Gillian Polack's Blog, page 36
March 31, 2015
gillpolack @ 2015-04-01T17:33:00
In 20 mins I start getting ready for my booklaunch. It's a bushsmoke day, so I'm wearing comforting clothes. However, I'll change into them at the very last minute, for they're more suitable to temperatures a bit cooler than those right now. They'll be fine after 6.30, which is when they need to be fine.
I'll see if I can give you today's WHM post before I go, so that you have something to read while I gallivant. Since The Art of Effective Dreaming is the novel that turned my life around (thanks to Tamara Mazzei) I've been saving a post from another writer who had that bouleversement.
Today is a day for celebrating the big changes.
I'll see if I can give you today's WHM post before I go, so that you have something to read while I gallivant. Since The Art of Effective Dreaming is the novel that turned my life around (thanks to Tamara Mazzei) I've been saving a post from another writer who had that bouleversement.
Today is a day for celebrating the big changes.
Liz Argall - Women's History Month
We have always been strong
I was something of a sickly child, or at least a weird and wobbly one. I could be full of energy, enthusiasm and clumsiness, but I was often tired, I often had issues with food, had that slightly neurotic distance and sensibilities that often marks someone as a writer in the making. I wanted to be a person of the body, but I wasn’t very good at it and it did not come as easily as reading or writing.
I did not want to be “the sickly kid” in school, those are people that are mercilessly picked on and seen as lacking in moral character, but I was often home sick, I was often dizzy, I’d bring boxes of tissues to school and still run out… being a mucous factor and having a post nasal drip for years is not the best way to win friends and influence people, but I did ok given my limitations. It’s uncanny to think about how physical I am now in my 30s when I look back at where I have been.
I think one of the things that kept me going (along with books, journaling and dogs) was a sense that my matriline was strong. It was the story of myself I liked the best, a true story at that. I know occupations of my mother’s line better than any other.
My great great grandmother was a washer woman. She ran her own business, she was strong. You cannot survive a business of boiling water and heavy fabrics back in those days without a strong back. In my mind she is tall and solid with arms like a wrestler, she does not have time to be pretty or even handsome, but she is practical and wise and wants her children to have a better life.
My great grandmother was an actress and a singer and during this critical developmental time she too was strong and energetic (though I later discovered that she was sickly when my grandmother was a young woman and had needed much caretaking, but this was not part of my great grandmother myth). She was in silent movies in Scotland and with her siblings sang under the stage name the La Motte (or was it Monte?) sisters. She married late and to an engineer. A highland scott to a lowland scott, a catholic to a protestant. By all accounts they adored each other and only argued about religion… she secretly had her children baptised catholic so that they wouldn’t go to hell. I imagined her firey and wonderful, the secret sneaking only adding charm.
My grandmother went to university, and before that to an all girls school where, because of her height, she played the male parts in dances and plays. She loved university, she loved dances and sociability, she too married late. The telegrams Joy received when she had my mother are full of surprise as well as praise for her cleverness at making such a thing. At an early age she changed her name to Joy because that felt more true than the one she had been given at birth. She worked for much of her married life as a tutor, as did her husband when his health allowed. I did not realize until after she died that she was sneakily my tutor, she had just done it so subtly on our Saturday afternoons together when we’d chat about what I was learning an I always felt better about writing my essays after spending time with her.
My mother got her honors degree in Psychology, using punch cards for the statistical analysis and heavily involved in student politics. She got into the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and made them give her a posting that wasn’t one of the meaningless cushy jobs they palmed women off to. That was how she became the first Australian female diplomat in South East Asia. The Malay Mail wrote an article about her, the headline “A New Breed of Woman.”
This is my matriline, I’ve held onto it like a thread in times of darkness. The women of my family have suffered and made sacrifices, but they have been strong and joyful, even when surrounded by illness and despair. They have made unconventional choices, been unconventional people with a certain straight forwardness and pragmatism as well as a dreamy creativity. They have been whole and complete and not just a figure in someone else’s shadow. They have been people and in a world where women and women’s experiences can be seen as less than. When the default human still does not mean my gender and where the patriarchy in my head can unperson me as well as the structural oppressions outside of me, it is good to have lifelines, matrilines to hold onto. We suffer, we survive, we are capable, we are diverse, we make our choices, we go on.
Bio:
Liz’s short stories can be found in places like Apex Magazine, Strange Horizons, and This is How You Die: Stories of the Inscrutable, Infallible, Inescapable Machine of Death. Liz writes love letters, songs and poems to inanimate object and two of her short stories have become plays that are regularly performed. She creates the webcomic Things Without Arms and Without Legs and her website is http://lizargall.com/
I was something of a sickly child, or at least a weird and wobbly one. I could be full of energy, enthusiasm and clumsiness, but I was often tired, I often had issues with food, had that slightly neurotic distance and sensibilities that often marks someone as a writer in the making. I wanted to be a person of the body, but I wasn’t very good at it and it did not come as easily as reading or writing.
I did not want to be “the sickly kid” in school, those are people that are mercilessly picked on and seen as lacking in moral character, but I was often home sick, I was often dizzy, I’d bring boxes of tissues to school and still run out… being a mucous factor and having a post nasal drip for years is not the best way to win friends and influence people, but I did ok given my limitations. It’s uncanny to think about how physical I am now in my 30s when I look back at where I have been.
I think one of the things that kept me going (along with books, journaling and dogs) was a sense that my matriline was strong. It was the story of myself I liked the best, a true story at that. I know occupations of my mother’s line better than any other.
My great great grandmother was a washer woman. She ran her own business, she was strong. You cannot survive a business of boiling water and heavy fabrics back in those days without a strong back. In my mind she is tall and solid with arms like a wrestler, she does not have time to be pretty or even handsome, but she is practical and wise and wants her children to have a better life.
My great grandmother was an actress and a singer and during this critical developmental time she too was strong and energetic (though I later discovered that she was sickly when my grandmother was a young woman and had needed much caretaking, but this was not part of my great grandmother myth). She was in silent movies in Scotland and with her siblings sang under the stage name the La Motte (or was it Monte?) sisters. She married late and to an engineer. A highland scott to a lowland scott, a catholic to a protestant. By all accounts they adored each other and only argued about religion… she secretly had her children baptised catholic so that they wouldn’t go to hell. I imagined her firey and wonderful, the secret sneaking only adding charm.
My grandmother went to university, and before that to an all girls school where, because of her height, she played the male parts in dances and plays. She loved university, she loved dances and sociability, she too married late. The telegrams Joy received when she had my mother are full of surprise as well as praise for her cleverness at making such a thing. At an early age she changed her name to Joy because that felt more true than the one she had been given at birth. She worked for much of her married life as a tutor, as did her husband when his health allowed. I did not realize until after she died that she was sneakily my tutor, she had just done it so subtly on our Saturday afternoons together when we’d chat about what I was learning an I always felt better about writing my essays after spending time with her.
My mother got her honors degree in Psychology, using punch cards for the statistical analysis and heavily involved in student politics. She got into the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and made them give her a posting that wasn’t one of the meaningless cushy jobs they palmed women off to. That was how she became the first Australian female diplomat in South East Asia. The Malay Mail wrote an article about her, the headline “A New Breed of Woman.”
