bluelotus

FACT AND FICTION IN MEMOIR

2012-02-05T16:57:00.000-08:00

Fact and Fiction in Memoir

Among the fifteen people in my memoir-writing group at Writers Victoria in January there were two sisters. I set the group a writing exercise where they would recall a significant clock or watch from their early lives, and write about it for ten minutes. After this I invited people to read out what they had written. Both sisters, without consulting each other, wrote about their grandfather’s fob watch. As we all listened to the second sister’s account, we could recognize the grandfather, but the funny thing was that one sister recalled a lovely golden chain, while the other remembered a silver one. Since the chain is now lost, we will probably never know whether it was silver or gold.

Workshops are often enlivened by moments not unlike this one, but I thought this textbook example of the behaviour of memory was worth noting. If these sisters can’t agree on the nature of the chain which they observed in the relatively recent past, just how much can ever be believed? And how much does this matter? When you are writing memoir you are in one sense fabricating a new past from the materials your memory offers you, you are constructing something like a piece of fiction, in some ways, while trying (I suppose) to stick to the truth. The truth as you know it.

Also worth noting is the fact that the group, as groups frequently do, decided to keep in touch with each other by email after the workshop.

I have been astonished by the energy and commitment of this particular group. They continue to write and to share their work with each other, and to offer clear-eyed yet always encouraging criticism of the writing. I think most of them will persevere and will write various kinds of memoir, some for general publication, some for family and friends. And I know they will all remember, in one way or another, the lovely lesson of the gold and silver chains.

In May 2012 I will be Assessing and Commenting on Manuscripts of Memoir as well as Fiction at Girrahween in Maldon, Central Victoria. More details later. Contact me on carmel@carmelbird.com

2012-01-23T16:28:00.000-08:00

image one: Ivan Bilibin

image two: George Cruikshank

Consider this sentence from 'The Golden Bird' by the Brothers Grimm: "So he sat down, and the fox began to run, and away they went over stock and stone so quick that their hair whistled in the wind."

The image of the fox and its passenger by George Cruikshank, coupled with this sentence from ‘The Golden Bird’ are lodged in my memories of long ago. The book, in a dark blue leather cover with fine gold embossing, was the collected stories of the Brothers Grimm. I received it when I was six and I pored over the images and the narratives for ever after.

What engaged me was the mystery embedded not just in the plots and characters, but also in the language and the rhythms. And in the pictures which seem to lift themselves out of the writing and dance with a life of their own.

My first experience of this book was just after the end of World War Two, when books were rarer and more precious than they have become. I write this at a time when books are on the endangered list, so in my lifetime I have seen them move from rare to very common to rare again. Not as rare as they were in the forties, but not as common as they were a very few years ago. I say this by way of establishing context, placing my personal relationship to the conventions of the fairy tale in time, and also, I realize in place.

For I held the lovely blue book in my hands in a Tasmanian country town, far away from Cruikshank’s London and the German forests of the Grimms. The fairy tales and their illustrations were the entrance to the mysteries of unrealities, yet they were also in many respects parallel to everyday reality. Words and pictures had the power to carry a child’s mind into weird places, to shift a child’s vision to contemplations of beauty and horror, and to move a child’s emotions towards terror and joy and pity. These tales fulfilled the promise that there is something else, somewhere else; that there is mystery.

I see them now as the messengers of the nature of ‘story’. A story, in this context, is a narrative that might have happened somewhere, and that is taken, for the time being, to be true. When you talk about a story in this way, you have belief and disbelief, reality and mystery, running with each other, somewhat like the man and the fox with their hair whistling in the wind. And people who move from reading stories to writing stories are, I think probably always, picking up the magic and setting out to work with it.

Part of the enchantment for children (and adults too) is the incantatory nature of the tales, and it is this element as much as any, I think, that binds the mind of a writer to these stories. ‘Once upon a time’ and ‘there were three brothers’ and ‘happily ever after’ are all implicated in both the stimulus of and the response to the fairy tale. The height of beauty and the murky depths of the grotesque are frankly placed before the reader in a kind of poetry, a kind of sing-song that works its way over and over again into the mind and heart.

You can of course become a novelist without actually reading these stories over and over as a child, but in my own case I am certain that my conviction that I had to write fiction had at least part of its origin in the fairy tales, particularly in the blue book with the Cruikshank illustrations. And those illustrations were black and white lithographs. All the colour they delivered was done by line, by shade, and a kind of leaping confidence in the rightness of the picture’s madness.

Another illustrator who nourished my imagination was Ivan Bilibin, a Russian who died in 1942. It is a mystery to me how Pushkin’s story ‘The Tale of Tsar Saltan’, illustrated by Bilbin, came to be with the other books in the house. There was a strange shelf constructed by my father, stuck rather high on the wall to the right of the fireplace, and shaped like a magazine rack. In this rack there were thin children’s books such as works by Mabel Lucie Atwell, and also the Pushkin.

The pictures are far, far from the black hobgoblins of Cruikshank; they are softly coloured in muted shades, highly patterned, and often contained within formal borders of decorative motifs from Russian folk art. The image here is a dazzling example of the mysterious vision Bilibin’s work brought to my child’s mind. ‘And behold, to his amaze, a great city met his gaze.’ The reader feels she is part of the foreground where the couple are held in soft shadow, feels she can look out at the fabulous walled city on the hillside in the distance, could walk the yellow path that leads through the archway in the wall, and enter the streets of the ‘great city’.

It was many years later, in the seventies, that the Russian picture books Bilibin illustrated became available in Australia and I collected several of them. The pictures are absolutely entrancing to me. I have never written a story bearing any recognizable inspiration from them, but I know they have a powerful and magical effect on me. They are so grand and confident and utterly mysterious. They are highly serene and yet they promise vast journeys, great narratives, deep truths. They use the most wonderful shades of green, for one thing.

I think what the stories mainly express is the human longing for the mystery of what is out of reach, but which must surely exist somewhere behind an invisible membrane of some kind. And I know that I was certainly captivated early on by the promise embedded in the tales, and that my writing is a kind of participation in the search for whatever it is that is concealed. When the strangeness of the tale was bound up with the visual magic of Cruikshank and Bilibin, the lifetime contract between myself and stories, the creation of stories, was sealed. I am overstating the case, for there were other influences, but the fairy stories and these two illustrators were clearly influences on how I now spend my time.

(This memoir is from the catalogue of the Happy Ever After Travelling Exhibition 2011/12 from the Newcastle Library.)

Finola Fox

2012-01-10T14:32:00.000-08:00

Penguin will publish my new children's picture book

The Fabulous Finola Fox in May 2012.
Illustrations are by Kerry Argent.
It's the story of an urban fox who collects shoes.
She is on a quest to find the pair to a gorgeous
feathered green shoe she found in an alley.
She finds more than she bargained for, including
romance.

Library at Borroloola

2011-12-06T14:24:00.000-08:00

BORROLOOLA LIBRARY
The Library at Borroloola is a place where the books and the building have long since been eaten by white ants. The story of the Borroloola Library is one of the most poignant and mythic of all library stories. If books and libraries are in crisis in 2011, and perhaps they are, imagine if you will, the tale of the library in Borroloola.
Borroloola is 1500 kilometres South East of Darwin, and 60 kilometres from the sea on the Gulf of Carpentaria. In the 1890s a mounted policeman, Cornelius Power, established the library. It is probable that he wrote to the governor of Victoria asking for donations of books. A thousand handsome books apparently came, by ship, and were kept in the jail as there was nowhere else for them to go. Later on there were three thousand books in total. This library became the centre of cultural life in the area, a handful of bushies and a large population of indigenous people borrowing and reading and holding regular open air public discussion on the things they read about. The collection contained the leather bound books that an educated Edwardian Englishman might have had in his house. Dickens, Bronte, Henry James, Kipling, Tennyson, Shakespeare, Aristotle, Plutarch, Homer, Virgil, the Bible – covered in canvas jackets. Ernestine Hill described it as ‘a kindly light of sanity to men half mad with loneliness’. By the late 1950s the library was in an almost total state of decay. Some of the books had been sent to Darwin. But many of them had been borrowed and never returned, and what remained would eventually be eaten by white ants, the pages of works of great literature ending up in the material of the ant hills. When David Attenborough made a documentary about it in the early sixties, he reported that the only remaining book was The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis, and that although the title page was legible, most of the interior had been eaten.
Sic transit Gloria mundi.

Library Thoughts

2011-12-03T14:24:00.000-08:00

Library Thoughts
Libraries are changing. Books are changing. There might be a crisis in libraries and books. Are they disappearing? Does it matter?
I was browsing through old copies of TLS and read a review (by Roderick Conway Morris) of a book ‘Venetian Navigators’ by Andrea di Robilant. The book’s about fourteenth century explorations of the far far northern regions of the planet. The reviewer suggests that as the Arctic ice-cap melts and North-West and North-East Passages open up to navigation, the areas explored by the Zen brothers in the fourteenth century will become central to world trade.
A section of the review caught my imagination, reminding me of the role and relevance of both books and libraries. It’s a lovely story about what can happen in a library when you are looking for one thing and your stumble upon something else.
QUOTE from TLS, June 3, 2011.
“Several years ago di Robilant, while researching an altogether different topic, happened upon a miniature volume in the Old and Rare Book Collection at the Marciana Library on Piazza San Marco in Venice. It measured about six by four inches, and glued to the back of it was a larger, crisply engraved wood-cut map. The author was the Venetian nobleman Nicolo Zen, and the title ‘On the Discovery of the Islands of Frislanda, Eslanda, Engroneland, Estotiland and Icaria made by the two Zen Brothers under the Artic Pole.’ The book was published in 1558.”
The accidental discovery of the little old book led to the writing of the book under review. I love stories like that. And I hope libraries and books don’t disappear.

Woodend Writing Workshop

2011-10-12T14:02:00.000-07:00

ROTARY CLUB OF WOODEND

Short Story Workshop with Carmel Bird

The Macedon Ranges Writers Group is running a five-hour workshop for members and community members on November 26th 2011 at the Woodend Community Centre starting at 11:00am. The Victorian Writers Centre and the Woodend Rotary Club are sponsoring the event.

The workshop, writing for young people and adults is being conducted by Carmel Bird who is primarily a writer of fiction, covering both adult and children's writing. Her first collection of short stories was published in 1983, and since then she has published another four collections of short stories, and also novels, essays, anthologies, and books on how to write. She is a leading author of short stories and has published ten novels, three of which have been short listed for the Miles Franklin Award. Her most recent novel is CHILD OF THE TWILIGHT. She is a celebrated teacher of both fiction and memoir-writing, and has published the non-fiction guide WRITING THE STORY OF YOUR LIFE. Carmel is also an experienced editor of many journals and anthologies, including THE STOLEN CHILDREN - THEIR STORIES. Her website is www.carmelbird.com

To book your tickets please go to http://www.trybooking.com/XNS but spaces are limited. To purchase a ticket go into the shopping cart section on the website, just click on full price and select a ticket. The total cost is $40.30. You will not be able to pay on the day.

For further information about the Workshop please call Miranda 0431 114 539 or Christine on 5429 5452 or 0407 012 140. If you would like to hear more about the Writer’s Group call Christine or email Sue Yardley sjyardley@bigpond.com.

Where: Woodend Community Centre
When: Saturday, 26 November, 2011
Time: 11:00 am – 4:00 pm
Bring: Writing materials; lunch; your ticket
Cost: $40 plus 30¢ booking fee
Booking: http://www.trybooking.com/XNS
Inquiries: 5429 5452 or 0431 114 539

GETTING TO THE EBOOK

2011-07-06T19:25:00.000-07:00

GETTING TO THE EBOOK
The brush-footed butterfly is any member of the Nymphalidae family, named for its reduced adult forelegs which are frequently hairy, resembling brushes. I know this because I flicked open a volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and there was the brush-foot, complete with pictures of typical members of the family such as mourning cloaks and anglewings. I had never really heard of the brush-foot before, and for more information I googled it and found 29,000 results. That shows you one of the differences between the Britannica and the Web. One other difference is that you can consult the Britannica by saying – tell me anything you like – whereas with the Web you have to have a starting point. Another thing is that on the open page of the Britannica the gaze strays over to the picture of Aleksey Alekseyevich Brusilov who was distinguished primarily for the 1916 Brusilov Breakthrough which contributed to the fall of the Tsar’s government in 1917. I didn’t know that before. He’s got 48,000 results on Google. But the big difference between the Britannica and the Web is that the Web collects only the dust that settles on a keyboard, whereas the Britannica, occupying quite a bit of space on a shelf, has to be dusted with a bunch of feathers quite often.

Writers collect a lot of books, and you sometimes hear them saying what a battle it is to house and control them. I am engaged in such a battle, and I happened to be looking at the Britannica because I was thinking about how much shelf space I could acquire if I threw the encyclopaedia out. Like having silly old grandpa put down. But I discovered that Old Grandpa Britannica is not so silly after all, and mostly I discovered that I love him very much. He is wise and wonderful.

So, I say to myself, is sentimentality going to win over common sense here?

When I was a child I spent endless hours browsing through several different kinds of encyclopaedias. In fact I can still visualize pages of them, words and pictures. The black and white photographs in the Richards’ in particular drift vividly through my memory – the Princes in the Tower, the Sword of Damocles, the Fighting Téméraire (53,000 Google results). So the experience of encyclopaedias is deeply nostalgic, browsing the Britannica takes me back to the pleasures of childhood, denies the passage of time. But it is also a present day pleasure to be found nowhere else. I am not just looking for specific information, I am going on a walk through a landscape I know and don’t know. I can keep walking here for many pleasurable hours. (When I am not dusting or out buying bookshelves.)

All those encyclopaedias I read as a child must have had an effect on me as a writer, but I realize that there were other books also that affected me in different ways. If I try to confine myself to five of those books I come up with: Treasures of English Verse; En Route; ‘The Fly’ by Katherine Mansfield; The Diary of Anne Frank; Barnaby Rudge.

For my sixth birthday my parents gave me Treasures of English Verse, first published by Oxford in 1925, last reprinted in 1942. They were treasures, and I learnt many of them by heart. Even though it was printed in wartime, it is a hardback bound in blue cloth and has a coloured picture as the frontispiece. The cover is faded now, the spine foxed. Etched into the front cover in black is an image of Pegasus flying above clouds and above a strip of stylized water where Art Nouveau images of what might be waves or birds or fish or leaves are flowing. The poems proceed from easy to difficult in three sections, each section signed off with a little woodcut – first an angel, then a Norse ship, then Queen Elizabeth the First. The coloured picture is of a shepherd boy with a flute, and underneath him are lines from Wordsworth’s ‘Written in March’, lines that were delicious then, but strike an ominous note in Eastern Australia today: ‘the rain is over and gone’. The poems begin with ‘The Raindrops’ Message’ by the beautifully named Lucy Diamond and end with George Herbert’s ‘Virtue’, praising the ‘sweet and virtuous soul’ that will live ‘though the whole world turn to coal’. Again I can now read into this a grim ecological message.

