I’ve always loved words, and I was certainly one of those kids who loved the library, at a time when having a book to read was one of the best ways to spend the hours of the day, away from school.
Meet Puss in Boots, my Muse who comes with me to all my gigs and meetings.
Puss in Boots
In high school, I discovered a talent for writing poetry, and while I didn’t go any further into it for quite a few years, once I started, I launched into poetry in a big way, as well as other types of working with words. Poetry is the one genre that feels most important for me personally, although I know writing a blockbuster that sells millions of copies would be a fine idea, financially
Money’s not Everything
Poets and megabucks don’t fit together naturally, so it’s fortunate that I’m not reliant on my poetry earnings to live the good life that I do! Life and living a good one are made up of many things — family and friends, a good sense of purpose, having things to do, look forward to, and enjoy.
I’ve discovered a love of editing and putting together books. I started by self-publishing my books, including poetry collections, and other quite different genres. I have published two books published with well-known South Australian publisher, Ginninderra Press including Angles on Ankles.
Angles on Ankles by Carolyn Cordon
‘The Details’ tells a tale.
From Angles on Ankles by Carolyn Cordon
My first published book was actually a children’s school reader, published many, many years ago which still brings me a handy bit of money in Electronic Lending Rights, every year.
Money isn’t everything in life, though. Getting just the right word, in the right place, writing a Haiku so perfect it brings you back to the moment you wrote about every time you read it. That is what’s worth more than money.
Other Voices
One of the things I love about poetry in South Australia is how it seems to be opening up to a large variety of different voices, so that the older male white poet, though common, is not the only voice heard and read.
Not that there’s anything wrong with the male voice, of course, but it should never be the only voice available, particularly in a country such as Australia, where we have such a broad range of humanity sharing our land, white, coloured, straight, gay, and other, and many who have come to the English language at an older age, still able to do amazing and interesting things with their words.
Current Projects
One of the projects I’m working on at the moment is an anthology of words written in response to Covid-19, which has certainly brought some of those ‘other voices’ to me. I’m enjoying discovering and accepting these interesting words, written about situations alien to me, but written in ways that easily show the truth of what people have lived with.
This book ‘Plague Invasion – Creative Writing Responses to Covid-19’ is possibly the most important thing I have produced. I am proud to have had the idea for it and to make it happen. I have other ideas in my head too, and another poetry collection may well come to be next year, who can tell? Poetry happens when it happens; you can’t force it!
A new poem for the times by Carolyn Cordon.
Poetry in the Community
Attending, or running a poetry reading where a mix of complete newbies and well-seasoned poets join together to make beautiful music with their poetry, what a wonderful thing that is to do.
You can read from your own work, and listen to the words of other poets, some of them already known to you, some new voices, and exciting times certainly can come when a poet absolutely ‘nails it’, and you feel the frisson on hearing the best possible words to show something to others.
That’s what poetry is, or can be all about, finding the best possible words, and bringing to the reader, or hearer of to an experience that meant so much to you that you had to write it down, in a way that would bring the same moment to others.
My Favourite Things
I’m a great fan of quietly sitting with a poetry collection and exploring the poet through the words they have written. Finding exciting ways of looking at something, new and unusual ways. I love this, and also to be able to talk with the poet later, to let them know how good it was to feel the truth in their words; a lovely thing indeed.
One of my favourite things is being one of the coordinators of the Gawler Poets at the Pub. It has been going for over twenty years. Once a month, poets and poetry lovers come together in historic Gawler, at the Prince Albert Hotel. We often have a workshop in the morning and a reading in the afternoon. Poets at the Pub began with Gawler icon, Martin Johnson and his partner Cathy Young. It’s changed venues a few times, but the Gawler Hotel seems to be it for now.
My Blogs
I run several blogs which connect with others; writers, poets, and bloggers, and people interested in the things about which I write. My main blog is about me, and I am often there, writing about my writing life. Another is about being a dog owner and gardener, which I go to sometimes, with news of those things.
An essential blog for me is the one about MS, which I began soon after my diagnosis. It has been a valuable tool of discovery as I found out more about this new disease I’d been ‘given’. Learning and teaching about Multiple Sclerosis were also necessary and liberating when my body was letting me down. It let me show that I could still keep in contact with the world and stay exciting and useful. You can find this vital blog here.
My Stoic blog is the most recent. Stoicism means a great deal to me and seems to be the way I wish to live my life. A Stoic life to me is about doing the best I can when I can; working to help others, whether people, society or the world, one step at a time. That is how I wish to live my life.
An earlier, critical blog of mine is about sexual abuse. It is not lovely, but over the years, it has been cathartic and healing not only for me but also for others. If you’ve experienced abuse, you can feel as though nobody understands. Still, I know that my words have benefited others who have moved with me from victim to survivor because I write honestly about these matters.
That’s probably enough for now, except to say that blogging is an integral part of my journey through life.
Carolyn Cordon is a writer, poet, and editor. She is also a highly engaged community member, editing the monthly newsletter — Mallala Crossroad Chronicle, as well as self-publishing her books.
She has had eight books published, in a mix of genres, including two poetry collections published by Ginninderra Press. Carolyn’s keenest interests are community, and Nature.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Photographs, images and and poems by Carolyn Cordon
A much younger acquaintance recently asked if I was content with my life. When I said ‘yes’, she queried if that was because I had given up my sense of adventure. Was it actually easier, though more boring, to settle for the status quo rather than look for something more? This made me stop and consider the highways, by-ways and detours travelled during my existence.
By Veronica Cookson
Sure enough, I never conquered Everest or sailed lonely seas single-handed, but I didn’t want to. Many years ago I read an opinion piece written by a much-loved actor during the 60s and 70s, who said that mothers didn’t have to do those things because they’d made their lone journey, climbed peaks, triumphed over pain and gained an affinity with the earth when giving birth. ‘Is that so’, I can hear you say, ‘women can do both, they can have it all’.
Well, I did both — not with a fulfilling career, but with menial jobs, at the same time being a wife and mother, struggling to cope. You could hardly call the pressure satisfying. I’d seen the same with my mother, six children, never enough money plus a husband with secrets and itchy feet.
Tempest, Flood and Drought
So, what have I accomplished? I didn’t have the knowledge to develop a life-transforming drug or the drive to open an orphanage overseas for unwanted babies. Yes, I gave birth — to two beautiful daughters (who’ve supplied me with a clutch of grandchildren), survived 25 years in an unhappy marriage, but no-one with a crystal ball or tarot ever predicted that I would be where I am today.
I live in a 1920s gingerbread cottage near the sea with husband David, whose arrival in my life is the best thing to ever happen to me.
Moana 1949
Moana 2020
Like a log cabin sitting among skyscrapers, this little weatherboard house is now the eldest in the area. Built by David’s grandfather, it’s name-plate reads Lutonia, labelled after his native Luton in Bedfordshire.
Veronica and David
David and I married on 8 November 2003 but when we first met I was already practising a long-held ambition, reading palms, travelling with a group of psychics, taking part in fairs locally as well as various parts of the state and interstate. This continued for around 20 years, but then with David by my side.
Palmistry was a fascinating part of my life. I had the privilege of meeting people who told me secrets not revealed to loved ones. They often shared sad but wonderful confidential stories.
I valued being part of that profession’s troupe, some of them as wacky as writers. A highlight of that time was the publication of my book, First Steps to Palmistry.
Sadly, the little paperback is now out of print but it was a thrill to see it on bookshelves.
Proliferation
After the myriad of jobs I did, working in offices, at a prawn factory, being a seamstress in a hospital, as a shop assistant and doing repairs and alterations at a dry cleaner, then back to office work in schools, I can recommend retirement. Retirement gives me time to pursue interests I couldn’t have undertaken previously.
David encouraged me to enrol in art classes when he knew that’s what I wanted above all else. He re-introduced me to writing which I’d given up as a school kid. He applauds my few little successes, from having poetry or prose published, to being invited to be a guest reader at forums like Coriole Winery’s annual Poetry in the Vines and Poets’ Corner as well as my spot here on Wattletales. A fulfilling challenge was being co-editor of the 2018 Friendly Street Poets Anthology, alchemy. David’s confidence in me has been a game-changer.
Vines and Tendrils
David and I have been fortunate to travel to a number of overseas countries, Egypt, China, the Adriatic, Italy and the British Isles. Those experiences have influenced much of my poetry. Sometimes we hired a car, but mostly we took bus trips, as below.
Buses at the pyramids
Tourists at the pyramids
Police at the pyramids
Previously published by Friendly Street Poets Inc., in ‘Dream Water Fragment’ (2017)
Cigarette ash and bread dough
Istanbul hop-on, hop-off bus
A Harvest of Riches
I am recording my family history in poetry, prose and prosy-poetry and below is a vignette from my childhood.
By Veronica Cookson
Cornucopia
My days are now simple. No longer is there an itch to burst out. I love to hear the magpies that rouse us in the mornings and spending precious time watching them, the rainbow lorikeets and rosellas at the birdbath. We travel and friends and family visit. There are plenty of shows to go to plus various group activities. Art, jigsaws and reading can take up a lot of time too.
If anyone asked me again whether I’m content with my life, I would honestly reiterate, ‘Hell yes’. I don’t have to prove anything to anyone, and no, I wouldn’t go back to another time or wish for more excitement, not for anything.
Author Bio
Originally from Port Lincoln, Veronica always loved poetry but didn’t start writing it until her 50s. Her poetry focuses a lot on family, travel and nature, and she often uses her early life as both inspiration and therapy.
Veronica’s sense of humour ensures her ‘country’ upbringing and quotes come to the fore in her ironic style, the funnier and more ironic the better — spying on family, friends and even her husband David, whose idiosyncrasies aren’t spared either.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS All featured photos, images, stories and poems the copyright of Veronica Cookson.
Now 77, I’ve moved on average, every 18 months throughout my life. To date, I’ve set up home in 50 dwellings in three countries — Australia, Japan and Sri Lanka — and numerous towns and suburbs across Victoria, New South Wales, South Australia, Queensland and the Northern Territory. I moved with my parents when I was young, with children till they left the nest and occasionally with, but mostly without, various husbands.
Tropical Cyclone.
My lifetime residential record includes eight hotels, three guest houses, a government hostel, a boarding house, a rooming house, a residential delicatessen and numerous free-standing houses, units and flats, not to speak of the occasional short-term outback donga. I’ve shared places, rented others, owned a few and now live in a retirement village. I’ve even had a stint in a high-rise public housing tower.
A decade or so ago, I compiled a list of my dwellings. I draw on a few below to highlight odd moments as a basis for considering the dislocation entailed in moving. It is sometimes hard to make a home.
Growing Up in Pubs
The photo shows the Transcontinental Hotel, Oodnadatta in far north SA where we lived in the early 1960s
In bios for poetry and writing, I often say I was born and bred in pubs. It is true. My father was a publican, and I list above the hotels I grew up in. I also worked as a receptionist, barmaid, waitress, cook or housemaid in the last four and, in others in various places when times got tough. Even as a mature university and postgrad student with three kids, I was weekend breakfast cook and housemaid at the Hotel Franklin.
The Marunouchi Hotel in Tokyo, Japan, was commandeered for use by the British Commonwealth Occupation Force (BCOF) and refurbished for purpose and managed by my father, Stan Warrell, promoted to the rank of Major for the role.
I was a sullen and lonely child, and although I was safe, I was isolated and often alone in Japan and daydreamed a lot. I didn’t like my nursemaid. I wanted mum and was only truly happy when touring with her. However, our Japanese chauffeur Kanamtsu and a bellboy called ‘Micky’ whose Japanese name I never knew spoilt me. I adored them.
My bedroom.
Sullen or sulking?
Me with two American boys.
Take a moment to think about the photo of me with two American boys, brothers and children of one of dad’s American counterparts. Nobody considered it wrong to pose children on a statue of the Bodhisattva, Konnan (Chinese, Quan Yin).
My parents took occasional weekend leave in Nikko, where dad played golf with his military friends while mum drank with their wives. I played with naked Japanese children in a nearby rockpool and learned to speak a little Japanese. An old woman my mother inaccurately calledmamasan took pity and fed me fluffy steamed rice when I visited her kitchen. I still love plain rice.
In the early 1950s, we moved into the NewAlbury Hotel. On the cusp of womanhood. I fell in love there with Elvis Presley and had one close friend whose father worked on the railways. Most parents did not approve of my hotel environment. It was in this hotel that my new brother spoilt my single-child status, but a lesbian waitress on staff befriended me and taught me how to play chess. I adored her. One day, she disappeared.
I later discovered that mum had sacked her to protect me. In her defence, years later, when Mum learned that my brother was gay, it made her love him more. In the New Albury Hotel, a fat, female cook took pity on me and allowed me to sit in her pantry to devour two packets of Arnott’s Milk Coffee biscuits after school. Nobody sacked her or the young, foreign kitchenhand who flirted with me before puberty.
Boarding House Life
For me as a child, the boarding house at 7 Redan Street, St Kilda, was my most nurturing home, even though my father, being in the Army, was away a lot. I adored this Redan Street dwelling. We lived here both before, and after my father’s military tour of Japan.
We had an upstairs room where we played a game, calling each other mummy frog, daddy frog and baby frog. After Japan, we sat cross-legged on the floor to eat at our prized Japanese chow table. I remember how big the double bed seemed. I slept on a divan. The building is now up for sale on Realestate.com as an expensive ‘illustrious c1888 solid brick Victorian residence’.
Guest Houses
After the New Albury Hotel, my parents bought a guest house called Tara. A red-headed young journalist staying as a guest made me blush when he wrote this poem in my autograph book for my 13th birthday.
The photo shows a squirrel monkey sucking his thumb.
In my late teens, I lived in a couple of other guest houses, one in Bondi, the other in Rushcutters Bay near Kings Cross. I could write books about both, but I’ll just tell you that I nearly fainted one pay-night in a Bondi fish and chip shop while waiting for my hamburger to cook.
Two Sri Lankan students in Australia on the Colombo Plan kindly walked me home that night and took me on tour next day to see The Three Sisters in the Blue Mountains with their posh friend who had a car. They urged me to return to my violent first husband because, they said, a young woman should not be alone or without a husband in a place like Bondi. Bless them. I did try, but it was a disaster.
Another night, two Bondi cops stalked me in their police vehicle as I walked home on the then mandatory high heels from a bus stop after work in the dark. They invited themselves into my boarding house room. Intimidating, handsome and in lust. Finally, I squirmed my way out of trouble by agreeing to bring a friend on another night. Next day, I moved.
A Hostel in Darwin and the House that Changed Everything
In the early 1960’s I lived in a Government Hostel in Darwin in a group of buildings that extends from Mitchell Street through to the Esplanade. It is now backpacker accommodation.
A decade or so later, hippies invaded Lameroo beach opposite the hostel. While they hung in tree houses on the hill leading down to the beach, swam naked in the sea-baths, smoked dope and horrified everyone, I was busy playing housewife in a new police house in an outer suburb until in 1974, Cyclone Tracy blew it away. Soon after that, my marriage broke up and blew me off with three little children under four.
Dislocation
If we accept that the idea of home is a tale of many mansions: of growing up, love, loss, disaster, recovery and, ultimately a place of belonging, then moving is a story of change. A new location often brings the transformation of identity. A move can also entail a shift in status as in my marital breakup.
But there is more to it. Cyclone or not, whenever we move into a new house, our bodies are extracted from a web of places, people, networks, activities, feelings and attachments. We have to start pretty much from scratch making new networks and connections in a process that we loosely call ‘settling in’.
But moving dislocates. Despite the internet, moving house rips bodies and minds out of their previous environment. It is thus a much bigger deal than many think. Psychologists tell us moving is one of the highest stress factors after the death of a loved one. What they don’t say is that, over time, connections and memories fade; continuity is erased.
Few people think of themselves as organisms out of place when we move, but that is what we are. The first time I sought a visa to travel to Sri Lanka, the question asking who my father was, tickled my sense of the ridiculous but it tells us something about belonging.
In Sinhalese culture, when someone wants to know who you are, people use the phrase, ‘where is your village?’ (koheede gama?’) Together with Sinhalese surname endings this tells a tale of caste and family. In Aboriginal society, country and family constitute identity. There is consonance.
L= Buddhist Dagaba, or reliquary mound.
Packing itself takes a toll on both body and mind. Unpacking symbolises the discomfort of dislocation. Unless we’re smart enough to put the kettle, toaster and iron at the top of a box marked ‘kitchen’, we are powerless to find comfort on arrival. And, when the removalists leave, there we are, bereft with a new mountain to climb.
Packing cases by the door.
Just yesterday, I read an article in The Monthly, which makes a similar connection to the one I allude to above between Sri Lankan and Aboriginal culture. It may seem a bit off-topic, but it is an insightful read in its own right exploring as it does the significance of the body in space. Drawing on the work of Bas Luhrmann and David Gulpilil in my favourite movie ‘Australia’, the article speaks more broadly about things we often fail to notice.
Displaced People
Millions in this world stand alone to leave with nothing in their foray into the unknown. Their order of terror and courage is hard to conceive.
Despite my discomforts, I hope this short exploration of the dislocation of moving home resonates enough to let you consider with compassion what migrants, asylum seekers and refugees go through. Can you imagine being ripped from the bosom of loved ones, often to become stateless and homeless for years in teeming refugee camps, unable to re-embed yourself in the fullness of life?
In 2018 World Vision wrote that “Most people remain displaced within their home countries, but about 25.9 million people worldwide have fled to other countries as refugees. More than half of the refugees are children. In 2018, 13.6 million people were newly displaced, either as refugees or IDPs (internally displaced people).”
The figure of 25.9 million refugees worldwide is more than the entire population of Australia and, at the risk of repeating, half of these 25.9 million refugees are children.
UNHCR recently reported that 79.5 million people worldwide had been forcibly displaced by the end of 2019. See the details here.
In Summary
What has emerged for me in writing this post is that at worst, I had a safe but somewhat isolated childhood. I was lucky enough to be able to seek comfort in books and, all the while, I dreamed of being a writer. As a young woman, life was not as safe for me, but I always had the love of my family. Having no single place to call home meant that my parents’ deaths cast me adrift. I had nowhere to belong.
One of the reasons I take friendship so seriously I think is that I lack any sense of continuity in time or place. Apart from my children, few people in my life today have known me for much more than a decade. I have led a fortunate but dislocated life. What I have shared here is a mere taste of its diversity.
A Writing Tip
Try going through your life in terms of where you have lived and how. Make a list and see where that takes you as I have here. That would be a pretty good start if you are interested in writing your life story.
If you have a particular period in your life that stands out, write a memoir.