This is my matriline, I’ve held onto it like a thread in times of darkness. The women of my family have suffered and made sacrifices, but they have been strong and joyful, even when surrounded by illness and despair. They have made unconventional choices, been unconventional people with a certain straight forwardness and pragmatism as well as a dreamy creativity. They have been whole and complete and not just a figure in someone else’s shadow. They have been people and in a world where women and women’s experiences can be seen as less than. When the default human still does not mean my gender and where the patriarchy in my head can unperson me as well as the structural oppressions outside of me, it is good to have lifelines, matrilines to hold onto. We suffer, we survive, we are capable, we are diverse, we make our choices, we go on.
Bio:
Liz’s short stories can be found in places like Apex Magazine, Strange Horizons, and This is How You Die: Stories of the Inscrutable, Infallible, Inescapable Machine of Death. Liz writes love letters, songs and poems to inanimate object and two of her short stories have become plays that are regularly performed. She creates the webcomic Things Without Arms and Without Legs and her website is http://lizargall.com/
gillpolack @ 2015-03-31T21:09:00
I'm slowly getting through things. We are in the midst of The Return of the Sons and Daughters of Smoke, so it's slow. I also get distracted by the fact that I have to organise my birthday next week (the trials of being born on a public holiday, last minute "Let's go out for dinner" never work) and this year has its own difficulty. What the heck does one do when one's birthday is the 100th memorial of Gallipoli?
If anyone wants to go to the Dawn Service, I'm willing to get up, this once, for it's special. After that (whether or not I get to the Dawn Service, which depends entirely on lifts from friends) I intend to spend some of my last year's birthday voucher on a superhero movie, then I shall come home and make many cakes. From 4 pm until the early hours of the Sunday, I'll be At Home. And I've said this before, in many places. I'm mainly reassuring myself that I won't be treading on toes by celebrating my birthday at all this year. Now that I've reminded myself for the third time today, let me just say that all friends are welcome, whether they live in Canberra or are passing through.
I've also decided (given life, the universe and how impossible March has been for so many people) to extend WHM until Saturday night. I have posts in hand and am expecting more, so we'll go out with a flourish. And since today is a day for catching up with big stuff, I shall skip a WHM post today and put one up tomorrow. Although if I finish everything and have energy, watch this space. Don't hold out too much hope - I'm very tired and have been working steadily on the Last of the Big Projects. It's nearing its end and needs a publisher and I'd like to get a proposal done this week, for over the weekend I have academic short stuff to do, and next week I fear will be all edits for the Beast, and who knows what comes after that.
There are reasons why I'm tired...
If anyone wants to go to the Dawn Service, I'm willing to get up, this once, for it's special. After that (whether or not I get to the Dawn Service, which depends entirely on lifts from friends) I intend to spend some of my last year's birthday voucher on a superhero movie, then I shall come home and make many cakes. From 4 pm until the early hours of the Sunday, I'll be At Home. And I've said this before, in many places. I'm mainly reassuring myself that I won't be treading on toes by celebrating my birthday at all this year. Now that I've reminded myself for the third time today, let me just say that all friends are welcome, whether they live in Canberra or are passing through.
I've also decided (given life, the universe and how impossible March has been for so many people) to extend WHM until Saturday night. I have posts in hand and am expecting more, so we'll go out with a flourish. And since today is a day for catching up with big stuff, I shall skip a WHM post today and put one up tomorrow. Although if I finish everything and have energy, watch this space. Don't hold out too much hope - I'm very tired and have been working steadily on the Last of the Big Projects. It's nearing its end and needs a publisher and I'd like to get a proposal done this week, for over the weekend I have academic short stuff to do, and next week I fear will be all edits for the Beast, and who knows what comes after that.
There are reasons why I'm tired...
March 30, 2015
Jacey Bedford - Women's History Month
Lessons Learned and Applied
The Parallels Between Singing and Writing
I used to be a folk singer. No--correction--I am a folk singer, I just don't do it as a full-time job any more, but even though I've officially retired from the road the singing is in me and I don't think I'll ever get it out. I don't even want to. People ask if I miss it. No, I don't. I don't miss it because in my head I haven't really stopped. I'm just on an extended break between tours. As it turns out, that's almost true, as in April 2015, Artisan takes to the road for a series of reunion gigs, the first in five years.
What do I do now? Well, I haven't actually retired, that's for sure. I run a booking agency for other folk performers touring in the UK, and I write science fiction and fantasy. My first novel, Empire of Dust, is a twisty space opera featuring brain-implanted psi-techs.
I've always written. I started my first novel when I was fifteen--a post apocalyptic dystopia (eat your heart out, Hunger Games fans) peopled by a cast of characters lifted from my favourite bands. I wrote it long-hand (the first five chapters, anyway, which was as far as I got) and typed it out (slowly and painfully) on a borrowed Imperial 66. I wrote through my twenties, when I was a librarian. When my kids came along I wrote while they slept. (Hence my habit of writing way into the early hours of the morning, which I've never been able to break.) And I wrote whilst singing my head off, in harmony--or at least in the back of the van on the way to gigs.
Music opened up the world for me. I come from a tiny village on the edge of the Yorkshire Pennines. Stick a pin in the middle of the island that is England, Scotland and Wales and I'll be the one to yell, Ouch!. But as Artisan's popularity grew, we began to tour the USA and Canada, meet new people and make new friends. I got my first writing break through music, via the hugely talented, Nebula Award-winning writer, Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, a friend of a group of (musical) friends from Seattle and--as it turns out--an Artisan fan. I would never have asked her to read my work because even as a clueless newbie I knew how many times professional writers get asked for those kind of favours, but my friend mentioned that I wrote. Annie (bless her) offered. She passed on the message to send the first chapter of my novel because she figured if I was used to entertaining an audience, I probably had a bit of gumption when it came to writing too. That was the first time I'd actually compared notes between the two halves of my life, but what she said made a lot of sense. This is how I see it…
Feedback
When you write a book feedback is slow. From the first once-upon-a-time to the book being out there on bookstore shelves can take years. When you're on a stage, feedback is instant. Your audience votes with applause and laughter, or if you really suck it votes with its feet. After the show it votes with its wallet at the CD sales stand. Obviously, if something works on stage you keep it in the act. If it doesn't, you drop it. It may take a lot longer to incorporate feedback into your writing, so you have to try and think ahead and to a certain extent second-guess your audience. What will they take to their hearts and what won't they? This is where being a member of a good critique group or attending an event like Milford really helps.
Style
I don't write songs. It takes me a minimum of 120,000 words to explain what my husband, Brian Bedford, can write in four verses. He's Artisan's song writer. We want his lyrics to be heard. In transmitting that song to an audience it's important that we, as singers, don't stand in front of it. The audience should hear the song, feel it, not be drawn to an examination of singing technique or the clarity of any one voice. If we're doing our job right, the technique should be invisible. We're not saying, 'Listen to me,' we're saying, 'Listen to the song.'
Ditto with writing, especially genre writing. (If you write literary or experimental fiction, all bets are off.) Of course, there's no One True Way, every writer is different, but this is my take on it. Purple prose, metaphor and alliteration will only take you so far. Just as the singer shouldn't stand in front of the song, I don't believe the author should stand in front of the story. I prefer the writing to be clean and elegant, the words apposite, the technique, invisible. Lyrical prose is a plus, as long as it doesn't pop up and distract the reader. While you're wondering why the author chose to describe a person's looks as umbelliferous, you're missing what's going on. The reader should be able to immerse themselves in what's happening on the page and not thinking about the person who wrote it and why they chose that particular word..
