Iris Lavell's Blog, page 12

Romance Writing: Three BLPG members to speak at Elizabeth Jolley Conference coming up August 16

The inaugural Elizabeth Jolley Conference entitled: Reading and Writing in the 21st Century will be held at the Esplanade Hotel in Fremantle as part of the 2013 Romance Writers Conference. The Elizabeth Jolley Conference is sponsored and coordinated by Curtin University and will be held on Friday August 16. The Romance Writers Conference includes this conference and spans the weekend Saturday August 17 - Sunday August 18.

Three BLPG members are scheduled to speak in the morning session of the Elizabeth Jolley Conference on Friday 16 - Trisha Kotai-Ewers, myself, and Lynn Allen.

Trisha Kotai-Ewers is President of the Fellowship of Australian Writers in WA and her book Listen to the Talk of Us: People with Dementia Speak Out was reviewed on this blog last year. Her talk will be called:

Pepper Tree Bay; red dust and riding boots: questioning life’s margins in three novels by Dorothy Lucie Sanders/Lucy Walker

Lynn Allen and I will follow Trisha's talk (both on at the same time in different rooms - dang!)
Lynn's profile appeared on this blog earlier - here. Lynn's talk is:

Exploring women and modalities of power in fiction: escaping the straightjacket of genre into digital space

Mine is:

Make Love, Not War: Baby Boomer (Romance?) Fiction in the Australian Context

Still, it's not all about us! There are a range of excellent speakers and fascinating topics relating to the romance writing genre with some wonderful home-grown authors including Deborah Burrows, Rachel Robertson and Alice Nelson.
 
The Keynote speaker Professor Imelda Whelehan


Would love to see you there if you are coming along.


 
 

Bullies and Chair-Kickers

A writer friend recently posted a powerful article on her blog about bullying in a school environment.  It's a situation that makes many of us very angry, and one that is not confined to schools. I have had brilliant colleagues in the past who have been at first lauded, and then as the workplace politics change, harassed and bullied out of their jobs. Someone once told me that she'd been told a particular person had been appointed as a 'chair kicker'. When she asked what this meant, she was told this: "Well, if you walk past someone's chair and you kick it, it is annoying. If you do it often enough they will get up and move. Then they will leave." The strategy seems to be a way of getting around unfair dismissal rules, if they continue to exist. It seems to happen mostly to people who are doing a reasonable job but who do not serve the interests (some might say the self-interests) of those in positions above them. Interesting too, that these kinds of people sometimes rise to positions of some influence and power, and are unburdened by the inconvenience of a conscience or any other aspect of communal responsibility likely to slow them down in their desire to become (somewhat ironically) held in high regard by the community they walk over.

There are probably deep seated reasons for this behaviour - innate and learned reasons, but the fact remains that there is also an element of decision-making and I think that this decision-making is not motivated by feelings of benevolence towards the other, or generosity or a willingness to work cooperatively with the other to grow if there is a problem with the organisational fit given a new direction perhaps. In some cases perhaps there is an element of defensiveness in the bully or chair-kicker born of a lack of skill or competence that, rather than face and address, they project onto others.

Why is she writing this on a blog for writers, you might ask. I suppose it is something that each of us must grapple with when we are writing, what the purpose of our writing might be, whether entertainment and pure art is enough. In some cases I think yes, it is. Then again, when we are made aware of social practices which seem to be increasingly pervasive and negatively impact on many peoples' lives, given that we are in a position to raise concerns about how the ripple effect damages them and all of us, I would say no.

I was listening to a talk by Philosopher and Ethicist Peter Singer who was speaking at a writers festival in Tasmania recently, and he threw out the challenge to writers there to write about the big-picture things that matter - world poverty, animal treatment and climate change. I think the seemingly small-picture nastiness that spreads and consolidates into the harsh attitudes that drive the way these bigger things are acted on, is just as important, and a place where, as writers, we might make a real difference. Refusing to tolerate a bullying culture is a big part of that.

