Magic Casements

Reasons to Cheerful - Part II

2009-11-05T18:50:00.006+11:00

Remember, remember, the 5th of November, Gunpowder, treason and plot!

I loved Guy Fawkes night when I was a kid. My siblings and I would make an effigy of Guy Fawkes out of old clothes, build a bonfire and throw him onto the top of the burning pile. I'l never forget my old orange nylon flares bursting into flames while my sisters set Catherine Wheels spinning on the gum trees in our back garden. Every year our Dad brought home a bag of crackers; penny bungers, tom thumbs, throwdowns and scary jumping jacks. There'd also be an indulgent array of fireworks; roman candles, flowerpots, golden showers and gorgeous rockets that we set in milk bottles before sending them into the night sky. The advent of daylight savings took some of the thrill out of the night, then crackers and fireworks were banned and finally suburban bonfires became illegal.

As Australia becomes safer and more secular, many of the festive events of my childhood have lost their pizzazz. But yesterday I went to the National Gallery of Victoria to attend the awards ceremony for the Victorian Premier's Reading Challenge and realised there's some excellent new reasons to celebrate.

I'm seriously proud to be an Ambassador for the Challenge. I know I would have loved to have been part of it when I was a kid. No one except my mum was particularly impressed by the volume of books I read as a child. It was almost a secret vice and not something you bragged about in class. But yesterday, hundreds of kids rolled up at the NGV to celebrate their achievements as readers. During the course of this year's Challenge 212,000 Victorian kids read 3.6 million books. According to most of these kids, 'Reading Rules'.

Being an arty, bookish kid in 1960s Melbourne wasn't all that cool but judging by the attitude of the funky junior readers at yesterdays event, things are a whole lot better for young booklovers these days. Frankly, things are better for readers of all of ages. There are more bookshops, more publishers, more support for readers and writers, better libraries and more opportunities to celebrate the importance of art and books in our lives.

For all the nostalgia for Guy Fawkes night, there's still plenty of reasons to be cheerful about the things we can and do celebrate.

As an afterthought, one of my other favourite childhood festivities that's still huge in Australia - possibly even bigger and better - is the Melbourne Cup. It helped that I had a weird dream that was both 'Shocking' (winner!) and about a 'Crime Scene' (2nd) which led me to placing a couple of very lucrative bets on Tuesday. Mysterious and magical. More reasons to be cheerful.

Reasons to be Cheerful - Part I

2009-10-31T14:17:00.008+11:00

When I was seventeen, I put a little book together called 'Reasons to Celebrate'. It was a birthday present for my best friend and consisted of a diary/birthday book with a justification for celebration listed on each and every day of the year. My friends and I were always trying to think up a good reason to indulge ourselves: to eat another ice-cream, order another pizza, not do our homework, or have another beer (yes, we were underage drinkers). My idea was that anytime we were looking for a good excuse to indulge, we could flick open the little green book and say, "Oh, look, today is National Ferret Day (April 2). Can't let that one slip by without celebrating!"

I spent weeks trying to fill in some of the more obscure dates, using religious calenders and the Encyclopedia Brittanica to find events of note but in the end I had to invent celebrations for days that proved too hard to find anything to commemorate. It's much easier being a teenager today. You can find so many more reasons to be cheerful.

Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the internet. Now that is a day worth noting. If it had been around when I was a kid, I could knocked up that little book of celebrations in an afternoon just by referencing the following two sites:

http://www.holidaysforeveryday.com
http://www.holidays.net

Todays listings of 'Reasons to celebrate' include:

Halloween
All Hallows Eve
Beggar's Night
Magic Day
National Knock-Knock Day (USA)
National UNICEF Day
Reformation Day (particularly in Slovenia & Brandenburg)
Samhain (Wiccan)
&
The anniversary of the death of Harry Houdini.

It's the last one that's on my mind this afternoon. One of the characters in my new novel, Charlie, is obsessed with magic. I've just finished reviewing some of the chapters where Charlie tries to create illusions and discovers exactly how Indian fakirs perform their mysterious acts.

There is something about magic, about our relationship to the invisible, the unknown, the unseen and unseeable that is at the heart of celebration. It's the essence of Halloween, Samhain and, of course, Magic Day.

Houdini died in 1926 and there was nothing cheerful about his passing. But he lived a dazzling, daring and passionate life and perhaps that's what celebration and magic are all about. Embracing life.

Because it's important

2009-10-27T15:55:00.002+11:00

October has been an utter drought for me on the blog front, even though there has been a million things about which I have thought 'I must write a post about that...'.

I've super-charged my brain with new ideas at the Ubud Readers and Writers Festival, spent two weeks in South Asia, pondered the Americanization of 'Vulture's Gate', made a big leap forward with the new novel and scribbled lists of ideas for future blogs in three different notebooks (yes, I know, counterproductive).

But when uber-librarian Pat Pledger of Read Plus emailed me about a recent survey of government school libraries, I knew it had to be the topic for the first blog I would write to break my drought. I know how important teacher-librarians are to the literary life of a school. I feel their presence as soon as I walk into a school library. Schools that are lucky enough to have libraries staffed by a dynamic teacher-librarians invariably have powerful literary cultures. In the past decade of visiting schools, I've grown to deeply admire teacher-librarians. The impact they have on the developing literacy of children is crucial in creating skilled readers and writers.

Following is the results of the survey, courtesy of Pat Pledger, and a link to a petition urging the federal government to ensure that all Australian primary and secondary students have access to a school library and a qualified teacher librarian:

The ASLRP survey undertaken on the behest of ASLA and ALIA shows a
great inequity in school library staffing and funding across Australia.

The survey showed that 35% of government school libraries have
no teacher librarians. Approximately two thirds of all schools have
either no teacher librarian or less than one Full Time Equivalent (FTE)
working in their school library. After the Northern Territory (5%),
Tasmania (50%), Western Australia (almost 60%) and Victoria
(65%) have the lowest number of TLs employed K-12 across all
sectors. Instead there are high numbers of library technicians
in Tasmania and Victoria and library officers in Western Australia.

