Melbourne Writers' Festival

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.

Epigraphs

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'.