Verse novels, a job change and finally a blog post!

Yep, I confess, it’s been ages since I wrote in this blog! In my defense, I have been busy with two big poetry-related projects since my last update. The first is that I changed jobs, moving from a public community mental health team to facilitating groups in a private mental health hospital and day program. As part of my new role, I have been preparing and leading creative writing groups for inpatients and outpatients, and it has been so enjoyable. It is so satisfying for me to be able to bring my occupational therapy skills and my writing skills together in this role, and to practice one of the core principles of my profession – using occupation (meaningful activity) for therapeutic purposes. I love bringing people together to write and share words in a way that helps them with their recovery journeys. It’s a privilege to listen to the diversity and the richness of writing when participants choose to read out what they’ve written in response to the same prompts. It’s also fun to share poems from some of my favourite poets and see how the group responds to them – we often have robust discussions (while being respectful of everyone’s opinions of course!) I find myself listening to writing podcasts, watching poetry videos and reading poetry and other creative writing with a double purpose now – for my own enjoyment but also to find material that would be good to share with the group.

The second piece of news is that in May last year I was awarded a Career Development Grant from the Australia Council, which is the arts funding and advisory body of the Australian Government. This meant I was able to work with a mentor and editor, the wonderful Gina Mercer, to transform my second poetry collection – which is all based on one theme – into a verse novel. It was so exciting to delve into the little-known genre of verse novels, read as many as I could, ponder the qualities that I liked best about my favourite ones, and expand my own skills by writing one. Gina is a fantastic mentor and was so helpful in coming up with ideas to help me when I was stuck. Once I finally settled on some key character and location details, the new poems came thick and fast. Gina was also very helpful with the editing phase, which mostly happened concurrently, helping me to pare back my words to make the work as sharp and concise as possible.

I will write more about this project in a future post, but for now, I thought I would share some notes about what I have learnt so far about verse novels. Okay so it turned into a bit of an essay, read on if you are interested …

Not many people even know they exist! So writing a verse novel is absolutely not the best way to become rich and famous … lucky that’s not my goal. Still, it would be nice if more people knew what verse novel were, and maybe had read a few good ones …

What’s the definition of a verse novel? I'd say it is story-telling through poetry.

How long have they been about? A long time! Wikipedia lists some of the older verse narratives which date back to Ancient Greece in the 8^th Century BC, including the Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey. Other classics often mentioned are Byron's Don Juan (1818–24), Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (1831) and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1857).  I haven’t read many of the classics but I'd like to. I have read Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate (1986), which apparently was a surprise bestseller, and really enjoyed it. I thought it flowed along well, considering it was written completely in Petrarchan sonnets, and it covered a satisfying mix of themes and relationships dramas.

According to Wikipedia, “the Australian poet, C.J. Dennis, had great success in Australia during World War I with his verse novels, The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke (1915), and The Moods of Ginger Mick (1916).” I’ve just taken these out of the library and am looking forward to reading them.  Derek Walcott's award-winning Omeros (1990) was also mentioned in a lot of the interviews.

What are they about? Anything and everything! I went on much the same journey as Judy Johnson who wrote “When I first became interested in writing a verse novel, I binge-read every example I could get my hands on: contemporary, historical, Australian and culturally diverse. I suppose I was looking for a bright star, a guiding principle that I could lean on whilst writing my own. Nothing of the sort exists of course. What I have learnt, is that, like poetry itself, the world of verse novels is a broad and inclusive church. Long may it remain so.” (From Inside the Verse Novel: Writers on Writing edited by Linda Weste). I definitely came across some favourites though, and sought to learn from their techniques.

Dorothy Porter wrote some riveting crime thrillers in this genre, including probably her most famous, The monkey’s mask, featuring the cynical lesbian private investigator Jill Fitzpatrick, and my favourite of hers, El Dorado, also a crime thriller, this time about the hunt for a serial child killer, which includes a focus on the friendship between an investigative police officer and his long-time lesbian friend. (Two of her other verse novels, What a Piece of Work and Wild Surmise, won the Miles Franklin Literary Award and El Dorado was nominated for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award in 2007.)

