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.]

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?

The work begins with the line, ‘You’re a good neighbour’, from ‘The Art of Courting’. The second-person point of view is notoriously difficult and I am impressed by the way you handle it, and by the shifts in point of view through the stories. In ‘Your Project’ you ask the reader to walk around in a pair of very difficult shoes. Can you tell us a little about working from the different conventions of point of view?

Second person can be tricky but there’s something I find quite freeing about it. It has a particular quality that allows me to experiment with language. ‘The Art of Courting’ is about a single woman in her forties who engages in a series of flirtatious games with a new neighbour. So the story itself has a sense of play and the language does too. There’s also an element of voyeurism about this story and the use of second person to place the reader in this woman’s shoes magnifies that. Different points of view work for different stories and I don’t have a particular favourite. I find that the characters and what the story needs dictate which point of view I use.

‘Kicking Dirt’ is a rich story: there really is a novel’s worth of back-story and presence here, skilfully managed. This ‘sense of the whole’ of the larger story indicated by the short form is something I’m very interested in. Is there a novel in the wings? A screen play? Why the short story form?

That’s what I love about the short form; the way it’s a slice of a larger world, a glimpse of something bigger. For me, the characters are fully-rounded people, with their own lifetime of history and quirks and experiences, and I always hope that translates to the page. I want my reader to be able to imagine a life beyond the brevity of the story.

I love short stories – both reading and writing them. There’s this idea that gets put about that they are a training ground for writing a novel. I completely disagree. The novel and the short story are two completely different beasts. And speaking of novels, yes there is one in the wings. I’ve been working on it in a very part-time way for the last five years in between editing and child wrangling. It’s frustratingly, tantalisingly close to being finished. I had a residency at the Varuna Writers Centre earlier this year where I cracked a problem that I’d had with it for months. But then it got sidelined. I became immersed in the editing process for Two Steps Forward, then various major editing projects took over, and now there’s all the publicity work for this and another book I’ve edited. I’m itching to stop talking about writing and actually do some! I have some time set aside in January when I’ve promised myself I’ll do nothing but focus on the novel. I’m sure the long break will actually prove beneficial, allowing me to come to it fresh, but I’m craving being in that space again with those characters.

‘The Third Child’ also deals with the almost ‘underground’ reality of women and pregnancy, in particular, women in miscarriage and ‘mothering’ is one of the themes of the collection. I know from your work at Overland that this is a deeply personal realm for you. Can you talk to us about the process of writing painful subject matter, and also on having that work edited and then published in the public domain?

I haven’t heard it put like that before – ‘underground’ – but it’s such an accurate description. Miscarriage is so common – women experience 55,000 miscarriages each year in Australia alone – but it doesn’t get talked about openly at either a private or public level. And yes, this is very personal subject matter because I experienced a miscarriage myself, which I wrote about for Overland, but I also wanted to deal with miscarriage through fiction because it’s rarely represented in anything other than clichés. I wanted to write about characters that were authentic, and really draw the reader into the complexity of the experience. Having this story go out into the public domain has been quite challenging because it is linked closely with my own experience, but it seems to have struck a chord with so many people. It’s the story that has been singled out the most – by both men and women – so readers have obviously connected with it. That’s been very gratifying.

‘Tangerine’ is also a poignant slice of the ‘difficult life’ that is not much talked about and, in my opinion, would make an excellent short film, as would many of the stories in Two Steps Forward. Are you purposefully ‘cinematic’ in your approach?

It’s interesting that you should say that. I don’t set out with the intention to be cinematic and yet the opening scene of ‘Tangerine’ arrived in my imagination much like a complete movie scene. I saw a man and a young girl standing together on a platform in the middle of the night. They were ill-at-ease with each other, and I wanted to know why this was, and what they were doing on that platform. The story unravelled from there. I’d love to see ‘Tangerine’ as a short film (any interested filmmakers out there?!).

I was lucky enough to have a filmmaker make a book trailer for Two Steps Forward using snatches of text from ‘The Art of Courting’. It really is a piece of art in its own right. The footage is stunning, but he also really captured the style and essence of that story, and of the collection as a whole. It’s quite something seeing your words come alive in a different medium.

How did you get involved with Affirm Press and the SHORTS initiative?

I saw Affirm’s press release calling for submissions to their Long Story Shorts series of six collections by newer writers. Given that it’s so difficult to get a collection published unless you’re already a well-established author the initiative was perfect for me. As it was for 450 other writers. Affirm Press were inundated with manuscripts and spent months wading through them. Fortunately for me Two Steps Forward was chosen as the series’ swansong. And it’s been a brilliant ride.

Two Steps Forward can be purchased at all good book stores.

I’d like to begin this blog by citing the great Welsh thinker Raymond Williams’s definition of the original avant-garde – that is, the ‘fully oppositional type’ of modernist artists who were active, mostly in Europe, in late nineteenth and early-mid twentieth centuries – from his essay, ‘The Politics of the Avant-Garde’:

The avant-garde, aggressive from the beginning, saw itself as the breakthrough to the future: its members were not bearers of a progress already repetitiously defined, but the militants of a creativity which would revive and liberate humanity.

The extent to which Dadaists, Futurists, Surrealists and other avant-gardists of the period to which Williams is referring succeeded in ‘reviving and liberating humanity’ is, of course, rather debatable; and as Williams points out later in the same essay, many of the techniques and experiments of these artists were coopted by mainstream capitalist cultures in areas of mass entertainment, popular culture, advertising, and so on. But the confrontational militancy of many early avant-garde artists’ works – whether the ‘slap in the face of public taste’ delivered by Vladimir Mayakovsky’s Communist Futurist poetry, or the shock of Mina Loy’s sexually explicit feminist, anti-romantic Love Songs, or the graphic violence and bizarre perversions of Un Chien Andalou – remains, after all these decades, potent and undeniable.

The purpose of this blog is to briefly address the possibility or otherwise of the emergence of an avant-garde in the digital milieu. I’d like to focus on the recent US poetic collective Flarf, which has been dubbed ‘an experimental poetry movement’ by Shell Fischer in a 2009 article. According to Fischer, the Flarf poets ‘prowl the Internet using random word searches, e-mail the bizarre results to one another, then distil the newly found phrases into poems that are often as disturbing as they are hilarious’. The resulting work has been described by one favourable commentator as ‘subversive’ and by another as a poetry that ‘often takes the form of social critique’, but also criticised by poet Dan Hoy in Jacket magazine for its creators’ ‘wilful dependency on corporate tools to do the searching, selecting, and contextualizing of poetic material, with no intra-textual suspicion or extra-textual analysis of the tool itself or what this means for the ‘product’ that’s being made’.

I’d like to suggest reading a Flarf poem as a way to evaluate viewing the artistic experiment as either a properly ‘subversive’ and ‘critical’ avant-garde movement or a shallow consumerist fad which, in Hoy’s words, sees ‘Google as a utilitarian tool without also acknowledging its [corporate, capitalist] ideological architecture’. A good selection of poems by a number of writers who identify themselves as Flarf poets can be found in issue 30 of Jacket magazine, and I’d like to take a closer look at Michael Magee’s ‘Fascist Fairytales 36’ as it appears in this selection.

