I’ve always loved those stories about the serendipity of some unlikely twist of fate that has led to a publisher discovering a manuscript. Let’s face it, luck and publishing go hand in hand. Having recently acquired a good luck story of my very own (more on that in a moment) it seemed like a good excuse to interview a bunch of talented local authors about how luck has played a part in their own fortunes.

But first to why Lady Luck is needed by every newbie author. Slush piles are a fact of publishing. Those teetering mounds of unsolicited manuscripts that flood every publisher’s office through which juniors wade. The likelihood of being discovered amongst them is rare, though it does happen. Laura Miller sums it up nicely on her blog:

People who have never had the job of reading through the heaps of unsolicited manuscripts … have no inkling of two awful facts: 1) just how much slush is out there, and 2) how really, really, really, really terrible the vast majority of it is … Everybody acknowledges that there have to be a few gems out in the slush pile – one manuscript in 10,000, say – buried under all the dreck. The problem lies in finding it. A diamond encased in a mountain of solid granite may be truly valuable, but at a certain point the cost of extracting it exceeds the value of the jewel … Instead of picking up every new manuscript with an open mind and a tiny nibbling hope, you learn to expect the worst. Because almost every time, the worst is exactly what you’ll get.

So that’s what un-agented manuscripts landing in a slush pile are up against, and I’ve been there. My collection of short fiction, Two Steps Forward, is now sitting on bookshop shelves but it is only there through an unlikely series of events. My manuscript was one of 450 to land on Affirm Press’ desk as part of their Long Story Short series call for submissions. It was shortlisted, but ultimately rejected. In response to the rejection letter I received from the publisher, Martin Hughes, we struck up an email conversation and Hughes offered to give me feedback on the collection. I said yes please and so he went to the assessments to put together something constructive. But they contradicted each other so much that he was unable to glean anything useful from them. As a result he generously spent his Christmas break reading the manuscript. It turned out he liked the book and handed it to his associate who also liked it, and before I knew it the book had been accepted for publication. So if I hadn’t been interested in feedback (and Hughes apparently offered it to other writers who were not interested) he would never have read the manuscript and it wouldn’t now be in bookshops. A stroke of luck if ever there was one.

Knowing the perils of the slush pile, when Glenda Guest finished her first novel, Siddon Rock, she was so dispirited that she didn’t even know where to start. In an interview with Verity La she recounts how she was feeling: ‘There was so much talk around about how hard it is to get a manuscript read through publishers, or even to get an agent to read your work. And if I did try a publisher’s slush pile, which one might like it? And would I cruel my chances of finding an agent if I’d tried around the publishers (and the answer to that one is definitely yes). See how the head was working? It was all too hard!’

So the manuscript sat there for ‘yonks’ until one evening Guest was tidying her desk and a list of agents given to her by an ex-agent fell out of a pile of papers. ‘I dialed the first number – it was as simple as that. The time must have been right with all the good planets lined up and pushing me along, because Lyn [Tranter] answered the phone herself; she was in the office alone as it was late, and usually doesn’t answer after hours. I told her I’d been given her name. She asked what the book was about – such a difficult thing to answer, that – we talked, she got reluctant because of it coming from a university course, she said send me the first chapter, and I knew it was a professional courtesy to the person who had recommended her. I sent it.’ Tranter took on Siddon Rock, it was picked up by Random House and went on to win the 2010 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book. And it all began with one perfectly timed phone call.

For Craig Cormick it was a chance encounter that lead to the publication of his first collection of short stories. He was interviewing David Horton, then head of Aboriginal Studies Press, for an article in the Canberra Times and mentioned that he had written a few stories with Indigenous themes, looking at Australian history with Aboriginal perspectives. ‘Being a nice guy he asked to see to few of the stories … the next thing I knew, a few weeks later I got a letter, or maybe it was an email, stating that the publishing committee had looked at my sample stories and liked them very much and would be pleased to publish my collection and I should send the full set stories to them. I nearly fell over onto the floor in surprise. Particularly since I’d only written those three stories and didn’t really have any of the others.’ Cormick wrote the collection, and it won the 1999 ACT Book of the Year Award.

Marion Halligan has a story of a different kind. With her fortieth birthday approaching she decided that she had to ‘stop thinking I was going to be a writer one day and do it now’. So she sent out three stories to Quadrant, the Bulletin and Southerly. As luck would have it they were all accepted. Some might say there was no luck at play here, just plain good talent. But Halligan’s next 23 stories were all rejected. Halligan says that if she’d received the rejections first she ‘might never have persevered’.

As Nigel Featherstone says, ‘Everything about writing is luck. Everything.’ The publication of his first novel, Remnants, is a good luck story of the very best kind. At a colleague’s suggestion he met with Ian Templeman, then head of Pandanus Books, the academic publisher at the Australian National University. Nigel recounts: ‘Over lunch Ian told me how he’d read a story of mine, “Song of Excess”, in Overland and would love to read the manuscript for my first novel – what luck he’d read that particular issue! A month later, I received a letter saying that Ian enjoyed the work but as Pandanus was primarily an academic publisher of non-fiction they couldn’t accept it; I should, however, again make contact with Ian. More than confused, I rang Ian. He said that he would like to publish Remnants, but he would have to establish a special imprint to do so, and this would take ‘some time’. Ian was true to his word, and in 2005 that little novel eventually saw the light of day through Pandanus Books’ Sullivan’s Creek series. Which would fold within a year because the ANU was adamant about focussing on the academic, not the fictional.’ It doesn’t come luckier than that.

As writer Christina Dodd says, ‘Every writer faces a moment in her career when she realises that a good part of success has nothing to do with skill or planning, and everything to do with pure, dumb luck.’

[My thanks to my fellow Canberra writers – Adrian Caesar, Craig Cormick, Nigel Featherstone, Marion Halligan, Jack Heath, Ingrid Jonach and Kel Robertson – for sharing their good luck stories with me. Unfortunately I was unable to include them all.]

At the time I made it clear that by this phrase I didn’t mean social realism. I gave a few examples of the sort of fiction I did mean, including Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria, Zamyatin’s We, The Master and Margarita, 100 Years of Solitude, Brave New World, 1984. Other examples that spring to mind are Animal Farm, Catch-22, Vonnegut Jr’s Slaughterhouse-5 and Player Piano, Orhan Pamuk’s Snow, Christos Tsiolkas’s Dead Europe. These are among my all-time favourite novels. I think of them as ‘politically engaged fiction’.

Before I started at Overland, I’d given up working as an editor. The last book I edited was Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap in 2007. But when Jeff Sparrow asked if I’d be interested in becoming Overland’s fiction editor, much to my surprise I said yes, immediately – because it was for Overland.

I love Overland’s political bent, its passion, argumentation, provocation, vision, big-picture writing about things that matter. I’ve especially enjoyed its feisty engagements with literature – as if literature had weight, really mattered – such as Alexis Wright’s essay on Oodgeroo Noonuccal, ‘A Weapon of Poetry’, and its meaty 3-person review of Christos Tsiolkas’s Dead Europe. Nothing less would have enticed me back to editing other people’s writing.

The first ever issue of Overland, Spring 1954, announced: ‘Overland is a new magazine, devoted to creative writing … It will make a special point of developing writing talent in people of diverse background. We ask of our readers, however inexpert, that they write for us; that they share our love of living, our optimism, our belief in the traditional dream of a better Australia.’ I like this ethos, its inclusiveness.

The early magazine’s focus on Realist fiction and its enthrallment to the 1890s Australia of Joseph Furphy, Henry Lawson and the Bulletin have been left behind, but its guiding vision has not. For me these words from Overland 7 best capture its view: ‘Writers are men and women who record the storms of history as they rage through the lives and minds of people.’ I think Overland continues to record the storms of history, be they political, economic, social, technological, cultural, environmental.

