Gillian Polack's Blog, page 35

gillpolack @ 2015-04-09T12:49:00

Last teaching day of term coincided with finishing nearly 400 pages of proofing and the inevitable result is that I'm tired. I'm having a half day off. So there! I might have a half day off tomorrow, too. And Saturday afternoon is all about friends and Ian McHugh's booklaunch. And Sunday morning I'm taking a half day off. Don't blink, for these amazing morsels of time off will be gone if you do.

gillpolack @ 2015-04-08T20:30:00

Term is over and I now have two weeks to catch up on everything. Except that this year the deadlines hit while term was ongoing, so I'm about as tired as I am at the end of the year. Still, it's two weeks without teaching and I'm making sure I see friends from time to time in the interstices. By "from time to time" I mean on Thursday and on Saturday and on Sunday. I'm a social gadabout!

My students gave me a birthday card and a present. One student researched me and created a chapbook for me/of me that included a bunch of things I'd taught this term. It's a gorgeous book and I felt a bit guilty teaching everyone how to put their book together (for it's a teaching process, to form a book of 16 pages written on both sides, but by writing up all the pages first and then folding and slitting edges). Such a lovely thought and such a lovely present!

By popular request we're doing just a bit more on chapbooks next term. I'm very pleased with this for I'm getting them to learn a lot of quite serious skills. And they're enjoying it!

On that note, I need tea. I have a Beast meeting in a half hour, to discuss the current stage (which is very near the end of everything for us, the authors) and would like to stop yawning before then.

While I think of it, please expect GRRM jokes over the next little while. I have enough students to run my Game of Thrones course and the weather has turned bleak so "Winter is coming" is inevitable as night follows day. My biggest problem with the course will be buses home at night and waiting in the cold and walking through carparks and getting dinner at impossible hours. I love evening classes, but I so hate the getting home aspect.

In between now and the evil night walks I have a story to write and I'm tempted to include evil marsupials in it. It all depends on how cold I am when I'm writing...

gillpolack @ 2015-04-06T20:38:00

Thunderstorms have slowed down the fury of my work. The need to cook duck and make chocolates have also slowed down the fury of my work. Rather than frittering at the edge of the many deadlines and wondering why I never make it, I'm going to take two hours properly off and do other things. The storms will have gone elsewhere, the duck will be cooked and I may even be less annoying to everyone around me.

The duck is a recipe I came across when I was about 11, and my parents refused to let me cook it. Their reason was that duck was unobtainable and, even if it had been possible to buy one, it would have been too small for six hungry people. So this is the evening of meeting childhood dreams. And, in a few minutes, of 100 minutes of trying hard not to work.

Women's History Month 2015 - linkfest

Just a few links and we're done with WHM for 2015. It's been amazing. Very rollercoasterish. Every year, the guests I host make all the work worthwhile. I learn something, every year. Thank you all!

Watch this space, for we've less than eleven months til the next one. To help tide you through, here is a link to my opening post, followed by my guests in alphabetical order sorted by first name.

