different to the other three.
"Is there paint in this one?" I said.
I could think of nothing else to say. Tony's friends had gathered around at one remove, watching me, waiting for my next mistake. It reminded me of something I had long forgotten, something I did not understand as a child, something I had not connected when my mother died and when I died too, just for a moment. It had happened to me at seven. And it happened to me at eighteen. I was alone, in another place, and people watched me, watched my chest rise, looking for signs of life.
I left my circle of admirers and wandered the studio, gazing into the paintings—no, the work—but remembering my own terrible scenes.
Kaaron Warren, recently nominated for a Bram Stoker award for her story "All You Can Do is Breathe", has been publishing fiction for twenty years. Kaaron Warren is an award-winning author with six books in print. Her three short story collections are The Grinding House, The Glass Woman and Dead Sea Fruit. Her novels are Slights, Walking the Tree and Mistification. She has a fourth short story collection, Through Splintered Walls, coming in June from Twelfth Planet Press.
She has recently been named Special Guest for the Australian National Science Fiction Convention in 2013.
She blogs at http://kaaronwarren.wordpress.com/ and can be found on Twitter @KaaronWarren
gillpolack @ 2012-03-08T11:42:00
An exceptionally lovely anonymous person has upgraded my LJ (thank you!!). This means I can give you Marian Sussex's pictures, to illustrate Lucy's post. I'll work out how to do that this afternoon, when I give you the special International Women's Day post.
March 7, 2012
Women's History Month - Lucy Sussex
An Australian Woman Artist
By Lucy Sussex
I'm a writer by trade and as such I deal in character and narrative—which my mother Marian's life had in quantity. As a writer I don't think I can do it justice, but as a daughter, I can offer you a potted version, with vignettes. In this I draw on Marian's words—and like many older Australian women she was gifted at anecdote. She told stories of her life, and if I get them wrong, then I apologise.
Everybody is a product of their nature and nurture, time and place. From the hindsight of the 21st century, we think those born 90 years ago lived in interesting times, in the Chinese sense of a curse: 2 world wars, the depression, then the cold war. Yet my parents were part of an extraordinary generation, who were interesting, tough, adaptive people precisely because of those times.
Marian Roscoe Wilson, b. 1916 in Melbourne, to a father, Alfred, who would be a major force in Melbourne Anglican life, ending as Dean of St Paul's Cathedral, and a mother, Florence Hearn, from a large country family, a woman of determined character. Marian is the 2nd daughter, which is very important. On the one hand it meant she couldn't, because of gender, follow in her father's footsteps. Had my mother been a male, she might have made a somewhat heretical Vicar. Gender also meant that she didn't, as was the case with young men of her generation, fight in ww2, from which so many came home scarred or not at all.
Vignette 1: a young Australian woman finds herself in Salisbury, and walks to Stonehenge, in high heels. She has the monument entirely to herself. Because, on that day, ww2 is declared.
That's very novelistic, but it's real life, true.
She knew before then that she wanted to be an artist. But the life of art is never easy, and certainly no way to earn a living in the midst of the great depression. Vicar's daughters do not have independent incomes. One of her art tutors told her, decades later: 'You could have been a Grace Cossington-Smith'. It was not something about which she was bitter, not at all. She appreciated her children, and the art she belatedly did.
Instead of following her natural inclination, she excelled academically, winning a scholarship to Melbourne University. She wrote skits for Janet Clarke Hall, and loved Middle English verse, even reading it in her 90th year. She might have been a Don—or she might have been a Vicar's wife, like her mother, for she got engaged to a Divinity student. The two occupations were probably not compatible. In any case they ceased to be options in her final degree year. Broken engagements do not make for high marks.
Vignette 2: a young woman, who is desperately unhappy, visits a Fortune teller—who tells her she will marry at 25 and never have to worry about money. Which turns out to be a perfectly accurate prediction.
More novelistic but true stuff.
Back in Melbourne, she meets Ronald Sussex at a dance and they marry. She becomes an academic wife, a hard-working and supportive sector of womanhood. It means: going anywhere the jobs are, entertaining the vice-chancellor to tea, and in the days of sabbatical leave, managing a household with children, overseas and on the road in foreign countries. I don't know how she did it.