The poem, written as an obviously bogus theatre script divided into three ‘Acts’, is an unabashedly fragmented and incoherent dialogue between the characters of Margaret Thatcher and the Sphinx. With absurd and provocative statements such as ‘Perfect competition is like virginity: it triggered a further doubling of crude oil’, ‘The nun agrees but asks for anal sex so she might keep her virginity’ and ‘Fearing a nuclear holocaust Margaret Thatcher integrates them into an enjoyable romance’, this poem indeed brings to mind the avant-gardist literature of early twentieth century.

But does it also advocate a radical, emancipatory politics, or does it instead view power and hegemony with a routine (postmodernist) irony and satire à la an episode of South Park? Magee’s poem is clearly a political piece as it references, among other things, the 1980s UK Miners’ Strike and the 1996 Comprehensive Ban Treaty. But I find that its political engagement goes beyond simply citing political issues by actually challenging dominant capitalist ideology. In my reading of this poem, its heady, chaotic conflation of sexual, political, economical, scientific and cultural concepts not only playfully reflects the absurdities of contemporary life but, more importantly, it names and exposes our deleterious willingness to believe in these absurdities.

Consider, for example, these lines from the second section of the poem:

A great percentage of prostitutes boast entire lingerie wardrobes in pink, act of rebellion. The pituitary glands of dead Meat and Livestock may be kept secret.

THATCHER: Bottoms Up, Threshers and Victoria!

Here the presentation of sexual exploitation and consumerism – ‘prostitutes [who] boast entire lingerie wardrobes’ – as radical action is not a clever tragicomical send-up but, as shown in the following line, an indirect naming of the obscene ‘secret’ of capitalist economy. ‘The pituitary glands’ – that is, the crucial part of the brain that generates hormones – of corporations such as Meat and Livestock do not generate supposedly healthy competition or a rational pursuit of happiness, but instead produce irrational fantasies which manipulate us into seeing exploitation and consumption as enticing ‘acts of rebellion’. The grotesquely candid Thatcher of Magee’s poem – to be contrasted with the odiously sanitised portrayal of ‘the Iron Lady’ in a forthcoming Hollywood movie – is rattled by the truth of this revelation, and shouts out the names of the independent British alcohol retailers that entered into administration partly due to her ruinous, free market policies.

The success of an avant-garde work of art cannot be assessed in terms of the work’s ability to singlehandedly foment social and political change – no cultural product, no matter how widely available or publicised, is capable of doing that – but such a work’s value should be seen in its willingness to participate in an experimental artistic movement with the aim of contributing to a break with mainstream culture and ruling class ideology. As such, I believe the Flarf poem that I have very briefly discussed in this blog can be seen as a properly radical work.

I will stop short of describing the entire Flarf oeuvre in this way because many poems associated with the movement are in my view, if I may be forgiven a pun, fluff, i.e. rather superficial linguistic playfulness with little to no discernable political or antagonistic notion. But a similar point could be made about any artistic movement. Based on digitally produced poems such as Michael Magee’s ‘Fascist Fairytales 36’, I believe the internet has the potential to enable and host a genuinely avant-gardist formation.

When Hitler came to power I was in the bath. The wireless in the living room was turned up loud, but all that drifted down to me were waves of happy cheering, like a football match …

Overland’s Boris Kelly corresponded with Anna Funder.

BK: Both of your books deal with the politics and, to some extent, the logistics of covert surveillance. What is it about spying that fascinates you?

AF: To secretly gain information about people and use it against them is a form of power, often illicit. It is done everywhere – by political parties, by secret services, by news organisations, by internet giants, by corporations trying to sell us something. I think it is a kind of voyeurism and theft combined and I think we need to be wary. Of course that is also what writers do, so the ethical entanglements of it are personal, not theoretical, to me.

BK: The central characters in All That I Am are German émigrés forced out of the country after the burning of the Reichstag and Hitler’s ascent to power. Although they are Jewish, their persecution by the National Socialists is primarily a consequence of their political activities, not their religion or ethnicity. What was it about this particular moment in history and the lives of these characters, most of whom are based on real people, that drew your attention?

AF: I like the dramatic tension of telling a story about prescience and courage. These people were the bell-ringers in a world that would not listen. The action takes place between 1933 and 1935, which is a long time before the war, and the better-known stories from that time. In the beginning – though, of course, the Nazis were by nature anti-Semitic – their first priority was to eliminate or expel the educated, the outspoken, and the cultural elite. Hence, the expulsions as soon as they came to power. Later came the extraordinary and little-known extra-territorial assassination squads that were sent out. But I never saw myself as drawn to a period. I was drawn to write about the characters themselves. I am interested in courage and its flipside, terror. I am interested in how we can be braver than is good for us, or, on the other side, we can let ourselves and everyone else around us down.

AF: I don’t think this is a historical novel – it does not set out to represent an era for its own sake. It is, however, one that makes the past firmly present. The situations the characters find themselves in – speaking out against unjust and outrageous governmental power – are utterly contemporary. I could have written the same book about characters in China, or Libya, or Burma or Russia and set it in the present. The idea that things can be known as facts, and yet not fully apprehended in the hearts and minds of people or the body politic, is something that fascinates me because it speaks to the fact that humans are only in the second instance rational beings – we apprehend things by emotion first, and hence the force of the novel form in our culture.

As for specifics, well there are many resonances. For instance Clara’s brother is on a ship of Jews fleeing Hitler that is off the coast of Florida, but it is turned away by both the US and Canadian and Cuban administrations, and sent back to Europe. That is the kind of thing happening off the Australian coast now.

More importantly, I think that the relationships between the characters in the novel are ones I see all around – mistaken loves that are nevertheless permanent and passionate; true loves that don’t turn into practical, everyday lives lived together; the difference between what we want and what we need and how, try as we might, we just can’t see it.

BK: There are moments in the novel that contain highly significant but very subtle plot and character details which, on a first reading, are likely to be missed. On a second reading their weight is more apparent. How important are such fine details to the craft and technique of the writer?

AF: I think they are hugely important. Underneath the suspense story there are several others. The book is in one way about what we don’t see – what an individual can miss; what a society can miss – the rise of Hitler, the boats off the coast … The details need to be there for the story, but also for the reader to experience the missing, and then the satisfaction of, finally, ‘seeing’.

BK: To take that point further: The novel is narrated in part by Ruth Becker, a ninety-four year-old woman living in Bondi Junction in 2001. Ruth reflects on years spent in Germany and then London with her cousin Dora, her own journalist husband Hans Wesemann and the celebrated, revolutionary playwright, Ernst Toller. At one point Ruth says:

It is an observation that reflects on both her personal life, especially her marriage, but also to wider social and political circumstances. How do you regard this tension between the personal and political? Was this a challenge in writing the novel?

AF: I loved writing about what we see and what we don’t. I’m interested in blindness of all kinds – the necessary ones in marriage, in life – and the devastating ones, in politics and in the limits of public compassion. For instance, I think some marriages, perhaps many, survive by selective blindness to foibles that would otherwise drive us crazy. And yet this too can lead to serious consequences. On the political plane, the blindness of appeasement, in the case of the British government – and of course the Menzies government in Australia, too, though that wasn’t my subject in All That I Am – while understandable in some ways was also devastating, in the first instance for some of my characters, and then later for everyone. I don’t draw any glib equivalence between individual human souls and the shifting movements of public consciousness but I think one thing a novel can and should do is explore both.