How does it feel when your last child leaves home? The day my son left home, I squealed more like a dumped teen than a 46-year old over-devoted mother, but then someone told me I’d have to do my own thing. After years of lavishing my children’s whims, my thing? Did I have one?
Wife, Mother and Businesswoman
My children made me prouder than a Swarovski punch bowl but I had no time to even think about what I liked doing.
Both of my children modelled with Mostly Kids. We traipsed to auditions which were like meat markets, but their photoshoots were successful.
I sewed costumes for my daughter and every other child who had two legs, an ear for music, and the ability to contort themselves toward every element at the same time.
I braved my son’s football when even he wasn’t keen. I took him halfway across the state to violin lessons which petered out once he’d mastered one tune and cheered him along with more laps of the swimming pool than there are.
Adding to my ridiculous schedule, which incurred cartwheels during sleep, I ran our skip bin business because my husband worked away. I also managed the Middleton General Store full time. In between, I took care of my father-in-law who lived with us. He forgot me most of the time but loved me when he recognised who I was. I loved him continually, along with his colourful tales of Ireland.
My First Writing Group
Lo and behold when a new writing group started the day after my nest emptied, enthusiasm spilled from me like molten lava. Designated as the new facilitator, I got to run the group before I took my pencils from their wrapping. I set creative writing exercises, and glory be our first anthology was published nine months later.
I had enough life experience to rewrite Aesop’s Fables, the Bible, and the entire set of Encyclopedia Britannica. I just needed the tools, you know, correct sentence construction and punctuation. I had a full set of Derwent coloured pencils in my toolbox, but they needed sharpening.
Now, I cringe at my early work. I can’t read it. Thirteen years on, my pencils have worn, but I keep sharpening.
My Writing Mind
‘Someone’s writing through me,’ I’d declared at first, astonished at what fell out — prolific words which made me wonder. I didn’t even know what I was writing until it appeared firmly in ink. Call me old fashioned, but surely writers have beginnings, middles and ending sorted before they commence writing? Not me!
Eventually, I realised that sections of my stories emerged from the play of dreams, some parts from previous decades and others from hearsay.
COVID-19 safe teddies and dollies.
I thought I was a total fruit cake until I discovered that writing for me is a therapeutic journey. I have grown with storytelling. It heals grief, anger and provides great joy.
When you write, I’d say, share it, burn it, or trample it to death if you wish but let the truth be known. You don’t need other people to tell you what to write, but when you publish, then you need to craft your writing for your audience.
Challenges as Storylines
I draw on family stories and my health in much of my writing. For example, my father’s passing was the most challenging period in my life, but he returns in many forms, in many stories, saying things he hadn’t time to say during his lifetime.
He was as Irish as Irish is. Patrick Murphy by name. Perhaps that’s why I’m full of Blarney. Dad was my rock and hero, which gave my husband some huge pants to fill.
Then there is Chronic Fatigue. It tops my list of bloody rude ailments. While it is intensely debilitating at times, I write myself sane. I also write on health sites as an ambassador for the condition.
Writing Achievements
My current project is a magical realism novel entitled Ten Pound Poms. Yes, it is the story of a family’s migration, my story, highlighting life’s magical moments.
A snippet of my magically real story.
I was invited with my writing group to attend an afternoon tea at Adelaide’s Government House after I read one of my poems to the Governor at the launch of Sand Writers’ anthology, Speak Out, 2019.
I have many other publications under my belt, and I love to entertain my friends on Facebook with the oddities of my life. People tell me that my postings burst with lopsided humour.
Poetry
I began by writing prose, but when prizewinning Adelaide poet, Jude Aquilina converted it into absurdist stanzas, I discovered a whole new genre to release my humour.
Published absurdism.
Where I once despised rhyming poetry, thinking it immature and contrived, now, it flows from my nib as fluidly as waters from Niagara Falls. I regularly submit to Australian Children’s Poetry, as wee rhyming ditties warm the hearts of the young. Why not try it yourself?
Where Stories Emerge
I see stories in each new dawn, in nature and especially in majestic life-giving trees. The trees around my home whisper secrets, but they are not mine to tell. I hear the wind moving through the eucalypts on its way to our homestead, bringing tales of the sea.
My valley of whispering trees.
Once, an ancient tree near my home, moaned in the darkness, sending the bejesus up my spine then down my gartered socks. In the morning, the ancient monolith lay hugging the earth, a tree that began its life long before my grandmother was born. My stories come from events like this.
Similarly, I draw on real-life to characterise; for example, an old man can be a gnarled periwinkle. A daft, laughing woman could become a gurgling jellyfish.
I live a precious and privileged life, one that delights me to record to share as a writer.
My Writing Tips
Write what suits you is my motto, as long as it is not defamatory or bullying. Life is too precious to harm a single soul. Remember, the pen is mightier than the sword.
Being in a writing group where you are among like-minded people, is a beautiful way to improve your craft, share ideas and learn from collegial critique.
Author Bio
I am of British and Irish descent, and the Blarney spills through me from childhood tales, coloured-in; daily anecdotes, wrung-out; and the hilarity of living with beasts in mammoth proportions.
Cradled as I am within a valley of whispering trees where secrets blow in from the sea, writing is now my way of life.
I have a devoted husband and supportive family. Their love fills my writing. There is little room for negativity in a life filled with joy like mine.
In 2013, with two weeks’ notice, I packed my bags, books and two dogs and drove three hundred kilometres to my first teaching job in Murrayville, remote North-West Victoria. Murrayville Community College is a well-resourced Reception to Year 12 school which services the farming families of the Murray Mallee area. My two dogs, Duke and Oonah, found their ‘inner wolf’ in this hamlet at the edge of the Mallee Desert. Their daily adventures were both fraught and funny.
I stayed in teacher housing bordering a large area of Mallee scrub. Each icy morning from July to October the dogs burst out the door at 6 a.m. and dashed down the dusty tracks while I breakfasted and prepared for school.
Duke and Oonah
Duke left, and Oonah right, first day in Murrayville 2013, in the lane way to Murrayville Community College.
From day one, Oonah, my 15-month old Shar-Pei, Staffordshire Cross, turned feral: hunting sheep, flushing rabbits from their warrens at 4.00 in the morning and commando climbing fences to turn up at the school. I became accustomed to the principal slipping into my classroom and quietly advising me: ‘Excuse me, Ms Vouis, your dogs are here – again.’
Duke, my four-year-old English Staffordshire, learned many new and unwelcome tricks from his new mate who assumed the Alpha dog place in their two-mutt pack. He too attended the school, and these two became my best students. Between apologising to sheep farmers and returning the dogs to their yard, I was terrified that Oonah would end up with a farmer’s bullet in her black velvet pelt or that I would have to award them a graduation certificate for Primary School.
My first contract was an excruciatingly laborious gig. I was the third English and Literature teacher for the Year 12 class that year, and the students resented me and the churn they had to endure. I was lonely, working 78 hours a week but my dogs made it bearable.
Enchantment
The isolating experience of living in a remote, rural location, on the edge of scrub with a dry, desolate beauty, built my resilience and forged a magical bond between my canine pack and me. Both my dogs are ‘recycled’, having come from rescue organisations. I am a Greek migrant who grew up in Whyalla to a back-chorus of ‘wog, wog’. All three of us, othered and marginalised, made a solid clan. Dogs ‘belong’ you and supply family where there is none; great mercy for me at this time and now too.
At night during harvest time when marking and reports were done, Duke, Oonah and I walked and walked along the red-dirt country roads. It was our midnight meditation; a small space between toil, sleep and morning.
December 23rd 2013 Port Noarlunga, upon return from Murrayville
Fields of ripe wheat spread out before us under the full moon. The silence and the silver light, the farmers’ house lights. Bush sounds and shadows are a permanent print in my memory.
May 2020 Sauerbier House steps, Port Noarlunga
Seven years on
Three weeks ago, after an eight-month chaotic and fruitless fight against a malignant Mast Cell Tumour, Oonah, only eight years old, was euthanised at home to the sound of ‘When They Ring the Golden Bells,’ played by my partner Steve Evans and accompanied by my very shaky, teary voice.
Oonah’s last day
That morning, I drove her to Port Noarlunga and carried her anaemic, rag doll body onto the beach for her last scent of salt and look at the beautiful marine sanctuary she loved and had run on and splashed in for her eight short years.
Oonah’s journey with cancer was mine too, which meant life and death treatment decisions that I had to make for her, all under terrible time pressure. Our labyrinth of interventions involved natural therapies, vets, oncologists, and also chemotherapy with the drug Palladia. This last choice ultimately ended her life.
Vale Oonah
Everyone who has experienced the death of a beloved animal knows the sorrow of losing that perfect bond — human and dog is an ideal friendship, except for a mismatched life span, which is a covenant with mourning. But I am grateful. Unconditional love remains like a thickness in the blood.
I am profoundly thankful for Oonah’s beauty, protection, intensity, companionship and the confidence she gave me to see out a gruelling teaching contract.
I am also glad that I gave her and Duke a chance to live in a rural, remote place where they could experience their wildness and the hunt that is inbuilt in their ancient wolf DNA. Dogs, the human-made copies of wolves are so often constrained in dull suburban lives where they can’t live out their wolf ancestry.
For us, Duke, Oonah and I, the Murrayville contract bonded us; our pack memories are as lasting as a tattoo.
In Happier Times
Oonah and Duke in Autumn Leaves
I offer this haibun in homage to Oonah’s black, wolf-like loyalty.
Author Bio
Maria won the 2018 Friendly StreetNew Poets 19 manuscript prize. She sings, speaks and writes poetry, specialising in form, spoken word and poetic craft which she teaches to adults and younger students.
A Greek migrant, Maria inhabits the schism of a two-tongue world, a space that fuels many of her poems. Work with minorities, particularly children in care, the voicelessness of animals, Indigenous and refugee issues and the plight of those on society’s fringe drives Maria.
As a finalist in the Goolwa 2017 Poetry Slam for her poem, Mr Lizard Lips and here is Maria, performing Little Poems About Kisses on YouTube.
Contact Maria here: loveoflearninginhouse@gmail.com
With a lifetime of experience behind me, I can draw on a plethora of ideas, a diverse background of failed ambitions, modest achievements, many ways of being and even disasters for my writing. Call me a veritable museum of womanhood in Australia since 1943 and continuing.
I write my blog because I have things to share, poetry because it excites me. And, I write stories to fulfil my childhood dream of being a novelist. And, along the way, I’ve found myself.
I write because…
In a post a couple of months ago, I talked about my first novel On Gidgee Plains. Six months after I signed a contract for it, the publisher went into liquidation. That broke my heart. Yet, I persist because I love to write.
Yes, I have stories to tell, but writing is also my ally, my friend, my place to turn. It is where I can rediscover myself in a world where the elderly drop out of sight. Characters are my imaginary friends, my compatriots and my companions.
Where other people’s stories allayed my childhood loneliness, in my later years, my stories complete me. Through poetry, and especially in my novels, I negotiate the past, create imaginary futures and, in so doing, recreate myself.
Make Space for Your Heart
When I taught Life Writing a few years ago, I started by encouraging new writers to, first of all, permit themselves to write. We need to say; it is OK to put ideas, thoughts, and feelings on the page without judgment, crafting comes later.
This checklist is like many others, but it is worth setting it out here for those who may never have seen them before.
A Writer’s Checklist
Create a particular writing space for you alone.
Create a ‘do not interrupt’ time for your writing.
Show up on the page every day for a specified time or number of words.
Keep a notebook or phone mike with you at all times to record observations, ideas, thoughts or feelings: anything that takes your interest or fancy.
Write three longhand stream of consciousness pages first thing in the morning to free up your creativity: anything goes, you can just grizzle on the page if you like. (Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way calls these the Morning Pages.)
Another brilliant idea from Julia Cameron is to take yourself on a weekly Artist’s Date. Take yourself somewhere as though you were a child to visit a place that thrills you or gets your creative juices flowing – a flea market, aquarium, museum, bead shop, fabric store, garden centre, botanic park, art gallery, antique shop, pub, tourist venue…go sky diving if you want to!
For further inspiration, go to your favourite café or nook to reflect and write.
Remember writers’ block exists in the conflict between the creative mind and the rational editor. So tell editor in your mind to mind its business until your creative intelligence has finished its work.
there is no such thing as a bad first draft
My Space
After I sold my house with its external studio and following my own advice, I designated the bedroom in my tiny retirement unit to be my writing space. That means that I sleep in the lounge where my bed doubles as a settee by day. I can sit and read on my balcony, which attracts the winter sun.
My Space, My Eyrie
The Eyrie
Looking out, looking in
it's where I soar
above hustle-bustle
deep in memory's well.
In my eyrie among
life's bric-a-brac, I scavenge online
for fragrant delights to
caress wrinkled skin
cosset a dry scalp and
put a sheen in white hair
just for me. Only me.
No eggs in this brightly cushioned
world. It's a nest of endings
with Persian rugs
secretly stuck to the floor where
only a bed pole
disturbs the comfortable façade.
Graceful, tasteful curtains
magnolia-and-birds on cream
hang from a golden rod to frame the sky
in sun and in rain
between gold-braided ties with plump, shiny tassels.
When curtains close in the dark
the eyrie is a magical cocoon from which
neither moth nor butterfly will emerge.
My Family of Ideas and Words
There was no television when I was young. Because I read so fast, the library of whatever town we were living in at the time gave me dispensation to take out additional books. I grew up in a different buzz of ideas and words in a family of readers.
When my mother was young, her favourite novel was the lesbian tale, The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall published in 1928. Mum spoke of it lovingly throughout her life, often saying she hoped I would read it one day. In retrospect, I can see that she was trying to share something of herself as a woman that way, beyond being a wife and mother.
Mum spoke with similar awe about the wonders of Ancient Egypt. She had yearned to go to university, but circumstances and times were against her.
In a similar vein, my gifted gay brother who died aged 52, was an avid reader of poetry and literary classics from an early age. He adored Ancient Egypt and at university, turned his intellect to the study of the Classics. He became fluent in both Ancient Greek and Latin which was quite a feat but, with a facility for languages, managed to also speak fluent French.
As for Dad, my mother’s family accused him of being gay because he wore a camel hair coat yet, all he ever read apart from his beloved racing pages were what he called his yippees. He kept stacks of them beside his bed, next to a full ashtray, and, as he aged, false teeth in a glass of cloudy water. He regularly took the yippees he’d read to a book exchange shop only to return with a new collection.
We are, I think as much what we read, grow up in and later surround ourselves with, as we are what we say, do or believe we are. Indeed, without the ideas and words that nurtured us and those we embrace along the way, how could we write at all?
My Writerly Journey
My own reading adventures began with Mae Gibbs’ Snuggle Pot and Cuddle Pie and Beatrix Potter’s Tales of Peter Rabbit until I graduated to Enid Blyton. As a young woman, I progressed to Sir Julian Huxley’s Evolutionary Humanism, and a particular favourite, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. My eclectic reading also included Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley.
My youthful intellectual perambulations covered a type of magical realism in children’s stories through to humanism, madness, and mysticism, all in keeping with my interests today. Later, through anthropology, I was fascinated by and studied South Asian myth, ritual and religion, and the emotions. In among that, I retain a hearty Okker bent like Dad’s, which springs to life in some of my poetry.
Writing is a splendid art and, for a writer like me, the joy is not in the product, but the process: the writers’ journey. I agree with Nuala O’Connor who says in her article, ‘Out of the Iron Cage to Swim’ —
I think a lot of unpublished people have a skewed idea about what being a published author might mean to the writer herself. The book is the end-product of years of research and writing; of unsuccessful experiments; and of the mid-book cri de cœur: ‘I’ve failed – again!’ Often, when the book is published, the writer is finished with it, emotionally and physically. The joy is not in the made object, or the party, or the wandering about, talking about the book. Those things can be fun, and celebration is important, but it’s not what the creative act is about. What the writer most wants is to be at home, alone, bubbling with anticipation, nurturing a fresh bud, being neatly deluded by nature and glad of it. Virginia Woolf said, ‘I want to be through the splash and swimming in calm water again. I want to be writing unobserved.’ Amen, sister.
Nuala O’Connor
Being-in-the-World
At the risk of repeating myself as I’ve quoted him in a previous post, let me cite Milan Kundera from, The Art of the Novel (p.42).
A novel examines not reality but existence. And existence is not what has occurred, existence is the realm of human possibilities…But again, to exist means: ‘being-in-the-world’. Thus, both the character and his world must be understood as possibilities (i.e., qualities of a promising nature – i.e., something is going to happen)
Milan Kundera
If, to exist means ‘being-in-the-world’, I am lucky to have grown up in a world before the selfie. I could lose myself in the imaginative world of characters, including my family. If, as it did with me, reading arouses curiosity, it was also my great fortune to grow up in pubs where I came into contact with all sorts of people; rich, poor, high and low status, with various social, religious and cultural backgrounds and education levels.
Whether on the page or the other side of a bar, characters are characters. And in telling stories from our lives as humans are prone to do, we create ourselves as characters along the way. No wonder I became an anthropologist. I was born to be a people-watcher, now poet and writer.
Try This
If you write or wish to, ask yourself why.
Ask yourself how you came to that desire.
Look for clues in your family, your past, your childhood dreams in the way I have in this post.
Don’t fear to tread through failures and disappointments.
Under Items 1-4 list whatever comes to mind and, using that information, write the story in the way outlined next. You may surprise yourself.
Tips Before You Start
Avoid writing remembered stories. These are stories already analysed to the point that we can recite them by heart. We see remembered stories clearly in our minds, as though we are the star in our very own TV show. They are so well-rehearsed we tell them for a purpose: self-presentation. We often modify or embellish them to suit our audience until we come to believe they constitute ‘me’.
Remembered stories are ‘front of house’ stuff. Forget them, at least for now.
Instead, dig deep into memory’s treasures by taking yourself there through the senses (sight, sound, smell, touch and taste). Stop talking and even thinking long enough to ask where you were, the time or place. What did it feel like? What light was there, was it hot or cold? Can you hear, see or smell anything? Bring tactility into it such as rough bricks, puppies, furry rugs or flowers and trees.
Working with the senses in this way you can tap into what Patti Miller in Writing Your Life calls original memory which brings together those things we exclude from remembered stories. Original memory is poetic. It is clear and connects things in ways that are unique to a particular moment.
Before I started work on my novel High Rise Society, I often outlined the concept to friends and tabled it in workshops to great feedback. ‘I’d read that’, they’d say. But early into the first draft my enthusiasm flagged which led to the idea of spicing it up with a touch of magical realism.