Bernadine Evaristo, best known for her Man Booker Prize-winning book Girl, Woman, Other, wrote about her family history in the verse novel Lara, which I loved. When talking about one of her other verse novels, The Emperor’s Babe, she describes herself as a “literary archaeologist”, in that when she first found out that there were Africans in Britain before the English arrived, she felt propelled to “get black British stories out there”, so she wrote about the life of a black African girl in AD 211 in London, who becomes a lover to the Emperor. I found this book to be so clever, original and captivating.  

Sally Morgan’s Sister Heart is a heart-wrenchingly beautiful book, told from the perspective of a young Aboriginal girl who is taken from the north of Australia and sent to an institution in the distant south. Morgan cuts the words down to the bare bones and her measured use of repetition and dialogue is brilliant. It is concise and quick to read but leaves a lasting impression. I think that is one of the strengths of the verse novel form – it is possible to tell a dark or tragic story without dragging people down too much or for too long, because the poetic form allows the story to be told in crisp snippets or vignettes, with the softening and enriching addition of imagery, metaphor, rhythm or aural devices and carefully curated words. Unlike most regular novels, many verse novels can be read in one sitting where it’s possible to enjoy the beginning, middle and the end all in one evening (like a movie). 

Judy Johnson’s Jack is another one of my favourite verse novels, telling the story of a captain’s “mesmerising descent into madness on board a Torres Strait pearling lugger in the 1930s.” (from Venetia Green’s Bookreads Review). Although it’s a grim, masculine-focused read, it was fascinating in terms of the characters, the setting, the history of shell diving and the skilful use of poetry to tell the story.

I also enjoyed Stag’s Leap by Sharon Olds, which is not exactly a verse novel but a masterful series of poems about divorce, telling an autobiographical story.

And my last favourite mention is Sarah Crossan’s Toffee which tells the story of a teenage girl, Allison, who runs away from her abusive father and accidentally ends up with an old lady who has dementia and thinks Allison is her childhood friend called Toffee. I have ordered Crossan’s other verse novels and can’t wait to read them, including her first one for adults, Here is the Beehive, which was released last year (see The Guardian review).  

Are verse novels popular? A 2016 article by Claire Hennessey in The Irish Times titled “The rise of the YA novel in verse” mentioned that “in American bookstores, Ellen Hopkins regularly tops the New York Times bestseller list. Hopkins, like many writers of YA verse novels, uses the sparseness of the form to explore some very difficult subjects in sensitive ways.” She said that they often attract favourable attention from critics, giving the example that “Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming, a memoir of her childhood as an African-American in the 1960s, racked up a variety of awards including the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, a Newbery Honor, and a Coretta Scott King Award.” 

Imogen Russell Williams argued in The Guardian (UK) in May 2019 that “Young Adult verse novels are currently in the ascendant, with three American poets appearing on the Carnegie shortlist: The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo, Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds, and Rebound by Kwame Alexander. On this side of the Atlantic, the driving force behind the verse novel’s resurgence is the Irish children’s laureate Sarah Crossan, whose 2011 book The Weight of Water won acclaim both from adult reviewers and from a wide-ranging young readership. Crossan went on to produce more highly successful verse novels: One, a story of conjoined twins, won the Carnegie in 2016, and Moonrise, an account of a boy’s farewell to a brother on death row, was shortlisted for the 2017 Costa children’s prize.” 

It seems that Hennessey was right in thinking that Irish and UK writers would soon catch on to the verse novel trend happening in the USA. In that 2016 article she argued that “The American readership seems to have realised earlier than we have that poetry can be a way of tackling the very difficult subjects without giving into the temptation to preach. When every single word counts, the tendency to state the moral of the story – and then state it again just in case the reader didn’t quite understand – becomes much more obvious to both author and editor, and they can pull back in time.

Writer Lisa Jacobson, in a 2014 interview for Writer’s Victoria, listed some of her favourite Australian verse novels and stated that “I sense the form is experiencing a revival, both here and abroad.” She said this is especially so for young adult readers, writing that “in this current climate, it’s the Young Adult (YA) verse novels that are flooding the bookshelves”, maybe because “the verse novel is a great way to capture younger audiences with increasingly short attention spans and get them reading!”

