Tag Archives: 2 2 and 2

January 20, 2016 · 10:13 pm

2, 2 and 2: Michelle Michau-Crawford talks about Leaving Elvis and Other Stories

MichelleLR-3I’m delighted that the first post for 2016 in my 2, 2 and 2 series, which highlights writers with new books, is Michelle Michau-Crawford and her debut short story collection Leaving Elvis and Other Stories (UWA Publishing). Michelle was one of the ‘next wave’ women writers featured on the blog in 2014, and I also had the great pleasure of editing this remarkable collection.

If the name of the author or the title story sounds familiar, you might be recalling that Michelle won the prestigious ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize in 2013 for the story ‘Leaving Elvis’, which was subsequently published in ABR.

Michelle has worked as a university lecturer, speechwriter, researcher and public relations officer, and lives in Perth with her menagerie in a house surrounded by vegetable gardens and fruit trees.

Here is the blurb for Leaving Elvis:

We’re travelling light, without excess, into our future. Gran had been rough as she uncurled my hands from their position, gripped around the open car doorframe, and shoved me into the passenger seat.

A man returns from World War II and struggles to come to terms with what has happened in his absence. Almost seventy years later, his middle-aged granddaughter packs up her late grandmother’s home and discovers more than she had bargained for. These two stories book-end thirteen closely linked stories of one family and the rippling of consequences across three generations, played out against the backdrop of a changing Australia.

A debut collection—as powerful as it is tender—from the winner of the 2013 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize.

And now over to Michelle…

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2 things that inspired my book

1 This collection started as a sort of side-project to take me away from the novel I thought I should be finishing. In a roundabout way, a gentle rejection was the inspiration for finally letting go of something that had ceased to bring me any real satisfaction in order to focus on something that was bringing me satisfaction. By the time I’d completed one story and some first drafts of several more short stories, I had grown to resent sitting down to work on the novel. I had basically killed that work by overwriting and overthinking it. But somewhere along the way I had convinced myself that without seeing it through to publication, I was a phoney, and that once it was done I could put it aside and ‘write more short stories’. One day I braved up enough to share the manuscript with a publisher for feedback, and when we met to discuss it she identified what I already knew. We suggested putting the manuscript aside for a while. I was so relieved that I may have jumped up from my chair and given her a hug and said something along the lines of ‘Thank goodness, now I can go to work on what I really want to be doing.’ I seem to recall that I then proceeded to babble on about the closely linked stories I was working on.

That publisher was Terri-ann White from UWA Publishing, so the rejection story had a very happy ending for me!

2 For as long as I can remember I have had a fascination with abandoned and lost children. I was born just six months before the Beaumont children disappeared in January 1966, and from early childhood always knew that children could simply cease to exist in the blink of an eye. In 2005 I began what would amount to eight years’ work (not full-time, I might add) on what eventually became the short story ‘Leaving Elvis’. I was researching for an Honours project at the time, looking at memory and trauma in Australian literature. My particular interest at that point was in intergenerational trauma and patterns of behaviour, and abandonment, in all its various forms, of children by adults. I came across Peter Pierce’s The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety (1999). In his book Pierce describes the way that the theme of abandonment has flowed through non-Indigenous Australian literature since white settlement, and contemplates the contemporary ‘lost child’ as a victim of white society itself. Where early writings centred on fears about a hostile and unforgiving land, writing changed direction around the 1950s, a period generally recognised as a time when there was a loss of innocence in white Australian culture. Without intending to, and certainly without realising it until well into the writing of the collection, I appear to have continued this pattern and written a book that explores, in part, the lost child as victim of society itself, along with intergenerational patterns of behaviour in a period commencing around the 1950s.

2 places connected with my book

1 The small ‘home’ town that features in a number of stories appears to be somewhere in or near the Western Australian wheat belt. However, I have intentionally left the location unspecific so that by changing a few minor details it could be just about any small town or outer suburb in Australia where people have somehow found themselves living. It is the sort of place where, with no real aspirations or ambition to spend a whole life there, several generations of one family now reside, doing the best they can. Some of the people in these stories are prone to plotting or dreaming about escaping to that mythical ‘somewhere else’ where they can leave their past behind and live a more fulfilling life. Ultimately, when it comes down to it, wherever they may find themselves living, this is the only place they have to come back to in order to feel some sense of connection and belonging to a physical environment.

2 The sky is a place that is significant in Louise’s adult life. In her years in Europe, it is the thought of the specific colours and expansiveness of the Australian sky that increases both her longing for home and her sense of isolation. At one point, she has a fling with an English artist who’d tried to paint the Australian sky just so she’d have an opportunity to be able to talk about home and the sky with him. Many years later, in another story, she realises that she has to return to Australia, to her home town, while looking up at the sky of the northern hemisphere with it’s ‘skew-whiff shades’ that will never be right.

2 favourite moments in the book

1 In the story The Light, there is a moment where Natalie, having reached rock-bottom, and with every reason not to feel good about anything at that particular time in her life, sits in an isolated place in nature and feels a few fleeting moments of calm. ‘She’s never had religion, but there’s something soothing and spiritual-like about being here, and she feels close to relaxed, sitting there with the sun disappearing while the immense orange sky turns purple and grey.’ Often the people in these stories struggle to feel they belong and maintain connections, Natalie perhaps more so than others. But that passing moment of recognition that there is something bigger than her and her problems is enough.

2 I’m interested in those vulnerable moments in childhood and adolescence where there is an understanding in the young that there is something going on within their bodies and minds, but still an inability to fully understand or articulate those changes. There is a moment in the story ‘Rendezvous’ where this occurs. Louise reflects on being about eleven years old when she’d stood in front of her friend Leslie Mulligan: ‘pulling petals off a daisy one at a time, she’d stared him in the face, he loves me, he loves me not.’ Watching her friend grow pink and embarrassed, she’d run off laughing, knowing that she had ‘some sort of mysterious power over him, but not yet knowing how or when to use it.’  Confused by both his and her reaction to the experience, she hides until Leslie finally gives up searching for her and goes home.

 

Leaving Elvis and Other Stories will be available in bookshops in February 2016
Find out more at UWA Publishing
Visit Michelle’s website or connect via her Facebook page
Michelle will be a guest of the Perth Writers Festival 2016

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November 30, 2015 · 9:49 pm

2, 2 and 2: Jenny Ackland talks about The Secret Son

I have been following Jenny Ackland’s blog, Seraglio, for some time, and was delighted to have the opportunity to meet her in Ubud recently, where she was launching her debut novel, The Secret Son.

Photo by Mark Wilson

Photo by Mark Wilson

Jenny has travelled widely and spent several years living in Turkey and Japan. She now lives in Melbourne, where she is a writer and teacher.

I am intrigued at what Jenny has said about The Secret Son, and it’s on top of my Christmas reading pile. Here is the book’s blurb:

Two men, living almost a century apart, with an unknown connection. Set in Australian and Turkey, The Secret Son tells the story of what happens when an Australian soldier, James, is accidentally left behind at Gallipoli. Helped by a young Turkish boy, James settles on a mountainside village, never to return home. Almost a century later, young Turkish-Australian Cem travels to Turkey, against the wishes of his haunted, tight-lipped grandfather. What is the story behind the dark deeds that connect the two men? An Australian historian determined to find the truth, a stolen inheritance, a wishing tree, a long-lost grandmother, and an unlikely sweetheart come together in a dazzlingly original, audacious and exhilarating novel about love, honour and belonging. The Secret Son is a moving meditation on the strength of women and what it means to be a good man.