Project summaries BLPG Members - Glen Hunting, June Winsome-Smith, Valerie Preston, and Louise Allan

Glen Hunting



Writes short stories and drama, and is also working on a novel. His short fiction has appeared in dotdotdash journal, and in the anthologies The Kid on the Karaoke Stage and Other Stories, and An Alphabetical Amulet.


June Winsome-Smith

Currently writing a speculative fiction novel in three parts...  and complementary non-fiction Journeybook. First draft planned for early 2014

Valerie Preston

Likes to write short stories and is currently working on a lengthy project of life writing – including reflections on the way stories inform identities and influence the outcomes of people’s lives

Louise Allan

A post on this blog with Louise Allan's profile can be found here. Louise  is revising her first novel and has a short story coming out in an OOTA anthology later in the year. Also blogs at louise-allan.com

BLPG member Nicole Chalmer's project

 Secrets of the Island Coast: a history of people and nature in the Esperance – Recherché Region.

Some of the islands around Esperance - Esperance Helitours  “The Island Coast” is the south eastern coast of WA. Its squeaky white beaches look out to the scattered Islands of the Recherche Archipelago. There are over two hundred Islands, some with unique plant and animal species. Most are still largely free of past and immediate human influence.  Landlocked islands of massive granite domes are dotted across the undulating mainland landscape. Humans, though a blink in geo-biological time, have had profound influences on historical and present ecosystems. In turn, they have been and are still being, patterned and moulded by the landscapes subtle influences. 

Esperance Helitours My book aims to allow readers to develop an appreciation of the historical contexts of human activities and their impacts on the Island Coast environment. The chapters progress through past to present human impacts, including vital physical factors such as fire and clearing for agriculture, upon the lives of the regions animals and plants. Through personalized narratives, photographs and illustrations, my book will attempt to reignite the primeval and heartfelt feelings for nature that were once central to survival of all peoples and their cultures.
Mammals  
The original native mammals of the Island coast are mostly gone. All that are left are the large kangaroos and some of the small species, such as Pygmy possums and Honey possums, that are have rapid breeding and generational turnover as a feature of their lifecycle.



Dunnart Dunnartsare members of the carnivorous marsupial Dasyurid family. Those found on the Island coast include the grey-bellied dunnart (Sminthopsis griseoventer) which occurs as far east as Cape Arid and the fat tailed dunnart (S.crassicaudata) which ranges across southern Australia. Dunnarts are small marsupials about the size of a mouse with large ears and eyes. The fat tailed dunnart stores fat in its tail which can become like a small turgid carrot when full. They are aggressive predators eating small invertebrates, frogs, lizards and mice.  


Western Pygmy Possum



Small striped Honey Possums (Tarsipes rostratus) or Noolbenger, are half the weight of a mouse. They are not really possums but the only surviving member of a long extinct marsupial group. Honey possums are relatively common and found in heathland and banksia woodlands and are nectivores which means they are specialized to feed almost exclusively on flower nectar and pollen.  They are probably very important pollinators of heath plants, the marsupial equivalent of a honeyeater as they have only residual teeth and a long brush tipped tongue for probing flowers. I have seen them at night by spotlight on B. speciosa.



As wet areas dry up in late spring early summer the waterbirds contract back to permanently  watered areas, such as provided by the RAMSAR (wetlands of International significance) listed, Lake Warden Wetland system that features the Hooded Plover (Thinornis rubricolis) as its mascot bird. Lake Warden itself was the single most regionally important lake for breeding of the Hooded Plover and its man made problems due to catchment overclearing are being dealt with through fencing projects, planting perennial grasses and drainage. This iconic bird, that is so under threat in the rest of Australia due to human over use of beaches, will hopefully return to breeding  in these wetlands.




Southern carpet pythons (Morelia spilota imbricata) are found on the Island coast and Islands of the Recherche. They are beautifully patterned, with diamond shaped clear pale grey to yellow marking against a dark background. The largest snakes found here, they have been recorded at 2.5 metres.  Pythons are not venomous and kill by wrapping coils around the prey’s body and suffocating it. Prey is located using heat sensor pits along their bottom jaw. 