BK: Dora is the pivotal character in the book. Your characterisation is drawn from accounts of the life of Dora Fabian, a pacifist, leftist political exile active in London, who was hunted by the Nazis. She is the most politically driven character in the novel. If she had lived on, do you think Dora would have returned to East or West Germany after the war?

AF: I think she would have gone to West Germany. She’d left the Socialist Workers Party a long time before. Or, she might have gone to the US, like Hannah Arendt did. Her ex-husband Walter went back West Germany.

BK: Do you write by hand at any point in the process of drafting?

AF: I have a notebook that I write things in – scraps, observations, ideas, pre-sleep insights. I never draft longhand, though sometimes the notes in the notebook are sentences, or paragraphs that come out of nowhere, and that I need to get down. When I look at the long-ago Stasiland notebooks – and there are ten of them – I can see the beginnings of paragraphs that were then fixed and honed for the book. Some come pristine though. For Stasiland I had the final paragraph of the book – ‘children on swings and roundabouts I never noticed were there’ – long before it was written. For All That I Am I had the last scene with Bev, and the last line where she ‘starts to clean’ also for a long, long time before I was done. These things are strange. It is as if I have an ending to write to, a point of hiatus or upswing or unfinished business that I nevertheless know is the final note of the book.

BK: Are you a meticulous note taker during the research phase?

AF: I don’t know that meticulous is the right word. It implies too much straight diligence. I do take lots of notes that I carry around with me. But they are bowerbird notes – bits of bright things that strike my mind.

BK: I’m interested to know if you might at some point write something closer to home, something with an explicitly Australian theme. Would you mind telling me what you are currently working on?

AF: I’m working on a novel. It’s sent in contemporary times and it’s not very political. Or not at the moment, at any rate.

BK: Given the acceleration of social and political volatility in the world today and the reactivation of the Left, do you think there is a place for the overtly political novel?

AF: I think there is always room for good novels. If they deal with political issues, so much the better. But to be good, they have to be about what it is that makes us human, and not, in the first instance, about prescriptions for living.

BK: Why the title, All That I Am?

AF: When Toller first sees Dora she’s holding an audience entranced with a speech. She extends her hand and he sees she is someone who holds their own life in their palm, to do with as she wishes. My characters are people who, like many activists, have to assess the value of their lives when powerful, possibly fatal forces are arrayed against them. Is it worth it to them to give up their lives? And on the other hand, for instance for Hans, he falls short of his ideas of himself. We all do this. When we do, we comfort ourselves with the idea that ‘we’re only human’. I wanted in the title to encompass the extraordinariness, the hugeness, the miracle of a single human being, and at the same time the smallness of a single soul.

So why bother? Because The Courier’s New Bicycle is a hybrid creature – a genre amalgam, but who would know from the bookshop shelf arrangement by genre, as if being in one category denies the possibility of the others?

My book rep tells me my real problem is that my surname begins with ‘W’. Chastened, I scuff my boot against her bag hung on the café chair. If only I’d had the perspicacity of Jim Grant, who, with a clear and canny eye to his future as an author, carefully gathered together the correct letters and syllables to make his nom de plume, and turned himself into Lee Child.

About labelling, I remember the first short story competition I sent a story to. Its requirements were that the writing be ‘speculative’. I thought, well, my stuff’s that. At the time, I didn’t realise how the term was part of a highly structured system of categorisation: one that a writer and their writing could become permanently ententacled in, despite the term itself being a superfluity, all fiction surely speculative. Anyway, this first story won that competition, then one called an Aurealis, and my trajectory as a writer of speculative fiction was set.

My first novel, The Daughters of Moab, was published in 2008 by HarperVoyager, and so it came out with a science fiction label. I preferred to call it poetic apocalyptic, a descriptor I’d come up with in an effort to flag to readers something of the style and substance of its interior, which was a conglomerate of SF, mythology and the supernatural, all with a literary bent, its bedrock being the land – a post-apocalyptic Terra Australis – and its preoccupations being with humanity’s capacity for destruction and equal instinct to survive.

Fiction that crosses genre lines runs the risk of not being judged on its own terms, but according to the label it comes with, preconceptions firmly attached. The Daughters of Moab, viewed through the lens of science fiction, was critiqued accordingly – and more often than not it vexed expectations, the prose deemed too obfuscatory for the genre. And while I maintained that a broader readership might get something out of a dose of the poetic mixed with the apocalyptic, apparently the story’s SF label made it too lowbrow for literary inspection.

I remember how my first-time novelist’s ego plunged like a bungy jumper into a bucket when (I shan’t say a close family member) saw the book cover’s shout line, Assassin. Protector. Blood Sister… and said, ‘If you write something like that, you have to expect a lot of people won’t want to read it’. Sadly, my close family member wasn’t wrong – labelling and shelf allocation all but killing a broader interest; and alas, the novel fell through the genre cracks.

By now you’re thinking I’m dark on labels. In fact I like labels, and sorting things. Some (family members) would say it’s my anally retentive Virgo nature coming to the fore, but I think labelling was invented to help everybody, not just me, organise a confusing world.

One of my favourite activities as a kid was to put all the animals from my big bag of plastic creatures into groups. Sometimes it was according to kind – farm animal, wild animal, mythological animal, etc; other times it was by biggest to littlest or best to worst; and other times it was according to the new alliances and friendships each had made with the others while I was off eating my breakfast. Eventually abandoning my bag of animals, I went on to list making and room tidying, my clothes drawers organised by colour and my files alphabetically. This, I said to myself, was so I could find things. Little did I know that this entirely sensible rationale would return later in life to bite me in the bum.

Back to the genre amalgam that is The Courier’s New Bicycle. I’m happy to report Australian Bookseller+Publisher has described it as ‘a disturbingly credible and darkly noir post-cyberpunk tale’. This quote-worthy phrase opens up the field of interest: the ‘noir’ a nod to crime fiction, the ‘cyberpunk’ to SF, and the ‘credible’ to current societal aptness. Hopefully, it will spur a variety of readers into wanting to know more about a bike courier and accidental sleuth who has a mystery to solve in the alleyways of a dystopian Melbourne just around the socio-political corner from now, despite the book’s despatch solely to the SF shelves steering it too towards the genre cracks. Which brings me to Venn diagrams.

Unlike fractions (those sharp-edged and unyielding divisions that caused me no end of pain), the circles that I learnt about in primary school geometry class, their intersections alluringly shaded, hinted at a world with grey areas, ambiguities. These days I wonder if my fascination for Venn diagrams was because I knew from quite young that I was attracted to girls as well as boys, desire floating in an as yet unnamed place, and those grey areas speaking to me of the possibilities that might live inside me and at the interstices of things. This might explain, in part, the gravitational pull cross-genre writing has always had on me, and maybe now’s the time to mention that Salisbury Forth, the primary protagonist in The Courier’s New Bicycle, is happily gender androgynous.

I don’t remember when I stopped believing in the binary labelling system currently used to decide sex and divide gender, and began to see both as continuums with any number of identity positions along them; but a non-intersecting binary now seems as blunt and flawed an instrument of categorising as the labelling system used, say, to keep literary and genre content apart.

An either/or world is a brittle, lifeless creature. The pleasure that sorting animals gave me as a kid was also the pleasure of re-sorting; that is, the freedom to change perspective and make endless rearrangements in the order of things. In my fiction I go to the grey areas and in-between places because they hold the most promise. And for those willing to read a novel that slips between the genre cracks, there’s always the possibility of finding wonderland.