Thanks to Linda Weste for putting together a book called Inside the Verse Novel: Writers on Writing where she interviews twenty-two verse novelists from the UK, USA, Australia and Canada about the genre. It was so great, when setting off on this project, to be able to start by reading direct words from verse novelists, including two of my favourites – Bernardine Evaristo and Judy Johnson. Some of the snippets that I thought were especially interesting from this book were:

Bernardine Evaristo: “I think they [verse novels] work best when there’s a real sense of character, drama and storytelling. I think the boundaries are and should be porous. The verse novel is a form of reinvention that can embrace the best of both genres – fiction and poetry.” It was so interesting to read about how she went about writing her verse novels Lara and The Emperor’s Babe – Lara started as a prose novel and then she spent two years reworking it into a verse novel – and The Emperor’s Babe began life as a few poems about a black Roman girl growing up in London 1800 years ago and ended up as a book-length sequence of poems about her life – “I then found myself writing a high velocity narrative that moved along at some pace but it needed its quieter moments for balance and emotional depth. As a writer whose background is in poetry and verse drama, I crafted the novel as a poet, polishing each “poem” before moving on to the next. Of course it’s a verse novel, so the poems aren’t really discrete from each other, they are more like poetic passages”.

Alice Jolly wrote that both plot and language are important in verse novels and she prefers those that are gripping page-turners. “For me, the verse or poetry of the book was not about slowing the reader down, or asking him or her to pause to admire a particularly good sentence. Instead the verse or poetry was about pushing the reader on through the narrative. I wanted to ensure that it wasn’t only the story that was pulling the reader through the book but the language as well.” When talking about her poetic techniques, she wrote “My approach was to read the work aloud to myself again and again so that I could hear the rhythms and patterns of the words.”

Christine Evans also said that she “read it aloud to myself, walking around the room. I was listening for the language to sing.” She wrote that “Narrative is primary in Cloudless, but the soul of the book is in the language, so balancing those aspects took a lot of concentration. I wanted the imagery to carry the emotional subtext of the book.”

Sarah Corbett wrote that “I also had to think about the complex web of symbols, details, images I was setting up over quite a large frame that would allow the reader to make sense of my ‘puzzle’.” Judy Johnson said that “The use of first-person dramatic monologue was my biggest narrative decision. I also used a lot of space within lines, particularly indents, to mimic the pauses in human thought and speech, or to withhold something for a few beats for effect." Alice Jolly feels “that the distinction between poetry and prose is largely illusory. A skilful writer of prose uses most of the same techniques that a poet uses.”

Ros Barber wrote that “Story is central. The form must be dictated by the story. Poetry gives you the option of greater emotional musculature, should you be brave enough to use it”.

Alan Wearne wrote that “for any verse novel ‘passing muster’ a poet must have an interest-nearing-obsession with language, character, dialogue and narrative. All these needn’t be in perfect balance, but when a verse novel lacks them all it ceased to be a novel and probably verse.” He believes that “the verse novel is the domain of poets, not novelists” and that “the idea of a novelist who hasn’t written poetry before, announcing ‘I’m going to write a verse novel…’ is laughable.”

Many verse novelists who were interviewed talked about needing to get the balance between narrative (or plot, story) and lyricism (or poetic techniques) right, including Geoff Page who wrote “Overall, the main thing I’ve learned is the important lesson of how much metaphoric or linguistic density to employ. The balance has to be ‘just right’. If not, you have a disaster on your hands.” Judy Johnson said that “It becomes obvious [in the editing process] where there is too much narrative to the point that the lyricism is lost and vice versa”. David Mason wrote “Trust the story. Don’t get too poetic.”

Christine Evans wrote that she really enjoys verse novels as a reader. “I love white space on the page, and the necessary compression and suggestiveness that the form commands.” She wrote that “the heart of a novel beats through character(s) undergoing a transformative experience … we need to travel with them as life de-rails them, and they struggle to find a way back, forward or sideways”.

Is anyone going to publish, review and read a verse novel? Alice Jolly’s book Mary Ann State, Imbecile, was recognized by the judges of major prizes such as the Walter Scott and Folio Prize, but she wrote that initially “my publishers found it impossible to get this book reviewed at all” and she goes on to advise writers against novels that “involve any typographical disruption” ie are laid out on the page like a poem, “as many readers are sadly rather cautious in their choices”.