Women’s History Month background: http://gillpolack.livejournal.com/1367772.html


Alma Alexander http://gillpolack.livejournal.com/1373467.html

Amanda Bridgeman http://gillpolack.livejournal.com/1372174.html

Dawn Meredith http://gillpolack.livejournal.com/1367446.html

Donna Maree Hanson http://gillpolack.livejournal.com/1363739.html

Felicity Pulman http://gillpolack.livejournal.com/1369913.html

Helen Hollick http://gillpolack.livejournal.com/1369254.html

Helen Lowe http://gillpolack.livejournal.com/1371533.html

Isolde Martyn http://gillpolack.livejournal.com/1366753.html

Jacey Bedford http://gillpolack.livejournal.com/1373839.html

Jane Routley http://gillpolack.livejournal.com/1372431.html

Joyce Chng http://gillpolack.livejournal.com/1365875.html

Kathleen Guler http://gillpolack.livejournal.com/1373147.html

KJ Taylor http://gillpolack.livejournal.com/1366047.html

Laura Goodin http://gillpolack.livejournal.com/1369579.html

Liz Argall http://gillpolack.livejournal.com/1374407.html

LynC http://gillpolack.livejournal.com/1364022.html

Mary Victoria http://gillpolack.livejournal.com/1365402.html

Milena Benini http://gillpolack.livejournal.com/1368106.html

Monica Carroll http://gillpolack.livejournal.com/1372923.html

Narrelle Harris http://gillpolack.livejournal.com/1370936.html

Nike Sulway http://gillpolack.livejournal.com/1376242.html

Pamela Freeman http://gillpolack.livejournal.com/1364860.html

Queenie Chan http://gillpolack.livejournal.com/1370240.html

Samantha Faulkner http://gillpolack.livejournal.com/1368665.html

Satima Flavell http://gillpolack.livejournal.com/1375696.html

Sharyn Lilley http://gillpolack.livejournal.com/1364532.html

Sue Burke http://gillpolack.livejournal.com/1366884.html

Sue Bursztynski http://gillpolack.livejournal.com/1373298.html

Tor Roxburgh http://gillpolack.livejournal.com/1370640.html

Wendy J Dunn http://gillpolack.livejournal.com/1374824.html

Wendy Orr http://gillpolack.livejournal.com/1363481.html

Nike Sulway - Women's History Month

I haven’t seen my friend in a couple of years, and before the talk I was nervous about seeing her. I am still afraid. We used to be close. We worked together for a while, at adjoining desks. Before that we worked at a university, across the hall from each other. And before that, we were merely friends. I have slept on the floor of her lounge room, looking out over the city. She is one of those women to whom I feel joined. To whom I used to feel visible. But things had changed. My long-term relationship had ended in a long, slow, drawn-out war of attrition that took many of my friendships with it. And a great many other things, too. A home. A heart. A sense of belonging.

I now live in a city I had never visited before my life was torn apart. In a house I do not own. I cannot hear or smell the sea. There is no forest around me. At night, I hear cars rather than owls or wild dogs, or the distant thump of pub music. I no longer hear the train pass through my dreams. There are no children in my home. There are no rooms for them to play in; no beds in which they sleep.

I pull into the carpark behind the main street. My friend says something about the part of her talk that is about the long train journey her mother made without her son in her arms. The son who was stolen from her. I think of that woman, barely more than a girl, sitting upright on the train. Her body travelling in one direction; some essential other part left behind. I think: that is how it feels. Yes. Exactly that. I am sitting upright in my seat; I am facing forward, but some essential part of me is being torn out in my wake.

I say, There is more than one way to lose a child.

I say too much, and then apologise. Do all women do this? I say: I’m sorry. I know you must have to hold a lot of women’s pain. And she smiles and says yes, and no. That since the book came out, yes, many women have told her about how their children were taken from them. But, no, she doesn’t hold onto those stories.

I imagine them passing through her – this skeleton-thin, tender old friend – the way the ghost of a distant train passes through my dreams.

I live in a city where nobody knows me. It is sometimes easy to live in a place so distant from myself. To live somewhere so removed from my past. My children are grown, are flown, are gone.

One is happy; one is restless; one is gentle; one is lost.


This is what it feels like: you are a house. All the doors and windows have been left open. You are bare and undefended. People go in and out of your rooms. They open the cupboards and pull up the carpets. They peer into your most intimate corners, frowning. The wind and rain penetrate you. You cannot move to shake them off. You cannot defend yourself. And there is no caretaker. Nobody to close the doors or shutter the windows.

Glass cracks and falls away. Rot and mould set in. What was bright becomes dull. What was strong softens and gives way until you are only the shape of a house. Children tell stories about you. Hold their breath as they enter you. Soon enough, the house is gone. You are only a portion of forest. Something wild, but bounded. A place without words. Things grow that were not planted there. Trees throw themselves towards the sky.

In the tale of the seven ravens, a mother who has lost her child goes into the forest. She has made a vow not to speak a single syllable for seven years. She falls to her knees. She digs a hole in the earth with her bare hands, and pours her sorrow into that dark place.

Then she stands, wipes her hands clean on her gown. Turns back towards the world, and smiles. This is what is asked of her. This is what is necessary. Not that she forget, but that she pretend that she has forgotten. Not that she cease grieving, but that she not put her grief in your hands.


Nike Sulway lives and works in Toowoomba. She the mother of four children, and the author of a handful of novels. Her most recent novel is Rupetta, published by Tartarus Press; it was shortlisted for an Aurealis Award, and was the first Australian book to win the James Tiptree, Jr Award. She blogs, somewhat irregularly, at www.perilousadventures.net

gillpolack @ 2015-04-04T00:07:00

Only two more posts and Women's History Month is over for me this year. It's actually been quite a difficult year, in terms of admin. A bunch of emails didn't get to people or from people to me, for starters. The grapevine says that a bunch of spam filters were changed and emails to me and from me were definitely caught in the middle. There were several authors I really wanted to hear from who didn't reply to my original email or my follow-up one and they're all immensely courteous, so there were more emails that didn't get there than I was able to solve. If you've been a previous guest and if you're a writer, then the likelihood is high that you were a victim of the email problem.