Plot
When you're putting together a set of songs for a concert you need a beginning a middle and an end. You're creating a sustainable entertainment arc. Your 'wake-up' starter-song should grab your audience's attention and tell them, 'This is what you can expect, so listen-up!' The end should be a big finish to fulfil your promise and raise the roof. Between those two bookends you need a succession of carefully chosen contrasts, each one building on the last; tension and release. If you juxtapose a lively song with an emotional melodic one full of lush harmonies then both songs benefit from the comparison. If you follow a tense, dramatic song (often your mid-point in the set) with a clever little ditty, it gives the audience chance to breathe again, but without losing their attention. Between the songs, you chat to them--little stories to lead from one song to the next while setting the right mood. If they call for it, and they always do, you can give them an encore, something soft and warm to send them home smiling, blissed out
When writing it's often a good plan to start just as things are kicking off, or in the middle of the action (in medias res), and vary the pace, building in an escalating series of events (reversals and pinch points) until you reach a dramatic mid-point, the fulcrum on which the lever of your story balances. A series of transitions holds it all together, just like your links between songs. Then you head for the no-holds-barred finale, probably via another big reversal and pinch point or plot twist. But don't just stop there--follow it with a resolution. In other words, give them an encore to send them home happy.
Attention Span
All the time, whether singing or writing, you have to hold your audience's attention. If you turn away and stop to tie your shoelace, literally or figuratively, you've lost them. You don't need to keep up a frenetic pace from start to finish, of course, but you do need to keep up a level of interest, and there should be dramatic tension running through it all. They have to want to turn the page, listen to the next song.
Characters
Your onstage persona is--like the advert says--you, but on a good day. Slightly larger than life, witty, warm, human, humane. Your audience should like you. That's what will keep them coming back. No matter how much they like your music, if you don't get them on your side, turn them into friends, they'll not become steadfast fans. Feeling miserable? Having a bad day? Don't ever take it out on your audience.
Your reader has to care about your characters, too. They have to want them to succeed in their endeavour, find true love, marry Princess Buttercup, drop the ring into the fires of Mount Doom and return safely, or stick it to a totalitarian state. There's nothing that will get a book hurled against a wall more quickly than if your characters are unremitting arseholes or dull at ditch-water. I don't care what happens to these characters--the eight deadly words you never want to hear from your readers.
Reviews
Afterwards there are reviews. We all hope for good ones:
"Bedford builds a taut story around the dangers of a new world.... Readers who crave high adventure and tense plots will enjoy this voyage into the future." - Publishers' Weekly review of Empire of Dust.
"Artisan aren't a hard act to follow. All I have to do now is get up here on stage and burst into flames." --Valdy, Canada.
"For tight, exciting harmony singing, as well as sheer delight and entertainment, Artisan are the bee's knees. You'd be mad to miss them." --St Neot's Festival.
Good reviews are great. Not so good reviews? Well, you learn from them as well, but though comments in a review may be a consideration when you start the next project, plan the next book, do the next gig, make the next CD, at the end of the day a review is just one person's opinion. Read it (or don't) and move on. Your writing and your music come from the heart. They are not just what you do, they are what you are. Trust yourself.
Jacey Bedford is a British author published by DAW in the USA. Her debut book, Empire of Dust, the first book in her Psi-tech Universe, launched in November 2014 and her second, Crossways, a sequel, is due in August 2015. She's agented by Amy Boggs of the Donald Maass Literary Agency. You can find out more from her website, or her blog, Tales from the Typeface
In another life she sang with a cappella trio Artisan from 1985 to 2005, playing gigs and festivals all over the UK, Canada, the USA (thirty-one North American tours) parts of Europe, Australia and even (once, briefly) Hong Kong. Along with her song-mates, Hilary Spencer and Brian Bedford, she's made twelve CDs and a DVD, done one reunion tour in 2010 and from April to October 2015 will hit the road again for a series of reunion gigs all over the UK, ten years after officially hanging up her tonsils. She keeps her connections to the music world by running a booking agency for other folk musicians.
The Parallels Between Singing and Writing
I used to be a folk singer. No--correction--I am a folk singer, I just don't do it as a full-time job any more, but even though I've officially retired from the road the singing is in me and I don't think I'll ever get it out. I don't even want to. People ask if I miss it. No, I don't. I don't miss it because in my head I haven't really stopped. I'm just on an extended break between tours. As it turns out, that's almost true, as in April 2015, Artisan takes to the road for a series of reunion gigs, the first in five years.
What do I do now? Well, I haven't actually retired, that's for sure. I run a booking agency for other folk performers touring in the UK, and I write science fiction and fantasy. My first novel, Empire of Dust, is a twisty space opera featuring brain-implanted psi-techs.
I've always written. I started my first novel when I was fifteen--a post apocalyptic dystopia (eat your heart out, Hunger Games fans) peopled by a cast of characters lifted from my favourite bands. I wrote it long-hand (the first five chapters, anyway, which was as far as I got) and typed it out (slowly and painfully) on a borrowed Imperial 66. I wrote through my twenties, when I was a librarian. When my kids came along I wrote while they slept. (Hence my habit of writing way into the early hours of the morning, which I've never been able to break.) And I wrote whilst singing my head off, in harmony--or at least in the back of the van on the way to gigs.
Music opened up the world for me. I come from a tiny village on the edge of the Yorkshire Pennines. Stick a pin in the middle of the island that is England, Scotland and Wales and I'll be the one to yell, Ouch!. But as Artisan's popularity grew, we began to tour the USA and Canada, meet new people and make new friends. I got my first writing break through music, via the hugely talented, Nebula Award-winning writer, Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, a friend of a group of (musical) friends from Seattle and--as it turns out--an Artisan fan. I would never have asked her to read my work because even as a clueless newbie I knew how many times professional writers get asked for those kind of favours, but my friend mentioned that I wrote. Annie (bless her) offered. She passed on the message to send the first chapter of my novel because she figured if I was used to entertaining an audience, I probably had a bit of gumption when it came to writing too. That was the first time I'd actually compared notes between the two halves of my life, but what she said made a lot of sense. This is how I see it…
Feedback
When you write a book feedback is slow. From the first once-upon-a-time to the book being out there on bookstore shelves can take years. When you're on a stage, feedback is instant. Your audience votes with applause and laughter, or if you really suck it votes with its feet. After the show it votes with its wallet at the CD sales stand. Obviously, if something works on stage you keep it in the act. If it doesn't, you drop it. It may take a lot longer to incorporate feedback into your writing, so you have to try and think ahead and to a certain extent second-guess your audience. What will they take to their hearts and what won't they? This is where being a member of a good critique group or attending an event like Milford really helps.
Style
I don't write songs. It takes me a minimum of 120,000 words to explain what my husband, Brian Bedford, can write in four verses. He's Artisan's song writer. We want his lyrics to be heard. In transmitting that song to an audience it's important that we, as singers, don't stand in front of it. The audience should hear the song, feel it, not be drawn to an examination of singing technique or the clarity of any one voice. If we're doing our job right, the technique should be invisible. We're not saying, 'Listen to me,' we're saying, 'Listen to the song.'