Ros Barber, whose verse novel The Marlowe Papers won several awards, believes that “for many adult readers, the form is really off-putting. I can’t tell you how many people tell me they haven’t read The Marlowe Papers because it is in verse. The idea of poetry (and such a big chunk of poetry) is intimidating to most readers…. even to me … I’m very quick to abandon them if they don’t grab me in the first twenty pages or so.” She went on to say that “Even if the storytelling is compelling, most people won’t even find that out, because they won’t even try to read it, being intimidated by the fact that it is in verse”.

I remember listening to a Chat 10 Looks 3 Podcast in November last year where Annabel Crabb talks about a verse novel she found fascinating by Sarah Crossan, Here is the Beehive, “about a woman who’s been having an affair with a [married] bloke for a number of years … and he suddenly dies and … the whole novel is her coming to terms with grieving somebody who nobody knew she had a relationship with. … The weird thing about the book is that it is written all in verse”. Leigh Sales then says “Oh, you know what? I was going to ask you can I have it, and then as soon as you’ve said that, it’s put me off”. “No no no, no, ah but that’s the thing, I thought oh no, AND you just do not notice. It’s not like rhyming verse. It is really really engaging. Surprisingly … You really do not notice it. Even on page one”. She convinced Sales to give it a try. Crabb emphasised “This book, like it is a novel … I like you thought alright ohh (disparaging tone), I’ll give this a go … and it’s absolutely gripping. The style actually lends itself to what this character is doing which is living in her own mind, remembering fragments …”   While Sales also spoke about Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask, saying “It’s a thriller and it’s really brilliantly done and I loved it”, both Crabb and Sales’ tendency to be put off by the concept of a novel being written in verse is widespread I think. I have noticed that, while talking passionately about verse novels with friends, colleagues and acquaintances, no-one has ever written down any recommendations or asked to borrow any! I often notice a kind of blank look come over their faces and only a polite level of interest shown. Getting people to pick up a verse novel and read the first few pages might be a challenge.

Christine Evans also wrote about verse novels being hard to sell and explained how she was offered a deal by an international agent if only she would rewrite her Cloudless manuscript from verse to prose. She decided to stick to her initial vision of the book because “the book lives in the form that it came to me, and that gives me joy”, even though “the likelihood is that very few people will ever read my book”. Alan Wearne thought verse novels “could be the way of the future” or “could be the ultimate literary mug’s game”!

All those experiences and perspectives could be very depressing to someone, like me, who has just written their first verse novel manuscript! But the thing is, when I read a really good verse novel, it is so intensely satisfying. Certain stories seem to lend themselves so well to the form. And it’s good to be different, isn’t it?!

If you want to check out verse novels, these two lists might help:

Ten verse novels recommended by Sarah Crossan

and in the Young Adult genre, 14 Books in Verse You Need to Read

Other verse novels I have read include:

·        Gap by Rebecca Jessen, which won her Best Emerging Author at the 2013             Queensland Literary Awards

·        The Lumberjack's Dove by Genna Rose Nethercott

·        Walking With Camels: The Story of Bertha Strehlow by Leni Shilton

·        Freehold: Verse Novel by Geoff Page

·        Coda for Shirley by Geoff Page

·        Blood and Old Belief: A Verse Novel by Paul Hetherington 

      Below are some of the books I have read or am looking forward to reading:

    (Author quotes not otherwise attributed are from Inside the Verse Novel: Writers on Writing edited by Linda Weste). 

Tasmanian Poetry Festival inspires

I was privileged to attend the Tasmanian Poetry Festival on Friday 4th and Saturday 5th October, 2019, in Launceston. 

The two half-day poetry workshops on Friday were great. Gina Mercer's "Mesmerizing Monologues" workshop gave us the opportunity to read different types and examples of monologue poetry and start writing one of our own. It's a great form and it was fun to play with different voices. 

Chrys Salt (pictured below), who came over from the UK, taught us about performing poetry. She gave us some excellent tips and tricks on reading or performing our poetry in a riveting way. With her direct, engaging and honest manner, Chrys coached us to improve our emotional expression, pace, voice projection and ability to "scoop" lines from the page and deliver them with eye contact to the audience. I learnt so much, and applied it in the open reading on Saturday morning which led to some great audience feedback afterwards. 

Gina and Chrys both gave great performances on the Saturday morning. Chrys used her set to deliver a series of powerful poems about the Iraq war, some of which used the technique of refrains to masterful effect. It was great to be there for Esther Ottoway's first open reading in a long time, and I enjoyed the other poets too, including Ross Donlon's ode to washing machines! 