Read more from Kim Westwood at her website.

I don’t have any figures for Australia, but conversations I have had with colleagues on this issue lead me to think it might be on the rise here too, although perhaps not to the extent that it is over there.¹

Why is this happening? Well of course, and as usual, it’s the fault of the bloody internet, ebooks, Google, Wikipedia and all the other digital information technologies. They make it very easy for students to cut and paste material. They don’t even have to retype it anymore. All they have to do is cobble their information together in a word.doc, click select all and make sure all their stolen clippings are in the same font. Some of them, though, forget to do even that much, bless ‘em.

Prior to the introduction of these digital nasties students had to go to the library, browse catalogues and bibliographies, actually borrow books, read them without the help of a FIND search field and then retype or write the sections they thought relevant to their work. Having to actually locate, touch and work with the physical object that is printed text helped reinforce the idea that each book was the work of some individual(s), belonged to that someone in a moral and economic sense and had to be acknowledged as such.

Now all they have to do is sit at the feet of the great screen god who, with just a few simple prompts, delivers all the information they’ll ever need, and more, direct to their desktops. There are no more individual books; all the information now comes from the one source – the often authorless, largely anonymous internet. Is it any wonder many of them they don’t understand plagiarism, copyright or moral rights?

Secondly, although we find ourselves at the beginning of the digital age, an age that is rapidly remaking study life at the student level, universities as organisations are still living in the print age. They build buildings to accommodate students who don’t want to come to campus, they schedule classes at such odd times that those students who wish to attend can’t, because they have to work, to pay for their tuition (thanks for that one Hawkey!). In other words they’re living in the past. To be fair, it’s hard for such monolithic institutions to do otherwise, but the disconnect between student behaviour and faculty expectations, in terms of this issue, is there. University notions of copyright, plagiarism and attribution, belonging as they do to the age of print, struggle to function in the digital realm or in the minds of (if Turnitin is to be believed) an increasing number of students.

The whole notion that someone can own a piece of knowledge and should be recognised and rewarded as owner every time anyone else mentions that work is a construction of the print age, the economic system that engendered the Romantic idea of the author as sole creator of a work. It is a notion designed to protect property and income, as much as to protect artistic integrity.

Print’s very form made plagiarising difficult, analogue music and film formats made the unauthorised borrowing of those properties problematic too. Digitised versions of any content, however, are easy to take; they have no physical form, and it doesn’t actually feel like stealing. All you’re doing is pressing a few keys. It’s not like anybody’s getting hurt …

Prior to print, in the world of the manuscript and oral storytelling, students would sit at the feet of the master who would dictate his thoughts and ideas to them. They were expected to do what we call plagiarising. Knowledge then was considered to be created communally, rather than by one single person.² Students would then use these dictated works as the basis for discussion, debate and the creation of yet more knowledge. That all changed once print introduced the buck to the world of knowledge.

This issue of copyright and plagiarism isn’t yet but will become a bigger debate than the print vs. eBook sideshow, because it is about pure economics: if nobody cares about who has written a book then the cult of the author is under threat. If the author has no currency then the economic unit that the author produces – the book – is similarly threatened. The news media industry has been struggling for years to cope with the fact that news as a commodity has very little value anymore, thanks to its being so widely distributed for free on the internet. Will we see book-based knowledge, ideas of authorship and intellectual property enjoy the same nightmare? What can we do to prevent this?

I wish I could answer that question!

At this early stage, perhaps all we can do is raise the issue that the current model, based as it is on how to control such works in print or in analogue format, is not working well enough anymore. Organically, and unconsciously perhaps, our students are creating new protocols and new understandings of these issues. Do we stand before them, Canute-like, ordering them to stop, or do we too look for a new approach to these issues?

I’m not suggesting we return to pre-print understandings of intellectual property and copyright, but perhaps we could learn something from an era in which what was said was more important that who said it.

1. Am I wrong? Is it worse or not so bad here? I’d be keen to know.
2. See this article from Teleread and the link to the thesis it’s based on for a much deeper discussion of the woes of copyright in the digital age.

Many years ago I found myself hurtling down a snow-covered hill aboard a toboggan. As the toboggan, captained by my elder brother, hurtled toward the large mound of snow that bordered the carpark – with no sign of slowing down – two things were at the forefront of my mind. The first was the knowledge that the toboggan had no braking system; I knew this because I had inspected it thoroughly before reluctantly climbing on. The second was the feeling that most of the people in the world were clearly idiots, particularly those who seemed to enjoy and willingly participate in snow sports. I was three years old.

Croggon writes: ‘it is difficult to remember what it is like to be a child, because it’s impossible to undo adult knowledge. Memory and fiction are closely related capacities that together form the raw material of the human drive towards narrative: what we remember is a fluid retelling, not a fixed photograph.’

According to this theory, my childhood memory isn’t only a memory, but a layered narrative, fused with fiction, born of re-telling. Yet, when I picture the moment in mind, the strongest feeling that accompanies it is the sense of bafflement at the adult world. This memory, not only of an event but of an interpretation of the world around me, is a precious resource to me as I have began over the last year to work on a children’s book. It shows – however fleetingly – just how sophisticated the inner world of a child can be. It shows the childhood mind not only as a ʻspongeʼ, but also a critical faculty. It is an artifact of that potent transition that a child’s consciousness undergoes around the age of three or four, as they become self-aware, as they begin to understand that their experience of the world is unique, separate, and private from everyone else’s. Or maybe I am just kidding myself. (Apologies.)

A few weeks ago at the last of the UTS Creative Connections talks, psychiatrist Professor Russell Meares and novelist Sue Woolfe discussed ʻCreativity and the Mindʼ. (To be broadcast on ABC later in the year.) Woolfe researched neurology and the brain in an effort to better understand her writer’s block, later using her findings to pen The Mystery of the Cleaning Lady: a Novelist Looks at Neuroscience and Creativity. She told the story of a four-year-old doing a drawing. When her teacher asked the child what she was drawing, the child told her she was drawing God. ʻBut we don’t know what God looks like,ʼ said the teacher. The child replied, in perfect earnestness, ʻWell, we will in a minute.ʼ

Meares and Woolfe went on to discuss how children’s minds, particularly those under five, are incredibly creative and unaffected by the restrictions of linear thought. They have great capacity to think laterally, as us boring old adults would say.

What this means for children’s writing, as Croggon notes in her column, is that ʻit is crucial not to patroniseʼ. The best children’s writers ʻtake children seriouslyʼ. They know that children have a very finely tuned facility for bullshit detection and a mind that is dedicated to expanding itself and seeking new experiences (read: a short attention span). These elements combined make for a very difficult and demanding audience. Indeed the wider world, including the literary set (I’m looking at you Martin Amis) often fails to comprehend just how tricky it is.

A few years ago, during a stint as a publishing assistant, I answered a telephone call from a newly retired woman. She said she had walked into a children’s bookshop on the weekend and thought what a thrill it would be to see her own name up there on the shelf. She then asked me how much money people normally made from children’s writing and told me to expect her manuscript in the post in a week’s time.

I should have hung up on her.