Ditto with writing, especially genre writing. (If you write literary or experimental fiction, all bets are off.) Of course, there's no One True Way, every writer is different, but this is my take on it. Purple prose, metaphor and alliteration will only take you so far. Just as the singer shouldn't stand in front of the song, I don't believe the author should stand in front of the story. I prefer the writing to be clean and elegant, the words apposite, the technique, invisible. Lyrical prose is a plus, as long as it doesn't pop up and distract the reader. While you're wondering why the author chose to describe a person's looks as umbelliferous, you're missing what's going on. The reader should be able to immerse themselves in what's happening on the page and not thinking about the person who wrote it and why they chose that particular word..
Plot
When you're putting together a set of songs for a concert you need a beginning a middle and an end. You're creating a sustainable entertainment arc. Your 'wake-up' starter-song should grab your audience's attention and tell them, 'This is what you can expect, so listen-up!' The end should be a big finish to fulfil your promise and raise the roof. Between those two bookends you need a succession of carefully chosen contrasts, each one building on the last; tension and release. If you juxtapose a lively song with an emotional melodic one full of lush harmonies then both songs benefit from the comparison. If you follow a tense, dramatic song (often your mid-point in the set) with a clever little ditty, it gives the audience chance to breathe again, but without losing their attention. Between the songs, you chat to them--little stories to lead from one song to the next while setting the right mood. If they call for it, and they always do, you can give them an encore, something soft and warm to send them home smiling, blissed out
When writing it's often a good plan to start just as things are kicking off, or in the middle of the action (in medias res), and vary the pace, building in an escalating series of events (reversals and pinch points) until you reach a dramatic mid-point, the fulcrum on which the lever of your story balances. A series of transitions holds it all together, just like your links between songs. Then you head for the no-holds-barred finale, probably via another big reversal and pinch point or plot twist. But don't just stop there--follow it with a resolution. In other words, give them an encore to send them home happy.
Attention Span
All the time, whether singing or writing, you have to hold your audience's attention. If you turn away and stop to tie your shoelace, literally or figuratively, you've lost them. You don't need to keep up a frenetic pace from start to finish, of course, but you do need to keep up a level of interest, and there should be dramatic tension running through it all. They have to want to turn the page, listen to the next song.
Characters
Your onstage persona is--like the advert says--you, but on a good day. Slightly larger than life, witty, warm, human, humane. Your audience should like you. That's what will keep them coming back. No matter how much they like your music, if you don't get them on your side, turn them into friends, they'll not become steadfast fans. Feeling miserable? Having a bad day? Don't ever take it out on your audience.
Your reader has to care about your characters, too. They have to want them to succeed in their endeavour, find true love, marry Princess Buttercup, drop the ring into the fires of Mount Doom and return safely, or stick it to a totalitarian state. There's nothing that will get a book hurled against a wall more quickly than if your characters are unremitting arseholes or dull at ditch-water. I don't care what happens to these characters--the eight deadly words you never want to hear from your readers.
Reviews
Afterwards there are reviews. We all hope for good ones:
"Bedford builds a taut story around the dangers of a new world.... Readers who crave high adventure and tense plots will enjoy this voyage into the future." - Publishers' Weekly review of Empire of Dust.
"Artisan aren't a hard act to follow. All I have to do now is get up here on stage and burst into flames." --Valdy, Canada.
"For tight, exciting harmony singing, as well as sheer delight and entertainment, Artisan are the bee's knees. You'd be mad to miss them." --St Neot's Festival.
Good reviews are great. Not so good reviews? Well, you learn from them as well, but though comments in a review may be a consideration when you start the next project, plan the next book, do the next gig, make the next CD, at the end of the day a review is just one person's opinion. Read it (or don't) and move on. Your writing and your music come from the heart. They are not just what you do, they are what you are. Trust yourself.
Jacey Bedford is a British author published by DAW in the USA. Her debut book, Empire of Dust, the first book in her Psi-tech Universe, launched in November 2014 and her second, Crossways, a sequel, is due in August 2015. She's agented by Amy Boggs of the Donald Maass Literary Agency. You can find out more from her website, or her blog, Tales from the Typeface
In another life she sang with a cappella trio Artisan from 1985 to 2005, playing gigs and festivals all over the UK, Canada, the USA (thirty-one North American tours) parts of Europe, Australia and even (once, briefly) Hong Kong. Along with her song-mates, Hilary Spencer and Brian Bedford, she's made twelve CDs and a DVD, done one reunion tour in 2010 and from April to October 2015 will hit the road again for a series of reunion gigs all over the UK, ten years after officially hanging up her tonsils. She keeps her connections to the music world by running a booking agency for other folk musicians.
March 28, 2015
Alma Alexander - Women's History Month
Much of history is silence. perhaps too much.
The thousand tiny incidents which all build up to the big thing - the snippets of tales that make up the backbone of all the events that shaped the human story (or at the very least the Western history edition of that) - they fall silent, often, almost always, when they run up against a woman in the narrative. The accepted writ runs back just far enough to find a great man who might have had his fingers in a particular pie - and anything beyond that, that's immaterial. There are suddenly doubts and fissures, it is never quite possible to be certain about the women in these men's lives - or about any women who might have played any part at all - because the record becomes sketchy. There are those who will speak of Albert Einstein's wife Mileva Maric as a gifted mathematician who helped shape Einstein's thinking and had at least a passing role in the formulation of the theories which have shaped our physical world for a hundred years - but for every such account there is a counternarrative that Mileva was a wannabe who never amounted to much or would never have amounted to much anyway and is entirely dismissable as the "little woman" who played a rather larger role in stifling Einstein's creative development than in helping it flower.
That's just one example.
I'd like to see a version of history where all the lost women and their contributions would be acknowledged, brought into the light. And no, by that I don't mean that I want a history written by Amazons who will erase the male presence from their world. But it would be nice, just once, to be acknowledged - in our own right, as the other half of our species - because of our own contribution to what the human race was, is, and is still in the process of becoming... and NOT just by bearing and nursing the children that will continue the species.
We are real, and we are alive, and we hold so much that is important and precious and wise.
It is time - past time! - for our voices to also be heard in the echoing silence of the narrative of human history.
The thousand tiny incidents which all build up to the big thing - the snippets of tales that make up the backbone of all the events that shaped the human story (or at the very least the Western history edition of that) - they fall silent, often, almost always, when they run up against a woman in the narrative. The accepted writ runs back just far enough to find a great man who might have had his fingers in a particular pie - and anything beyond that, that's immaterial. There are suddenly doubts and fissures, it is never quite possible to be certain about the women in these men's lives - or about any women who might have played any part at all - because the record becomes sketchy. There are those who will speak of Albert Einstein's wife Mileva Maric as a gifted mathematician who helped shape Einstein's thinking and had at least a passing role in the formulation of the theories which have shaped our physical world for a hundred years - but for every such account there is a counternarrative that Mileva was a wannabe who never amounted to much or would never have amounted to much anyway and is entirely dismissable as the "little woman" who played a rather larger role in stifling Einstein's creative development than in helping it flower.
That's just one example.