She had children, which she approached in a similar supportive but also creative spirit. She wanted to make something special for her first-born, my brother Roland, but it was wartime and fabric was rationed. The only fine woolen fabric she could get was khaki. So my brother ended up resplendent in khaki smocked in bright yellow and red—showing her sense of colour. Whatever we wanted to do, vocation-wise, she was there for us. Not many mothers would let a sixteen-year-old girl, my sister Polly, go to Prague to study cello. With me she corrected my grammar when I started writing, and told me my sentences were too staccato. None of this: that's nice dear, if it plainly wasn't. She knew when to criticize, and when to hold back.
It wasn't until we moved to Townsville that she got what Virginia Woolf described as essential for a creative woman: a room of her own. It was a studio for her, where she worked first alone, then with a tutor, David Rainford. He told her when her art was pretty-pretty, and encouraged her to draw with strength. Only when my father retired did she achieve her ambition of going to art school: RMIT. Not many people do that at 60. She graduated, and became a printmaker, exhibiting locally and overseas.
She also did what many people think is very easy but is in fact very hard: wrote and illustrated a children's book for her eldest granddaughter, Nicola, which was of professional standard and got published: THE MAGIC BILLY.
The unpleasant irony is that after 8 years printmaking chemicals gave her cancer of the throat. But though she gave up her printmaking, she made something positive of it. She always did that. She turned to using pastels, and a move to Brisbane opened up her palette to bright colour again. Some of the examples we can see around us now.
Last vignette. A woman artist in her 70s is invited to a church celebration in Brisbane, where her first love, an Anglican cleric, will be officiating. Also present is a famous former parishioner, now one of Australia's best poets: Gwen Harwood. They are quite remarkably alike, these two women, and the cleric tells the poet's biographer, who is present: 'I loved them both!' It is the first and only time the three corners of this old love triangle meet.
Again, another moment that is almost too novelistic to be true.
Novels are hard to end, and so are lives. My mother died on Friday the thirteenth, from the belated effects of her cancer treatment. 'Death is the price we pay for life and for all life,' Ursula Le Guin wrote in a book my mother loved, THE FARTHEST SHORE. She paid it peacefully.
The mind replays memories, sometimes in creative ways. As a reviewer, I don't like ghostly visitations in dreams as a plot device. Dreams are more inevitably more about the dreamer than what they dream about. Nonetheless several nights ago I dreamt I saw Marian. She stood in a half-open doorway, an interior scene. What was in the room behind her was uncertain. She looked out from behind her big glasses, then slowly closed the door. I woke at that point, so retained the dream, and mulled over it. "In my father's house are many mansions?"—to be Biblical. 'A room of one's own?'—to be feminist. In either case, an artist's studio.
To finish, with one of the poems Marian wrote for the MSWPS newsletter, the Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptors. She made light of her poems, but they do articulate the artistic beliefs behind her work. And this one is rather good:
LOOKING
We say we paint a flower, a face, a scene,
But that is only half of what we mean—
What of the building blocks: lines, balance, shapes,
The almost abstract—something which escapes
The passing viewer? Leonardo told
His students: Go and find a wall that's old
And look at it. At first it's just a wall
Weathered and stained—nothing is there at all
But trace the seams and blemishes you'll find
Line, shape, and form, clear to the artist's mind.
And so we see what Leonardo knew:
Nature and time
Are picture-builders too.
Link to Marian's webpage: http://home.vicnet.net.au/~mswps/SUSSEX.html
By Lucy Sussex
I'm a writer by trade and as such I deal in character and narrative—which my mother Marian's life had in quantity. As a writer I don't think I can do it justice, but as a daughter, I can offer you a potted version, with vignettes. In this I draw on Marian's words—and like many older Australian women she was gifted at anecdote. She told stories of her life, and if I get them wrong, then I apologise.
Everybody is a product of their nature and nurture, time and place. From the hindsight of the 21st century, we think those born 90 years ago lived in interesting times, in the Chinese sense of a curse: 2 world wars, the depression, then the cold war. Yet my parents were part of an extraordinary generation, who were interesting, tough, adaptive people precisely because of those times.
Marian Roscoe Wilson, b. 1916 in Melbourne, to a father, Alfred, who would be a major force in Melbourne Anglican life, ending as Dean of St Paul's Cathedral, and a mother, Florence Hearn, from a large country family, a woman of determined character. Marian is the 2nd daughter, which is very important. On the one hand it meant she couldn't, because of gender, follow in her father's footsteps. Had my mother been a male, she might have made a somewhat heretical Vicar. Gender also meant that she didn't, as was the case with young men of her generation, fight in ww2, from which so many came home scarred or not at all.
Vignette 1: a young Australian woman finds herself in Salisbury, and walks to Stonehenge, in high heels. She has the monument entirely to herself. Because, on that day, ww2 is declared.