As though to affirm my decision, the universe brought me a WritersSA workshop on just that topic. Sadly, days before it was due, COVID-19 shut it down. It was a blow because I am not naturally inclined to write magical realism and don’t pretend that I can. Indeed, as an anthropologist, I’m more of a realist. But I decided to carry on.
As I began to read up on the topic myself, my excitement grew. I had only to figure out how to weave magic into a tale about poor people living in high rise public housing. The answer was already there in the book; tree-hugging.
Photo by Laxmar Belina
Tree-hugging
On the face of it, hugging a tree is not a magical event. Indeed, some might call it silly. But like regular humans, the characters in my novel don’t hug trees at random. They hug trees they like because taste has a social or cultural background*. Now that is an anthropological truism; call it ‘data’ if you will.
It wasn’t such a leap from hugging trees to deciding to have trees and characters talking to each other.
To test the viability of this idea, I read The Songs of Trees by David George Haskell, a book rich in botanical and scientific information which, at the same time is lyrical in creating a remarkable story about trees. Inspirational stuff.
The Song of Trees also led me into the realm of fungi which are vital to tree life, living, as they do, in and among tree roots.
Photo by FOTOROS
What is magical realism?
In his article, ‘Writing magical realism: The Ultimate Guide‘, Jack Smith explores magical realism in literature. It variously involves the inclusion of ghosts, rain that lasts five years, fabulism, the fantastical and improbable, the supernatural, paranormal, surreal, uncanny and the marvellous — not forgetting magic, myth and dream — all used to construct worlds at a tilt.
Further, Smith argues that the magical elements of life are fundamental to it, linked as they universally are to death. In his words —
mortality disposes us to an interest in magic, so until the conundrum of death is solved, we’ll likely always have an appetite, in art, for exceeding the limitations of what is observably possible.
Jack Smith
Many people think not only of Colombia as in the image below, but Latin America as a whole when they think of magical realism. However, Colombia may come to mind first if only from the 1982 Nobel prize-winning Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
A neon sign showing a slogan of Colombia
My brush with the genre
Initially, I was smitten by magical realism in Salman Rushdie’s 1981 Booker Prize-winning novel, Midnight’s Children. Here are his opening lines —
I was born in the city of Bombay … once upon a time. No, that won’t do, there’s no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar’s Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. And the time? The time matters, too. Well then: at night. No, it’s important to be more … On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came. Oh, spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India’s arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world.
See how Rushdie plays the fairy-tale phrase, ‘once upon a time’ against reality in the first sentence? He then imports an equally magical if not fantastic quality by saying the clock struck ‘on the stroke of midnight’. He weaves his magic into a real moment again by having clock-hands joining palms. The midnight arrival of this baby later teased with awful names is the portentous moment of India’s independence. Yet, what lightness of being is in these few words. What an intellect, too.
Scholars may debate whether Nigerian novelist Ben Okri writes magical realism or spiritual realism. Yet, he is another of my favourites in this genre, starting with The Famished Road that won him the 1991 Booker Prize.
I remain a fan of both Okri and Rushdie. I am in awe of their extraordinary if sometimes enigmatic talent to evoke and take readers on a rollicking ride; in the case of Rushdie certainly. When I was at university, I used to say you had to read him like Karl Marx, who is only understandable if you don’t fixate on words but instead, roll with their tide. Magical realism as a genre does not necessarily have a clear beginning, middle and end; it has a slightly breathless quality in the way it invites you to suspend disbelief.
Jack Smith’s who’s who of magical realism, of course, includes Isabel Allende, Jorge Luis Borges and Japanese author, Haruki Murakami among others. You will remember Murakami for his 1997 novel, Wind Up Bird Chronicle. All are acclaimed writers, so there must be something special going on. Could it be magic?
The realism of magic
In general, I prefer feet-on-the-ground realism. At the same time, as an anthropologist, I am bound to think of the world, as not actually real, but — following Michael Taussig, one of my guiding anthropologists as mentioned earlier — as really made up.
You might like to read Taussig’s groundbreaking work set in Colombia, Shamanism, Colonialism, and The Wild Man. As the review on Amazon says, he explores ‘not the magic of the shaman but that of the politicising fictions creating the effect of the real.’
I remember too, how excited I was when I read Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman’s book at university. First published in 1966, The Social Construction of Reality the idea that we create our realities changed my world.
As Jack Smith asks, if realism is about ‘impressions of lived experience’, what is magical realism? And, here’s the twist. The magic in magical realism is part of reality, part of the lived experience of characters within the genre called magical realism. Magic is embedded in our lives, but we don’t always notice it.
It’s all about perception
Readers of magical realism are encouraged to understand the world somewhat anthropologically. They may not believe in ghosts, witches or the living dead, talking trees or five-year rain, but must suspend their everyday assumptions to accept that such entities are real to characters. And, often enough, writers may have grown up in worlds where the numinous and ethereal exist and are often honoured as real.
We could suggest that the term, ‘magical realism’ is a Western construct predicated on a rational, scientistic cosmology that does not allow for the reality of ‘magic’. The name alone carries this distinction.
Think about this. When we say, ‘that’s a myth’ aren’t we saying something is untrue? Similarly, many in the scientistic West altogether dismiss, not only myth but also religion, without ever asking why every known human culture contains a religious, spiritual and mythological dimension.
In anthropology, myth is truth. Mythology embodies the wisdom by which cultures and people live. In Australia, we have myths about nation, motherhood and mateship to name a few, and we judge others in these terms. When someone says ‘That’s un-Australian’ we all know what it means against the background of our myths. Myths, like symbols such as a national flag, are real. They carry huge emotive power and they construct our reality. And, we construct our reality in their terms.
A flag, after all, is only a piece of cloth yet people lay down their lives for theirs. A flag’s mythological and symbolic value carries the immensity of who we believe we are. In this sense, any story without fantastical bits is probably a bit dry.
Techniques
Whether writing in the magical realism genre or including only the occasional magical moment in your narrative, your character must think there is nothing at all untoward about the event or situation confronting or engaging them. We may think tree-hugging is kooky, but can we make our readers believe in trees that talk?
Using techniques drawn from this genre allows for a character to ‘know’ things that others don’t, and for which the narrative otherwise does not provide scope. Magical realism is known to lend itself to issues such as inequity and power imbalance as in a recent novel by Shokoofeh Azar, The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree(shortlisted for 2018 Stella Prize).
We have to ask what is real. I recently re-read Mae Gibb’s Snuggle Pot and Cuddle Pie. When I was a child, the Big Bad Banksia men terrified me; they were as real to me as the Devil as proselytised by the church, always behind me, ready to sneak up on me. To me, that was as real as the suppressed anger I saw on the faces of people with false smiles. We only have to exaggerate that a bit, and bingo, we have a mask! Mae Gibbs gave me hope with her gum nut babies, there was always someone to help.
On my Welcome page, acacias scream at me in a poem. Is that a metaphor, anthropomorphosis, the malevolence of nature or a touch of magic? It came from an authentic moment driving through the Adelaide Hills in those snappy-cold days of early Spring. There is always a fine line between reality, imagination and magic.
Try This
Choose your favourite tree type and find one close to where you live.
Wherever it is, take courage and hug it. Press your chest and forehead on its marvellous trunk and stand stock still.
Notice how your heartbeat becomes more important than the sounds around you but note too, any changes if, for example, someone walks past. Does it begin to pound?
Just observe your body leaning into the tree, hold the tree in your arms. Are you separate from the tree or do you meld into it?
Give your tree a name. (An act of separation)
Ask your tree a question and listen, deeply. What do you hear?
Write this experience down and create a short story about whatever came up for you.
If you do the exercise, I’d love to hear about it.
The COVID-19 pandemic, hereafter known as coronatime, has delivered uncertainty upon us from where we may incline towards chaos psychologically, socially, politically and economically. It is also possible to find sanity.
While the majority of the world is complying with political directives to maintain lockdown distancing rules and cleanse at every opportunity, we simultaneously witness televised punch-ups over toilet paper in supermarket aisles where we otherwise stand in disbelief before empty shelves.
What is going on here? Why struggle? Why hoard? In trying to think this through, I stumbled on a post by LinkedIn Editor, Scott Olster saying it’s okay to be uncertain in uncertain times. And the way our world has shut down definitely creates uncertainty.
Olster refers to a New York Times article by psychologist Siobhan Roberts entitled ‘Embracing the Uncertainties‘ in which she argues that uncertainty arises when people lose control over their environment. And, we have certainly done that in this coronatime lockdown.
Little surprise then that the media is full of ideas about how to retain control. But, there is another way.
Control
The worst thing about the pandemic for me is the media’s somewhat messianic approach in its daily information and advice bombardment. How to avoid boredom, how to satisfy our longings when we cannot meet our loved ones, how to manage children when families are home together. That last one gets to me. Are modern families so dysfunctional that being together for lengthy periods is no longer possible? Why do children have to be permanently entertained? What does it mean to say we are socially depriving toddlers if they miss a bit of pre-school or that school kids interrupt our careers?
The message overall is that there is a right and wrong way to get through this coronatime. We are lucky; they say because we are All Together which is complete nonsense that emanates from the mouths of people on good salaries in a context where millions are sick, jobless, broke, isolated and at extreme risk in many aspects of their lives.
Much of the media onslaught is insufferable talk-show fluff, replete with silly jokes and pretentious conversations by personalities whose opinions are, frankly, highly dubious. Why I mention media jabber-jabber is that it is — once again —about how to ‘manage’, ‘fight’ or ‘control’ everything in our environment.
May I ask, when did you last have absolute control over anything?
Fear’s imperative to take control
Even in serious discussions, the notion routinely appears that, as humans, we can control things. Psychologist Susan David in her YouTube video ‘How to be Your Best Self in Times of Crisis’ offers thoughts on how we might begin to come to terms with what is going on in an uncertain time by doing just that; taking control. She sensibly speaks of finding ways to make life feel better by establishing small pockets of control in our immediate environment. That sort of action can help.
But, doesn’t the sort of greedy fear that haunts our supermarket aisles tell us that fear is behind the behaviour? Surely it is fear that drives the struggle to control which is what stockpiling is; an attempt to control, to forestall scarcity, to stay on top of things.
The western certainty that we can control is a New Age sensibility. But mantras like ‘I am successful’ don’t work in the face of catastrophic events. But, fear comes not from feeling out of control but being out of control. At that level, it is a natural human response.
The thousands upon thousands of unfortunate people lining the streets outside Centrelink are out of control. Their fear is caused by reality, by a shocking situation that has potentially severe consequences. They are in a pickle. They lost their jobs overnight. Without warning. No amount of jocular how-to advice from the media will fix that. Good policy and outstanding leadership are what is needed for coronatime.
We need to shift focus. We need to ask, how we can survive coronatime when we simply cannot control the external circumstances of our lives.
Relaxing into uncertainty
For a person like me who grew up with a father who always said, ‘if you have any woes, Luv, read the newspaper, there’s always someone worse off than you’. The idea that we could, in fact, control our circumstances had not yet come into being.
Over the years, I’ve moved away from the need to control externals by developing techniques that help me through anxiety which is a slightly milder malady of uncertainty. These techniques include comfort eating, escaping through retail therapy or going for a long drive into the countryside. Unfortunately, that is a restricted activity now but even thinking about it reminds me that my problems are in the main, first world.
Being anxious comes precisely from the need to be in control. I hate waiting for things. I am not patient. I often think that events conspire against me and so on. Like others in my world, I am a product of this Western social universe in which the lockdown acts as low-grade, continuous stress. No wonder all the little things that previously might have irritated us, grow huge in our minds.
Does the need to control make me duplicitous when I say I am also weak? No. it makes me human. We are all human.
After many years of Dhamma study, practising meditation and teaching Buddhism, I have come to accept reality for what it is, which is how I stay (or return to) calm and relax into uncertainty. The Buddhist philosophy helped me come to peace at the loss of my adult eldest son. What I know is that severe dislocation is something we must allow in — accept and experience — before we can move on.
The struggle to control the uncontrollable is futile.
Take it as it comes
In Australia, we have so far been fortunate. As a nation, we have had to make some sacrifices, but to date, the spread of the Coronavirus has been minimal with few deaths compared to other parts of the world.
Tram in an empty Moseley Square at Glenelg Beach.
In South Australia, where I live, we have fared even better. These photos are pre-coronatime but, apart from the signs, they convey what one of the busiest beachside tourist attractions in Adelaide now looks, every day.
Moseley Square cafe strip.
Being old, retired and physically safe in retirement living, despite the minor irritations of living with little acoustic protection from lives in other apartments, I am one of the lucky ones in coronatime. My environment is fairly predictable and I find myself concerned more for the future of democracy, of the world economy and things like war, destitution and starvation. Will things pan out politically and economically in Australia?
Social distancing for me does mean that I can’t go to my regular poetry and writing groups, gigs and workshops. Nor can I meet with friends for coffee, long lunches or day trips when I feel like it. As this little poem shows, the restrictions for me are benign, even productive.
The Freedom
After the shock, freedom
like being at home alone
with a book as a child
able to sprawl across your bed
for hours, meeting characters
on adventures, loving as if
to avoid heartbreak
but crying anyway.
With no-one to answer to
no fear arises. No need to defend
and parry or sharpen the wit
to protect yourself. No. You
are alone and safe at last.
Who's bored? Not I, my imagination
frolics even as I sleep
enticing me to wake, to rise
to write
to create magic on the page
the real and the surreal
colliding in the voluptuous
chorus of life. My life.
Stillness follows. Satiated
I smile, open my heart.
As time goes on
In Australia, we must not be complacent. Nor must we feel sorry for ourselves. My heart goes out to those who have lost work or livelihood during coronatime, or lost so much in the recent bush fires. I grieve for all the precious Australian fauna killed in those horrendous events. I hope nobody becomes homeless and destitute. For those who are ill, I wish you a speedy return to health and wellbeing.
But, as my dad would admonish us, look at the news. Suffering in the rest of the world is often overwhelming, without this pandemic sweeping through. Today, ABC News online posted an article about the devastation the Coronavirus will cause in the Middle East. Can you imagine what it would be like to experience coronatime in war-damaged Syria or an overcrowded refugee camp overflowing with the millions currently displaced in the world?
Yesterday, I watched a TED talk describing how the shutdown in India put 20 million people on the streets overnight. People who migrate to the city from impoverished villages to do casual, day-labour to eke out an existence week to week. Without work, they could starve. A further 10 million small traders were similarly affected.
Getting back to normal
Will we ever get back to normal? It depends on what one means by ‘normal’. It may take a long time to get back on our collective feet, but things are likely to be different. My suggestion is that we bring curiosity to what is going on around us, it is life. It is an experience and we will survive. Nobody knows what is around the corner.
Try this
If I have one suggestion for you this month, it is this. Write about your coronatime experience. It may not be a ghost, but it is a spook in your life, and you need to give it full attention.
Buy an exercise book. Record what happens or has happened to you. Describe how you feel about the impositions and restrictions. Don’t hold back. Notice your emotions as you write; they may just change as you go.
Describe in detail what has happened or is happening to you. Name the disruptions — to work, home, family, health, career, studies, the whole catastrophe.
Describe in detail the things that stand out for you, that have or had the greatest impact.
List the issues that others — friends and family talk about. How do their thoughts and experiences affect you and your relationships?
What do you fear most?
What is working for you?
What can you actually control?
Follow your progress day by day.
This is more than keeping a diary. Writing this way about things that bother you, especially when you have no idea what will come next, is grounding. It gets it out of your head and into perspective.
Whether we prefer a latte, flat white, short or long black, espresso, macchiato or, dare I say it, chai (sic), few of us would associate loneliness with coffee. Instead, we would typically associate coffee drinking with commensality, community and camaraderie.
On weekends in the seaside suburb where I live, schools of ageing cyclists clatter over the pavement with their cleated riding boots to commandeer large tables at the best coffee shops. For those whose intimate conversation is drowned out by loud male voices — for the groups are mostly all-male — we enjoy a giggle at skinny old arses showing through the Lycra instead.
What is lonely about a group of cyclists? Well, I guess it is the sort of loneliness that drives humans into groups, that existential angst that asks, ‘what’s it all about?’ If we can cover loneliness in frenetic activity and togetherness, the argument goes, we’ll be OK.
Can we also assume from the lyrics in The Whitlam’s song that, there is ‘No Aphrodisiac’ like loneliness, that loneliness itself spurs us towards connection? Doesn’t the ‘you’ in the song evoke the way we yearn for what is missing or absent from our lives?
A Lesson from John Marsden’s Masterclass
Recently, I was lucky enough to attend a writing masterclass with John Marsden, one of Australia’s most prolific and popular writers who has sold five million books worldwide. Of his 40 books, many, like Tomorrow, When the War Began, screened by ABC Australia, are young adult fiction.
Personal Photo from John Marsden’s masterclass hosted by Writers SA on Sunday, 1 March 2020, during Adelaide Writers’ Week.
One of the short exercises Marsden set for the masterclass of 70+ participants was to write a scene portraying loneliness. He told us to show the emotion, not tell.
I wrote the following.
Starbucks
(c) Lindy Warrell 2020
Leaving aside whether this little piece of writing is good, bad or indifferent, or even whether it shows Phyllis’ loneliness as the exercise required, let me now put it in the context that led to this post.
Cafes, Coffee and Loneliness at the Workshop
As it happened, a new friend sitting next to me at Marsden’s workshop wrote a similar scene to mine, although instead of talking about SUV-style prams, her story was about the invasion of a coffee shop by a mother’s club when her protagonist, like Phyllis, was sitting alone. We laughed at the similarities, but,we were not alone.
When John Marsden asked who would like to share their story, a few shy hands went up. The first person read sitting down, after which he gave a little disquisition to advise that when we share our writing, we need to stand to read so as to command the room. The poor girl was embarrassed. Needless to say, the next half a dozen readers stood up, throwing their voices.
What intrigued me though, was that they had all written scenes that mentioned barristers, coffee and cafes. In a group of 70+, that means at least 10% talked in slightly different ways about the loneliness of coffee in our society. The task was to evoke loneliness. The percentage who chose ‘coffee’ as their setting for loneliness prompted me to write this post.
Does Coffee Alleviate Loneliness?
I remember years ago feeling welcomed at Starbucks with my laptop (until the SUV prams arrived, which sparked my scene above). Starbucks left South Australia soon after.
Beginning writers are often encouraged to take themselves away from home to work. Some go to libraries, but many people have favourite coffee shops where there is both atmosphere and an opportunity to people-watch. It is fortunate that Australia is renowned for its café and coffee culture.