I'd like to see a version of history where all the lost women and their contributions would be acknowledged, brought into the light. And no, by that I don't mean that I want a history written by Amazons who will erase the male presence from their world. But it would be nice, just once, to be acknowledged - in our own right, as the other half of our species - because of our own contribution to what the human race was, is, and is still in the process of becoming... and NOT just by bearing and nursing the children that will continue the species.
We are real, and we are alive, and we hold so much that is important and precious and wise.
It is time - past time! - for our voices to also be heard in the echoing silence of the narrative of human history.
Sue Bursztynski - Women's History Month
I have a lot of heroines in my family. I could talk about my mother, who lost everything in the war, and all but one sister and a cousin, and managed to turn her life around in Australia, and learn many new skills, with her new family - us - but that would also apply to my wonderful father, who was self-taught in everything, who built shelves and produced silver jewellery, threw himself into the world of the Internet and made his family his first priority right to the end. And this is Women's History Month. So we'll talk about my sister, whose working life started with a manual typewriter and has gone on to a tertiary education and published work in many venues.
Towards the end of Year 10, my sister Mary became ill and missed her exams. She didn't want to repeat Year 10; instead she decided to attend business college, where she learned to be what is now called a PA and in those days was a secretary.
A secretary was a lot more than just a typist. Those were the days before the Internet and personal computers; the boss would rely on the secretary to do a lot of things they can do themselves these days. My sister specialised in medicine, as a legal secretary specialised in law; both required special skills. She was always bringing home medical dictionaries to study.
As the years went by, manual typewriters were replaced with electric and electronic, then word processors and then personal computers. And Mary learned to use all of them, and to search the Net for things she needed. These days she delights in book downloads and videos of the family on her mini-iPad and has replaced her cookbooks with online recipes, which take up a lot less space.
Her sons grew up and started work and finally, Mary decided it was time to finish her secondary education and go beyond. She threw herself into VCE and, like many mature-age students, did much better than the teenagers.
However, her choice of tertiary institution was, not the sandstones, but TAFE. My sister enrolled in Professional Writing And Editing at Holmesglen TAFE. There, she did everything from publishing and editing to short stories. She had some interesting stories to tell about Industry Overview, the subject in which publishers came to talk about their publications. One was about a literary magazine that had been going for ten years and was still relying on government grants to keep going. Her opinion of that publication was not high.
Since then, most of her sales have been articles. She has been in the Australian, the Herald Sun, the Big Issue and quite a few issues of Melbourne's Child, a magazine which is free in shops, but which pays well if you can get the gig. I remember her calling me once to say she had just received a cheque for $500 and should she ask about it, because surely they weren't paying THAT much? I advised her to take the money and run.
She never sold any fiction, but she did get a third place in the Scarlet Stilettos for a very Roald Dahl-like murder story called "Me And Chivas Regal". (She had never read Roald Dahl). Now that Melbourne's Child is no longer taking freelance work, perhaps I can persuade her to go back to fiction.
She works from home, writing other people's resumes and job applications; she found a gap in the market and filled it.
And on top of it all, she has become a first-rate nana, making sure her bright young grandchildren go to the library regularly, develop their skills and have chances she didn't at their ages.
Towards the end of Year 10, my sister Mary became ill and missed her exams. She didn't want to repeat Year 10; instead she decided to attend business college, where she learned to be what is now called a PA and in those days was a secretary.
A secretary was a lot more than just a typist. Those were the days before the Internet and personal computers; the boss would rely on the secretary to do a lot of things they can do themselves these days. My sister specialised in medicine, as a legal secretary specialised in law; both required special skills. She was always bringing home medical dictionaries to study.
As the years went by, manual typewriters were replaced with electric and electronic, then word processors and then personal computers. And Mary learned to use all of them, and to search the Net for things she needed. These days she delights in book downloads and videos of the family on her mini-iPad and has replaced her cookbooks with online recipes, which take up a lot less space.
Her sons grew up and started work and finally, Mary decided it was time to finish her secondary education and go beyond. She threw herself into VCE and, like many mature-age students, did much better than the teenagers.
However, her choice of tertiary institution was, not the sandstones, but TAFE. My sister enrolled in Professional Writing And Editing at Holmesglen TAFE. There, she did everything from publishing and editing to short stories. She had some interesting stories to tell about Industry Overview, the subject in which publishers came to talk about their publications. One was about a literary magazine that had been going for ten years and was still relying on government grants to keep going. Her opinion of that publication was not high.
Since then, most of her sales have been articles. She has been in the Australian, the Herald Sun, the Big Issue and quite a few issues of Melbourne's Child, a magazine which is free in shops, but which pays well if you can get the gig. I remember her calling me once to say she had just received a cheque for $500 and should she ask about it, because surely they weren't paying THAT much? I advised her to take the money and run.
She never sold any fiction, but she did get a third place in the Scarlet Stilettos for a very Roald Dahl-like murder story called "Me And Chivas Regal". (She had never read Roald Dahl). Now that Melbourne's Child is no longer taking freelance work, perhaps I can persuade her to go back to fiction.
She works from home, writing other people's resumes and job applications; she found a gap in the market and filled it.
And on top of it all, she has become a first-rate nana, making sure her bright young grandchildren go to the library regularly, develop their skills and have chances she didn't at their ages.
Kathleen Guler - Women's History Month
Grandma’s Boots
Grandma always said she was going to die with her boots on, a phrase that hails from America’s Old West days. She wasn’t famous or a pioneer, and her boots were probably plain old galoshes, but she had that tough, gritty, no-nonsense attitude that a pioneer needed to survive. From Topeka, Kansas, she married in 1909 and gave birth to four children in quick succession, born in 1911, 1913, 1915 and 1918. In 1919, her husband, my grandfather, abruptly died from a brain hemorrhage.
To be widowed with four very young children in a time when women were not well received in the workplace and movements for women’s rights were only beginning, Grandma needed to make a decision quickly. Offers of help came from her in-laws. But her father-in-law was the sort of strict, dour Ulster Scot Presbyterian who never allowed any sort of “unseemly demeanor”—such as laughter, cheerfulness, or any kind of mischief—on a Sunday. Children and adults alike were required to sit still, hands folded, and contemplate what they had heard in church that morning. For that matter, the rest of the week was not treated with much difference. In addition, he had a habit of needing a bit too much gratitude for any wee bit of help given.
To my mom, the third of the four children, Grandma was a hero and someone of whom to be very proud, and offering pride was something Mom never took lightly. Grandma refused her in-laws’ help, probably to their disdain, because she absolutely did not want to be beholden to them. With quiet determination, she went to work, doing various kinds of office duties. She sold the big house the family had lived in and bought a smaller one that was easier to handle financially and physically. And she raised those four kids all by herself. She never remarried, remained independent after they were all grown, and retired in the 1950s, living alone in her own home with quiet dignity until shortly before she passed away at the age of 93. She spent only the few final days of her life in a nursing home. She was determined to die with those proverbial boots still on, and she damn near did.