That's very novelistic, but it's real life, true.
She knew before then that she wanted to be an artist. But the life of art is never easy, and certainly no way to earn a living in the midst of the great depression. Vicar's daughters do not have independent incomes. One of her art tutors told her, decades later: 'You could have been a Grace Cossington-Smith'. It was not something about which she was bitter, not at all. She appreciated her children, and the art she belatedly did.
Instead of following her natural inclination, she excelled academically, winning a scholarship to Melbourne University. She wrote skits for Janet Clarke Hall, and loved Middle English verse, even reading it in her 90th year. She might have been a Don—or she might have been a Vicar's wife, like her mother, for she got engaged to a Divinity student. The two occupations were probably not compatible. In any case they ceased to be options in her final degree year. Broken engagements do not make for high marks.
Vignette 2: a young woman, who is desperately unhappy, visits a Fortune teller—who tells her she will marry at 25 and never have to worry about money. Which turns out to be a perfectly accurate prediction.
More novelistic but true stuff.
Back in Melbourne, she meets Ronald Sussex at a dance and they marry. She becomes an academic wife, a hard-working and supportive sector of womanhood. It means: going anywhere the jobs are, entertaining the vice-chancellor to tea, and in the days of sabbatical leave, managing a household with children, overseas and on the road in foreign countries. I don't know how she did it.
She had children, which she approached in a similar supportive but also creative spirit. She wanted to make something special for her first-born, my brother Roland, but it was wartime and fabric was rationed. The only fine woolen fabric she could get was khaki. So my brother ended up resplendent in khaki smocked in bright yellow and red—showing her sense of colour. Whatever we wanted to do, vocation-wise, she was there for us. Not many mothers would let a sixteen-year-old girl, my sister Polly, go to Prague to study cello. With me she corrected my grammar when I started writing, and told me my sentences were too staccato. None of this: that's nice dear, if it plainly wasn't. She knew when to criticize, and when to hold back.
It wasn't until we moved to Townsville that she got what Virginia Woolf described as essential for a creative woman: a room of her own. It was a studio for her, where she worked first alone, then with a tutor, David Rainford. He told her when her art was pretty-pretty, and encouraged her to draw with strength. Only when my father retired did she achieve her ambition of going to art school: RMIT. Not many people do that at 60. She graduated, and became a printmaker, exhibiting locally and overseas.
She also did what many people think is very easy but is in fact very hard: wrote and illustrated a children's book for her eldest granddaughter, Nicola, which was of professional standard and got published: THE MAGIC BILLY.
The unpleasant irony is that after 8 years printmaking chemicals gave her cancer of the throat. But though she gave up her printmaking, she made something positive of it. She always did that. She turned to using pastels, and a move to Brisbane opened up her palette to bright colour again. Some of the examples we can see around us now.
Last vignette. A woman artist in her 70s is invited to a church celebration in Brisbane, where her first love, an Anglican cleric, will be officiating. Also present is a famous former parishioner, now one of Australia's best poets: Gwen Harwood. They are quite remarkably alike, these two women, and the cleric tells the poet's biographer, who is present: 'I loved them both!' It is the first and only time the three corners of this old love triangle meet.
Again, another moment that is almost too novelistic to be true.
Novels are hard to end, and so are lives. My mother died on Friday the thirteenth, from the belated effects of her cancer treatment. 'Death is the price we pay for life and for all life,' Ursula Le Guin wrote in a book my mother loved, THE FARTHEST SHORE. She paid it peacefully.
The mind replays memories, sometimes in creative ways. As a reviewer, I don't like ghostly visitations in dreams as a plot device. Dreams are more inevitably more about the dreamer than what they dream about. Nonetheless several nights ago I dreamt I saw Marian. She stood in a half-open doorway, an interior scene. What was in the room behind her was uncertain. She looked out from behind her big glasses, then slowly closed the door. I woke at that point, so retained the dream, and mulled over it. "In my father's house are many mansions?"—to be Biblical. 'A room of one's own?'—to be feminist. In either case, an artist's studio.
To finish, with one of the poems Marian wrote for the MSWPS newsletter, the Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptors. She made light of her poems, but they do articulate the artistic beliefs behind her work. And this one is rather good:
LOOKING
We say we paint a flower, a face, a scene,
But that is only half of what we mean—
What of the building blocks: lines, balance, shapes,
The almost abstract—something which escapes
The passing viewer? Leonardo told
His students: Go and find a wall that's old
And look at it. At first it's just a wall
Weathered and stained—nothing is there at all
But trace the seams and blemishes you'll find
Line, shape, and form, clear to the artist's mind.