Over to Jenny…

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2 things that inspired my book

1 The seed of origin of The Secret Son came when I was living in Istanbul in 2000. I had been married to a Turkish man for ten years (why yes, a carpet seller!) and we had a child, who was then three. My mother came to stay with us and for my birthday gave me a trilogy of novels by Turkish author Yaşar Kemal called The Wind from the Plain. It was the first novel in that series that introduced me to the rambunctious and vivid lives of a group of Anatolian villagers, seasonal cotton pickers whose small lives exploded onto the pages. I was stunned by the beautiful prose, the tender rendering of these people and the humour with which Kemal described their lives of battle and conflict.

The Wind from the Plain was the first Turkish literature I’d read, and was seminal for me. I’d loved Istanbul from the moment I’d arrived in 1990, as a young backpacker, only there because her father had paid for her ticket so that she could go, as some sort of proxy for him, to the 75th commemoration at Gallipoli that April. In the ancient part of a metropolis, where others complained about the too-frequent and oppressive mosque calls to prayer, I was excited and felt entirely satisfied being there.

I read the trilogy and I decided I wanted to write my own story, a novel, about a bunch of Turkish villagers living in a Turkish village. I soon had 60,000 words, but then life got in the way as it does and the work was put to the side until 2010. I realised that much of the Turkish village stuff would have to go, but it still forms an important component of the novel that eventually emerged.

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Yaşar Kemal

2 Four days after leaving Melbourne, I met my future husband on the grass at the Hippodrome outside the Blue Mosque, and that same night went to Gallipoli for the dawn service at Anzac Cove. Standing there on the beach, seeing the old soldiers walking to their seats, each escorted by a young Australian or New Zealand serviceman, watching old men who’d survived the horror as almost-boys raise their walking sticks and wave to the crowd, had been unexpectedly moving to this callous young woman. I cried with everyone else. I took photos and knew I would never forget those moments, but I never expected I’d write about it in a novel or that it would be relevant to any novel I might write. But it turns out that it was an intrinsic part of the way this novel emerged, in parts, over years.

First, I had those 60,000 words set in my imaginary Turkish village. Next came the idea of Cem, a young Turkish-Australian man, child of migrants, growing up in Melbourne. He was the bridge for Australian readers, and a character who could visit Gallipoli in 1990. The second bridge to the village was James, a young man from Beechworth, who gets accidentally left behind in Gallipoli during the Allied evacuation of December 1916. How could I write a novel about Turkey, particularly one that drew connections between that country and this, and not include Gallipoli in some way? I had to find out a way to try to write about this iconic part of Australian history without being clichéd, predictable and trite. While it’s not a large part of the book, it is a crucial element.

2 places connected to the book

1 The area around Beechworth, and extending down to the Strathbogie Ranges, is known as Ned Kelly country. In my novel, Beechworth is the country Victorian town where James grows up with his beekeeping mother, Madela. The reason for the inclusion of Beechworth is that one part of my story is concerned with the possible secret son of Ned Kelly, and that James might be that son. The Strathbogie Ranges are a stunning part of Victoria. There is something mystical about the landscape: small hills and rises, with no great sweeping flatlands between them, enormous granite boulders scattered about. You get the sense of being pocketed away, nestled even, when you are within that landscape. I am drawn as a person and writer to rural areas. Where others seek coastlines and ocean, I turn the other way, and my mind often travels inland, in the opposite direction from the locations Germaine Greer once noted we have built our cities, along the beaches, looking outwards, away from the great inhospitable interior. I like land and hills and rivers. I like wide open spaces, not dense forested mountains. The ocean scares me but I plan to write about it one day.

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2 My second place connected to the novel is a metaphysical one. It was a state I held mentally while writing the book, as well as several states I wanted to explore thematically in the novel. I’m really interested in the interstitial space that exists between cultures and identity, between one boundary and the next. I am also interested in the idea of traversing time, nations, histories, identity, gender and even genre. Not strictly a historical work, this novel includes real historical characters that have been expanded fictionally and given new lives (maybe cheekily). Two of Australia’s enduring cultural fascinations (Ned Kelly and Gallipoli) have been mashed together, there’s an element of mysticism or magical realism, and time skipping to let the reader see either the conclusions or the likely outcomes of most of the main characters. The other state I held while writing this book was I attempted to be playful and not take it too seriously, allowing myself to follow paths that might have seemed ludicrous and risky. But I reasoned that if I didn’t have fun while writing, and encounter surprises and feel exhilarated and set myself challenges while writing, then the reading experience would probably be a flat one. I suppose it was a way of justifying to myself how I could dare write this story, and how I could dare enjoy doing it so much.

2 favourite things connected to the book

1 Berna is many people’s favourite person in the book. Berna was originally a side character, but she emerged more strongly towards the end of the development of the manuscript as a necessary strong anchoring female voice and as a character who sits at the centre of the two men’s storylines. Her narrative is written in first person and hers is the only voice the reader gets in that form.

Berna is a mystical and knowing old woman. She is also wry. While the male concerns in the book are about working out one’s path in life, how one wants to be in life, how to be a good man (and these are universal concerns, of course), Berna is the central spindle around whom the threads of the other narratives wind. Her voice first came into the manuscript in the form of her feminist rant, which I named ‘Berna’s Lament’, and I realised this was the psychological centre of the book and that Berna needed to be more prominent.

2 When I was wrangling with the structure of the book, I was imagining it as a Turkish carpet with a medallion design. This was really helpful and an amusing challenge to myself to ‘make it fit’. As I mentioned above, I wanted Berna’s Lament to be at the exact centre of the novel (the central ‘medallion’), with the narratives of James (first medallion) and Cem (third medallion) sitting on either side. I had scenes written on index cards, and laid them out on the floor over and over, adjusting and shaping, until I had it in perfect balance. Then it went to the publishers for the editing process and things had to be moved a little, but still, in my imagination, it’s in the form of carpet; the medallions are there, repeating motifs are there, and the borders are there as well as the fringe. The ‘intentional mistake’ is mentioned in the book as something that carpet weavers from the Islamic world deliberately do, because in their minds only God can create something perfect. Other people say this isn’t true, that the mistake a person can see in an oriental carpet is simply a sincere mistake, or a forced change of colour because the wool supply has run out. But I like to believe in the intentional mistake, and while I did have an intentional mistake that was edited out before the manuscript even got to the publisher, of course there are still errors in the book and I comfort myself by thinking they are intentional, in the spirit of the carpet weavers of Anatolia.

turkish rug

The Secret Son is in bookshops now
Find out more at Allen & Unwin
Follow Jenny’s blog, Seraglio

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August 3, 2015 · 9:03 am

2, 2 and 2: Rebecca Lim talks about Afterlight

9781922182005Anyone who read the last issue of my newsletter will know that I loved Rebecca Lim’s YA novel The Astrologer’s Daughter (Text Publishing, 2014) and its fearless protagonist Avicenna Crowe. So I was delighted to find that Rebecca has recently released a new novel, Afterlight—and even more so when she agreed to answer some 2, 2 and 2 questions.

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Rebecca has been prolific since leaving her former profession as a commercial lawyer to write full time. She is the author of sixteen books for children and young adult readers, including the acclaimed Mercy series. Her work has been longlisted for the David Gemmell Legend Award, the Gold Inky Award and the CBCA Book of the Year Award for Older Readers, and she has been an Aurealis Awards and Davitt Awards finalist. Her novels have been translated into German, French, Turkish, Portuguese and Polish.

Rebecca was born in Singapore and is now based in Melbourne.

Here is the blurb for Afterlight:

Since her parents died in a freak motorbike accident, Sophie Teague’s life has fallen apart.

But she’s just enrolled at a new high school, hoping for a fresh start.