In order to write well for children, one must un-learn much of what restrictive adult thinking has taught us. (Far more complicated than having a good long walk down memory lane.) Back in February Martin Amis commented that he would have to suffer brain damage before he could write for children, describing children’s writing as requiring a ʻlower registerʼ than what he is capable of writing. (Don’t worry, Overlanders, the level of frustration you feel toward Mr Amis is perfectly natural. Allow yourself a moment to go smash something or write a threatening letter before returning to this post.)

However ignorant, arrogant and downright twattish Amisʼs comments might be, he may unintentionally be making a fair(ish) point here, only in that children’s writing requires a completely different mode of thinking than writing for adults. (That’s different Mr Amis, not less intelligent.) Where people like Amis may think this means more restrictions, it is obvious from looking at any great children’s books that the opposite is true. Surrealism, absurdity, quirkiness roam free in children’s books. As does a certain darkness, reflective of the ʻincommunicable privacies, bizarre myth-making, perverse games, inchoate fears, passionate desires and griefsʼ that Croggon refers to. Sentimentality is an adult construction.

When I was very young I owned a picture book that told the story of a girl getting ready for bed. I don’t remember details, but the last page – and my childhood interpretation of it – has stuck firmly in my memory. It was a simple watercolour picture, quite beautiful, of the girl’s shower cap floating in the bath, the girl gone. My adult mind now knows that this was meant to infer that she had finished her bath and gone to bed. Yet I distinctly remember thinking that the girl must have drowned. This macabre notion fascinated me. I was both terrified and captivated by it. (And before you ask: no, I didnʼt know of anyone who had drowned or even died at this stage. I was wonderfully twisted all by myself.)

More often that not, the best children’s stories have a tinge of darkness. They have for centuries. They all have layers of complexity that are remarkable for stories whose words often number less than one hundred. As wonderfully self-contained exercises in the concise, I find they influence me just as much in writing for an adult audience as they do in my attempts to write for children. And after laboring through Amisʼs undeniably dreadful Yellow Dog I dare say he could learn a thing of two as well.

In the end, when my brother and I got to the bottom of the hill, the toboggan flew up the snowy embankment and took flight, sailing through the air, over cars and startled onlookers, before landing with a dramatic slide on the carparkʼs icy surface. Or maybe I made that bit up. Either way, I still havenʼt changed my attitude to snow sports.

Unfortunately, in the case of poetry, the requisite talents are not so clear-cut. If only there were an equivalent So You Think You Can Write; we could all just turn up at the cattle call audition and have our hopeful hearts broken by a Simon Cowell-esque judge wielding a quill and a dictionary. Even then though, there’d be those few tragics left staring forlornly but defiantly into the camera whining: ‘What would he know? He wouldn’t know a decent poet if they smacked him in the face with their next manuscript. My MUM and all my mates LOVE my writing, and they should know, they’ve read it ALL.’

Noetry is one of my pet hates. I write noetry a lot. Probably sixty percent of what I write, I’d consider to be noetry. I don’t mean poetry that people don’t like. I mean bad poetry. I mean Oh-no!-poetry.

I don’t particularly like Sylvia Plath’s poetry: I think most of it is angst-ridden self-indulgence. But it’s not really bad poetry. I mean, it has literary merit and I can see why other people might like it.

But what if you’d like to be a professional poet and you’re just not up to it? What if all you write is noetry, and you desperately want to be a published poet?

Do you have critics brave enough to tell you your writing sucks, and are you ready to hear it?

Are you going to insist your poetry is misunderstood genius, self-publish your work and force your (secretly bewildered) family and friends to buy all fifty copies?

With time, and workshopping, and honest writer-friends and editors, I’ve become more able to recognise my noetry. I shelve it, trash it, burn it and delete it. I cross out line after line, cringe at keyboard after keyboard and curse a lot. And I’m starting to write noetry less and less. (Uhhhh … I think.)

But sometimes people ask me to read their poetry and tell them what I think. And sometimes … I lie. I know, I know. I shouldn’t. I’m not doing them any favours.

But what if someone you know quite well presents you triumphantly with a notebook full of poetry that they’re convinced is sheer genius, and looks at you with hopeful, expectant eyes waiting for you to confirm they’re the next best thing since Shakespeare? Can you take the ‘well … it’s a matter of opinion …‘ route and weasel out, or are you going to break their heart?

When I was studying poetry at university I had the pleasure of being taught by Alan Wearne, poet and verse novelist extraordinaire and one of Australia’s all-time poetry greats. During my time as his student, I workshopped a poem called ‘Slogan on the Moon’. It was probably the first political poem I ever wrote. It was about something I read in the newspaper about Pizza Hut wanting to laser beam their logo onto the moon as a marketing stunt.

When it came time to talk about that particular poem, Wearne grabbed at his head, clearly in pain, and told me (in front of the class) it was ‘Just awful … it’s hard to believe the person who wrote those other poems wrote this I mean it’s just SO bad.’

I wasn’t devastated, but furious. He obviously just didn’t get it. It was one of the most insightful poems I’d ever written. Just because he didn’t like it, didn’t mean it wasn’t a brilliant poem. After all, that was just his opinion.

I found ‘Slogan on the Moon’ recently in an old writing portfolio. I wanted to shrivel up and die. It is, quite possibly, the worst poem in the history of mankind.

When the voice of noetry reason comes to visit you, will you tear out its vocal chords, or swallow your pride and listen?

Cross-posted from Slam up.

Oh dear. I’d been sprung. I had to admit that I don’t really get what Twitter is for if one is not overthrowing a dictatorship or having a steamy affair with Liz Hurley. I’m just not into it. And before anyone starts banging on about a generation gap, wait for it ‘peeps’, I’m a member of Gen Y. (Just. Hand me my knitting needles and show me to a Smokey Dawson Easy Lift Recliner.) The more I think about it and the more I attempt to harness the useful forces of Twitter, the more I feel it is to the detriment of that delicate stage for my writing that lies between the first seeds of inspiration and the actual setting of words on a page – the thinking bit.

Don’t get me wrong I am abreast with the current publishing upheaval: the demise of traditional booksellers, the precarious position of print journals. (Then there are those who stand waiting for the novel to die so they can take their pickings of the estate like your second cousins at the deathbed of Great Aunt Nell – the ones who had already popped stickers with their name on all the good furniture.) I have read the articles that assert that if emerging writers are to ‘make it’ in this shiny new cyber age they must create and maintain a strong online profile. But it is my opinion that the process of tweeting steals from the process of writing, and writers can easily spend so much time building their online profile that they can’t get anything written.

Much of this ground has already been covered by Cate Kennedy on this very site (and more recently Jacinda at Meanjin). I agreed with much of what Kennedy in particular wrote on the subject – but it also now occurs to me that she has an advantage which I do not: she already has the attention of publishers. And it is no secret that the portion of those who bask in the warm glow of the attention of print publishers is shrinking. Add to this the fact that I found myself on a shortlist for a certain Fellowship, and have discovered that few of my ‘fellow’ shortlistees have Twitter accounts. Ah ha, my opportunity to strike! To gain a little advantage, perhaps, since publishers are so very concerned about this online profile bizzo.

So, after this recent prompting I attempted to revive the lifeless carcass of my Twitter account. The initial stages of this were quite enjoyable: I re-designed my profile page, a process which reminded me of that bit in Tony Hawk’s ProSkater II where one could design one’s own skater dude. (Take that, whipper snappers!) Then I filled in a few bits about myself in the bio. Then, I humbly attempted to formulate a tweet. Immediately I was met with the question, ‘Is it possible to Tweet humbly?’ The very premise of Twitter relies solely on one factor: that the 140 characters in one’s head are worthy of proclamation to the whole world. Or, in this case, my nine followers. (Hi guys!)