I read The Diary of Anne Frank when I was fifteen. I remember sitting in the apricot tree – the book was covered in the brown paper we used to protect books. It is commonplace now for teenagers to read the published diaries of other teenagers, but I had never seen anything like The Diary. It was emotionally freighted with the tragic knowledge that the teenage writer, who broke off the writing on the first of August 1944 was arrested by the Nazis on the fourth of August and died in Bergen-Belsen in 1945. She was fifteen when she died; I was fifteen as I was reading. She was so candid and alive and full of bright innocent hope. I realize now that the reading was a revelation to me, a revelation of how it was possible to write. But it was also a powerful message about the efficacy of writing under pressure, appalling and unimaginable pressure. And I remember experiencing a new feeling of guilt at the realization that when I was frolicking about the garden in Tasmania in the early forties, this girl was hidden in an attic in Amsterdam in fear of her life, able to write: ‘I am young and strong and am living a great adventure.’ Perhaps it was for me an epiphany. ‘The liberation is drawing nearer. Why then should I be in despair?’
Another revelation came about a year later when I read ‘The Fly’ by Katherine Mansfield. Before this I had no concept of the short story form. I woke up to the idea that you could deliver psychological truth via mood, structure, image and language – that the plotting could be stronger because it was subtle, that character would emerge through the other elements of the piece, that the metaphor and the meaning were one. I really was astonished by all that, and delighted, and inspired.
A key book in my development as a reader, and hence as a writer, was Barnaby Rudge. I was seven, and you couldn’t be a member of the children’s library until you were eight. This is now hard to imagine. My older sister was reading David Copperfield, and so I had a passing knowledge of the existence if not the importance of Charles Dickens. My father had pity on me and took me to the adult library saying I could use his card. So – bliss – there I was importantly holding my father’s hand, ascending a magical spiral staircase in a gracious old Georgian building, heading for the Dickens shelf. I selected a leather-bound volume of Barnaby Rudge for two reasons – I thought the title sounded wonderful, and I loved the illustrations, particularly those of Dolly Varden in her bonnet and crinoline. When I came to read the book at home, I found that although I could read a lot of the words, I could not make any sense of most of the sentences. So in an agony of disappointment and rage and wounded pride I sat in tears, slowly turning the pages, making my way through the book, dwelling with relief on the illustrations. This was reading as frozen horror. But I believe it speeded up my determination to read well, and soon enough I turned eight and was admitted to children’s with its fishtank and Enid Blytons.
Then there was the French text book En Route which I started when I was twelve. This was a little blue hardback with a dizzy pattern of dark red calligraphy all over the cover. It was by a genius called E.Saxelby M.A., and was illustrated by another genius called Blam. It, and the subsequent books in the series, followed the lives and adventures of a family named Lépine – Monsieur, Madame, Paul, Bobette and Toto. As with the Treasures of English Verse I still know slabs of these books by heart. I believe that because I moved slowly through the books, particularly the first one, I took in a great many small details of human relationship and psychology, of character and plot and the possibilities of story. The narratives were quite brilliantly constructed and paced. I believe I still draw on elements of the Lépines today as I write.
So from the beginning I truly loved to read, and was quickly led from the intricacies of the texts to a desire to write. It seemed natural.
Just for fun I googled Saxelby, but all I found was an invitation to let Catherine Saxelby guide me ‘through the mumbo-jumbo of how to adopt healthier eating habits.’ No, no, give me Paul and Bobette who eat slices of bread and butter covered in honey. The landscape of words is a beautiful place in which I will continue to wander in sentimentality, but also, I believe, common sense. Sometimes on www; sometimes on the bookshelves.
And then, of course, there’s eBooks. I have finally got there, and I do love them. But I still love Britannica between covers, and also www and so on and so forth.

women and men and books

2011-06-17T01:56:00.000-07:00

I begin by accepting the recent figures etc about male/female divide in
literature, and my theory is supported by them.

It seems to me that the gender divide in novels themselves is only a symptom of
the prevailing power structure in western society.

A broad project of literature is to examine where things go
wrong in human affairs.

Human beings are generally inclined to blame somebody
(or fate - of which more later) for the their troubles.

And broadly speaking, I think men tend to blame women and women blame
men.

Western society is still, after all this time, predicated on the idea that men are in
charge of that society.

So at base men are keeping the gates.

When women write the story, the men are to blame for the trouble.
When men write the story it is the women who are to blame.

And men still have the power to see to it that their version of
events is the dominant one. Hence the predominance of male
reviewers and books by men getting reviewed over books by women.

Even when a man is writing, and a man is to blame for the trouble
in the story, the man - it seems to me - still comes out as perversely admirable.
(Humbert Humbert, say.)

The other element is fate. Even when fate is to blame, men and women
still have to respond to that, and so there is no avoiding the male or female
response of some kind.

So what I am saying, in very simple terms, is that when the woman writes the novel the man is the baddie, and vice versa.

I am saying that men are still in power, and so they are still able to push
their version of events which is that Eve was responsible for the fall, and
the woman's version is still being sidelined.

Wheeler Centre

2011-06-15T16:20:00.000-07:00

Discussion of Feasts in Madame Bovary, The Leopard etc

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bookshow/stories/2011/3238876.htm

Judge's Report

2011-06-02T16:41:00.000-07:00

The following piece is the transcript of a speech

I made at the Belgrave Library where I was

invited to judge a competition in the writing of

short stories long ago in 2000. I have recently

been asked to post it here. It is also on my

website: www.carmelbird.com

JUDGE’S REPORT

I invite you to listen to the voices of the opening sentences from the ten prizewinning stories.

‘I still have the dagger.’

‘It was only at the urging of my son that I took the trip to England.’

‘After his father died he stopped fishing.’

‘The word on the street was that Cherie had lost her fix in someone’s car and he, fat hypocrite, had driven straight to the police and ordered them to get that filthy thing out of his vehicle.’

‘He walks between the stars.’

‘I read a book once. It was called Crosses and was about these two girls who cut themselves with glass because it eases their emotional pain.’

‘Have you ever loved somebody so much you couldn’t eat or sleep?’

‘It was the last week of the summer, but more importantly the end of the disastrous heatwave we had experienced through the scorching past few months.’

‘Hello, I’m a retired racing Greyhound by the name of Rosie and I’d like to tell you about my life as a Greyhound.’

‘Hi, I’m a twelve years old girl. I love my life.’

What you have heard are ten distinctive voices. You have heard confidence. You have probably felt invited in to listen to what might be going to happen. They have probably all got your attention straight away. You want, I imagine, to hear where these beginnings will lead you.

I would like to dwell on the power and significance of the beginnings of stories for a while. I know nothing about any of the writers, and so I don’t know whether they are experienced writers or not. But I do know that quite often when inexperienced writers set out to write a story, they demonstrate, in their words, the fact that they find it difficult to make the shift from the world of everyday reality into the world of imagination. And what they often do, in order to facilitate this shift - they write a sentence or even a paragraph that in fact describes the shift. They say something like: ‘Moonlight fell on the path leading up to the door of the gloomy mansion.’ They take us on a little atmospheric journey as they make their own approach to the world of imaginary beings and events. Now there is no harm in writing such a sentence to begin with, to get yourself in place and to get going, but what every writer has to learn to do is to recognise the purpose of that sentence and then delete it. Nine times out of ten. Because there are really no hard and fast rules to writing fiction. But I promise you that more often than not the sentences of the type I just gave you (Moonlight fell on the path leading up to the door of the gloomy mansion.) are killer sentences. They do not invite the reader into a world; they warn the reader that the writer is in the process of shifting from reality to fiction, and they warn that the writer is feeling uncomfortable. The reader wants to feel safe with the confident voice of the writer. They want to hear something like:

‘Hello, I’m a retired racing Greyhound.’

Another very important element in the writing of a successful story is for the writer to have, as soon as possible, a clear idea of how the story is going to end. Too often stories will just tail off or will end on a false note, a note that doesn’t ring true as on outcome for that story. Student writers often have brilliant ideas for a story - a kind of shining concept that means they will approach the task of writing with great enthusiasm. But then the whole thing starts to fall apart as they go on. I promise you that if they had made a decision about how the story was going to end, they would probably not have had that problem.

There is something deep within the make-up of human beings that makes us long to tell stories and to hear stories. We are story-telling creatures. Now I am often asked whether stories (in competitions, in magazines and so on) have to have a beginning, middle and end. And I happen to believe that the answer is yes, they do. There is such a thing as a piece of writing that is moving, interesting, beautiful, and that lacks those elements, but it is not really a story. It might be a description, or a word game. And that’s OK. But - let’s face it - we all know a story when we hear one. If I the man who mows my lawn or mends the roof says to me: What are you writing, and I say, I’m writing a story, then he says - and he invariably says this: so what is it about? And then he says: so how does it end? He knows, just as you know, that a story begins with a set of circumstances, and that these will change for better or worse, and that the outcome will be satisfying in some way, and will emerge from the workings of the story. Fairy stories are perfect examples of stories. They begin with an event: the king dies. They proceed with the events that follow from that. There is conflict and tension. And they end when the conflict and tension are resolved by certain discoveries, deaths and marriages. Please don’t think that I am advocating only the writing of fairy stories. I merely use them as a good example of the timeless human response to stories.

Now what I have described so far might be called the impulse for the story. The writer is then face with how to construct the thing in order to best present the characters and the dilemmas. You might begin with the final event, for instance, and then fill the reader in on how things led up to that. You might tell everything from the point of view of the main character, or from the point of view of the policeman, or the elephant. These are decisions to be made by the writer when confronted with the material. Writers ask themselves which would be the best way to bring the story and the reader together.

For don’t forget that writing fiction, telling stories, is a form of communication. There are at least three parts to the contract: the writer, the story and the reader. And it is the writer’s job to construct the story I such a beguiling way that there will be a reader. The writer has a responsibility to engage and even entertain - and certainly to move - the reader. Writing a story is job you give yourself - nobody really asks you to do it - so you have to be really strong and convincing. Which brings me back to the idea of confidence. Your voice must be confident. And such confidence is linked to urgency. Any story you tell should really be a story you feel you urgently need to tell. When that urgency is present, the decisions about how to begin, how to end, how to construct what happens in between - these will largely be made at an unconscious level. It is useful to recall the story of Scherezade - she had to interest the Sultan in her stories night after night so that he would not kill her, but would keep coming back for more (stories).

Sometimes students ask me whether there are any subjects that are taboo as material for short stories. I don’t know of any. Of course there are fashions - and sometimes it is OK to follow fashion, and sometimes it isn’t. The range of subject matter in the ten winning stories is very wide. What I wanted was to feel engaged and moved by what I read. There are a couple of things to bear in mind - short stories have a limited number of characters, and the reader’s attention needs to be focused on a limited range of events - perhaps just one event or one aspect of life. I am asked about dialogue. Well, dialogue is a wonderful way to move the story along and to demonstrate the characters. But some people are better at writing dialogue than others. There is no rule that says there needs to be dialogue. If you are not so good at it, don’t do it. Go away and practise, maybe, and write dialogue another time.

I spoke of urgency. The winning story in the adult category ‘Joey’ is a beautiful narrative which speaks with quiet, confident urgency. It is immaculately constructed, employs lively dialogue, and draws the reader through the events to a moving and deeply satisfying conclusion. There is the interplay of close friendship and enduring love, marred by tragedy, between the distinctive characters of the narrator and Joey.

The winner of the teenage section is a story called ‘Distance’. This is a remarkably successful story which uses the element of dream in a very powerful way. It is dangerous and difficult to use dream in fiction. The writing is vivid and lyrical, and the characters are alive in the mind of the reader. The principal character is particularly firm and engaging.

The junior section was won by a story of disaster. ‘Aftermath of the Quake.’ The description is economical and very convincing, told in the first person. There is tension, and then there is relief, and final resolution. A happy ending for the family who are safe, but a scene of devastation all around. This is an ambitious and sophisticated story.

Then the winner of the residents’ category ‘That Gipsy Touch’ is a strong and well constructed story with a very successful sex scene. This story has several vivid characters and an atmosphere of violence, mystery and conflict.

These stories and the runners-up will be bound and made available in the library. Please read them. You will be amazed and entertained. And if you are hoping to write stories of your own, you will find in these inspiration and even instruction. For people who want to write stories must, I believe, read stories. Reading gives you the rhythm of what a story is. You will learn far more about writing from reading good stories than you will from listening to me.

Roving Party Review

2011-05-31T00:33:00.000-07:00

Review by Carmel Bird of The Roving Party by Rohan Wilson.

This review is published in Australian Book Review - June 2011

Stories of the impact of European discovery, exploration, invasion and settlement on Australia are naturally a source of fascination to novelists. The microcosm of the island of Tasmania, with its cruel yet beautiful landscapes, and its unforgiving weather, offers these stories with a special kind of eerie horror. Against the landscape, the stories emerge both in concert and in counterpoint, describing the stains which forever disfigure and haunt the place. Tasmania was less a frontier in the American sense of the word, than a dead end.

Although the blood of indigenous Tasmanians still flows in the veins of many people, the principal narrative of the violent fracture and disappearance of the tribes is one of doom and destruction, and like many tales of the conflicts between outsiders and indigenous peoples, the stories are often inhabited by strange heroes and villains. The geography of the island ensures that the atmosphere is bleak, with a sense of terminal horror in the making (an atmosphere notably captured in the 2009 movie Van Diemen’s Land). The non-fiction works of such writers as Henry Reynolds and Lyndall Ryan have vividly documented this period, giving rise to what have been called the history wars between historians who believe the first Tasmanians suffered genocide at the hands of the British, and those who deny this interpretation of events. Fiction, of course, has licence to move into the realm of the imagination, taking inspiration from the apparent facts of history, and moving into the minds and hearts of characters, some of whom have been plucked from history, some of whom have been invented by writers.

This novel is set in the time when Governor Arthur was bringing in his draconian reforms to the colony, ensuring that Van Diemen’s Land was in fact the fiercest dictatorship in the world, an abyss, a hell on earth. In the course of the narrative, Arthur cancels the bounty he had put on the heads of members of indigenous tribes, so that the enterprise driving the group described as the ‘roving party’ who are hunting down the tribesmen, after days and nights of brutal and grotesque activity, is void. The historical figure that looms large in the story is John Batman who is (in the history books) seen as the villain who tricked the tribes of Port Phillip in Victoria into handing over the land on which Melbourne now stands. In The Roving Party Batman is still living in Van Diemen’s Land, leading a very small and motley group in search of native people for capture, involving also massacres. Batman’s group consists of a boy, four convicts, two black trackers, a farmhand, and Black Bill.

Black Bill is the conflicted central character. He sets up a literary echo of Joe Christmas in Light in August, being a black man brought up as white. The abiding motif of the book is smoke, and Black Bill lodges in the reader’s consciousness veiled in a wreath or cloud or smudge of smoke, as if his very being is veiled, ghostly. There are the campfires of the roving party, the pipes the men smoke, and frequently Black Bill scans the heavens for the smoke of tribal fires. At the heart of the narrative are his dreams in which he talks to his unborn child.

Although the whole book follows the party as they roam about the harsh forbidding landscape shooting people and dogs in detailed realistic scenes of graphic gore, there is a deep mythic level located within Black Bill. The novel opens with reference to his unspoken tribal name, a name he has ‘no good use for’, and ends as he whispers the ‘secret name’ of his dead baby son. He longs, at the end, for future dreams in which this dead son will visit him. There is a terrible beauty in this redemptive act of naming. The name ‘Black Bill’ is a nasty British nick-name, and in fact the character is more often designated by the narrative as ‘the Vandemonian’, the only character so named. It raises him to a grand status, yet marks him out for doom. The dead child works as a symbol of the obliteration of the tribes, for it (the mother says it was female, Black Bill says it was male) was in fact monstrously ill-formed and hopeless, like a vestigial gesture of nature. Yet for Black Bill and Katherine (the mother) it remains the spiritual link to themselves, and hence to the blood of the tribe. The baby’s body is incinerated at birth, and Katherine wears the polished skull ‘mooncoloured, pale and jawless’ on a cord around her neck. Bill cups the skull in his hands and whispers to it, ‘desolate of heart’.

If there is one adjective that would cover the story of the roving party it is that one – desolate. There is a catalogue of rapes and murders: ‘As he surveyed the great unbroken blackness circling the camp he was caught from behind by the hair and a broad winking blade cleaved his throat to the vertebra.’ And against this relentless bone-splitting, blood-letting savagery, swirls the sad lyricism of: ‘Bereft of their women and children the clansmen crossed their clanhold at a pace and progressed along the frontier as if they were as insubstantial as the stays of mistfilled light between the silver wattles.’

It comes as no surprise that this grim and astonishing novel was chosen as the winner of this year’s Vogel award. END

Raf the Dog

2011-05-21T16:34:00.000-07:00

Raf the Dog

Published in Meanjin, June 2011

‘All knowledge – the totality of all questions and answers – is contained in the dog.’

Franz Kafka from ‘Investigations of the Dog’.

In the seventeenth century Cervantes wrote a story called ‘The Conversation of Dogs’. It consisted of the midnight conversation between two dogs as overheard by the narrator of the story. And long before that, in the fifth century BC the fables of Aesop recorded the wit, wisdom and character traits of the animals. In more recent times there are the tales of Beatrix Potter and the works of Lewis Carroll. The Mouse and His Child by Russell Hoban is a brilliant modern example of the tradition. Talking animals are most often found in stories for children, although famous examples of adult works in the genre are by Orwell, Chekov and Woolf. Recently Andrew O’Hagan published The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe which is written by a maltese belonging to the star.

The world is probably divided into two kinds of people, those who like books by dogs and those who don’t. I do. I loved the idea of O’Hagan’s book when I first heard of it, and I was utterly captivated by the reading, thrilled by the wit, energy and rhythm of the writing. The reflections of Maf are superb insights into America in the early sixties, as well as into big subjects such as literature, art, psychology, history and politics. This is philosophy at its most engaging. The view Maf gives of Marilyn is unlike any other, and is ultimately a most lucid and moving one. He can read her mind, and there is a point at which she can read his. He is so wise and wistful, she so fragile and doomed. On the one hand this book is a revelation about all the dogs in literature and art, and on the other it is a novel of profound and highly entertaining insight into the human heart.

It is this novel that has given me the courage to tell the story of

‘Raf the Dog – a Tale of Mystery, Money and the Supernatural’.