The many ways coffee shops tell us something about our society reminds me of my early years as a barmaid. In my father’s pubs and many others where I worked over the years, old single men would wait by the front door at opening time, ready to claim their favourite stool. There they would sit, staring at their glass, drinking slow and steady all day. They would only lift their heads when an opportunity to corner the bar staff or a customer who might listen presented itself.
Our TV soapies cast such iconic pub characters as the slightly potty, hobnobbing knowers of obscure and secret things about a neighbourhood that others might want to forget. But, those men were isolates and probably lonely. Could it be that the modern, upmarket coffee shop serves a similar function to Australian pubs?
An Aside
I won’t get into pokie parlours except to say that the scientific and medical research into problem gambling might better serve the public if they could find an answer to levels of loneliness in contemporary society.
What is Loneliness?
The Macquarie Dictionary tells us that the words, ‘lonely’ and ‘loneliness’ are nouns. (Try pronouncing the adverbial form, ‘lonelily’). However, most definitional lists are given under the adjectival forms, ‘lonelier’ and ‘loneliest’ which is rather odd.
The Macquarie definitions below pertain only to the word ‘lonely’. To me, they describe the cause of loneliness, not the state. Number five is the closest you get to what loneliness actually is, but the definition is circular.
1. lone; solitary; without company
2. destitute of sympathetic or friendly company
3. remote from people or places of human activity
4. standing apart; isolated
5. affected with, characterised by, or causing a depressing feeling of being alone; lonesome
The question remains, what is loneliness? Like dictionaries, the internet too tells us nothing of its nature abut is big on describing its effects (presumably for a caring industry).
Loneliness has a wide range of negative effects on both physical and mental health, including depression and suicide, cardiovascular disease and stroke and other health consequences. Unlike our dictionary, this article at least tells us loneliness is an emotion. It also says that loneliness is a state of mind which, fortunately, is something we can change.
Lifeline
I should add here, as others do on this topic, if you are suffering right now, contact Lifeline. Knowing the causes of loneliness is fine, but sometimes we feel lonely and depressed for no reason and may need to reach out for help. There’s no shame in that.
Alone or in a Crowd
Given the paucity of understanding about what loneliness might actually be, John Marsden was onto something when he asked us to write a short scene ‘showing’ it in action, in situ.
As we know, loneliness is different from isolation. And, being alone does not by itself cause loneliness. Some of us are natural loners.
So, how does loneliness show itself? How do we write about it without naming it? Well, here is a series of mini expositions on how loneliness feels. Even though this article is telling in a literary sense, it gives writers a few hints about how we might show, depict, evoke or portray a character experiencing loneliness.
I must say that I disagree with the proposition that loneliness is ‘unnatural’ as this somewhat unreliable source does. To say that is to deny an emotion that we can all feel at times. For example, loneliness comes upon us exquisitely in grief. That is natural. As such is not unique to the modern world although I grant it may be more ubiquitous in industrialised society.
Still, we need to explore such writings because a) they come from a well-intentioned space, and b) everything helps us as writers to understand better how to portray this particular human state on the page.
We can drown in loneliness whether we are alone or in a crowd. We can be lonelier in a relationship than when single. Loneliness remains in many ways, a mystery. But, as I’ve previously argued, we need periods of tragedy and disaster to enhance our writing. Why not add loneliness to the list?
Back to Coffee
Trainee barista Karin Stenback tells us there are five things we should know about Australian coffee culture. Coffee in Australia, she says, is a way of life and ours, in little old down-under Australia, is one of the most advanced in the world. I had to laugh when I read —
Starbucks…failed to enter the markets in Australia, because Australians didn’t like the poor quality of their coffee and their average customer service (Munchies). Australians want to drink coffee that tastes like coffee. People are demanding quality flavours and aromas, quality roasting and brewing and simply just caring baristas who’ll treat the coffee the way they should.
Karin Stenback
Choosing our favourite coffee shop makes a statement about who we are, the location, the venue, and the quality of the coffee are all-important. Capitalism offers a choice, and we choose our coffee accordingly. Taste in coffee adds to our identity just as styles of music and fashion do.
We are, in these ways, what we consume and therein lies the problem. Beneath the mask of identity lies the existential angst of loneliness in our culture.
Whether you go to a coffee shop to escape yourself, avoid being home alone, or to get together with friends at the end of a marathon Saturday or Sunday morning cycle, we all seek to not feel lonely.
When are you Lonely?
Think about those times you feel lonely. What do you do to
escape the feeling? Do you ever stay with it to see what it is trying to tell
you?
Instead of seeking it, write about how you seek to escape when you are lonely. Where do you go, what do you do? Write about how you feel and think of ways to portray that, to show, not tell.
Always in this sort of exercise, write about yourself in the third person as you move into, through and out of an episode of loneliness.
Ok, that’s it from me till next time. Happy Writing
When I write, my characters are either my friends or my enemies. Sometimes, they are me, the child who read a lot and got lost in imaginary worlds, the little girl who fell in love with heroes and heroines who conquered the odds. For all their different faces and voices, I adore following their ups and downs as life trips them up, provides challenges or sends them to bottomless pits, hoping they’ll overcome.
In my youth, my heroes were human. They had a thousand faces and a limitless cast of voices. Back then, heroes did not need action costumes or bionic parts any more than Tarzan in his jungle home (what a metaphor). Even Superman was the very human, bespectacled Clark Kent beneath the flying red cape.
In this context, let me recommend Joseph Campbell’s groundbreaking book, The Hero With a Thousand Faces written in 1949. This brilliant work underpins the storyline for the same hero’s journey that you will read about today in various how-to-write-a-novel texts. Given his lifelong interest in mythology (1904-1987), I’m sure Campbell would love the irony of that.
On Amazon and for Kindle. A brilliant book for your collection.
The heroic quest is not always spatial and external. It may also be an internal, psychological or spiritual journey which is why I advocate the exploration of suffering in Questions Over Coffee. The external can be metaphorical and some narratives encompass both internal and external aspects of the hero’s journey which gives greater depth.
Life is Our Teacher
My poem The Passage in an earlier post shows that humans share a lot in life. But equally, we are diverse, and we traverse a range of often-difficult paths alone like our fictional heroes whether in film or on the page or TV. In our variety, we are fascinating creatures, whose lives are story-making factories that build character in much the same way as we bring fictional characters to life in our writing.
As humans, we bring diverse cultural and social backgrounds into a world that acts upon us as we act upon it. Dislocate us and we are out of place. As in life, so in writing, dislocation shows the true grit of a fictional character. We must put them in positions that force them to make choices and follow paths; some leading nowhere, others causing people to come together, break apart and, ultimately, change.
Like us, characters must choose which way to go. In that sense, sliding doors are part of any heroic journey.
Writers are the Puppeteers
I introduced the hero’s journey here to make the point that, we are much more than surfaces and our characters must be too. But, a hero’s journey is only part of the story. Creating a character with depth also requires more intimate techniques and this is where faces and voices come in.
I remember how my children laughed wickedly when they were young, mocking the way my face and voice changed, depending on who I was speaking to, on and off the phone. It was a valuable lesson to have innocent eyes see me like that. And I’ve been interested in the relationship between faces and voices ever since.
I suspect we all have a phone voice or what I’ve come to call my pompous voice because there is always so much more going on beneath the externals. For example, a pompous voice might indicate a character’s self-consciousness or denote insecurity in relation to their interlocutor. We must go beneath the surface to hear inner voices properly. But, first to faces.
Faces: the one-way gaze
Consider these photos.
This is my web page profile picture. Do you think ideas about me would vary in terms of the age, status and social leanings of a viewer?
Here I am as a 1970s bride. If I used this photo as my profile picture would people read what I say differently?
Here I am as a little girl sulking. Feeling invisible to the adults around me I hid my face.
Although the sepia photo is 70 years old, that sulky child still lives in me. While my hopes as a young bride were dashed, inside, I am still that young woman at times, full of optimism. The old woman I’ve become holds those (and other) earlier moments in memory along with a range of social roles: daughter, wife, mother, academic, poet and novelist, BUT
It still pisses me off to be treated as invisible.
Lindy
When people say things like ‘aren’t you clever for your age’ or, ‘it’s good to keep your mind active’, they are talking to my age, not me. Nowadays, I no longer hunch to hide myself away as I did as a child. I roar! Or, write a poem.
As humans, we are all complex and whole, not just types. Typology is for scientists, not artists. And that’s the point. We must not type-cast our characters and, even though we are puppeteers, we need to work with both faces and voices to develop subtleties of character.
Voices: in action
High Rise Society, starts with the 60-year-old, middle-class protagonist destitute and on the streets in Melbourne. When she gets public housing she is initially grateful to have found a home and seeks acceptance and friendship among her high-rise counterparts. But when her best friend dies unexpectedly, she begins to feel the new world she had begun to love, degrades her.
Although I don’t develop it here, as the story progresses, the protagonist Ruby develops two distinct voices: beneath her polite and open veneer lurks a mean inner voice of self-talk contradicting what she says.
Here is an excerpt from a first chapter scene in High Rise Society, showing a brash young social worker talking to high rise residents who she sees as her project. Here, I use dialogue to sketch context and voice as a shorthand way to convey character.
Excerpt
Social worker Gaye Bailey interrupts a private conversation in which old-timers Annie and Mary are initiating Ruby into high-rise life.
Lindy Warrell
End of Excerpt
Try This
Let me first ask, in this selfie-crazed world where we objectify ourselves to ourselves, are we what our photos portray? Are we merely a surface with faces posed in emulation of the rich and famous in ‘in’ settings as contrived as our Insta-pics? Or, are we more than that? Take a moment to reflect, then ask how many voices you have in your head. How many of these do you use in speech, and which do you heed inside?
Exercise:
Write a scene exploring two people on public transport who board and sit opposite each other. One person may be a black-jeans-wearing, tattooed youngster. The other a motherly or even grandmotherly figure in a cotton dress.
You decide who your characters are, and how they dress or behave, based on appearance to start. Whether you create two men of different generations, two women or a male-female pair or some other configuration doesn’t matter. However, it is best if you make at least one character completely different from you. Pick a type you have strong opinions about.
Sit quietly inside each of these characters, looking at the other. Then, working from one perspective at a time, write what each one is observing, thinking about the other. Remember, they are sitting opposite each other, possibly with knees or parcels and bags in close contact.
Write about the following —
The way your characters enter the bus, train or tram, choose their seat and sit opposite you.
What they look like, what ‘you’ (the other character) smell or feel or think.
What they might be thinking or feeling from their perspective.
If they speak, what do they say, how do they sound?
Is the voice what you imagined it would be?
Change places and do the same with the second character. In other words, be both of these people, each looking at and sizing up the other, and see what comes up.
I have learned a lot in my publication journey. My first contract for On Gidgee Plains, signed in July 2019, was rescinded in January 2020. The publisher I was with ceased business. All author contracts, including mine, were cancelled and all I gained was this fantastic cover art and an ISBN. Handy if I choose to self-publish.
In business, these things happen, especially for sole operators and small entities like Small Press Network (SPN) publishers such as the publisher with which I signed. I read recently that if a new publisher lasts two full years, they are on their way. Mine didn’t quite make the two-year mark. I empathise with the publisher for whom business failure was a shattering blow.
Of course, I was devastated too but, in retrospect, my first experience in seeking a publisher was, to put it mildly, naïve and a bit haphazard. Still, I’ve learned along the way.
My journey — finding the right reader
I had played around with the concept for On Gidgee Plains for a long time but got writing seriously in 2013 when I felt I’d developed a decent storyline. I finished writing and editing as far as I could go in September 2016 at which time, I hesitatingly sought a professional reader.
Although my local writers’ centre offers manuscript assessment, I appointed someone I knew well because the book was close to me, precious, and I was not ready for the sort of slash and burn approach I might get from a total stranger. Bit silly, really, when most prospective readers are unknown.
I waited for four months to hear back, which was a stretch. My question had been, was the book publishable or not. The appraisal included a recommendation that I submit the novel for a national literary award. With such positive feedback, I became reckless. I believed my book to be ready to go out into the world. I accepted most of the editing suggestions (pleased they were few) and set forth on my publishing journey.
My journey — finding the right publisher
While I’ve published academic articles, reviews and poetry over the years, my publishing journey as a novelist was a new experience. Publishing is a competitive business. And it is slow. Very slow. Which means living in hope for long stretches, being patient enough to get on with other things while you wait.
Perhaps foolishly, I decided to bypass the agent idea. There are arguments for and against working with an agent. They take significant fees, but they also know the industry which is large and complex.
I chose to send my manuscript directly to the Big Five publishers as they are known in Australia who are open to unsolicited manuscripts on certain days and at particular intervals. These are —
Almost every publisher who accepts unsolicited manuscripts advises at the outset whether or not they’ll get back to you and how long they expect to take either way. I was optimistic. I was patient, but I waited in vain. Eventually, this door closed.
The next step
As deadlines passed, and rejections rolled in, I began searching in earnest for specific publishers, niche publishers that I thought might be interested in my story. I discovered Australia’s Small Press Network of independent publishers, and it was here that I had a modicum of success.
One SPN publisher wanted me to change the second half of the book. I declined. Another offered valuable advice. Like many new writers they said, I tended to overwrite, but I mustn’t lose heart because my book had many beautiful lyrical moments. More editing would do the trick.
To the uninitiated, ‘overwriting’ is pretty much a form of
telling rather than giving the reader credit for keeping up. It includes the
use of unnecessary tags like ‘he said’.
Getting positive feedback from these two publishers sent me back to my manuscript. I asked an editor friend with a literary editor’s eye, what she thought. She was fierce but armed with her detailed critique, I went through the novel with a fine-tooth comb, cutting 15,000 useless words. The original manuscript was 87,500 words. The word-count is now 72,500.
I touched base again with the publishers who’d wanted me to change the ending and asked if they’d reconsider the manuscript now that I had substantially edited it. They reviewed and accepted the revised version. It was soon evident that the publisher was struggling but I hung on until the bitter end. The thought of starting again did not appeal to me.
So, here I am in January 2020, heading towards 77 years of age next month and six years on from idea to failed contract. While it hurt, I have removed forthcoming’ from On Gidgee Plains on my books page — for now.
Author Promotion
If 2018 was the year of submissions, 2019 was the year of waiting, but I kept busy.
I kept up with my poetry as you can see in my new book, Life Blinks launched on 12 January. I got stuck into my second novel, High Rise Society and am making good progress there.
Most exciting of all, I attended a brilliant workshop series called ‘So, You Want To Write a Novel’ run by a well-known and respected Australian writer and poet, Jude Aquilina. She had us writing synopses, character profiles and much more that got me started on my a third novel entitled Beyond Ginza. I’ve collected books and undertaken research for this story and, I can’t wait to get into it. It spurs me on.
Other helpful workshops I attended covered the how-to of seeking publication and one on author branding. It was mandatory, workshop convenors said in unison, that writers develop a professional web page. And I did.
Wattletales, as you see it now, is my first web page. I am proud to have created it myself on WordPress.org. There is always so much we can learn. Yesterday I attended a Canva workshop and I’m booked to do one on promotion and publicity.
I still struggle with SEO (search engine optimisation) which means learning a whole new language, a whole new way to portray yourself. It also requires you to objectify the self, something I’m not doing here. Today, I’m telling the story of my journey towards the desired goal of getting my novels published. The dream is to have three novels published before I depart this planet.
My publishing journey Mark 2
My first publishing journey is a cautionary tale. Do not rush in with your novel before you are absolutely sure it is ready. I say this because, last week when the mere thought of again preparing my work to suit the requirements of different publishers exhausted me, I decided I’d give the previously discarded path of seeking an agent a go. Trouble is, that is as much work as going direct.
Nevertheless, I looked through the list of Australian literary agents on the Australian Society of Authors (ASA) website and happily selected three I thought might possibly accept my work until I read the submission requirements. One stated categorically that anyone who had submitted to more than three Australian publishers, need not bother to send their work. They would not read it.
Don’t lose heart. There are many valuable sites where you can get quite a bit of free advice. Try Jericho Writers on how to find an agent and Authors Publish for ideas on where to send your work. These are both top-shelf sites to help you on your way. A bit expensive for some of us to become a member, but if you can afford it, why not give them a try?
I’m still undecided about which way to go, direct or through an agent but one thing I am doing before I make up my mind is giving my manuscript another thorough proof and edit. Every time you return to your writing, you can improve it.
Traps for young players
A note to the wise, please avoid Austin Macauley Publishers who seem to get top billing via Google every time you search for a publisher. Austin Macauley gave me a thrill a few months after I started sending On Gidgee Plains out. They sent a signed contract (in duplicate) in a glossy folder with a letter of offer to publish. Their proviso was that, as an unknown writer, I would have to pay.
Pedlars of false dreams are out there
wattletales
There is a range of publishers who will produce your book for you for a fee, but you need to beware. Some, more often known as hybrid publishers, are genuine. Still, it is a fine line between partnership publication and a scam. Check them all out. You’ll find reviews on the internet and at your local writers’ centre or association. I consult the Australian Society of Authors website. It’s worth being a member.
Success, or slush pile?
All advice, from workshops, readings and online forums, is that we must, first of all, bring our manuscripts up to standard, not only for publishers but agents as well. Indeed, we need to do that before we submit to a professional reader. First work on your story.
When I started writing, I read a lot of how-to books. Here are my two favourites.
I think I’ve mentioned Robert McKee’s work entitled Story: Substance, structure, style, and the principles of screenwriting in a previous post. However, I cannot emphasise how important this book is. Yes, it says it is about screenwriting, but it is excellent for novelists because it explains in easy-to-use and straightforward language how to captivate your audience.
Stephen King’s book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft is part biography, part writers’ helper but it is deeply honest and insightful. It is available on Amazon.
Before you send anything out, whether to publisher or agent, pay a professional reader, or engage an assessment service (again, find these through your local writers’ centre).
Be professional about getting published
When I started writing, the only app I used was Scrivener which I still use and highly recommend to this day as an aid to creative output Scrivener lets you save web pages, character profiles, research and other material right there where you write in the same project window. It also facilitates moving text so you don’t get lost as your manuscript grows as it does with an extra-long Word document.
writing is the first step
editing and proofing for publication come after the creative phase
wattletales
Before you think about sending your manuscript to anyone, even when you feel your story is working well, make sure you check it thoroughly for grammar, spelling and style.
No matter how good you are, be aware that grammatical rules change, and language is always in flux. When I taught at University back in the 1980s and early 1990s, I was amazed at the low literacy levels of students because, in my day, schools hammered grammar and spelling and punctuation into us. Not so, nowadays.