This year I’ve been looking for stories which grapple with, oh, the issues of the day, the times, the era (these were contested terms in 2010). I don’t think all literature must or should do this, but I do think it’s appropriate that Overland publishes fiction that attempts to do so – and when it does not, then I’m no longer interested in the job.

In the four issues of 2011, I’ve published eight stories and two novel extracts. I’ve published stories I love, stories that have moved me in one way or another, to laughter, tears, rage, wonder, astonishment, or all and more. And of course, given the above, I’ve tried to publish stories with a political dimension, however loose. And I’ve also tried to publish from across Australia and across genres – realist, surreal, science fiction, spoof, satire, comedy, historical – with a mix of established and new voices.

Here are the stories I’ve published this year:

Issue 202: ‘Finders, Keepers’ by Clare Strahan, a brilliant sci-fi reduction ad absurdum of consumer capitalism.

Issue 203: ‘Under skin, in blood’ by Larissa Behrendt, her first published short story, about hidden lethal invasions of Indigenous Australia.

‘The long way’, Paul Mitchell’s poignant story about men, land and cars in the aftermath of the Victorian bushfires.

‘Daylight’, Susan Bennett’s funny, angry spoof of the contentious blockbuster Twilight.

Issue 204: ‘How to tell if you’re the red herring’ – Jacinda Woodhead’s fierce and surreal vision of the illogic of racism.

An extract from Charlotte Wood’s rollercoaster new novel Animal People about the fine lines we draw between animals and humans.

‘Reading coffee’ by Anthony Panegyres, his powerful story of a young girl on the goldfields of Western Australia during the anti-Greek uprisings of 1916.

Issue 205: ‘Experiment No. 1 in Animal Tourism’ by Stephen Muecke, his elliptical fragments on the transportation of a Tasmanian devil.

‘Letter to a small village’, Louise Pine’s disturbing tale of the death of a child on a road in Africa.

The first published extract (a fragment) from Alexis Wright’s forthcoming novel The Swan Book.

Being Overland fiction editor is an exciting and agonising job. I’ve had to turn down many good stories – dozens arrive each month and we can only publish a dozen a year. I don’t see every story that’s submitted to Overland. They are read by a dedicated team of volunteers now guided by Clare Strahan. All of us who work with Overland’s fiction do it for love, not money, so I’d like to give a huge thank you to all those who have devoted their time this year to this important activity: publishing and promoting new short fiction in Australia.

I’d like to take this opportunity to acknowledge and thank by name the following tireless volunteers: Clare Strahan, Joshua Mostafa, Kathleen McLeod, SJ Finn, Trish Bolton, Miranda Camboni, Boris Kelly, Emily Laidlaw, Louise Pine, Mark William Jackson, Lina Vale, Elizabeth Reichhardt, Claire Zorn, Julie Perrin and Georgia Claire. THANK YOU SO MUCH. As I’m sure you’re only too aware, we couldn’t do it without you.

And the fiction doesn’t stop here. First up in 2012 Overland will be publishing James Bradley’s first zombie story, Paul Dawson’s spoof of twenty-first century academia and SJ Finn’s story of living beyond the law. So stay tuned.

In many areas the editor-author partnership remains unchanged. Editors and publishers work with authors the way they always have: commissioning, editing and publishing work. At the other end of the spectrum is self-publishing including web pages, blogs, twitter etc, produced without editorial intervention. Between these is a hybrid model – in which some areas of a journal, for example, will be edited, but blog posts or opinion pieces remain unedited. Then there’s the editorial process where no apparent human intervention occurs; instead machine-made decisions are based on complex algorithms referencing past choices and the preferences of the majority.

Editing and being edited is like a love affair. Sometimes it’s great, sometimes not. When it works you can find yourself shouting, ‘Yes! Yes! Yes! Or, like Jack Nicholson’s character responding to Helen Hunt in As Good As It Gets, an editor can make an author ‘want to be a better man’ (or woman). As with love affairs, there’s the ongoing search for the ‘one who really gets you’, or for the transformative relationship which will ‘take you away from all this’.

Perhaps this is the reason so many authors become romantically involved with their publishers and editors. Or maybe it’s just that authors don’t always get out much.

A good – or indeed bad – editor can fundamentally change a writer’s work. Some partnerships are legendary: Ezra Pound and TS Eliot, Gordon Lish’s slicing and dicing of Raymond Carver, Max Perkins and F Scott Fitzgerald.

When the author-editor connection breaks down, it can have all the characteristics of a failed relationship, including name-calling, sulks, rage, backstabbing and legendary feuds. Sylvia Plath fans will never forgive Ted Hughes’s alleged suppression of Plath’s work, and similar claims have been made about Percy Bysshe Shelley’s intervention in Mary Shelley’s work.

Economic realities mean that publishers are less likely to have the time to invest in the long-term nurturing/interventionist editorial relationships. Cory Doctorow outlined some of the recent changes in publishing in a Guardian article, and, as Gary Kamiya pointed out some years ago, many traditional editorial roles are being outsourced or forgotten.

But where does this leave us in the unmediated part of the online world? What happens when the audience becomes the gatekeeper? A lot of the online world is as much mediated by editors as the traditional print world. Editors commission work, read unsolicited material, choose what they want, edit it and make the final call as to how it is presented.

On the other hand, the ease with which anyone can self-publish by creating web pages, blogs, etc, means that there’s lots of material for which the audience is the only editor. In some ways, a relationship that used to be private and personal now becomes public. We’ve replaced an intimate editorial relationship with one or two people with an open relationship with many. Like an ongoing version of some reality television show – it’s the crowd that gets to decide. And as we all know, the crowd is not always wise or kind.

Exposing yourself to the unfettered reaction of the mob, instead of the (hopefully) measured, thoughtful response of an editor, is like diving into the mosh pit. Sometimes the crowd lifts you high, carrying you along on their shoulders, at other times you’re trampled beneath the crush. Most often there’s a kind of ‘meh’ of non-response, and, as Zora Sanders reminded us in a recent Meanjin post – there are trolls out there whose main agenda is to hurt and maim.

Readers today have the expectation of participation, of a dialogue, a democratic response to the author. So whether they are consumed by joy or a kind of write-rage, they expect to comment. How this ‘editorialising’ impacts the writer is as individual as any relationship. Some people are empowered by thoughtful, engaging comments, others are dragged under by violent destructive responses.

Commenting online seems to have replaced some other forms of public editing. While Apostrophe man and woman still stalk the mean streets (sometimes in the guise of one of my sisters), other forms of street editorial (also known as graffiti) seem to have fallen away. While graffiti as art is flourishing, there seems to be less direct comment. Perhaps the fury to respond which used to drive people to pick up a paint can is now directed to tweeting, emailing and online commenting. I keep expecting some of the 99% to reply to the Big Clubs’ pro gambling ‘who voted’ billboards with BUGA UP style ripostes, but I haven’t seen it yet. It looks like no one can be buggered. They may be actively tweeting and blogging instead, but they’re talking to a different audience.

The centrality of editors in setting and reflecting cultural agendas over the years can’t be underestimated. The impact on Australian culture of literary journals and publishing houses with strong, determined editors, from Louisa Lawson and the Dawn, through the Bulletin’s JF Archibald and Alfred Stephens, down through the long stayers like Meanjin, Overland and Southerly, is immense.

But how will this play out when it’s not a human editor who is choosing which works to include and discard, but a machine?

Search engines and social media already edit what you see in response to the choices of the crowd and your previous preferences. (See Eli Pariser’sTED talk for an overview.) Many web pages, particularly news sites, are constructed by pulling in a mash-up of ‘popular’ items into a page, and instead of human editors determining what they’ll publish, editing is replaced by filtering and decisions are made by a computer gatekeeper.