Many years ago when I was living in the city I felt the need for a companion in the form of a small white dog. My daughter is an expert at finding cats and dogs for humans, so she was on the case, preferring to give homes to rescued dogs rather than get brand new ones. We investigated several shelters, but to no avail. I grew tired of the hunt and finally decided to buy a new puppy. The price of course began at around $400. This was not going to be easy. Taking a common sense approach I went to the local credit union and opened a special purpose account.

‘What is the purpose?’ asked the teller, not looking up from her keyboard.

‘I am buying a dog.’

There was a sudden burst of sunlight that radiated instantly from within the teller. Her gold bracelets jangled, her spectacles winked, her lovely teeth gleamed at me with pleasure.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘a dog! What kind of dog?’

‘A maltese.’

‘Oh yes! Yes. They are so beautiful. So sweet. So wise and wistful. You are doing the right thing.’

So I did the right thing and deposited some idiotically small amount of money in the account which was recorded as being ‘For Purchase of Dog’.

Project Dog was under way.

When I got home there was a message on the phone from my daughter.

It said:

‘I have your dog. Call me.’

This was like the message left by a dognapper. Alarming and horrible.

With pounding heart I called back and she told me she was out at the RSPCA with a sad little maltese in her arms. I rushed out to see him, and there he was, a tiny, bewildered, skin and bone creature in a blue knitted jacket staring up at me with big brown eyes. Wise? Yes. Wistful? Oh yes. Love at first sight. He had been abandoned in an outer suburb, and had somehow survived long enough to be rescued. I bought him, and two days later was able to take him home. My daughter likes to name animals, and she named him Rafael, after the Archangel. I took him to visit the lady at the credit union and she lit up all over again.

‘The Archangel!’ she cried.

He has many charming ways, but one of his rather tedious habits consists of sniffing and grubbing vigorously under scruffy bushes by the side of the road. Once he came out of the bush having divested himself of his fancy overcoat. A Superman moment. And another time, having been busily grubbing, he emerged from the bush with something in his mouth. It was a mobile phone.

I took the phone home and worked out how to contact the owner. She said she would come round in a few minutes and collect the phone. Before long she was jogging down the front path, ponytail flying, sunglasses on top of her head, pink lycra and silver trainers flashing in the sun.

‘Hi, I’m Samsara.’ She was bouncing on the spot. I kind of understood how the phone had ended up in the bush.

I said hello and held out the phone. Without a break in the bouncing, she reached out and swept the phone from my palm.

‘Thanks,’ she said, and was gone, bouncing off up the garden path and out the gate.

I never heard from her again. Her name is from Sanskrit, and Wikipedia says it ‘refers to a place, set of objects and possessions, but originally referred to a process of continuous pursuit of flow of life.’ Well, she did seem to be in continuous pursuit of that flow, down the garden path and up again. Did I receive a card, a note, an email, a text? Roses? Champagne? Right, I did not.

A few years later I decided to sell the house in the city and move to the backblocks. There would be an auction. There would be Open For Inspection. On the first day of the inspections I planned, as is proper, to be far away from the house. However that morning my computer packed up, and just before the inspectors were due to arrive, the technician came, so when the people were looking over the house, I was in the study with the tech and the computer. I was trying to pay no attention to what was going on behind me, but suddenly a voice said:

‘Hi, remember me, I’m Samsara.’

Sure enough, there she was, her ponytail intact, her clothes more sober, and in her arms a baby, at her feet a child, behind her a husband. She recalled the incident of the mobile, and then they all moved on, mingling with the other visitors. Were they serious? Well I didn’t hang around on the other Open for Inspection days, but always on the list of people the name Samara would appear.

On auction day, going, going, gone, Samsara bought the house.

No roses, no champagne, just a cheque for the deposit, balance due in sixty days.

How the spectacles of the lady at the credit union sparkled and twinkled. How she clapped her hands and rattled her bracelets.

‘What a dog!’ she said. ‘What a dog!’

little people review

2011-05-02T18:42:00.000-07:00

Review by Carmel Bird

of novel Little People by Jane Sullivan

This is a prize-winning novel, runner-up in the 2010 CAL-Scribe Fiction prize for a novel by a writer over 35 years of age. It blends the powerful theme of dogged maternal love with the extraordinary world of P.T.Barnum’s freak shows. I once visited the circus museum in San Antonio, Texas, and for a long time I looked in amazement at the exquisite miniature carriage of General Tom Thumb. So delicate, so doll-like, so sad. The sight of it brought home to me the everyday reality of the strange life of a human being who was not just from another time, but from a branch of the human race that had fashioned a form of success out of disability and adversity.

The novel, a darkly romantic fairytale with fantastic elements of nineteenth century gothic is set in Australia in 1870. The central character is Mary Ann who starts out, Bronte-like, as a governess, but with something more Dickensian-grotesque lying in wait for her. Pregnant to the father of her charges, she desperately seeks an abortion in the hideous back streets of Melbourne. When she is unable to go through with it she finds herself in the river where she rescues someone who appears to be a drowning child. This person is, however, none other than Tom Thumb, the world famous circus dwarf who is touring the country with his troupe. Mary Ann has fallen into very strange company indeed. Is she safe, or has she descended from the frying pan into the fire?

In an historical note the author explains that the troupe did visit Australia for a nine-month tour in 1870, and that Mary Ann’s story is, however, pure fiction. The two elements of history and fiction are woven together to produce the fabric of the action-filled story. The novel unfolds in chapters that are narrated by Mary Ann, while there are occasional sections narrated by other characters, namely the various midgets. (The correct term ‘pituitary dwarfism’ is given in the historical note, but not used in the body of the text.) Each section, presented as a ‘sideshow’, is prefaced by a black and white photograph of the relevant midget. The pictures are poignant, as well as beguiling and fascinating in themselves. While they are a respectable post-modern device, I found them disconcerting. For they constantly reminded me of the factual world of the troupe, when I was actually following the ups and downs of the imagined saga of Mary Ann. The author in her note is frank about the distinctions she drew between the history and the fiction, but the appearance of photographs of the ‘real’ characters somehow serves to undermine the ‘reality’ I desired for the characters of invention. A reader is willing to be swept up in the world of fiction, and to be pulled back with a reminder that it is only fiction after all sets up an interference and a tension that do not serve the tale which is in this case building to a climax way beyond reality.

Water is a dominant motif throughout, Mary Ann frequently being characterised as mermaid-like, with Tennyson’s 1830 poem “The Mermaid” threading its way through the story in ways that are sometimes part of romance, and sometimes part of something very ominous. Mary Ann is a ragged Madonna figure. There is a sense of impending doom and disaster that Mary Ann can’t quite put her finger on, but it dogs her as she valiantly battles to survive and to guard the life of her unborn child. Hideous images of the so-called mermaids that used to be exhibited in museums and freak shows lurk in the muddy gloom that swirls through the narrative, seemingly waiting to swallow up Mary Ann and her baby.

The unborn child is central to the novel’s plot, and it has the dangerous quality of someone messianic. Tom Thumb puts round the story that the child is his, conceived by some kind of electrical magnetism when he and Mary Ann were struggling for survival in the river.

The nine month period of the midgets’ time in Australia is beautifully apt for the gestation of the baby, the progression of the pregnancy lending the novel much of its suspense. The reader is never able to forget that Mary Ann is pregnant. Tom Thumb and his wife Lavinia are also focused on this fact. Childless, the couple are known to borrow babies to dandle in photographs, and there is a deep shuddering fear that they are planning to kidnap Mary Ann’s baby and abandon Mary Ann. With a touching simplicity and innocence, Mary Ann is unable to believe that such wickedness could really be. For she retains, through thick and thin, the blameless perseverance of a Jane Eyre type. But will she win through? Can she, in this bewildering world where good and evil blend like blood and milk in water, can she ever work out who is her Mr Rochester? The reader can see, for the clues are consistently planted, but Mary Ann is blind to her destiny, and herein lies her almost fatal error.

The final section of the novel takes off rather like an episode of Dr Who, and builds to the wild conclusion, with all the elements coming together to amaze the reader. At the very beginning Mary Ann said she had ‘no idea how dangerous the world could be’. How right she was.

2011-03-16T15:46:00.000-07:00

WRITING THE STORY OF YOUR LIFE: Ultimate Guide to Writing Memoir (HarperCollins) by Carmel Bird

At the Perth Writers' Festival 2011 I gave a workshop in writing memoir. Below is an interview that Perth writer Tamara Hunter did with me on that occasion. The interview can also be read on www.waxings.wordpress.com

Tamara Hunter’s Interview With Carmel Bird

at Perth Writers’ Festival

A New York Times writer recently suggested, rather bluntly, that about three quarters of the memoirs on the market should never have seen the light of day. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/30/books/review/Genzlinger-t.html?_r=3&pagewanted=1

There was a time, Neil Genzlinger wrote, when “unremarkable lives went unremarked upon, the way God intended”. Genzlinger knew he sounded harsh, but stuck to his conviction that the memoirs market is an absurdly bloated genre in dire need of culling.

I half expect award-winning Australian writer Carmel Bird to disagree - especially since she’s written an engaging guide for aspiring memoirists and when we spoke was preparing to give a workshop on the subject at the recent Perth Writers Festival.

However Bird, whose extensive catalogue includes a collection of startlingly original short and long fiction and several writing guides, says Genzlinger has a point.

“The best thing he said - and I think this applies to all writing – is if you didn’t feel you were discovering something (as you wrote it) don’t publish it,” she says.

“Another great thing he said is ordeal without perspective is merely an ordeal. I couldn’t agree more. You’ve got to have perspective and perceptiveness and a lot other things - control of language and the like. And then he talked about immature writers writing memoirs and I agree with that as well.”

It turns out that it’s one thing to have a fascinating life or experience - another entirely to write about it compellingly. While many memoirs may walk off the shelf due to the name on the jacket, that doesn’t necessarily make them good memoirs.

“Celebrity memoirs, for instance, are just full of trashy writing and sentimental cliché,” Bird says. “I think the celebs could write - but of course they don't have to bother because the marketing decision is guided not by the quality of the memoir, but by the value of the celebrity.”

Bird doesn’t want to bag anyone but cites a public figure who achieved remarkable things at a young age, only to turn out a memoir which proved to be the least interesting part of the whole story – a book which demonstrated that no matter what that person’s other qualities, they lacked any kind of passion for writing. Passion, says Bird, is key.

“There has to be a dedication and passion for the literary process at some level in order for the experience to be properly communicated, decently communicated, helpfully communicated to other people,” she says.

She refers to one of the books reviewed by Genzlinger -- the only one of four named memoirs to be reviewed positively - and highlights his description of it as a spare, beautiful exploration.

“That’s what we want, beautiful exploration; a beautiful exploration where the writer takes the reader’s hand and says ‘Well, let’s explore this together’, and the reader feels safe. And the reader feels they are having moments of revelation and illumination. That sounds a bit grand, but that’s what literature does – it illuminates you.”

Bird talks beautifully of the writers’ impulse to explain themselves to the world and the world to themselves.

“Sometimes in the process of doing that, the writer discovers that they have some insights about the world to offer to other people,” she says. “That is a gift that they can offer to the world, and when you offer someone a gift - say it’s cookies - you make the best cookies you can. You wrap them up in nice paper and you tie them up with a bow and you write a nice card and you give them as a gift. Writing is the same - you do the best you can.”

So how do you find the writing equivalent of the pretty paper and bow?

“Experience, practice and reading,” Bird responds at once. “Life experience, practising writing, and reading good writing. If you want to write fiction, you read fiction. If you want to write memoirs, you read memoirs.”

Bird - who has taught writing in workshops and classes over many years – is of the considered opinion that anybody who puts their mind to it can write simply, cleanly, and in a way that engages readers, especially once encouraged to throw away cliché and elaborate, empty phrases and vocabulary.

“But in there there’s a writer, isn’t there? They put their mind to it. They don’t only put their mind to it – they put their heart, their mind, their time, their life, everything to it. And if they do that, they can do it.”

Bird, who also wrote the disarming Dear Writer, a series of warm, humorously instructive letters from a fictional manuscript assessor to an aspiring writer of fiction, says memoir writing can be even more emotionally draining than fiction.

“Not always. I mean fiction writing can be very demanding on the writer, depending on what they’re writing about. But memoir writing can really touch the heart of the writer very, very deeply, and be very troubling as they’re writing. Quite often if they write and then read out what they’ve written to their friends or a group of other writers, they find the emotion comes out when they try to read it. It can be really hard.”

Painful as it can be though, Bird says that ultimately writing should be a pleasurable process.

“I mean, if you can’t derive pleasure from it, don’t do it. I’m writing a novel at the moment and I have to dedicate a lot of time every day to that, which means there are other things that I can’t do. Now I would prefer to do the novel than to do the other things, to tell you the truth, but there are choices I have to make.

“On the other hand, as I sit at the computer writing that novel, I’m having the greatest fun. It’s not a funny novel, but I’m having the best time, and I’m getting a lot of pleasure. I’m sitting there discovering something. That’s what I’m doing – I’m discovering. And I can’t do it in my head. I can think up something or other about the novel that’s something I might write tomorrow but until I write it, I don’t discover it, and it’s a marvellous, marvellous feeling to discover the thing as you go along. And when the writer is making those discoveries, the ultimate reader will go along and discover too.”

She comes back to the idea of writing as a gift, saying that once you write something down – even in a diary that isn’t discovered for 100 years – you’re transferring your thoughts, your life, your heart and your feelings to at least one other person.

“We read Samuel Pepys’ diary, from years ago, and the life that brings to that era is extraordinary. Of course he was probably a genius, but anybody can do it to a degree. It doesn’t mean that every memoir is going to be a best seller. Not every child who learns the violin ends up at Carnegie Hall, but they can give pleasure by playing their little concert to their friends, to their family. So I think there is a place for remembering that writing fiction, but in particular writing memoirs, is a gift that the writer is offering the other people.

“Anybody can write. But writing well is about passion and love for the writing, and dedication and discipline and giving it the time and space. And dignity - giving writing its dignity. Technique matters if the writing is to have the strength to engage readers. My book and workshops set out to equip people with techniques of writing.

“I know it sounds kind of airy fairy and impossible, but I do think that if people have some skills, and if they write with the truth of their own hearts, then they will write well.”

· Carmel Bird is a leading Australian novelist and short story writer who has been repeatedly short-listed for the Miles Franklin Award. Her work frequently explores dark or menacing themes in a highly original, witty and unexpected manner. Her novels include Cape Grimm, Red Shoes, The White Garden and The Bluebird Cafe. She is the author of several short story collections and has edited several anthologies including, in1998, The Stolen Children – Their Stories, and most recently, Home Truth. She has also taught writing extensively, and has written three books of writing advice including Writing the Story of Your Life: The Ultimate Guide. Her most recent novel is Child of the Twilight. She grew up in Tasmania and now lives in Victoria.

Perth Writers'Festival

2011-03-04T18:06:00.000-08:00

#This weekend I am at the Writers'Festival in Perth.
The festival is at the beautiful University of Western
Australia, and the sun is shining.

#My first session on Saturday
March 5th is with Brenda Walker and Hetti Perkins.
We are discussing the concept of HOME. Donna Ward is in the
chair.

#Second session is with Fiona McGregor and Natasha Lester.
We will talk about writing fiction, and how novels have the
ability to reveal what goes on behind the facades of
everyday life. Terri Ann White is in the chair.

#Third is a Sunday workshop on how to write memoir, with
reference to my book "Writing the Story of Your Life".

#Then on Monday there is a session on how fiction
expresses the idea of grief. My novel "Child of the Twilight"
is the one I will be discussing here.
The other writers on the panel are Natasha Lester and Stephen
Daisley.
Dennis Haskell is in the chair.

Beggars of Carlton

2010-10-20T18:39:00.000-07:00

Spring in Melbourne. At dusk the restaurant tables on the pavements are crowded with joyful customers tucking into the famous dishes of Lygon Street, Carlton. The air is warm with the aroma of coffee and Italian cooking. The bookshops are doing a steady trade. Cabs cruise and swoop. Professional beggars are drifting out of the shadows, quietly targeting their prey.

I have spent the past two hours enjoying the festivities of a book launch among the crammed shelves of Readings Bookshop where I have been launching Helen Heritage’s novel. Dotted among the fans and family are the free-loaders who are there for the drinks and nibbles. One of them cruises among about with his skate-board under his arm, snaffling the canapés, doing a circuit, coming back for more. There is a small irony in the title of the novel I am launching: Borrowed Landscape. But among the chatter and goodwill there seems to be space for the man with the skate-board and his ilk.

When I emerge from the bookshop, the street is buzzing and twinkling and clattering with a kind of anticipation of good things to come in the night. Somebody is playing a harmonica, but softly, underneath the jostling music of the crowd. I look up and down the street, searching for a likely place to hail a cab. It would be nice to have a cup of coffee outside Tiamo, but no, I must hurry home.

