My ASA Mentorship

My writing space at Varuna

In late 2014, following a nudge from one of my RMIT lecturers, I applied for a Mentorship with the Australian Society of Authors. I submitted excerpts from my manuscript The Year of the Lilyweeds (since renamed) which had won a Varuna fellowship the previous year.
I spent hours perusing the ASA list of all the people available as mentors - everyone who's anyone in the world of writing and publication, it seemed to me - and eventually chose Diana Giese, a Sydney-based writer, literary journalist and editor. One of the many testimonials available said "Diana understands the culture and essence of the publishing world, and what it takes to turn a manuscript into a publishable work. It was her encouragement, unfaltering belief and undying optimism...that kept me going when I was ready to call it a day...."
I also invested time in close examination of Diana's own website - http://www.dianagiese.com.au and concluded that here was a woman who gets things done! And how right that turned out to be.
The mentorship has finished now and I have been the recipient of 12 months of the most wonderful support and insightful comment from Diana throughout. I was invited to join the ASA as an Associate Member and have enjoyed ongoing contact with the ASA administration, who have been prompt, friendly and informative whenever I've had a question. 

There's no 'but' coming here. It has been an amazing privilege throughout. For a start Diana read my entire manuscript, which mentors are not obliged to do. From that point we worked on the manuscript together throughout the year - mostly via email - negotiating changes, deleting parts that didn't seem to go anywhere and adding a lot of material to expand the story and let the characters grow. I deleted about 25,000 words and added another 40,000. 
It was such a thrill and a challenge to hear comments like 'Your readers will want to know more about Jack' or 'I think Bridie and Jacob must get together'. As the story is an historical fiction I found myself researching  things like National Service in Australia, music of the Depression years, what might an isolated woman be reading in 1950, knowing that I had someone to be accountable to and knowing that she wouldn't miss a trick!
I have a very different manuscript now from what it was 12 months ago. The latest hard copy went off with a kiss and a sigh to Diana a week ago. All fingers crossed.
What an honour this experience has been. The What Now? phase isn't nearly so daunting, knowing that this manuscript, thanks to Diana and the ASA, is as good as I can possibly make it.

Postscript:

Oh! The 2015/16 winners have just been announced! Congratulations and the best of luck to every one of them!

https://www.asauthors.org/emerging-writers-and-illustrators-mentorships

~*~

Jane Gardam & The Queen of the Tambourine

What a treat it was, when trawling through the bookshelves one wet weekend down at the beach, to come across a Jane Gardam novel that I hadn't read. This is like discovering an unredeemed book voucher hidden in the back of your wallet.
Jane Gardam is one of those writers who can take you so far into someone else's world that for days after finishing the book you find yourself wondering how the protagonist is going. She is a prolific and highly awarded English writer—think Penelope Lively, Muriel Spark— whose other books I have loved, God on the Rocks and Crusoe's Daughter especially.
There are reams of reviews about Queen of the Tambourine and all other Jane Gardam novels of course and I'm not about to write another one. 
(Go to Goodreads https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/268104.The_Queen_of_the_Tambourine )

But if you haven't discovered her yet there's a world of delight awaiting you. The Queen of the Tambourine is a tale told entirely in letters written by the apparently disintegrating Eliza Peabody to her mysterious neighbour, Joan, who may or may not be missing. Her other neighbours in the posh South London street provide Eliza's whole context and her preoccupation. She is the ultimate unreliable narrator.

From this sad, hilarious and piercingly perceptive story, written in 1991 remember, I couldn't resist recording some examples of her writing, those bits you come across and want to underline, turning down page corners (tch tch) so you can find them again afterwards. (Elliot Perlman and John Banville inspire the same urge.)
So, a few of the thoughts of dippy but perceptive Eliza Peabody:  "I seriously think Simon is taking drugs. He has that bright look, and there's something about his shoulder blades..."
Of modern London mothers: "...their children get themselves about the world to foreign lands at an age when their grandparents were still being taken for short walks in the park."
Mr Forbes with his "skimmed-milk smile" and the visiting speaker, smoking "a very loose-looking cigarette with tobacco hanging out of it like hairs from a nose."
"...the golfers in their yellow jerseys, like wandering bananas..."
Or later, Eliza's friend stares at "some polystyrene urns and a statue of Pandora, letting all the troubles of the world out of a polystyrene box at her feet. She had a join all down her sides and over her head like an Easter egg that would fall apart if you tapped it."
In the fridge there is "an open tin of anchovies. Fillets of worm. Unwound it could sever an artery."
And of the offspring of a family friend "The great mysteries of puberty are yet to come for these girls... " although "Grizel is getting very thick with her sports mistress." 
Everything so under-stated and original.
The thoughts of Eliza Peabody take us along a sometimes disconcerting pathway that is well worth following, just for the privilege of being inside her head as she tries to make sense of her own unfathomable world.

~*~

Haiku From Sue Canders

My friend, poet and photographer Sue Canders, sometimes makes my day with a new haiku and photo from the beautiful Bass Coast.
This is to-day's gift to me, and now to you!

Neon striped sunrise

A warm wrap for cool morning

Fashionable dawn

A Festive Greeting to All

...... and may everyone give you book vouchers for Christmas.

What to Read When You Have Nothing to Read

When you read fairly quickly it's not always practical to pay $30 each for three books that you might finish in a week. So to supplement the joy of succumbing to such a bundle of new books from Readings or Dymocks I also swap books with friends and browse secondhand bookshops or book exchanges. (No, I don't use libraries. I just can't relax, knowing I have to take it back.)
But for a while recently I was in that panic-inducing state of having nothing to read. But a good browse in the wonderful Ramalama Book Exchange in Wonthaggi got me by.