As it has done in the past, the federal government is in a position to
influence state school library funding and staffing. To do this, they
can: collect national data on school library staffing, funding, and
scheduling; tie funding so that states can and must adequately staff and
fund school library programs and services; require that literacy
programs and other national curricula should explicitly recognize the
central role school libraries have in student achievement, literacy
attainment, and preparation for post-secondary success; develop national
school library standards; increase teacher librarian training positions
in university programs.

All Australian students deserve 21st century schools staffed by 21st
century professionally qualified teacher librarians.

Join in signing the petition now
http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/a-qualified-teacher-librarian-in-every-school.html

--

Collected Works from Collected Works

2009-09-19T21:17:00.004+10:00

On Friday morning I dropped by my favourite bookshop in the world - Collected Works. It's in the Nicholas Building on the corner of Flinders Lane and Swanston Street in downtown Melbourne. I was searching for books for my very-well-read godchildren. There's been a run of birthdays in the last month and somehow I've managed to fall behind in my godmotherly duties. But the great thing about godparenting is that you are so easily forgiven (or at least, that's what I'm banking on).

One of the lovely things about being a god-parent is having the luxury of being the source of strange and unexpected gifts. I'm ashamed to admit my presents rarely arrive on time and are inevitably of the bookish persuasion but, so far, the feedback from the kids has been positive and I like to imagine that they sow a seed of curiosity.

After a long and intense conversation with the ever-wise Kris Hemensley, the resident poet of Collected Works, I put several books on order as belated birthday presents and walked out with three books of poetry which I KNOW I should put in the post immediately. Unfortunately, I'm going to have trouble parting with them. Especially Adam Ford's 'The Third Fruit is a Bird'. There's a certain seventeen-year-old who is destined to eventually own it but perhaps I'll have to go back and buy another copy as this one is already looking well-loved. (Okay, RW, you know it's on its way). Perhaps I'll have to hang on to all three books for the moment and start all over again because sometimes books are simply too seductive to allow themselves the luxury of travel.

Sorry much-loved kids, you'll have to wait a little longer.

Parallel histories or Things we have Lost

2009-09-15T09:07:00.009+10:00

The tiny coloured ramekins, jugs and eggcups that line my kitchen windowsill were made by my father. In the early morning light they glisten like opals. Their glazes are smooth and rich. In the late 1940s imported glazes were hard to come by so my father sourced his pigments from the Dulux paint factory and made the glazes himself. My grandfather was also a potter who dug his own clay and built his own kilns. In my early childhood I imagined that making pottery was a very Australian occupation. Our house was awash with ceramics made by friends and relatives. We were so spoilt for beautiful crockery that we even used elegant, hand-thrown bowls to feed the cats.

For more than twenty years my father worked as a potter, building up his pottery from a tiny studio pottery in a shed in Sydney in the 1940s to a successful commercial pottery in Melbourne that employed a team of potters and artists who decorated the work. In the early 1960s, my father went to Canberra with other Australian potters to lodge a formal plea with the government not to remove tariffs that protected the Australian ceramics industry from being swamped by cheap imported crockery. Their bid failed.

Despite the fact that his work was popular - a 'must-have' for every Australian that aspired to stylish dining - my father had little confidence that his pottery would survive an influx of cheap imitations. So he sold the potteries before the inevitable slump and collapse of Australian commercial potteries. He committed himself to his deepest passion and became a full-time sculptor. In the long run, it proved a good move for him and our family but I always felt sorry for the artist who bought the business from my father. It lasted less than a decade once the restrictions against imports were removed.

Australians gained a huge range of cheap crockery but we lost access to a large body of studio and commercial pottery. There are still Australian potters working on a small scale but few can support themselves and you won't find their work in mainstream shops. In the wake of the Australian productivity commission's recommendation to lift restrictions on the import of books, I can't help but draw comparisons.

If Australian publishing went the same way as Australian potteries, writing in this country would become the luxury of the hobbyist. Most Australian writers, if it is no longer possible to make a living from their work, will have to resort to other jobs and a huge body of Australian writing will be lost.

There have been a lot of articles in the newspapers and on the internet over the course of this year thrashing out the arguments for and against the removal of restrictions. Perhaps I should have written this post months ago but when authors were accused of being 'greedy', I felt a wearying grief that history was repeating itself. If you want to understand the situation fully, check out Saving Aussie Books and Australians for Australian Books.

Stories serve a very different purpose to aesthetic objects. Putting the cat's food in a mass-produced bowl from China isn't the same as reading a child a story that fails to reflect any aspect of their country's history and culture. Everything changes but we should always be mindful of what will be lost in our haste to embrace the future.

Business

2009-08-20T15:09:00.002+10:00

It's about to start - the whirly-gig of events that happen during the Melbourne Writer's Festival and Children's Bookweek. Having the two festivals coincide makes for a very crazy time for most children's authors. For me, the action starts tonight with the presentation of awards for the junior writing prizes of the My Brother Jack Literary Festival (yes, another festival). It was a huge job judging the awards this year - 156 short stories and 103 poems were entered in the competition. I'm looking forward to meeting the young prize-winning authors.
Then I'm heading straight onto a party to celebrate the opening of the MWF. Tomorrow I have one day of grace in which to get some writing done before twelve days of back to back events.
On Saturday, Vulture's Gate will be launched into the world, officially, at Fairfield Library.
On Monday, I'm doing two gigs at the Melbourne Writers' Festival - one with Julia Lawrinson on 'Truth, History and Fiction' and then one on my own talking about 'Tomorrow, Today' and the premise of Vulture's Gate. Then every other day of the week and the following week, I'll be visiting schools, conducting workshops, catching up with other writers who are in town for the festival or attending Children's Bookweek events. One good thing about having so much on is that I can't get particularly stressed about any single event. I'm probably more excited about having a full day of Punch and Judy on Sunday than anything else, simply because it's outside the normal run of activities for August.
I feel as if I'm living in two universes - one in which I am incredibly busy racing around Melbourne, meeting people and engaging with the present and another where my mind is totally pre-occupied with the book I'm working on. At night, I dream of travel, of being at sea, in airports, other countries or the landscape of my new novel - sailing through the Malacca Straits on my way to India.
Somedays, striking a balance between real life and the life of the imagination is like trying to juggle water. Maybe that's why writing is like magic. In one moment the ideas are simply falling through the air like raindrops that disappear into the earth and in the next, they're soaking into the pages of your story. Not the best metaphor, perhaps, but one that makes sense to me as I head out into a rainy Melbourne afternoon.