The subject was a hard one, too. Writers who are normally wonderfully self-confident doublethought and needed to ask questions and... it was a lot more work for me than usual.

It was worth it. Some of the stories that writers shared... Also, I received a half dozen requests to do this theme again next year. It was infinitely harder for those sharing their stories, but quite obviously far more rewarding for the readers.

I'll put the last two posts up over the next 48 hours, along with a list of who you've met and where to find them. And then I'm done with it for the year and can focus on raucous deadlines.

Satima Flavell - Women's History Month

I was honoured when Gillian invited me to write another piece for her blog, but when I saw the topic, ‘personal stories of major obstacles overcome, especially for women in the arts’, I had a quiet little panic, for I have never suffered at the hands of this particular brand of sexism.

I’ve been lucky, it seems, for sexism, the biggest obstacle facing women in all fields, is certainly alive and well in the arts. Come to think of it, this has been true throughout my lifelong experience, even though I have never encountered it at a personal level.

Take dance, for example, the field with which I have the longest familiarity. It was well-recognised when I was young that the occasional boy entering an eisteddfod would usually win his sections, even if there were better candidates who were female. The excuse was ‘There are so few boys taking up dance, we have to favour them a bit to encourage them’. These days, a lot more boys take up dance, but as I am not involved in teaching the relevant age group, I can’t say whether this is still the received wisdom.

Certainly boys are still winning competitions hand over fist, but I think these days, especially in viewer-judged TV contests, it might be because they offer more exciting routines with feats of strength and elevation that girls can’t usually match.

In writing, sexism is rife. I attended a panel at the recent Perth Writers Festival that discussed this very topic. The ladies of the panel (Aviva Tuffold, Maxine Benedra Clarke, Ceridwen Dovey and Alice Pung) pointed out that while the Miles Franklin award is over 50 years old, only 16 women have won the annual prize. There is, of course, the Stella Prize, limited to female entrants, but surely writing and publishing awards should be fought out on a level playing field? Not so, it seems. Women, while no longer expected to spend most of their time hovering around the kitchen sink, are expected to write ‘women’s fiction’, and should never include rough male characters or vulgar language.

One might even suspect that it easier for men to get published, since their books generally sell better. Sadly, many readers, if not most, whether they be male or female, tend to prefer books with a male name on the cover, and many men will not give a second glance to books written by women. Some female writers have got around this by using masculine-looking pseudonyms, (KJ Rowling, Robin Hobb, Lian Hearn – to say nothing of Miles Franklin herself) and as one panel member recounted, male readers are often surprised to find a book by a woman that ‘could have been written by a man’, which tribute they trot forth as a supposed commendation!

No one on the panel at Perth Writers Festival was able to think of ways in which this particular ‘glass ceiling’ might be broken. One consoling factor, perhaps, is that men writing romance usually use a female pseudonym, since romance is the one publishing field in which women dominate, both as readers and writers. This is, however, a gross exception to the norm. The truth is that women read widely across all genres, while men, generally speaking, avoid romance and women’s biographies as if they were poison unto their souls.

Perhaps we’re on a forlorn hope here. Perhaps women authors of horror, crime and mystery will have to go on hiding behind noms-de-plume until the angel Gabrielle blows her trumpet and calls, ‘God has finished considering your submissions. Come and hear her judgement.’



Satima Flavell is a freelance writer, editor and reviewer. Her first novel, The Dagger of Dresnia, is published by Satalyte Press, and she also written short stories and poems. As an editor, she specialises in High Fantasy, her favourite genre, and she enjoys mentoring first-time writers. Her website is at www.satimaflavell.com.au.

gillpolack @ 2015-04-03T11:12:00

There's been a flurry of interest in my food historyishness. Given this, and given I have complete archives of all my posts from the days when i was a professional blogger and write about food hsitory every day of every week, I'm putting together a compilation. I wanted to have it done by tonight, as a Passover present, but just sorting the posts and deciding which ones people will still be interested in is taking much longer than I anticipated. And I have other things that must be done today (ones with real deadlines, like my seder and like things that need to be in print for the first time) so I'm giving myself until lunchtime to do as much as I can, and then I'll get back to it in between other things.