So there I am at the traffic lights on the corner, scanning four ways for a cab, my right arm in the air, when somebody steps in front of me, and says softly but firmly: ‘Carmel’. Quickly I take in the shape and detail of the man – he is not young, is unshaven, he is dressed in greasy tatters, a broken backpack over his left shoulder. I have never seen him before. He’s one of the beggars, and has emerged from the shadows to ask for ‘six dollars to get a room for the night’.

Just then a cab pulls up for me and I grab the door. As we sweep off down the street, the image of the beggar stays with me and I realise he must have picked my name from the book launch. As I said, professional beggars.

2010-09-29T17:27:00.000-07:00

CD-ROM of 1998 novel Red Shoes

In 1998 Random House published my novel Red Shoes, and the book was accompanied by an interactive CD-ROM. I am now engaged in a search for original copies of the CD-ROM. If you have one and would like to sell it to me, please get in touch: carmel@carmelbird.com

Book Review of Bereft by Chris Womersly

2010-08-30T05:21:00.000-07:00

Carmel Bird's review of Bereft a novel by Chris Womersly published by Scribe

Review published in Australian Book Review, September 2010

The 1914-18 war is lodged in the minds of Australians with the power of myth. Chris Womersley, in startling, powerful, plain yet tender and lyrical prose, has constructed a heart-breaking narrative that opens up the wounds of war, laying bare like sinews the events that track back before the conflict and reach forward into the collective memory. I was reminded of A.S. Byatt’s recent novel The Children’s Book which also foregrounds in poetic language the so-called Great War, and similarly etches forever the stark horror of broken bodies and minds on the consciousness of its readers.

In Bereft, Mary Walker, in her quarantined bedroom in the small NSW country town of Flint, in 1919, is dying, a victim of the influenza epidemic (often referred to here as ‘the plague’) that followed the Great War. Her only daughter, Sarah, was raped and murdered at the age of twelve, in 1909. After the child’s death, Sarah’s older brother Quinn ran off and was not seen again. He was presumed to have committed the crime. A telegram from the Army told his mother he fought in the war and was killed. In her fevered isolation Mary is ‘comforted by visions of her lost children’. It is she who gave those children their passionate love of stories, saying that a good story is ‘like medicine’, but also she who speculates that maybe stories are a way of ‘hiding from the world’. It is Mary who realises there is no word to define a mother who has lost a child, Mary who grasps the word ‘bereft’ to describe herself, Mary therefore who gives the novel its title.

The ‘story’ you will read in this novel tells how Quinn perhaps survived the war and returned home after all, like a fugitive living ghost when his mother was dying, and how he took revenge for his sister’s murder, and for the ruin of his own existence. His elusive presence in Flint in 1919 takes on, for the people remaining in the little town, the ‘shimmer of truth’. Such a shimmer plays and tantalises across the novel, drawing the reader into the broken heart of the world as it emerges from the meaningless carnage and infection of war into the chimeric rubble of peace. The war, with its mythic qualities, takes on the face of a hideous dreamscape, and the fact that hallucination is never far from the novel’s landscape adds to the breathless nightmare nature of the story. Sometimes I felt a kind of faint echo of Under Milk Wood flickering through the fabric of the scenes, although in Bereft there is nothing whimsical. This is an account of terrible, terrible cruelty, of profound and wrenching sorrow. War is the big drama of human horror, but in what passes for peacetime are enacted also the basest moments of exquisite cruelty. That Womersley can marry these two extremes, and construct a narrative in which the reader is left with a burning sense of regret, tenderness and love, is a mark of his skill and of his fictional reach.

On his secret return home in 1919 Quinn inhabits the wild places in the hills behind Flint, leading a fugitive existence, with stealthy visits to his dying mother. One time he takes her a bunch of lavender, a herb known for its power to induce drowsiness, and later she is unsure whether she spoke to her son, or imagined she did. The reader is frequently placed in a similar position of doubt, but this effect is used in the narrative to increase a desire to believe, to in fact strengthen the credibility of the supernatural element of the text. Quinn has visited a London medium, and come away with a written message from the spirit of his beloved sister Sarah: ‘Don’t forget me. Come back and save me. Please.’ This note is his treasure and his talisman. Truth is a sombre and fragile matter.

Into Quinn’s life in the wild comes a strange elphin companion, a twelve year-old orphan sprite-girl named Sadie Fox who is looking for her brother, ‘a pilot in the war’. Quinn and Sadie have, in Quinn’s own words, ‘conjured each other’. They are each of the earth, having the ability to listen to the deep sounds of the natural world. Quinn constantly compares the busy lives of insects with the lives of human beings, and he can detect the ‘grinding of the earth’ as it revolves in space. It is a world forsaken by God, where in a moment of Blakean symbolism Sadie kills a sacrificial lamb.

Quinn’s quest for revenge moves relentlessly on with the tension of a thriller, pacing Sadie’s dream-desire to go with him to Kensington Gardens where there is a ‘fairy queen and she grants wishes’. Quinn himself concedes that this would be a fresh green place filled with mist. And so a link to Byatt’s The Children’s Book is firmly clarified. In both novels the ghastly stench and blood and mud and bone of war are played against the sad narrative of Peter Pan and the fairies, both articulating the inability of human beings to imagine anything more useful than fairyland. Quinn and Sadie and a grey horse walk away on an ‘ordinary Sunday morning’, closing the story to the accompaniment of hymns floating from the church. The reader can only weep for them, and for the suffering of the foolish world.

Home Truth

2010-08-18T23:29:00.000-07:00

Go to http://somehometruths.blogspot.com/ for interview on Home Truth anthology

Melbourne Writers' Festival

2010-08-17T21:32:00.000-07:00

At the Melbourne Writers' Festival 2010 I will be speaking about my novel

Child of the Twilight

at a session called Writing Women.

Some of the key content of my novel is concerned with the existence of miraculous black statues of the Virgin Mary in Europe.

On my own dressing table I have a tiny statue of the black madonna from Guadalupe in Spain. She is dressed in a robe of atmosphere-sensitive chips that change colour with the weather. When it is hot she is bright turquoise, when it is cold she moves through pale yucky pink to icy-blue white. Her little black face remains forever pitch black.

I was in Guadalupe doing research for my Child of the Twilight, some of which is set in Spain, and much of which is concerned with the theft of a religious statue. In my Festival session on Women Writing I will discuss the question of the black images of the Virgin Mary - as well as other things.
In my other session on storytelling at Toff of the Town I will be telling a story.
It won't be a story about black madonnas, so just so you know, the story of the lady of Guadalupe goes like this:

In 1326 a cowherd, in response to seeing a vision of the Virgin, dug up a casket which contained a black statue of Mary. The statue had been buried six centuries earlier by knights fleeing from the Saracens. It became an object of veneration, and is believed to have been responsible for many miracles. When Columbus set out to discover the New World, he began his journey from the steps of the cathedral at Guadalupe, and placed his ships under the patronage of the Black Virgin of Guadalupe.

A great story I think.

Enid Blyton

2010-08-06T23:12:00.000-07:00

The Enid Blyton Question

When I was at university in the 1950s I wrote, as part of a thesis on writing for children, a piece on the work of Enid Blyton. The idea was hardly revolutionary, simply being that although the writing was not so great, the appeal to children was phenomenal. At that time the works were often the subject of discussions among librarians mainly because of the inbuilt racism, but they were a fairly new topic for academic treatment. Since then I have not paid very much attention to them.

But among my collection of old videos is a copy of The Magic Faraway Tree, and of all the old videos the one my grandson fixed on was this one. He asked for the book of the film. So his father started reading it to him at bedtime, and now the child has become enchanted by, and a bit obsessed with, Enid Blyton. He has a favourite CD of Kate Winslet reading The Magic Faraway Tree. And I know a grandmother whose grand-daughter of a similar age has also fallen for all this. Admittedly I am dealing with an anecdotal sample of two.

The copies the children are hearing are from the old texts, although the Winslet recording makes changes such as in the names – I am not sure what else. The child notices and discusses the differences, but these do not seem to bother him. The vocabulary and ideas of the originals he treats as he treats any story – it is good narrative and it engages him and he learns new words and ways of being.

I bought him a new version of one of the books, and he accepted that this was the same but different, and so what.

The old Enid still writes terrible sentences, but she still has the power to enchant and enslave readers with her narrative drug. Changing her stuff seems to be a waste of time – unless it is just a ploy to boost sales, which I suppose is all it is.

2010-06-29T16:48:00.000-07:00

HOME TRUTH - published July 2010 Fourth Estate - Essays by ten Australian writers on the idea of 'home'

INTRODUCTION by Carmel Bird

‘He was alone, three million light-years from home.’ So concludes

the first chapter of the novel of the film E.T. Packed between

‘alone’ and ‘home’, those three million light-years express the vast

and tender emotions carried by the concept of home, the place of

origin, the place of belonging, of comfort, of relationship, the

haven. Home is the place each human being (and each extraterrestrial)

seeks with the heart. In 1982 Steven Spielberg gave the

world the imperative ‘E.T. phone home.’ This unlikely little clump

of words went straight to the core of the matter. Connection with

home is the genesis of hope.

In this collection of essays ten writers have taken ten personal

approaches to the meaning of ‘home’. They sometimes locate their

home in the country of origin, in the town, in the house, but almost

all move into some examination of relationships with others, and

also into the nature of the self. ‘Home’ it seems is bound up with

identity. Exploration of identity frequently takes the writers into

recollections of their early selves, and ‘home’ sometimes lies very

close to the places and relationships of childhood. Contemplation

of home leads back to the mother and forward to the grave, such a

trajectory bringing writers inevitably again to an examination of

the self.

All the essayists are established Australian writers, writers

who have had a great deal of time and experience on which to

reflect. The details are different for each one, but then each in

some way or other ultimately comes up against the sense of the

self. Australia is a continent to which Europeans came in the

eighteenth century partly for the purpose of establishing European

culture, in an attempt to convert a land they experienced as foreign

and hostile into a land they could ultimately consider to be home.

The terrible violence and tragedy of this exercise whereby

powerful invaders overtook the homeland of the indigenous

peoples will forever mark this country. And the invaders carried

with them their own tragic underclass, people who were forced

into exile from their homelands. The idea of home is horribly

scored and burned into the story of this country.

In 1997 a government report on the lives of thousands of

indigenous Australians who had been taken from their families was

published. It was called Bringing Them Home. This is a most

striking example of the powerful use of the word ‘home’, a word

which is used so frequently in speech and writing without

necessarily very much reflection. All the emotion of the stories

contained in the report is packed into the word. Home. The report

contained personal accounts by indigenous people of their

childhood experience of being removed from their families and

homes and relocated. I edited and published a collection of these

stories in 1998 in The Stolen Children – Their Stories.

That is all a long time ago now, and it may seem odd to say so,

but as a result of seeing the word ‘home’ in the title of the report, I

have been contemplating the word ever since, wondering what it

means to people, how writers might explore it and describe it. This

present collection is the result of my contemplation. The writers

here are all people of principally European heritage, all originating

from migrations at various times up to the middle of last century.

A collection of ten essays implies a small selection, and I have

confined this selection particularly to writers who work with

images. I believe it is images that can give the writers the power to

carry their understanding of the word ‘home’ into the hearts and

minds of readers. For the word itself is an abstraction, and requires

the solidity of the image in order to come to life.

In February 2009 bushfires in rural Victoria killed 173 people.

Pictures of burnt-out houses are the graphic symbols of those lost

lives. These houses were homes, they were repositories of

possessions, hopes and dreams. They were the fragile havens, the

places of supposed safety and nurture, the locations where the

people placed their identities. The word ‘homeless’ has a terrible,

terrible ring. When you are homeless, where is your identity?

Since 1788 Australia has been a place of migrations, from the

people who came here in search of a new home in the nineteenth

and twentieth centuries, to those who still today make their way

here in the hope of a better life, a hope that is sometimes frustrated

and dashed. Home, they are all looking for their home. The place

they once called home has in many cases become a place of danger

and fear, rendering it no longer truly ‘home’.

The essays in this collection address in various ways the

question of what ‘home’ might mean. It is my hope and

expectation that readers will take the essays as inspiration for

further contemplation on the meaning of the term.

I am sometimes visited by the memory of a dusty pink rose

that bloomed in my garden some years ago. In the hollow centre of

the rose lived a bright green praying mantis that seemed very much

at home. In the end, the rose lost its petals and died. I always

wonder where the insect went. And a most moving and potent uses

of the word ‘home’ can be seen on the First World War memorial

in the Sydney Botanical Gardens. The reference is to the horses

that were, at the conclusion of the war, shot by the soldiers who

loved them. Rather than see these faithful animals fall into the

unloving hands of local traders, the men destroyed them. On the

memorial is the statement: ‘They did not come home.’

2010-05-29T20:33:00.000-07:00

I LOVE THIS BOOK

TITLE: The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe AUTHOR: Andrew O’Hagan PUBLISHER: Faber and Faber

REVIEWER: Carmel Bird

This novel declares itself in its title. It is written by Marilyn’s Maltese. The world is probably divided into two kinds of people, those who like books by dogs and those who don’t. I do. I loved the idea of this book when I first heard of it, and I was utterly captivated by the reading, thrilled by the wit, energy and rhythm of the writing. The reflections of Maf are superb insights into America in the early sixties, as well as into big subjects such as literature, art, psychology, history and politics. This is philosophy at its most engaging. There is an ancient tradition in literature where animals speak to and for humans. Maf identifies a book by Cervantes ‘The Conversation of the Dogs’ as marking the birth of the genre in the development of the modern novel, and goes on to cite examples by Woolf, Chekov, Orwell and many more. Kafka he quotes: ‘All knowledge – the totality of all questions and answers – is contained in the dog.’ The view Maf gives of Marilyn is unlike any other, and is ultimately a most lucid and moving one. He can read her mind, and there is a point at which she can read his. He is so wise and wistful, she so fragile and doomed. On the one hand this book is a revelation about all the dogs in literature and art, and on the other it is a novel of profound and highly entertaining insight into the human heart.

New Book Due 1st July 2010

2010-05-11T20:08:00.001-07:00

Book Group Notes - for - Child of the Twilight

2010-05-10T17:45:00.000-07:00

Twilight is the dangerous time when nothing is quite as it seems. In what sense is Sydney a ′child of the twilight′?

How significant are our biological origins in shaping our identities?

In Rosita′s imagination the ′wellbeing of mankind was being held together with prayer′. Does the novel portray tragedy and disaster as a result of a stitch being dropped in the embroidery of the Divine Heart prayers?

In her own art, Cora refers to Jan Van Eyck′s Marriage of the Arnolfini but in quite startling ways. What does this say about her and her attitudes to marriage and fertility?

Do you think that the school staff - in particular the headmistress, Dr Silver reacted appropriately to Cora Mean′s accident in the art room?

What roles do Furta Sacra (holy theft) and miracles play in the Child of the Twilight? How do these ideas affect the way the characters see our world?

′Fiction is the perfect place to put the facts,′ says Sydney. What are the advantages for her telling her story as fiction rather than fact?

The novel uses a number of symbols of fertility - in particular the Black Madonna. What does the Black Madonna represent to Sydney? To Diana?

What do you think Sydney believes was most influential in creating her life - science or her mother′s prayers?

How reliable is Sydney as narrator?

The theft of the statue represents a serious interference to the order of things. Throughout the novel the idea of ′interference′ looms large: Sydney′s conception, Diana′s manipulations, Barnaby′s work as a surgeon, to name a few instances. These are worldly interferences. However there is also a more mystical side to interference in the form of prayers offered and prayers answered. When is interference a good thing?

Rufus′ father is involved in the MOSE project in Venice. What is the symbolic significance of this project in the lives of Cora and Rufus?

The characters are described by their attributes - Corazon the Fertile, Diana the Manipulator, Cosimo the Trickster. This gives the narrative a quality of fable or mystery play. How effective is this technique in a novel of today?

Assisted Reproductive Technology, with its acronym ART provides the impetus or the germ of the novel, and there is a great deal of ′art′ in the usual sense also. How do these to two interpretations of ′art′ function together?

How do you think Roland′s life was shaped by the violent death of his twin sister?

The old painting of the indigenous Madonna in the church in Tasmania has previously escaped Diana′s notice. What is the significance of her realisation of its existence?

Both Sydney and Cosimo can never know their genetic origins. In what ways does this fact affect their lives and their outlook?

What is your opinion of Sydney′s morality with regard to reading Edith′s diary and extracting its secrets?

Eleena was killed during a cricket match. What are the roles of games and accident and destiny in the novel?

Why do you think Sydney′s imaginary friends are native Americans?