That’s until Eve, a beautiful ghost in black, starts making terrifying nightly appearances, wanting Sophie to be her hands, eyes and go-to girl.

There are loose ends that Eve needs Sophie to tie up. But dealing with the dead might just involve the greatest sacrifice of all.

Dark, thrilling and unrelentingly eerie, Afterlight will take you deep into the heart of a dangerous love story, revealing the otherworldly—and deadly—pull of past wrongs that only the living can put right.

Over now to Rebecca…

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2 things that inspired the book

I write these slightly freaky books for children and young adults that feature empowered female characters living in a fictional world that—as much as possible—resembles the real world I live in and not the one depicted in, say, Neighbours. So if you pick up one of my stories—no matter if you’re a three-year-old or an eighteen-year-old—you’ll be met with young women from different socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds finding reserves of strength, ferocity, tenacity and adaptability in the face of great adversity. I’m not interested in presenting the lives of pretty people facing mildly perplexing personal conundrums, because I don’t know anyone like that. So as a starting point, the ‘real’ world will always inspire any fiction I create and you’ll find my characters will reflect you, me and the woman standing next to you at the bus stop. My fictional universe includes Chinese and Colombian kids, people who speak Italian, Spanish or Russian, homeless teens living in their cars and people who have to work as strippers, waitresses or clairvoyants, just to survive. Archangels, demons and Norman knights also exist in my universe because, damn it, they can. I always proceed on the basis that anything is possible.

We live in a dark and deeply complex world. The news is a potent trigger for a lot of my work. A few of my novels are fictional responses to some terrible abduction, cold case and imprisonment stories that were emerging around the time I was writing the books. The things people do to each other in real life are staggering, and I write to try and make sense of questions like: Why do bad things happen to good people? What happens to human energy, human consciousness, after death? Are we ruled by fate or by our own free will? How does one bad past act reverberate into the future?

Afterlight had its genesis in a terrible shooting that occurred early one weekday in the Melbourne CBD a few years ago. A bikie and a tabletop dancer were involved. Innocent people on their way to work, or just going about their business, were critically injured or killed. My outrage about violence against women is an underlying theme in most of my books for young adults.

2 places connected with the book

I live in Melbourne and have lived all over it geographically since we moved here from country Queensland when I was a pre-schooler. I’ve set my books in places like Paris and Milan, Macchu Picchu and small town USA, but nothing gives me more of a thrill than having my characters literally running for their lives through places I’ve known and loved for years.

My last book, The Astrologer’s Daughter, was set in and around Chinatown and North Melbourne. The action in Afterlight takes in the famous Greek Quarter in the CBD, but I also have Sophie ‘Storkie’ Teague (my main character) living in a rundown pub in North Fitzroy and running errands out to far flung Melbourne bayside and northern suburbs, at the behest of an insistent dead woman. The walking trail that runs alongside Merri Creek is pivotal to the last stages of the book.

2 favourite things

At heart, I’m a massive introvert, and sometimes going out into the world, or seeing what we as a species do to each other and our environment, can be a little disheartening or depleting.

Early music—particularly choral music by Palestrina, Allegri, Taverner and Monteverdi, and any recording, really, by Jordi Savall or Hespèrion XX—will have a quietening/recharging effect. I managed to sneak a choir or two and a few choral and classical music references into my series for young adults that began with Mercy (2010, featuring a fallen amnesiac archangel), which I was secretly chuffed about. Nobody else enjoyed those bits as much as me, possibly (!), but then again no one has probably ever quoted lyrics from Lakmé by Léo Delibes in a YA novel, so there you go.

The other thing I can’t do without is reading. I read all over the shop—YA, picture books, historical fiction, literary fiction, thrillers, mysteries, true crime, science, you name it—and I like to write across the spectrum, too. Why just write a contemporary YA novel when it can also be a mystery/thriller/paranormal book with touches of romance in it?

Afterlight is in bookshops now
Find out more at Text Publishing

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July 27, 2015 · 8:31 am

Susan Midalia talks about Feet to the Stars

UnknownRecently, during a major decluttering exercise involving thirty or forty archive boxes, I came across a collection of my undergraduate literature assignments (do I need to mention I’m a hoarder?). As I sorted through them, I was reminded that long before Susan Midalia and I became friends, and writing and editing colleagues, she had been my lecturer and tutor in a unit on Australian Literature and Film—a unit I had loved, not least because Susan is the most inspiring of teachers. I think she has been teaching me, in one way or another, ever since.

Susan retired from an academic career in 2006 to write fiction full-time, and her new book follows A History of the Beanbag (2007), shortlisted for the Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards, and An Unknown Sky (2012), shortlisted for the Steele Rudd Award. She is, or has been, a judge of several literary awards, including the WA Premier’s Book Awards, the T.A.G. Hungerford Award, the Todhunter Literary Award and the Margaret River Short Story Competition. She is a board member of writingWA, Margaret River Press, and A Maze of Story, a volunteer organisation that encourages creativity in socially and economically disadvantaged children. She is also a regular facilitator of short story writing workshops.

I’m delighted she has agreed to answer some 2, 2 and 2 questions about her new book, the intriguingly titled Feet to the Stars.

Here is the back-cover blurb:

Susan Midalia’s third collection of stories, Feet to the Stars, offers keenly observed details about everyday life, expressed with pathos, tenderness and bracing wit. Subtly rendered and emotionally engaging, these stories speak of the transformative capacities of the human mind and heart, and of the ways we affect each other, sometimes unwittingly and often profoundly. They offer us the pleasure of listening to different voices, and the satisfaction of careful crafting and evocative prose.

Over now to Susan…

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Two things that inspired me to write the book

There are two areas of experience that keep returning to me, not always consciously or deliberately. The first is children. This might be partly autobiographical; having helped to raise two adult sons who I love fiercely, I remain fascinated by that complex combination in children, particularly adolescents, of wisdom and naiveté, kindness and self-absorption; by their capacity to enrich and sometimes to burden the life of a parent; by their idealism and freedom from hypocrisy, which reinforces for me, and I hope for all of us, the value of hope in a cynical adult world.

A second preoccupation in my new collection is the need for political engagement as a means of questioning structures of power. I was inspired to write stories such as ‘The hook’, ‘Oranges’ and ‘Exploring’—all of which in their different ways deal with issues of injustice and political self-interest—partly because I’ve been increasingly concerned by what’s happening to, and in, Australia. Like many Australians, I’ve become dismayed, saddened and indeed afraid of the lack of compassion and basic human decency that I believe is beginning to characterise this country. Not that I want to preach to my readers, because good writing doesn’t pontificate or tell the reader what to think. Rather, I try to encourage reflection on the way we treat one another, both in our daily lives and in the wider society, for in the end, that’s what matters most to me.

Two places connected with my book

First, and speaking geographically, most of the stories in this collection are set in Australia. Sometimes the physical settings are integral to the meaning of the story; in ‘Exploring’, for example, a road trip across the Nullarbor and the setting of Cottesloe Beach are used as a means of questioning cultural myths of identity. For the most part, however, the stories are urban/suburban, and here I’m not so much interested in physical space but how ‘Australian-ness’ is manifest in the way my characters speak, think and behave.