The Google corporation is working hard on creating a ‘synthesis of knowledge’ in which instead of getting a series of webpages in response to a query, we’ll get a Google-crafted ‘synthesis’ of all the responses (probably edited to reflect our known preferences and prejudices).

The logical extension of this is a future version of my favourite literary journal where none of the bits my online editor thinks I don’t want to see appear – all the hard bits, the things that challenge me, the people I don’t agree with, anything new and exciting, are removed – kind of like listening to your favourite radio shock-jock. Or it might be that a ‘knowledge editor’ synthesises the disparate bits of the journal into one small easy-to-digest document.

But why stop there? Why not, like the 60 second classics, exponentially reduce the journal to its essence like a sauce simmering on the stove, until all that remains is one well-crafted tweet or haiku?

Anyone want to give it a go?

Or so many political and cultural elites would like us to believe. On the very day of my writing this blog, for example, we were subjected to federal Minister for Small Business Nick Sherry’s apocalyptic diagnosis that Australian booksellers will be annihilated within the next five years, thanks, in part, to the (supposed) explosion of online sales of ebooks. In a less dramatic and more considered register, Kate Eltham, CEO of Queensland Writers Centre, pontificated on the ABC television’s Jennifer Byrne Presents, that the advent of ebooks and e-readers was disrupting ‘the underpinning supply chains that are currently supporting modern publishing’.

Significant to both Senator Sherry’s and CEO Eltham’s perspectives are their disconcertingly upbeat views of these (apparently) cataclysmic changes. For the Minister, the prophesied obliteration of bookshops promises a brave new world in which ‘online trading present[s] a growth opportunity for businesses to expand their potential customer reach’; while for Eltham a future without paper books is nothing short of paradisiacal:

I’m optimistic in the best sense. I think that we are going to see an abundance of titles available. We’re going to see a multitude of channels to get those titles. And we’re going to see conversations taking place between readers that didn’t take place before. So I’m excited and I think this is going to be a really fun time.

Commentators, far more eloquent and informed than I, have questioned the validity of the claim that the printed book has run its course. Suffice it to say that, as Meanland’s own Jacinda Woodhead has shown, Amazon’s sensational news of their ebooks outselling printed books was, at best, highly dubious; and according to Jeremy Fisher, in his Meanjin Meanland essay, ‘[t]he printed book is showing no signs even of a death rattle’. While disagreement between the ebullient advocates of the ebook and their opponents are likely to continue for years to come – until, perhaps, either the e-reader has been, once and for all, assigned to the dustbin of history alongside other notable technological failures, or the printed book has joined the stone table, the papyrus scroll and the illuminated manuscript in museums – what interests me is the excessively sanguine, indeed utopian view of those who see the (proposed) demise of the printed book as an unconditionally wonderful thing.

Why is it that seemingly learned people – who have, one can safely assume, read a book or two during their lives – are so ecstatic about the collapse of not just an industry but one of the tenets of civilisation? What exactly are the redemptive, heavenly consequences of the Four Horsemen of the Internet, ebooks, online shopping, and the vertiginous Australian dollar bringing an end to the profane worlds of print publishing and printed-book selling?

The most obvious answer is, of course, the commercial interests of corporations who, for example, release inflated figures of the sales of their ebooks to boost the sales of their e-readers, or the blatant interference by other interested corporations who, for example, pay influential public figures to champion the cause of an e-future. (According to the Age, Senator Sherry’s comments apropos of the death of bookselling in Australia came at the launch of a public awareness campaign ‘organised by online payment company PayPal’.) In an even slightly less imperfect world, the Capitalist economic base would not be capable of so effortlessly molding the cultural superstructure and propagating spurious assumptions as facts; but I shall desist from indulging in utopian fantasies of my own, and instead explore one example of a myth or, in this case, a fairytale that supports a dominant ideology hard at work trying to convince us all that This-is-the-end-of-the-book-as-we-know-it-and-we-should-all-feel-very-very-fine.

The story concerns one Amanda Hocking who, according to one enthusiastic YouTube appraisal, is a ‘26 year old [North American] writer who was turned down by several publishers only to publish her work as ebooks for Amazon Kindle earning her millions of dollars’. As someone who has had more than his fair share of rejection from many, many publishers, I warm to the story of a fellow struggling writer who has told the ‘haters’ – as one of the presenters in the above YouTube clip has eloquently put it – ‘to suck it’. Also, as a Marxist, I’m very happy to hear that a young, working-class woman has taken control of her own means of production and circumvented exploitation by elitist publishers and distributors. But a closer look at this American Dream tale of going from rags to riches in the age of the ebook reveals this supposedly ‘revolutionary’ tale as a sadly disingenuous, deceptive fantasy.

To begin with, Hocking’s self-e-published bestsellers are far from radical or new in any sense of these words. Among her books are vampire romance novels written for young adults. While possibly emulating the Twilight series is not – rather disappointingly – a punishable offence yet, the fact that this ebook success story could have only come about as a consequence of the immense popularity of Stephenie Meyer’s series of printed books undermines the triumphalism and hubris of those who view Hocking’s success as a repudiation of print publishing. As Jenny Lee has written in Overland, successful self-published e-titles cited by one advocate of ebooks ‘are all in well-established popular genres’, a fact which, in my view, greatly weakens any claim the proponents of this latest publishing technology could have to it being a radical departure from the apparently atrophied paradigms of print publishing.

Also, as it would have been blatantly obvious in my quoted introduction of Hocking, her story serves, perhaps against her wishes, as publicity for Amazon Kindle. While I certainly hope that this obviously industrious writer receives fair payment for her work – although it is rather worrying that, as she mentions in this Associated Press clip, she’s yet to be paid any royalties by Amazon – it is quite possible that here, as with many other e-publishing success stories, ‘the beneficiaries’, as also noted by Lee in her Meanland article, ‘aren’t self-publishers but the [online] store-owners, who are some of the largest corporations on the planet’. While viewing the abovementioned clip, note how Amazon’s e-reader Kindle is rather conspicuously plugged, as is, perhaps oddly, the energy drink Red Bull, presented here as a writer’s drink.

The most self-contradictory aspect of the view of Hocking’s writing career as an exemplification of the utopian wonders of ebooks and e-publishing, however, is its truly fairytale, she-lived-happily-ever-after ending. According to her own blog, Hocking’s ‘new young adult four-book series’ is to be published – for a no doubt gargantuan advance – by St Martin’s Press, one of the United States’ major print publishers. And, although as with almost all other publishers that I know of, the Press’s parent company, Macmillan Publishers Ltd, has embraced digital publishing options, these publishers cannot be seen, in any sense of the word, as e-publishers – as of June 2011, according to The Bookseller.com, only 8% of Pan Macmillan’s sales are accounted for by ebook sales. So if e-publishing is the glorious future and print publishing an expired past, why is this paragon of e-writing abandoning the electrophoretic ink screen of the e-reader gadget for the enervated paper pages of a printed book?

The simplest answer seems to be that the printed book is neither dead nor dying. As much as I for one would like to see hierarchies and stifling bourgeois ideologies of much of the existing print publishing and bookselling challenged and disrupted, on the basis of the frankly flimsy premise of much of the unsubstantiated hype and hyperbole surrounding ebooks, digital technology is not likely to liberate us into a utopian future in which any writer can get published, recognised and rewarded for their work.

I fear that, to the contrary, we may end up with hundreds of thousands of obsolete e-readers and further toxic e-waste being dumped on the slum dwellers of Ghana or China, where staggering quantities of the affluent nations’ high-tech effluence are disposed of by some of the world’s most deprived and vulnerable in some of the most monstrously dangerous work environments imaginable. The image of rivers becoming contaminated, water undrinkable and soil non-arable as a consequence of the processing of mounds of our unwanted e-readers is most certainly not a utopian fantasy, but a properly abject, dystopian reality.