Writer and historian Kathleen Guler is the author of the award-winning Macsen’s Treasure series of four novels set in fifth-century Britain. The fourth, A Land Beyond Ravens, won the 2010 Colorado Book Award for Historical Fiction. Drawing from her Welsh and Scottish heritage and a long background in history and literature, the author has also published numerous articles, essays, reviews and poems, is a member of the Historical Novel Society, holds a Masters Degree in history (with honors) from American Military University, and participates in various writing and academic groups focused on history. She is currently working on a new novel that involves Celtic raiders and nomadic Scythians in the fourth century BC. Her books can be found worldwide through Amazon and Smashwords.
Grandma always said she was going to die with her boots on, a phrase that hails from America’s Old West days. She wasn’t famous or a pioneer, and her boots were probably plain old galoshes, but she had that tough, gritty, no-nonsense attitude that a pioneer needed to survive. From Topeka, Kansas, she married in 1909 and gave birth to four children in quick succession, born in 1911, 1913, 1915 and 1918. In 1919, her husband, my grandfather, abruptly died from a brain hemorrhage.
To be widowed with four very young children in a time when women were not well received in the workplace and movements for women’s rights were only beginning, Grandma needed to make a decision quickly. Offers of help came from her in-laws. But her father-in-law was the sort of strict, dour Ulster Scot Presbyterian who never allowed any sort of “unseemly demeanor”—such as laughter, cheerfulness, or any kind of mischief—on a Sunday. Children and adults alike were required to sit still, hands folded, and contemplate what they had heard in church that morning. For that matter, the rest of the week was not treated with much difference. In addition, he had a habit of needing a bit too much gratitude for any wee bit of help given.
To my mom, the third of the four children, Grandma was a hero and someone of whom to be very proud, and offering pride was something Mom never took lightly. Grandma refused her in-laws’ help, probably to their disdain, because she absolutely did not want to be beholden to them. With quiet determination, she went to work, doing various kinds of office duties. She sold the big house the family had lived in and bought a smaller one that was easier to handle financially and physically. And she raised those four kids all by herself. She never remarried, remained independent after they were all grown, and retired in the 1950s, living alone in her own home with quiet dignity until shortly before she passed away at the age of 93. She spent only the few final days of her life in a nursing home. She was determined to die with those proverbial boots still on, and she damn near did.
Writer and historian Kathleen Guler is the author of the award-winning Macsen’s Treasure series of four novels set in fifth-century Britain. The fourth, A Land Beyond Ravens, won the 2010 Colorado Book Award for Historical Fiction. Drawing from her Welsh and Scottish heritage and a long background in history and literature, the author has also published numerous articles, essays, reviews and poems, is a member of the Historical Novel Society, holds a Masters Degree in history (with honors) from American Military University, and participates in various writing and academic groups focused on history. She is currently working on a new novel that involves Celtic raiders and nomadic Scythians in the fourth century BC. Her books can be found worldwide through Amazon and Smashwords.
Monica Carroll - Women's History Month
Two women have crossed my research path over the last few years. In some ways they seem radically apart, but when I read about them I feel the same spirit in each. The first is Edith Stein (1891-1942). She is, most simply, an astounding woman. She was a student under the great phenomenologist, Edmund Husserl. She completed her dissertation on empathy in 1916. And, as an assistant to Husserl, developed his phenomenology notes into comprehensive writings. I like reading about Husserl, Stein and the others taking long walks each day around the outskirts of Frieburg. I like to imagine walking and talking about impossible things like the experience of consciousness. Stein left Husserl's employ in 1918 but stayed close to the phenomenology circle writing and publishing her own work. Stein underwent a deep religious conversion and became a Carmelite at a convent in Cologne. She transferred to Eckt in 1938 but was arrested and deported to Auschwitz where, most researchers conclude, she was gassed to death. She was beatified in 1987 and canonised in 1998 in Vatican City.
The other woman that astounds me is Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861-1937). She, like Stein, found a way through to a university education. When I read about her she sounds unconventional, strong-willed and open-minded. She became a psychoanalyst, novelist and play-write. Rilke adored her. Freud took guidance from her. I love the famous photograph of her in the back of a cart, wielding a whip to Paul Ree and Friederich Nietzsche. I think this photograph was prophetic for showing us Nietzsche's future. Like Stein, Andreas-Salomé was persecuted for Jewish heritage. Like Stein, she attended University when it was almost impossible for women to do so. And, like Stein, her research broke ground that we build on today.
Empathy, libido, care and the erotic are strange topics to draw together but for me they have a fascinating embodiment from the perspective of womanness. Both Stein and Andreas-Salome lived their lives never knowing they would have an impact on a woman in Canberra, Australia a century or so after their time. I thank them, and all the other women, from whom I take such freedoms today.
The other woman that astounds me is Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861-1937). She, like Stein, found a way through to a university education. When I read about her she sounds unconventional, strong-willed and open-minded. She became a psychoanalyst, novelist and play-write. Rilke adored her. Freud took guidance from her. I love the famous photograph of her in the back of a cart, wielding a whip to Paul Ree and Friederich Nietzsche. I think this photograph was prophetic for showing us Nietzsche's future. Like Stein, Andreas-Salomé was persecuted for Jewish heritage. Like Stein, she attended University when it was almost impossible for women to do so. And, like Stein, her research broke ground that we build on today.
Empathy, libido, care and the erotic are strange topics to draw together but for me they have a fascinating embodiment from the perspective of womanness. Both Stein and Andreas-Salome lived their lives never knowing they would have an impact on a woman in Canberra, Australia a century or so after their time. I thank them, and all the other women, from whom I take such freedoms today.
March 27, 2015
Jane Routley - Women's History Month
Most writers have trouble with their hands or backs just as most ballet dancers have trouble with their feet. I was only 24 when I had my first bout of tendonitis. I’d strained myself in my final cataloguing exam and then went straight out to work stamping books in a library. What had seemed like a piece of luck, turned out to be a disaster. Soon the pain in my shoulders and arms was keeping me up at night. And the worry. RSI was in all the papers at the time and I was certain I had it. The doctors agreed.
I left my job – it was casual and I didn’t want a workers compensation claim on my work record anyway – and went on sickness benefits. That was a horrible 6 months. My mother had gone overseas for the year and I’d been working for the money to join her. I lived in a share house with a fascinating but very difficult friend. I was broke, I had no family support, I spent most of what I had on physiotherapy, I’d just finished Uni so I was suddenly directionless and I’d recently broken up with my long term boyfriend. I’d been longing with a mix of fear and trepidation for all the essays to end so that I could start being a writer. That seemed about to go down the toilet along with my writing career. A life of sickness benefits and poverty seemed to loom. On top of all this I secretly feared I was a neurotic malingerer hiding from the world behind psychosomatic pain.
My mother sent me money for treatment and slowly I put things back together. Counselling and physiotherapy reassured me that my pain was real and so could heal. I’d been neglecting shoulder and back pain all through my university years. It was this that was causing my arm and wrist pain. I started on a regime of regular stretching exercises and tried to keep swimming and keep fit.
Like many SF nerds I hate exercise so it’s been a lesson which I keep having to relearn. You have to maintain your body otherwise it lets you down and you wind up in pain and at the physiotherapist. Small amounts of boring annoying daily exercise (blah!) are better than big lumps of boring annoying exercise once a fortnight. And you should keep your typing muscles flexible in the same way as well.