Punch and Judy Live

2009-08-18T18:00:00.000+10:00

Okay, I have to admit it. I have another life. A life outside books. It involves a lot of other people and a huge cast of puppets.

In my other life, I'm in love with Mr Punch. As gross, violent and irreverent as he may be, there is something simply irresistible about Punch.

Maybe it's the fact that he is around 400 years old - which puts him way ahead of your run-of-the-mill vampire. Maybe it's all his alter egos that add to his appeal - Pulcinella in Italy, Kasper in Germany, Jan Klaassen in the netherlands and Mester Jakel in Denmark. In Russia he is known as Petrushka, in Romania he is Vasilache; in Hungary, László, and in France Polichinelle, while all across the English speaking world he is loved, loathed and reviled as Mr Punch.

I'm not alone in loving Punch. He has a grip on the imaginations of millions, including author Neil Gaiman whose book Punch : The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy references the comic puppet show and a tragic reality. But within the construct of the puppet show, Mr Punch is the absolute antithesis of a tragic figure.

Andy Griffiths, who understands more about humour than anyone I know and is also a fan of Punch, explained that what kids love in a comic character is the character's inability to learn, that the difference between a tragedy and a comedy is that the hero of the tragedy sees the error of his ways. The comedic hero never learns.

Kids love the fact that Mr Punch never changes. They know he is wrong about everything. They are deliciously scandalised by his behaviour; when he gets away with throwing away the baby, knocking the policeman on the head and tricking the devil. He is about as far removed from a moral paragon as you can find in fiction - which is why adults worry that he is a bad role model. But no child wants to emulate Mr Punch. They do love laughing at him. Perhaps it's an added pleasure for them to realise they're morally superior to Mr Punch. Even though they're still kids and everyone is telling them how to behave, they're way ahead of Punch.

This Sunday, 23 August, my better half, the puppeteer and Punch Professor, Ken Harper will be staging three Punch performances at Northcote Town Hall. If you've never seen Mr Punch live, you haven't lived! Tickets will be available at the door.

The vanishing art of reading

2009-08-17T18:55:00.007+10:00

In a recent conversation with a young friend I made a comment about the 'art' of reading and my friend scoffed. He felt there was no art to reading and it required no particular talent - it was simply decoding text and once you knew how to do it all readers were equal. But I believe that just as musicians become more skilled through practice and commitment to their art, so do readers. Just because you've mastered chopsticks, doesn't mean you can play Rachmaninov. There is no plateau, there is always more to know, more to understand.

I am still learning to improve my skills as a reader, despite the fact I have read thousands of books in myriad genres. I have a number of books on my shelves on 'how to read a book'. Not all of them are great reads but many of them have added to my understanding of what it means to really get the most out of my reading. Reading widely requires both energy and patience. Sometimes it requires the same sort of compassion that you must have when listening to someone speak with a very heavy accent. You have to let your mind attune to the rhythms of the language before you can fully grasp what the speaker is trying to communicate. It's a skill that is particularly important to develop when reading work written in other eras, works in translation or books from other cultures.

Last month I attended the AATE/ALEA conference in Hobart, Tasmania where Professor Barry McGaw from the University of Melbourne presented a fascinating paper on Australian reading standards. He is also the Chair of the National Curriculum Board so, ostensibly, he was discussing the outline of the plans for the new curriculum but he also talked about where Australia fits in the OECD in terms of literacy. Apparently, Australia's standards of literacy have been slipping for the last decade but, surprisingly, it's not because there are more illiterate students but because our top readers, the students scoring at the highest end of the scale for comprehension and language skill aren't attaining the scores they used to a decade ago. The slippage in standards is amongst the talented readers.

Professor McGaw explained it wasn't clear why the best readers have fallen in their standards but he noted that the countries that have attained the greatest improvement in literacy skills, like Korea, have focussed not only on working with readers who are struggling with literacy but have extended their top-end readers as well. There is always more to learn about reading.
You can download Professor McGaw's materials from the conference website. His power point presentation incorporating the graphs he used to illustrate the changes in reading standards are compelling.

I hate snobbery about literature - there is a place for every kind of book. But I'm not a fan of the pervasive idea that simply being able to read a book is enough. All books are NOT of equal merit. Good books are not always easy. Just because they are difficult doesn't mean they are not well written or not worth reading. I've noticed a certain smugness among some readers who feel if they can knock over a book like 'Twilight' or one of the Harry Potter titles in a weekend then they have learned all there is to know about reading. It's like assuming that because you can scoff a bowl of ice-cream, you are a master gourmet. Some books are more like artichokes - you have to peel back the layers and savour each mouthful.

Sometimes I worry that the sheer volume of easy-to-read novels that are available to young readers is deterring them from making an effort to wrestle with more difficult books. Reading widely requires support from parents, librarians, booksellers, teachers, friends and the wider community. And it also requires readers to take reading seriously, to celebrate all the diverse voices of the literary world, and to develop the reading skill and stamina to persevere with complex stories and difficult prose.

Rights, Rites and Getting it Right

2009-08-13T21:02:00.009+10:00

I've been getting through a lot of fiction this week though not a lot of my own in terms of writing. But one of the great pleasures of being a writer is allowing yourself the time to indulge in plenty of serious reading. One of the best pieces of advice I was given when I first started out writing was to consider reading a part of my working day, not simply a leisure activity or a guilty indulgence. So I try and set aside a slab of time in any working day to read and I know that doing so strengthens my writing and enriches my world.