Now, language and rules change fast, but apps keep abreast of the game. It wasn’t until I proofed my first novel manuscript with the apps I’m about to introduce, that I realised my comma and inverted comma style was out of date. So, too was my use of articles and tags. And flowery overwriting! My mistake was to send my manuscript out to too many, too soon. It was not ready.
Getting your manuscript, your synopsis, author bio and even your covering letter all in tip-top order is a priority when seeking publication and there are tools to help.
Editing and proofing apps
I recommend three editing and proofing apps for writers. There are more, for both Mac and PC, but as a Mac-using writer, not a techie, I include only those I know best.
My process is to forget about editing and proofing while working in Scrivener. Still, as soon as I finish my first draft, I save to Microsoft Word where the long editing, refining and proofing phase begins.
Grammarly
You can use Grammarly for free. If you fall in love with it as I did, it’s worth paying for. I use the Premium version, which is not cheap, but I wouldn’t be without it. It checks both spelling and grammar at a much more sophisticated level than Microsoft Word. You can set your own language and goals for correctness, clarity, engagement and delivery according to what sort of what genre and effect, you hope to achieve.
I was over the moon just before Christmas 2019 when Grammarly announced that its Beta app for use on a Mac. You can use it online or embed it in your Word documents. It corrects your language on web sites, including social media sites.
ProWritingAid
I have a friend who swears by ProWritingAid. It is similar
to Grammarly but cheaper. They say it is better for novelists because it has
more proofs around style, but I don’t find it is as sophisticated as Grammarly.
Hemmingway
Authors often write long sentences, lovely long sentences, but they are brilliant only to the extent they transport their reader, rather than lose them. Hemmingway is the doctor for that problem. Hemmingway is another freebie which is excellent when you are working on a first draft. It is less about grammar and spelling and more about style.
Check this out
I tended (and, still do to some extent), write long sentences with clauses and sub-clauses which, while grammatically correct like this one, are apparently no longer appreciated by the reading public in this fast-paced meme-y world of ours.
So, here’s a pic of the first draft of a part of this blog. I thought it might amuse you because, right now, Grammarly is telling me my text is 100% perfect, but Hemmingway says, long sentences, lady! Fix that.
Try This
If you feel uncomfortable trialling new apps with your current project, bring out some old drafts and run each piece through Hemmingway. Then give Grammarly or ProWritingAid a try. See which works best for you.
I recommend a combination of Hemingway followed by Grammarly which has helped me (and a couple of my writing buddies) to stop overwriting.
Habits are hard to shake, but these clever companions make it easier to refine your writing and learn along the way.
In each of my posts to date, I have explored ways in which life informs poetry and fiction, using my life to exemplify. And there is no doubt that fiction and poetry, like film and other cultural events, inform who we are.
Xmas 2019
Stories in novels, movies or on television are texts in and of this world, whether they are set in the everyday world or imagined space as in sci-fi and fantasy. Have you ever noticed the resemblances between futuristic stories and good old westerns? Goodies and baddies prevail in both and, for me, that raises issues in reality and the imagination.
There is an inherent contradiction in trying to distinguish imagination from reality. Both are equally embedded in the real world — or, should I say, the world as we imagine it to actually be.
Do you see yourself in your writing?
Let’s start by asking, do you see yourself in your writing? And if so, how? This is one way to begin exploring what is real and what imagined.
Life in one form or another enters our writing whether you are, like me, realising dreams late in life, or just starting out. We cannot escape ourselves when we write. If we are not in our poems or novels explicitly, we are always there implicitly.
I think here of the way the movie director Alfred Hitchcock made an elliptical appearance in all his movies. It used to be fun trying to spot him. (If you’ve never seen a Hitchcock film, let me suggest Psycho. (You can view it on YouTube here for a couple of dollars. IMDB still lists it as an 8.5 film.)
As writers, everything we do, from the choice of topic to genre and style, speaks of us as living humans in a partly real and part-imagined world. I’d go so far as to suggest that we imagine most of our personal reality in much the same way as we do our fiction, albeit with different emphases.
Life and what we write
Below is a schematic representation of Wattletales posts since its inception. While I started with no plan about what to write, as you can see, somehow the posts interweave. They derive their meaning from my interests. What I know, what I write and how I am in the world are clearly represented in it even though I decided each month’s content ad hoc.
Even if I’d planned, the result would be similar. What I recognise now is that the theme of my posts has been one that explores the relationship between reality and texts, between what we take to be true and the stuff we make up. Until writing this post, I had not realised how much my thinking has been influenced by Michael Taussig.
As I’ve argued before in Life Writing 101, there is no such thing as a stable, enduring or fixed self. As a Buddhist I understand that one’s sense of self is a mere collection of stories we tell about ourselves, many of them contradictory. I have quoted him before, Michael Taussig (Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses, Rutledge 1993) puts this succinctly —
Now the strange thing about this silly if not desperate place between the real and the really made-up is that it appears to be where most of us spend most of our time as epistemically correct, socially created and occasionally creative beings. We dissimulate. We act and have to act as if mischief were not afoot in the kingdom of the real…
Michael Taussig
I argue that the way we construct ourselves is pretty close to how we create stories on the page. Our memories even play with time as we do on the page when we gather together themes or topics.
As for life, so for texts
Like the Author Bios post, When Purposes Collide is also in many ways key to what I am saying here because it discusses the same strange disjunction we make between our ‘real selves’ and our ‘constructed image’ for the web. Both are equally fiction.
Whether I’ve written about being creative in old age, Life Writing or the issue of character in fiction, my theme is a constant. Life, poetry and fiction are all part real and part imagined. So, whether talking about writing or writing about talking in fiction and in poetry is much of a muchness to me.
I concede that a few of my posts have been pragmatic, such as Writing SEO, or Clickbait, where I discuss the nature of ‘internet language’. How to Start a Life Writing Club and Tips and Pitfalls in Fiction Research are also more along the lines of advice. I call these pieces my flat earth writing. It is OK to occasionally stop analysing and just treat the world as though it is real but I suspect I would have been raising questions, even then.
There is no right or wrong way to write
Not everybody is interested in the way life plays with fiction and poetry and vice versa. Or whether things are real or imagined. Readers and audiences admire substantive work that unambiguously addresses the issues of the day as though they are real and otherwise enhances our experience of the world from another’s perspective.
We see this both in positive literary reviews (the establishment) and spoken word slams (the people) where intimate lives are often revealed. The former is more often than not written in the context of other texts, or a history of texts (a specialised history and language unto itself). In the latter, in spoken word slams, context is often taken for granted as being now, as though history doesn’t exist and this moment is all there is.
My questions are all about contradictions, dilemmas and, yes, struggles and the effort it takes to get these things on the page. It’s a truism to say that we must start with what we know. The struggle starts when we examine how we, as writers and our work are socially, politically and historically situated. In other words, when we check in to see whether our words have an impact.
The posts, Author Bios and When Purposes Collide indicate that we need to ask what are the insides and outsides of creative life at both social and personal levels. Deeper still, we might well examine the relationship between persona and the inner world as I have in this little poem called ‘The Poet’ which is a mix of the real and the imagined.
My Poet
I get in the way of my poet who's silent before I know it I think and think and try not to blink...
I stare outside to forget, forget, forget myself till my poet pops up with right words
it doesn't always work you see but there's a lot to like about me, me, me
my façade for example goes for a ramble to all sorts of places among all sorts of people where it may well extrude by mouth but lest we forget it ingests by eye and ear and mind just to feed my poet
Understanding context
As an anthropologist, I write both poetry and fiction close to life. Stylistically I am a realist so I gravitate to issues such as ethics, truth versus verisimilitude, and the individual in politics and history. These are simultaneously topics of interest to me as a writer and the contexts in which I write.
Even when we take the world to be wholly real, there are dilemmas for the imagination.
Politics and Ethics
In life, there are some things we can be sure of and others that take the wind out of our sails. Politics and ethics certainly make things difficult for a writer who wants to write about other cultures, their own families or even themselves when they have children old enough to know what they say.
Ambiguity:
When my children were young, the dilemma of what I could and could not say about my role as a mother proved problematic. How could I tell anyone how if or when my kids did something outside the box? Could I write about such things? Or, would that be a betrayal?
Uncertainty:
Anthropology teaches that it is offensive to write for or about others from the safe and privileged space of one’s own world view. The risk is that we will compare and judge rather than objectively record and thus skew what we see.
To prevent that, we must examine with some rigour our place, our own social and historical situation, in relation to those whose lives we claim to represent in our writing. We must be aware of the way our position distorts the context.
Anthropologists today suspend their values and realities — to the extent that is humanly possible — to try and see the world from another’s perspective without judgment. In disciplines like anthropology, discourse about the right to write about ‘the other’ abounds.
The first to articulate the political distortions that come from a politically dominant perspective found in earlier scholarly work was Edward Said in his groundbreaking text, Orientalism, London: Vintage 1979.
You can still get this on Kindle from Amazon
Orientalism presents a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between “the Orient” and (most of the time) “the Occident.” Thus a very large mass of writers, among whom are poet, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and imperial administrators, have accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, “mind,” destiny, and so on … the phenomenon of Orientalism as I study it here deals principally, not with a correspondence between Orientalism and Orient, but with the internal consistency of Orientalism and its ideas about the Orient… despite or beyond any correspondence, or lack thereof, with a “real” Orient.
Edward Said
The quotation is drawn from an anonymous online obituary from The Guardian. In the simplest terms, he speaks of the de-humanising or stereotyping potential of writing without reflection from a position of power and we must take note.
Truth and verisimilitude
In our scientific world, we learn to believe in ‘the facts’. Concrete truths, however, are often difficult to pin down in social worlds.
In fiction, if we wrote our stories with what I call the ‘and then, and then’ the way a child might, or with the detail employed by science, nobody would ever read our work. Novelists evoke. Their aim is to write in a way that gives readers their own experience, to create a story that reads as though it were true. And, we borrow from life and re-imagine it.
The space between the real and the imagined on the page is deeply ambiguous. We borrow from ‘the truth’ and write in the register of verisimilitude and add imagined things to create moments on the page that ignore temporality and space in order to represent atruth about human life as I have done in this poem called ‘Home’.
Home
My mother fills a crystal vase with flowers for the mantelpiece — lies drunk in congealing fat roast lamb and potatoes ruined on the lino floor.
Always there after school she waits for me to tell her everything tells me I cannot live without her.
She loves me my mother who hates my father, He says he loves his wife but gets me to put her to bed when she's 'like that'.
Always a spotless kitchen fresh fruit on the table my mum in apron and perm — like TV ads but she never smiles.
She holds on till dark to seek herself.
The individual and history
In life writing such as biography and memoir, as in fiction, we must situate ourselves or our characters, in context. Humans are social, political, ethical and historical beings and so are our characters. Context is more than setting, it is the entire world or cosmos that our characters act within. We cannot write complete contexts which are the very fabric of our being in the world and should be for our characters as well.
History once fell into the trap of recording wars, empires, explorers, governments and kings (almost all men) which effectively silenced not only their subjects but largely excised women from history. We don’t want to do that in our writing.
The Feminist example:
Until very recently, women’s lives did not rate in authoritative historical texts. In Australia’s official war photos, women on the front were not named. They were collectively and individually labelled; subjugated to their role such as ‘nurse’ and forever silenced, sacrificed if you like, to the history of the national war effort. The world of war was imagined as being ‘about men’.
But, when the voices of ordinary people speak out or write up as in social media nowadays, you get a groundswell for change. Imagined realities are threatened.
contemporary voices:
Consider the #metoo movement. When women are trapped and silenced as individuals in untenable circumstances by sexual abuse and domestic violence, political change is not possible. But whenever many speak together, something extraordinary happens.
Feminism created opportunities for women to speak up. Its struggle was to overturn cultural imaginings. And it worked and is working even better now. You only have to read the paper. Women are now moving to the front and centre of the historical and political stage which means, the world is being reimagined.
Then there is Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old environmental activist who has inspired young people across the world to protest about climate change. She has been named Time‘s Person of the Year for 2019.
As the Buddha might say, life is always in a state of flux and is illusory. If we stick with the reality principle, wanting things to remain the same, we suffer. The outrage at Greta Thunberg from mostly white, middle-aged, established men is evidence of this.
Move over emperors and kings. Remarkable women are making a mark.
Politics and the individual
true stories:
Nothing is ever quite as it seems. History is not a straight line. Power plays everywhere competing to convince us of diverse flat-earth theories. It’s fascinating to see how the real and the imagined are distorted by power.
Let me tell you that when I went to university in my late 30’s having left school at 15, I was unaware that women then worked for two-thirds of a man’s wage for the same job. I had an early divorce from a violent man, but because I’d been married, even at 17, I no government or military entity would employ me. I wanted to be a policewoman.
Even when we were working in ‘women’s’ jobs, employers sacked us when we married. A friend of mine had an affair with an engineer in her office; she was sacked and he was not. Even after these embargos on women’s employment changed (I’m not sure if they were laws or mere customs, like changing your name upon marriage) we had to leave the workforce when we became pregnant. That was the real world.
even overseas:
When I started university as a special entry student I questioned the idea that ‘the personal is political’. During fieldwork in Sri Lanka, I was forced to reconsider.
In Sri Lanka, I felt like a ‘powerless’ single mother of three and student on a low scholarship income. However, my income made me relatively affluent and, because I was a researcher, people described me as a lecturer or called me by the honorific, ‘Madam’. They treated me as a ‘powerful’ representative of an ‘advanced nation’ and its interests. Could I then play ‘powerless’ in the face of a people who at that time had very little?
Everything is relative. We cannot be extricated from the social, political and historical contexts in which our lives take place. What we feel and experience is not necessarily the way others think of and experience us. We imagine our realities based on the specifics of our context.
Our stories are simultaneously private and collective, individual and historical and personal and political. Everything we write has ethical implications and, yet, the real world is half-imagined.
Respect those you write about
the power of words:
I’ll leave this post here with a reminder to always pay attention to the power of words; words are socially, politically, historically and ethically as situated as you, your words and the written word in general. Whether we write journalism, history, poetry or fiction, our words affect and could possibly harm others.
In order to write with respect, therefore, we must examine how and why we write and the degree to which we are writing what is real or imagined.
real and the imagined realities:
Nobody wants a review like that by Russell Marks in the current issue of Overland (No.237 summer 2019 pp 52-57). In an article provocatively entitled ‘Crocodile Tears: On Misreading Justice’ Marks critically examines a popular novel called Saltwater by Queensland Barrister, Cathy McLennan. As I read it, Marks exposes the implicit and explicit racism of a work in which a person in a position of significant power romanticises suffering.
Marks charges McLennan with a failure to understand the Aboriginal world about which she writes even though she is in a position of power over that world as a Magistrate. Her novel is apparently recommended reading, including at university level which says a lot about how misinformation can feedback into society if not checked.
Marks remark that the book’s …myriad problems could have excluded it from publication altogether’ is circumspect given his damning review. But what he has shown is how very important it is to examine one’s own context and understand the extent to which we imagine the worlds of others wrongly while believing our unexamined perceptions to be real.
As an aside
Have you ever played with mind mapping? As you can see from the map I shared above about my blogging tendencies, it can be very helpful in sorting out what’s what in your writing or your thoughts.
I use Mindjet’s Mind Manager. You can try it for free for 30 days and it is available for both Mac and Windows. There are cheaper options if you look around but it might help as you work on the exercises below.
What is real and what is imagined in your world
The first step in writing fiction and poetry is to be real on the page. A little bit of integrity goes a long way in all writing, even if only you read it.
Do you see yourself in your writing? If so, how?
List your major life turning points and the ethical struggles they represent for life-writing or fiction.
Examine what your writing says about you.
Re-write things that, when you read them now make you cringe.
Check your contexts: individual, political, ethical, historical — real or imagined.
Articulate the ways your life is embedded, no matter how slight, in all of your work.
If you have any ideas for topics you’d like to see covered here next year, please let me know.
Old age is the time for acceptance. If in adolescence we prepare for a good life, in old age, we must prepare for a good death. As we age, birthdays, New Year Celebrations and anniversaries flick by in the blink of a sleeping eye.
When (life) time is short, there are two keys to creative ageing, acceptance and downsizing. Neither is difficult because the ageing process itself invites us to be honest with ourselves, to get real. And when we become more accepting of our limitations, the easier it all becomes.
Along the way, physical and emotional signs force us to downsize — even minimalize — expectations, take stock and accept the process.
Early Signifiers
When my children were in their teens, I had a strong sense of their emergence, first from my body, then out of the crib and into the house, the garden, school and the world beyond. I understood then, in my early middle years, that I was on the cusp of ‘going down’ the other side.
I recently wrote this poem articulating how I felt all those years ago.
Key 1: Accept Signs of Change
Working in my fifties as an anthropological consultant in Queensland, I lived for a time in Coolangatta on the Gold Coast. Although I had not until then thought much about death, I clearly remember telling my Adelaide-based brother on the phone one day that, should I pre-decease him, I was not to be buried on the East Coast. It never felt like ‘my place’. I didn’t belong.
Looking back, I hadn’t recognised that I may have disliked Coolangatta because it was showing me something I was not ready to hear; I had aged. At shopping centres, all I could see were old people. When I noticed an old woman’s reflection in a mirror or shop window, I’d do a double-take when I realised it was me.
Coolangatta then catered for retirees. Those who failed to notice or preferred to ignore the signs that life expectancy was shrinking, headed north to Surfers Paradise for supplies of haute couture, gold, diamonds, bleach, painted nails and lots of wine to hide behind. As if the high-rise building shadows on Surfers’ famous beach strip were not warning enough.
Haunted by the spectre of lost youth, I returned to Adelaide only to discover that women in their late fifties did not appeal to employers any more than they did, then, to me. (A lesson in self-hate there for anyone who recognises this)
My PhD and I picked up a scrap of casual work in a printing factory for a time and, for a few months I sold books at Dymocks. But my hope that being around literature would spur me on to write as I’d wanted to do since childhood did not come to anything. I looked for ‘proper’ work.
A couple of shaky years later, I won a contract position in Katherine in the Northern Territory, which jerked me back to the past. When I met the (very) senior public servant who was to be my superior, he lolled in his chair and smirked as he asked my age. ‘How old are you.’ was his only question. I realised from this series of events, that I seriously needed to retire.
Life Forces Us to Reflect
Although I was tempted back to work between the age of 68 and 71 to pay for a burst water heater, I officially retired at 60. The first three years were hard. Like many others, I’d identified for years with my profession. The experience is joked about as relevance deprivation. When I moved back to Adelaide, I found there was also social isolation. The space I’d once occupied had grown cold.