‘Ah, yes,’ you may say. ‘But you call yourself a writer. This itself depends on the fact that you believe you have precious thoughts in your head that deserve to be read by others.’

Well, yes. But the process of getting these thoughts onto a page is a long and tortured one. I am not Stephen Fry. I find it difficult to instantaneously think of pithy statements of 140 characters or less. I also don’t spend enough time on the netasphere to come across lots of interesting links. (This could be because I spend so much time thinking of new names for the internet.) And there are already people who do this so very well. (Hi Jeff!) But, just like those lucky few who find themselves in the background of a Channel Ten weather update, I felt I must make the most of this opportunity and at least attempt a few handstands.

So, what first? ‘Think, woman! Think!’ Nothing. No pithy statements leapt from my skull. Instead I spent half an hour looking for an article I could pop a link up to. (Thank you, New Yorker.) Half an hour I could have spent writing, or thinking about writing. For inspiration I thought I might see what other writer-folk were tweeting about. Maybe I could mix up the syntax and steal a few. (Already reduced to plagiarism after half an hour.) So I had a look for my favorite writers: Craig Silvey? Nothing. Sonya Hartnett? Nothing. Jonathan Safran Foer? David Sedaris? Reif Larsen? Nothing. Zadie Smith? Three tweets, six months ago. Annie Proulx? Nothing. (Maybe I spelt her name wrong.) What does this mean?!

And guess what happened while I was searching for these people? I got distracted by people who are on Twitter, following all sorts of fascinating links, yet only filling my head with more noise. Substantial noise, nonetheless, but still noise.

Perhaps it really does come down to a time thing. As the mother of a toddler, minutes of time to myself are very few. I have to maximise their productivity. I must wring out whatever time is left after eating and sleeping if I am to get any actual writing done. This isn’t to say that I don’t spend any time nosing about webblytown, of course I do. I just don’t feel compelled to broadcast my findings yet. Usually because someone with more clout than I already has done so. (Unless the said finding is a design for Robbie the Robot with built-in espresso machine. That was awesome.)

Nor is this post intended to take aim at those who enjoy a regular tweet and find it to be a productive use of their time. Rather, perhaps what I am saying is this: Twitter is another tool out there for writers. It doesn’t mean we all should use it. Just as some writers strap themselves to their chairs for eight hours a day and others only write sporadically between the hours of 11pm and 2am, some will surely find Twitter useful and some will not. Some may find that it keeps them engaged and thinking and reflecting and thus writing. Some, like myself, may find it makes them self-conscious and renders them mute, second-guessing every word they write.

Thus, for the moment I think I will stop trying to fake it. Unless I come across any more interesting robot designs.

The latest Meanjin, Volume 70, the first edition for 2011, is also the Meanjin-swansong of its editor Sophie Cunningham who took the helm in 2008 and resigned unexpectedly in 2010. Sophie’s editorial wraps-up her time with the journal and welcomes the newly appointed Sally Heath.

This edition of Meanjin begins with the rather droll ‘Mulgrave, je t’aime’ by Oslo Davis, a cartoon that should bring a smile to the lips of many Melbournites and friends-of-Melbournites. Goodness only knows what would happen to the ‘faux hipsters’ if they made it out as far as Warburton …

Well, Warburton is a long way from Footscray, where the current and collectible final Cunningham edition of Meanjin fell into my greedy hands. And, therefore, it was on the train that I first dipped in to the magazine. The journal is a beautiful creature in layout and design (though I have to say, my eyes are not lovers of the pink text), and the vessel for many a finely crafted word.

Oslo treats us to a very different kind of illustration, and a most excellently disturbing one at that, for the opening article in Meanjin’s bite-sized ‘Newsreel’ section: ‘Flag waving on the beach’ by Paul Magee. Magee paints a convincing picture of the psychology-of-belonging and the complex juxtaposition of ego and depersonalisation associated with our flag and whatever it is the flag represents. Magee draws together the threads of at least seven diverse writers on the subject of flags in an enlightening, easy-to-read examination of bigotry and the ‘ideology of national character’.

Sure, we might be different in other respects, but when it comes to whatever the flag represents we’re equal, even substitutable.

That sort of depersonalisation gets promoted as a great thing, but it’s also a dangerous state of affairs. It gives people the opportunity to think of themselves as depersonalised agents of a power so much greater than them. […] Peirce wrote in 1871, [whenever] you have a social system built upon collective allegiance to the idea of a higher power, you will find brutal bigotry.

Next came the Essays section where I nodded along disapprovingly with Lorin Clarke as she lamented the loss of the ‘spirit of public cheek’ in the commercialisation of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. The next essay, which made me cry, made me want to stand up on the train and rant, was written by Jacinda Woodhead and is called ‘This Woman I Knew’.

To me, ‘This Woman I Knew’ is an essay that leaps off the page – not just for its content, but also for its style and innovation in managing to write about a deeply contentious and difficult subject. (Those lovelies who are acquainted with me on Twitter will know that I am already a great fan of Woodhead but I’d like to think my colleagueship with the writer is irrelevant here.)

There has long been much debate about abortion – an issue for women, one presumes, since time immemorial. Rarely have I come across commentary on abortion that does not draw on stereotypes, patriarchal assumptions or a kind of shadowy sentimentalism; and that puts the reader firmly in the driver’s seat of the decision and impact of one individual’s story of abortion.

Steve Fielding suggested that women should be forced through certain hoops before having an abortion, such as viewing ultrasound footage of the foetus developing inside them: ‘Adequate information should be at hand for people to make a considered decision. This may include counselling and may also include scans of these unborn children–it’s very important this decision is done light-heartedly.’ Surely, I thought, this borders on torture.

Woven into a fiction-style scene-building is a well-considered insight into history and current chilling facts about women and abortion; and finally, an uplifting and hopeful shout-out to the possibility that women can, indeed, reclaim their bodies.

Meanjin’s fiction section offers up a fine selection, and none more innovative and interesting and clever (in the best sense) than ‘A Story in Writing’ by Ryan O’Neill.

Bowdlerise

He put his hand on her [censored] and pulled down her [censored]. ‘[censored] me,’ she said. ‘Quickly.’

The story is offered up in sections under headings so delicious and cunning as to send any history/literary boffin into spasms of delight – and to thoroughly entertain the rest of us. Annotation is a true redeemer of footnotes and Hyperbole (the most hilarious thing I’ve ever read in the whole world) had me throw back my head and laugh out loud.

As to Sophie Cunningham and Sally Heath and Meanjin’s ‘new direction’, may they all live happily ever after. Take a trip with Meanjin #70 – it’s a cracker.

It peers among the marvels to enlighten
A distant world’s attention, all agog
For each new vision that it sends.

(Stephen Edgar, ‘All Eyes’)

Quick to self-blame for technology stuff-ups, I gave myself over to a number of scenarios: had I clicked something accidentally with my newly acquired acrylic nail extensions (French polish, if you must know), did I have a virus (well yes, I’d had a nasty dose of summer flu but this time round it was my computer’s questionable state of immunity causing the V&Ds), or was this simply a sign my laptop was dying and the blue screen of death imminent?