Last night I bought two new books from Leesa, one of the fantastic dynamo booksellers from The Little Bookroom. One of them was Siobhan Dowd's award winning novel Bog Child and the other was Free? Stories celebrating human rights. I'm only half way through Bog Child but loving its richness. I finished Free? early this morning. I'd read most of it before I switched off the light the night before but felt compelled to finish it before I got up. Some of the stories are brilliant, some more ordinary but each addresses one of the thirty Articles in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Not every article is covered but some of the ones that are dealt with are handled so beautifully that I found myself feeling very moved by the sheer integrity of the stories. Particularly outstanding are the first and last stories in the collection - David Almond's Klaus Vogel and the Bad Lads and Michael Morpurgo's No Trumpets Needed. It seems neither of these authors can write a story that isn't utterly perfect. Other authors who contributed to the book include Ursula Dubosarsky, Margaret Mahy, Eoin Colfer, Malorie Blackman and Jamila Gavin who all rate among my favourite writers for younger readers.

What I took away from this is book a reinforced sense of the powerful way that stories explore what is important about being human; our rights, our responsibilities and the rites of passage that lead us into the wide world.

The Sea-wreck Stranger

2009-08-12T16:08:00.003+10:00

I've wanted to write a post about this book for quite a while but have been confounded by the fact that I have too much to say about it. The temptation to write a 'spoiler' is so strong that I've resisted writing about it at all.

I first heard of this New Zealand author last year when the NZ writer Brigid Lowry emailed me and said she'd been reading a fantastic new work of YA called "The Sea Wrack Tangle' by Anna Mackenzie as it had just won the NZ Post Award. And then Brigid immediately wrote again to say it was actually called 'The Sea-Wreck Stranger'. But both titles seemed intriguing and I kept an eye out for it in Australian bookshops. Then, serendipitously, I was sent a copy by Text publishers who were about to publish an Australian edition of the book. They asked if I would consider writing a comment to go on the cover, if I happened to like the story.

It's a little nerve-wracking reading a book on the premise that you might have to email the publishers and tell them you have nothing good to say about the work. So I was enormously relieved to find I simply fell into this novel and was totally absorbed by the world that Anna Mackenzie had created for her character Ness.

This is the comment I sent to Text for inclusion on the back cover of the Australian edition:

"I love Ness, her story, her strength, and her passionate intensity. A sea- wrecked stranger, an island of dark secrets and a heroine who isn't afraid to discover the difficult truth make for a gripping, unputdownable read."

Tonight I'm speaking at an event that the Centre for Youth Literature are hosting at the State Library of Victoria called "What's New in Books for Teenagers?". I'll definitely be discussing The Ship-wreck Stranger as a book that captures the zeitgeist in YA fiction. In some very subtle ways, McKenzie's book explores different aspects of the ideas that I was preoccupied with when I wrote Vulture's Gate, which I'll also be talking about. CYL staff will be discussing the latest releases in their knowledgeable way too so I'm hoping to come home with a swag full of inspired reading.

You can't edit a blank page

2009-08-04T09:21:00.010+10:00

I'm always making resolutions about writing. A New Year, a new month, a new day - any way that I can create a demarcation point - I say to myself "from this moment forward I am going to be more focussed, more disciplined, more committed..." and then someone drops by or the phone rings and I am granted a reprieve from the obsessive business of getting a story finished. Or, more honesty, it's not other people that keep me from my work. It's me. I find my own distractions.

But today I've got few excuses (I can always find one or two) to not grab the manuscript and wrestle with its messy chapters. The house is quiet, I've unplugged the phone and I even have something to look forward to at the end of the day, which always helps me keep to the task at hand. This evening I'm off to listen to other writers talk about their Faraway Journeys at the State Library.

Of late I've done so much talking about writing myself that it's chipped away at my ability to actually produce the words on the page. Sometimes the most arduous journey is walking along the short path through my garden to my office. Forcing myself to stay the distance with this particular project and not be lured away from the desk by a million temptations has been incredibly difficult.

I've been working on this manuscript for over three years now and its completion still feels like a mammoth task though it's due in at my publishers in a matter of weeks. I have two quotes pinned above my desk that I think I need to re-read this morning. One says, in big bold letters: YOU CAN'T EDIT A BLANK PAGE. It's a great quote which I've seen attributed to a dozen writers - perhaps it is such a truism that it's impossible to know who said it first. The second quote is from one of my favourite authors, the 19th Century French novelist, Honore de Balzac. I first copied out this quote from his novel Cousin Bette when I was a teenager but I think it's taken decades of writing for me to understand it fully:

The man who can formulate his design in words is held to be out of the common run of men. This faculty all artists and writers possess; but execution needs more than this. It means creating, bringing to birth, laboriously rearing the child, putting it to bed every evening gorged with milk, kissing it every morning with a mother’s never spent affection, licking it clean, clothing it over and over again in the prettiest garments, which it spoils again and again. It means never being disheartened by the upheavals of a frenetic life, but making of the growing work of art a living masterpiece, which in sculpture speaks to all eyes, in literature to all minds, in painting to all memories, in music to every heart. This is the travail of execution. The hand must constantly progress, in constant obedience to the mind.

Time to make the hand obey...

Who's Afraid of the Big, Bad Future?

2009-08-03T14:48:00.007+10:00

I've been thinking a lot about fear lately. Not least because I've just finished reading Daniel Gardner's fantastic book on the subject.

One of my misgivings in writing Vulture's Gate is that I've always been suspicious of doomsday prophesies and was amazed to discover that I felt compelled to write about a totally dysfunctional, post-apocalypse world. And yet I couldn't tell the story I wanted to tell without harnessing some of the powerful images and ideas that went with a futuristic dystopia. I've been relieved to note from the early reviews that most readers feel the book offers hope. Because, despite all, I am hopeful for the future. I loved that Gardner's book, despite it's gloomy topic, explained the mechanisms of fear. In clear, accessible prose, Gardner reviews hundreds of studies done on 'risk' and our responses to fearful situations and presents a compelling argument for optimism.

