Calibre Prize 2014

Early in February I received an email to inform me that I had been longlisted for this year's Calibre Prize! The title of my submitted essay is 'A hole in the heart: on secrets, silence, and sorrow' and is memoir based on my adoptive life.

The shortlist was released this month on the Australian Book Review's website. Here is the announcement:

The Calibre Prize, now in its eighth year, continues to attract outstanding new essays. This year we received almost 100 essays, with a huge variety of styles and subject matter. The judges – Morag Fraser and Peter Rose – have shortlisted six of them:
– Ruth Balint: ‘The Paradox of Weimar: Hitlerism and Goethe’
– Martin Edmond: ‘Five Towns’
– Rebecca Giggs: ‘Open Ground: Trespassing on the Pilbara’s Mining Boom’
– Christine Piper: ‘Unearthing the Past’
– Anne-Marie Priest: ‘“Something very difficult and unusual”: The Love Song of Henry and Olga’
– Stephen Wright: ‘Blows upon a Bruise’
This year the winner (who will receive $5000) will be announced at a special ceremony on Wednesday, 26 March. This will take place in the Assembly Hall at Boyd, starting at 6 pm. The essayists will read extracts from their essays. This is a free public event, but reservations are necessary: rsvp@australianbookreview.com.au.
ABR will then publish the winning essay in the April issue, followed by the other shortlisted essays.

Congratulations to all the shortlisted writers and I look forward to reading their essays.

He was sitting

He was sitting eeriely still at the table. She tried to look in his direction only every so often, so as not to seem obvious. His eyes were large and clear, no bloodshot haziness. He was reading a book, plain-clothed so she couldn't see the title, and was turning the pages at a reasonable rate. But something drew her eyes back to him. And then he looked up at her suddenly, and she froze.

Jigsaw Part Five

The jigsaw pieces made up a picture. In it were three people, a mother, a father, and a baby girl. The child was newborn, but though so young, Alice recognised her own features. The mother and father were not the parents Alice knew. They were standing in the background, their hands neatly clasped in front of them, their eyes looking over at the other couple.

  Alice peered closely at the faces. The father seemed to blur, his features going in and out of focus so that she could not really say whether he was dark or fair, or handsome or blue-eyed or red-haired or anything. The mother was looking over at the older couple, Alice’s parents, seeming to fix her gaze on the older woman’s face.

  Alice ran her finger over the faces, wondering what the picture meant. The mother holding the baby suddenly turned to speak, and Alice snatched her finger away, and fell back on the carpet.

  “This is you, Alice. This is you, you realise that don’t you? I am your first mother, I had you and gave you away, because I could not keep you. I could not afford to keep you. I would have been beaten up by my father, and by my mother, and probably my brothers. My grandmother would never have spoken to me again. They would all have called me a slut, and I would have been cast out. They don’t know, and never will know, about you. They thought I went off to work in another state for a few months. Don’t you ever tell my secret, Alice.”

  Alice put her finger under the edge of a piece of the jigsaw. She flicked it up and sent it flying. She did this with the next one, then the next and the next. Until the pieces were strewn all around her room.

 

Jigsaw Part Four

She walked along Moggill Road, into Toowong, along Coronation Drive by the river, stopping once or twice to watch something float past. She dodged cyclists as they rang their bells at her, and studied one piece of anti-safe sex graffiti. She walked up onto Victoria Bridge, across the river, past the large concrete buildings, into the Southbank precinct. She had a swim in the lagoon.

After a short sunbathe on the beach, she dressed and walked into West End. The locksmith looked at her locked pocket and shook his head.

“Can’t you give it a bang or something?”

He looked at her with a pained expression.

“You don’t have to go to a locksmith to get something banged on,” he sniffed. “This is what they call a Hooley lock. Only the person who made it can unlock it. Unless.”

“Unless what?”

He didn’t answer her. He tried to open it, just to show Alice how impossible it was. After all of his various instruments failed, he resorted to giving the lock a good wallop. That squashed it flat, but didn’t open it. Alice and the locksmith smiled exhaustedly at each other, and agreed to give up.

When she got home, she took a pair of secateurs and crunched the battered lock apart. Fragments of metal flew everywhere. At least, that was what she thought they were, until she looked down at the pocket and realised the fragments were coming out of it. She stood up from the table and took a step back. Bits and pieces of strange objects were spurting out, at an ever faster rate. She tried to catch some of them, but they seemed to disappear into the corners and crevices of the room, like sparks from sparklers.

She got a broom and began to sweep the floor. Amongst the dust, dried cockroaches, corks and biscuit crumbs she found the fragments. They looked like jigsaw puzzle pieces. When the pocket finally ceased its production, she took all the bits she had found into her bedroom, and shut the door.

Review of Secret Storms by Julie Mannix von Zerneck and Kathy Hatfield

This joint memoir is testament to the pain and heartache experienced by women who relinquish their babies at birth, regardless of how their lives unfold afterwards. Julie Mannix von Zerneck was born to a highly original couple, her father being a fire-eater and sword swallower, and her mother a radio actress. Their home was often filled with carnival people in the early days, and exotic animals. Her parents travelled widely and wrote books about their experiences, which was both fascinating and alienating for their children left behind.