What this means is that I'm in full flight Gillianishness. I have my share of the Beast edits to do between now and Wednesday (you know you're being published when you come back from a booklaunch to find an editorial letter for the next book in your email) and I've an article due Monday night and I've a proposal due today and I've a short story that must be written come hell or high water (and that will probably include both hell and high water) so of course it's the right time to do something like making a digest of my food history posts.

In four days things really get busy, BTW. If I fall to pieces then, it's probably entirely my own fault.

I think the real reasons for this extra project are because people want it (which is always a good reason) but also because I'm still a bit bowled over by the Joe Abercrombie thing. I don't know if I said it here, but I didn't get to Mr Abercrombie's Canberra event because of the advent of bushfire smoke. It was the same bookshop that launched my novel the other night, though, and I was very surprised to hear that I outsold him.

Make the novels available and visible and readers will come...

This makes me suspect that the different promotion given to various authors makes an appreciable difference to our income, which may be a gender thing, but it equally may be a regional thing - and now I want one of those giant banners that 3 of my male friends have had recently, and I want to hide behind it and jump out and scare readers (this is why I cannot have nice things...)

Anyhow, the moral of this story is that if you like a novel, talk about it, for if you don't talk about it, no-one will know they need to buy it. And that sometimes small fry can outsell big fry when enough people care about a particular novel at a particular moment.

gillpolack @ 2015-04-02T14:29:00

I did a quick report on the HNSA conference.

I've pictures from the booklaunch, thanks to the wonderful Elizabeth Fitzgerald. In case that's not enough, Simon Brown (who is an amazing writer - Winter is my personal favourite) has kindly blogged his speech from the event.

Wendy J. Dunn - Women's History Month

Birth and Rebirth

When I looked through my journal for something I could use for Gillian’s topic, I re- discovered this short essay I wrote in a response to an article I read twenty years ago. My essay explores the event that turned my life around:

Years ago, Janet Hawley wrote a powerful essay called Fresh Horizons (1995), which explored ‘the role of fright’ (p. 13), a disturbing, life stopping moment that results in a period of deep reflection, and alters the direction of our lives (p. 10). Connecting to those lines, I remembered when I too experienced this ‘role of fright’.

My encounter with the ‘role of fright’ happened when I gave birth to my second son. His birth was so traumatic that both my baby and I were in shock for weeks afterwards, and experienced the effect of it for years to come. In 1981, childbirth was far more institutionalised than it is now. I gave birth to my son in a small hospital, with staff seemingly determined to keep the control of childbirth directed towards the hospital’s convenience.

I was a ‘good’ patient. I didn’t argue when the doctor ordered an induced birth at forty weeks. I didn’t argue when the medical staff attached me to a machine that dictated the type of labour my body produced. In fact, I didn’t argue about anything. This resulted in my downfall as a ‘good’ patient. The first midwife, eager to add another baby to her tally before she went off duty, continued to increase the level of oxytocin to my body, speeding up contractions. Despite the rapid, agonising contractions, with barely any rest in between, I stayed silent about my body being allowed to give birth in its own time. I even tried to stop crying out in pain when my midwife told me I was making too much noise. As a very young woman, I always strived to do what was expected of me. This time I was expected to be a ‘good’ patient.

Hours into my labour, my son’s heartbeat appeared to stop. Later, our doctor told us the more likely explanation: our baby had changed his position, and our inexperienced midwife, when she tried to hear his heartbeat, did not realise this. No matter the explanation, it resulted in everything flung into panic mode and the use of high forceps. I remember vividly the feeling of standing outside my own body, thinking, who is screaming? I returned to my body where I could no longer escape the answer.

I was sobbing when they placed my baby boy in my arms, after tearing him out of my body. My son, his head badly bruised, cried in such a way I knew he was hurting, just as I was hurting. Those first moments after his birth bonded us in our dual suffering. I, still unable to articulate our true anguish, kept repeating, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” I felt ashamed that I had been a ‘bad’ patient, reduced now to a state where I needed to apologise.

After my son's birth, while we were in hospital and for weeks after we returned home, I spent time reflecting on life. This life ‘fright’ had cast me adrift. Now, with all my moorings gone, I was in unknown and uncharted seas, where strong waves of barely controlled emotion threatened to engulf me. I went so deep within myself I often found it difficult to respond to other people. Friends would talk to me, but I heard them as if from a great distance. I was too distracted listening to everything I had unconsciously repressed over the years. All these things demanded from me a hearing. People began to worry about me because only I understood what was truly going on. A doctor may have diagnosed post-natal depression. If this is what it was, I can only now describe it as a beneficial post-natal depression. The fright of my son's birth made me face that I simply didn’t know who I was.