And so we see what Leonardo knew:
Nature and time
Are picture-builders too.
Link to Marian's webpage: http://home.vicnet.net.au/~mswps/SUSSEX.html
gillpolack @ 2012-03-07T15:05:00
A day in bed hasn't sorted me, but it certainly helped. I made my bus this morning, taught, made my bus home and promptly went back to bed, but at least I was able to teach.
We had a good class. We talked about the exhibition, of course (and one of my students had written a poem on the followers we attracted during our excursion!) and spent the rest of the class talking about the relationship between etiquette and audience and purpose of writing. We demonstrated definitely that if you decided exactly who you're writing for then you're more likely to write something they want to read and that this applies just as much to officials who have sent you undesirable bills as to friends to whom you wish to dedicate a poem. We also met Manzoni.
The etiquette thing was interesting. There are so many vague statements floating around about who one's 'readers' should be that my students came up with global definitions of readership: "This poem is for everyone who likes words" "This letter is for lovers of aeroplanes." When we sat down and refined it a bit more "Is this letter for anyone who likes aeroplanes, or for B, to whom it is addressed?" their writing styles changed significantly. My students now understand why blank verse is not going to get their rates query answered any faster and how vocabulary choices can change when one addresses the "to whom and why" questions. What was really interesting was that it made sense to everyone when we talked about it as writing etiquette and applied it to everything they wrote. Applied solely to creative writing and discussed in terms of genre and audiences, it had flown right over them like an aeroplane.
And that's all my day. The rest is rest. Except that I have a really interesting WHM post for you, which will go up in between rests.
We had a good class. We talked about the exhibition, of course (and one of my students had written a poem on the followers we attracted during our excursion!) and spent the rest of the class talking about the relationship between etiquette and audience and purpose of writing. We demonstrated definitely that if you decided exactly who you're writing for then you're more likely to write something they want to read and that this applies just as much to officials who have sent you undesirable bills as to friends to whom you wish to dedicate a poem. We also met Manzoni.
The etiquette thing was interesting. There are so many vague statements floating around about who one's 'readers' should be that my students came up with global definitions of readership: "This poem is for everyone who likes words" "This letter is for lovers of aeroplanes." When we sat down and refined it a bit more "Is this letter for anyone who likes aeroplanes, or for B, to whom it is addressed?" their writing styles changed significantly. My students now understand why blank verse is not going to get their rates query answered any faster and how vocabulary choices can change when one addresses the "to whom and why" questions. What was really interesting was that it made sense to everyone when we talked about it as writing etiquette and applied it to everything they wrote. Applied solely to creative writing and discussed in terms of genre and audiences, it had flown right over them like an aeroplane.
And that's all my day. The rest is rest. Except that I have a really interesting WHM post for you, which will go up in between rests.
March 6, 2012
Women's History Month - Deborah Biancotti
Novelist, memoirist and essayist Shirley Hazzard has won the Miles Franklin Award (2004), National Book Award (2003) and National Book Critics Circle Award (1980). She's been nominated for the Orange Prize (2004) and was shortlisted for the 'Lost Man Booker Prize' of 1970. She's been described internationally as "unusually old-world" (from Slate, link below) and "one of the few living novelists who seems able to traverse the distance" between heaven and earth (Salon.com, link below). But locally, our own presses have preferred to focus on her geographical absence rather than her literary presence.
Hazzard was born in my adopted hometown of Sydney in 1931 but left the country when she was fifteen. Fifty years later she won the Miles Franklin Award for The Great Fire; an award which recognises "the novel of the highest literary merit that portrays Australian life in any of its phases" (Miles Franklin website, link below). In a parallel win for the 'tall poppy syndrome', Hazzard – who dared to be an apparently affluent, well-read and successful woman – ignited ire from such respected journalists as Kerry O'Brien and Jana Wendt (links below). Perhaps forced into a defensive position, even Hazzard herself seemed surprised by the win, explaining it like this:
I thought this was also very generous to include me in that way but, of course, Australia was the first fifteen years of my life and you are already Australian for life by doing that.
- (link below)
It's unclear what criticism the judges received.