Looking to reinvent myself as an active retiree, I established regular life-writing workshops and meditation groups in my area. I volunteered at the local Community Centre, teaching people how to use their electronic devices and social media and was even the Buddhist Chaplain at Flinders University’s Oasis Centre for a year.
I was content enough but life had not finished with me. I lost my eldest son in 2014. A year later, I fell. A broken right shoulder thrust me into six weeks of home-bound solitude. Life dismantled me. I had to accept if not my vulnerability, at least the fact that I was no longer invincible.
Key 2: When Downsizing Becomes Fun
Fortunately, I started writing poetry in 2007, which kept me sane. Although I’d found creative expression in my home, garden and cooking over the years, poetry took me on an explicit journey. I did not realise at the time that I was heading down a new path.
Not long after my son’s death, I decided to move into retirement living. I put my house on the market and it sold in days. The settlement followed four weeks later. I remember thinking then that the universe moves fast when you are on the right track.
I thought I’d eliminated anything that wouldn’t fit in my tiny new unit. And that was a big downsize exercise. Yet, when the removalists tried to fit my desk and office equipment in, it was impossible, the desk alone let alone the cabinet I felt I could not leave behind, filled the entire space. I had to ask them to take the furniture and give it away.
In the pictures below, It might take a minute to spot the difference but I can assure you, my present space is a fraction of what I once had. Still, the new office looks ok don’t you think?
The big old desk in my house.Smaller desk in Retirement Unit
I took a while to settle into high-rise living but being in the heart of the seaside suburb of Glenelg allows me to attend writing workshops with ease and read at poetry events whenever I choose. I regularly catch up with friends in the restaurant and coffee strip at the end of the Glenelg tramline, 100 metres away.
Since moving, I’ve created my first web site, published two poetry chapbooks (a third came out in January 2020) and my first novel,On Gidgee Plains found a publisher. Although my book contract was rescinded when the publisher later ceased trading, this is what I mean when I talk about downsizing for creativity in old age. Being stripped of distractions as my strength and vigour decline has been my saviour. It gives me time to focus on my creative side.
From Downsizing…
After undergoing hip replacement surgery in 2018, I emptied my kitchen of all but the most basic of pots, plates and potato peelers. During convalescence, I went back onto Lite and Easy. A sudden and complete loss of interest in cooking made this permanent. My pantry is now empty. My time expanded.
As a person who’s moved so many times, downsizing was not hard for me. I have not always been so gracious about the physical decline that comes with ageing but the creative compensation is worth it. The medical fraternity (sic) describes me as someone with ‘multiple co-morbidities’ which translates into lots of little body bits in need of tender care. They can be trying at times. Here is my protest poem.
Post-op
I'm not a patient patient.
Some call me hard to bear
But, how can I just lie around,
wondering what to wear?
There must be more to life
than ageing gracefully;
frenzy or rage are more my style
than time's attempt to maim me.
Take note — it is my body,
this ageing lump of flesh
and curiosity courses still
through every vein and artery.
While I'm not a poet's poet —
be that as it may — I hope my words
will scorch your ears
forever and a day.
…To Minimalism
The shift from downsizing to minimalism became seriously personal. It is right to speak of downsizing a house, big furniture and even a kitchen. Still hidden in cupboards and the inner recess of my soul I harboured the detritus of unfulfilled aspirations. This required a more intimate level of tidying as described by Marie Kondo in her marvellous book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying.
My children had selected treasures and photos when I sold the house but in my little retirement unit a big stash of brushes, sketchbooks, coloured and lead pencils of all sizes, crayons, watercolours, acrylic and oil paints and all the appurtenances of a would-be artist were carefully hidden away.
I had been to art classes over the years. As a child, I sketched trees, grasses, horses and houses, but it was my romance with the idea of art that accumulated an expensive array of stuff. In one fell swoop, I let it all go.
Same with embroidery. Even though I’d failed sewing at school and, despite clumsy arthritic fingers, I’d filled my elderly space with clear containers of colourful threads, crystal and glass beads and exotic drawings that I wanted to translate into embroidered art.
Again, I had all the valuables and none of the skill. I bought embroidery, beading and how-to books, joined groups of kindly, helpful people, but the evidence was stark. I had no talent. The glorious bounty had to go.
I sold my academic library years earlier when I decided I was moving into the creative path of art and embroidery. That said goodbye to academe. Now, all that remains is a state of the art collection of writing tools: a 24″ iMac, a MacBookPro notebook, iPad, iPhone, top-notch software, a decent desk, a new colour laser printer.
No distractions. Only novels and poetry books.
Reflections
For most of us, health decline in old age is inevitable as Arthur Krystal observes in his article ‘Why We Can’t Tell The Truth About Aging: A long life is a gift. But will we be grateful for it?’ The New Yorker 4 November 2019.
Ageing is a natural process. My philosophy is that we should explore it with the same curiosity that infants bring to the discovery of fingers, toes and nose. We cannot jump up and down at cot-sides but we can bring interest, acceptance and maybe even joy to the process.
Being creative in any medium gives us something new to jump up and down about. I am never lonely because I have new friends — the characters in my novels — to play with. I also have a purpose. One novel soon to be released, one on the way and another burning inside me to write before I die.
In between, I write a lot of poetry about death and dying. We must not be afraid because it comes to us all. So, I urge everyone to be comfortable with downsizing. As we decline, there is no purpose in clinging to what we once had or were. I use my story and a few poems in this post to share how inspiration and creativity can emerge even in our older years.
Kintsugi
fading from sight
white hair, pale skin
bloodless lips and a body
shrinking —
the therapist asks about
age, profession, partner
parents, children, siblings,
and delicate jigsaw pieces
resurrect a portrait
in glorious colour
traced with fine golden lines
of life's fragility
Try This
Always write about what you know. Embellish with imagination.
Look at your dreams and aspirations. Write a poem about these. Don’t judge. Be real. Editing comes later. If you try to edit (critique in your mind as you write) you will suffer writer’s block.
Let me finish with my favourite poem which is apposite to today’s topic.
My Skeleton and Me
I met my skeleton this morning
as it sneaked into my mind —
there it was,
giant teeth
infinite grin
staring straight at me,
eye sockets so deep
my skin and flesh
drowned in their hollows,
yet we laughed giant
jagged-jaw giggles
and with each guffaw
drew closer -
tied to me by tendons
cushioned by muscles
my bony friend held me
in a cradle of ribs
that hurt as we
cackled together
for my leg twitched at random,
warm and soft on the outside
skinny and hard within -
what a wicked joke life is
we agreed:
of a sudden, I felt sad
bones outlast flesh I thought,
without blood supply
my friend's smile will turn to rictus,
grotesque on lonely bones
unless — ah! yes
if I choose cremation,
we shall convulse together one last time
Across the world, naming practices keep us in our place. This is the power of words and names.
The Example of Kinship
Aboriginal Kinship Structure
Take kinship terms. We reinforce their power every time we assume their roles. Kinship terms are words which embed us in our social fabric. As specific words that both define and construct the reality of family realtisonships, they have the power to orchestrate behaviour, determine lines of descent, respect and accountability. The expectations of kinship structures underpin many family disagreements. Even so, among immediate kin such as mother, father, aunt, uncle, sister and brother kinship terms give us a sense of belonging or sense of distance.
In some cultures, kinship categories differ along gender and age lines. These extrapolate to the public sphere. In Sri Lanka, for example, an older male bus driver will call a youth ‘younger brother’, malli or, ‘little younger brother’, podimalli. Aunts and uncles in some worlds are either on your mother’s side or your father’s side, not both as in the West. It’s not easy to get your head around the diversity of kinship relationships across cultures.
Differences aside, kinship is universally a taken-for-granted part of human reality. Think of our attitudes towards in-laws versus family ties which we see as ties of ‘blood’. Ideas of kinship define taboos such as not being able to marry certain categories of kin.
The study of kinship is complex, and naming practices vary from culture to culture. Everywhere, humans assume that the words they use to construct their realities are ‘natural’ and that is what I want to talk about here. My focus is on the construction of old age in a country like Australia.
The Real Me
Let’s start by looking at how we construct ourselves as we move through life.
In many ways, we construct ourselves through words. We embody the notion of ‘me’ in our words and in the way we tell stories about our experiences and preferences. Who among us has never said ‘I am the sort of person who…’? Who among us does not see ourself in relationship to others?
Salman Rushdie here identifies the fact that we construct our realities through the prism of relationships with others. Among other things, this contributes to the pain of grief. Loss of another is also the loss of a dimension of who we believe ourselves to be..
We are a collocation of stories held by others (opinions) and our own (remembered) stories. The truth is never clear-cut.
Etched as they are in our minds, remembered stories routinely play out as though we are the star in our very own TV show. They are well-rehearsed, told for a purpose (as a mode of self-presentation) and modified or refined for different audiences. Other people may not believe or agree but, in our minds, what we remember and talk about simultaneously constructs, constitutes and defines our sense of the ‘real me’. Remembered stories are part of how we want others to see us. They are our ‘front of house’ stuff.
Loss or failure undermines the solidity of our remembered stories. They are inviolable only when external reality matches our words. ‘I am a person who…’ loses it’s power when vulnerability assails us.
Constructed Realities and Fiction
Creating fictional characters is similar to the process we sue to construct our personal reality through words.
In life, we repeatedly stumble over events that cause us to wonder if we are mad. Of course, all that emotion and pain from a lost love, illness, losing a job — even retiring — becomes grit for our writing. As writers, we can draw on and enhance our experience then elaborate with flair and imagination. Storytelling is rarely just about ‘the facts’ whether in reality or fiction. One way or another a story is always about life, about the words we use to construct reality whether to believe, create a parable or write historical fiction, sci-fi or fantasy novels.
A novel examines not reality but existence. And existence is not what has occurred, existence is the realm of human possibilities…But again, to exist means: ‘being-in-the-world’. Thus both the character and his world must be understood as possibilities (i.e., qualities of a promising nature – i.e., something is going to happen).
Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel (p.42)
Fictional characters are the same as us. Through our words as humans or as writers, our stories record the fact that we are in a constant state of becoming, transforming and, eventually, if we are lucky, become old.
When We Get Old
Quite aside from sudden shocks like natural disasters, accidents and illnesses that wreck us, we all must confront the inevitable but slow process of degeneration that comes with old age. At first, it creeps up on you. Then, like a surprise, it takes over and can occupy your days. It seems that when it does, we pass the threshold of interest. It is challenging to reconcile potentiality with the imminence of death; what a sobering thought.
In my retirement-living meditation group, I encourage participants, who like me, are elderly, to bring curiosity to the process of ageing. A newborn discovers his or her body, by laughing in fascinated wonder at toes and fingers or pointing to noses so why don’t we examine the ageing process in the same way. Being curious as bits and parts of us begin to fail can displace dread.
How Reality is Constructed in Everyday Life
The Example of Old Age
Old age is a whole new colourless world where labels become more prominent in constructing the elderly as being beyond the threshold of interest. Here’s how.
Our lack of strength and vivacity elicits terms of endearment from others.
Instead of calling us by name, they lump us together by age in interactions using labels like ‘luvvie’, ‘luv‘, ‘darling’, ‘darl’ or ‘sweetie’. We hear this at the supermarket as much as in hospital where I’ll admit; it matters less because in hospital you are effectively outside the social structure anyway — no good bucking the system there.
However, I recently told a waitress who called me sweetie as she prepared my latte that I was not at all sweet. I spoke without as mile. She was dumbstruck. At this café where ‘luvvie’, a British term, has come into vogue with the new owner, a recent immigrant from the UK, I told the young waitress that calling me ‘luvvie’ was patronising. She took a good while to comprehend. When I asked her why she used the term, she said it made her feel good. At least she was honest. But her honesty is telling in that it speaks to the complete irrelevance of her interlocutor.
My point is that going against the grain causes surprise, if not shock in a context where it is common to vacate the personality and social status of older people.
Feminising Old Age
Many of the terms used to address the elderly in shops, cafes and other busy places where staff run off their feet, are feminine. Sometimes these feminising terms are also used to with men, adding insult to injury.
A senior man playing with a puzzle. Note the emptiness in the brain region of the puzzle. It could even be the area of personality.
Youth offers life’s promise. Old age leads to death. In a world like ours, this is a distinction driven by markets in cosmetic beauty feeding the desperation to remain young forever. In this context, it is not surprising that old people are identified more with their biological decline than acknowledged for their many achievements and accomplishments. Other cultures may revere their elders, but not ours.
The dangerous thing here is the wiping of identity and the way, through words and labels, old people’s social value disappears. People forget in such constructions of old people that they are not a species apart, which is how it can feel.
Sticks and Stones
The old adage that ‘sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me’, is wrong. I grew up on that and believed it for many years.
An in-house joke among oldies who cannot let go of their former employed self is that they suffer ‘relevance deprivation’. If we have a PhD, nobody knows or cares. An old single woman is almost universally addressed as Mrs in clinics and hospital waiting rooms where they must at least use your surname. (Men have the universal moniker of Mr that never changes to define them in relation to others.)
But, for both men and women, if you were formerly a senior official, a creative person or someone of note, nobody cares. Your body becomes your identity.
The truth is that ageing is every bit as rigorous and formidable to the experience as adolescence. But it has no value because instead of blossoming and growing into character, it is a gradual fading. And, we hate to fade.
Those approaching elderly status are just as scared of the old as they are of the young they can no longer emulate without being ridiculous. This came home to me recently as I sat in the sunshine on the foreshore at Glenelg where I live. A petite woman in her sixties with thinning long white hair and wearing upmarket walking gear called out to me, ‘enjoying the sun luv?’ I said yes, paused for effect, then added ‘luv‘. She took offence.
Variations on the Theme
In my grandmother’s day, young women and old called each other Mrs So and So when they chatted over the fence. Days of such formality are far behind us, but it’s safe to say that today’s intimacy which finds us calling anyone by their first name would horrify previous generations. The term Mrs of course, then firmly connected women with a husband. And, if you were getting on a bit and still called ‘Miss’, there was something wrong with you. The name for that social malaise was spinster.
When I was young and impressionable, my aunt in Sydney, then in her late forties or early fifties called everyone ‘darl’ or ‘darling’. Being starved for love as I then thought myself, this language seduced me into thinking that she cared. Looking back, she used the term universally which suggests she was too lazy to remember names, something that requires effort. What a shame.
Finally, my mother railed all her life at the way my father and other men called her ‘mum’. A gendered kinship term that ideally defines a relationship between a parent and child. The way it was used then as in my poem, and often still is, shows how everyday words construct our realities. As you will see, my mum bucked the system.
Good On Yer Mum
'You're so good at lighting fires luv
I wish I could do it like you.'
His words seduced and in her youth
she let herself be fooled.
For years by day and night she lit
to keep the family warm
but all she got was praise by rote
that began to feel like porn.
'Here'yar mum' he'd say
passing her the keys.
'no-one else can drive like you,
you make it look a breeze.'
'But keep the window open mum
your side's always best,'
too vain was he to have his hair
tousled like the rest.
The butcher down the street,
now there was a kindly soul,
she loved the way he cut her meat
till he called her mum as well.
I'm not his bloody mother
she would rant about such men,
did they think she'd only married
to lose herself in them?
Once alert to the ruse
she began to refuse and said,
the matches are on the bloody shelf,the fire won't make itself.
One day there was no supper
for dad's Friday poker mates,
she sat at table against taboo
and won with an Ace-high straight.
'It must have been a fluke,' they said
'for a little woman to beat the men,'
in shock and awe they invited her back
and, behold, she won again.
'Your mother's as tough as old boots,'
my father confided in pride
but all she heard was, 'good on yer mum',
she thought he had a hide.
Try This
Think of a word someone else uses to define you. It may be a kinship term, or any other word or name. What does it say about your relationship? How do you like it?
Write a poem about that.
Examine any affectionate terms you use towards another and, write a poem about that too. We often offend unintentionally.
Final Note. Grammarly kept picking me up for using the term ‘old’ throughout this post. I had to laugh. The word ‘elderly’ is deemed to be OK.
What is the difference between character and characterisation in fiction? Is there something distinctive about each of us that persists throughout life and is that OK in fiction? Today I’m exploring the difference between character and characterisation in fiction. And how does character transcend characterisation?
I start with the premise that, in fact, we are all chameleons. Sure, we don’t change skin colour, but we can alter our self-presentation on an as-needed basis — Pjs in front of the television and business suit at work, that kind of thing. More than the chameleon, we can also enact different behaviours according to the situation and different situations force us to change demeanour.
Creating Fictional Characters
Many advise us to write dossiers to help us create characters in an imaginary or researched process that comes up with loves, hates, tastes, habits, quirks, appearance and history before we put pen to paper. In other words, invent backstory and get to know it thoroughly. The problem with this is that charcters on the page begin to have minds of their own!
In his brilliant book, Story, Robert McKee emphasises the importance of a character’s mettle in action. To McKee, a character is honed in action, emerging throughout the novel, giving it structure, from the choices made. He distinguishes this from characterisation which is the list model described above. For McKee ‘character’ is a moral entity, unknowable except in choice and action.
While Story is overtly for screenwriters, its insights work equally for fiction. McKee’s brilliance is in the way he interlinks the expected behaviour associated with social roles — the paraphernalia of characterisation — and the choices people make which don’t always match the externals or, by extension, the expected.
Beware of Static Characterisation
We cannot altogether avoid portraying people in terms of their social roles, so we need to find ways to convey that aspect too. When I chose the chameleon as the main image for today’s post, I was thinking of the multiple roles we play within our families: mother, daughter, wife and lover or father, son, husband and lover.
Beyond the family, we can work with uniforms and modes of dress according to profession or occupation. But, in character terms, in moral character terms, these are simply roles, and roles are static at any given moment.
Our characters not only have a role, vis a vis a protagonist such as a friend, enemy, supporter but in society. Here again, we are talking of conventional professions and occupations. They mean something and contribute to our understanding of who our characters are. Place of residence and activities like regular attendance at sports events count too. These sorts of static identifiers operate subliminally as ‘taken for granted’. They are important, but only half the story.
On Character as Metaphor
A character is no more a human being than the Venus de Milo is a real woman. A character is a work of art, a metaphor for human nature. We relate to characters as if they were real, but they’re superior to reality.
Robert McKee
Our characters are a ‘metaphor for human nature’. And that must be dynamic.
Static identifiers border on stereotype. They are shallow and will not excite your reader who wants their hero to fail and succeed and fail again. The reader needs to experience what a character goes through when they take a wrong turn, become miserable and then find their way, to receive both punishment and approbation. Readers want them to struggle as if in real life. Readers want their protagonist to want something so badly so they can be on their side in the quest for it.