But she begins the book with a disturbing chapter set in the Eastern Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute, where she has been placed because her parents view her as suicidal after she took three sleeping pills. She is also pregnant, and her mother wants her to have an abortion, but this is not Julie’s choice. The chapters describing her time in the ward, which is the entirety of her pregnancy, include graphic descriptions of her fellow patients, “Mafia Whore”, “The DuPont Executive’s Wife”, the “Zombies”, and Theresa. Although at first they seem terrifying and mysterious to her, she soon comes to regard them with affection; “Mafia Whore”, a loud and intimidating woman with a startlingly foul vocabulary, becomes protective of the mother-to-be.

 

Review continued at Maggie Ball's website, The Compulsive Reader.

Review of Negotiating the Personal in Creative Writing

The core message of Negotiating the Personal in Creative Writing is that teachers and students need to maintain communication in order for the teaching to be most effective, and the author gives numerous examples of how to do this throughout. The personal components of the teacher-student relationship cannot be neglected if students are to develop fully as writers.

Carl Vandermeulen is based at the University of Wisconsin and has taught writing, photography, and teacher education. His book is another in the series New Writing Viewpoints, edited by Graeme Harper, and aimed at teachers and researchers.

In the introduction Vandermeulen explains why he wrote Negotiating the Personal in Creative Writing. He taught a poetry class that he thought would be successful, but failed miserably because there was a mismatch between his role as teacher and evaluator in that particular class, and his previous role as something quite different, an advisor and advocate. The clash of the personal with the impersonal produced a situation where not only the writing work suffered, but the relationships were strained. Vandermeulen advocates the advice of Tom C Hunley who teaches creative writing at Western Kentucky University, and whom he cites: that ‘introductory courses need to focus on fundamental – and personal – kinds of growth that enable the process of writing and of becoming a writer’ (x, which cites Hunley 2007).

 

Continued at TEXT.

Review of The Event of Literature

Terry Eagleton is a literary theorist and critic, public intellectual, Marxist, and author of numerous books, including a memoir The Gatekeeper (2002) and the extremely widely read Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983). He studied under Raymond Williams at Cambridge, and has held positions at various universities, lately being Distinguished Professor of English Literature at the University of Lancaster.

He also has a sense of humor, which reveals itself at surprising moments throughout this latest book. If you are unfamiliar with his work I would recommend reading Literary Theory first, and perhaps others, to familiarize yourself with his ideas and style of thinking and writing. This latest book seems to be aimed at those with a special interest in literature and literary theory, rather than the general reader. Or, as the author notes in his preface, those interested in thephilosophy of literature.

Review continued at Metapsychology Online Reviews.

Review of Open City by Teju Cole

On reaching a scene near the end of Teju Cole’s novel I had to reassess what I thought I knew about the narrator Julius, a young psychiatrist of Nigerian and German background. He has an encounter with a friend who tells him something startling and disturbing, to both him and the reader. It was on the second reading of this absorbing and satisfying novel, with this scene in mind, that I began to see his central character a little better, and to understand the multiple layers of meaning and the myriad interplays between identity, literature, culture, race, suffering, and death. It is one of those books that contains worlds.

Continued at Transnational Literature.

Review of Melissa's Gift by Olin Dodson

Olin Dodson received a telephone call from a stranger in August, 1990, to tell him that a woman, Gloria Maria, with whom he had had a brief relationship in 1978 in Costa Rica, had a message for him. It turned out the message was that he had a twelve year old daughter and she wanted to meet him; she was the ‘Melissa’ of the title. This momentous news arrived at the same time he was thinking of relationships and yearning for a child of his own. The caller, Laura, who became a good friend, mentioned something about a pancreatic disorder; he learned it was cystic fibrosis, an incurable genetic disease that causes lung and digestive problems, in particular, and a truncated life expectancy.

 

Continued at The Compulsive Reader.

Review of Come the Revolution by Alex Mitchell

Alex Mitchell is a journalist with an extraordinary career investigating the political landscape, largely from a Trotskyist perspective. He begins his memoir with an ending: he and his partner Judith White leaving England and their many years of work for the Workers Revolutionary Party, he as reporter and editor of the party’s newspaper, and she as head of their book publishing program. It is July 1986 and they are going to Australia.

This is a big story, for Mitchell has led, so far, a big life. He was born in 1942 in Queensland to progressive-minded parents; his mother was a founding member of the One People of Australia League (OPAL), and encouraged activists like Roberta Sykes and Bonita and Eddie Mabo. His first job was as a cadet journalist on the Townsville Daily Bulletin in 1960:

 

My chief surprise was that at the end of each week I collected an envelope containing £6 (equivalent to about $120 today). They were actually giving me money for something I loved doing. I was still in disbelief when I gave up full-time reporting 47 years later. (13)

 

 

Continued at M/C Reviews: Culture and the Media. 