The Friday night opening launch was great, with Rees Campbell reading some beautiful Tasmanian-based poems and Greg North bringing the house down with some hilarious performance poetry about fracking, carpets and sticky tape! 

The Poetry Cup on Saturday night saw a diverse range of poets try and beat the one-minute timer. My poem about trying to break my relationship with sugar went down well, (thanks to my friend Jen's help with work-shopping it in her kitchen that afternoon) although I ran out of time to deliver the last two lines. Nancy Corbett won the audience over with her gorgeous poem about wanting to save the world. 

The Sky Falls Down: An Anthology of Loss launch

The Sky Falls Down: An Anthology of Loss was launched at the Fullers Bookshop in Hobart on the 26^th June, 2019. Edited by two dedicated and inspirational writers, Terry Whitebeach and Gina Mercer, it was great to hear them talk about their passion for the project when they spoke at the launch. It was a real labour of love and I treasured being able to celebrate the finished product with them and a packed room full of other people. I read out my suite of poems titled Vacant Seats, which was published in the book, and explores the emotional impacts that infertility can have. I received lots of warm comments from people afterwards who appreciated or could relate to the poems.   

One description of the anthology reads: "In this compelling collection, eighty-nine writers traverse their particular territory of loss and bring back travellers' tales. Their skillfully crafted accounts are insightful, inspiring, amusing, heart-breaking, resilient and, above all, damn good reading."

'This beautiful collection of writings explores the landscape of loss. It will meet you where you are. You'll find yourself reaching for particular pieces that somehow articulate how you're feeling, even before you've found the words to express it yourself... May this book become both a friend and a warm companion.' - Petrea King, Quest for Life Centre

You can buy copies here, here or from your bookshop.

Students of the Anthropocene

A poem I wrote inspired by the youth uprising around the world on Friday, 15th March 2019. Unfortunately ABC news Tasmania did not bother to show us that 1.5 million students went on strike in more than 2000 locations in 123 countries on that day. Including over 100,000 marching in Milan (Italy) and Montreal (Canada). 

Students of the Anthropocene

by Susan Austin

we concern ourselves with today as well as those pesky tomorrows

as much as we try, we fail to placate the advancing sea,

the flourish of coal-defending mockery in our highest halls enrages

for decades you marketed the system as natural,

with in-built mechanisms for righting itself

but the climate changes, ecosystems scream in the face of all you say

take your slogans of fairness with you as you retreat

we know the size of the pie you smuggled

behind your video-monitored double gates

we’re led by the young who teach themselves the science

we down tools, pens, don’t log in today

we storm the streets and send you on your apocalyptic way.

Salmon ponds

After sharing some of my recent poems about parenting with a fellow poet of mine, she said she was surprised at the tone and content of them, that the photos I posted on Facebook gave off a lovely, smiling, happy impression of our lives and she would never have guessed I was finding motherhood challenging. I laughed and then shared the following poem that I had written about the difference between a photo on Facebook and the underlying experience. Facebook is a strange, complicated thing and I won't launch into a discussion about it here, but I thought I would share that poem. When I read it at the Seasonal Poets event a few people came up to me afterwards and told me they could relate :-) 

Salmon Ponds

gorgeous sibling Facebook photos

matching navy track pants,

one with pink beanie and pom-pom on top, one with white wispy hair

arm around the other’s shoulders, looking at the camera, smiling cutely

it was freezing

my hands turned to ice in ten minutes

it was day eight of husband being away for work

it was an outing planned for the sanity-salvaging forty-five minute drive there and back

it was the morning after being up through the night with toddler teething troubles,

woken early by daughter with phantom wet undies

it was after toy pram fights and three time-outs before packing the bag

on the way there, after wrestling son into seat with some force,

after stopping numerous times to cajole him to put arms back in straps,

after he removed shoes and socks which had been a struggle to put on,

after he ripped a page out of my favourite childhood book,

it was pointing out cows and swans,

explaining paper mills and singing along as the frog jumped out of the pond

on the way home it was relieved silence as they both slept and I wondered

how to resuscitate my mood, where to suture my patience,

how a simple outing could have been so onerous.

it was only the small things,

the fights over fish feed,

pellets flung to the ground as one snatched a cup from the other,

the anxiety of watching a toddler saunter close to the edge

the slow-motion response to my “Look! A fish jumped!”