McGee tells us how to bring the drama, the dynamics onto the page. The key to true character, he says, is desire. And behind that lies motivation. These are the hidden factors, the internals that drive momentum. In that sense, he says, a protagonist ‘creates the rest of the cast’. What an idea. It is one you cannot let go once you hear it. When developing a cast, you need to think about the statics, the roles but that is only on the surface.
No list of descriptors can transport a reader. No made-up history will either. Yes, any backstory will flesh things out, but it needs to be more than a dry statement of fact. It needs to be full of dashed chances and moral dilemmas that propel a character along their path which is your story. Put another way, you must show the moral character of a protagonist. How did they get themselves into a pickle? What led them out, which choices worked, and which did not.
It is precisely the unfolding of choices and outcomes leading to new ones that beguile a reader. We need to show external conflict, sure. But the internal conflict from drives, desires, beliefs and aspirations give our stories their rationale and shape so it makes sense as though it were real. And we must choose our cast wisely to make this happen.
On Character-isation and Symbolism
On the page, we don’t have the visual luxury of a cinematic screen. We must name things to stimulate our readers’ imagination. For this, we need symbols.
Symbols may be static viewed by themselves, yet they are powerful because they arouse emotion.
Think of the national flag. People die for such things. It is not merely a piece of coloured cloth. Symbols are culturally understood. We only need to name the symbol for a reader to fill in the gaps.
Settings are symbolic. Indeed, they can even be characters in our story as important as any other fictional person in it. Whether it is a landscape or cityscape, a house or a department store, the setting is a mighty clever trope in any story. So too, is the weather. All of these conspire together to orchestrate the story as a whole.
Just as a building can fall over, the weather can change, and fire and flood can destroy a landscape, we must still give readers a sense of the malleability of our characters in action in a place that suits the mood, or provides the right atmosphere. That means using the landscape and the weather as symbols too.
Remember that your own life offers great hints for creating a character. In my post On Being a Guest Poet, I talk about ways in which my poetry defines me. Here, I’m asking you what sort of dog are you?
What is Your Take on Dogs, and Character?
I recently attended a workshop asking us to use the physical and behavioural features of animals to ‘describe’ our characters. In High Rise Society, my novel in progress, many of my cast members have companion dogs that hint both at social status and personality. How our characters relate to or care for their animals gives us some moral leverage but, as a park is central to the story, the animals in this book are characters too!
Below are images are five dogs. Which one if any, do you think would suit an old lady in a retirement home? Perhaps a chihuahua would be best. Or, would that be functional rather than meaningful?
Which dog are you? Name the traits of both dog and yourself. Play with this.
Remember, we are looking for meaning here. And for ideas about character.
Working with one at a time, check out the breed. How is your person/character the same or different? Are there resonances of mood, nature, activity or social situation. Write about this.
Put two of these dogs and their owners together and write a scene or a story, keeping in mind Robert McKee’s advice as I’ve spelt it out above.
Till now, I’ve explored different ways that real-life moments can shape a narrative to enhance character and story.
Now, it’s time to dig deeper. Explore the dark side of life, the tough moments that cause suffering.
Happiness on the Page
It is a literary truism that good lives lived well are boring on the page.
As readers of fiction, we want to explore the dark side of life, to vicariously suffer as our protagonists face tragedy and experience despair. Without trauma and misery, we lead only half-lives. As readers, we want to be onside as characters grapple with problems, willing them to achieve their wants, desires and goals. When they fail or when life fails them, we hold our breath while they confront their inner and outer demons, hoping they’ll succeed, or change. That’s what keeps us reading. It is the hero’s journey.
In poetry, it is again our role to create something that evokes a response in readers. The page is not the place for outpourings of a writer’s feelings, good or bad. Words and their order must enhance a reader’s experience. They must go on their own journey through our words. Our job is to evoke, not reminisce. In poetry too, we must look for words that invite, excite and stimulate a reader’s imagination.
The best way to achieve these things is to draw on our own emotional experience, but only for the raw data. We must leave ourselves behind when we craft and style.
Cherishing the Bad Things in Life
In a world entranced by positivity, and a fruitless search for happiness, there is a grave risk of denying all that makes us human. Hijacked as it was from Buddhism before being castrated for corporate success, this positivity message has spawned a new morality akin to Calvinism in the emergence of capitalism. In other words, it has become a self-serving moralism asserting success as a sign of being a chosen one. In such a world, the disenfranchised and disturbed are seen to be undeserving.
More particularly, the cults of happiness and success make us shallow, focusing as they do, on surfaces and the artifice of status. Buddhist philosophy, on the other hand, shows us that spiritual practice is about allowing everything to be exactly as it is. It invites us to attend to the truth at the moment.
As Toni Bernhardt says in her book, How to be Sick: a Buddhist Inspired Guide for the Chronically Ill and Their Caregivers, if we are sad, we are sad. If we are ill, we must experience that state of being, even bringing curiosity to it to help ourselves heal. We need to stop fighting or ignoring the bad things in life. After all, who can really avoid the ravages of grief?
Tragedy and Suffering
Where would fiction and poetry be in bubble-world of happy denial or un-knowing; a world where keeping up appearances is all there is? If there neither tragedy about, nor despair in our writing, there can be no heroes. And, readers will close the page.
Australia’s erstwhile Prime Minister and Elder Statemen, Malcolm Frazer, once said ‘Life’s not meant to be easy’. Back then, we mocked this media bite and rightly so for it seems he misquoted the play, Back to Methuselah where the complete saying is simple, honest and uplifting.
Life is not meant to be easy, my child; but take courage: it can be delightful.
Bernard Shaw
The struggle to be happy or to have a perfect life can only torture us with its constant fear of failure. Yes, we could make a story of that, but only if we are prepared to admit that perpetual happiness and perfection are illusions. Equanimity will only come when we accept that the trials and tribulations of being human are the grit of life and, as such, the essence of storytelling because they give us the grit to create great fictional characters.
Life Issues No Warnings
Cyclone Tracy, Christmas Eve, Darwin 1974.
Disaster, desertion, destitution, grief, redundancy, illness, loss, being imprisoned, ostracised or even exiled come when they do, as sudden assaults.
Their effect is to leave us feeling fragile, vulnerable and needing to re-frame.
It is at such times that we shimmy around in that liminal space between sanity and insanity, wondering where the line is if indeed there is one. In such emotional states, our personality, our character becomes labile, and we must create ourselves anew. How can we write stories or write poems without the understanding that arises from this bad stuff?
A Poetic Example
Forty-five years after the event, I wrote a poem about my experience of Cyclone Tracy, a small but dense category four tropical cyclone that hit Darwin on Christmas Eve in 1974.
Tracy splintered my house and shattered my home. As for many others, the disaster led to the breakup of my marriage, forcing me to raise three little children alone. It was a significant turning point in my life, one that had carry-on effects for a long time. Not in terms of feeling sorry for myself, but because it changed me.
The poem conveys a little of my experience of Cyclone Tracy’s devastation. I don’t mention my experience, and yet, people have told me that it evokes for them how awful it must have been for me. Whatdo you think?
1974
A new house in Darwin, angels twinkle and bells tinkle on a fresh pine branch in the corner while fridge and freezer wheeze with the weight of kabana and beer, ham, pork and turkey — all that Christmas cheer. Clouds glower. A howl of wind blows visitors home, and older children hide gifts under beds as louvered windows shatter. The roof lifts off.
~
A whining, whirring, whinnying wind batters the house of your mind. Rain pelts, squalls, gusts at regular intervals, like a runaway train, it pummels fibro sheets from their moorings. Metallic sounds scratch, crash and scrape, splintered homes are whipped and whooshed in obeisance to a power that pelts fridges like ping pong balls and propels cars into water towers and pools on hotel roofs.
~
I want to pee says your two-year old, pee on the bed, you keen as lightening coruscates the black curtain of tropical stars and slivers of frozen rain pierce your face. You lie in the tiny warm puddle.
~
After thunder, silence — the storm’s eye. Will death come tonight?
~
At dawn, you hustle outside to a yellow-grey fugue bereft of birdsong and rustling leaves. A solitary crier emerges from rubble, head to the school, he calls, hurry, he warns, Tracy is turning back.
~
The stinking disappointment of foul meat, sour milk melted ice cream and wilted lettuce rots next to warm booze in fridges across Darwin. Merry Christmas. Women pitch in at the shelter, cook, clean and manufacture nappies from toilet paper for little ones with the trots. In the face of disease, you tremble on blankets beneath giant, jagged guillotines of window glass loose enough to drop any moment.
~
Three days and three nights communications are down, a doctor hides his skills under blankets till exposed for stealing a plate of eggs scrambled with powdered milk for kids. There is a kerfuffle, but women and children keep going with measles while men do what they can, out and about.
~
Just as planes come to whisk you away you hear that someone down the road was sliced in two by a meteor of corrugated iron. You wonder if it was from your roof, light a cigarette and pray.
~
A man in female garb is arrested as 360 women, children and babies board a Boeing 727; it’s capacity 180. Tighten your seatbeltsthe hosties plead as the plane’s tail dips; its nose points to heaven from the weight of the line to the loo. Laughter erupts. Even the hosties are scared.
Try This
Close your eyes and meditate for a minute or two, then think about a significant turning point in your life, a moment of disaster or despair that changed you.
Working with the first episode or event that comes to mind, write fast for seven minutes to see how much raw but rich detail comes effortlessly. Use an alarm and stop when it rings even if the story isn’t finished. You can do this many times. It forces the mind to go back and gather ‘original’ knowledge.
Then —
Give your experience of that event to a made-up character. In other words, put that character in your situation with another fictional character and see how their interaction plays out, using your story.
Choose keywords from what you wrote and turn them into a poem about the event. Then, write a poem. Remember to use concrete nouns to represent emotion, avoiding and avoid abstractions like, ‘love’ and ‘hate’.
How do you choose poems for a guest-poet gig? And, how do you present them if you are not a performer at heart? These were my questions when I started selecting poems for my first solo presentation.
The Hidden Life of Poems
As I sifted through my poems to choose what best to read on the night, I found myself reading my work through other’s eyes; editor’s eyes and my poetry seemed — dare I say it? — boring.
Fortunately, that feeling didn’t last long once I settled on a topic. I decided to bring together my Australian poems, poems that could not have been written about other places, or, as it transpired, by anyone else.
The organisers asked me to say what inspires me as a poet and where I get my ideas. And, as I sifted and sorted poems in these terms, something magical happened.
I could suddenly see how my selection fell into three parts, thus revealing more about me and my life than I could have imagined.
Could I have predicted this? Perhaps. After all, I am a fan Clifford Geertz who argues that, no matter how theoretical, esoteric or academic our writing may be, our lives are always embedded therein.
But the truth of Clifford’s dictum didn’t emerge until I gave each poem its particular history. Only then did I learn that my poetic voice also varies depending on content, introducing the element of time in a process that is both subconscious and, I would argue, instinctive.
Sample Poems
Does your voice change with different poems? Can you see how mine does in the three examples below?
Down Under
‘Strine’ is the Aussie word for ‘Australian’. It is a mocking voice, but here, the poem mocks itself. I grew up with Strine. It comes to me when I’m cynical. It is my first and youngest voice.
Down Under
My name is Stralia I live in the sun walk in rubber thongs and the crack of my bum smiles at strangers unabashed — long as they're not Asians, Muslims, or some other weird mob.
We're a nice lot here plenty barbecues and beer but our beaches brim with sharks and jelly fish stingers, invisible floaters that kill and in yards across the nation Funnel Web spiders and King Brown snakes will jump up and bite — as quick as look at you.
Ours is an island nation borders tight as the sphincter of fear. We have a warm side a welcoming side but we won't suck up to them others 'cos if we had our 'druthers illegals'd all be white unless they're Christian of course.
We are a sunburnt country mateship rules our waves — I may be no better than you but you dare not differ from me.
The Palimpsest
In this poem, the voice is a mix of anthropological observation and political statement matching my middle years; my professional life. Notice a completely different tone?
The Palimpsest
Rain's caress tentative on scorched earth yields a steam of joy, lizard tongues dart among wet leaves in search of droplets, respite for insects whose vigilance turns to birds that flit and trill through the canopy, alert to feed chicks beneath darkening skies.
Air turns fecund with humidity, lightning and thunder explode in a deluge that swells rivers to greet an invasion of parched tongues.
Prey and predator line muddy banks in thirsty truce, macropod, ruminant, single or cloven hoofed, wary only of the boot that erases subtler signs: matchstick sketches of a trillion, trillion birds' feet, pointy padded tracks of the kangaroo, snake and goanna glissades, ancient marsupial traces, and Dreaming tracks all but expunged, not by fire nor storm but a hobnailed tread.
Joy is This
This last poem is in my mature voice.
Joy is This
tears wash wrinkles when old women cry in the presence of a newborn…
…soft cheeks and bottoms arouse pain, love…
…and the breathless terror of death
Once I discerned the difference in voice by addressing my host’s questions about inspiration and ideas, the presentation structured itself into three, meaningful sections.
Reading, Reciting, and Performing
I like to read poetry, to spend time with it, to go over things to skip others and cherish my favourites away from others’ eyes. I also like to critique other people’s work as we do in TramsEnd Poets where we all first read our poems out loud, then silently read everyone’s before giving written feedback. Listening and reading are two different things; two different methods of appreciation and understanding.
When it comes to performance, while listening to slam and spoken-word poetry can be fun at the time, much of it does not translate well to the pages of solitude.
I like and participate in open mike gigs like Friendly Street Poets and other public readings in cosy, arty cafes and venues in and around town. Adelaide also hosts number of poetry-friendly pubs around town where we can find a mixed bag of performance-based poetry, slam or spoken word, sometimes with music as well. We are lucky to have such a lively and creative underground scene.
For a serious-minded soul like me, who learned elocution as a child, the idea of performing in many of those forums is frightening. In elocution class, I learned to recite classical poems by rote in terms of mood, rhythm and meaning. For those who don’t know, elocution is the study of formal speaking. You learn how to enunciate, pronounce, emphasise as well as coming to terms with grammar, mood and style. You will find a plethora of fun lessons on YouTube.
From Page to Performance
From page to public reading is one leap. Another is from eisteddfod to performance in spoken-word or slam events. Of course, there are always judges when prizes are involved, so competitions differ only by degree from eisteddfods because, by definition, judging decides who’s in and who’s out of a particular scene or genre. They set the paradigms.
Spoken word poetry is 50% written especially for performance. We often mistakenly speak of spoken word as slam poetry, but the word ‘slam poetry’ refers mainly to a usually high powered, competitive event which has certain constraints, such as a time limit.
Keepers of tradition and theoretical purists (academics and judges) may speak of spoken word poetry and slam events as not being poetry at all. But, that’s a bit stiff. Poetry is on the move. It changes as it travels through space, changes cultures and periods.
Paying Homage
I thank the Poet’s Corner of the Effective Living Centre for inviting me to be a guest. I write in free verse, which is not at all suited to performance so, I thank my elocution teachers for showing me how to read out loud properly. While I no longer need to recite with books on my head to ensure my posture shows good character as they taught, I pay homage to them in this little poem.
I want to write a real poem
I want to write a real poem using dactyl trochee or iamb in hexameters or pentameters heroes of the academic scan.
I want to write a real poem with caesuras or rhythmic beat plus plucky pyrrhic substitutions or enjambment and mixed feet.
I want to write a real poem a bouquet in metaphor far from the raw description that proper poets abhor.
I want to write a real poem where decisions must be made about line and punctuation to appeal, delight, persuade.
I want to write a real poem an ode perhaps or villanelle or take exotic paths into gatha,haiku or ghazal.
I want to write a real poem one of these prosody days ‘till then I trust I’m forgiven if I stick to my funny old ways.
Try This
Decide on a topic, something you write a lot of poems about and select 20-30 shortish poems that fit comfortably on a page. Go through each poem and ask yourself —
Why did I write this?
Where did I get my ideas from?
Write a small blurb at the head of each poem, addressing these questions and see what happens.
Have you always wanted to write about your life, but never known how or where to start? Well, read on with your writer’s heart. There are people like you in every community and suburb who’d jump at an opportunity to collaborate and learn if a club opened up nearby. People have stories to tell, stories from their lives that they want or need to share. So, how about starting a life writing club where storytelling can flourish.
Some of you may think taking a course or doing a workshop is the way to go. The notion that guidance is needed is hard to shake. But observation as a life writing coach showed me that coming together provides the primary impetus for getting our stories onto the page. Collaborative learning is great. The more input by each member, the more fruitful the outcome.
While book clubs proliferate nowadays, when it comes to writing, the situation is dire. You can find creative writing groups in church and community halls but many are simple appreciation societies. Most focus on creative writing. You may fancy starting or attending a writers’ Meetup but my experience is that you often encounter competitive souls there. That’s fine if that’s your gig and you can similarly attend the occasional workshops hosted by council libraries or, increasingly, by Writers’ Centres.
But you won’t find writing clubs on offer, especially not life writing clubs.
Advantages of the Club Format
A club is a perfect forum for life writing.
In simple lterms, a club is —
…a group of persons organized for a social, literary, sporting, political, or other purpose, regulated by rules agreed by its members.
Macquarie Dictionary
Notice that rules are ‘agreed by members’. No boss.
(You can, of course, incorporate your club and become a legal entity, but that is not what I’m proposing here. I’m suggesting a small, familiar and intimate gathering for the purpose of collaborating on your writing and storytelling. In Australia, each State has it’s own Consumer Affairs if you want to go down this path. )
In the end, it is not about how well you write, but how close to yourself you are game to get.
Clubs are equalizers and, as such, provide a nurturing environment for being OK being just who you are. No writing credentials necessary. When you write personal stories, you make a direct investment in yourself. And, when we write with purpose like that, the need to compare ourselves with other writers disappears. Life writing engages the reality of our lives and experiences and, when we share those, the group environemnt that a club offers, empowers everyone. Storytelling is the key.
If you decide to form a life writing club, don’t worry about differences in culture, age or background. Writing about one’s life in a group brings out commonalities of human experience within diversity. Indeed, in a well-run group, writers will feel safe to share which allows trust, warmth and congeniality to arise. And, it is there, that creativity flourishes.
Start-up Tips
The critical factor for success is to find people who are open to discovering themselves. They don’t need to be friends. But they join with a willingness to dig deep, be real and have fun in the process. Compassion, respect, fondness and friendship follow.
Members
Don’t worry about differences in culture, age or background. Writing about one’s life in a group brings out the commonalities in diversity. Indeed, in a well-run group, writers will feel safe to share and, there, creativity will flourish. An ideal number to get started would be seven to ten people.