My copy of Gardner's book is so crammed with post-it notes, it looks like I've been studying it for an end-of-year exam. It's definitely one of the best works of popular science that I've read in a long time. I could probably write a dozen blogs from spin-off ideas this book has generated but perhaps it's worth just quoting Gardner in a chapter where he explained the way memories are formed and used to measure risk:

"There is obvious survival value in remembering personal experiences of risk. But even more valuable for our ancient ancestors - and us, too - is the ability to learn and remember from the experiences of others. After all, there's only one of you. But when you sit around the campfire after a long day of foraging, there may be twenty or thirty other people. If you can gather their experiences you will multiply the information on which your judgements are based twenty or thirty times."

What a great argument for books and reading! I love the size of the tribe that fill my bookcases.
Much of the information that Gardner presents in his book confirms the invaluable nature of narrative and how we use it to shape our understanding of the world. Risk - The Science and Politics of Fear (which is sub-titled 'How the Culture of Fear Manipulates your Brain') -clarified much about how risk and fear shape our responses to the world and why they work so powerfully in fiction.

Counting down the days

2009-07-04T11:44:00.005+10:00

Less than a month to go and Vulture's Gate will be in bookshops across Australia. I have a stack of glossy covers on my desk, though I'm still waiting on my advance copies of the bound book.

This afternoon I had a long chat with the very lovely publicist from Allen and Unwin, Sarah Tran. I probably drove her crazy with questions as I vented my anxieties about the passage of this novel into the world. I poured over the media release and fretted about potential misunderstandings - though it's too late now as both the book and the release have left the warehouse on their way to around a hundred reviewers, radio stations, newspapers and media outlets.

I can't believe how anxious I am about its release. It was a story that ambushed me when I was working on another novel and I still haven't worked out how to discuss its contents. Tomorrow, I'm giving a talk at Glen Waverley Library as part of the Monash Library Literary Festival. I've put together a powerpoint presentation of images related to my books and their covers but, if the last couple of gigs are anything to go by, I'll probably be hit by an almost familiar ripple of fear when the cover of 'Vulture's Gate' flashes onto the screen. There are so many things embedded in this book, I think it will take me a few more weeks to grapple with how to explain its genesis.

As I unwrapped the parcel of covers this morning and read the strap line I was struck again by the strangeness of this story that I have brought into the world: Girls are extinct, Chaos Rules, Welcome to the future...

Misery

2009-07-03T15:13:00.004+10:00

Misery memoirs have been around for a long time. They existed long before Dave Pelzer's A Child Called It became a sensation for Pelzer's portrayal of his brutalised and miserable childhood. When I wrote my novel A Prayer for Blue Delaney, which touched upon the fate of Australian child migrants of the 1950s, I received many emails from young readers asking me if I'd read Pelzer's book and I became aware of how many children read misery memoirs as if they are books for children. Just because a book is about a child, doesn't mean it is suitable for younger readers.

Miserable childhoods are classic material for children's books. Richard Davies has posted a list of 20 Classics that document shattered childhoods over at the Abe Books website. But there is a difference between children's book about tough childhoods and misery memoirs. I've researched the lives of many people whose childhoods were fraught with suffering and struggled to make sense of the stories, to sift through the sickening details to find the core truth and integrity of the story. It isn't the misery that makes the stories important but the humanity of the child. When retelling these stories for younger readers, it's inappropriately gratuitous to include every gruesome detail. Sometimes when you 'tell all' you only create a work that is a testament of brutality, of the depths of human despair.

Misery memoirs no doubt have an important place alongside adult biographies but it's more than a little disturbing when you spot one on the shelves of a primary school library.

Last Christmas, I walked into a Borders bookshops and was confronted by a wall of misery memoirs in the foyer. A pair of young girls who were no older than ten years of age were browsing the titles on display, presumably making their Christmas selection. And it struck me that the way these memoirs are marketed is almost more disturbing than their content. I am not an advocate of censoring the reading of children as I believe child readers are generally very good at self censorship but the covers of these books are both compelling and misleading from a child's perspective. I chose to display in this post only a fraction of the covers that I stumbled across. There are dozens more in a similar vein. A doe-eyed child viewed through the soft focus lens has become a hallmark of childhood abuse. It's no wonder child readers are drawn to them.

The titles alone give you a sense of the parallel themes: Ugly, Abandoned, Sickened, Broken, Cut and Scarred. Then there are the titles that reference society's abandonment and failure to protect the children: Suffer the Little Children, Deliver me from Evil, Touched by Evil, Nobody Heard Me Cry, Nobody Came.

Perhaps the most disturbing titles are the ones that reference 'Daddy'. Many of these books detail explicit and grotesque acts of sexual abuse. There are dozens of them, each detailing the betrayal daughters have suffered at their hands of their fathers. When I was running a search for related titles on the internet, the online bookseller threw up a list of titles about sexual abuse along with a very sweet picture book about a bear and his cub entitled 'Kisses for Daddy'.

I've long suspected that Tolstoy was wrong when he wrote "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." There is something depressingly repetitious about human misery.

Good Girls, Bad Girls

2009-06-29T19:28:00.005+10:00

It's school holidays here in Victoria. I used to love the winter term break - especially as the cold weather provided a perfect excuse to spend all day watching television. (Yes, I was a TV addict as well as a book addict.) So though I usually blog about books, I've been thinking about the other pleasures of childhood holidays.

I especially loved it when daytime television featured 'festivals' of 1930s child stars. As much as I admired Shirley Temple, it was the 'Jane Withers Festivals' that provoked special excitement. What was it about Jane? She's largely forgotten now, except for her role as the very bad rich girl who bullies Shirley in the film Bright Eyes. But I think what I liked about her was that, even though she wasn't as pretty as Shirley, she was bursting with energy. And even when she was bad, you couldn't help but admire her. She was never a wimp.

It's decades since I've seen a Jane Withers films but she is fixed in my memory as the tough but good-natured working-class kid who saves the day, not necessarily through cheesy personal charm but through sheer grit and determination. She was a real girl. The sort of girl that everybody knew and had probably had a really big fight with at some stage. I loved her for that. Sometimes it feels as if the only girls left in the movie world are impossibly pretty and dauntingly unreal. Perhaps Abigail Breslin's success rests on the fact she gets a little closer to real girldom than many of her contemporaries. But Jane could do wicked in a way that I've never seen Abigail B. tackle.