My response was to stare at her blankly. I thought she’d probably confused me with someone else, and asked whether she had. She looked a little confused. You just performed that poem – the one about your son being shot. I looked at her again, blankly. The poem you JUST read, she insisted, it’s in your book! I wracked my brain and realised she meant the poem ‘mali’, which appears in my book Gil Scott Heron is on Parole (Picaro Press, 2010). The poem is about the anxiety of carrying a black child in the womb, with the mother (myself) imagining all of the things that could go wrong:

… birthing a black child
into this world
wasn’t smart on any footing
like dumping osama in abu ghraib
& saying have fun boys
nobody’s looking
i felt sick
every time i felt you kicking …

The poem also contains the lines:

… gunned down on the tube for wearing a back-pack
seven holes
not one sniper stopping to think that
maybe a mama wz losing her child …

Clearly, the reader had taken the poem literally. I explained what the poem was actually about and all the while the woman was staring at me dubiously. When I got back behind the mic, I noticed her toward the back of the room whispering to some mates who in turn, were staring at me even more accusingly than she was – as if they were wondering whether every poem was flight of fancy. Wtf?

Even if the poem had been written from the perspective of a woman who’d lost her son to police brutality, would they have been justified in being peeved? Fiction is a word usually applied to story writing, but poetry can just as easily be fiction or storytelling, can’t it? I know my poems often are, but should I have to declare that they are? Surely a poet has no obligation to their readers to separate fact from fiction? Am I selling you myself, or selling you my song?

I once submitted a novel of mine to a Novel Search competition. It was successful, but didn’t end up being published (full story in the interview here if you’re interested). One thing that surprised me, and has always stuck with me, is that when I initially submitted the first 10000 words of the manuscript, the potential publisher, when calling me for a full submission, asked: Uh, I was just wondering … how much of this manuscript is actually autobiography? I paused for a moment, wondering: What does he want me, or expect me, to say? Umm. About five per cent. That five per cent or so was so sporadic: locations and mundane situations rather than people or names. Thank goodness, he said, most of what we’ve been sent has been thinly veiled autobiography.

The competition was a fiction writing competition, so his frustration made sense. It got me thinking though, about different writing forms and truth. In my experience readers, particularly non-poets and superparticularly (let me invent a few new words every now and then – it’s my blog after all) non-writers, generally expect poetry to be honest. Literally honest: they expect to hear about the poet’s direct experiences or at least actual observations. If you write a poem about riding the railway in India, they expect that you have ridden the railway in India. If you write about a volatile break-up, they expect you to have been devastated by an ended relationship.

Why? It’s not journalism, it’s poetry! What are your thoughts about poetry and truth? Should I give myself, or are you okay with my song?

Cross-posted from slam up.

Anyhow, as part of the endless stream of consequences of the aforementioned disasters etc etc, I bought an eight-acre share with house on a 100-acre commune with three friends, who were accompanied by a small dog and a three-legged cat. It’s the second commune I’ve lived on, and generally not being concerned with property as personal investment, they can be conducive to all sorts of things, ways of living and thinking.

I had written for a long time I should add, since I was a child, a not uncommon trait of writers. And given that there are not many activities we engage in as adults that we also did as children, a lot of questions could be begged as to what on earth we think we’re doing when we’re writing. The Scottish poet Don Paterson recently said that as an experiment he wrote his commentary on Shakespeare’s sonnets ‘while awake, bored, half-asleep, full of cold, drunk, exhausted, serene, smart, befuddled and stupid …. on the train, in bed, in the bath and in my lunch-break … while I was fed up marking papers, or stuck on Bioshock on the Playstation.’

I was a bit nonplussed by this, as I wasn’t too sure there was any other way to write. I felt like I’d missed something and perhaps hadn’t been doing writing properly. Perhaps I was missing a muse.

Anyway, where was I? Yes, I bought a share on a commune and started writing, most of the day, every day. The writer, said Donald Barthelme, is the person who when he or she begins doesn’t know what they are doing. I discussed this statement with another writer once who seemed to be under the impression that what Barthelme meant was that he didn’t know what to write next.

So while it may not be obvious to anyone reading this or anything else I’ve written, I’m very attached to ambiguity. Blogs, by their nature are not made to welcome ambiguity. They are like lollies. You toss them down, and think, Oooh tasty. Must have another one.

The English songwriters Michael Flanders and another Donald, Donald Swann, had the following joke as part of their stage patter:

DS (sitting behind piano): What’s that you’re holding?
MF (in wheelchair): It’s for you. It’s a sweet. Eat it now.
DS: Thank you … I say, it’s a lovely GREEN colour isn’t it?
MF: Yes, it is a beautiful GREEN colour isn’t it? Almost translucent. I’m glad you like it … … It was pink when I bought it.

I’d like to write blogs like that, I think. Blogs as green lollies that you realise may well have originally been another colour just as you gulp them down.

It can be very easy to get discouraged about writing, whether you’re picking away at it occasionally or it’s the first thing you do after breakfast. Personally, I’ve found that when I’m working on something, which I usually am, it sometimes happens that someone says, ‘I’d love to read what you’ve written’. A request that I then scramble to find courteous ways to say, ‘No, go away’ to. And as I am, to say the least, not a naturally socially skilled person, I tend to get myself in all sorts of bother. Though I admit that after being repeatedly asked, I did once give a 30 000-word manuscript to one of my communal housemates and shareowners. After about a month, during which I wondered if she’d decided to rewrite it herself, I found the manuscript back on my desk one day with a note on top that said ‘ That was FUCKING FULL ON.’ We then seemed to agree, by some kind of invisible consensus, never to speak of it again.

There could be many reasons to write the thing generally called ‘fiction’. Personally, I wonder if we write fiction because we’re out of our minds and are attempting some form of self-cure. I think there’s copious evidence for this. Yet another Donald – Winnicott – said, in his usual gnomic way, that the writer is the person who simultaneously wants to hide and wants to be found. That sounds very much like the child playing hide and seek, who is terrified of being forgotten and also has great anxiety at being discovered.

From my tiny perspective, the novel looks pretty much stuffed I think, and has been for some time. Just because many people write novels, and many read them doesn’t mean they’re alive, just as a city full of zombies, isn’t by any stretch a city full of people.

In Elif Batuman’s LRB essay on fiction and the whole university creative writing thing – an essay that keeps popping up everywhere, which perhaps shows how little fiction writers question what they are doing – she makes the point that most graduates of university creative writing programs could write a better sentence than Stendhal, but Stendhal actually wrote something worth reading. Oddly, I had just been thinking along the same lines in relation to Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, a copy of which I got for 20 cents at a sale in Nimbin last week. If it was Lowry’s assignment for Creative Writing, I suspect that it would have a lot of red ink on it and a ‘See me after class’. To put it another way, one can’t imagine Under the Volcano emerging unscathed from editorial mutilation if it were submitted to a publisher today. All Lowry’s darlings would have been dutifully murdered for starters. As a piece of ‘creative writing’, Under the Volcano is all over the place. It reads like a novel written by a hallucinating drunk, which it was, and bits of it are very, very interesting.

So why write at all? When I read writers on writing, they’re very often extremely lame, inexcusably platitudinous and about as convincing as BP’s spin doctors. It’s not unusual, too, for writers to talk about writing as either ‘self-expression’ or as ‘communication’. My immediate response is, is that it? Are they the only two alternatives on offer? Could we get a bit ironic about what these things might be? Could we generate a bit of incredulity about these two narratives? Could writing just possibly be a political act, could it possibly always have been, in one shape or another? When we write, could we possibly think about acknowledging that? Does ‘literature’ actually really suck?

