Peggy Frew and Elizabeth Harrower

What a privilege to have heard both these women speak recently during the spate of Writers' Festivals that have provided so much for us to think about. It was with some surprise though that I started to think about these two together, in relation to two most memorable protagonists.

I've been reading like mad lately, the consequence of a pile of wonderful books on my To Read pile, many of them from young women graduates of RMIT's Professional Writing and Editing course. I should be queasy with envy, I know, but in fact I'm filled with admiration. Lucy Treloar, Kate Mildenhall, Myfanwy Jones and Peggy Frew to name a few.

The story that has stuck in my mind most recently has been Peggy Frew's Hope Farm.

Set mainly in a Gippsland hippy commune in the mid 1980's, this tells the story of 13 year old Silver and her needy, unreliable mother Ishtar, who conceives Silver when she herself is just 17 and decides, bravely, to keep the baby when all around her are pressing her to give her up.  (At times I wondered if it would have been better for Silver if her mother had made a different decision but that's by the by.)

There are endless great reviews of this book and I don't plan to write another one but the character of Silver affected me to the bones. I lived with her as she shivered through the cold of this strange, ramshackle commune where her mother has dragged her to live, silent and neglected. I lived with her as she longed, in vain, to be noticed, heard, loved and included. And all the while I had a spectre on my shoulder asking 'who does Silver remind you of?'
In the night it came to me, as so often happens - it is Emily Lawrence in Elizabeth Harrower's  The Long Prospect. Harrower gives us a piercing, gut-wrenching portrait of 12 year old Emily, starved of love and condemned to live, as an outsider and a nuisance, in the boarding house owned by her detestable grandmother, Lilian. Emily's own parents have moved to Sydney with scant regard for their daughter's happiness and have only cursory contact with her.

Ishtar, Silver's mother, has none of the malice of Lilian. She is just too needy herself—with good cause—to give Silver a fraction of what she craves. What struck me about the two girls—teetering on the brink of adolescence, when a mother's love might be the most important thing in the world—is the terrible silence of their loneliness, their powerlessness to express their needs, especially their need for love, stability and belonging. They are piercingly similar and I could offer Peggy Frew few greater compliments than a comparison with Elizabeth Harrower.

But one of the (many) things that so impressed me about Hope Farm was the psychological consistency of how Silver develops into adulthood. Without the overt mother love she craves Silver has little chance of escaping the dysfunctional traits that might result - attachment issues among them.

It is perhaps a truism that the most important thing a mother's love teaches us is that we can be loveable. Without that belief it might well be a rocky road to fulfilment. We see that in Silver as she grows up into adulthood. With Emily Lawrence we're left to wonder, and hope.
Now if only someone would write a sequel to The Long Prospect...

~*~

One thing leads to another...

After my spaniel Archie's success on Twitter I didn't feel quite so bad when, for a subject called Creating Digital Content at RMIT, I had to start a Twitter site of my own - yes, in my own name, no hiding behind Archie. I set out to follow mainly writers, publishers, some favourite 'reviews' (Paris, London, Sydney, New York) and a select few of the umpteen million How-to's posted by those (who are these people?) who would tell us how easy it is to be a successful—and presumably, published—writer in this world where the proliferation of self-published books seems positively alarming. Quality control anyone?

The self-promotion thing on Twitter is hard to take. Archie never had to put up with this. But, I have to confess that, if you can bypass all that, a lot of excellent articles come my way - 'Popular in Your Network' - without me having to trawl through the entire journal, review or whatever. Someone in cyberspace is pretty cluey about selecting what they think I might like to read. More often than not, they get it right.

For the same subject at RMIT we had to create a major project, most typically a website of some kind which many chose as a place in which to showcase their own writing.  Lots of them are hugely impressive.
I chose instead to create a site where I could explain the background, the impetus, behind a manuscript of mine called The Time of the Lilyweeds. This manuscript has been through Varuna, through an ASA mentorship and has, it seems, been 'polished' to within an inch of its life. There are now no excuses for not putting it out there to publishers to find its way either into print or into their no-doubt bulging recycle bin. A terrifying thought. I have other manuscripts finished, another underway which I'm putting out to trusted friends in episode form for feedback. But Lilyweeds, as it's referred to by those I know, love and trust, is the one I'm committed to, the one I want 'out there' as a lasting tribute to a group of women whom I believe to be severely under-represented in Australian fiction.
It might be a bit premature, mightn't it, giving this unpublished manuscript its own website at this early stage?

But if you'd like to know about it and why I came to write it, there's a lot of information there at

https://lilyweeds.me

I'd love you to let me know what you think...