I’m very aware that I’m not given to creating literal settings, mainly because it’s not one of my strengths as a writer. I greatly admire writers who make settings seem real, immediate, atmospheric, who offer us either the pleasures of recognition—places we know—and the pleasures of geographical difference. But I’ve decided to leave that to those wonderful writers, and console myself with the fact that this absence in my stories puts me in the brilliant company of Jane Austen, whose novels very rarely create physical settings. Like Austen, I’m drawn instead to inner spaces—to our thoughts and feelings, motives, fears, desires—the whole glorious mess of human consciousness. This is the second element that’s prompted me to write this book: I’m interested in the things people think but don’t always say, as well as in what they manage to say in those moments of confusion, clarity, humility, disillusionment, affirmation, despair, consolation, that constitute our lives. One of my main goals in this collection was the creation of a range of different inner spaces and voices: males as well as females, adolescents and adults, working-class and middle-class. Trying to imagine what it might be like to be someone who’s very different from me is both immensely pleasurable—a bit like being an actor, I guess—and an ethical imperative, an act of the empathetic imagination which for me lies at the heart of writing, reading and being.

Two favourite passages from Feet to the Stars

The first is from a story called ‘Because’. Narrated retrospectively by a woman called Violet, it’s a story centred on her ‘search’ for her mother, Beth, who went missing when Violet was two years old. Here is Violet, recalling the objects once owned by her mother:

What else did my father give me? What scraps and shards, what rags of passing time, through which I might recall my mother? Were there other evidential texts of more, or less, veracity? More, or less, haunting? He gave me objects: a bronze letter-opener; a box of unwritten postcards; a silver hairbrush with an embroidered backing, stitched in crimson and green. All of which I saw, and continued to see, as unexceptional. But I am fond of my mother’s tiny, grey pincushion in the shape of a mouse, which holds for me the pathos of the miniature; and a marcasite brooch in the shape of a bow, fashionable during her time, and fashionable once more. But whenever I look at these objects, touch them, I cannot feel my mother. Perhaps a bracelet or a necklace, something she had worn against her skin, might have made a difference. Or perhaps it is merely the paradox of any object from the past, its presence confirming absence. Like a photograph of the dead: you are here; you are gone.

And here’s an extract from the titular story, ‘Feet to the Stars’. It’s narrated from the perspective of Paul, a middle-aged teacher in a private girls’ school, who has been visiting—at her request—one of his students, hospitalised with anorexia:

At school the girls had made a card for Nell and asked him to sign it. One of those jumbo-sized cards, meant for celebrations and silly occasions, and at the top of the page, a quotation in bright red letters: Clownlike, happiest on your hands, feet to the stars. Sylvia Plath. Bella said it had taken ages to find words that everyone agreed on: some girls just wanted a simple message like get well soon or we miss you, and the school sacristan preferred something from the Bible.

‘We talked about the poem, remember?’ said Laurie. ‘About being a kid, about being happiest, and how we only think we’re happy cos we party and drink and stuff. And how that’s not really being happy, it’s just pretending to be a grown-up.’

‘Nell forgot to put her feet to the stars,’ said Imogen. ‘Or maybe she doesn’t know how.’

And so Paul signed his name, added it to the names of his students, who didn’t always have the language but who certainly understood.

‘We’re giving it to her tomorrow,’ said Imogen. ‘Me and Helena.’

He didn’t say, Helena and I.

‘And Nell thinks the other girls can start visiting her now.’

He told them that their friendship would mean a great deal to her. That it might even help more than all the doctors could. And then, because he couldn’t help himself, because he’d been lecturing students for years, would be lecturing until the day he died, he told them about Carl Jung.

‘He was a famous psychoanalyst,’ he said. ‘He spoke to many troubled, unhappy people, gave them the benefit of his complex theories and many years of training. But in the end he believed he did nothing that a good friend couldn’t have done. Listen. And show they care.’

Helena gave him a puzzled look. ‘So that’s how you pronounce it,’ she said. ‘Jung. I thought it rhymed with dung.’ She beamed at her classmates. ‘I’m reading his work on the collective unconscious. It’s very deep.’

 

Feet to the Stars will be in bookshops on 1 August 2015
You can find out more at UWA Publishing

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July 20, 2015 · 8:11 am

2, 2 and 2: Felicity Young talks about The Insanity of Murder

Attachment-1Western Australia is home to several world-class crime writers, and one of them is Felicity Young.

Felicity was born in Germany, attended boarding school in the UK, and emigrated to Western Australia with her parents in 1976. She, her husband and their three children moved to a small farm 40 kilometres north of Perth in 1990, and now, when she is not writing, she works on their Suffolk sheep stud and rears orphaned kangaroos.

It’s no secret that I have loved Felicity’s Dody McCleland series since the first book was published in 2012. Set in Edwardian London, it features Britain’s first female autopsy surgeon, and I was interested to read on Felicity’s website that the background of this character is drawn from the life of Felicity’s grandmother, who was at that time one of only a handful of female graduates of Trinity College, Dublin. Crime plus historical fiction is an exciting mix, and Felicity always weaves in social issues of the times, along with family, class and gender dynamics.

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I am looking forward to reading the latest (fourth) in the series, The Insanity of Murder.

Here is the book’s blurb:

To Doctor Dody McCleland, the gruesome job of dealing with the results of an explosion at the Necropolis Railway Station is testing enough. But when her suffragette sister Florence is implicated in the crime, matters worsen and Dody finds her loyalty cruelly divided. Can she choose between love for her sister and her secret love for Chief Inspector Matthew Pike, the investigating officer on the case?

Dody and Pike’s investigations lead them to a women’s rest home where patients are not encouraged to read or think and where clandestine treatments and operations are conducted in an unethical and inhumane manner. Together Dody and Pike must uncover such foul play before their secret liaisons become public knowledge—and before Florence becomes the rest home’s next victim.

And now, over to Felicity…

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2 things that inspired the book

1. One of the constant topics running through my Dody McCleland series is society’s attitude to women in the Edwardian period. I’ve dealt with hunger striking suffragettes, criminal abortions and the abuse of the weak by the powerful. None, however, can be more horrific to me than the treatment of the mentally ill.

My concern and interest in the topic began when I was a student nurse seconded briefly to Graylands psychiatric hospital. I’ll never forget witnessing a woman being subjected to ECT therapy: the tying down, the lack of control and the awful convulsions. I am in no position to give an opinion on the efficacy of the treatment, other than to say that to an almost layperson it seemed horribly brutal, a remnant from another time.

If I had not seen this with my own eyes, I don’t think the treatment of female insanity in the Edwardian period would have resonated so strongly with me.

2. Leading on from this, the second inspiration would have been my visit to the science museum in London, where I came across this charming contraption. It’s a D’Arsonval cage, believed to cure all sorts of medical and psychological problems. With a small amount of poetic licence, I modified this machine and turned it into something much more lethal.

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2 places connected with the book

1. The Elysium rest home for women is my old school boarding house, from the croquet pitch at the front and down the hill to the lake where we would smoke and meet boys. I was never a smoker, but enjoyed the danger of hanging out with the rebels. As for meeting boys, well, maybe one or two.

2. The coal cellar in one of the final chapters belonged to my grandmother. It was a spooky place with big lacquered doors through which, once a month, the coalman would tip his delivery of coal and coke.

2 favourite things about the book

1. The themes of my books are often quite intense and I lighten the tone every now and then with humour. I particularly enjoy writing the character of Florence, my protagonist’s sister. She is everything Dody is not—impulsive, flippant, reckless and irreverent—but also vulnerable, especially in this book. The extract below follows a scene in which Florence has taken some pills in order to appear insane to a ‘nerve doctor’.

Dody turned on her sister as soon as Doctor Lamb had left the house. ‘Florence, how could you!’ Florence calmly ignored Dody’s outburst and reached for the sherry decanter.

Dody slapped her hand away. ‘Don’t you dare! Not on top of those pills you’ve taken.’

‘Pills, what pills?’ Florence asked innocently.

Dody felt like strangling her. ‘Fast acting, short lasting. I left them on the dressing table—more fool me—never expecting that you would help yourself to them. I can see your demeanour improving before my very eyes.’