I’m not sure there’s actually a worthwhile debate to be had about this though, to be honest. Rjurik Davidson had a go at the commodification of creative writing courses in the 200th issue of Overland, and while he was comprehensive and even-handed in his investigations, I found myself thinking he might have pulled his punches a bit. A few humorous swings in the direction of the deranged academics and publishers represented in his essay may not have been a bad thing. On the other hand, Rjurik may have more nous and shown more common sense than I.

Those defending the novel and defending fiction have a very different set of values than those who don’t. To the fiction writer, the novel is almost a sacred object, and messing with people’s sense of the sacred, no matter how absurd their experience or their object may seem, is always an unwise act. If someone is really determined to make a fetish out of zombie culture, then by all means they should be left to it.

Of course, this brings me back to why I myself would want to write. In short, it’s because I want to know what I think. ‘Think’ in this case, probably covers a lot of ground. Like Winnicott, I’m interested in capacities. One of Winnicott’s memorable phrases is ‘the capacity to be alone’. I’m interested too in the capacity of reverie to subvert the politics of my thinking, and writing helps with that. Writing also has the capacity to be a private delirium in many ways, a private pleasure, a guilty one, as so many pleasures are. But there are always a few odds and sods that might be made public, sods like this, a mouldering lolly in the bottom of the jar that once upon a time may well have been a shinier and more attractive colour.

At the Wheeler Centre’s weekly lunchtime soapbox event Anna Krien addressed the question of whether newspapers still matter in the digital era. Krien’s central argument was that print newspapers needed to recognise and mobilise the features that make them unique and play to their strengths, rather than playing catch up with their online competition. Print newspapers can make a virtue of their relative slowness; can devote resources to research; can provide in-depth analysis and long-form reportage; can deliver a product that is worth the paper it is printed on (i.e. is worth its cover price and is worth whatever effort it takes to carry it from breakfast table to briefcase to beachside). In so doing, newspapers can leave the speedy work of ‘news coverage’ to the web. Printed papers, with their research, analysis and critique, can be the roughage in our media diet, giving us something to chew on: slow-to-digest information that complements the news snacks we get online.

It’s just possible that the same idea could be used in considering how to respond to talk of the demise of the novel in the digital era. That is to say, what if we proposed that it was the slowness of print books that provides a pleasure that online forms don’t deliver? In an essay in The Millions, Garth Hallberg notes that ‘the current profusion of long novels would seem to complicate the picture of the Incredible Shrinking Attention Span.’ Just like Krien’s proposal that the newspaper should seize its potential for (time-consuming) considered investigation, many novels make a virtue of their ‘bigness’ and ‘slowness’; make a virtue of being substantial food-for-thought.

The reason for this foray into publishing? The founders of Vandal felt that as young writers, the established literary gatekeepers ignored them; the industry was a fortress without a drawbridge.

Howell writes:

People tend to frown on self-publishing but for me it was a good thing. At the very least it meant I was doing something. I had a book I could hold in my hand; I could send it off to snooty literary editors to say, Who am I? I can WRITE! After Vandal I started sending stories off willy-nilly. I wrote my way around the world.

At the time, Mark Davis had just published Gangland: Cultural Elites and the New Generationalism, for which he was both hailed and condemned. Davis railed against the conservatism of the cultural gatekeepers – he also launched one of the first Vandal publications.

Listening to Howell, I was reminded of recent conversations with new writers thirsting for some legitimacy, writers frustrated by the perceived inflexibility and insularity of the industry. I asked Howell if she thought that new writers were still marginalised and ignored.

Read the rest at Meanland.

I left the session confident that I could carry on pursuing my literary career without changing my name to Craig and safe in the knowledge that I was unlikely to ever be propositioned in the offices of Allen & Unwin by a chain-smoking man drinking a Bloody Mary in a sharp suit. Case closed.

Or was it? (Cue three-note suspense-inducing music from Law & Order.)

The following day at the festival, I was standing in a queue for a session when the woman next to me struck up a bit of a conversation. (I don’t own an iPod, you see.) She asked what sessions I had been to. I mentioned ‘No Country for Young Women’. She asked what conclusion they reached. I told her that in the experience of these three women, gender hadn’t been a barrier for them in the Australian literary scene. She looked at me with utter disgust and asked me if I was kidding. I said no. She said, ‘That’s rubbish’, by which I took her to mean that the conclusion was rubbish, rather than she thought I was a liar.

Turns out my new friend had worked in the publishing industry for years, eventually starting her own company in an effort to escape what she perceived to be entrenched sexism. Now, at that point I began to wonder if she wasn’t, a little, you know, bonkers. She did have quite an alarming hair-do*, after all. I gently told her that in my admittedly limited experience I hadn’t found the industry to be male dominated at all – I had worked for a few publishers and all my colleagues, bar one, had been women. To which she replied, ‘What about the CEOs? The ones who make the final decisions?’

Yes, they where men, but that doesn’t make the industry sexist, does it?

After about half-an-hour, in which I was given some insight into the woman’s general loathing of the male species, our association ended and I was left thinking she was a little … eccentric. It’s just not like that anymore, surely.

Or is it? (Repeat suspenseful music.)

The other day I was listening to ABC Radio National’s Book Show while I was folding the washing (no joke) and guess who should be on? None other than Overland’s very own Jeff Sparrow. He was joined by former associate editor of the Griffith Review, Sally Breen, and they were discussing Forbes newly released list of highest-earning authors. It was noted that only three of the top ten were women and the topic quickly turned to whether the literary world was sexist. Breen certainly thinks it is to a degree, sighting AS Byatt’s comments about the Orange Prize for women writers, while Jeff Sparrow told of how the Overland folk had recently done a tally to see how many female writers they have published compared to male. (The result, Jeff?) The Jonathan Franzen question came up: Would his work receive the same amount of attention if he were female? Or, would Joanna Franzen be ‘just another’ female writer writing about domestic relationships?

It seems impossible to have this discussion without mentioning Louis Nowra’s article about Germaine Greer that appeared in the Monthly. (Although it’s unclear whether this is explicit sexism, or just a confusing ramble that made it to print because of the author’s name.) One is also forced to consider the ‘Australian Legends of the Written Word’ stamp series issued by Australia Post, which – as commented on in the Guardian – included only one female writer.

Which leaves us where, exactly? No country for young (or any-age) women?

As declared by my Year Ten maths teacher, I am not and never will be a statistician, however I thought I might do what might be perceived to be the proper thing and have a look at some numbers. So, I studied the previous four editions of an internationally renowned American literary journal and using my limited mathematical skills was able to deduce that about sixty-five percent of the published writers were men, the rest, you guessed it, were mermaids. No! They were women, silly.

But what the hell does that mean, anyway? Is it evidence of sexism? Maybe not, maybe it’s just evidence that thirty-five percent were female authors and sixty-five percent were male. Using a similar technique, I was also able to discover that of the sixty books short-listed for the Booker Prize in the last ten years, thirty-seven were by male authors, twenty-three by female. Yet, surely the aim of every award should be to honour quality writing, not fulfil a predetermined quota of female writers. Which brings us back to the Orange Prize and Ms Byatt. I have to admit that I, like AS Byatt, find the idea of special awards for women a wee bit patronising. It makes me think of the infants’ playground at primary school – are we not yet ready to play with the ‘big kids’?

As a closing note, of the four Australian books I have read in the last three months, two were by men (Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole; Craig Silvey, Jasper Jones) and two were by women (Sonya Hartnett, Butterfly; Nikki Gemmell, The Book of Rapture). All four of them explored ‘traditionally female’ themes to do with family and relationships, except The Book of Rapture, which also engaged in the ‘political, big idea’ stuff normally associated with male writers …

*Thank you, Louis Nowra for pointing out how well a woman’s hair-do can indicate her intellectual capacity.