By then, however, Hazzard wasn't unfamiliar with contention. Winning the 2003 National Book Award for The Great Fire, she was second on stage after Stephen King. As noted in The Paris Review (The Art of Fiction #185, see link below):
[King] delivered an extended, pointed, even aggressive, defense of "popular" writers that seemed to condescend to mere "literary" writers. When Hazzard got to the microphone, she hit back--with brief, polite but firm eloquence--at King's claims, and noted that his having offered a reading list of best-selling authors wasn't "much of a satisfaction."
She skewers his defence with her sheer understatement, and she doesn't skip a fight. Even being a traditional King fan, I found myself chuckling out loud.
Hazzard has spent little time in Australia since leaving it, though she seems to talk about it with insight and some affection. More affection than I would have felt if I'd had the opportunity to leave so young. She praises her early education in Australian schools, but rejects the 'institutionalised dreariness' of the Australian arts in the fifties. Of her history education in particular, she says,
The only history that was boring was that of our own country--a sad little brown book of failed explorations, intrepid deaths of those who tried to map the dead interior of the Australian continent. This was so shamefacedly presented, with the terrible chronicle of the convict settlement that was the founding of the nation, that it wasn't until the publication of Patrick White's masterpiece (as I think of it) Voss that most Australians began to consider the drama of it all.
- Shirley Hazzard, The Art of Fiction #185 (see link, below)
Though I admit even during my schooling in the seventies, the Australian history component struck me as dull, full of the deaths of white men in either exploration or war. The only drama I recall was presented by my second-grade teacher who told us the aboriginal kids in our class were smarter than the white kids, in a kind of blanket statement that had something to do with 'the land' and our white-kid inability to live off it. Looking back, I recall the aboriginal kids taking the news with grace, and the white kids – children, mostly, of immigrants responsible for clearing the land for "settlement" – being mainly baffled. The land had always struck me as a grim place, even before then, and I wasn't sure I wanted to live off it. Which I now consider a dreadfully 'white' reaction, and just one of several examples of my dreadful whiteness.
In her most famous work, the 1980 National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel, Transit of Venus, she contrasts Australia to Britain through the eyes of young Caroline Bell:
"Australian summer is a scorching without a leaf to spare. Out there, the force is in the lack, in the scarcity and distance. [snip] For colours like these you need water." But even with water, in Australia the pigment might not be there. It was doubtful that pinks or blues lay dormant in Australian earth; let alone the full prestige of green."
- Shirley Hazzard, Transit of Venus, Part I: The Old World, ch. 3
Words that I think, in my mid-twenties, I would almost have written myself if I'd had Hazzard's power. That yearning she expresses to be elsewhere has been part of my Australian experience for as long as I can remember, and I don't just mean for me. In twenty years of travel, I've found it impossible to be anywhere that other Australians aren't, as we strike out from our island as far as feet and plane and ship will take us.
Since Hazzard averages around twenty years between books (though in recent years, that's sped up – mostly through essay collections), it's no surprise to see her career stretch from the 1963 short story collection Cliffs of Fall to the 2008 non-fiction of The Ancient Shore: Dispatches from Naples (with her husband, Francis Steegmuller). In between, she has been nominated for the Orange Prize (2004) and the 'Lost Man Booker Prize' of 1970 (for The Bay of Noon). She's also written two non-fiction books that criticise the United Nations where she worked when first arriving in the USA (though the UN sounds, sadly, about as bad as any bureaucracy I've ever encountered), and a memoir about her friendship with Graham Greene.
Hazzard is known for her masterful prose, her detailed attention to even the minutiae of everyday life and 'ordinary' relationships. At times, her writing feels like it has that particular qualities of Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Locke, where each tiny movement, each hair on the head of each protagonist is meticulously wrought into large, almost overwhelming shapes fraught with consequence.
It's been said that her prose outweighs her narrative and character to the point where even readers who care deeply about those elements will put them aside to feel the sense of portent and the strength of moment that only Hazzard can bring. This has certainly been my experience, as I'm swept along by her stories about characters I despise in circumstances I find strange and foreign. As Judith Shulevitz describes it (Slate, link below):
[This is] a standard Hazzard trick, in which an abstraction is rendered concrete and given its own agency and power. At another point Hazzard describes the action of a man swabbing down a sickroom from which a patient has been removed as "creating vacancy." This is a novel about and in protest of the abstractions that work upon us—war, history, bureaucracy—and Hazzard has found a language evocative enough both to make us feel them and to worry about them.
There is indeed something about Hazzard's writing that isn't exactly timeless, that feels caught in a very particular era where women could be headstrong but not liberated. And yet that very call to history is one of Hazzard's strengths, along with a wry humour and fierce perceptiveness. She opens us up not only to the world as it is and was, but the worlds inside ourselves, as they've been throughout human history. Her writing is bold and wry, her words deceptively gentle, her insight uncompromisingly sharp.