There I found one of the most beautiful stories I've read for a long time: The Light Between Oceans, by M.L Stedman.

It made me ache with pity for not just one, but several, of the main characters. Goodreads said:
'...we are swept into a story about extraordinarily compelling characters seeking to find their North Star in a world where there is no right answer, where justice for one person is another’s tragic loss'. 
The fabulous setting on a remote island with the lighthouse keeper certainly helped. Read it and be changed.

Then I bought The Fisherman, the much anticipated debut novel by Nigerian writer Chigozie Obioma. I'd so loved his beautiful essay 'The Audacity of Prose' that I couldn't wait to read his book. It did not disappoint, a gripping story and so 'novel' with its setting of an unfamiliar Nigeria in which characters swayed between that culture and the infringments of the western world. Mysticism, superstition, danger, the powerful ties of family and a sense of foreboding right from the beginning—all combined to chart the destiny of the so easy-to-love brothers and the terrible fate ahead for them.

Sebastian Faulks' Engleby was on the shelves at home and unread so that was next—published in 2007 but recommended some time ago by Andrea Goldsmith for the tricks that the clever use of voice and point of view can play on us.  The blurb concludes - '...unlike anything he has written before: contemporary, demonic, heart-wrenching and funny, in the deepest shades of black.'

I tried Gary Crew's The Diviner's Son and was so depressed by the premise which involved a boy chained up by the ankles in a sideshow caravan that I put it away after the first few chapters, figuring that my life would not be enhanced by carrying that image in my head for one moment longer than I had to. I know, what a sook.

And then I got a cold. One of those head colds that makes you a thorough misery-guts to live with and keeps you coughing, night and day, for weeks on end. So I hit the easy reads. Having heard Liz Bryski speak at the Writers Festival I noticed several of her books on the shelves of another favourite book exchange, so I bought four. (I had read one of hers previously but I forgot, and bought it again.) I'm sure there's a huge market for these books with their subject matter of vaguely disenfranchised women busting out and 'finding themselves' but—suffice to say they were ideal for someone functioning on just the two cylinders, with a head cold and a perpetually runny nose. I look at them now and for the life of me can't remember the plots of any of them.

But now that I'm better I plan to embark on something a little different (for me). I rarely read non-fiction but have been tempted by Richard Glover's highly acclaimed memoir, Flesh Wounds. And, although I rarely read about magic, Jennifer Byrne's Bookclub on the ABC at the weekend has me thinking seriously of buying Lev Grossman's Trilogy, The Magicians, which Goodreads calls 'an enthralling coming-of-age tale about magic practiced (sic) in the real world - where good and evil aren't black and white, and power comes at a terrible price.'

It has been called 'the grown-ups' Harry Potter'. Not sure if that's a good thing or not.


Anyway, that should keep me going until my study term ends, by which time I might decide to read Wuthering Heights again, in the hope that this time Cathy comes to her senses and marries Heathcliff instead.

~*~

Literary Support

Every aspiring writer needs someone on hand to discuss things with when necessary.
Stella can be very thoughtful about the big issues of Life.
Here she is preparing a case for the use of the present tense.

Some are more help than others...

~ * ~

The Audacity of Prose

Chigozie Obioma - The Audacity of Prose

Before I'd heard of Chigozie Obioma's debut novel The Fishermen - currently long listed for the Man Booker Prize - I'd read the essay he wrote for The Millions entitled "The Audacity of Prose". The essay came my way via Krissy Kneen, a Brisbane writer who said Obioma's essay made her want to stand up and shout 'Hurrah!'

"I've been so bored with the trend towards clean, crisp unadorned prose sweeping the literary world of late. Gone is the poetry and playfulness that marks some of my favourite writing."
This struck such a chord with me that I followed the trail along through her article, to Obioma's essay and then to the first enticing chapter of his novel, now available from the BBC at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05mq8wt .

The main contention of Obioma's essay is an objection to the prevailing trend in fiction writing towards sparse, minimalist prose. "The enthroned style," he says "is dished out in schools under the strict dictum: Less is more ... resulting in the crowning of minimalism as the cherished form of writing."
While he accepts that a minimalist style is often the right style for the task at hand, it is also the case, he claims, that "more can also be more, and less is often inevitably less..... excess is excess but inadequate is also inadequate."
Writers today, he says, should be aware that the novels that are remembered will be those that err on the side of audacious prose. Among the proponents of this he includes Nabokov, Updike, Conrad, as well as William Faulkner, Shirley Hazzard, Ian McEwan and Cormac McCarthy to name a few.

Obioma's own fiction prose is anything but ornate. There is no 'flowery' language, no pretension, but neither is there a dominance of those flat, clipped sentences to which present day aspiring writers are so often told they must aspire. On the basis of the one chapter of The Fisherman though, Obiamo is already a master of the exquisite metaphor, the simile so apt we want to stop and write it down.
I for one can't wait to read the lot, and as I sit here on this dreary, grey Melbourne afternoon I can't help but wish to be transported to the Byron Bay Writers' Festival where the man himself will speak any time now. And the sun will most likely be shining, tourists trekking up to the lighthouse, not to mention the Pacific Ocean crashing away across the sandhills....

Oh well, you can at least read his essay here:

http://www.themillions.com/2015/06/the-audacity-of-prose.html?utm_source=Newsletter+Master+Database&utm_campaign=1d138caeae-Great_reads_31_July_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_00600a80f3-1d138caeae-72131637