Still, there were several points that attracted my attention. In particular, Stinson critiques my argument for an engaged literature. He writes:

Davidson’s piece is ultimately interesting and even-handed, although it runs what currently seems to be Overland’s party line on what literature should be, which is ‘a literature that takes us back into the world – that thinks about the issues that surround and affect us – rather than away from it: a culture of engagement rather than escapism, of reflection rather than consolation’. As I’ve noted elsewhere, an extremely problematic set of assumptions underpins this notion of literature (and more on this below).

It’s not quite clear what the ‘problematic set of assumptions’ is. Later, Stinson expands on the point (which he qualifies with ‘warning, unfounded emotional rant approaching’):

Everyone who is currently holding the position that art needs to take on the real world, engage with real issues, adhere to standard notions of plot and characertisation, or think more about content, repeat after me: ‘I am a complete and total philistine. I have rejected completely the innovations of modernism and have a deep, profound and aesthetically conservative nostalgia for the classics of literature (as I have chosen to define them in my own personal cannon).’

Now between this first quote and the second there are a number of paragraphs, and we can’t be sure that the second directly follows the first. Indeed, the second paragraph directly relates to Batuman’s piece on creative writing programs in the LRB (and may well be fair as an assessment of Batuman’s position). But it seems to be what he is referring to when he writes in the first paragraph, ‘more on this below’. If this is the case, Stinson has made a serious category error. For it appears that he equates taking on the ‘real world’ with realism, a literature of engagement with ‘conservative nostalgia for the classics of literature’, Batuman’s position, with mine (or Overland’s). Stinson’s own interests are in avant-garde writing, and here he defends this movement against the cold dead hand of ‘realism’.

The first irony is that, as Stinson would realize, the modernists were deeply engaged in the ‘real world’ – they are, in fact, paradigmatic of the engaged artist. They were precisely the kinds of people I was gesturing towards when I wrote the Overland ‘party line’. The great surrealist writer Breton was associated with the radical Left, as were Brecht and Picasso. Mayakovsky became the poet laureate of the Russian revolution. Of course the political Left cannot lay sole claim to these modernist avant-gardes – Marinetti, Ezra Pound, Eliot and Yeats were all on the far right – but it’s no surprise that those most interested in breaking the ossified forms of realism were political radicals.

The point is that at times non-realism provides a better handle on the contemporary world than classical realism. Should this surprise us, considering we live in a society of such constant change, of social disintegration on vast tracts of the planet, of technological lurches forward, of impending disasters – climate and otherwise – of famines and droughts, of genocide and war? As Marx wrote in neo-modernist language: ‘All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.’ This is the space with which non-realism engages, though perhaps it is not the only method of approach (though it is the one that I, personally, have chosen).

This category error is unfortunate, as Stinson’s analysis of contemporary culture, if not particularly original, is a useful starting point:

while I agree that the majority of contemporary literature is bland, this is a result of the fact that books are a commodity that must be sold, and are therefore marketed to appeal to the broadest possible audience, while any novel seen as too ‘difficult’ will usually either be ignored or else edited into something that’s more in line with a saleable good (this seems to be more prevalent in the Anglophone world, as the overwhelming mediocrity of Booker and Pulitzer prize shortlists suggests). Totalitarian societies censor great art, but capitalist societies just ignore it. I’ll simply end my critique by noting this: there is no crisis within contemporary literature as such, but there is a crisis in how literature is produced, disseminated and advertised within the marketplace. The failures are systemic failures that cannot be separated from larger economic structures.

So far, so good. Similar arguments have been made by the Frankfurt school: most obviously Adorno and Horkheimer in The Dialectic of Enlightenment and Marcuse in One-Dimensional Man. Frederic Jameson makes a similar point in his theories of postmodernism, though his theory of capitalism is influenced by Lukacs, even if his aesthetic conclusions are somewhat different.

Though Stinson doesn’t explain quite what he means by ‘the majority of contemporary literature is bland’, I suspect we would agree on the details. In a recent Overland editorial, I suggested a brief formulation:

We live in a deeply commodified culture that values style over substance, image over reality, the disposable over the sustainable. McDonald’s and Coca-Cola, The Da Vinci Code and Transformers, Australian Idol and Border Security – these are the faces of mass culture.

I revisited that analysis in the piece on creative writing, though in a different context. The point, it seems to me, is that this commodified culture is one of escapism. I wrote, ‘This is a culture whose primary aim is to take us away from the world, to feed us degraded ideological constructions and images of the lives we secretly yearn for but will never have. It is a culture of distraction and consolation.’ There are many concrete analyses one could here make. We could take the commercial news, which provides little in the way of news, but rather a form of entertainment. We might examine a show like Australian Idol, essentially a big karaoke competition, where we are encouraged to pick a contestant who will be our ‘favourite’. We can be happy when they win, sad when they lose. We might choose Twilight, a novel which reaffirms, as Laura Miller has explained, the ‘traditional feminine fantasy of being delivered from obscurity by a dazzling, powerful man, of needing to do no more to prove or find yourself than win his devotion, of being guarded from all life’s vicissitudes by his boundless strength and wealth’.

The point, I argued, was to build a countercultural movement against this commodified logic. It is apparently here that Stinson and I part company. Why? The secret seems to me to be in Stinson’s analysis of why there is a ‘crisis’ in contemporary culture. Stinson’s analysis has only two essential terms: economics and culture. He writes, ‘there is no crisis within contemporary literature as such, but there is a crisis in how literature is produced, disseminated and advertised within the marketplace. The failures are systemic failures that cannot be separated from larger economic structures.’ The missing term here, is, of course, politics. Personally, I think the crisis of literature has as much to do with the political impasse of the last twenty years, with the dominance of commodity capitalism politically and ideologically, as with its economics. Crudely put, in a situation where people see no alternative, they seek escape. They seek a culture of consolation. The great engaged art movements, whether they were the avant-gardes of the thirties or sixties, or indeed the realists during the fifties like Arthur Miller, were almost always connected with political movements and drew energy and inspiration from them (I hope to write about one such 1960s literary movement in a forthcoming Overland). In that respect, today, more than ever, if you are interested in literature, you also should be interested in radical politics. Indeed, if Overland could be said to maintain a ‘line’, that’s a pretty good summation of it.

Many people feel a distinct sense of impending doom, as though creative and financial control have been wrested from the hands of writers, artists and musicians and let loose on the infinite and unpoliced data cables across the world. But copyright, by its very nature, is extraordinarily restrictive. Currently, for your typical, non-full-time creator, there is no means of saying to another artist, ‘Can I use your work?’ Rather we rely on ‘permission culture’, in which cultural products are monitored and controlled by corporations.

Contrary to what copyright culture and modern capitalism would have us believe, the sharing of culture is the norm for individuals, for artists and for society as a whole. In mediaeval Europe, say, someone would tell a rip-roaring (and doubtless violent and bloody) story that you remembered and retold when you travelled to your next village. And maybe you retold it with some slight embellishments. From its earliest days, human cultural history was dependent on the oral tradition, which transferred culture between generations and communities.

My point being, everyone takes ideas from other people – how can we not? It’s particularly so now, when many of us are exposed to a tidal wave of data on any given day. So what happens when someone gets the idea that copyright is primarily an ugly mask of contemporary capitalism and that culture should return to the ‘commons’, thereby supporting community culture?

Enter stage left: Creative Commons.

Head to Meanland for the rest of the essay.

It has been well documented (usually by bloggers) that a blog, along with facebook and twitter, are essential tools for the aspiring writer. Blogs are a cheap and easy way to get your work out to millions of potential readers. Start a blog and scream ‘death to the publisher infidels, we don’t need you anymore’. But, herein lies the danger, when the blog becomes the product instead of the marketing tool.