‘That reminds me; I must look a fright. May I borrow your comb please, dear?’

2. I wouldn’t be writing this series if I did not revel in the research. While I research the major topics I often come across interesting little tid-bits that just have to be found a place in the manuscript. I came across one little known fact, a dietary guideline called ‘Fletcherizing’, while I was researching the topic of anorexia in Edwardian women. Doctor Fletcher was known as the ‘Great Masticator’.

This is taken from a scene featuring Dody’s rather ‘straight’ lover, Chief Inspector Matthew Pike, and his daughter, Violet.

‘Would you like an ice cream, or a packet of biscuits to take home? They bake them on the premises. I’m told you cannot find fresher biscuits in the whole of London.’

Pike nodded to a pile of artfully arranged biscuits displayed under a glass dome on the tearoom’s expansive counter. Next to it stood an extravagant iced wedding cake all Doric columns and bell towers. It looked very pricey. How much did it cost to get married these days? he wondered absently.

‘No, thank you, Father,’ Violet answered. ‘Doctor Fletcher says ices and biscuits are incredibly bad for one.’

Pike’s eyes flicked back to his daughter. ‘And who’s Doctor Fletcher when he’s at home?’

‘A diet doctor from America. Among other things, Doctor Fletcher says one must chew each mouthful thirty two times: “Nature will castigate those who don’t masticate.”’ She paused and regarded him with a frown. ‘I’m not teasing this time, it’s not funny, Father. Many famous and intelligent people are followers of his teachings.’

‘I’m sure they are,’ Pike said, trying to maintain a straight face.

 

The Insanity of Murder will be available on 1 August.
You can find out more at HarperCollins Publishers Australia
You can also visit Felicity’s website

 

 

 

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June 15, 2015 · 8:46 am

2, 2 and 2: Ian Reid on The Mind’s Own Place

Reid photoI had the pleasure of sharing the stage with Ian Reid at a ‘Stories on Stage’ event at Koorliny Arts Centre in Kwinana last year—a presentation in which we discussed our shared interest in research and the use of history in the fiction we write. We have no doubt haunted the same desks and microfilm readers and reading rooms at many libraries and archives. We also share a publisher, UWA Publishing, so there are multiple intersections between our writing and publishing lives.

Ian’s publication record, however, is far more extensive than mine. He is the author of a dozen books across several genres—fiction, non-fiction and poetry. His work has been widely anthologised, awarded prizes, and translated into several languages. His previous historical novels are The End of Longing and That Untravelled World.

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Ian lives in Perth, where he is an adjunct professor at The University of Western Australia and an emeritus professor at Curtin University. He was recently awarded the State Library of Western Australia’s 2015 Battye Memorial Fellowship.

I am looking forward to reading his new novel, The Mind’s Own Place, which is about to be published.

Here is the book’s blurb:

Two women and three men, displaced in different ways by the rapid transformation of Victorian England, travel separately to a small settlement on Australia’s western rim. With them they carry social ambitions and psychological wounds. As their lives intersect in the Swan River Colony, what they encounter is not quite what they expect. Who will struggle, who will thrive, and how will each react when secrets emerge?

Though fictional, The Mind’s Own Place is partly based on the actual experiences of historical figures: a pair of convicts from respectable backgrounds, talented and enterprising but troubled; two female immigrants, free settlers, not equally fortunate or resilient; and the first detective in Western Australia, who eventually uncovers more than he intends.

Like Ian Reid’s previous acclaimed novels, this powerful story explores intricate relationships between the shaping of character and the pressure of adversity. It reveals damaged families, mixed motives, and the long shadows thrown by the past.

Wherever his characters go, Ian Reid places us vividly there.—The Age

 And now, over to Ian…

TMOP front cover copy

2 things that inspired the book

My imagination was stirred by the fact that the Swan River Colony, even after shiploads of convicts began to arrive, remained for several decades a very small community in which people were often closely connected, at times more closely than they knew. There were, I discovered, only a couple of degrees of separation between noteworthy historical figures who came to Perth and Fremantle at that time, and I began to invent a story around that factual core.

It also struck me that what we now call the Industrial Revolution was by no means confined to cities. The profound economic, political and social transformation of Victorian England caused turbulent effects in small towns and villages across its countryside, dislocating the lives of families and individuals. By choice or not, some of these people consequently found their way to the western shore of Australia, flotsam and jetsam of that upheaval on the other side of the world.

2 places connected with the book

As intimated in its title, much of this novel turns on the importance of location, location, location. Of the several places that figure prominently in the story, two come particularly to mind here.

The Old Mill in South Perth: many know this 1835 building to be one of the earliest that survives from colonial days in Western Australia, but not many know how or why its structure was boldly altered in 1880 by a fascinating emancipist known as Satan Browne. The highs and lows of Browne’s career in England and Australia, culminating in his project of turning the abandoned mill into something visionary, provided me with the basis for one of the main narrative strands in my novel.

Old Mill

Old Mill, South Perth (courtesy Battye Library)

Newton-in-Makerfield (now known as Newton-le-Willows): this little Merseyside market town suddenly became an important centre of railway engineering because it was at the mid-point of the Liverpool–Manchester line, which opened in 1830 as the world’s first steam-powered public transport system. The once-quiet town’s new industrial activities included the Vulcan Foundry, in which famous locomotive inventor Robert Stephenson was a partner, while the magnificent Sankey Viaduct, designed by Stephenson’s father, straddled a canal just outside the town. Newton is the setting for a few of my novel’s early chapters.

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Viaduct across the Sankey Valley (Henry Pyall, 1831)

2 favourite situations in the book

In a Lancashire town, a young boy becomes wedged under the rails of a railway bridge embankment as the train comes closer.

He began to tremble. The trembling was not only within his body but also in the beam on which he lay, and in the track close above him. Then the trembling became a shuddering vibration, and with it a rumble that grew louder and louder into a terrible approaching clamour…

In an Essex village, an adolescent girl who is sent to fetch a rabbit carcass from a neighbour’s barn becomes enticed by the farm boy into quaffing cider.

So she drank again, quickly. It made the back of her throat tingle, and she began to feel giddy as a peg-top. Arthur stood closer to her, his warm breath redolent of apple juice…

 

The Mind’s Own Place will be in bookshops on 1 July 2015
You can find out more at:
UWA Publishing
Ian Reid’s website, Reid on Writing

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April 30, 2015 · 5:41 pm

2, 2 and 2: Meg McKinlay talks about A Single Stone

Meg McKinlay is a poet, a writer of fiction for children and young people, and the author of my favourite laugh-out-loud picture book, The Truth about Penguins. (If you suspect you haven’t been told the truth about penguins, you’re probably right, and I suggest you order a copy immediately.) She and I also share a love of all things duck-shaped.

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Meg has published 11 books for children, ranging from picture books through to young adult novels, and a collection of poetry for adults. Her work has been shortlisted for (among others) the WA Premier’s Book Awards, the Environment Award for Children’s Literature, and the Children’s Book Council Book of the Year Award, and her novel Surface Tension (published as Below in the US) won the Children’s/Young Adult category of the 2012 Davitt Award for Crimewriting.

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She has a PhD in Japanese Literature and taught for many years at The University of Western Australia, in subjects ranging from Australian Literature and Creative Writing to Japanese Language. In 2010, she took up an Asialink Residency in Japan to conduct research for a novel for adults; she says she’s going to get that written any day now… I believe her. I believe she could write anything.

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Her new novel for young adults, A Single Stone, is about to be released and I’m thrilled that she’s agreed to talk about it here.

