When he read

When he read a book, the words swam. He'd read and re-read a paragraph, but the meaning would elude him. He'd read each word, examining it and not moving to the next one before he'd thought yes, I understand what that word means. But by the end of the sentence, the combination of word-meanings had slid away, and there was no sentence-meaning in its place. It was a blur, a blank, a smear of text without hope of comprehension. He went on, saying to himself that the meaning would come, he just had to swim through the words to find it.

The photographs

The photographs I dug up that time were old, black and white, small size, eaten at the edges some of them, blurred or faded, and had writing on the back. But not all of them had writing on the back, and that was frustrating. There were no names, but some people were identified as 'mother', 'father', 'uncle', and so forth. Places were always identified, which was helpful, except for the fact that I had no idea where these places were. St Michael's Mount? I made a note to look it up, as well as all the other names. 

Review of Architectures of Possibility by Lance Olsen with Trevor Hodge

Architectures of Possibility: After Innovative Writing is not your average book about writing, which may be suggested by its title. Lance Olsen is interested in creative writing as a ‘series of choices’, whereby to ‘write one way rather than another is to convey, not simply an aesthetics, but a course of thinking, a course of being in the world, that privileges one approach to “reality” over another’ (13). He’s not interested in the ‘Balzacian mode’ of writing, a term introduced by Alain Robbe-Grillet to refer to the works of nineteenth century authors like Honoré de Balzac who preferenced realism, here defined as a ‘genre of averages’ (11). Rather it is writing ‘as a possibility space where everything can and should be considered, attempted, and troubled’ (13).

Review continued at M/C Reviews.

These imaginary conversations

These imaginary conversations she has. They don't make it better. If anything they make her more angry. What's the point of reconstructing arguments? The time has gone. She was a different person back then, and talking to him was different. Now, she limits what she says, and avoids him. He could write if he wanted, or learn how to use a computer. The extreme fatigue she feels when she puts the phone down after talking with him permeates all the way through to her marrow, to the centre of her brain, to the centre of her chest, into her heart.

Something woke him

Something woke him, and for a moment he didn't know where he was. But there was someone outside, a male from the voice, and he was shouting something. He threw off the bedclothes and tottered to the window. The light from the neighbour across the road shone over an old ute, filled with newspapers, and a man in overalls on his driveway wrestling with a dog. The dog, more precisely, had a newspaper in her mouth, and was resolutely hanging onto it with her teeth, while the man, swearing all the colours of the schema, was hanging onto the other end.

'Looking at the earth with a bird's eye view': Lines for Birds by Hill and Wolseley

Lines for Birds by Barry Hill and John Wolseley is one of the most beautiful books I have ever seen. It is poetry and paintings: the poetry is rich with metaphor and imagery, the paintings extraordinary evocations of birds in their landscapes. The high standard of production by UWA Publishing does justice to the fine quality of the content. 

In the introduction the creators explain that the idea for the book came about in 2001, when Barry Hill first saw John Wolseley’s painting, Olive-backed Oriole and Papaya Fruit (2000), in an exhibition of his called Tracing the Wallace Line.This painting and the poem, ‘Olive-backed Oriole Eating Pawpaw’, are included in the book. Hill’s poem begins:

It’s no wound
it is flame
of fruit, Capricornia sap.

Eat me, it says
to its ravenous arrival
Dig in, I’m yours. (94)

The painting shows a bright orange and red fruit and the hungry, enticed bird, exquisitely rendered in green, leaning in to its meal. The poem is described as celebrating ‘with Darwin in mind, the ünion of beauty and savagery’ (1), with a touch of humour that is suffused throughout the work. 

Review continued at The Compulsive Reader.

This hole is different

This hole is different. The soil is moist and rich, the worms are coming out to play, and the birds are gathering around. As I dig deeper in, there are colours coming through. Like the way carrots can be purple, there is purple soil down here, and now a dark red, a pinky type of thing, now an orange. Problem is, the hole is now much too big for the little fennel plant. I’ll have to fill it in again, or dig a shallower hole somewhere else. What is this? I’ve hit something hard again with the shovel. Oh my…

The day before

The day before, she had talked to her father on the phone. Why don't you come and visit me, he asked. You could come down on the weekend. She let the sound of her breathing fill the handset. Are you still there, he said. No, I went away a long time ago. What? he said. I said, I went away a long time ago. Now he let the sound of his (laboured) breathing fill the distance. You didn’t have to leave home. You could have stayed with us. The phone remained against her face a moment, then slid away.

His heart

His heart beats irregularly sometimes. He feels it at night, when he's lying in bed, listening to the silence, or to the crying dance of the curlews. It sounds like dozens of them out there, tip-toeing up and down the street, calling their screaming, wailing, keening cry, but it's only two. Once a curlew came up to his front door. He saw it by chance and approached, but it backed away into the night. Then the cry came, and something moved in his bones. What were they calling, if not something beyond this life, beyond what he could see?

The last time

The last time I dug a hole in the garden, the water welled up and ran over my feet. The time before that, when I dug a hole to put in a grevillea, I struck something hard, and it turned out to be a cylinder filled with photographs. I’ll tell you about them in a minute. The time before the photographs, I dug up a skeleton. Not a human, thank God, but a small animal skeleton, a dog probably, not that I’m an expert on boneology or anything, but that’s what it looked like. I carefully put the soil back. 

caught my eye

'The aim of literature ... is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.' – Donald Barthelme.

(found in Lance Olsen's Architectures of Possibility: After Innovative Writing)

There was something moving

There was something moving by the back fence. The sound came into her sleepingness until she was no longer sleeping but wide awake and listening intently. She felt damp, and chilled, and swathed in night. The sound stopped. The sugar cane mulch was making her skin itch. She could feel weeds tickling her feet. The sound began again, but it was further away, heading towards the house. Had she left the door open? She slowly raised herself up and turned to peer in the direction of the kitchen. Screen door closed, light gleaming, geckos gathered on the window. Silence again.

Review of The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House

Tin House began as a literary magazine in the United States in 1999, venturing into publishing books three years later, and now also hosts annual writers’ workshops in Portland, Oregon. According to the brief introduction by Lee Montgomery, it is from these workshops that this book originated, and it is a stimulating and provocative collection.

Not all of the contributing writers were familiar to me, but all of the seventeen essays are worth reading, with several being exceptionally useful, both to writers and teachers of writing, who will garner ideas aplenty. The topics discussed are place, sex, simplicity, editing (using The Great Gatsby’s evolution as an example), character motivation, fairy tales, material, time, imaginary worlds, scene-making, Shakespeare, revision, poetry, telling versus showing, and empathy. And two essays that are difficult to describe in one word: ‘Let Mot Incorrect’ by Jim Crusoe, which is about getting to the ‘right word’ through many wrong ones, and ‘Lost in the Woods’ by Antonya Nelson, a rather beautiful dissertation on lostness in story, the characters’ search for each other, loneliness and aloneness.

 

Review continued at TEXT.

The long blue day

The long blue day often visits him. This year seems to have encouraged them again. He loves the colour blue, but the blue of bitter moods is a punch, an ache. It seems so hard to get anything worthwhile done, to start anything beautiful; the focus is scattered, wayward, lazy. Instead, he doodles with a mouse, clicking from one pretty trinket to the next. When he looks out of the window, there is his neighbour standing over their last living azalea, the only one to have survived the drought. It hasn’t rained for a long time, except in his heart.