I know it’s been a while between blog posts but I’ve been busy! My second book, Dancing With Empty Prams, is coming out soon with Walleah Press. Ralph Wessman, the publisher, has been a wonderful supporter of my poetry since I moved to Tasmania almost 20 years ago and I am so grateful and happy that he has applied his skills and time to helping me bring this book into the world.
Dancing
With Empty Prams is a verse novel. It tells the story of a woman whose plan to have a
baby carries her on a quest she never could have imagined. Six poems from it
have won or were commended in state and national poetry competitions and nine
have been featured in journals and anthologies, including the Australian Poetry
Journal. It started off as a collection of poems documenting my own journey of
infertility, and when I was awarded a Career Development Grant from the
Australia Council for the Arts in 2020 I was able to work with the immensely
talented Dr Gina Mercer to turn it into a verse novel. I am proud of the end
result and excited to share it with the world.
I had help from a creative group of friends in work-shopping cover style ideas and my friend Jen Lorrimar-Shanks designed the beautiful cover which you can see below.
I’ll share with you below some of the endorsements that I have received
for the book. I will make it available to buy from my website when it is
printed. We are getting close! Thanks for your support.
"Susan
Austin's Dancing with Empty Prams is a moving, involving
account of a woman's fertility quest, and an inventive, carefully structured
verse novel. The reader is drawn in to an emotional and physical ordeal across
years of trying, miscarriage, and ultimately the gruelling IVF process. This
book's significance is in its voicing of an experience not often represented so
thoroughly in literature - a lonely journey made more challenging by taboos,
ignorance, prejudices and opaque jargon. Anyone who has been touched by these
issues will feel seen." Melinda
Smith
“It is estimated that as many as one in
six couples in Australia have trouble getting pregnant – some who find it
impossible to conceive naturally, choose the IVF journey which can oscillate
seemingly endlessly (as it does in Dancing with Empty Prams)
between hope and disappointment, optimism and dispiriting self-doubt.
Susan
Austin’s verse novel on the subject is emotionally charged but avoids
sentimentality by keeping it real. It is well-informed if not experienced and
as such is an important book for the women who will personally connect with it,
for their families and friends to better understand and appreciate the journey
and for the general public who will find in Dancing with Empty Prams a
human-interest story that is genuinely moving, educational and at times downright
funny.” Jane Williams
“The directness of the poems, exploring the
most intimate aspects of human fertility, is matched by a ferocity of craft
which kept me turning pages. This is powerful and important work - cogent and
topical.
It
is vital that women’s experience is added into the national cultural mix. For
decades publishing has been dominated by heroic hyper-masculine quest
narratives. This work subverts that tradition through a wry, poignant, punchy
exploration of the quest for motherhood, a matter literally of life and death,
played out in suburban bedrooms and clinics across Australia – and yet rarely
documented or heard in the national conversation.” Dr Gina Mercer
“I have
watched Susan Austin develop as a poet and a person since the late 1990s. She
is committed to living life as a poet, and her poetry grows with all the other
aspects of her life. She is also a charismatic performer. She brings both the
poet and non-poet with her, often into difficult terrain. She is a poet who has
something to say, and people respond to this.
Susan
Austin brings her verbal acuity, sound ethical concerns, charm and humanity to
this current project. She makes compelling poetry. I have rarely read a poetry
manuscript, such as this one, that I can’t put down but need to read in a
sitting. She is an important voice in poetry, especially Tasmanian poetry.” Liz Winfield
Susan’s
verse novel, Dancing With Empty Prams, is one of the most keenly
observed poetry works I have read in recent years. It lays open the suburban
life of a couple to expose the piercing, intimate, bleak, and intensely lonely
experience of infertility. The experience for the reader is emotionally deep
and gripping: it is a book which, as it progresses, becomes impossible to put
down. I cried at the end. Susan’s craft in this work is masterful, and the
issues she raises, compelling and relevant.” Esther Ottaway, 2022 Tasmanian Literary Awards winner