After my recovery from the pain, I slowly worked my way through a series of short term casual jobs until after 18 months I was able to start my first permanent job as a librarian. During this time writing was a balancing act. I was afraid of getting injured again which made me very dilettantish. But I wrote some short stories and got some good feedback. I kept at it even though it would have been easier to give up. Being a writer was the dream which gladdened my daily grind.
As a feminist I’m a bit ashamed to have to admit how much I owe my husband. But he deserves a lot of credit for the writing career I do have. He was the one who got a job in Germany, where (horror of horrors! :) ) I was not allowed to work for the first two years. He supported me while I devoted myself to writing alone. I was able to keep my back pain at bay. I was able to do the 10 thousand hours or so you need to get good at something. And Germany and Denmark, both of them places with great public transport and bicycle lanes, were good places to stay fit as well. Since I set my own hours I was able to pace myself and avoid more tendonitis.
The nineties were a great time for me. I wrote four novels, I lived in Europe, I had a publisher and I took myself to some killer SF conventions.
Things changed horribly around the beginning of the noughties. Publishers everywhere started shedding their mid-list authors - those who sold books but weren’t best sellers. Knowing that this might be going to happen didn’t make it easier to spend the four years writing and rewriting the last book I wrote for them, the sequel that they passed over and which I hope to bring out as an ebook sometime soon.
The IT work dried up and we returned to Australia to live. We’d been getting homesick anyway and were glad to be home, but alas, it was time for me to get back to the real world and earn a living. The fact that my skill with the Dewey Decimal System was in demand was a mixed blessing. I made good money but after a while the ugly spectre of tendonitis started to rear its head again.
But this time instead of being a disaster, it was actually a piece of luck in disguise. At a time when circumstances in the publishing industry were telling me to go back to full time work and to writing as a hobby, the choice was suddenly made very stark. My body wouldn’t let me do data entry as a cataloguer all day and come home and write all evening or on the weekend. I couldn’t be a writer and a librarian.
I started looking around for part-time work that would pay the bills but not involve data entry. In this day and age it’s not easy. All white collar jobs no matter how humble now involve some kind of data entry. Eventually I stumbled on an ad for Railway Station Attendants in the local paper. I’ve always liked trains. They’re a kind of cut-price promise of wider worlds. It was the best career choice I’ve ever made. If you’ve read the Station Stories I’ve been posting regularly on my blog you will know that I love my job.
Sometimes when I’m wondering if I will ever sell another book or if I will ever be able to go overseas again (or buy a new car when the old one dies) I doubt I’ve made the right career choice. But even though I only write a couple of hours a day, I still have the odd sleepless night of pain and the odd sheepish visits to the physio or chiropractor confessing that, no I haven’t been doing my exercises. I swear I will dedicate my next book to these people.
Deep down I know that this is the best choice for me. I’m very lucky not to have any children or mortgage to support. Tendonitis has dominated my career decisions. I’m not glad about that, but I can see it has forced me to focus on what is really important to me. I’m happy with my life path in a way I wouldn’t have been had I stuck at being a cataloguer. That is the only success that matters.
I left my job – it was casual and I didn’t want a workers compensation claim on my work record anyway – and went on sickness benefits. That was a horrible 6 months. My mother had gone overseas for the year and I’d been working for the money to join her. I lived in a share house with a fascinating but very difficult friend. I was broke, I had no family support, I spent most of what I had on physiotherapy, I’d just finished Uni so I was suddenly directionless and I’d recently broken up with my long term boyfriend. I’d been longing with a mix of fear and trepidation for all the essays to end so that I could start being a writer. That seemed about to go down the toilet along with my writing career. A life of sickness benefits and poverty seemed to loom. On top of all this I secretly feared I was a neurotic malingerer hiding from the world behind psychosomatic pain.
My mother sent me money for treatment and slowly I put things back together. Counselling and physiotherapy reassured me that my pain was real and so could heal. I’d been neglecting shoulder and back pain all through my university years. It was this that was causing my arm and wrist pain. I started on a regime of regular stretching exercises and tried to keep swimming and keep fit.
Like many SF nerds I hate exercise so it’s been a lesson which I keep having to relearn. You have to maintain your body otherwise it lets you down and you wind up in pain and at the physiotherapist. Small amounts of boring annoying daily exercise (blah!) are better than big lumps of boring annoying exercise once a fortnight. And you should keep your typing muscles flexible in the same way as well.
After my recovery from the pain, I slowly worked my way through a series of short term casual jobs until after 18 months I was able to start my first permanent job as a librarian. During this time writing was a balancing act. I was afraid of getting injured again which made me very dilettantish. But I wrote some short stories and got some good feedback. I kept at it even though it would have been easier to give up. Being a writer was the dream which gladdened my daily grind.
As a feminist I’m a bit ashamed to have to admit how much I owe my husband. But he deserves a lot of credit for the writing career I do have. He was the one who got a job in Germany, where (horror of horrors! :) ) I was not allowed to work for the first two years. He supported me while I devoted myself to writing alone. I was able to keep my back pain at bay. I was able to do the 10 thousand hours or so you need to get good at something. And Germany and Denmark, both of them places with great public transport and bicycle lanes, were good places to stay fit as well. Since I set my own hours I was able to pace myself and avoid more tendonitis.
The nineties were a great time for me. I wrote four novels, I lived in Europe, I had a publisher and I took myself to some killer SF conventions.
Things changed horribly around the beginning of the noughties. Publishers everywhere started shedding their mid-list authors - those who sold books but weren’t best sellers. Knowing that this might be going to happen didn’t make it easier to spend the four years writing and rewriting the last book I wrote for them, the sequel that they passed over and which I hope to bring out as an ebook sometime soon.
The IT work dried up and we returned to Australia to live. We’d been getting homesick anyway and were glad to be home, but alas, it was time for me to get back to the real world and earn a living. The fact that my skill with the Dewey Decimal System was in demand was a mixed blessing. I made good money but after a while the ugly spectre of tendonitis started to rear its head again.
But this time instead of being a disaster, it was actually a piece of luck in disguise. At a time when circumstances in the publishing industry were telling me to go back to full time work and to writing as a hobby, the choice was suddenly made very stark. My body wouldn’t let me do data entry as a cataloguer all day and come home and write all evening or on the weekend. I couldn’t be a writer and a librarian.
I started looking around for part-time work that would pay the bills but not involve data entry. In this day and age it’s not easy. All white collar jobs no matter how humble now involve some kind of data entry. Eventually I stumbled on an ad for Railway Station Attendants in the local paper. I’ve always liked trains. They’re a kind of cut-price promise of wider worlds. It was the best career choice I’ve ever made. If you’ve read the Station Stories I’ve been posting regularly on my blog you will know that I love my job.
Sometimes when I’m wondering if I will ever sell another book or if I will ever be able to go overseas again (or buy a new car when the old one dies) I doubt I’ve made the right career choice. But even though I only write a couple of hours a day, I still have the odd sleepless night of pain and the odd sheepish visits to the physio or chiropractor confessing that, no I haven’t been doing my exercises. I swear I will dedicate my next book to these people.
Deep down I know that this is the best choice for me. I’m very lucky not to have any children or mortgage to support. Tendonitis has dominated my career decisions. I’m not glad about that, but I can see it has forced me to focus on what is really important to me. I’m happy with my life path in a way I wouldn’t have been had I stuck at being a cataloguer. That is the only success that matters.