I love Shirley Hazzard because before reading her work, I despised most relationship and romance writing for never quite getting the full picture of even the most ordinary relationship. But Hazzard writes about relationships with a towering maturity that makes you realise just how central our relationships are to our humanity, how they can bring out the best and worst of what we have to offer. And how they will do that – bring out the best and worst – for as long as humanity survives.
Links:
Old World Style: Shirley Hazzard's long-awaited novel, by Judith Shulevitz:
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2003/10/oldworld_style.html
"The Great Fire" by Shirley Hazzard, by Charles Taylor
http://www.salon.com/2003/10/28/hazzard/singleton/
Shirely Hazzard: Miles Franklin Award Winner (reporter Jana Wendt):
http://sgp1.paddington.ninemsn.com.au/sunday/art_profiles/article_1584.asp?s=1
Shirley Hazzard's Rich and Varied Career (reporter Kerry O'Brien):
http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2005/s1399427.htm
The Miles Franklin Award website:
http://www.milesfranklin.com.au
Shirley Hazzard's Australia: Belated Reading and Cultural Mobility, by Brigitta Olubus:
http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/jasal/article/view/1509/2080
'At Home in More Than One Place': Cosmopolitanism in the work of Shirley Hazzard, by Brigitta Olubus:
http://www.australianbookreview.com.au/files/Features/April_2010/ABR_April_10_Olubas_commentary.pdf
Shirley Hazzard, The Art of Fiction #185, The Paris Review:
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5505/the-art-of-fiction-no-185-shirley-hazzard
New Yorker Bookclub discusses The Transit of Venus (with spoilers):
http://downloads.newyorker.com/site/bookclub/bookclub_june2010.mp3?_kip_ipx=658205317-1328851271
Deborah Biancotti's first short story won an Aurealis Award and her first collection, A BOOK OF ENDINGS, was shortlisted for the William L. Crawford Award for Best First Fantasy Book. Her second collection, BAD POWER has recently been launched by Twelfth Planet Press.
Hazzard was born in my adopted hometown of Sydney in 1931 but left the country when she was fifteen. Fifty years later she won the Miles Franklin Award for The Great Fire; an award which recognises "the novel of the highest literary merit that portrays Australian life in any of its phases" (Miles Franklin website, link below). In a parallel win for the 'tall poppy syndrome', Hazzard – who dared to be an apparently affluent, well-read and successful woman – ignited ire from such respected journalists as Kerry O'Brien and Jana Wendt (links below). Perhaps forced into a defensive position, even Hazzard herself seemed surprised by the win, explaining it like this:
I thought this was also very generous to include me in that way but, of course, Australia was the first fifteen years of my life and you are already Australian for life by doing that.
- (link below)
It's unclear what criticism the judges received.
By then, however, Hazzard wasn't unfamiliar with contention. Winning the 2003 National Book Award for The Great Fire, she was second on stage after Stephen King. As noted in The Paris Review (The Art of Fiction #185, see link below):
[King] delivered an extended, pointed, even aggressive, defense of "popular" writers that seemed to condescend to mere "literary" writers. When Hazzard got to the microphone, she hit back--with brief, polite but firm eloquence--at King's claims, and noted that his having offered a reading list of best-selling authors wasn't "much of a satisfaction."
She skewers his defence with her sheer understatement, and she doesn't skip a fight. Even being a traditional King fan, I found myself chuckling out loud.
Hazzard has spent little time in Australia since leaving it, though she seems to talk about it with insight and some affection. More affection than I would have felt if I'd had the opportunity to leave so young. She praises her early education in Australian schools, but rejects the 'institutionalised dreariness' of the Australian arts in the fifties. Of her history education in particular, she says,
The only history that was boring was that of our own country--a sad little brown book of failed explorations, intrepid deaths of those who tried to map the dead interior of the Australian continent. This was so shamefacedly presented, with the terrible chronicle of the convict settlement that was the founding of the nation, that it wasn't until the publication of Patrick White's masterpiece (as I think of it) Voss that most Australians began to consider the drama of it all.