The narrative criss-crosses the globe. Even Rosita the Spinster finally makes it from Australia to Europe, and it seems that there have been English Vinnicombes in rural Tasmania. What is the significance of these migrations?

What is the significance of Barnaby′s work as an eye surgeon?

What is the significance of Avila′s business ′Marriages Performed at Sea′?

A miracle is something that can not be explained except by divine intervention. What is your response to ′miracles"?

The Origins of Ideas for Fiction

2010-04-28T01:32:00.000-07:00

Readers often ask writers about where the ideas for novels and stories come from. The answer to this question is really never simple. I will be talking about my new novel – Child of the Twilight. And where it fits into my thinking. Once a novel is published, the writer has the luxury of being able to mentally going back over its origins, of seeing how each element somehow developed from events, thoughts, ideas etc.

This kind of thing is deeply personal and is perhaps not often discussed. Readers and reviewers and critics come to the novel from the outside, as it were, but it is the writer who holds the real keys. It is the writer’s business to give the readers enough guidance to take them through the narrative. And it is the reader’s responsibility to take notice along the way. To follow the clues. That makes it sound as if every story is a mystery – and in a way I think that is true.

One of my short stories called The Quince Tree is published in a collection in Norway. It is a tiny little old story and I never think about it much. But recently I had an email from a Norwegian reader who wanted to know about the use of colours in the story. Did they mean what the reader thought they meant? And how had I arrived at the scheme she found operating with the colours in the story. Now when I get a question like this I take it very seriously, and I have to stop and consider my response. Because when I write – and when many fiction writers write – the elements that make up the narrative and that texture the prose arrive freighted with the writer’s own understandings and memories and points of view and prejudices – and so forth. From the writer’s side of things, everything is going forward at once – the nature of the character, the events, the setting, the tone, the language – everything depends on everything else. But readers – such as the reader in Norway – come to things bit by bit, and may be attracted to the flash of the colour yellow, and start to wonder why yellow. Now in the case of the quince story, the colour is the colour of the fruit, and so is unavoidable – so the question that arises is really – why quince? There is truly no simple answer to that question. The subject matter of a story comes from deep within the experience and dare I say the heart of the writer. The writer is in a sense saying to the reader ‘I have a message for you,’ should you want to hear it.

I propose to tell you the story of the writing of my novel Child of the Twilight. Of telling you where I believe it comes from, telling you what possessed me to write this book. Before I do this, let me just outline the plot for you, and tell you a little about the characters.

A miracle working statue of Baby Jesus is stolen from a church in Rome. This fact is the central matter in the novel, and also holds the central image in the novel of the importance of babies and the making of babies, including modern methods such as IVF.

A young Australian priest is there in Rome at the time of the theft. His mother in Melbourne has a keen devotion to the lost statue. The statue is not recovered. The priest – his name is Roland – returns to Australia where he works in Melbourne, part of his duties being as chaplain to a girls’ boarding school. One of the girls at the school gets pregnant to a boy from the brother school, but she loses the baby very early in the pregnancy. She was not actually aware that she was pregnant.
As part of her recovery her aunt takes her overseas for a holiday. They visit the church where the statue went missing, as well as other Catholic shrines. One of the aunt’s great interests is in black statues of the Virgin Mary. These statues are – or used to be – key figures for women’s focus on conception and childbirth. They are associated with the earth itself, with darkness, mystery and miracles.

When in Rome Cora and her aunt meet an old priest at the church from which the statue of the baby disappeared. They discuss the lost statue with him, and talk about the Australian priest Roland who is known to all of them. One of the key ideas in the book is the ease with which international connections are discovered and established – the six degrees of separation idea. There is a sense in which a vast human family is united by the holy family – located here in the lost statue of the baby, and the figure of the black madonna. Cora’s boyfriend (the father of her lost child) follows her to Italy, and a few years later he and Cora marry. The lost statue is never found, however the mystery of its disappearance is revealed at the end of the book.
Reduced to that more or less factual outline, the book could sound rather solemn. However the tone is not at all solemn, owing to the fact that the story is narrated by a nineteen year old girl who is completely unsentimental. So she tells the story, and at some points she enters the story.

I have stopped talking about the plot and am now talking about how the story is told. This girl is called Sydney. Why? People have often been named after places in the world – but in recent years this has become particularly fashionable. Dakota, Paris, India, Cheyenne, Montana, Odessa. I noticed that Australian place names are not popular – so I decided to use one. Sydney. Her surname is also a place name – Kent – and her mother is named after a Spanish town, her father after an English village. The girl Sydney was an IVF baby, and she is very hung up on the fact that all her genetic material came from unknown sources – both of her parents being infertile. Another key fact is that the origins of her egg and sperm are unknown, and there are no records. So – in the context of a world of six degrees of separation, Sydney imagines she could be related to anybody and everybody. She has a very detached and matter of fact way of talking about things. So the chances of becoming sentimental about the religious aspects of the story are avoided.

So that is how the book is. But I said I would talk about where it came from. Telling you what possessed me.
A long time ago when I was studying French in year twelve at high school, we read a story by Prosper Merimee about a black statue of the goddess Venus. These pagan statues were christianised in the middle ages, and so have become the black madonnas in shrines throughout Europe. In fact the statue of Venus in the story fascinated me, and led me to realize the presence of the black madonnas, and also their significance. They are so unlike the pretty statues of Our Lady of Lourdes and Our Lady of Fatima – these two being nineteenth century images, whereas the black ones are much more ancient. The black ones are part of the world of medieval knights and troubadours, and interest in all this led me to the secret language of the troubadours – called the Green Language or the Language of the Birds. This is a rhyming, punning way of speaking, and by using it the troubadours could communicate secrets and messages without seeming to do so.

There is a character in my book – Cosimo, the older priest in the Roman church where the statue was – who sometimes speaks like that.

For many years I studied the phenomenon of the black madonna, and I visited a number of shrines, mainly in Spain and France. But the novel that references these images and ideas did not really get going until I saw a news item – a very tiny news item – in the paper in 1994. It was a report on the theft of a miraculous statue – the Bambinello – from the Franciscan church in Rome. For some reason – and these things do remain unclear – this sparked the book. But I still wrote a number of other books before this one was completed.

One thing that kept puzzling me was how I was going to get the tone I wanted – the unsentimental plain narrative that was almost cold. Then I the idea of the character of Sydney Kent came to me, and the rest fell into place. Sydney is an international child, wandering the world with her wealthy professional parents. She tells the story.

Home Truth Review

2010-04-21T14:12:00.000-07:00

Publication Date: July 2010
From Bookseller and Publisher
Review by Candice Cappe
FOUR STARS
In the introduction to Home Truth, Carmel Bird talks
of Steven Spielberg’s character E.T., and his plight to
reconnect with that place he called home, a place where
he would find safety and solace from the alien world in
which he found himself. This sets an appropriate scene
for the ten essays that follow in this fascinating collection
of reflections on home and belonging. The sense of home
can be interpreted in so many ways: it is the place of
our childhood, as explored by Gabrielle Lord and Peter
Goldsworthy; a place of history and origin, as discussed
in Matthew Condon’s essay; the womb from which we
evolve and grow before becoming independent and
reaching out into the world, as in Ian Britain’s piece; and
a place of memory and lost meaning when the person we
share it with is no longer there, as expressed in Andrea
Goldsmith’s moving recollection. With contributions
from some of Australia’s best known contemporary
writers, readers are treated to an eclectic and diverse range
of pieces demonstrating that home is as much about the
people who share it with us as it is about time and place.
This is a thought-provoking collection, taking us on a
journey into personal spaces we all know and recognise as
dimensions of those places we call home.

Candice Cappe is the bookshop manager at the
National Library of Australia in Canberra”

2010-04-15T18:35:00.000-07:00

INTRODUCTION TO READING AT BOOKTIQUE 18 APRIL 2010
'Child of the Twilight'
Back in the nineties I published a non-fiction book about the indigenous children of the stolen generations. This new novel also has ‘child’ in the title, and these books both reflect my lifelong interest in the subject of the child. Children are the focus of a lot of my fiction. I think that children signify hope, all that is good and beautiful. It is easy to become sentimental about children and childhood, and I probably often do.

'Child of the Twilight' begins by considering the centrality of the child in the Christian religion – a miraculous wooden statue of Baby Jesus is stolen from a church in Rome. It goes on to explore how children are conceived – in the ordinary old fashioned way, and by modern methods of IVF. Early in the book there is a little scene between one of the main characters and his twin sister when they were small. What the little girl says to her brother sums up the simplicity and truthfulness of a child’s view of the world.

‘They had been taken to visit an ancient uncle. In his garden there was a cherry tree and a grape vine. Roland and Eleena were sitting together on a low stone wall in the sun, each with a glass of red fizzy drink. Eleena turned to Roland and she said: This is nice, Rolly, this is nice. And he felt she meant everything – not just the drink, everything – the sun, the stone wall, the cherry tree, the grapevine, the sky – everything. Life, she said to him, was nice. This is nice, Rolly. Life is nice.’

I will read two short pieces from the novel. The first bit is set in Rome in 1994 and is about the theft of the statue. The second is in Melbourne in 2001 and is about a pregnant schoolgirl. The two pieces are linked by the presence in both of the young Franciscan priest who is the Roland I just read about. Actually in the second piece I don’t think the priest gets a mention, but he is there – believe me.

Reading By Moonlight

2010-03-31T14:33:00.000-07:00

My Short Review Of
Reading by Moonlight: how books saved a life
A memoir by Brenda Walker, published by Hamish Hamilton
When a woman goes into hospital for cancer surgery, she packs necessities, and usually something that is dear to her. Brenda Walker has spent a lifetime reading, and her treasured object was a book. Throughout the five stages of the treatment – surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, reconstruction and survival – she is never without reading matter. In her case the books are mostly classics such as the works of Dickens, Dante, Tolstoy, Patrick White. They speak to her, sustain and console her, bring light in the terrible darkness, and give shape and meaning to the experiences she must undergo.
The books occupy a vital space in her life alongside the spaces necessarily occupied by professionals, family members and dear kind friends. The writer says that if she had to nominate ‘the single person” she was staying alive for it would be her son. And she also expresses her profound love for and gratitude towards her mother who at least five times made the journey from New South Wales to Western Australia to look after her.
This memoir is very moving and also instructive, frankly guiding readers through the terrors of disease and treatment, and fear of dying, while exploring with them the joys of immersion in the gift of great literature.
This book, while facing dark truths and examining deep loneliness, is luminous with a quiet joy. It tells how stories hold the promise of more stories to come, and of another dawn. It stands beside Joan Didion’s memoir about the death of her husband, “The Year of Magical Thinking” and also Susan Sontag’s “Illness as Metaphor” as one of those books you will take to your heart, and will not easily forget.

Footpath Library

2010-03-15T16:04:00.000-07:00

Published in The Age - 13 March 2010

On a hot February evening we drove into a narrow street behind the Town Hall in Fitzroy. High above us along the ridge on the slate roof of a ancient bluestone church were strung, at regular intervals, like pearls on a necklace, seventeen seagulls, facing east, their backs to the setting sun. They were waiting for pickings. Down below, a crowd was gathering around two white Vinnies vans, one van giving away sandwiches the other dispensing free soup, coffee and cordial. I was with the people in the red car behind the vans, the car with a boot full of books. We would stop here for half an hour, offering free books to homeless and disadvantaged people.
While people surged forward to the vans, we put down a rug on the pavement and placed on it rows of books and magazines. A Chinese grandfather brought over his folding chair and gathered up some of the Chinese books for himself, smiling broadly, sipping coffee from a polystyrene cup. One man, disappointed that there was no dictionary on the rug, ordered one for next week. The books are free to take away, like the food. This is the Footpath Library, an initiative of the Lauriston Girls’ School Community Service Program.
Every Sunday night two members of the school staff follow the Vinnies vans which make six stops at key locations around inner Melbourne. Books are collected from members of the school community, and are stored in the school library – nine shelves where the books, in excellent condition, are stacked three deep. My journey began at the school library. As a book-lover I was dazed by the sight of the tightly packed spines on the shelves – Minette Walters, Gabrielle Lord, Ruth Rendell, Dean Koontz, Sydney Sheldon. There’s also a huge collection of biography and non-fiction, which is the most popular category with clients of the Footpath Library. And several shelves of books in Chinese. A regular contributor to the supply is Bayside Library Services; one large donation of books came from the State Library of Victoria. We put eight shopping bags of already selected books into the boot of the car in preparation for the night’s work.
The Footpath Library began when a Sydney woman, Sarah Garnett, was working as a volunteer, serving meals to homeless and disadvantaged people, and started bringing along books for distribution. This small gesture has developed in other cities to become part of the services on which homeless and disadvantaged people rely for sustenance and comfort. Joan Hammonds, the librarian at Lauriston, is the force behind the Melbourne Footpath Library, which has been operating for two years.
My journey continued in North Melbourne where the two Vinnies vans were stocking up. The six regular volunteers, led by long-timers, Norm and Manfred, wore fluorescent orange vests with the blue logo on the back. The 1,500 sandwiches are made from donated bread, with fillings such as tuna, ham, cheese, vegemite. Our first stop was on the edge of a North Melbourne park, and as we drew up a dozen or so clients drifted into view, some with their dogs, making first for the food and coffee, then over to the striped rug where we had placed the books from one of the shopping bags in the boot. This is not a grand operation – the rug is small and displays maybe fifteen books. Joan is quite familiar with the clientele at each stop, and so each bag is filled with things designed to interest them. Magazines such as New Scientist and National Geographic were popular here. There was some discussion over the merits of a book on war by Winston Churchill.
The books lie on the rug, face up, shiny coloured invitations to other worlds. The light is beginning to fade, the empty polystyrene cups are beginning to blow and bowl along the road. A few books have gone. Pack up the vans, the car, drive off. The clients linger by the wire fence to the park, but when I look back, they have dissolved into the pink dusk.
The drive to the Fitzroy Town Hall takes us past the Zoo, the dry parklands where birds are twittering loudly, round College Crescent. The towers of the university halls of residence speak not only of learning and books but also of warmth and community and home. We concentrate on being simply practical, not sentimental, with our car full of books, but there is a temptation to philosophize as we sail along past the have-a-lots on our way to the have-no-muches.
After the Fitzroy Town Hall we head for Hanover House in Southbank. The lights in St Patrick’s glow amber in the twilight as we zip past on our way to a street behind Crown Casino. Again it is easy to wonder about the distinctions, this time between the pulse and glitter of Crown and the quiet dignified gathering of people, two of them in wheelchairs, standing in the pool of light outside the crisis accommodation of Hanover House. We spread out our wares on the red and grey rug. A woman pounces with delight on Boris Starling’s thriller Vodka, provoking mirth among the company. She takes a couple of other things, and I talk her into taking Kay Cottee’s First Lady. Again the New Scientist and National Geographic are winners.
Next stop is a narrow lane where we park behind buildings, and a few people appear out of the shadows to get their meal and talk among themselves. This lot is not interested in books. But then we get to Flinders Street Station, and like children waiting for the circus, the people are sitting in a long line on the ledge of the stone foundations. One of the regulars is a woman “Annette” who says she has so many books in her room that her landlady has warned her not to bring back any more. Nothing daunted, she picks up a Ruth Rendell, but puts it back saying she already has it. She is thrilled with the autobiography of Barrie Humphries. I think she took about six books to add to her overflowing collection. Two novels by Iain Banks – severe black and white covers – attract the attention of two young men, but then they put them back. This is a busy gathering with a considerable feeling of camaraderie. It feels less isolated, more part of its surroundings, than the other stops. Annette spies a history of the Boy Scouts and gleefully carries it off.
Last stop a street by the Victoria Market where there are just a few people in need of soup and sandwiches, a magazine, a thriller and some conversation. All over until next Sunday.

REVIEW from Boomerang Books

2010-03-13T20:08:00.000-08:00

For those who enjoy reading to indulge in the pleasure of beautiful writing then Carmel Bird’s latest novel might be just what you are after. Child of the Twilight is a deceptively complex work with great depth of both characterisation and theme. On one level the story is of love and loss, yet woven through this are the weighty themes of belief, fate and deception. Central to the story’s narrative is the theft of the religious icon named the Bambinello, stolen from a Rome monastery.
Throughout the novel the concepts of birth and origin play an important part in the lives of the characters as they contend with their individual loss, search for identity or quest to unravel the mystery of the missing statue. As the story unfolds, readers are challenged by the notion of faith and led to question the ideas we live by as the story delves into the labyrinth of real and imagined beliefs. The writing is contemporary and engaging, yet manages to sustain medieval overtones drawing close connections to myth and folklore, while exploring the deeper issues of loss and the unknown. This is a carefully constructed work with a compelling storyline that keeps you guessing right until the final pages.