Here is the blurb:

Every girl dreams of being part of the line—the chosen seven who tunnel deep into the mountain to find the harvest. No work is more important.

Jena is the leader of the line—strong, respected, reliable. And—as all girls must be—she is small; years of training have seen to that. It is not always easy but it is the way of things. And so a girl must wrap her limbs, lie still, deny herself a second bowl of stew. Or a first.

But what happens when one tiny discovery makes Jena question everything she has ever known? What happens when moving a single stone changes everything?

Over now to Meg…

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2 things that inspired my book

1. This quote from Franz Kafka’s The Zurau Aphorisms:

Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes a part of the ceremony.

was a very early seed for the story, planted some 25 years ago. As a teenager attending an Anglican high school and skirting the periphery of church culture, I was taken by this notion of how something inherently random and meaningless might be co-opted into sacred ritual. For what reason, to what end? Consciously or otherwise? And what are the consequences when the ritual becomes completely detached from its origin?

2. The village in which A Single Stone is set relies for its survival on a mineral which is found deep inside the surrounding mountains. However, the prevailing mythology dictates that one mustn’t dig into the stone, but follow its natural passages. And for leopard-related reasons, only girls are permitted to do so. To facilitate this, girls are kept as small as possible, with one of the means by which this is done being a system of binding—not of the feet, but of the body as a whole—which begins at birth and continues in some form for many years.

This fictional practice has a clear antecedent in the Chinese cultural practice of foot-binding, my interest in which perhaps owes something to my background in Asian Studies, although my area of specialisation was Japan rather than China. I’m interested in how this intersects with gendered constructs of beauty, and specifically in the fact that the binding was generally practised by women, with mothers binding their daughters’ feet—often just as their own had been bound—in the belief that this would make them more attractive and give them better prospects in life. This led me to think about Western standards of beauty, about what’s being imposed on our own daughters now, and about who’s responsible for the perpetuation of these ideals—how that works between mothers and daughters, for example. What became a wider-ranging reflection on those sorts of issues—and also, I hope, a compelling story!—began with that concrete image of the body, bound and constrained, shaped to fit.

2 places connected with my book

1. As a young reader, I was very fond of C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, and in particular of the fourth book in the series, The Silver Chair. In the book, Jill, Eustace and Puddleglum, having made their way underground, meet some gnomes who come from the fictional land of Bism, a world far below. The gnomes express their horror of the ‘Overland’ world, saying things like:

They say there’s no roof at all there; only a horrible, great emptiness called the sky.

You can’t really like it—crawling about like flies on top of the world!

Reading this at the age of about seven had a profound effect on me. It made me think about difference in a very personal way, to wonder how I might feel—who I might be—if I had grown up in Bism. I think it’s from here, via a very roundabout route of course, that my main character, Jena, evolved—a girl who feels at home underground, in tight spaces, who is so comfortable there she feels ill at ease outside, with nothing pressing on her.

2. Manning Park is my local park, just around the corner from where I live in Hamilton Hill, and where I walk almost every day. There’s a sealed path that circles the lake so you can cycle or scooter or push a pram around with ease. Since I’m walking rather than doing any of those things, I don’t use the path. I prefer to walk on the grass, and find it mildly amusing that people who used to do so started following the path as soon as it was laid down. I have an irrational stubborn streak and on a certain level say fie on paths of all kinds, especially ones that smother and smooth over the perfectly good earth underneath.

But I also live with chronic pain, and there are days when even walking is a difficult prospect. On one such day, I found myself unintentionally walking on the path. I stepped off it, saying fie!, but a few minutes later found that I’d drifted back onto it. Once I was conscious of it, I noticed this happening on other days as well, and I came to realise that when I’m in pain, when I feel unsteady, I’m drawn to the path. And because I have a mind that sees metaphor everywhere, this led me to think about how when things are difficult it might be easier to follow a path—whether literal or figurative—that’s been laid out for you, one that’s regular and predictable and which flattens out the uneven, the unexpected. This is an idea that’s made its way into the book in a few different guises.

2 favourite things about A Single Stone

1. The bird motif. Birds appear at a number of points in one form or another, and I’m quietly pleased with how I’ve used them to represent certain things, and with the way that shifts across the course of the book. There were many more bird scenes that hit the cutting room floor during the re-drafting process and the book is stronger for that; I have a tendency to get a bit drunk on metaphor and overplay things.

I also love that the main character’s name has a connection to this motif, because that was serendipitous rather than by design. She had a different name until the very final draft but somehow it never felt quite right. I was casting about for another when I came across Jena, and there was something about it that immediately clicked. I thought I should investigate possible meanings before settling on it, just to make sure it wasn’t at odds with her character in some fundamental way, and discovered that it was generally considered to mean ‘endurance’ or ‘little bird’. And that was that.

2. These lines, from a scene where an important shift takes place:

She has never been a girl to see a box without opening it. To leave a lid pressed firmly in place.

She will only move one stone, and that just a little. The finest margin, to widen the gap.

I like the sense of quiet portent here. I’m a chronic overwriter, and I’m always pleased when I manage to pull back and be a bit sparing.

 

A Single Stone will be in bookshops from 1 May 2015.
Find out more at:
Walker Books
Meg’s website

 

 

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April 15, 2015 · 7:49 am

2, 2 and 2: Stephen Daisley talks about Coming Rain

Stephen Daisley was born in New Zealand and now lives in the South West of Western Australia. He spent five years in the New Zealand Army, and cites an interesting list of previous occupations: sheep herder, brush cutter, truck driver, road worker, bartender and construction worker.

Red-Tailed Black Cockatoos sweeping by a chapel amidst rainforest.If authors were birds, I think Stephen would be a Forest Red-Tailed Cockatoo—much admired but only occasionally seen! But I had the pleasure of meeting him at the Margaret River Readers and Writers Festival in 2013, at which time I was yet to read his debut novel, Traitor (Text Publishing, 2011). This was probably a good thing, as I am prone to becoming utterly tongue-tied in the presence of those whose books I count among my favourites.

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Traitor was shortlisted for a string of major awards (NSW Premier’s Awards, Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book, ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year, ABIA Newcomer of the Year) and won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction in 2011. Stephen Romei (in The Australian) called it ‘one of the finest debut novels I have ever read. Indeed it’s one of the best novels I have read in recent years.’ It is an exquisitely written story of friendship and compassion and deserves every one of the many accolades it has been given.

His much-awaited second novel, Coming Rain, is about to be published, and I was delighted when Stephen agreed to talk about it here.

First, here is the blurb:

They returned to the main part of the shed and it was Lew’s turn to sharpen his cutters. The woolshed now bright and well lit. Painter walked to his stand and connected the handpiece to the down-rod. He drizzled oil over the comb and the cutter, adjusted the tension and pulled the rope to engage the running gear.  The handpiece buzzed and he studied it for a moment, pulled the rope again to disengage the running gear. Repeated the  process with his spare handpiece. Filled the oil can and stepped to the catching-pen door, leaned on it and looked at the sheep in the pen. Lit a cigarette, waiting for Lew.

Western Australia, the wheatbelt. Lew McLeod has been travelling and working with Painter Hayes since he was a boy. Shearing, charcoal burning—whatever comes. Painter made him his first pair of shoes. It’s a hard and uncertain life but it’s the only one he knows.

But Lew’s a grown man now. And with this latest job, shearing for John Drysdale and his daughter Clara, everything will change.

Stephen Daisley writes in lucid, rippling prose of how things work, and why; of the profound satisfaction in hard work done with care, of love and friendship and the damage that both contain.

Over now to Stephen…

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2 things that inspired my book

I once watched two farmers greeting each other at a stock sale.

‘Gidday mate, how’re goin’, had any rain?’