- Shirley Hazzard, The Art of Fiction #185 (see link, below)
Though I admit even during my schooling in the seventies, the Australian history component struck me as dull, full of the deaths of white men in either exploration or war. The only drama I recall was presented by my second-grade teacher who told us the aboriginal kids in our class were smarter than the white kids, in a kind of blanket statement that had something to do with 'the land' and our white-kid inability to live off it. Looking back, I recall the aboriginal kids taking the news with grace, and the white kids – children, mostly, of immigrants responsible for clearing the land for "settlement" – being mainly baffled. The land had always struck me as a grim place, even before then, and I wasn't sure I wanted to live off it. Which I now consider a dreadfully 'white' reaction, and just one of several examples of my dreadful whiteness.
In her most famous work, the 1980 National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel, Transit of Venus, she contrasts Australia to Britain through the eyes of young Caroline Bell:
"Australian summer is a scorching without a leaf to spare. Out there, the force is in the lack, in the scarcity and distance. [snip] For colours like these you need water." But even with water, in Australia the pigment might not be there. It was doubtful that pinks or blues lay dormant in Australian earth; let alone the full prestige of green."
- Shirley Hazzard, Transit of Venus, Part I: The Old World, ch. 3
Words that I think, in my mid-twenties, I would almost have written myself if I'd had Hazzard's power. That yearning she expresses to be elsewhere has been part of my Australian experience for as long as I can remember, and I don't just mean for me. In twenty years of travel, I've found it impossible to be anywhere that other Australians aren't, as we strike out from our island as far as feet and plane and ship will take us.
Since Hazzard averages around twenty years between books (though in recent years, that's sped up – mostly through essay collections), it's no surprise to see her career stretch from the 1963 short story collection Cliffs of Fall to the 2008 non-fiction of The Ancient Shore: Dispatches from Naples (with her husband, Francis Steegmuller). In between, she has been nominated for the Orange Prize (2004) and the 'Lost Man Booker Prize' of 1970 (for The Bay of Noon). She's also written two non-fiction books that criticise the United Nations where she worked when first arriving in the USA (though the UN sounds, sadly, about as bad as any bureaucracy I've ever encountered), and a memoir about her friendship with Graham Greene.
Hazzard is known for her masterful prose, her detailed attention to even the minutiae of everyday life and 'ordinary' relationships. At times, her writing feels like it has that particular qualities of Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Locke, where each tiny movement, each hair on the head of each protagonist is meticulously wrought into large, almost overwhelming shapes fraught with consequence.
It's been said that her prose outweighs her narrative and character to the point where even readers who care deeply about those elements will put them aside to feel the sense of portent and the strength of moment that only Hazzard can bring. This has certainly been my experience, as I'm swept along by her stories about characters I despise in circumstances I find strange and foreign. As Judith Shulevitz describes it (Slate, link below):
[This is] a standard Hazzard trick, in which an abstraction is rendered concrete and given its own agency and power. At another point Hazzard describes the action of a man swabbing down a sickroom from which a patient has been removed as "creating vacancy." This is a novel about and in protest of the abstractions that work upon us—war, history, bureaucracy—and Hazzard has found a language evocative enough both to make us feel them and to worry about them.
There is indeed something about Hazzard's writing that isn't exactly timeless, that feels caught in a very particular era where women could be headstrong but not liberated. And yet that very call to history is one of Hazzard's strengths, along with a wry humour and fierce perceptiveness. She opens us up not only to the world as it is and was, but the worlds inside ourselves, as they've been throughout human history. Her writing is bold and wry, her words deceptively gentle, her insight uncompromisingly sharp.
I love Shirley Hazzard because before reading her work, I despised most relationship and romance writing for never quite getting the full picture of even the most ordinary relationship. But Hazzard writes about relationships with a towering maturity that makes you realise just how central our relationships are to our humanity, how they can bring out the best and worst of what we have to offer. And how they will do that – bring out the best and worst – for as long as humanity survives.