Despite my best intentions, I haven't been able to embed the only decent clip of Jane Withers in action that I could find but if you follow the link, you'll get an idea of the sort of girl Jane could capture so well. You may not like her, but you have to admit, she's got spunk:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltsEms2SkGI

The Good Blog

2009-06-04T10:01:00.006+10:00

I am ashamed to admit that I have been seduced away from blogging by Twitter - that's my feeble excuse for not having written a blog for nearly a month. I've felt annoyed when some of my favourite bloggers (Lili Wilkinson and Penni Russon of Eglantine's Cake to name and shame a couple) slowed their output in favour of the 140 character hit but now I understand the attraction. Yet Twitter can't replace the solid ideas that you can embed in a good blog.

What constitutes a good blog and what are the justifications for keeping one? There are a surfeit of dull ones out there and I don't want to add to the effluence in the blogsphere. But still I'm not sure of the form. Anyone who has read this blog regularly will notice that I've shifted away from regular book reviews and started posting my own news and ideas about books in general. I've fiddled with the design and layout, I've added boxes and reworded my profile. But I still don't think I've hit upon what exactly makes a good blog - the sort of blog I really enjoy reading.

So here's my short list of what are the most important elements of a good blog:

Regular postings (but not so often that the reader feels despair at keeping up)
Informative
Provocative
No more than 500 words in length
A dash of intimacy

I don't think I'm scoring very well. I certainly aim for the first four but I'm not good at self-revelation, even though I admire it in other people and their blogs. I write because I like to think about 'the other' but I love to read blogs where the author references their life and family, the little intimacies that make them accessible and human. I struggle to pepper my blogs with references to my life outside books, worry that my kids would be deeply irritated to find themselves mentioned, and feel my family is too complex and unwieldy to reference.

Yet some days, blogging can feel like sheer self-indulgence. It's the sort writing you do when you're not really writing. The article you write without certainty of a readership, without financial reward, without higher purpose. Which is probably what most writing is like for most of us - but this morning I read Margo Lanagan's blog and loved her comment about the process of judging the Vogel prize : "...the idea that if you fill 200 pages with words, that must be a novel. Oh ho, but it's not, people."

The idea that if you fill a page of cyberspace with a few thousand characters, you have written a blog is valid - but it's not a good blog.

What we are remembered for

2009-05-18T17:45:00.001+10:00

It's not uncommon for children's authors to have a little chip on their shoulder. We're often asked 'but when are you going to write a book for adults?' as if the work we're sweating over isn't of much importance and the only readers that count are over eighteen. I doubt that authors of adult fiction, especially those with a literary bent, are ever asked when they are going to write a book for children. I don't find this question insulting any more. Just misguided. Those who ask it show little understanding of children's literature.
Reading Gretchen Gerzina's biography of Frances Hodgson Burnett is a good reminder of the enduring quality of children's literature. In her lifetime, FBH was compared with Charlotte Bronte and Henry James as one of the great novelists of the late 19th Century. She was a prolific author of adult fiction and yet the three books she is remembered for are only a fraction of her spectacular output: The Secret Garden, Little Lord Fauntleroy and A Little Princess. Ironically, The Secret Garden, which was written when FBH was in her sixties, was not considered one of her stand-out novels and yet in the course of the last hundred years it has become a timeless classic.
Perhaps every author of adult fiction should be asked "But when are you going to write a book for children?"

Missing Mothers - A Mother's Day Thought

2009-05-10T13:13:00.004+10:00

When I was a young mother, I used to resent how invisible mothers were in children's fiction. Think about it: Both Mary and Colin in the Secret Garden were motherless along with Sarah from The Little Princess, Pippi Longstocking, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Harry Potter, Bastian from Never Ending Story, and Ann of Green Gables, The Bastables in E. Nesbits books - to name but a few. The roll call of children in classic fiction whose mothers have died on them is long and venerable. Some of the afore named characters had also carelessly lost their fathers too but absent mothers probably outnumber absent fathers by two to one.

Recently, I read a review by Ruth Starke where she lamented the number of children's and YA books currently being published where the mothers were dead. But it strikes me the authors are only continuing a very old tradition of matricide in children's fiction. Why are mother's so often dead, disabled or totally absent from so much children's fiction?

It wasn't until I had written a few novels that I started to understand why 'getting rid of the mother' is such a key motif of books for younger readers. Mothers risk their lives to keep their children safe (which, essentially, makes them the heroes of the stories). Mothers discourage risk taking, try and prevent nasty situations from arising and generally thwart the possibility of children experiencing any heart-wrenching drama or action. C.S. Lewis could never have made the Narnia Chronicles work if he hadn't got the mothers out of the story as soon as possible. Lily Potter stood between Harry and Voldemort. If she had survived, Harry would have had to put up with her protecting him for the rest of his life and there would have only been one short book, not seven. Mothers simply take up too much space. Their heroism completely undermines the possibility of a child protagonist have a truly big adventure. Mothers stand between the child and the wider world ensuring their offspring reach adulthood safely. And wrecking millions of exciting stories, for which, in the real world, we are endlessly grateful.

In removing mothers from stories for children authors allow young readers to safely explore the world through fiction, to take risks in their imagination, to understand courage and fortitude without personally experiencing suffering. The absent mother in fiction is a reflection of how mothers are towering figures in reality.

The perfect author bio

2009-05-04T16:45:00.000+10:00

Clunes is an eccentric town in Victoria - in the heart of the goldfields. I spent Saturday wandering around their leafy streets, enjoying their annual 'Back To Booktown' event. I loved the quiet intensity of a town full of books and readers. There were serious bookworms everywhere, lugging around shopping bags full of book booty. There were even those who cleverly came equipped with trolleys so they could manage their weighty hauls.

I was very modest in my purchases and mostly enjoyed browsing. But I couldn't resist buying a biography of the poet Alexander Pope by Edith Sitwell. (The image is of its back cover).