Flyer
Create a flyer. It should give a date, time and interim venue plus a contact number or email for queries. The initial invitation is for people to get together at a coffee shop or café to talk about forming a club in your area. Post the flyer on notice boards; at Coles, in laundromats and storefronts. Go beyond your suburb but stay within cooee.
Post the invitation on Facebook or on any other social media. If you belong to other groups, spread the word there.
The flyer should tantalise with the promise of self-discovery and using phrases like —
tell your own story
tap into your creativity
gain perspective on the past
achieve personal insight
have fun
meet new people
help create a circle of safety for storytelling.
Promotions
So, start with a flyer. It should give a date, time and venue plus a contact number or email for queries. The invitation is for people to get together at a coffee shop or café to talk about forming a club in your area. Post it on notice boards; at Coles, in laundromats and storefronts. Go beyond your suburb but stay within cooee.
Post the details on Facebook, too or on any other social media. If you belong to other groups, spread the word there.
Initial Meeting
At the initial meeting, or over a couple of get-togethers, you can collaborate in drawing up the club’s rules. First thing will be to agree on times and periodicity, then venues and length of meetings. It is probably best to meet no sooner every fortnight or month, probably the latter is best because members will need writing time in between. You should allocate at least three hours.
Regular Venue
You can take turns meeting hosting meetings or book space at a community centre, in a library or gather in a coffee shop, café or pub. Be creative in choosing your venue but remember you will need privacy.
‘When someone goes on a trip, he has something to tell about’, goes the German saying, and people imagine the storyteller as someone who has come from afar. But they enjoy no less listening to the man who has stayed at home, making an honest living, and who knows the local tales and traditions.
Walter Benjamin
Basic Club Parameters and Rules
As a matter of respect and to ensure success, members must agree to maintain confidentiality and commit to the principle of nondisclosure. The former is well understood. The latter includes refraining from raising other people’s stories with them outside club meetings, despite it being shared within the group. Further, there is nothing worse after you reveal intimate details of your life for another person to say, ‘I know, I know, I had that too’. That is appropriating another’s experience it disempowers the storyteller and breaches trust.
Do not pre-circulate written stories. Although this is customary in creative writing circles, the magic of collective life-writing is precisely in the immediacy of face-to-face sharing.
Always keep a box of tissues on hand and a ‘pretend’ jar for people to put ‘air’ money in if they apologise for their story or writing. (Many people apologise about themselves in so many ways and the aim, here, is to help them gain confidence.)
Members should bring along an exercise they have discovered or made up (for ideas, see the of works list in last month’s post). The club’s work is for each member to contribute writing prompts as well as writing, sharing and providing feedback.
The exercise format is simple. First, read the exercise to the group and invite questions. Second, allot 7 – 10 minutes of writing time with the instruction that people should write straight from the (no dilly dally thinking time). Then share one at a time and discuss. Over time, people will have a number of small pieces of work (which should be named) to develop further.
A useful rule of thumb is for the writer to remain silent while others offer feedback.
As the club grows in confidence, you might introduce some creative techniques. Again, there is a lot written out there, and each member could research one creative writing technique to share with others at meetings. Members can revise their earlier work as homework, and as work refines, perhaps that can be shared by email for feedback. The process is cumulative.
Techniques
Life writing is a two-step process. Our first attempt when we write life stories is like talking to the page. It is an outpouring. The craft then is a matter of turning the writing around to entice a reader. Here is an exercise that allows you to practice doing that.
Exercise
Write for 10 minutes on a major turning point or sliding-door moment in your life. Write fast, straight from the guts as your memory brings that moment back to you.
Consider what you have written. Read it as though it were someone else’s story. Then tell the story again using the third person. Doing this should give you enough distance from the emotionto create yourself as a protagonist. In the end, you will become a character on the page.
Now re-write the story giving your character a fictional name and show him or her coming to that moment – what were they doing leading up to the moment. What did they want or fear? How did they feel (change) after that turning point? Better or worse? What new direction did they find?
Even as you tell your own life stories, you will need to change your perspective and give your readers a reason to read. They’ll want to know ‘what next’.
Life writing is writing about your life. It covers a range of sub-genres from travel and sojourn writing to memoir, autobiography and meditations on places or people. It can take the form of a personal essay, an anecdote or vignette. You can even use letters to tell your story.
Here is an example of a delightful meditation on a life moment. A couple of Scottish writers (James Boswell and Samuel Johnson) came up with the idea while lounging about a Scottish inn on a lazy Autumn afternoon, in 1773. It appears in Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, and is far more than a simple record of an event such as ‘I went to…’. Notice how it evokes place, awe and wonder for the reader with a touch of humour.
MEDITATION ON A PUDDINGLet us seriously reflect of what a pudding is composed. It is composed of flour that once waved in the golden grain, and drank the dews of the morning; of milk pressed from the swelling udder by the gentle hand of the beauteous milkmaid, whose beauty and innocence might have recommended a worse draught; who, while she stroked the udder, indulged no ambitious thoughts of wandering in palaces, formed no plans for the destruction of her fellow-creatures; milk, which is drawn from the cow, that useful animal, that eats the grass of the field, and supplies us with that which made the greatest part of the food of mankind in the age which the poets have agreed to call golden. It is made with an egg, that miracle of nature, which the theoretical Burnet has compared to creation. An egg contains water within its beautiful smooth surface; and an unformed mass, by the incubation of the parent, becomes a regular animal, furnished with bones and sinews, and covered with feathers. – Let us consider; can there be more wanting to complete the Meditation on a Pudding? If more is wanting, more may be found. It contains salt, which keeps the sea from putrefaction: salt, which is made the image of intellectual excellence, contributes to the formation of a pudding.
When you write about your life, prepare to strip bare.
Venus of Willendorf
Why is Life Writing Creative?
In practice, life writing explores ways in which we construct and contest identity. It reflects the way our subjectivity becomes dislodged and reconstituted in the course of a lifetime. We construct our idea of self through stories, believing them to be real. Our identity, then, is a type of fiction. This means that we can approach writing about our lives much as we do a novel. Indeed, if you want readers, you will have to.
Life writing and the novel. Are they different?
Milan Kundera tells us that a novel —
…examines not reality but existence. And existence is not what has occurred, existence is the realm of human possibilities…But again, to exist means: ‘being-in-the-world’. Thus both the character and his world must be understood as possibilities. The Art of the Novel, London, Faber and Faber (1986:42)
As for a novel also, the art of life writing is about making a narrative, but it goes further. Etymologically, the term ‘narrative’ connotes ‘knowing’, so the process of writing about your life can mean ‘coming to know yourself’.
In psychological terms —
…narrative is not merely a literary form but a mode of phenomenological and cognitive self-experience, while self — the self of autobiographical discourse does not necessarily precede its constitution in narrative. (Making Selves 100)
In other words, there is no such thing as a stable, enduring or fixed self. As Buddhist teachings might say, the ego is a merely collection of stories we tell about ourselves. Many are contradictory. None is absolutely real. Michael Taussig puts this nicely —
Now the strange thing about this silly if not desperate place between the real and the really made-up is that it appears to be where most of us spend most of our time as epistemically correct, socially created and occasionally creative beings. We dissimulate. We act and have to act as if mischief were not afoot in the kingdom of the real… (Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses, Routledge 1993).
The Benefits of Life Writing
Creative life writing does two things.
Emotionally, it takes you to places you may never have been aware of. Life writing is a craft as well as an art. While it can be used for therapeutic purposes, it is not therapy. Nevertheless, it uncovers new layers of meaning and deep personal insights that lead to understanding and forgiveness for yourself and others.
Writing about your life provides an opportunity for you to open up to yourself; to examine your experienece on the page. At its best, it allows you to explore literary techniques to make your narrative sing; to attract, fascinate and perhaps even enlighten your readers.
Where to Start?
Life writing must start with the intention to be honest on the page. Without that commitment to emotional truth, your stories will be lifeless. To quote Virginia Wolf, ‘If you do not tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell it about anyone else.’
The process has four essential steps.
1. Identify a good story
To do this, you need to avoid chronology, specified topics and ‘remembered’ stories. The latter are the tales we love to tell and change to suit different occasions and audiences. Most of these are the stories sedimented as ‘me’. We use these constructs in daily life as part of our presentation of self. They are underpinned with the idea, ‘I am a person who…’. Therefore, they do not entertain our readers.
To avoide these pitfalls, we can stimulate our deep or original memory, and find aspects of your life you had forgotten, often in unexpected places, you need to work with exercises. As I will explore next month, the second step will the be to explore creative literary devices and techniques to enhance your story.
I’ve listed some readings below to help you on your life writing journey and here are two exercises to give you a taste of how this works.
Exercise One: The Senses
Imagine a moment when you were a child, hiding or holding back in some way. Take yourself back there with closed eyes. Meditate on it for a minute or two.
Where are you? What happens? Who is involved? What do you see, hear, touch, taste and smell?
Open your eyes and write as fast as you can for about 5-7 minutes.
Exercise Two: Turning Points
A turning point involves a moment of revelation, an instant when you change your mind. A student of mine described her most important turning point being the morning when her abusive husband brought burnt toast in bed. In that instant, she decided to leave him. You might think of a turning point as a sliding-door moment. You need to identify what happened to cause you to change from from one way of being to another.
Write for ten minutes.
Exercises like this may seem random, but themes will begin to emerge over time. You may even surprise yourself if you write for two minutes on how your like your eggs cooked, and why.. Writing little pieces like this helps you to find themes which will help when you start to put your biography or memoir together.
2. Tell the truth
The first draft of our first attempt at life writing is often a self-oriented ‘splat’ on the page. It contains all the raw, emotional truth of the original happening or moment, the golden nuggets of life writing.
However, If you write chronologically, your story will sound like a child’s recounting of an event: ‘and then, and then, and then’ which is tedious to read. Working with exercises to jolt your mind bypasses the emotional outpourings and captures the original moment and your original memory will bring back sensory data and emotional depth. In those details lies colour, richness and your unique voice.
3. Contextualise
No story exists in isolation. Life is always personal, political and historical. We therefore need to situate our stories in time. This includes relations to others in our lives and, by research, our historical and political contexts. If you write about friends or family members there will be ethical issues. You’ll need to ask whose story it really is an whether you have the right to talk about others without their consent. I have touched on that before here.
4. Create a compelling narrative
Once you have a collection of stories about significant moments in your life, you will have the raw material to bring together. Themes will emerge over time to help you decide the best genre and style to use if you want to publish.
A Checklist for New Writers
Create a special writing space for you alone.
Create a ‘do not interrupt’ time out for writing.
Show up on the page every day for a specified time or number of words.
Keep a notebook (or recorder) with you at all times to record observations, ideas, thoughts or feelings, anything that takes your interest or fancy.
Write three unedited Morning Pages* longhand first thing to free up your creativity: anything goes, you can just grizzle on the page if you like
Take yourself on a weekly Artist’s Date,* (just you) – visit a special place that thrills you or gets your creative juices flowing – a flea market, aquarium, museum, bead shop, fabric store, garden centre, botanic park, art gallery, antique shop, pub, tourist venue…go sky diving if you want to!
For further inspiration, go to a favourite café or nook to reflect and write
Remember writers block is a caused by conflict between the creative mind and the rational editor – tell the editor to mind her business until your creative mind has finished what it wants to do. There is no such thing as a bad first draft!
*Julia Cameron’s famous self-help book that many published writers I’ve known started with, The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path To Higher Creativity. First published in 1992, the latest reprint was in 2016. An evergreen text still readily available online and in bookstores. This is where you’ll learn about Morning Pages and Artist Dates mentioned earlier.
Another evergreen influence on the craft of writing from the guts is Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones. It came out in 1986 (latest reprint 2016) and has sold in excess of a million copies in translation around the world. It’s still on the shelves and online.
There are no doubt other, more recent works on the topic of life writing, but these books are groundbreaking, seminal works to help you get started.
Live — Read — Write well
To be continued in June
A final note: If you want to start a life-writing club, you will find tips here.
When you started your web page or blog, did you ever think it would entail learning a new language? No? Well, welcome to the world of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) aka Clickbait.
One thing is certain. If you want someone to read your web page or blog, you need to wrap your head around SEO, an evolving language determined by Google’s algorithms.
As a WordPress user, Yoast is my guide. It is a marvellous plugin. Great support, lots of lessons on offer but what a lot we have to learn. For me, though, it raises a slew of questions.
By way of background, let me oh-so-briefly introduce a few theories about the relationship between language and meaning. My approach may be ambiguous but, as always I write about my struggle to understand.
Language and Meaning
At university, theories about the relationship between language and meaning fascinated me. As an anthropologist, I explored different approaches for trying to understand the social and cultural worlds about which I read. The following three philosophers had an impact on me.
In his work, The Savage Mind (1962) French structuralist, Claude Levi-Strauss undertook an extensive study of the world’s myths to argue that meaning derived from binary oppositions. His work allowed him to posit the then-groundbreaking idea that human minds (traditional and modern) are all the same. Although personal computers did not come to prominence until about 1975, we might contextualise his1960s and 1970s thinking in the emerging binary world of computerisation.
Later in the 20thcentury, another French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, shifted away from trying to understand how words pointed to the world as symbols as many structuralists, including Levi-Strauss, did. He moved away from trying to establish meaning internal to an utterance as though language was a thing in itself. Derrida invited us to examine what is said or written as situated in contexts of power. He and fellow deconstructionists thus began to question and unravel the notion of absolute truth.
My favourite is the Russian philosopher, Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin. Born in 1895, Bakhtin died in 1975 and his work came to prominence in the 1980s partly in company with the deconstructionist changes Derrida and his cohort wrought in social, cultural and literary theory. He, too, saw language not as signs pointing to the world but as an active constituent of the world.
As he says in his essay, ‘Discourse in the Novel’ (see The Dialogical Imagination) Bakhtin argued that ‘Form and content in discourse are one, once we understand that verbal discourse is a social phenomenon.’ In other words, we should not abstract language as discourse from action in context. Each utterance, be it spoken or in textual form must be understood as socially situated. Part of his legacy is the notion of Heteroglossia, meaning ”multilanguedness’.
In Bakhtin’s terms, heteroglossia is a condition of social life. It means that each profession, class, culture, station, technical or creative endeavour has a unique language. We all think and speak within our particular social, cultural, professional or philosophical framework.
Here’s the clincher
If we accept that Bakhtin is right, writing for SEO requires us to learn a new language, one that skims off the top, regularises, routinises and makes the online world predictably bland.
With its promise of success, writing for SEO seduces us into new ways of creating stripped back meaning. Taking the Derrida-deconstructionist position, SEO places us under the control of Google’s algorithms. Google, then, is in a position of power over what we say and how we say it online. If we stick to subtle or difficulty ideas to entertain audiences within our own hetreraglossic world, we be accused of using jargon and fade into oblivion.
Can you imagine Levi-Strauss, Derrida, Bakhtin and all the other philosophers and thinkers we study at university constructing themselves for SEO? Yet, this is the world we live in, so we might as well give in. Don’t you think?
Help is mostly free
Fortunately, there are web pages like Learn Google Analytics, dedicated to helping you and you can download The Ultimate Google Analytics Glossary — 2019 Edition. I notice this not yet called a dictionary which would presuppose a new language, but it won’t be long because we are witnessing one emerge. Not code. A new language in our already heteraglossic world.
We all know that code entered our lives when computing started, but now we can develop our web pages at the ‘front end’ where what you see is what you get. Still, we need this new SEO language with its keywords, focus keywords, tags, categories and other identifiers. How would we navigate the immeasurable internet otherwise?
Yoast offers free keyword research training. The email offer says, ‘Enjoy optimising for the right keywords’.
What to do?
Does the SEO effort to find readers, to find an audience, re-shape not only the way we use language but our minds? Does it lead to shallow thinking? Worse still, does it lead to mindless conformity?
I struggle to reduce complex sentences and ideas to key phrases, short or long-tailed. It is undoubtedly an art unto itself as articulated in a recent WIX Content piece ‘Why SEO Is a Writer’s Best Friend‘. Here are the tips they offer – with my slick tongue-in-cheek critique in italics beside each.
Give your audience what they want — invite agreement, not consideration
Keep it simple, keep it direct — don’t stretch people
Be fresh, and refresh! — no eternal wisdom required
In his course promo on Facebook, author and leadership consultant Mel H Abraham says seductively that people have had enough of how-to videos and posts. He urges us to get real:
Think of the teachers you had growing up. Who were your favourites? Those who delivered the best information or those who were funny, the storytellers, the ones who truly cared about you?
Your content and message have to part of you, have to be an extension of who you are.
You need to show your audience that you connect with them and you align with their emotions, values, and identities. If you can’t connect with someone, no one is going to listen to you, let alone buy from you.
He may have a point, but can we avoid the imperatives of writing for SEO on our web pages?
There is hope
We can just let our web page point to us. The ad, after all, is not necessarily the full product.
Yes, SEO is creating a new sharp, short, shallow but uniform language. If you doubt, check out this, where Yoast describes how to write for SEO. In brief it says (with my meta comment beside in italics) —
Focus on your audience — not on the idea you are developing or creating
Write clear paragraphs — duh!
Write short sentences — keep it simple stupid
Limit difficult words — dumb it down to limit exploration and deeper thinking
Use transition words — in case nobody understands anything
Mix it up!— not vocab, just instead of ‘and’ or ‘too’, say ‘also’ or ‘moreover’
When it comes to power, you might compare the imperatives of this list to my being told by my supervisor at university that I should learn to ‘write like a man’. That’s the power of writing ‘for’ an audience’ rather than expressing what you mean or want to say from deep within yourself. It’s also worth noting that words have power in relation to status, position and authority and who has more than the Internet?
Still, we must live in the world as it is with the crazy, overwhelming universe of the internet. The worldwide web points to things we could never otherwise have discovered. It is a marvel, and it is OK for it to have its own language, one we can use to navigate it with confidence. We simply need to avoid seeing it as the thing to which it points, as any language does; the real world.
In an Adelaide Festival Writers Week interview in 2019, Man Booker Prizewinning author, Ben Okri, reminded us of the importance of depth in communication. He says, ‘when we lose our deeper reading, we become easier to manipulate’. He was of course, talking about his latest novel, The Freedom Artist which Publishers, Harper Collins, promote ‘an impassioned plea for justice and a penetrating examination of how freedom is threatened in a post-truth society.’ Be mindful of that.
But, Give Yoast a Go.
I love Yoast. I get a lot from it and they offer plenty of freebies like this downloadable guide, WordPress SEO: the definitive guide for those who use WordPress.
A paid course with Yoast costs only $149 (probably US) or $199 with feedback.