Creativity and the Bambinello

2010-03-13T18:22:00.000-08:00

A key idea that informs my fiction is that of creativity, creativity in the forms of writing, painting, and biology. This idea has led me to contemplate images of the Madonna and child, focusing sometimes on the black virgin. The black virgin has a strong presence in my 2010 novel Child of the Twilight, as has the image of the baby Jesus.
In the 1987 story “The Woodpecker Toy Fact” there is a toymaker named Jack Frost. The narrator of the story recalls her childhood perception of him and his work. “At Christmas he used to make wooden peepshows of the crib. You closed one eye and looked through the hole in the box. Inside, in an unearthly light, were first the shepherds, then the animals, and further back the baby like a sugar mouse in his mother’s arms. The angels were in the far distance, wings sharp like the wings of swallows.” The narrator makes up a lie, telling people Jack Frost told her he made the original of the statue of the Infant Jesus of Prague, but nobody takes any notice of her.
At the end of Child of the Twilight a wedding takes place in the church at Woodpecker Point where there is a statue of the Infant of Prague, and there is also a fresco of a black virgin that is a portrait of an indigenous Tasmanian woman. This novel examines the issue of human fertility, presenting to the reader some babies who are the result of accidental couplings, some who are the result of IVF or ART, where science meets biology, and some who are the result of miracles outside science and beyond biology (notably the birth of Jesus).
The images of the black virgin that are venerated in churches, principally in Mediterranean countries, are signifiers of the fertility of Mary, and are frequently found where ancient fertility cults flourished in pagan times. The statues themselves are often the self-same statues that once were venerated as the black goddess. This dark aspect of Mary is deeply attractive to women in particular, and is acknowledged at a visceral as well as a spiritual level.
The statues themselves frequently come with stories of miraculous appearances in streams or caves, and are associated with water, the giver of life. The black virgin presides over birth and motherhood, and church hierarchy and patriarchy have over the centuries attempted to suppress devotion to her, fearful and suspicious of her pagan origins, and probably her dark female arts. You will find her steadily going about her business in such places as Montserrat and Saragossa as well as hundreds of less famous centres. She is good for tourism too.
In Child of the Twilight two are characters who collect facsimiles of the many statues of the black virgin, and one of these characters becomes involved in the search for a miraculous statue of the baby Jesus that has gone missing from a church in Rome. He was fashioned in the fifteenth century by a Franciscan, in the manner of Pinocchio, from a piece of olive wood grown in the garden of Gethsemane and was called the Bambinello. He was painted by angels, lost at sea, and ended up in a glass case in the church of Santa Maria in Araceoli, until he was stolen in 1994.
The role this image plays in the fertility of the characters in the novel brings together the miraculous, the scientific, and the biological, as well as locating the interest in the world of art, not to mention crime as well.
I have written at length on the subject of creativity in connection with the written word (Writing the Story of Your Life; Dear Writer; Not Now Jack) In my fiction I can also trace this preoccupation, specifically via the imagery of the mother and child, in Christian iconography, as well as in the frequent emphasis on the mother, and the child, in my the stories.

Q&A With Candice Capp - National Library Bookshop

2010-03-04T11:59:00.000-08:00

Carmel Bird explores faith, loss and the theft of an icon in her new work Child of the Twilight (February, Fourth Estate). Here she answers questions from National Library of Australia bookshop manager Candice Cappe.

Q The issue of art theft is important in Child of the Twilight, in particular the theft of a religious icon which resembles the infant Jesus—based on a real incident. How much of your work is inspired by real-life events?

A When I heard about the disappearance of the statue from the Roman church I knew I had to write about it. I knew in my heart that this was something I wished to explore in a novel. There is a thread that runs through my work—an interest in, focus on, the centrality of the child, which is of course also central to the Christian faith. This focus in my fiction sometimes leads to disappearing children (as in novel The Bluebird Café), and the fact that this was a stolen miracle-working statue of the infant Christ seemed fascinating to me. I perceived a metaphorical dimension to the disappearance. It came at a time when women appear to be having trouble conceiving, and are able to take advantage of medical procedures such as IVF, and I wished to explore some of the implications of such interventions. There were two real-life matters inspiring me—the statue and IVF. Bringing the two together was absorbing work. The statue is wooden, like the statue of Pinocchio, and stories of the making of children from substances other than human material (flowers, snow) appealed to my imagination.

Q The themes of faith and loss are central throughout the book, almost asking readers to question the beliefs that we live by. Did you set out to pose the questions about myth and belief in this book and do you think faith becomes more important once we have experienced loss?

A It sounds rather routine to say this, but the process is more or less: 1) the inspiration 2) the situation 3) the characters 4) the development of the plot. All these come together at the one time, in the writing, and develop alongside each other. As the work is constructed, the images and ideas work their way along as well. The whole exercise seems to bloom, all its elements opening out simultaneously in the process of the work. I can see, as I read the finished novel, that questions of belief of various kinds are being posed. However I did not set out to pose them. The range of responses people have to tragedy and loss is fascinating and important, and I have explored some of these responses.

A With regard to faith and loss—it does seem (in life) that people frequently seek a religious support in the face of loss, even when there has been little apparent faith beforehand. Religious faith can appear to bring comfort when comfort proves elusive. This novel does not aim to provide clear answers to the great questions of suffering and faith, however it cannot but pose them.

Q The book is narrated in the first person through the eyes of a young woman, Sydney Kent, and the tone is contemporary in style and voice, yet some of the themes and characters have an almost medieval appearance. How important is the idea of mystical legend and folklore in your work?

A Sydney is an American girl who is the product of an IVF procedure whereby all her genetic material originated outside her family. All details and records have been destroyed so that Sydney will never know who she really is. She is in fact a modern mystery, and has developed an interest in ancient fertility mysteries. The wisdom embedded in legend and myth and folklore seems to me to be apposite to the mysteries that will perhaps (or perhaps not) forever surround creation. The medieval flavour of parts of the text foregrounds for the modern reader some of the ancient poetic solutions to modern scientific problems (such as infertility).

Q Your writing appears imaginatively woven together with beautiful descriptive language, which makes me wonder if writing is as much a visual process as an intellectual one for you?

A My work is visual and musical—I work with the images that will bring forward the ideas, and with the rhythms of the language. Within this novel there are many key references to works of art, both genuine and false—these references are an important part of the visual canvas of the text.

LAUNCH OF CHILD OF THE TWILIGHT

2010-03-02T17:16:00.000-08:00

The novel was launched by Ian Britain
in February 2010

Ian: "These days I give a new novel I may pick up about twenty minutes to get me hooked. I give it up after that if I’m not confident of two things: that it’s going to be about everything, and that I’m going to find myself coming into it. ‘My idea of a writer,’ says Susan Sontag, is ‘someone interested in everything.’

Carmel Bird’s new novel is not just about everything but is set in everyone’s favourite places and written in every manner and mode. There’s birth, death, sex, religion, art, food, fashion, war, family, schooldays, technology, magic, innocence, crime, love, pain and the whole damned thing. There’s Sydney, Melbourne, New York, Rome, Venice, Paris, Barcelona, Portugal, Mexico, Gethsemane and Woodpecker Point. And it’s all wrapped up in a style that, with brilliant, knowing playfulness, makes Gothic and Grand Guignol seem colloquial, normal, everyday, while lending a sublimity to cliché, a transcendence to bathos.

My favourite character, lethally portrayed, is a headmistress, Dr Silver, who’s a Mrs Malaprop of platitudes. ‘Medieval legend or soap?’ the narrator asks at one point. We get the best of both worlds here, as Dr Silver might answer. But it’s true. Where in this fantastic confection could I possibly find myself? As it turns out, in several strands of the plot, and in various aspects of nearly all the characters, even minor ones. The action centres around the hunt for a missing religious statue, and celebrates the ‘thrill of getting control of an object that should be out of your reach’.

Only a few weeks before I came to read this book I was involved in a hunt, not for a sacred object, but a very profane one – the missing diaries of a notorious artist whose biography I’m writing. These had been missing for nearly 65 years. Through extraordinary luck I turned them up in the most unlikely place.

Carmel Bird’s novel not only captures the thrill of the chase, the fanatical urge, the mad hope that I came to feel so keenly but also the inordinate sense of miracle when the grail is actually located. But this is only one of multitudinous connections I found with my own life, career, sensibility. ‘I am drawn to secret autobiography expressed in code,’ says the narrator at another point. Any other reader, I’m convinced, will find his or her own autobiography here too.

It’s spooky, but this book knows you better than you’ll ever know this book. That’s part of its enduring mystery, both in the sense of a deeply spiritual drama and the curliest crime fiction. Thus does it combine in one the two genres of which Carmel has long been a recognised master. Rush out to buy it and be spooked."

THOUGHTS ON READING

2010-02-11T19:32:00.000-08:00

Notes for Panel Discussion on Reading at Abbotsford Convent February 13, 2010
Every book I read, and just about every book I have ever read, is marked on the margins with either pencil dots or pencil crosses. The blank pages at the back are then annotated according to page numbers, corresponding to the pencil marks. Sometimes I paste an envelope onto the inside back cover and insert into it white index cards onto which I have kept my annotations. So much for my little reading habits.
I think that reading is a kind of weird magic, actually. In his autobiography Robert Hughes writes of ‘the transformative value of word-magic’. He is discussing the poems he read in adolescence. But the phrase can be applied to the very art and act of reading which is a skill that is more or less taken for granted, but I think it’s truly fantastic. There’s a lovely book by John Sutherland called Magic Moments – it’s a memoir located in the books – and also films – he has loved. It caught my attention because of the word ‘magic’ in the title. He doesn’t really talk about what I am calling the magic of the art of reading, but he looks at the role of treasured narratives in the shaping of his life. To get the magic moment from reading you have to master the magical art of reading.
Everyone here has done that – and you are here to listen to what writers might say about reading. Stephanie has been reading Rilke, and writing about Rilke; Sue has been deep in the war diaries of Weary Dunlop, and has written his life. The inspiration for my new book began with a story I read years and years ago when I was in my final year of high school. It was a story by Prosper Merimee about a wedding in the French Pyrenees. A strange silvery black statue of Venus had been dug up, and was standing near the family home. The bridegroom was playing a game of pelota before the wedding, and put the wedding ring – supposedly for safe-keeping on the ring finger of the statue. When he came to retrieve the ring, the statue’s hand was clenched, and the ring was stuck. So he had to use a trashy little ring he had bought to give to a lady of the night. Well the party after the wedding ceremony was long and drunken, and the bride retired early. She lay in the dark waiting for the bridegroom. She was under the impression that he had fallen heavily into bed beside her, and had fallen into a drunken slumber. However – before long another person entered the bedroom. This really was the bridegroom, and he fell drunkenly into the bed beside the other figure. This figure turned out to be the statue of Venus who considered herself to be married to the bridegroom. She proceeded to squeeze him to death before lumbering out of the room back to her place beside the pelota court.
As a teenager I became fascinated by the dark statues of ancient goddesses that sometimes emerge from the earth in Europe. I discovered that many of these are venerated as being figures of the Virgin Mary – known as the Black Madonna. These figures became objects of great fascination to me.
The Black Madonna is a key figure in my new book – Child of the Twilight. It has been a long time, and a long process, but I have told you the story of my inspiration because it originated in my reading.
The word ‘reading’ implies a ‘reader’ and these days a ‘reader’ might be less of a person and more of a kindle or an ipod. And in the publishing contracts of today there is a newish term which is a kind of definition of a reader – this term is ‘end-user’. When you sign up with your publisher for them to produce your work as an e-book, the contract is concerned with your rights, the rights of the publisher and those of the end-user. The end-user sounds to me like someone who picks up cigarette butts in the gutter. Or someone who gathers scraps of soap and fashions them into a useful little block.
By the way I enjoy reading books on an ipod. And I have recently explored the world of the VOOK. That’s with a V. You can buy, for example, the children’s picture book The Velveteen Rabbit as a Vook – and experience a whole new kind of reading. You read the text on a screen, move in and out of it to images and videos, and discuss it as you go with other readers on Twitter. There are also whole novels you can get as Vooks. It is a different reading experience, but part of it still depends on being able to decode the marks on paper or screen. To some extent.
So leaving aside for now the literary gadgetry, I have some anecdotes to relate in response to the topic ‘reading’.
The first concerns the three elements of magic involving the writing of fiction – there’s the writer and there’s the writing and there’s the reader. The writing, or the book, is the link between the two, and without the reader the circle is incomplete. The writer and the reader come together in the book. And usually the text is the only meeting place for them. However at writers’ festivals the writer and the reader can come face to face. And they can sometimes discover that the book the writer wrote is not the same thing as the book the reader read. This is I think an important part of the whole process. It can be quite shocking and confronting to talk with one’s readers and to discover the things people have discovered. Or to listen to one’s reviewers and to learn of the things they have NOT discovered. Words and ideas are so rich and slippery. The connection between writer and reader is not as simple as it looks. Readers often even misremember even the title of the book – once I wrote a book called Not Now Jack I’m Writing a Novel – and I was introduced at a festival as the author of Not Now Harry I’m Writing a Book. Possibly an improvement.
Recently I was reminded of the many ways books and readers come together.
I had been invited to speak to a group of readers in a very tiny rural Victorian town. To get to the town I drove through forest and farmland, up hill and down dale, with almost no traffic and with scary rotten bridges across dry creek beds. Finally I arrived at a community hall – I can’t resist naming the hall because I am beguiled by the name – the Agnes Mudford Hall.
I was to have afternoon tea and a chat with my readers. But not in the hall itself, as I had imagined. No, we were to assemble in a lovely little white marquee that had been put up on the grass beside the hall rather like a wedding tent. And under the marquee was a mobile tea and coffee kiosk with a jovial man dispensing coffee and biscuits. Next to the marquee was a huge bus full of books – the local bookmobile, also manned by a cheerful attendant who said he didn’t really read books – that you can easily teach a bus driver to be a librarian, but you can’t so easily get a librarian to drive a bus. This is probably not true – but I didn’t argue.
I was in a lovely oasis of reading – in the middle of central Victoria, the heart of the old goldfields country.
Most of the readers had come to my books by orthodox means – but there was one woman who told a nice little story which I will recount.
She had never read anything of mine. Had never heard of me. She was listening to the radio and heard the advertisement for the literary afternoon tea at the Agnes Mudford centre. She did not really intend to go to the afternoon tea, but she had registered my name. Later that day she opened a bag of books left for her by a friend. One of the books was a collection of short fiction in which she found one of my stories. She read the story, remembered the afternoon tea, and decided to go. The magic circle between the writer and the reader had been closed by the story. This anecdote goes to show not only that it pays to advertise on the radio, but also that books get around, and writers simply never know where they will turn up. You never know who is reading, and that is a wonderful thing about writing.
The life and journey of the words a writer writes are strange and beautiful. I realize I could move off here into a discussion of the internet and its role in reading, of the kindle and e-book and the vook and so on and on, but I prefer to confine myself for the time being to the notion of the conventional book and conventional publishing of books. I enjoy reading on the kindle and on the computer screen, by the way. I am not arguing against such things.
The second anecdote concerns the child who is learning to read.
My small grandson knows a little bit about reading, although he recognises mostly single words, not many whole sequences. He knows there is a code he has to crack, a magic art he needs to master. When I see the word ‘reading’ these days I think of him, and the way every day delivers a little bit of progress in his mastery of the art. He has an expectation about narrative. He understands character, plot and suspense, and he knows that there are really only two endings – happy resolution or total destruction. He told me a story recently about two of his toys – they happened to be a lion and a rabbit – but the species don’t signify. He said they meet and kiss and then they fall down dead. He follows narrative in a range of media from film to the internet and so forth. He and I were recently alone in an old church. We had a good look at everything and lit a lot of candles. And he was interested in the outlandish size of the bible that was open on the lectern. He said:
‘This is a very long story.’
So he has absorbed the idea that between the covers of a book the pages of writing contain a narrative, and that narrative is magic and that the words are the key.
We went to see Fantastic Mr Fox together. It turns out that much of the film depends on the audience reading words on the screen. ‘What does that say?’ the child would ask me. It became impossible to keep going, since the narrative was incomprehensible without the words, and by the time I had whispered them to him the action had moved on. After half an hour or so he said: ‘I just don’t get it.’ It seemed a bit cruel to persist. So we left.
He will learn to read. But some people don’t. I am reminded of something that happened two years ago.
Now the third anecdote in the series.
I had just moved from the city to the country and my new bed was being delivered from the city. The man who drove the delivery truck very kindly moved the old bed into the guest bedroom, and then he assembled the new one in my bedroom. The house was full of books. As he was putting the new bed together the man commented on the books and said he supposed I must read a lot. Then he said in a sad, sincere and wistful way: ‘I wish I could read.’
He said he had missed out on reading in school, and had made several very serious attempts as an adult to learn to read. He had been assessed and been included in special programs and classes. These attempts had all somehow failed and he still could not read. I then made an effort to discover avenues he had not explored. All this came to nought. What he needed I suppose was daily individual instruction. I felt really sad and powerless. An irony was that perhaps I could have helped him personally, but we had only met because I had moved away from the city and I could no longer hope to be in contact with him on a regular basis.
The final story is a key one in my own life as a writer and reader. Once a long time ago when I was suffering from a broken romance I lost the ability to read. Reading had always been a fundamental part of my life, so this loss of ability was devastating. I could still recognize words, but I was unable to hold sequences in my head long enough for them to make any sense. I could still write a shopping list, could still read a telephone book. But writing or reading a story was out of the question.
In the middle of this nightmare I happened to stay with an aunt for a few days. I slept in a room which was lined with books. The books nearest to the bed were the works of Agatha Christie. I had never read any. I opened one and focused my frustrated gaze on the first sentence. I am sorry I can’t remember what it said. But whatever it was – I discovered that the words yielded up the meaning just as they used to do, and before I knew what had happened I was reading again. Perhaps the mechanism was the one that people describe when they say that children get turned on to reading by Harry Potter. Is it the simplicity of the prose in conjunction with the writer’s utter commitment to the plot and the characters? Well there are of course many elements to the magic at work here, and there are many opinions and even grand theories you can consider along the way. But when I think of reading I always come back to the notion that there is a magic at work. A kind of magic that had deserted me for a time. Reading is concerned with spells cooked up by writers, involving readers, and not forgetting all the end-users.

