Two friends of mine, Anne Myers and Andrea Gillum – fantastic emerging writers I met at Varuna, the Writer’s House in Katoomba, NSW – have stories in the 2016 edition of Award Winning Australian Writing. All sorts of competitions are represented – poetry, life writing, short fiction, microfiction… It’s a surprise package of all-sorts, great to dip into and discover. From the Foreword by Sam Cooney:
...being a writer is wholly about taking what’s in front of you, whether it’s IRL or in your mind, then adding flourishes and deleting some boring bits and twisting a bit here and turning a bit there, then doing whatiever if is you can do with that piece – submitting it, publishing it on your blog,etc – to obtain some of the glory you desire, and maybe a bit of bonus catharsis, too. What I mean is: being a writer is doing very silly things, taking unwise risks, in order to be party of something larger…
I can remember the thrill of seeing my first short story published in an anthology (it was the last, too, but that’s because I more or less stopped writing short fiction). On Wednesday I needed a very light and slim book for a train journey and I chose a book of short stories by Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen. I don’t know if she’s much read today, though a couple of her novels – The Death of the Heart, In the Heat of the Day – are published in the Vintage Classics series.
In her preface to Encounters, written nearly 30 years after the collection was first published, she writes:
The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion to the objective value of what is written. It was perhaps more difficult then than now to disentangle what was there, on the page, from the creative excitement which had given it birth. There could be but one test of validity: publication. I know I shaped every line in the direction of the unknown arbiter: there was still the sensation of ‘showing up’ work. When I say that had I not written with the intention of being published I should not have written, I should add that I did not so much envisage glory as affirmation.
Not glory: affirmation.
Realistically, there isn’t much glory for most writers. Nor money.
But there is affirmation in being, at last, out there. On a page (of any kind) and – in ways you may not be able to plan or predict or foretell – in your reader’s life.
Award Winning Australian Writing 2016 edited by Chloe Brien, Melbourne Books $29.95