image one: Ivan Bilibin

image two: George Cruikshank

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finola Fox

Penguin will publish my new children's picture book

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

Library at Borroloola

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

Library Thoughts

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

Woodend Writing Workshop

ROTARY CLUB OF WOODEND


Short Story Workshop with Carmel Bird

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

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

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

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

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

GETTING TO THE EBOOK

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

women and men and books

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

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

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

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

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

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

So at base men are keeping the gates.

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

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

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

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

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

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