Both Pope and Sitwell were very eccentric characters so she is definitely the appropriate person to write his biography. As much as I've enjoyed (and puzzled over) both Pope and Sitwell's poetry, I'm ashamed to admit that what really inspired me to buy the book was its cover - specifically Sitwell's author bio. In case you find the print too small, it reads "She was educated privately and her principal recreation are reading and thinking about poetry, listening to music and silence."

Authors are often asked to submit short bios for book covers, festivals and public appearances. I always find it a cringeworthy exercise. It is so hard to summarise yourself, your life, your history, your interests and ideas in less than 150 words (try it and discover the cringe factor). I love Sitwell's neat encapsulation of her passions and their straightforward simplicity. I'd love to plagarise it: "Murray was educated in government schools and her principal recreation are reading and thinking about fiction, listening to music and silence... How beautifully simple and to the point!

Proof

2009-04-30T10:28:00.010+10:00

This is the cover of the uncorrected proof of my new novel. It will be officially released in August but meanwhile the proof copy has been set free and has been read by booksellers and international publishers.

The cover of the final version is slightly different to this one - it's glossy and blue with red type and more birds. And the contents will be slightly different too. I spent yesterday trawling through the typeset pages, agonising over last minute changes and gasping at the number of typos that had slipped through the earlier editing process.

Proof copies are perplexing beasts. They make me squirm because I know the final copy will be sharper and shinier and hopefully typo-free though it's amazing what can slip through the cracks. I thought this recent version was fairly clean but yesterday I found 'heard of a vulture' instead of 'head' and a 'p' missing from "suppressed". There were also a number of things that should have been caught at the copy-editing stage such as "beneath" used three times in one paragraph. By the time I'd finished checking all the proof-readers mark-up my head was aching and I'd bitten down both my thumbnails and I'd added an alteration to nearly every page. Ahhhhh!!

But then I opened up Twitter to find a heartening tweet from Leesa at The Little Book Room who had been sent a copy of the uncorrected proof.

"Just finished Kirsty Murray's 'Vulture's Gate'! Excellent excellence! Can't wait for August..."

Me too, Leesa. Me too.

Making Space

2009-04-28T16:26:00.006+10:00

Sometimes the clutter in my office drives me crazy. This morning I had coffee with an old friend, the comedienne Denise Scott and we talked about the comedy festival and life and writing and how easy it is to get distracted. After Scotty had headed out into her day, I sat in the cafe and made a long list of everything that I needed to do when I got back to my office. Somehow it was much easier to think through what needed doing when it wasn't actually in front of me. I know many writers who prefer to work in cafe's, rather than in their own spaces. The only time that's worked for me was one very hot summer when I was working on Walking Home with Marie-Claire. My office grew so unbearably steamy that I had to retreat to a local cafe to take advantage of their air-conditioning. JK Rowling wrote the first Harry Potter stories in a cafe to escape the cold. So obviously cafe's work well for all types of writers in all kinds of seasons. But mostly I prefer them for list making - not real writing.

Libraries are a different story, though they are full of divine distraction. I think the only reason I am a writer is that I love the company of books - other people's no less than my own. Lately, I I've been re-reading the work of one of my favourite historians, Barbara Tuchman, who was a true library addict. I can really relate to her quote:
Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.

Tuchman's book on the 14th Century, A Distant Mirror, is still one of the best works of popular history on the medieval period. I first read it in my late teens, alongside a huge swag of fantasy, and her history informed and enriched my reading of all the fiction. I wish I'd read it before I finished high school as I suspect it would have seriously influenced me to study history at university but the book wasn't published until I was already on my way to California to practice being a serious drifter - long before my days of committed list-making and novel writing.

One of the things I wrote on my list this morning, was to try and blog more regularly. I enjoy the process and the discipline but life is crowded. How to juggle all the different wants, all the different words, all the different ways of bringing books to life? Maybe I need to go back to spending more time in the library and less in my office that is so crowded with distractions. Maybe I need to rearrange the office. Maybe I need to get off the internet and get back to my novel.

Grief and Nation

2009-04-27T10:28:00.008+10:00

The photograph on the left is of my Great-Uncle Louis. He died in 1918 of horrific injuries in the mud and slaughter of the Western Front in France during WWI .

And below is an image, which I find far more poignant, of the family who mourned him. It was taken shortly after they found out he was dead. He should have been in the family photograph. They had waited four years for his return. Just before the telegram announcing his death arrived, they had received a letter from him saying he would be home soon. Louis was the eldest child, the only son. My grandmother, his little sister, is the girl standing behind her grief-stricken father, on the far right.

In all the jingoistic media coverage of Anzac day this past weekend, little mention was made of those who are heartbroken and traumatised by war. Some of the men in my family who returned from WWI (including both my grandfathers and five of their brothers) became pacifists. They had seen enough horror to make them hope WWI would be 'the war to end all wars'. I grew up believing Anzac day was about grief, not nation.

I have rough drafts of two short historical novels about Australia's war experiences in a drawer in my office - both based on family experiences. I'm not sure if they will ever come fully to life. Something continues to hold me back from working on them. Maybe it's a sense of ambivalence about how often Australians can turn stories about suffering into reasons to celebrate.

I started this post with an idea that I'd make a list of my favourite Australian books about WWI - there are plenty of good ones out there, especially for younger readers. But in the end I realised I have mixed feelings about many of them, even the ones I've enjoyed reading. So I'm simply going to be nepotistic and post a link to an article my daughter wrote on Anzac day for Eureka Street. Every generation has to reinvent their links to the past.

More about girls, boys and books

2009-04-16T11:08:00.004+10:00

‘When are we going to study a book that’s not about a sulky teenage boy standing on a beach?’

I laughed when this remark was repeated to me by a Year 9 English teacher from one of his disgruntled female students. But the sad truth is that many young people pass through secondary school in co-educational and boys’ schools without reading a book that features a female protagonist. I have met many young people who have encountered only one female protagonist in their secondary school study of fiction – Scout from Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. As much as I love Scout, having a seven-year-old girl as the only complex female protagonist that you encounter in six years of studying literature is pretty sad. It is common for students to leave school without having any sense of the importance of female narratives or the talents of female writers. I believe this is a loss for both genders and a disaster for young, aspiring female novelists.