“Look! A fish swimming, see its colourful tail swishing!”

my pointing and exclaiming

which failed to assist them to ever spot the fish

the fact that neither ate their treat – maple syrup pancakes –

so I ate them all and felt sick and bulky,

that son started pulling apart the already-ripped back of his highchair

and wouldn’t desist,

that he cried out repeatedly to be let down when I was still sipping my tea,

that they took turns banging their spoons on the table,

the trip to the loo with me wrestling him away from bin, toilet paper, tap, soap,

grabbing him up as he commando-crawled across the dirty floor to evade me,

the second trip to the loo thirty minutes later which resulted in no more three-year-old wee

just more two-year-old wrestling

the fights over sandwiches, drink bottles

the leisurely walk along the creek where I was hoping

to stretch my legs, get a slight pace going to warm up,

but where I had to stop every metre

because son refused to sit in pram,

wouldn’t walk in the right direction

or actually follow any instructions to leave the gate open /

don’t climb through the creek fence / hurry up

and daughter refused to hop out when I did finally convince son to hop in.

It’s just little things, over-reactions,

inflated expectations, taking things too seriously,

but look, here are my adorable children

smiling sweetly at the camera, her arm around his shoulders

beside the glistening pond –

(at least I got a good photo)

imagine if you will, the lovely time we had.

I'm still here!

Wow where has time gone over the last four years? I’ve now got a four-and-a-half year old daughter and a son who is turning three next week, I guess that’s where the time has gone! It’s also been buried by mountains of colds, flus and bugs that seem to chase little children and their families around relentlessly. I’ve written a poem about what I’ve been doing, called “Have you been doing any writing?” and it was chosen by the Communion Literary Journal and included in Volume 6, December 2016. You can find it here, if you scroll down past my “interview”. https://walleahpress.com.au/communion6-Susan-Austin.html

I really enjoyed being a featured reader at the Seasonal Poets event at Hadley’s Hotel in May this year, alongside Gina Mercer and Ben Walter. It was good to present some new work and get some positive feedback on it from members of the audience, and it was special to share the stage with two people who I very much admire and who have helped me enormously on my poetry journey. It was great to hear that this fantastic quarterly event is going to continue despite the loss of Tasmanian Writers Centre funding. Hopefully as the kids are getting older and my husband is travelling less often for work, I might be able to get along to more of them!  

I’m also happy to have joined a new poetry workshopping group and am finding the monthly meetings very inspiring and productive. Hopefully I’ll be able to devote more time to poetry and post more often as the intensity of the early years of raising small children begins to lighten a little.

Beaconsfield Festival of Golden Words

On the weekend I attended the first Beaconsfield Festival of Golden Words (in Northern Tasmania) as a guest poet. It was a great writer’s festival – well organised and with lots of interesting sessions. I loved the fact that most of it was free, thus enabling anyone to attend. It was also good to go somewhere different and to support the local economy in a struggling area, although not really that practical as there wasn’t much accommodation around and we stayed half an hour’s drive away – making the logistics a bit challenging for my partner to look after our 6 month old baby in between breastfeeds (not a common issue for attendees I suppose!)

I was a little disappointed that there was only one panel on poetry in the main program, out of about 32 sessions. Although there were also two poets’ breakfasts, they were at 7:30am in the morning on Saturday and Sunday, a bit of an ask for people staying a distance away to get to. Also they were at a café with only limited seating, whereas the non-poetry events were held in big marquees. Is the marginalisation of poetry at these events because poetry isn’t that appealing to people or do the organisers underestimate the interest that there might be, were the events to be included in the main program? It was an issue with the Tasmanian Writer’s Festival last year too I felt. But as this was only my second writers’ festival (aside from the Tasmanian Poetry Festival, where there is a feast of poetry on offer and no marginalisation to be had!) I don’t know if this is a trend.