‘Good good. No rain. You?’

‘No.’

‘Reckon it’s coming?’

‘Yep.’

‘Good and bad.’

The ubiquitous 1890 painting by Tom Roberts called Shearing the Rams. [You can view this, and read about it, on the National Gallery of Victoria website.]

2 personal connections with the book

Having worked on sheep and cattle stations and in shearing gangs, I continue to feel an admiration and deep compassion for people on the land. The dry humour and endurance of that existence and how this formed such an enduring part of what shaped modern Australia. I believe this myth is almost as strong as what Gallipoli has come to mean.

The rural landscape of Western Australia is, for me, an almost physical expression of the belief that rain is coming. What that is. The hope and sometime despair. The acceptance of both.

2 favourite passages from the book

The sun woman’s fire spread across the sky as the moon fled and the red light came dawn and over them all. A great flock of pink and grey galahs flew above the road and Lew watched as the light rose and for as far as he could see, the earth turned pale blue and mauve in the smoky pink of early morning. The sunlight coming over the horizon and into his eyes. It blinded him as he sat up in the truck. The sun rising quickly now. Painter also woke.

Clara laughed at this most beautiful of sights, put her hand to her mouth as if to weep; she had no idea how much time had passed. A moment or two, five, fifteen minutes. A newborn standing, staggering, falling and desperate somehow to keep trying. Pearl came to her foal, some of the white shroud and afterbirth still swinging from her uterus. Made an ancient throat and belly noise of recognition. Using her nose and face, she lifted and gently urged him to stand. The foal seemed to nod and steady. He swayed and found his feet. And, after a moment, began to search for her teats beneath her front shoulder. Pearl guided him as he kept smelling along her belly until he found her milk. He somehow knew to bend his head, turn it slightly, open his mouth and begin to suckle.

Tears were streaming down Clara’s face and she was laughing.

 

Coming Rain will be in bookshops on 22 April 2015.
You can find out more at Text Publishing.

* Red-tailed Cockatoo photo reproduced under licence from BigStock.

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March 30, 2015 · 6:07 am

2, 2 and 2: Dianne Touchell talks about A Small Madness

Dianne-Touchell-B&W2 (2)

Dianne Touchell is fearless when it comes to what she writes and how she writes it, although I’m sure she would tell you that she’s just responding to what inspires and interests her as a writer of young adult fiction. What I particularly admire about her work is the respect she accords her adolescent fictional characters and, by extension, the young people who are her readers. The result: fiction that feels authentic, that is unquestionably compassionate.

I had the pleasure of working with Dianne as editor of her debut novel, Creepy & Maud (Fremantle Press, 2012), which was shortlisted for the Children’s Book Council of Australia’s Book of the Year Award in 2013, in the Older Readers category. It also became embroiled in a censorship incident, re-igniting the ‘gatekeeper’ debate that is frequently raised in relation to YA fiction; you can read a well-balanced account of that here.

Dianne was born and raised in Fremantle, Western Australia, and reportedly has worked as a fry cook, a nightclub singer, a housekeeper, a bookseller and an office manager. She enjoys cold weather—something we have in common—and Mexican food. She lives with animals (I’m not sure how many of them are human).

I’m thrilled to be featuring Dianne’s second novel, A Small Madness (Allen & Unwin, 2015), which I believe sets her career on a stellar trajectory. Here is the book’s blurb:

Rose didn’t tell anyone about it. She wondered if it showed. She looked at herself in the mirror and turned this way and then that way. She stood as close to the mirror as she could, leaning over the bathroom basin, looking into her own eyes until they disappeared behind the fog of her breath. Looking for something. Some evidence that she was different. How could all of these feelings not show? She was a woman now, but it didn’t show and she couldn’t tell anyone.

An intimate, beautiful, important novel that challenged my beliefs and broke my heart.—Vikki Wakefield, author of Friday Brown

Over now to Dianne…

ASM Cover

2 things that inspired my book

1. This story was inspired by actual events that took place while I was living in the US more than ten years ago. A high-achieving teen couple became pregnant and hid that pregnancy. When the baby was born in a motel room, the teen father killed the infant and disposed of it in a dumpster. I was horrified by the story, but also felt there was more than one victim here. There was no compassion extended to the kids who had chosen this path; they were referred to as monsters.

I believe we have created a culture that hobbles young adults with strident expectations predominantly imposed to satisfy external appearances and alleviate parental anxiety, while simultaneously allowing these same young people to suffer in acute isolation with no outlet for their truest selves and fears. I became angry, because this sort of thing doesn’t happen in isolation. There had to be lots of broken things and broken people around them in order for them to feel they had no one to go to for help. Such an extreme choice had to be the product of some extreme familial and environmental malfunction. I wanted to write a story about the bigger picture.

2. I’ve always been very interested in the different ways sexually active girls and sexually active boys are viewed and judged. We are still slut-shaming girls while the boys enjoying these sluts are neither mentioned nor censured. A good girl apparently becomes a bad girl when she has sex, especially if she enjoys sex. So if there is a consequence to having sex, such as pregnancy or disease, a good girl who has been taught by society that her virginity is her crown is far less likely to seek help. Expectation becomes the shame-flame. And a good girl is aware that that shame will infect her entire family. In many ways we haven’t moved that far forward since Lydia Bennett fucked off with Wickham. There are cultures and religions operating right now where a girl can be excommunicated and banished for having sex, and/or blamed for leading a boy into having sex himself. This enrages me. I am inspired by my rage.

2 places connected with the book

1. The parental headspace: anxiety-filled, adamant, structured, time-poor, practicality-driven, peace-craving, obsessed with externals and appearances, a sense of isolation. Busy parents lose their peripheral vision and too often gain their only positive reinforcement from the eyes of other parents gazing enviously on to their apparently happy home. But no one looks into the apparently happy home. That might shatter the mutual delusion between grown-ups using their children for validation.

2. The young adult headspace: anxiety-filled, chaotic, unstructured, time-poor, sensually driven, acceptance-craving, obsessed with externals and appearances, a sense of isolation. The desperate need to be validated, which is so often misinterpreted as being bolshie. Young adults lose their peripheral vision and too often gain their only positive reinforcement by internalising and acting upon the expectations of grown-ups. No good choices can thrive within that kind of disconnection from self.

My geographical place is where these two intersect.

2 favourite things about A Small Madness

1. This description of Michael’s experience of the denied pregnancy:

He wondered if that nascent snow-caver ever sent tendrils of sadness into Rose’s dreams. It lived in his. It pulsed and rolled and nudged like a manatee in his spinal fluid, and it wasn’t even growing in him.

2. The relationship between Liv and her mother:

‘Oh fuck, oh fuck…’

‘Hello?’

‘…oh fuck, oh fuck…Mum?’

‘Livvie? Is that you?’

‘Please come. Please come to Rose’s. Oh fuck, Mum.’

‘Jesus, baby. I’m still in bed. What’s going on?’

‘Please come to Rose’s, Mum. She…she…’

‘Tell me what’s wrong—now!’

‘I just need you.’

‘On my way.’

 

A Small Madness is in bookshops now.
Find out more at:
Allen & Unwin
Dianne’s website

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February 23, 2015 · 6:43 am

2, 2 and 2: Chigozie Obioma talks about The Fishermen

Obioma_Chigozie_2014_HighresI met Chigozie Obioma in the northern autumn of 2012, when we were among a group of international writers in residence at OMI’s Ledig House, New York State. While there, I had the pleasure of reading an extract from Chigozie’s debut novel The Fishermen, which was then with his agent and in the process of being submitted to publishers. It is now about to be released in Australia/New Zealand (Scribe), the US/Canada, the UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Greece, the Netherlands, Brazil and South Korea (covering translations in nine languages).