I have met teachers who presume their male students are loathe to read books by female authors or about female protagonists and use this excuse to justify the selection of texts that they present their classes. But on what grounds do we assume male children are so inherently misogynistic and why do we collude in promoting centuries old cultural bias? In my experience, boys who read and are genuinely literate, read regardless of the author's gender. Boys who are reluctant readers may be harder to cater for but aren’t we pandering to the worst in their cultural education by reinforcing stereotypes and assuming that they will only read books by or about men? Discovering how female culture operates through reading fiction could prove to be the single most valuable life skill they will acquire in their education.

We live in a culture of increasing superficiality where the loud and flash garner our attention and praise, often at the expense of the subtle and meaningful. Advocates of youth literature have a vested interest in ensuring that voices of both genders are heard equally, that their stories are celebrated without bias. and that aspiring young female writers can find role models as easily as their male counterparts. It may take conscious effort to overturn entrenched prejudices, but surely, it’s an effort worth making.

* This is an excerpt from my article 'Invisible Women' published in Viewpoint Magazine - vol 16, No 1 - Autumn 2008

Invisible Girls

2009-04-14T16:58:00.006+10:00

I've been tossing up whether to blog about this year's CBCA (Children's Book Council of Australia) shortlist and notable books or whether to let my annoyance settle. But even though a couple of weeks have passed since the list came out, I don't feel less annoyed. I feel more so.

Last year I wrote an article entitled Invisible Women that was published in Viewpoint magazine. Amongst other things, the essay pointed out how consistently the CBCA favours male authors and male narratives in the Older Readers category of their awards.

Most years, the CBCA shortlist four male authors and two female authors, despite the fact that there are more women authors nominated for the award. This year, the CBCA are in typical form - the 2009 shortlist features four male authors and two female. More worrying, the majority of the shortlisted and notable books in the Older Reader's section feature male protagonists. Only one of the six shortlisted books features a female protagonist - Jackie French's A Rose for the Anzac Boys (I could point out this is a book about girls who go to help the boys at the front - because we all know the best stories about girls are always connected to male narratives, but I'll resist - well, sort of).

I don't want to detract anything from the work of the very talented authors that made it onto the shortlist. I'm sure they deserve to be there. But it's worrying the way, as a culture, we belittle stories that focus on the female experience - particularly the young female experience. Books that are about what it means to be a girl are too often dismissed as not being about the real world. What is it about teenage girls, characters coming into the full power of their sexuality, that makes judges shy away from their narratives?

The CBCA judges are faced with a very difficult and unenviable task. It's thankless and exhausting and CBCA judges don't even get paid. I know how demoralising judging can be because I helped judge last year's Victorian Premier's Awards for YA fiction. So I didn't want to comment on the shortlist - until I read the books on the 'notable' list. If you get a mention on the notables list, it means the judges agonised about your book. It means they -want to acknowledge it but can't squash anymore than six books onto their shortlist.

So let's look at the Older Reader's longlist. Of the ten books on this year's notables (excluding the six shortlisted titles) five were by men and five were by women. Looks better? Not really. Ten of the titles feature male protagonists. One is a collection of short stories. Only five titles feature female protagonists - out of sixteen books.

The CBCA Younger Readers notable list features 23 titles. The gender balance for the younger readers is much more representative of both the author and reader demographics. It's a mystery as to why the judges didn't include more titles in the Older Readers list, especially when there were so many strong contenders of powerful female narratives that were published last year.

Here's my very incomplete long list of notable Australian authors that produced powerful narratives featuring female protagonists. All these books would have been nominated for the CBCA awards by their publishers. None of these are on the CBCA notable list but many of them are catching the eye of judges of the various state's Premier's Literary Awards:

Somebody's Crying - Maureen McCarthy
Everything Beautiful - Simmone Howell
Sprite Downberry - Nette Hilton - shortlisted for the 2009 NSW Premier's Award - Ethel Turner Award for YA fiction
My Candlelight Novel - Joanne Horniman - shortlisted for the Ethel Turner Award
A Brief History of Montmaray - Michelle Cooper - shortlisted for the Ethel Turner Award and the 2008 Inky Award
The Push - Julia Lawrinson - shortlisted for the 2008 QLD Premier's Award - YA fiction
Indigo Girls - Penni Russon - shortlisted for the 2008 Inky Award
Mahtab's Story - Libby Gleeson

No doubt there are many other fabulous books by female authors that didn't get a guernsey. The above are just a few titles I'm familiar with. And no doubt some great books by male authors didn't make it onto the notables list too. But what I want to know, is where are the girls? The wonderful, passionate, complex teenage female characters that so many Australian authors are writing about and why aren't they being recognised? Do we need a Barbara Jefferis Award for YA fiction? Why are our girls invisible?

On listening

2009-04-02T16:34:00.003+11:00

I have forgotten how to blog. It's been over three weeks since my last blog post and even though I've had plenty of books, news and ideas to blog about, I have felt very disinclined. I can't even blame Twitter as I have been remiss about telling the world how I feel and what Im doing. So here's my news:

I have been reading, proof-reading and sitting in my garden admiring the bees. I've been listening to the stories in my household - we've been busy lately with guests, house-guests and the new addition to our regular crew of one of my godchildren who has moved back into her old bedroom. There's been plenty going of good gossip.

I've been to Queensland and back for the fabulous Somerset Celebration of Literature. I've spoken to five thousand sparky young thinkers at the Halogen Foundation's Young Leaders Day. I've finished up a residency with young writers in Caufield and am looking forward to a quiet month at the desk before I head off to Margaret River, WA in May for yet another round of literary events. As much as I love the hurdy-gurdy of festivals and public speaking, it's good to be home again, listening to the stories around me and working my way through the huge stack of books beside my bed.

And I've finally been catching up on reading other people's blogs and some excellent online articles. Here's one of my favourite lines from a fantastic article that I read recently on the state of publishing:

"In an increasingly self-centered society a premium is placed on being heard rather than listening, being seen rather than watching, and on being read rather than reading."

Colin Robinson - London Review of Books