All the above, and more, seemed entirely possible. Except for one thing: the only website I couldn’t access was www.overland.org.au Resisting the impulsive side of my nature, I bided my time. Five minutes later I still couldn’t connect, and five minutes after that and so on and so forth, the whole day long. Soon I was convinced there was something more serious afoot than technical problems my end. But websites, especially websites like Overland, just don’t crash – do they?

Could it be I’d tried Jacinda’s patience too often and she’d used her editorial power to shut me up once and for all? Perhaps I had been a little snippy in one of my comments (some of us don’t suffer misogynists and other fools gladly), deployed too many adjectives, adverbs and exclamation marks (see this post), littered more than one response with grammatical errors and typos, discussed Heidegger without appropriate reference to Wikipedia, or was it simply that my postings were embarrassingly atheoretical when compared to Rjurik’s (cultural studies was such a long time ago)! Still, if I was going to discover why Overland’s website went AWOL, I’d have to extend my gaze a little further than my own navel.

Once I started thinking about who had reason to shut down the website the list of suspects became as long as an Andrew Bolt rant. Could it be a despairing poet rumoured to have recently formed the Overland Dead Poet’s Society, a Luddite plot or revenge of the postmodernists? Had Mubarak been reading Overland and Boris’s article the final straw? Sounds far-fetched I know, but if Mubarak can flick the switch on Egypt… Perhaps it was a communist plot, a late-capitalist plot or even an ABC plot. I hear rumours they’re none-too-happy at the ABC that Overland do what they once did, but better.

But then an epiphany: the mastermind of Overland’s problems was as predictable as the death of the newspaper. Who else could it be but Rupert and his band of sycophants over at News Limited wanting to remind commie bastards residing under beds and online who’s boss?

Later that day, when with heavy heart I attempted to access Overland, I found myself directed to the Webmaster. I don’t know about you but the Webmaster sounds sort’ve kinky! (Is there a Webmistress? And what do these guys wear when they’re on duty?)

Following a good night’s sleep aided and abetted by Diazepam, I came to the conclusion this whole missing Overland website thing might be the result of human error. After all, the Overland folk must be a bit the worse for wear after putting together the next edition, or maybe Jacinda, Jeff and co had a couple of G&Ts and didn’t notice the website was down. Or could it be that a member of editorial staff is trying to get a PhD done in record time, and the huge pile of books, submissions, needy bloggers and editing became overwhelming? Said person needed some time out and flicked the switch. Who could therefore blame them?

But back to me, did anyone care about my withdrawal symptoms? Two days of engaging with mainstream media had brought my nether regions out in a rash. I couldn’t stop thinking about Warnie and I was worried for Liz. And I’d started watching Sunrise. Loving it that Kochie and Mel are my new best friends.

In the absence of Overland commentary to provide cerebral stimulation, I was sucked into the vortex of comments on the Age website. There was a moment when I was even tempted to post myself. Overlanders, you could learn a thing or two. For example:

The old saying “if it’s not broke don’t fix it” comes to mind! Problem is whenever one says something along these lines all the left wing looneys come out of their box and accuse us of being racist.

I just finished my first book, which has taken me well over a decade to finish – yobbo

And then just as I was beginning to think mainstream media wasn’t half bad, I was connected again. Who could hold me responsible for toasting this happy outcome by replacing my breakfast cuppa with something a little more in line with Overland philosophy?

No doubt the Webmaster will have an explanation for Overland’s disappearance from our screens on that fateful (clichéd) day. But I reckon if Assange isn’t himself shut down, he’ll eventually tell the world what was going on the day the lights went out in Overland!

I smile, wondering the exact same thing, and shuffle my three-month-old daughter into the red sling strung across one shoulder, eager to hear Fadzai’s response. One of the baby’s eyes opens suspiciously but she ultimately succumbs to sleep. Still Waters doesn’t seem, to me, to be an obvious christening for this newly formed storytelling sister-circle. Water is such a life force – so all-powerful in its movement and strength. Water floods, drowns, devastates, replenishes and revives. Water slides land, washes away foundations and even erodes stone. Still Waters seems somehow helpless, ominous, melancholy. It makes me think of stagnant ponds and lifeless children, of time standing still.

‘Still Waters, because they run deep, but there is no movement,’ says Fadzai. ‘Still Waters because we are constantly struggling to make waves. Still Waters because there is so much potential, right here just under the surface.’ A knowing nod circles the room and all of us are in agreeance. Still Waters. Amen to that. Suddenly, an old spiritual I haven’t heard for years rises up, deep and rumbling, in my ears:

Wade in the water
Wade in the water / children
Wade in the water
The Lord’s gonna trouble the water

I wonder, am I the only one to hear it.

Writing the ‘other’ Black Australia, I tell the sisters of the newly established storytellers group, has been a long and lonely, if productive, road. Particularly in the notoriously monocultural Australian poetry scene. Paving a path as a young black female poet writing intensely political, and at times heavily criticised, work about the experiences of African descendents in the ‘new world’ has not been easy. But perhaps the most difficult thing of all has been the absence of sisters whose solidarity would surely have made the road less rocky.

Yet here they are now, gathered with me on the couches, cross-legged on the polished wooden floorboards of this small room in North Melbourne: Zimbabwean model and writer Teurai Chinakira, writer Tinashe Pwiti, artist Abby Osia-Ogada (an Australian of Kenyan and Italian heritage), writer and group founder Fadzai Jaravaza, fashion and events co-ordinator Salamawit Mekonnen (of Ethiopian heritage). The group’s supported by Australian lawyer and facilitator Annie Davis, theatre and dance expert Liza Freddi, radio personality and journalist Namila Benson (PNG), and journalist and filmmaker Rachel Maher.

It is early days now, and how the group will grow and change in numbers and direction we are uncertain. For now, we are all content hearing each other chant the same incantation. Though we come via different continents, have travelled different journeys and have lived different lives, we are united by storytelling and skin, and ready to start meeting once a month together, writing, workshopping and sharing our work with the world – taking back our tongues.

The Still Waters Storytelling Network meets on the third Saturday of every month at the Institute for Postcolonial Studies, and aims to tell the stories of Australian women of African descent. Maxine Beneba Clarke will be documenting their progress on the Overland blog.

I have recently returned from a blissful week at Varuna Writers’ Centre. For the uninitiated Varuna is writers’ heaven. Housed in author Eleanor Dark’s former Blue Mountains residency, it is the only place of its kind in Australia where writers can stay and focus solely on writing. With four other writers living in the house, evening conversations often turned to the writing process. We talked about how, when and where we write. About the perfect space in which to create. Varuna aside (for surely there is nowhere more perfect than this place), I confessed to a love of cafes. There you can write in a bubble but are surrounded by life that feeds you. The novel I went to Varuna to work on has mostly been written in this way, fuelled by many a cup of coffee.

I also confessed to erratic nocturnal habits (my long-suffering husband is regularly subjected to three am scribblings). Some years ago he bought me a gift that has pleased us both. The marvellous invention of a pen with a light on its end. So at least he no longer has to endure the flickering of the lamp – on, off, on, off – as the words come in spurts.

The kind of writers I admire most are those who wake before dawn and crank out a thousand words before breakfast, then head off to a ‘real’ job. On the rare occasions that I’m up at this hushed time of day I romanticise that I should do it more often. But in reality I’m not a morning person, and knowing how and when you write best is part of the key. So I snatch time in cafes while my partner does child minding duty or at night when the children are sleeping, and find myself scrawling on the pile of paper I keep beside my bed in the dark, my pen casting a quiet pool of turquoise light.