Dragonfly Order Odonata comprises dragonflies and damselflies. The dragonflies and damselflies are an ancient group of insects around long before the dinosaurs. Fossils as old as 250 million years have been found and the largest insect that ever lived was a dragonfly with a wingspan of 70cm
 



  

BLPG member profile: Marlish Glorie

I have written a number of plays and three novels. My novels have all met with different fates. First one: The Reluctant Housewife was designated to the proverbial bottom drawer, second novel was published: The Bookshop on JacarandaStreet , third novel: Oh Happiness! looking for a publisher  (but thinking of self-publishing as an eBook), and I’m currently wrestling with my fourth novel Tilda Branch.

Words and action - the stories we tell ourselves

I tell myself it's too cold to get up. I stay in bed. I tell myself I love cold, crisp mornings. I get up. It might not be that simple. In between the "too cold to get up story" and staying in bed inaction I feel the warmth of the cocoon I have created under the blankets, the promise of heat emanating from my partner's body like the faint light from a distant star - actually I think the heat goes more in the other direction,  the cold rush of air on my knee when he rolls over and takes the doona with him. Then I tell myself the other story about loving cold, crisp mornings, hot cup of coffee, nature calling, appointments etc. I guess my pictures have lots of labels on them. I don't think it's the same for everyone.

I think of the little one whose autism either closes off speech or produces a bit of a word salad. I wonder if image and the music of the everyday sounds abound in his mind. Synaesthesia too - that phenomenon where sounds have colour or taste, where images feel like something tangible. What are his stories and how do they influence his decision-making?

Perhaps we all have a kind of synaesthesia. It's just that the 'wiring' in a typical brain that links to our words also links to sounds, tastes, colours, images, action sequences.

But I also think about the way our stories can cause us to treat others well. Or badly. We create them, and then we believe them, and then we act on them. They can cause healing, or harm. They can influence others in their beliefs. We need to ask ourselves, to what end? And we need to follow that end through to its natural conclusion.

Anyway that's my story, and I'm sticking to it!

Book reviews

The book I chose to reviewCheck out Annabel Smith's Friday Faves where each week she asks someone to share a review of their favourite all-time book. This coming Friday she asked me to contribute, and I found it difficult to choose what to write about, hence the long introduction to the review, but I always feel that any book that grabs my attention at a particular time does so because it is relevant to something that I am learning about at the time. My current favourite is The Crying Room.

Anyway the link might introduce you to Annabel's excellent blog (if you haven't already stumbled across it) so I hope you will take the detour to check it out.

New poem by Patricia Johnson

The Baby

I tried to save her
but the baby fell.
I tried to hold her
but did not hold her well.
 
I tried to love her
but my love was ill.
I tried to keep her
but she had her will.
 
My baby fell
and broke apart her life.
Then in my heart
there lay a glittering knife.
 
The knife is rusted now
it still remains.
My heart is burnt and scarred
and loves her just the same.
 

What does love have to do with it?

At the risk of being howled down (in my own imagination!) I wanted to write something about love – the broad, compassionate Agape kind, in the Greek definition, rather than romantic and sexual Erosnecessarily, although that kind of love is good too. I wanted to write about how I think this compassionate kind of love could lead to a deep empathy with our created characters, and especially with those who behave differently from ourselves and hold different values. I have been thinking that this kind of love is a strong partner to authenticity and integrity for the novelist. I have been thinking about this for a while, but wasn’t quite sure how to put it, or even if I could implicitly claim it, as it is possibly one of the most difficult things to achieve.