At this point in my life, my academic study of sociology was still in the future, so I lacked a lot of words to express how I felt. Even so, I began to confront the reason why I was now struggling to fight my way through this life storm. It came home to me that I had fallen into the expected narrative for my life. Having left an extremely unhappy, unsettled home at seventeen, I had married at eighteen, bore my first child ten months later, now had given birth to another child. I was a wife and mother— the accepted, expected dual-roles for a woman of my class and time – before I had a chance to really grow up and to understand my true identity. I was so young I thought I had to put aside all my childhood and teenage dreams of becoming a writer and visual artist because I was now a wife and mother. The previous two years of my life had seen me struggle with relentless despair. My son’s birth made me realise an important truth. My life was being dictated by the conditioning of my society. This conditioning had me utterly in its grip by the time I married. I had accepted (or tried to) the ‘reality’ of my life. A conditioning so internalised I saw the fault as being with me, and not with society, whenever I found it difficult to accept the limits of my ‘normal’ life.

When my second son came into the world I possessed everything that I believed should have offered me happiness: a marriage with someone I loved, healthy children, a comfortable home. But, there were so many moments – in what for me was a half-life – when I drowned in dark despair. If I dared to express my discontent to others, what did they answer? ‘Stop feeling sorry for yourself. You’re a lucky woman. You’ve no reason to indulge in self-pity.’ And I would think, ‘Yes - many people have real problems. There is no reason to feel this dreadful sadness or to feel I had somehow missed out on a complete life. Again I pushed this unhappiness down, only to have it re-emerge again. I told myself that if I learnt to accept my role, I would be happy, simply because I no longer strived for ‘things not meant for me’. I became frightened to step out and fully live because it meant stepping out from the accepted. I had yielded to the illusion it was better to remain safe within a life of understood standards, than risk myself further by taking up the gauntlet thrown down by life, which offered no guarantee of victory.
My birth experience was the ‘fright’ I needed to get my life on track. A year after my son’s birth, I began a Bachelor of Arts Degree through an Early Leavers Scheme, this led to an eventual career in teaching. Gaining my Degree also gave me the confidence to set out and write my first novel, Dear Heart, How Like You This?

Berger writes in his “Introduction to Sociology” (and here I am changing Berger’s man to woman for obvious reasons): ‘Heidegger’s concept [woman] enables us to live inauthentically by sealing up the metaphysical questions that our existence poses…The agonised question ‘why?’ that every [woman] feels at some moment or other as [she] becomes conscious of [her] condition is stifled by the cliché answers that society has available’ (1968 p. 169). How tragically true. I believe far too many people in our world would rather be living their lives differently. Life is too precious and short for people not to seek out their true and authentic life, a life that will make them grow as human beings.

References
Janet Hawley 1995, Fresh Horizons, Good Weekend, The Age
Peter Berger 1968, Invitation to Sociology, U.S.A.


Bio:

Wendy J. Dunn is an Australian writer who has been obsessed by Anne Boleyn and Tudor History since she was ten-years-old. She is the author of two Tudor novels: Dear Heart, How Like You This?, the winner of the 2003 Glyph Fiction Award and 2004 runner up in the Eric Hoffer Award for Commercial Fiction, and The Light in the Labyrinth, her first young adult novel.

While she continues to have a very close and spooky relationship with Sir Thomas Wyatt, the elder (Tom told the story of Anne Boleyn in Dear Heart, How Like You This?), serendipity of life now leaves her no longer wondering if she has been channeling Anne Boleyn and Sir Tom for years in her writing, but considering the possibility of ancestral memory. Her own family tree reveals the intriguing fact that her ancestors – possibly over three generations – had purchased land from both the Boleyn and Wyatt families to build up their own holdings. It seems very likely Wendy’s ancestors knew the Wyatts and Boleyns personally.

Born in Melbourne, Australia, Wendy is married and the mother of three sons and one daughter—named after a certain Tudor queen, surprisingly, not Anne.

After successfully completing her MA (Writing) at Swinburne University Wendy became a tutor for the same course. She gained her PhD (Human Society) in 2014.

Web: www.wendyjdunn.com/
Facebook: www.facebook.com/authorwendyjdunn
Goodreads: www.goodreads.com/author/show/197156....