~*~

https://twitter.com/gabygard1218

https://twitter.com/Archie_Spaniel

The Lost Love of Harold Fry & Miss Queenie Hennessy

Recently a friend lent* me The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy but then I heard it was in fact a sequel to The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry so I bought that and read it first.  In fact the author, Rachel Joyce (I think I'd love her as a friend), prefers them to be thought of as companion works rather than sequels and prequels.

Harold Fry, retired and saddened by his loveless marriage and one shockingly tragic event in his life, receives a letter from Queenie Hennessy, a woman he worked with many years ago. She writes to let him know she is in a hospice with not long to live. Harold, upset, writes the flimsiest of replies but when he heads out to post his letter, decides to keep walking until he can deliver his note to Queenie in person, 600 miles away at the other end of England, a feat which he hopes will keep her alive. His trials along the way and the people he meets tell us a lot about the human heart.

Description of landscape in literature is pretty much out of favour these days. I love it—writing it and reading it—but many others are scathing and roll their eyes in disdain. So imagine my pleasure in finding that Harold is liberally sprinkled with descriptions of the English countryside such as:

"It had never been such a beautiful May. Every day the sky shone a peerless blue, untouched by cloud. Already the gardens were crammed with lupins, roses, delphiniums, honeysuckle and lime clouds of lady's mantle. Insects cricked, hovered, bumbled and whizzed."

So right now you're either gagging or thinking 'gosh I must read this!' (And it was long listed for the Man Booker prize.)
In Queenie these beautiful images abound but are even more touching because the beauty of landscape is all Queenie has, apart from her memories of her long and unspoken love of Harold Fry.

"I could lose a morning trying to identify the colours and shapes in a rock pool; anemones with long black tentacles, rust-green flowers, silvery barnacles, skittering black crabs and pink-spotted starfish."

Despite the subject matter, neither book is maudlin. Queenie herself can be very droll:

"I should add here there are things I have tried to lose. A pair of slippers I won in a tombola. A sunflower ornament that clapped its plastic leaves as daylight came and released a refreshing odour of such chemical toxicity that all my bean seedlings died."

Of the two books, I loved Queenie more. It's wry, funny, heartbreaking and peopled with characters you might never forget, from the selfless nuns who run the hospice to some of the terminally ill patients, including the foul-mouthed Finty who won't die without dress-ups and a fight, and who, in her final days, learns to tweet and says 'Fuck! I'm trending!"

There is a beautiful, personal piece by Rachel Joyce (left) at the end of Queenie in which she says "I set out to write a book about dying that was full of life." In this she has succeeded well. Both books are set to be much loved for a long time to come.

And I do find all that description of landscape very gratifying. I hope it becomes a trend.

~*~

* past tense of lend - lent or loaned? I had to look it up.

On My "To Read" Table

Last Saturday I finally got to head to Dymocks in the city to spend my Christmas voucher. What a long time it's been sitting there, waiting, burning a hole in my wallet. Luckily my Clunes friend, who seems to have read most of the books in the world, was on hand to occasionally pull a face or shake his head and very cautiously advise against something I'd picked up to consider buying. He did this with The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared. 'Nah, you wouldn't like it,' he said, and after a brief verbal review, I believed him.

He did try to talk me into This Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, saying it was the most profoundly moving thing he'd ever read but I've heard others say it's slit-your-wrists territory and will give you nightmares for years, so I erred on the side of caution and left it on the shelf, for the time being at least.

So what did I end up with?

• The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce
• Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
• We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
• The Green Road by Anne Enright and 
• My Brilliant Friend the first of those Ellena Ferrante books that seem to have divided many people into love it/hate it camps.

So, plenty to go on with. Winter coming, open fires to light and any number of 4-legged friends to share the couch.

Not much room for me....



~*~

The Tell-Tale Heart - How Scary Is It Really?

Last week in my Short Form Fiction class, my lecturer, the amazing Ania Walwicz, brought us copies of The Telltale Heart, a short story written by Edgar Allan Poe in 1843.
When I saw it, my own heart did a little flip as I remembered being scared out of my wits by this tale when I was very young. How young, I now wonder? I said in class that my mother read this tale to me when I was about ten and it frightened the daylights out of me. Now, after having read it and discussed it with others, I can't believe this to be right. I know that there was at least one well-thumbed copy of Edgar Allan Poe stories in the house, but surely no-one would read such a horrible story to a ten-year old? Yet the written tale itself is not really all that frightening.
To summarise, a young man becomes obsessed with the pale, dead eye of the old man he lives with, to such an extent that he finally kills him, chops him up and hides him under the floorboards. (See? Not scary at all.) He denies his own patently obvious madness and when two policemen arrive, summoned by the old man's screams, the young man's own guilt leads him, quite quickly, to confess.