Upcoming Events

2010-02-08T20:42:00.000-08:00

February 13
Writers at the Convent
**6pm Panel on Reading - with Stephanie Dowrick and Sue Ebury
February 14
Writers at the Convent
**10am In Conversation
**10.45am Ian Britain Launches of Child of the Twilight

Review of "Child of the Twilight"

2010-02-05T23:06:00.000-08:00

REVIEW BY PETER PIERCE
THE AGE and SYDNEY MORNING HERALD 6/2/2010
In her ninth novel, the dark but exuberant fantasy, Child of the Twilight, Carmel Bird leads us on a historical and geographical traverse of Catholic Europe. It is thronged with priests, nuns and believers, with churches full of statuary, places where the miraculous is made concrete in such figures as the Black Madonna and the Bambinello, the Infant Jesus in the Franciscan Church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli in Rome. The statue’s supposed healing powers attract supplicants from around the world.
The plot turns on the disappearance of the Bambinello on a rainy night in 1994, and the attempts to recover him by Diana Mean (collector of Black Virgins who is dedicated to completing her late husband’s history of them) and painter and art teacher Rosita Vienna, for whom the statue has become her “own baby, her lost child, her stolen darling”.
These details are a reminder of the familiar fictional territory to which Bird returns in this novel. She has written often of the Means with their flower farm in the fastness of north-western Tasmania. The central figure in this instalment is young Corazon Mean, who accompanies Diana and Rosita to Europe. When the narrator of Child of the Twilight, 19 year-old Sydney Peony Kent, turns up in Tasmania for Corazon’s wedding she exclaims (having grown up in California) “this was totally yesteryear”. Further, the house where Corazon grew up is buried deep, yes like a house in a fairy tale, in a small forest of old European trees.” One of the inquiries of the novel is into how emphatically the old world has planted itself in Australia, in brick and in belief, and how tenaciously it resists the encroachments of the new.
Another inquiry takes us back to the heart of Bird’s imagining, and to a key business of Australian fiction. This is her fascination with the fate of lost children. Her is a memory of Lovelygod Mean, “a child in Tasmania swallowed by the forest (whose story Bird told in The Bluebird Café), here the story of Fatima and Lourdes, the aunts whom Sydney never knew, as they died in childhood. Diana has lost an infant son. Another child is killed in a car accident, while Viola Vinnicombe may be the victim of a tweedy Cambridge paedophile.
Bird seems to regard preying on helpless children as a mordant and unchangeable fact of the modern world. If Sydney Kent’s mother, Avila (her business Marriages Performed at Sea), has “a vast catalogue of tales of babies and children lost and gone, in one way or another”, so does Bird. Yet much as the lost and the dead throng her novel, so do children who have survived the circumstances of their birth, and sometimes orphaning or abandonment.
There is much playfulness in Child of the Twilight too, generated and controlled by the artful narrator, who explains to us how easy it is to smuggle fact into fiction, the better to disguise it. That is how we learn what is perhaps the truth of the multiple disappearances of the Bambinello. Sydney is also pleased to reveal to us “Sex in Venice” where Rufus Gigli and Cora are lovers: “This might almost be a mediaeval legend of love and loss and quest and love again. Either that or…a soap.”
Bird has followed an eccentric and determined path in her writing. Her imagination has a cohesiveness, often self-referential, that puts one in mind of hardly anyone else in Australian literature. Perhaps Barbara Hanrahan or Elizabeth Jolley, but the comparisons do not neatly fit. Bird entertains magic, discovers how vital are the apparently most flimsy connections between people, never mocks the most extreme behaviour, whether credulous or cunning. Child of the Twilight has a fuller and richer cast than has been introduced here. Its members dwell in the superstitious world that Bird has conjured, one compounded of dread, and faith.

Child of the Twilight - Inspiration

2010-01-31T15:10:00.000-08:00

NOTES ON INSPIRATION FOR ‘CHILD OF THE TWILIGHT’

When I was studying French in my final year at high school, I read a story by Prosper Merimee that really captivated me.
It was the story of a wedding in the Pyrenees. The bridegroom is a bit of a peasant, and the bride is more socially elevated. A few days before the wedding an archaeological dig brings up an ancient statue of Venus. It is a huge statue, black with silvery sinister eyes. While the community decides what to do with her, she stands beside the local pelota court.
(On the morning of the wedding the bridegroom and his yob friends play pelota. As a joke the bridegroom deposits the wedding ring that he will later put on his bride’s finger onto the ring finger of the statue of Venus while he plays pelota. At the end of the game, when he goes to recover the ring, he discovers that the hand appears to have contracted so that it is impossible to get the ring off. So at the wedding he uses a cheap little ring he got at a brothel.
The wedding is riotous and the bridegroom and his friends get very drunk. The bride goes upstairs to bed alone. As she lies in the marriage bed by herself, she hears the heavy footsteps. It must be her husband. He heaves himself into the bed and lies there as if in a stupor. The modest bride is afraid and lies very still. Then soon there is a second set of heavy footsteps and another figure lurches into the bed.
The first one was in fact the statue; the second is the husband. The statue believes she is married to the husband, and she claims him, holding him in such a fast embrace that she crushes him to death. She then steps out of the bed and returns to her place beside the pelota court.)
I was deeply affected by many aspects of the story, in particular by the idea of the ancient black statue of the goddess of love and of her profound malice and sense of justice.
At the same time I was studying the history of western art, and I came across many representations of Venus, some seen in her ancient black manifestation, some seen as a pure white beauty.
At some point I made the connection – perhaps first unconsciously – between Venus and the construction of the ideal goddess-woman, the Virgin Mary. The images of Mary that were most familiar to me were the sweet pink and blue and white images of Lourdes and Fatima, that is nineteenth century versions. I was also familiar with the pretty Mary in western painting.
But then I began to discover the manifestations of Mary in places such as Montserrat (Barcelona), and the ancient black image connected with the figure in the Merimee story. (Montserrat is not really far geographically from the Pyrenees.) I set off on a quest for the Black Madonna, discovering statues such as the one at Montserrat. This ‘quest’ was conducted by reading, but also by visiting places in Spain, France and Italy where there are Black Virgins. I learned that the blackness of the statues is often overlooked and even suppressed in a general desire to gloss over what are seen as the hidden and negative aspects of the ‘mother’ (and therefore of the ideal mother, Mary). I found many of the black statues to be amazingly beautiful and attractive. And there is a vast cult following of them, with powerful connections and superstitions. The one at Montserrat is one of the most well-known in the world. It is located on top of an almost inaccessible and very dangerous mountain ridge. Spanish couples make the journey up to her to have their union blessed. She is visited by couples who wish for a child (this sounds like a fairytale). Montserrat is generally a place of pilgrimage and miracle.
The black statues were important in the history of the troubadours, and there are songs and prayers that attest to this link. I became interested in the language of the troubadours, a secret, punning, rhyming language known as the green language or the language of the birds. It is not written down anywhere, but remains elusive yet real.
Since I am not interested in writing ‘historical’ fiction, the inspiration that was gathering from these several strands needed to find its expression in a contemporary story with some links to ancient matters.
In 1994 I read a short newspaper article in The Age reporting the theft of an old statue of baby Jesus from a church in Rome. I had seen the statue in the sixties, but had not paid a lot of attention to it really. It is believed to be responsible for miracles, particularly those concerned with birth (and also with wealth). Suddenly all the strands began to come together. The statue was in a Franciscan church in the heart of Rome, and there is a connection between St Francis and the green language, which he probably spoke.
One of the strongest human bonds is the bond between the mother and the child. This fascinates me (I am not alone here). There is a thread running through my writing that foregrounds and examines this bond. Mary with Jesus is a key image of the bond, in western Christian society. My interest in everyday mothers and babies intersected with my interest in Black Madonnas. (I think the first appearance of a Black Virgin in my fiction is in an old story called ‘Kay Petman’s Coloured Pencils – collected in The Essential Bird – HarperCollins).

Modern attitudes to conception and birth are different in some respects from what they were when I was in my early twenties. With the development of medical technologies and of legal technicalities, it is possible for women to conceive or not conceive, to conceive with their own eggs or with the eggs of others. Artificial insemination is quite ordinary. Assisted reproductive technologies are constantly evolving and are being used by huge numbers of people. The miracle of birth intersects with the miracle of technology. It occurred to me to put these methods up against the technology of the virgin birth of Christ, inspired by the miraculous wooden statue that had been stolen in Rome in 1994. (So far it has never been found. For the sake of the novel, it would be cool if it could be discovered in February 2010 – we shall see. )
The question arose as to what kind of character would be across all this. As I was considering the question, I was working as a teacher with a number of teenage girls who were the product of IVF and who were only too happy to discuss this matter openly with each other or anyone else who happened to be around. No big deal.
And so developed the narrator who is nineteen at the time of the telling, and who is an American IVF baby. Her character developed from there – she is the only child of a busy high profile international couple based in LA who provide her with every material thing including a nanny-companion and pets, but who apparently treat her more as one of their worldly achievements than as a little girl. She develops a cold and unsentimental attitude to most things, and spends much of her time reading the classics and writing novels. She is named, as many children now are, after a place, in this case Sydney, Australia. It is in fact where she was conceived, but I can’t remember whether this fact is still in the book or not. The family (on the mother’s side at least) comes from an old fashioned Catholic tradition, hence an interest in things religious, and a number of highly religious connections and relatives. Sydney doesn’t think she is unrelated to the ‘parents’. Everyone else seems to be either related internationally or else acquainted internationally. She is conscious that she has, in a sense, no discoverable identity. Her maternal ‘grandfather’ is a wrier of science fiction, and he loves Sydney very much, and thinks she is incredibly special and different. He calls her his ‘child of the twilight of time’.
So the plot is an intersection between the issues of modern fertility and conception and the ancient matters of faith and miracles located in such objects as the baby Jesus statue in Rome and the black statues of Mary.
One of the characters, Diana, is an Australian woman living in Barcelona, dedicated to completing a vast book by her late husband on the subject of the Black Virgin. Diana originated in Tasmania, and the novel ends (2007) in the place of her birth in the early 1950s. It is there that she discovers a painting of a Black Virgin in the little old rural church. Although she had seen this picture frequently in her early life, she had never made the connection between it and her late husband’s project. This is just an example of the ubiquity of the Black Virgin, under the nose as it were, but unrecognised. Diana and one of her friends have made an effort to trace the stolen statue of the baby Jesus. They still have hopes, but so far have had no real success.
Some of the characters are devout believers in prayer and miracles. Sydney is a narrator who tries to remain impartial and practical, reporting the facts and leaving the interpretation up to the other characters and the reader.
Sydney takes upon herself the role of that narrator of the lives of Diana and her niece Corazon who is young and fertile. One train of thought concerns the lost statue; the other concerns the romantic life of Corazon.
I can sum it all up by saying the story concerns the theft of a miraculous statue from a church in Rome, and follows the connections between the people who want to conceal its
whereabouts, and those who want to find it.

Child of the Twilight - Book Group Questions

2010-01-27T11:54:00.000-08:00

• Twilight is the dangerous time when nothing is quite as it seems. In what sense is Sydney a ‘child of the twilight’?

• The theft of the statue represents a serious interference to the order of things. Throughout the novel the idea of ‘interference’ looms large: Sydney’s conception, Diana’s manipulations, Barnaby’s work as a surgeon, to name a few instances. These are worldly interferences. However there is also a more mystical side to interference in the form of prayers offered and prayers answered. When is interference a good thing?

• How significant are our biological origins in shaping our identities?

• In Rosita’s imagination the ‘wellbeing of mankind was being held together with prayer’. Does the novel portray tragedy and disaster as a result of a stitch being dropped in the embroidery of the Divine Heart prayers?

• In her own art, Cora refers to Jan Van Eyck’s Marriage of the Arnolfini but in quite startling ways. What does this say about her and her attitudes to marriage and fertility?

• Do you think that the school staff – in particular the headmistress, Dr Silver reacted appropriately to Cora Mean’s accident in the art room?

• What roles do Furta Sacra (holy theft) and miracles play in the Child of the Twilight? How do these ideas affect the way the characters see our world?

• ‘Fiction is the perfect place to put the facts,’ says Sydney. What are the advantages for her telling her story as fiction rather than fact?

• The novel uses a number of symbols of fertility – in particular the Black Madonna. What does the Black Madonna represent to Sydney? To Diana?

• What do you think Sydney believes was most influential in creating her life – science or her mother’s prayers?

• How reliable is Sydney as narrator?

• Rufus’ father is involved in the MOSE project in Venice. What is the symbolic significance of this project in the lives of Cora and Rufus?

• The characters are described by their attributes – Corazon the Fertile, Diana the Manipulator, Cosimo the Trickster. This gives the narrative a quality of fable or mystery play. How effective is this technique in a novel of today?

• Assisted Reproductive Technology, with its acronym ART provides the impetus or the germ of the novel, and there is a great deal of ‘art’ in the usual sense also. How do these to two interpretations of ‘art’ function together?

• How do you think Roland’s life was shaped by the violent death of his twin sister?

• The old painting of the indigenous Madonna in the church in Tasmania has previously escaped Diana’s notice. What is the significance of her realisation of its existence?
• Both Sydney and Cosimo can never know their genetic origins. In what ways does this fact affect their lives and their outlook?

• Sydney has a cold, practical and unromantic attitude to reproduction, describing herself as being simply genetic material. Do you find this sad?

• What is your opinion of Sydney’s morality with regard to reading Edith’s diary and extracting its secrets?

• Eleena was killed during a cricket match. What are the roles of games and accident and destiny in the novel?

• Why do you think Sydney’s imaginary friends are native Americans?

• The narrative criss-crosses the globe. Even Rosita the Spinster finally makes it from Australia to Europe, and it seems that there have been English Vinnecombes in rural Tasmania. What is the significance of these migrations?

• What is the significance of Barnaby’s work as an eye surgeon?

• What is the significance of Avila’s business ‘Marriages Performed at Sea’?

• A miracle is something that can not be explained except by divine intervention. What is your response to ‘miracles”?
• How important is it to know where your genetic material comes from?