Chigozie was born in Akure, Nigeria, has lived in Cyprus and Turkey, and is currently a resident of the United States, where he is a Helen Zell Fellow in creative writing at the University of Michigan. His fiction has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review and Transition, and he has won Hopwood Awards for fiction and poetry.

The Fishermen, which some have called ‘the African Kite Runner’, has been chosen as one of the American Library Association’s best four debuts of the spring, and was listed in Jane Sullivan’s preview of 2015 highlights in the Sydney Morning Herald. Man Booker Prize winner Eleanor Catton has described it as:

Awesome in the true sense of the word: crackling with life, freighted with death, vertiginous both in its style and in the elemental power of its story. Few novels deserve to be called ‘mythic’, but Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen is certainly one of them. A truly magnificent debut.

Intrigued? Here is the book’s blurb:

In a Nigerian town in the mid 1990s, four brothers encounter a madman whose mystic prophecy of violence threatens the core of their close-knit family.

Told from the point of view of nine-year-old Benjamin, the youngest of four brothers, The Fishermen is the Cain and Abel-esque story of an unforgettable childhood in 1990s Nigeria, in the small town of Akure. When their strict father has to travel to a distant city for work, the brothers take advantage of his extended absence to skip school and go fishing. At the ominous, forbidden nearby river, they meet a dangerous local madman who persuades the oldest of the boys that he is destined to be killed by one of his siblings. What happens next is an almost mythic event whose impact—both tragic and redemptive—will transcend the lives and imaginations of its characters and its readers.

Dazzling and viscerally powerful, The Fishermen never leaves Akure but the story it tells has enormous universal appeal. Seen through the prism of one family’s destiny, this is an essential novel about Africa with all of its contradictions—economic, political and religious—and the epic beauty of its own culture. With this bold debut, Chigozie Obioma emerges as one of the most original new voices of modern African literature, echoing its older generation’s masterful storytelling with a contemporary fearlessness and purpose.

Over now to Chigozie…

The Fishermen Final Cover.

2 things that inspired my book

1. The Fishermen was foremost an attempt to tell the universal story of family bonds and what happens when they are severed. First, it was intended as a sort of tribute to my siblings, especially my brothers—a love letter. I am from a family of twelve children: seven brothers and four sisters. In 2009, living in Cyprus, and homesick, I began reflecting on something my father had told me some time before, about his joy at the growing bond between my two eldest brothers who, growing up, had maintained a strong rivalry that would sometimes culminate in fist fights. As I began pondering what was the worst that could have happened at that time, the image of the Agwu family came to me. Then I created Abulu as the facilitator of conflict between the brothers.

2. On a larger thematic note, I wanted the novel to comment on the socio-political situation of Nigeria. Nigeria, to me, is an insane idea created by a madman and bought by sane people—the prophesying madman here being the British, and the recipients of the vision being the people of Nigeria (three major tribes with nothing in common, cohabiting to form a ‘nation’).

The British were involved in the scramble for African territories, and the area around the Niger River in sub-Saharan West Africa became their own. They did not do this with the interest of the native peoples at heart; they merely wanted to expand their sphere of influence. When the British left in 1960 and Nigeria gained independence, the people immediately saw their differences, and that they could not exist as a nation, but it was too late. Oil had been discovered in commercial quantities in the south, from which the unified Nigeria benefited. One of the bloodiest wars in the history of Africa was fought when the Igbo (situated in the south-east) attempted to pull out of the union in 1966, following a genocidal cleansing of tribesmen in the north. So within six years of independence, the nation was torn apart. If the Igbo nation had successfully seceded from Nigeria, and if the other major tribes had formed independent nation-states, the result could have been an end to the failing polity that is Nigeria today. But Britain intervened again during the war, helping Nigeria win and reintegrating the breakaway Igbo nation of Biafra back into Nigeria.

Given this historical context, I intend Abulu as a metaphor for this entity that infiltrates the lives of others, creates chaos through mere words, and causes suffering among the people, while the family of four boys is a metaphor for the major tribes of Nigeria.

2 places connected with the book

1. Akure, a town (a city, actually, though I shudder to call it that, having now seen many actual ‘cities’) you’d almost never know existed even if you were familiar with Nigeria, is the place of my provenance. It was the soil in which my foot was first planted, where I first learned to sing ‘Arise, O Compatriots’ and where, as I have now come to understand, a great portion of my mind was shaped. I was born within months of my family moving there, and because of the ambience of the place, and my father’s new success and promotion in his workplace, which came with the transfer (if you happen to read The Fishermen, you won’t have to ask me why I italicise this word) to Akure, I was named Chi-go-zie—which is in fact a prayer that this new town (sorry, city) would bring the family good fortune. Hence, God (Chi) bless (go) us (zie—anyi).

I believe my family did achieve much success in this town, but I won’t go into all that now. I turn to the Agwu family of The Fishermen. The town, as Benjamin sketches it below in the book, is where the novel essentially happens—from start to finish. The family lives here, in a house like the one I grew up in, and fishes at a nearby river, like the one I myself once fished! But our version of Akure was slightly different, in that there was no prophesying madman around, though I spent my childhood wishing for many strange, supernal things to happen.

Map of Azure as it appears in the novel, sketched by Benjamin, the narrator

Map of Azure as it appears in the novel, sketched by Benjamin, the narrator

2. Cyprus, that eternal of all mortal places; that orgiastic island where Aphrodite was born, springing up like sea foam from the Mediterranean Sea. That sea is, to say the least, infinitely beautiful. Exotically blue, furiously hot: it is a sliver of the earth’s seamless beauty. It was on this island where I found myself in 2007, far, so very far from home, that I first conceived the vision of The Fishermen recounted above.

2 favourite elements of the book

1. I’m moved by what I feel is what eventually becomes of most of us as we graduate from the college of childhood to adulthood: dream unfulfilled or despoiled. It can be painful to look at the present, which was once—during one’s childhood—a far-distant future, the kind of which nine-year-old Benjamin, the narrator of The Fishermen, says later in the novel: ‘if one attempted to see the future one would see nothing; it was like peeping into an earhole.’ In the present, most of us are not what we dreamed to become. Yet I can’t help remembering, and often returning to, that moment when it was just a dream, when the world was at one’s fingertips and anything could be achieved in one’s fertile imagination. Benjamin muses on early on about that here:

All that mattered was the present and the foreseeable future. Glimpses of it mostly came like a locomotive train treading tracks of hope, with black coal in its heart and a loud elephantine toot. Sometimes these glimpses came through dreams or flights of fanciful thoughts that whispered in your head—I will be a pilot, or the president of Nigeria, rich man, own helicopters—for the future was what we made of it. It was a blank canvas on which anything could be imagined.

2. Abulu, the vision-seeing madman. He and the likes of him are one of the reasons I wrote this book. All over West Africa, derelicts like Abulu are allowed to roam the streets, feeding like stray dogs. Many get run over like animals and die like roadkill. Abulu’s story, if it succeeds, will provide me with a platform to start up a public campaign to have these people taken off the streets and housed in places where they can be cared for. A group of my friends have started a Tumblr campaign, and will be calling on everyone who spots a derelict on any West African street to take photos and send them in, so that they can gather as many images as possible to bring the predicament of these people to light.

German edition of The Fishermen

German edition of The Fishermen

 

The Fishermen will be in bookshops in Australia on 2 March 2015

You can find out more at:
Scribe
Chigozie’s author website

Chigozie’s Australian publicist is Bridie Riordan: bridie@scribepub.com.au

© Zach Mueller

© Zach Mueller

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