Review of A Field Guide for Immersion Writing by Robin Hemley

Robin Hemley has written an excellent book on immersion writing, which he defines as ‘any kind of memoir, travel narrative, or journalistic piece in which the narrative is as much forward-looking as backward, and in which the writer is a part of the story being told’ (8). He writes with humour and passion and injects himself into the prose, thus making for a great example of what he is describing.

Hemley is the director of the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, as well as author of fiction, non-fiction, memoir, essays and books on writing. His previous, now updated, book on writing is Turning Life Into Fiction.

He loosely classifies each form of immersion writing according to the subcategories of quest, experiment, investigation, reenactment and infiltration. He stresses that these subcategories are not equally important for each form. In a fairly straightforward manner, Hemley addresses each form of immersion writing in the three chapters after the introduction, followed by a chapter on ethical and legal considerations, and one on preparing a proposal.


Continued at M/C Reviews: Culture and the Media.

Review of Scared Sick by Robin Karr-Morse and Meredith Wiley

I cannot recommend Scared Sick highly enough because of its approachable style, clear explanation of complex medical science for the general reader, passionate advocacy for babies and small children, and its importance in encouraging everyone to pay attention to what we are doing to the youngest members of our societies. I was shocked to learn that it was only from the late 1980s that newborns, whether premature or full term, were given anesthesia when operated on for conditions such as heart defects. It was thought the infantile central nervous system was not developed enough for neonates to feel pain, and so they were simply paralyzed for surgery with no pain relief. It seems to take us a long time before we notice the suffering of others, and the effects it has on them. No wonder we are still in the early days of noticing psychological stress and instigating preventative programs and therapies for it.

Continued at Metapsychology Online Reviews.

 

Review of Living, Thinking, Looking: Essays by Siri Hustvedt

Siri Hustvedt is fascinated by the brain and mind, and what can go wrong with them. She is also fascinated by fiction, reading, writing, art; she writes with verve, intelligence, and understanding about all these things, and others as well. In her latest collection of essays, she notes the link is her 'abiding curiosity about what it means to be human' (ix), and the reader cannot argue with that conclusion.

In an echo from her previous essay collection, A Plea for Eros, she writes that 'no single theoretical model can contain the complexity of human reality' (x), so her intense interest in Freud and psychoanalysis is a critical one, and interwoven with other interests to form a larger organism.


Continued at Metapsychology Online Reviews.

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.

'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.

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.

Review of Speech Matters by Katharine Gelber

This is an exceptionally clear and well organised text, making it easy to read for just about anyone interested in matters of free speech, particularly with regard to political speech, which is her interest of concern. Katharine Gelber researches, writes, and teaches in the field of politics and human rights, being an Associate Professor of Politics and Public Policy at the University of Queensland. Speech Matters: Getting Free Speech Right is her fourth book.

Continued at M/C Reviews: Culture and the Media.

Review of Irrepressible: The Life and Times of Jessica Mitford by Leslie Brody

On first glance, I was unsure about the author’s attitude to her subject: the cover of the book shows a rather evil-looking Jessica Mitford stubbing out a cigarette in an ashtray. Is Leslie Brody critical of Mitford’s life as a muckraker, Communist, civil rights activist, aristocrat, sister to the fascist Diana and Unity, and writer? It turns out that she is definitely not; in fact, quite the opposite. Her strong principles and fun-loving attitude to life are celebrated here.

For those unfamiliar with the Mitford family, they were a large and unusual clan who lived in Swinbrook House in Oxfordshire, England from 1926. Lord and Lady Redesdale (‘Farve’ and ‘Muv’ to their children) had six daughters and one son: Nancy (writer of Love in A Cold Climate, amongst many others); Pamela (nicknamed ‘Woman’ because of her domesticity); Tom (killed in WWII); Diana (married British fascist leader Oswald Mosley); Unity (worshipped Hitler); Jessica; and Deborah (or ‘Debo’, who became the Duchess of Devonshire). Jessica’s nicknames included ‘Brave Little D’, which her mother called her, ‘Boud’, ‘Hen’ and ‘Susan’, which was used by Nancy, who was also called Susan by Jessica, just to make things confusing. The name that really stuck, though, was Decca.


Continued at The Compulsive Reader.

Review of Your Voice in My Head: A Memoir by Emma Forrest

Emma Forrest's memoir about having a mental illness—in her case, a type of bipolar disorder with rapid cycling between depression and mania—is engrossing and involving. She knows how to write poetically and viscerally, conveying the pain and despair of her illness in vivid terms. At times she comes across as self-absorbed and irritating in her self-abuse, but that is the often the nature of mental illness. When something goes wrong with your mind, it is difficult to control your thoughts and behavior; Forrest shows this well.


Continue reading at Metapsychology Online Reviews.

Review of The Memory Palace: A Memoir by Mira Bartók

The Memory Palace is one of the most beautiful, tragic and hopeful memoirs that you will ever read. Mira Bartók's artistry, imagination, compassion, and skill with words have created a book about family and mental illness that will be read for many years to come by a wide range of people: the mentally ill, their families and friends, mental health professionals, social service workers, and—I would hope—politicians and the wider community.


Continue reading at Metapsychology Online Reviews.