Anyway, I enjoyed the poet’s breakfast (and was sad to miss the Saturday one). Cameron Hindrum did a fab job at organising and MC'ing as usual and I got some nice feedback on the poems that I read, including the new one I wrote about baby-gazing. Ben Walter and Gina Mercer’s poetry was excellent as always, and it was great to experience the quirky and energetic poetry of ‘Fakington Wilde’ for the first time – I loved his poems about money, about the girl and dog on the scanner ads and mobile phone culture. I bought his new book even though the title (Space travel for idiots) and the cover (fried eggs and bacon) were not appealing!

I enjoyed the other sessions I was able to get to. I saw most of the ‘Poets do it differently” session with Tim Thorne, Sherryl Clark and Cameron Hindrum. This inspired me to read more verse novels and look up some of their favourite poets which were mentioned.  

‘The Author-Editor Relationship’ session was interesting. Apparently editors are underpaid and under-recognised for the work they do. I’ve been interested in learning more about editing and so was pleased to hear them explain about the different aspects of it, like development editing, structural editing and line editing. Picking up subtle repetitions of words or phrases, slightly incongruous pace changes and other issues throughout a manuscript would take some practice and training, and a bit of an obsessional personality. It seems like some authors have great communication and trusting relationships with their editors whereas others run into conflicts and issues.

I saw a bit of ‘Tasmania – the tipping point’ with Rodney Croome etc, although having read the Griffith Review book, didn’t pick up much that was new.

I saw half of Alex Miller’s interview. He came across as a very interesting person. I was impressed with his courage in giving up his career to become a full-time novelist, basically becoming as he termed ‘unemployable’ by letting his resume take a dive into piecemeal unskilled evening work so he could write during the daytime, not knowing if he would succeed or not. His books usually take years to write although the last one just took 10 weeks. He doesn’t sketch out a whole plot or anything beforehand, but sees where the characters and the story take him as he goes along.

I really enjoyed the session ‘The Internet is your friend – I think’ with Wendy Harmer, Danielle Wood, Matthew Lamb Sherryl Clark and the chair, Tristan Banks, who did a fantastic job. The pros and cons of web technology were discussed with lots of humour and energy from the panel. Basically it can be very useful to writers when it comes to research and marketing and interacting with readers etc but it can also be overwhelming and a major procrastination problem. It sounds like managing the news blogsite ‘The Hoopla’ is loads of work (and it sounds interesting – wish I had more time to read blogs and online news/discussion sites).

I saw a little bit of Philip Nitschke’s interview, when he encouraged everyone in their later years to go and get themselves some of the euthanasia drug before they get into a situation where they need a loved one to get it, thereby putting the loved one at risk of prosecution after the act. He spoke about having to help someone die and how harrowing that was the first time. He talked about the trouble with developing criteria for who should be able to access euthanasia and how if someone was making an informed, rational decision to die (like the woman who was adamant she wanted to kill herself when she was 80 and the woman who wanted to die when her husband did), then they should be allowed to. As a mental health professional who has spent a lot of time trying to prevent people from suiciding, I found this kind of argument very confronting.

I don’t have much to say about the ‘Why Tragedy Attracts Us’ session with Hannah Kent, Rohan Wilson and Poppy Gee. I have read Rohan’s book (and been on a panel with him before, therefore have heard him speak about his book before) and am interested to read Hannah and Poppy’s books.

‘Our Black Past – Aboriginal stories that had to be told’ was interesting. Dr Kristyn Harman spoke about her book which looked at the way some Aboriginals, Maoris and native South Africans got trapped in the convict system. She said that Aboriginal convicts often suffered and died quickly after being imprisoned, so much so that in the 1800s there was a Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in custody which recommended that they be released as soon as they showed signs of being sick. Also interesting was the discussion by Henry Reynolds about how preposterous it was that so much commemoration goes on in Tasmania about the Boer War but officials do not recognise the war that went on between the white invaders and Aboriginal peoples. Professor Peter Stanley explained that he had tried to get the National War Memorial to acknowledge these wars but because they did not involve official Australian soldiers, they refused. Discussion included teasing out the issues around why there is so little acknowledgment of these wars, and one main reason is that this would mean highlighting the fact that Aboriginal people never gave up their sovereignty and a proper treaty is needed.

Well, that summarises the main things I got out of the weekend. It was great to have some time to consider some big issues, see some famous authors, mix with some lovely poets, see somewhere different, and what’s more, baby Kate slept all the way there in the car and almost all the way home!

Thanks to Session for the pic.