I think it is so much easier to be callous and cynical these days if you want to look smart, and possibly in some quarters cynical is more socially and critically accepted when something is being judged as realistic, serious writing. Love, compassion and kindness are often seen as soft options, or as best contained within a religious paradigm, as if they can't credibly exist outside this container, either in life or in writing. Nevertheless I would suggest that they do, commonly, and that love and the humanity of the characters that we create, are tied together; that we need to feel real love for the identities that we create on the pages that we write, and that if one separates love and character, love and the humanity of the book, there will be an impoverishment of what might have been. I think this because I believe love opens up understanding and possibility, whereas cynicism throws up the barriers and leads to suspicion and the closing down of possibilities. Cynicism is a protective mechanism, understandable, but if invariably employed, too inflexible for unlimited exploration in writing.
So I was heartened to read an article in the weekend’s Weekend Australian Review magazine, entitled: Love, not reason, at heart of human rights, in which Miriam Cosic reviewed a book by Alexandre Lefebvre. The book she reviewed is called: Human Rights as a Way of Life: On Bergson’s Political Philosophy. Lefebvre was a student of Henri Bergson, a French Philosopher who was born in 1859, and who worked with US President Woodrow Wilson to create the League of Nations which, although flawed, hoped to prevent future wars, following the First World War.
The reviewer Cosic writes, ‘As the cover (to the book) has it: “For Bergson, the main purpose of human rights is to initiate all human beings into love”… In Lefebvre’s take on it, love can nurture not only those in need of protection but those who extend the protection too.’
And when I read this it occurred to me that one of the assumptions that I have made with regard to the responsibility of the writer, all along, is that writing at its best is about human rights and about working towards initiating human beings into love or returning them to love. I have been assuming that whatever we write has the potential to add something to the world that might make it a slightly more understanding, loving and compassionate place. No, I am not a religious person, and certainly I am no Mother Teresa, but I do like that quote from the great lady: “Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.”
Maybe this is the new way of the interconnected cyber-world. Each one of us who makes our voice heard has the potential to do small things with great love.

A Daily Writing Schedule

Certain things stick in my head, becoming mantras, and as I share them with others, and others do likewise, they can become memes. A successful writer at a workshop I once attended said, "If you want to be a writer, write. You can fix a bad page, but you can't fix a blank page." She went on to suggest that a daily writing practice of as little as 300 words a day will provide you with 365 x 300 = 109,500 words in a year, provided you do what she said, which is to 'write forward' - easier said than done, but a great goal to keep going with new material until the first draft is done. It is possible to do that and still hold down a full-time job, provided you don't want to do anything else like watch television, go on the social media all night, and spend time with your family. Actually it is still possible, but you need to be well-disciplined, want to do it, and have something to say. You can cut that hundred thousand words down to between 70,000 and 80,000 and you have a novel sized book of around 250 pages. Of course, by that stage, they need to be good pages, and the right words in the right order - at least from your perspective.

I think there is value in daily goal-setting, in writing forward and in progressing the story in a linear way. I wish I could do it, but my process seems to consist of (yes) daily writing practice, but not actually writing forward as a general rule, but in fits and starts, and in fact much of the writing is writing within what I already have down. And inside my own head, of course. I do have a daily writing schedule which consists of writing daily. That's it.

This week I started the new novel. Officially. I drew up a plan and stuck it on my wall. I used the table function on my word processor and painstakingly put a new date in every little square. On the first day I spent my time writing in between doing the laundry, dishes, bed, listening to an interview on the radio with a professor of microbiology on bacteria. I checked my emails, and cooked up a big pot of Dahl with some extremely hot chillies. I know all that sounds like skiving off, but I think of it as my thinking time. At the end of the day I wrote in the first little square. I have written in four little squares now. So far, so good. So far, I think I like what I've done, but I'm not showing it to anyone yet. No, not for a while.

Day five. I'd like to write forward, and I probably will - a bit. Knowing the way I go though, there will be a lot of working what I have - already, and that seems to bring new stuff in, as I take stuff out. The net result is inching forward.

Wish me luck. And if you're between projects at the moment why not start one now? Even an average of 100 words a day will get you a novella-sized manuscript by this time next year. 100 'fixed', or even 'bad' ones that you can fix.