Links:
Old World Style: Shirley Hazzard's long-awaited novel, by Judith Shulevitz:
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2003/10/oldworld_style.html
"The Great Fire" by Shirley Hazzard, by Charles Taylor
http://www.salon.com/2003/10/28/hazzard/singleton/
Shirely Hazzard: Miles Franklin Award Winner (reporter Jana Wendt):
http://sgp1.paddington.ninemsn.com.au/sunday/art_profiles/article_1584.asp?s=1
Shirley Hazzard's Rich and Varied Career (reporter Kerry O'Brien):
http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2005/s1399427.htm
The Miles Franklin Award website:
http://www.milesfranklin.com.au
Shirley Hazzard's Australia: Belated Reading and Cultural Mobility, by Brigitta Olubus:
http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/jasal/article/view/1509/2080
'At Home in More Than One Place': Cosmopolitanism in the work of Shirley Hazzard, by Brigitta Olubus:
http://www.australianbookreview.com.au/files/Features/April_2010/ABR_April_10_Olubas_commentary.pdf
Shirley Hazzard, The Art of Fiction #185, The Paris Review:
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5505/the-art-of-fiction-no-185-shirley-hazzard
New Yorker Bookclub discusses The Transit of Venus (with spoilers):
http://downloads.newyorker.com/site/bookclub/bookclub_june2010.mp3?_kip_ipx=658205317-1328851271
Deborah Biancotti's first short story won an Aurealis Award and her first collection, A BOOK OF ENDINGS, was shortlisted for the William L. Crawford Award for Best First Fantasy Book. Her second collection, BAD POWER has recently been launched by Twelfth Planet Press.
gillpolack @ 2012-03-06T15:29:00
No normal post from me today. Am rather unwell. It's a rather nasty flu and mostly I just need sleep and water. Much water. Much sleep. The WHM post will be up in a few minutes, and then I go back to bed.
March 5, 2012
gillpolack @ 2012-03-05T21:17:00
I forgot to mention that the new BiblioBuffet thingie is up. All about those two wonderful Boydell and Brewer books that I discovered in my mailbox some weeks ago. http://www.bibliobuffet.com/bookish-dreaming/1711-cultural-memory-and-the-stories-we-tell-030412
Women's History Month
This is a quick reminder (because I was asked) that all the WHM posts this month are by the writers themselves (except when they're by the musician or artist themself!). Because there are bios and because I would very much like these words to speak for themselves, I'm not giving introductions.
WHM- Karen Simpson Nikakis
In my view, two of the best women writers in Australia today are Sonya Hartnett and Margo Lanagan but these two haven’t influenced me (at least not consciously). The writers who have really influenced me haven’t in fact been Australian, and a lot haven’t even been women, but the woman whose works hit me in the guts like a punch, and whose writing showed me for the first time, the full possibilities of narrative was Mary Stewart’s Merlin trilogy. Note I’m talking books here, not just a writer because I can read a novel by an author and adore it, and be left completely cold by their other works.
I might have been predisposed to love these works because at the time I was interested in pre-Roman Britain but the impact was a lot more than that. Stewart (who is English, born 1916 and who is now 95) evokes the era by creating a full sensory experience. We smell the sweat steaming from horses; see the hoar frost glittering under an empty sky; hear the cry of the hawk as it wheels away; feel the coarseness of sackcloth and taste the tart juice in berries picked wild.
Reading Stewart’s works made the concept of setting being as potent and as active as character (as opposed to being window dressing) real to me, and it stayed with me when I started to write years later (I read these books in 1976 as a 21 year old and didn’t start writing until I was 38). The other thing I found revelatory in her writing was her use of metaphor. There is a wonderful scene towards the end of The crystal cave where the physical act of Arthur’s conception is paralleled by a description of Merlin standing on the windswept balcony of Tintagel castle watching the increasingly urgent then softly dwindling pulsing of a star.
The other writer who’s had a lasting influence (alas also not Australian) is Natalie Babbitt (a US writer born 1932), or more precisely her novel Tuck Everlasting. For those unfamiliar with the story (which Google has just informed me has twice been made into a film), it is about a family who inadvertently drink from a stream that bequeaths immortality, and the profound consequences of it. I was probably in my early twenties when I read this too, and what impressed me was the understated poignancy of the tale. It taught me that the greatest power lies in the simplest prose.
Brief bio
I work full time as Foundation Head of Program of NMIT’s Bachelor of Writing and Publishing in Melbourne, but previously delivered programs in Secondary Schools, AMEC’s, TAFEs (both in Australia and China) and Universities. I began writing in my late 30’s after attending some lectures on Carl Jung. It seemed to open a door in my mind and my first novel poured out (The song of the Silvercades - the second in the Kira Chronicles). This is not an uncommon effect of engaging with Jung. At the time I was completing a Masters on the purposes of dragons, and then went on to a Ph.D on the role of the female hero in Campbell’s universal hero myth. I wrote the other two books in the Kira Chronicles trilogy (The whisper of leaves and The cry of the marwing) and was the first author to be picked up by Allen and Unwin’s Friday Pitch.
My other works include: Dragon tales: the role of the dragon in selected narratives (Heidelberg Press); Hunter (presently being assessed for publication); Avatara (probably to be my first ebook). I am presently working on an angel trilogy.