There are writers who have far stranger habits than mine. Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway and Vladimir Nabokov all liked to write standing up, with Wolfe often leaning over the top of his fridge. Truman Capote, on the other hand, always wrote lying down, in bed or on a couch. Junot Diaz likes to lock himself into the bathroom to write. Edgar Allen Poe wrote with a cat on his shoulder. And when writing The Anthologist, Nicholson Baker grew a beard, dressed in character and filmed 40 hours of himself giving poetry lectures in the style of his main protagonist. Yes, writers are a strange lot.

But writing is not as simple as heading for the bathroom or grabbing a cat. There’s the issue of procrastination, something every writer wrestles with at some stage or another. Paul Rudnick puts it nicely: ‘Writing is 90 per cent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It’s a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in the morning and you reach the point where you have to write.’ One of my Varuna cohorts told a marvellous story about a writer friend who has attached seven leather belts to his writing chair. When he sits down in it at dawn, bleary-eyed, he straps himself in, preventing procrastination and forcing himself to write (it is more effort to undo all the belts than to just get on with it). I repeat, writers are a strange lot.

But procrastination is not necessarily empty time. Sometimes it can be crucial to the writing process. While you play solitaire or dust some obscure high shelf ideas are either consciously or unconsciously percolating. The writing is gestating. But these days – sandwiching writing in between children and editing work – I rarely have the luxury of procrastination. Time is precious. That percolating still happens, but it happens in the midst of life. Now when I get one hour here, three hours there to write, I just do it. Toni Morrison once said that when her writing habits were no longer driven by work and children she felt ‘giddy’ in her own house. I look forward to a little giddiness. In the meantime there are invaluable interludes like Varuna where I cracked a problematic section of my novel, Love and other small things, and everything somehow fell into place. Almost two weeks on, it seems I am still surfing a post-Varuna high, travelling ever closer to a finished final draft.

As I write this my clock is rudely reminding me that it is 4.12 am. Time to put the turquoise-lit pen down, post this, and hear your stories about how you write.

Can I smell smoke? How far am I from home? Who is at my home? Where is my cat? Is there petrol in the car if we need to evacuate?

No, I remind myself. I am not in the Blue Mountains anymore, I am in the inner west and the closest tree to my house is a hundred metres away.

My dad and my brother are in the Rural Fire Service. They used to come home from a fire – their yellow overalls carrying the heavy scent of smouldering bark – and mum and I would get a little tally: how close the fires were to the Grose Valley, what streets were being evacuated, how many houses had been lost and where. They would both sleep for a couple of hours and then head out again. Sometimes they wouldn’t come home at all, sleeping in the truck instead.

They never had to come home and tell us how many people had been killed.

173 people is so, so very many. Children, parents, brothers and sisters, friends who had gone back to get other friends, all swallowed up. In the weeks and months following the Black Saturday bush fires I found myself reading every story that was printed, every personal account that was aired on television. I couldn’t help it. I did so with guilt, a dread that maybe I was garnering a twisted sort of entertainment from such horrific tragedy, but I couldn’t stop reading, couldn’t stop listening. I still can’t.

I have always written about firefighters. It must be that old ‘what you know’ thing, although in this case I know very little firsthand. I have never fought a fire; I have only ever imagined what my father and brother were facing. But I have seen the sun choked by smoke and had white ash like snowflakes fall on my face. I have had a bag packed by the front door. But I have never had to evacuate or return home to a charred pile of bricks, scavenging through for anything that might remain: a bathroom tile, a spoon from a wedding cutlery set, sooted glass beads. Still, I find myself drawn to these narratives, both in reading and writing. Is it any different to slowing down to stare at the scene of a car accident? I would like to think not. I would like to think that in some part of me I identify, just a tiny bit, with what these people have been through. The experience isn’t as alien to me as those other monumental tragedies that have filled so many pages and film cells: the Holocaust, the September 11 attacks. Sympathy, after all, is not a difficult emotion to tap into. Empathy is far more potent, far more manipulative, far more powerful. Narratives that we empathise with resonate because we can slot ourselves in. Another aspect of this is surely the sense of solidarity conjured by such narratives.

Strangely enough, I was reminded of this in reading an article about 127 Hours director, Danny Boyle. 127 Hours tells the story of Aaron Ralston, the rock climber who in 2003 severed his own hand with a penknife to free himself after becoming pinned under a boulder. In the Sydney Morning Herald on Saturday, Jane Wheatley wrote of her experience of watching the amputation:

‘I managed to view the amputation scene through splayed fingers, I tell Boyle, because by then you had gone on such a journey with Ralston – the fall, the ingenious if fruitless attempts to free himself, the heartbreaking soliloquies and thirst-induced hallucinations – that you felt the least you could do was to bear witness.’

Perhaps that is what it is. Bearing witness.

On Wednesday night ABC2 aired the documentary Inside the Firestorm. It was respectful journalism that allowed the subjects to speak for themselves. A man spoke of being overcome by smoke and waking up in a paddock, wondering where his wife and two small children were. Their absence was palpable, just a singular man in the frame, just his voice and photos of his family. Their fate was horribly clear even before he got to the end of his story. Another woman was in her fifties, well dressed, nicely made-up for the cameras in mauves and lavenders – she had obviously thought about her appearance on national television. She was so calm, so articulate, reflective even, as she spoke about fleeing her home and not knowing exactly where her husband was. It wasn’t until she described what a gentle person he had been that she crumbled and lost composure. This documentary was still a story though, still a narrative, and techniques, however subtle, had been employed to carry the viewer along on the journey. The most notable was the use of narration in present tense, telling of the fire’s progress as the narrative switched focus from person to person, area to area. It didn’t feel gratuitous or sensationalised though. It didn’t feel like rubber-necking at an accident, it felt like bearing witness. And there’s a difference. Isn’t there?

Simultaneously, Channel Nine was broadcasting its ‘live’ coverage of cyclone Yasi. Reporters in multiple locations with unruly hair, looking so very concerned; cameras at the ready to capture dramatic footage they could later boast would only be seen on Nine. Constantly shifting from reporter to reporter, each with no more to say than the last. The frequent ad breaks were introduced with montages of the Premier and the Prime Minister voicing their warnings, people evacuating their homes, trees flailing, all to a dramatic musical sore. Building drama and tension and expectation for an event yet to unfold. One couldn’t help but feel there was perhaps a little misplaced disappointment when the cyclone didn’t fulfil its category five prediction. The tragic irony, of course, is that it was a lack of information that led to so very many deaths on 7 February 2009. Although emotional manipulation to a carefully chosen soundtrack isn’t what anyone needs in an emergency, I wonder if we’ll ever see TV screens all carrying the same information: a simple list of which areas need to evacuate and in what direction. But who would want to miss a ratings opportunity like that?

As to the aftermath, there is a fine balance when it comes to documenting these tragedies. I don’t think we’ll produce a blockbuster with a Black Saturday backdrop – Cate Blanchett and Hugh Jackman in a doomed romance. At least not for a few years. But these stories need to be told, because silence builds trauma. These 173 people and what happened to them needs to be remembered. Let’s hope our nations’s storytellers can find ways to do it respectfully.