Two blogs are created every second. In publishing terms this equates to a slush pile that increases by a full-length novel every three minutes. Hoping to achieve fame and fortune via a blog is like throwing a bottled message into the ocean and hoping a publisher (or their influential equivalent) will find it.

But more dangerous than the exercise in futility detailed above is what one writer (whose name eludes me) called the ‘group hug effect’. A writer posts a piece of work which is nowhere near finished then sits back and waits for the followers to throw up their empty comments ‘wonderful’, ‘I love this’, ‘you have captured this perfectly’. The writer then receives some sort of inner glow and feels the work is complete.

Group hugs are provided by what I would call ‘blog trawlers’, similar yet opposite to ‘blog trolls’, whose aim is to offend, blog trawlers will comment on any piece of insane crap that a blogger posts. Blog trawlers maintain blogs of their own and comment in the hope of a return comment on their blog. Their blogs are usually filled with little images called ‘blog awards’ such as the ‘Sunshine award’. This community is fine if it is what you are looking for – an extended social network – but if you are serious about writing, this community can drag you down into a quagmire of shallow praise and false hope. I knew it was time for me to get out when someone offered me a ‘Sunshine award’. (The irony was totally lost in the offer.)

For any writer hoping to reach beyond immediate family and trawlers, there is a danger that once a piece of work is posted it is considered ‘published’ by many well-respected journals (Overland being one), and will not be considered for submission. This leads to a catch-22: you can either post on your blog and forget print and reputable online journals, or you can split your creativity, writing some for the blog and keeping some aside for submissions. Anyone who can do this and write effectively doesn’t need a blog to promote themselves, they’d already have a Nobel prize.

So, after a year of active blogging I ripped it all down and deleted my wordpress account, ran screaming to the darkest corner of my house and leapt into the foetal position, never again to look into the evil dashboard asking to be fed a new post. My blog was dead, I had killed it and danced on its grave.

That is, until last week.

I’d been long enough away to learn the perils. The domain is active again but not so much a blog as a minimal static website offering samples of my poetry that have been published elsewhere – this way I’m not throwing up something that should have rotted away in the bottom of a drawer. Comments are blocked on the new site so that people don’t feel compelled to comment for the sake of commenting, and I don’t feel obliged to reply. It is now set up merely as a ‘search’ point for if someone reads my work and feels compelled to search for more. So please, feel free to visit markwmjackson.wordpress.com. It doesn’t bite anymore.

Much is being made at the moment about the number of students enrolling in creative writing courses across our fair land. In fact, it is fair to say that in the next decade Australia’s biggest challenge won’t be overpopulation; it will be a severe skills shortage due to the fact everyone is chucking in their jobs and going off to ‘learn’ how to be a writer. If you want to read about the way this may or may not be impacting on Australia’s literary culture, I strongly recommend reading Rjurik Davidson’s article ‘Liberated zone or pure commodification?’ in the current issue of Overland. (I would happily cut and paste it right here, but appropriation hasn’t really taken off in the literary community the way it has in visual arts.) Suffice to say, there are a lot of folk out there tapping away on their keyboards in the hope that one day they will make it into print. Or to use an animal metaphor (which regular readers will know I am rather fond of) there are a lot of hungry caterpillars out there wondering how they can help themselves emerge from their cocoons as beautiful butterflies rather than dusty brown moths – squashed under a pile of rejection slips.

A couple of weeks ago I had the great pleasure of gathering in a room full of emerging writers keen to gather as many insider tips as possible. The event was a night held as part of the third annual Sydney Jewish Writers’ Festival. Rather than being a soup kitchen set up to provide a hearty meal for impoverished emerging writers, the evening took the form of a panel discussion to encourage such people to keep clawing their way toward literary success – no matter how poverty stricken and downtrodden they may become. And who better to offer words of encouragement than three successful and charming writers: Cathy Randall, Steve Toltz and Ben Naparstek, all of them bright-eyed and showing no signs of malnourishment. (Don’t worry, I’m going to stop there.)

If you are unfamiliar with these names, dear Overlanders, you will surely be familiar with their work. Cathy Randall wrote and directed Hey, Hey, It’s Esther Blueburger, Steve Toltz is the author of the Booker Prize nominated A Fraction of the Whole, and Ben Naparstek is the editor of The Monthly. (A post he took up at the age of twenty-three. No, that’s not a typo.) .

The advice given by these three charming panellists was simple: in order to make it as a writer, one must possess an extraordinary amount of self-delusion.

Cathy Randall said that this is absolutely imperative because everyone you confide your aspirations in will tell you they are out of reach. In her case she was working as a ‘not very good’ journalist when she decided at the age of twenty-eight that she wanted to write and direct her own film, despite not having a skerrick of industry experience or training. When Ms Randall did apply to the Australian Film Television and Radio School, she was rejected and received her application back only to discover the words, ‘This person will never be a writer!’ scrawled across it in red pen. (Seriously, who the hell invented red pens? They have a lot to answer for.) Randall said the rejection only made her more determined.

Lets face it, being an emerging writer is much like being 15 – rejection is a big part of life. I can’t remember the stats exactly, but somewhere near a billion manuscripts land on publishers’ desks every year. Actually, that was last year; it’s probably a trillion by now. Of these, about two get published. So the odds aren’t good. In fact, I sometimes wonder if I would be better off spending the equivalent amount on lottery tickets rather than postage. But I don’t, because I don’t want to be a millionaire, I just want to get my bloody book published. In order to stay motivated, it’s best to be as naive as possible, because if one knows exactly what one is up against, one would probably not even attempt to make it as a writer. Also, according to Steve Toltz, it’s vital one doesn’t have a ‘fall back’ profession in reserve for the moment they do realise just how tough it can be out there in the big bad world of publishing. If he had had one, he would have never finished writing his book and would have fallen back long ago.

Toltz is also a big believer in the idea that good writers aren’t taught; rather, they learn by reading – and ‘as a writer you always emulate what you read’. Therefore it follows that you’d want to make sure you’re reading ‘good’ stuff. Toltz went so far as to say emerging writers shouldn’t read their contemporaries, but stick to the classics instead. ‘Think of all the contemporary Australian novels that get published, they can’t all be good,’ he said. Which leads me to suspect he is unfamiliar with the abovementioned statistics and has perhaps got it the wrong way around: of all the contemporary Australian novels that get rejected, they can’t all be rubbish. In fact, it would be nice to think the very limited number that do get published are usually very good by very nature of the fact that they are limited.

Toltz’s rule was to read one contemporary novel for every five classics. (Blimey, looks like I may have to pick up Ulysses after all.) For those of us who have a deep, deep love of contemporary fiction, it would be comforting to say that Toltz’s own writing disproves his rule, but in my humble opinion, A Fraction of the Whole is marvellous. (It is worth noting that since attending this talk I have made myself read an hour of Dickens every night, and I dare say it’s doing more for my writing than watching Bondi Vet, ever could.)

All three writers also spoke about their training taking less of an academic form and being more self-directed: Naparstek studied the work of journalists he loved, Randall learned to write a screenplay by ploughing through piles of screenplays, Toltz – you guessed it – read the classics. Interestingly, none of the three speakers ended up working in the field their undergraduate degrees were associated with.

The effectiveness of events such as the one held at the SJWF relies heavily on the participants being open and honest about their experiences. It is no good going along and listening to someone natter on about how they received a $10 million advance for the first thing they ever wrote, before watching them take off in their helicopter. Emerging writers go to these sorts of things specifically to hear from writers who financed their endeavours by working in call centres (Steve Toltz) or as extras on B-grade TV hospital dramas (again, Steve Toltz). In this respect the evening was a great success, a sort of prep talk I will keep in mind the next time someone asks when I’m going to get a ‘real’ job. (Or I ask myself, more like.) It did leave one question hanging though: what if one doesn’t listen when people advise one give away writing and one carries on tirelessly, but is really a bit crap? The key is, I guess, to know which bits of advice to listen to. At the moment I’m sticking with Toltz’s and am off to read another chapter about the young Phillip Pirrip and his great expectations.