Amanda Bridgeman - Women's History Month
Some days I look at life and think it’s hard. I work a full time job where I manage several staff, am PA to the boss, I spend nights and weekends working on a second job – the books – and I live in an old house that always needs something fixing. And some days I just look at all the work around me and think it’s hard, there’s too much, and I’m tired.
But then I look around me, at my friends and family, and realise that my life isn’t really that hard. It’s busy, sure, but it’s not hard. You see, there are a bunch of women in my life who’ve had it tougher. These women have shown me what it means to be a strong woman.
One of my best friends recently received the ‘all clear’ from having had breast cancer. She’d been in remission for 5 years and was over the moon. I remember when she first found out that she had cancer. She had a seven month old son and had noticed a lump. She ignored the lump at first because she was breastfeeding and thought it was just the way things were. But nine weeks on the lump was still there so she went and got it checked out. And that’s when her life changed for forever. Within a matter of weeks she’d had a series of operations. First the lump was removed and tested which confirmed it was cancer. Then she went back to have the lymph nodes removed and tested, which confirmed the cancer had spread. Then she went back a third time to have her breast removed. It was an absolute whirlwind that sent her life spinning.
Then the chemo started, which came with an array of side effects. Of course there was the nausea, and she lost her hair and had to wear wigs that made her overheat and sweat (I understand now why some people opt for scarves instead). The worst, though, was seeing the impact the chemo had on her fingernails. I remember my friend showing me just how delicately her fingernails sat upon her skin. She wiggled them about as though they were barely attached to her. It was horrible, like something out of a horror film, and all the evidence in the world of just how awful cancer and chemo can be. She’d been to hell and back, all while coping as a first time mum, and yet I don’t think I ever heard her complain…
I look back on my grandmothers and mother with a similar but different awe. One grandmother Lilly, had two children when her husband walked out on her. He simply went off to work and never came back. She held it together, though, and took a job as a barmaid to support her kids. It was there she met the man I came to know and love as my grandfather, Harry. Harry, a fisherman, came with eight kids. Yes, that’s right, eight kids. His ex-wife had been unable to cope with them, but Lilly took them on and together they raised ten children/teenagers, like a regular little Brady Bunch. Ten children/teenagers. Can you imagine…
My other grandmother, Iris, was a farmer’s wife. Living and working the land isn’t an easy job for anyone. Living out in the country, as a farmer’s wife, raising five kids, is a pretty good effort in itself, but add to that a son with polio, a husband who suffers an aneurysm, and years later a battle with breast cancer that results in a mastectomy. Still you never heard her complain. She just took it in her stride and got on with things.
Then there is my mother. She herself raised four kids, and worked businesses with my father throughout. My parents worked hard their whole life, put three of their kids through university, all with grand plans to enjoy retirement when it came. Then the GFC hit, wiping out two thirds of their superannuation, and my father was diagnosed with Lewy Body Dementia (and more recently Alzheimer’s too). So my father became ill, and my mother became his full-time carer. Their grand plans of enjoying retirement became a game of watching pennies and driving from one medical appointment to the next. After working hard their whole life, this was their reward. And yet, I rarely hear my mother complain. She just deals with it and carries on.
So I look at these women: my friend, my grandmothers, my mother, and I see the hardships and struggles they’ve been through, and I shake my head in wonder at just how strong they are. How have they not collapsed in a heap? Despite what has happened to them, they’ve picked themselves up, dusted off, and carried on. They rarely asked for help, they rarely complained. They just did it. They just got things done.
These are the real superwomen of everyday life, and there are many more like them out there. Seriously, we need to take the time more often to just stop and say ‘thank you’ to them. Thank you, for not giving up!
So whenever I think about how ‘hard’ my life is, I simply stop and think of them, then laugh at my foolishness. I could only dream to be as strong as they.
But then I look around me, at my friends and family, and realise that my life isn’t really that hard. It’s busy, sure, but it’s not hard. You see, there are a bunch of women in my life who’ve had it tougher. These women have shown me what it means to be a strong woman.
One of my best friends recently received the ‘all clear’ from having had breast cancer. She’d been in remission for 5 years and was over the moon. I remember when she first found out that she had cancer. She had a seven month old son and had noticed a lump. She ignored the lump at first because she was breastfeeding and thought it was just the way things were. But nine weeks on the lump was still there so she went and got it checked out. And that’s when her life changed for forever. Within a matter of weeks she’d had a series of operations. First the lump was removed and tested which confirmed it was cancer. Then she went back to have the lymph nodes removed and tested, which confirmed the cancer had spread. Then she went back a third time to have her breast removed. It was an absolute whirlwind that sent her life spinning.
Then the chemo started, which came with an array of side effects. Of course there was the nausea, and she lost her hair and had to wear wigs that made her overheat and sweat (I understand now why some people opt for scarves instead). The worst, though, was seeing the impact the chemo had on her fingernails. I remember my friend showing me just how delicately her fingernails sat upon her skin. She wiggled them about as though they were barely attached to her. It was horrible, like something out of a horror film, and all the evidence in the world of just how awful cancer and chemo can be. She’d been to hell and back, all while coping as a first time mum, and yet I don’t think I ever heard her complain…
I look back on my grandmothers and mother with a similar but different awe. One grandmother Lilly, had two children when her husband walked out on her. He simply went off to work and never came back. She held it together, though, and took a job as a barmaid to support her kids. It was there she met the man I came to know and love as my grandfather, Harry. Harry, a fisherman, came with eight kids. Yes, that’s right, eight kids. His ex-wife had been unable to cope with them, but Lilly took them on and together they raised ten children/teenagers, like a regular little Brady Bunch. Ten children/teenagers. Can you imagine…
My other grandmother, Iris, was a farmer’s wife. Living and working the land isn’t an easy job for anyone. Living out in the country, as a farmer’s wife, raising five kids, is a pretty good effort in itself, but add to that a son with polio, a husband who suffers an aneurysm, and years later a battle with breast cancer that results in a mastectomy. Still you never heard her complain. She just took it in her stride and got on with things.
Then there is my mother. She herself raised four kids, and worked businesses with my father throughout. My parents worked hard their whole life, put three of their kids through university, all with grand plans to enjoy retirement when it came. Then the GFC hit, wiping out two thirds of their superannuation, and my father was diagnosed with Lewy Body Dementia (and more recently Alzheimer’s too). So my father became ill, and my mother became his full-time carer. Their grand plans of enjoying retirement became a game of watching pennies and driving from one medical appointment to the next. After working hard their whole life, this was their reward. And yet, I rarely hear my mother complain. She just deals with it and carries on.
So I look at these women: my friend, my grandmothers, my mother, and I see the hardships and struggles they’ve been through, and I shake my head in wonder at just how strong they are. How have they not collapsed in a heap? Despite what has happened to them, they’ve picked themselves up, dusted off, and carried on. They rarely asked for help, they rarely complained. They just did it. They just got things done.
These are the real superwomen of everyday life, and there are many more like them out there. Seriously, we need to take the time more often to just stop and say ‘thank you’ to them. Thank you, for not giving up!
So whenever I think about how ‘hard’ my life is, I simply stop and think of them, then laugh at my foolishness. I could only dream to be as strong as they.