"Child of the Twilight" New Novel - February 2010

2010-01-12T22:02:00.000-08:00

A Woman of Seville

2010-01-08T21:27:00.000-08:00

My review of A Woman of Seville by Sallie Muirden in The Age 09/01/2010
Sallie Muirden’s novel Revelations of a Spanish Infanta sprang from the author’s passionate interest in Diego Velaquez, in particular his painting of the ‘Maids of Honour’. Now she returns to the early life of Velazquez, the young apprentice.
A Woman of Spain opens with Diego and his master Pacheco high up in the tower of the cathedral peering down on life through a telescope. The cathedral in Seville was built on the ruins of the Moorish mosque, and the tower of the mosque, the Giralda, became the tower of the cathedral. The Inquisition is still very active, so there is a sense of real danger. The position of young Morisco boys, separated from their parents who have been expelled from the country, is under threat. Pacheco has come here to spy for the Inquisitor. As the men look down, they establish the bustling pageant of 17th century life in the city, taking the reader smoothly from one key character to another. Diego observes that the telescope can be used for good or evil, of which there seem to be equal measure in Seville, a ‘sinful city’. An abiding colour and tone are established for the story in the image of ‘purple figs splitting out of their skins’.
This is historical fiction rendered in poetic image and careful language, and structured with regard for one of the key metaphors of the text, that of balance. This image is embodied in the ‘ladder-man’ who manifests himself to the beautiful Paula, a courtesan, mistress of a bishop, and an artist’s model. In the manner of such writers as Jeannette Winterson, Muirden incorporates the character of the ladder-man into the realistic historical narrative with wit and grace. The ladder-man moves across the rooftops of Seville with ease, taking Paula on excursions with him, instructing her in the necessary art of balance. Because he is mute he communicates in writing. ‘He has the look of a shepherd about him, wearing a rustic shift, his ladder a kind of crook.’ He is then a type of Christ, and from childhood Paula has wished to be personally loved by Christ. The ladder-man’s name, which is not revealed until late in the story, is Aurelio which means ‘golden’, characterizing him as precious, a fact that is clear from the beginning.
The novel’s structure balances and swings, chapter by chapter, between the first person point of view of Diego and that of Paula. One narrative thread concerns Paula’s sitting for the figure of Mary Magdalene with Christ in ‘The Penitent Woman’. The artist is a visiting Flemish painter (fictional) whose name, Harmen Weddesteeg, is derived from the name Rembrandt Harmenzoon van Rijn who was born in Weddesteeg. Hence the great painters Rembrandt and Velasquez are embedded in the fabric of Paula’s story. More or less everyone is seeking love of some kind, the text enlivened by colourful scenes of lust and sensuality. Not for nothing was the split fig introduced in the first pages.
It is not only love they seek, however, but also freedom. And the most poignant of these seekers are the Morisco boys who are captive at the cathedral, valued for their beautiful voices. They want nothing more that to escape and find their way to their exiled beloved families, some of whom have been lost anyway in ‘boat tragedies’. There are disturbing resonances here with the desperation and tragedy of 20th century and present day conflicts, migrations and expulsions.
The history and the fantasy in this novel keep coming up against the deep and terrible cruelty of which the human heart is capable. Perhaps the sad thing is that the true balance Paula seeks with her ethereal ladder-man is located in the realm of fantasy. Velazquez plans a vast canvas ‘a scene of weeping Moors flooding down cathedral hill, their battered baggage strewn along the gutters and a blind Christian beggar caught up in the surge’. In a postscript to the novel the reader learns that Velasquez did execute such a work, but that it was destroyed by a fire a hundred years after it was completed. Thus the narrative plaits and weaves the moving dramas of fantasy and reality as they swing back and forth before the reader’s gaze.

Writing Workshop

2010-01-05T13:57:00.000-08:00

On Monday January 11 at the Victorian Writers' Centre I will give a masterclass on writing novels. This will run for just one day, so designing the day's activities is a very interesting exercise in itself. I plan to make the people work quite hard, the main idea being to inspire them to design a detailed presentation for a novel they hope to write. Lots of discussion and Q&A, as well as written exercises. And it will be nice to be able to show them my new book which will be published on the first of February.

Link to info about the workshop www.vwc.org.au
And about the new book www.carmelbird.com

Epigraphs

2009-12-28T14:31:00.000-08:00

One of the secondary characters in 'This Side of Paradise' is a young poet named Thomas Parke D’Invilliers. Fitzgerald uses a quotation from one of D’Invilliers’ poems as the epigraph to' The Great Gatsby'. ‘Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her; If you can bounce high, bounce for her too, Till she cry “Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover, I must have you!” ’ This reference and playfulness I find very appealing.
I am fascinated by epigraphs and their relation to the work, as well as to the creator of the work. In fact when I get a new book I like to read all the pages at the front, and sometimes back, before I begin reading the text. It is sometimes possible to discover therein little gestures and clues. Not only epigraphs, but dedications also are doorways of a kind into the book, and also into the mind, heart, life and mood of the author.
For my own books I usually have an epigraph, or even two or three. One of these will nearly always be a quotation from a writer called Carrillo Mean, a shadowy character who appears in most of my novels and some of my short stories. In my first novel 'Cherry Ripe' he does not appear in the epigraphs, but in the acknowledgements. The novel quotes from one of his books, and so he is acknowledged as the author of ‘Igneous Intrusions in Southern Tasmania.’
The second novel is ‘The Bluebird Café’, where Carrillo is a significant character in the narrative, and here the first epigraph is by another member of his family, Phoenix Mean. The second epigraph is from Faust: ‘In the beginning was Meaning.’ I am fond of Carrillo’s words that appear as the epigraph to ‘The Common Rat’ (collection of short fiction): ‘Rats, they’re only human.’
And so he goes on. His epigraph to my new novel ‘Child of the Twilight’ is: ‘Assisted Reproductive Technology tells the modern love story of Romeo Spermatozoon and Juliet Oocyte.’ This is from his work 'Creation in the Time of Twilight'.

Feast of Holy Innocents

2009-12-27T19:21:00.000-08:00

Pennyweight Flat Cemetery Castlemaine Victoria

Mary Skillicorn died at eighteen months in Castlemaine in 1854. She is buried in a tiny rocky cemetery beneath crooked sheltering grey box gums in Pennyweight Flat where the colours are soft greys and browns, with accents of pink and purple and acid green. Around her in the leaf litter and rubble of stones are the graves of two hundred other children of the gold-rush. Most of the graves have been obliterated by time, but a few grey-green lichen-covered headstones with faded lettering mark the spot, tell a fragment of the tale. It is perhaps because these graves have almost, but not quite, returned to the earth that they are so particularly heart-breaking. Mary shares her place with Elizabeth Carbis. On one grave grows a lone wild yellow daisy, the only flower around. The stone here is lettered in Chinese.

Beneath a clear cornflower sky we met in the morning round the prehistoric, strangely horizontal trunk of a gum. We had brought chairs and rugs – an antique floral parasol – from a distance you might imagine we were twenty people maybe having a picnic. This was December 27, the Feast of the Holy Innocents, and the priest from the Castlemaine Anglican parish was assembling an altar between a flaking headstone and the scarred fat friendly tree-trunk.

These faded, broken details of the few headstones are so tantalising and so poignant, and yet in their very slender way they begin to form a picture of short lives lived long ago. One simply says ‘Emil’, the rest has dissolved away. All the children died between 1852 and 1857, a time when fetid and polluted water, poor food and deadly diseases such as typhoid, diphtheria and whooping cough were everyday features of the diggings. Pennyweight Flat was so named because it was impossible to find more than a pennyweight of gold in an acre of ground in that location, so it was from the beginning a hard, grim place. In fact it seems impossible to believe that a skerrick of gold ever surfaced here. Is it too fanciful to imagine the remains of the children as a treasure buried in the ground, marked by collections and patterns of stones? The place was fenced and restored, to a degree, in 1929, by public subscription.

The scattered little graves have brought the people here today, have attracted us all to the unrecorded stories we know are here, and know will probably never be clearly told. The first child buried here was Henry Baxter, one year and nine months old, on May 28, 1852. His grave is on the highest point, and is the largest assembly of stones. A little web research tells me the name ‘Skillicorn’ was common on the Isle of Man; perhaps it would be possible to discover Mary’s family. There are no Skillicorns in the local phone book. Because Mary is named and framed by her dates, she seems to me to have an identity here under the umbrella of the gum trees. Most of the two hundred are nameless, and are consequently shady presences over whose bones we presumably are walking with our careless and sacrilegious feet.

This land was of course the home of indigenous people long before the diggers came looking for gold. It is inhabited by the ghosts of those other children too. And there is something utterly un-European in the atmosphere of the place. Parched yet pale green fields stretch away from the fenced and raised area of the graveyard, and a line of houses is visible in the near distance. But the mood and texture around the graves is quite different, is filled with a spirit all its own, filled with a hovering silence, gently broken by the words of the Prayer Book liturgy, so English and elegant and dignified. Comforting and musical, but telling today a terrible story, a story that binds itself to the stories of the cemetery babies, some of whom were, in a sense, victims of the common lust for gold.

In the days following the birth of Christ, King Herod ordered the slaughter of all newborn boys in Bethlehem, hoping to eliminate the promised Messiah by overkill. The feast on December 27, after the joys of Christmas day, remembers those innocent victims of Herod’s purge. The ceremony at Pennyweight Flat, an isolated place of peace and sorrow, far from Bethlehem, far from England, constructs an embrace that stretches across time and space to gather in the lives of all children who have died, known and unknown, near and far.

In the midst of the ritual of the service of Holy Communion, the priest invited people to speak personally of their feelings about the place, their reasons for being present. And with great spontaneous eloquence they told of their varying comprehensions of the meaning of Pennyweight Flat. One spoke of a vision of the spirits of the children being welcomed into the company of angels. One drew attention to the most recent news items of the violent deaths of children in a war zone. One woman expressed her gratitude for the health of her own four children. It was a unique and curious feeling to be in such a forlornly lovely place and to hear such a mixture of the spiritual and the terrible and the everyday. Curious indeed to hear voices there at all, for it is a lonely and a silent place. At least three of the people were quietly drawing patterns in the dust with sticks as they listened or spoke, as if in imitation of the actions of a child.

The priest, vested in a striking splash of scarlet among the muted colours of the graveyard, and wearing a neat Akubra, distributed to the congregation small prints of a picture by William Blake. It is an arresting, difficult, disturbing and unexpected image of the Baby Jesus naked and lying, not in a manger, but on a cross, a holy innocent cradled by his own future. And there was a reading of Blake’s poem ‘Holy Thursday’ from the ‘Songs of Innocence’ which ends with the line:
‘Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door.’ Poetry seemed to be the right response to the occasion which was so steeped in history and sorrow, as well as being informed by great simplicity and goodness.

As I walked away I picked from the flurry of dried gum leaves on the cemetery floor a little piece of dark grey slate, a sliver of green glass, and a stump of bright orange crayon, and took them home. I am not really sure why I did this, but it seemed to be somehow a necessary gesture. The other thing I did was to return the following day to Pennyweight Flat with a bunch of herbs and marigolds from the garden. I placed them on the grave of Mary Skillicorn and Elizabeth Carbis. I did this with due reverence, but I have to confess that I was probably responding to my own fascination and delight in the odd music of Mary’s name. Maybe the herbs were for the two hundred, but it was Mary Skillicorn who accepted the posy in their name.

New Novel Due Feb 2010 - Prologue

2009-12-22T15:44:00.000-08:00

Child of the Twilight - Prologue
My grandfather Frank called me his ‘child of the twilight of time’.

‘Sydney,’ he would say to me, ‘you are the promise of a different new and beautiful reality. You belong to the twilight. Twilight is the tricky hour between being and non-being, the veil between this world and the next.’
‘Frank,’ said my grandmother, ‘it is wrong to speak like that to her. She is a child like any other child.’

One late afternoon – twilight was about to fall – I heard the two of them talking in the library in the dear old house in Mendocino. They were arguing about me. Raised voices were rare in this household, but when they happened, it seems to me they always happened in the library. I thought then that library contained the history of the whole world. Now I believe it really did. This time I was on the terrace, outside the open French doors, buried deep in the silky old cushions of an armchair. The dogs were sleeping at my feet.

‘Sydney is nothing but another insect to you, isn’t she, Frank? Just a specimen for you to fabulate about. You can’t reduce every single thing to science or science fiction.’

Grandfather was silent except for a catch in his throat that was the beginning of a sob. He turned away from her and walked towards the French doors. He stopped before stepping onto the terrace, and he said quietly, in a voice I had seldom heard him use,
‘I love her. I love her with all my heart, and I wish in my unforgivable scientific arrogance to understand her being, understand her spirit. She is new, Hortense, new. Do you not understand that she is new? Oh, what’s the use? I am in awe at her courage and her strange perfection. She is a child of change, a child of the twilight of time.’
Grandmother was also very still and quiet, and she just said,
‘Sydney is a child like any other, and I wish, I wish with all my heart that you could see that and would remember that. I have said it before and I will say it again, she is not the subject of scientific enquiry, nor is she the subject of some piece of speculative fiction.’
Then grandfather walked out onto the terrace and across the lawn. He walked straight past me in my armchair but he didn’t know I was there.
I believe he later wrote a story titled ‘Child of the Twilight of Time’, but I have never read it, and don’t know of its existence either in manuscript or in published form. He wrote sci-fi under a lot of different names.

My own name is Sydney Peony Kent. Frank and Hortense have now passed away, but they were the parents of three girls, Fatima, Lourdes, both deceased, and my mother, Avila, who married Barnaby Kent. Barnaby is descended from the family that also produced Constance, a girl who murdered her baby brother and ended up as the matron of a hospital in Australia. In Sydney, as it happened. There was also a Tasmanian branch of the family that invented the cultured pearl. I am unrelated by blood to all these people, since I am the product of unknown egg and unknown sperm, implanted in Avila at her own request.

Avila/Barnaby are an infertile couple. The details of my heritage are unrecorded. Hence I will never know my true identity. I was born in LA in 1988, and have lived in Holmby Hills all my life, although I’ve spent a lot of my time travelling the world with Avila/Barnaby. He is an eye surgeon of international fame, having saved the sight of princes, popes, presidents and pop stars. Avila runs ‘Marriages Performed at Sea’ which takes her everywhere on the celebrity wedding circuit. I haven’t had an education, although I spent a short periods in various Sacred Heart schools which failed to influence me in an educational or spiritual way. Avila herself is a devout Catholic of sentimental nineteenth-century type, and belongs to the global Sacred Heart family. My principal interest is and always has been in writing novels of a traditional kind. I write in notebooks, in green ink, with the old silver Parker that belonged to grandfather Frank. Unlike most of my Facebook generation I’m not a blogger, but I am devoted to Google, to the extent that I named my beloved King Charles ‘Google’. He is always with me except when we travel. I then stay in touch with him via live feed at Linda’s Lodge of Luxury for Dogs in Santa Monica. We see and hear each other, and sometimes I believe I can smell his special mixture of earthy dog, mandrake and rosemary dog shampoo, and fresh bread. I take him for short walks on screen in camera range and he goes wild with excitement. ‘Kmmmon!’ I go, and Google woofs his funny little woof, and off we trot. I have goldfish and frogs, and a spectacular collection of snow globes, many of which contain black statues of the Virgin Mary. Did you ever have a goldfish? If you did you will have some understanding sadness, of the meaning of life and of the significance of death. I have never really made friends with people my own age, but I am devoted to Isabella, who is my nanny from Mexico. She was found by Avila when I was five days old, at the bus station in LA. Isabella goes everywhere with us, as do my imaginary native American friends Aurora Flame and Amber Moon, both named after peonies. Isabella carries with her at all times the black and shrivelled remains of her own placenta, called her ‘little coat’, which she says is God’s mark of her identity.

My novels are seen by some as evidence of my own fruitless search for identity, in spite of the fanciful plots and complex characters. I consider myself not as an identity, but as ‘material’ in a clinical sense. When I speak of egg and sperm, oocyte and gamete, I think back to the time before I became a zygote, and imagine my identity as an invisible speck. Grandfather Frank and I saw eye to eye in this. I go along with his classification of me as a child of time’s twilight, as something new and futuristic. A being from the moment between seeing and not seeing, a creature outside ordinary reality. Avila has given me to understand that this is the case. I constantly peer into the lives of those to whom I would be related, if I were related to anybody at all. Free-floating, I drift along the branches of the family trees of Avila/Barnaby, out to the very finest twigs. There I have found Roland the Good, Cosimo the Archivist, Diana the Manipulator, Rosita the Spinster, Corazón the Fertile, and Rufus the Virile. I am Sydney the Navigator, Child of the Twilight of Time.

CHARACTER

2009-12-21T14:20:00.000-08:00

Next month I am giving a masterclass on writing a novel. So reading How Fiction Works has been a nice refreshing preparation. I love it when James Wood says: "There is nothing harder than the creation of fictional character." And when he says that a "great deal of nonsense is written every day about characters in fiction". It is so good to revisit many an old character through the eyes of James Wood, and to reflect on how their creators might have created them. The process remains (mercifully) mysterious. The thing is - you can theorise and analyse all you like about these things, but there is no substitute for getting down to work and giving it a try. You can analyse your work after you have written it.

The blue river of truth

2009-12-19T21:10:00.000-08:00

What Maisie Knew
At the end of Chapter Four comes the famous description of the governess's reading habits:
"She took refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed curled the blue river of truth."

2009-12-18T15:37:00.000-08:00

I duly started to read the James Wood but was sent off immediately to What Maisie Knew. So that is where I am now. And very happy.

How Fiction Works

2009-12-18T14:44:00.000-08:00

In The Weekend Australian (December 19 - 2009) Luke Slattery interviews James Wood. The interview reminded me I must read again How Fiction Works - one of the best books on the subject.