Albert Camus wrote that the only serious question is whether to kill yourself or not. Tom Robbins wrote that the only serious question is whether time has a beginning and an end. Camus clearly got up on the wrong side of bed, and Robbins must have forgotten to set the alarm. There is only one serious question. And that is: Who knows how to make love stay? Answer me that and I will tell you whether or not to kill yourself. – Tom Robbins

Martin Hughes and Zoe Dattner interviewed Richard Nash at the Wheeler Centre and replayed the interview on RRR’s Max Headroom on 22 July 2010. Due to the miracle of modern technology, I listened to it the other day.

Richard Nash described print-books as ‘talismanic things’ that were passed between loved ones with the same emotional sensibility and heirloom potential as ‘a piece of jewellery’. He said, ‘Bookshelves are a kind of way of telegraphing to a person that comes in our front door for the first time, who we are.’

Zoe Dattner asserted that it’s the stories that matter, not the books themselves. In the ebook/e-reader future: ‘Bookshelves will just be called shelves and we’ll put all sorts of stuff on there so when we go to people’s houses we’ll still do that stuff – or their Myspace page or whatever – there will be lots of spaces where we can display that kind of personal expression of ourselves …’

Ah Zoe, you break my heart.

The book, the old fashioned print-book, is not a download. It’s not words on a screen. I have nothing against online publishing. Look, here I am, publishing online. I love the Internet. But the online book and e-reader type device is not a print-book; they are different beasts and I think it’s a kind of tragedy to imagine, as Zoe suggests, that there’s no need for both. Why does electronic technology have to obliterate the material, papery, dog-eared artefact? I agree with Richard Nash. The artefact of the book has a meaning, it is a jewel.

Imagine this: I’m 20-something and standing in front of the bookshelf explaining to my soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend that the difference between he and I, is ‘all these books, all these books are inside me, they’ve informed me, shaped my thinking either by osmosis or rejection or examination or some kind of tunnel I’ve been through. An initiation. And not just the words but the circumstances around the words – everything I brought to the words at the time. All these books are places I’ve been without you – and they matter.’

Yes, you might think he would have just left right then of his own accord, but that’s not the point.

I loved Tom Robbins when I was eighteen and can remember spending an intimate week with Still Life with Woodpecker. Reading it again at forty-something, it took only a couple of hours and wasn’t quite the vibrant life-changing experience I remembered, though I didn’t have nearly as bad a reaction as this person. There were still plenty of quotes I wanted to write down – though perhaps now I’m not so keen to put them in cards or on the facing pages of other books and give them to my friends (and foes). Clearly I had brought a lot to the story from my own story, from where I was in my life at the time.

Pondering this as part of a wider pondering about reading, writing and why books matter, I came to the conclusion that it’s not just the stories themselves; it’s also the stories that belong to when and where the book was read, whose hands it came from, how it ended up on the shelf, other places the shelf has been housed – the reason the book has a meaning beyond the artefact. The book itself evokes both memory and meaning.

At the bookshelf, as I stood there trying to explain the disaster it boded for he and I, all its authors and their books seemed to pulse behind me like some kind of energy, some being – all the nothing of my learning. I say nothing, because there I was fighting with a lover who could barely read the* Herald Sun* so I can’t have known too much or I’d have simply walked. Smiled, waved and walked. But no, there I was, trying to explain in words what all the words meant and how they’d shaped and affected me: to someone who wasn’t the slightest bit interested in my words or anybody else’s.

Could it possibly have been the same if I showed him my ‘Myspace page or whatever’ and said – see! this is a major player in what shaped me from childhood to now. Here’s a photo of the virtual page my father held in his hands, one arm round my shoulders, reading me to sleep. Here’s the one my mother propped me up with in my sick-bed to while away the hours after I had my appendix out and the recovery didn’t go too well – the cause of me missing seven weeks of primary school but advancing my reading to The Hobbit, Watership Down and beyond …

All right. Maybe angst-ridden lovers in the future will be able to say ‘Here’s the Facebook page that catapulted my teenaged mind into thinking about social justice. The tweet that awakened questions about intimacy, guilt and yearning; deepened by this download and that podcast and … but alas, I can’t show you any of that because the display-technology no longer exists.’

But even if the current technology survives, could it possibly speak like the dog-eared paperback with my mother’s writing on the facing page? The glorious hardback with the hand-sewn bookmark? The Albert Camus with the long, torturous self-penned poem and quote inscription from the best friend who understood my pain? The Penguin-classic with the moving-pictures drawn in the corner by the boy I loved in Year 9?

Yes, Zoe, despite its wildly materialistic limitations, I think any ‘things’ on shelves – ornaments, mementos, art and gifts from the well-meaning, including books, journals, et al – can reflect ‘who we are’ and yes, so can the Myspace page or whatever.

I think, however, that the difference is as mammoth as that between the typed word and the handwritten one in terms of how it reflects the creator, the individual.

It seems to me that the print-book as artefact can evoke a hidden history – a virtual world within the covers shaped by the reader and at the same time shaping the reader – in a way that a computer screen, phone or other e-reading device, cannot. Certainly not a ‘Myspace page’ or equivalent, probably created in a few hours and entirely mutable according to the mood/fashion of the moment. And the old manual typewriter on my kitchen bench agrees with me – a creature of very different mood to this mistake-devouring computer (bless them both).

Something else bothers me about the demise of the print-book as an artefact. Where does it leave the blind? The blind can currently read a book independently – very different to having to have it interpreted by the voice of another in audio form. Where are Braille books in the print-bookless society?

Well, I’m banking on the print-bookless society being much like the paperless society and look forward to there being more print-books than ever.

This piece has been cross-posted at Meanland.

Rule number 1: If there’s a lock for something and you haven’t been given the key, it’s not for your benefit.

Digital locks are there to prevent unauthorised copies of digital works. However, warns Doctorow, Digital Rights Management (DRM) is there to reinforce the greatest lie: DRM exists to help you (the artist) and contain losses to piracy. Most countries have laws that prohibit breaking technology (or breaking DRM). You as an owner of a device cannot remove DRM from anything you’ve purchased for that device.

In actual fact, what it does is stop creators from authorising users across platforms, or having audiences across platforms. Therefore, we have a situation where creators are locked-in to distribution. It used to be that copyright belonged to people who created things. Now we live in a world where creators – and audiences – are locked-in to both distribution and platform.

‘Imagine audiences buy your books through the iPad,’ Doctorow put to the audience. As a creator, you could not authorise users to move to the Kindle if, for some reason, you decided to move platforms (or distributor). ‘It would be like Borders telling customers they could only use Ikea bookcases on which to shelve their books.’ If you as creator decide to change stores, you have to be certain that all those customers will follow – meaning they have to throw away all of their old books and buy new ones, or be satisfied owning parallel collections. He gave, as an example, the millions of apps touted for iPads and iPhones. On average, most of these app creators make very little, but can’t afford to go somewhere other than Apple because they risk alienating their audiences.

‘It’s about negotiating leverage for creators’ and individual artists having negotiating power. Being locked-in to distribution does not simply result in a lack of copy. This is a notion promulgated by the Magic Bean Vendors, who can be found everywhere, from DRM to the war on terror. They are organisations that create a problem, which everyone then needs to be protected from. They make obstacle courses in order to remove obstacles (hence, the purpose for their existence).

Read the rest of the write-up over at Meanland.