The impetus for his confession, and what scared me witless as a ten year old, is the sound of the old man's heartbeat, pounding away, unstoppable, even after his death.
Many films have been made of this short story - predictably all short, as there's not much of a plot. One, made by Brian Desmond Hurst in 1934, was quickly withdrawn from the cinema and written up in newspapers at the time as the film that was 'too horrible to show'.

My family were all avid movie-goers so I suspect it was one of these short films I got to see so young. And ever since, the sound of a pounding heart, in any movie, has had the capacity to scare me quite terribly. Now that I've re-read The Telltale Heart, combed YouTube for a dozen versions of the short film and watched them all, I think the scare factor has dissipated.

Pity, really. I think I'll kind of miss it....

~*~

Dogs on Twitter?

Here’s something you may not know. Thousands of dogs all over the world have their own Twitter accounts. Can you believe that?

Okay, let me go back. I was one of those people a bit dismissive of Twitter. I chortled disdainfully along with Jon Faine when he relayed the news to radio world that there were rumours of YouTube merging with Twitter and Facebook to form a conglomerate known as YouTwitFace. I applauded the divine Miss Kitty Flanagan when she did an hilarious skit shouting Twitter-type information loudly, from a park bench. 

Who cares, I thought, who in the Twittersphere let another cup of tea get cold, bemoaned their dimpled thighs or caught the cat chewing their toothbrush? (Actually, a good warning in that last one maybe...).

So when a particular course I’m doing decreed that we all must have a ‘presence on the ‘Net’—including on Twitter—I hit upon the amazingly unique idea of hiding behind one of my dogs (thanks Archie) and setting up the account in his name.

And oh, how very unoriginal that turned out to be. A zillion dog owners throughout the world thought of this years ago. Many of them have four and five thousand followers!

And how entertaining it is to join the ranks. (Don't mention the time-wasting...)

There’s the gorgeous golden retriever, Tennyson Tails, who tweeted “Human has left vacuum cleaner in the doorway of lounge (turned off). How can I possibly get round it, I will have to sit in the hallway forever.”
Digger (left) with his exploding bed - honestly!

Or the beautiful Cockerpoo (I think we call them Spoodles), Royston Bradley, with a photo of all his toys pegged on the washing line '........ an old photo, Marvin has no ears now'.

There’s the irresistible West Highland Terrier, Busby Watson, with his message “Me moustache is covered in gravy. Look like Poirot.” 

And countless trails of destruction—dog beds, shoes, videos, tv remotes, fruit from backyard trees—with cute photos offering funny justifications from the doggy perpetrators.

I realise this is a bit like people trying to relate their dreams, isn’t it. Chances are you’re not falling around in helpless laughter as I often am when I waste time in the doggy Twittersphere. You have to be there. And thousands of dog-lovers the world over obviously are. Archie has clocked up 335 followers in his first few months. True! Most are from the UK, some from Canada and the US and a few from Australia and Europe. One devoted Follower is a German Neurophysicist now living in Ohio. Go figure.

So look, I know it’s a time waster. There’s climate change, Donald Trump, Syria, Africa, refugees, shameful governments all over the world, broken promises and self-serving policies that will affect the state of humankind for centuries to come. How calming then, it is, to view a Tweet with accompanying photo of a brown cocker spaniel staring fixedly at a sunny window and the caption – “Looking for a fly.”  It’s a great antidote, I can tell you. Check it out.

~*~

Book Launch - The Light on the Water

Few things can be more inspirational for an aspiring writer than to attend the book launch of someone you admire and respect. Olga Lorenzo is a creative writing teacher at RMIT and her new book - The Light on the Water - was launched at Readings Bookshop in Carlton on Thursday night.
The place was packed to the walls and every face was beaming.  The goodwill in the room was palpable and not just because of the free wine. There were family members, close friends, lecturer/colleagues from RMIT and elsewhere and plenty of students, most of them aspiring writers.
When Olga read from her book there was rapt attention and the excerpt she chose delivered all that we could have hoped.
Most of us left hugging a signed copy of the book (I started to read mine as soon as I got home and can't put it down) and I'm guessing a lot of us were thinking 'Oh please let this be me one day!' - not in envy, but in happiness for someone else's success and inspired by all those years of persistence that culminated in a joyous night like this.
Congratulations Olga and thank you for sharing!

~*~