Susan Green

Our son came up on the weekend, a Father’s Day visit, and he brought with him a couple of issues of the Quarterly Essay for me to read. I have to confess that these days, my news media/current affairs reading is pretty slight. Each day I  skim the Melbourne Age and the Guardian, which gives me British as well as Australian articles and commentary. I gave up my New York Times habit over a year ago, after overdosing on American politics during the Trump presidency –  but an astonishingly cheap deal for the New Yorker got me a very smart tote bag and a digital subscription.  Though I don’t always make the best use of it, I do appreciate the daily newsletter that pops into my inbox. It often prompts me to read something I didn’t even know I was interested in. Or to read an American take on something I care about, like literacy.

The Rise and Fall of Vibes-Based Literacy by Jessica Winter, in the September 1^st issue, got me thinking (again) about my own struggles with teaching children to read.
By ‘vibes-based literacy’, Winter means the method called in the US ‘balanced literacy’. It’s also often known as ‘Units of Study’, ‘Lucy Calkin’ (after the influential educator who wrote the aforementioned) or simply as ‘Teacher’s College’ because it was so widely taught to student teachers. In a (very little) nutshell, children are helped to develop a range of cueing strategies and memorise high-frequency words. It’s much the same as what we called the ‘whole language’ or ‘whole word’ approach, back in the day  when I was at Melbourne Teacher’s College. Phonics and other explicit instruction in decoding strategies were very much frowned upon.

According to Winter, since the 1980s Lucy Calkin’s approach has dominated American schools and in fact, was the officially mandated teaching method in many districts. This, despite the “long-standing consensus among researchers that intensive phonics and vocabulary-building instruction—an approach often referred to, nowadays, as the “science of reading”—are essential.”
She continues: “There has never been much peer-reviewed research to support Units of Study or other balanced-literacy curricula. In 2020, the education nonprofit Student Achievement Partners published a meticulous vivisection of Calkins’s program: “there are constantly missed opportunities to build new vocabulary and knowledge about the world or learn about how written English works,” the authors noted. “The impact is most severe for children who do not come to school already possessing what they need to know to make sense of written and academic English.”

Which had me thinking about my prep grade at a small rural primary school way back in 1985. I’d had a grade 2-3-4 f0r two years, and the principal decided it was time to move the staff around. I have the greatest respect for good early childhood teachers, mainly because I wasn’t one and I know how hard it is. Worse, I was drastically under-prepared to teach reading because I had no idea where to proceed with the children who weren’t naturals.
Fortunately most of them seemed to just ‘catch’ reading. Some of them had difficulties but eventually managed to master their readers or the little books we made in the classroom. And a very few made very little progress at all under my watch. Like the little girl I’ll call Annie-May.
My principal gave me ten minutes a day to do intensive reading practice with Annie-May. I had no idea what I was supposed to do, really. So I sat her on my knee, and we ‘read’ books together. She was supposed to predict the text, using the pictures as clues. She was supposed to easily recognise words like ‘the’, ‘and’ , ‘she’ and ‘him’ and build up a wider vocabulary bank of memorised words like ‘cat’ and ‘dog’ and so on. She was supposed to learn to associate reading and books with enjoyment. Which she did, in a way. After one session, when I thought we were beginning to get somewhere, Annie-May turned to me and said (and yes, she did speak like this), “Dat was a nice little tuddle, Miss Dween.”
In later years, thinking about Annie-May, the youngest of a family of six children from a farming family – busy, financially stretched, with little time for reading and books – I wonder if she ever learned to read fluently. Was there a window of opportunity there, in preps, that was missed because I had no idea? I have to set against my pangs of guilt, the image of the happy little girl who’d had some precious moments of quiet time with her teacher. A nice little cuddle.
Good vibes…but as far as literacy is concerned, a fail.

This tour of Britain’s ‘shadowlands’ is both haunting and horrifying. The writer explores eight lost places. They are the neolithic Skara Brae in Orkney; a once-thriving medieval town of Trellech in Wales; the port of Winchelsea, a 13th century naval base and important trading port; the rural village of Wharram Percy; the city of Dunwich, which slowly fell into the sea; the isolated Scottish island of St Kilda, whose inhabitants were evacuated after the population crashed to under 50; a whole group of villages in rural Norfolk taken over by the military during WWII and never returned to the inhabitants; a Welsh valley town called Capel Celyn, drowned under a dam to provide water to Liverpool.

There are poetic, elegiac, lyrical descriptions of ruins, relics and remnants in beautiful and often isolated places. There are towns that simply died, fell into ruin and were lost. There’s an enjoyable melancholy in wandering with the author around the remaining stones and walls, imagining long-ago lives.
But this is also a record of violence, cruelty and disease. Who knew that medieval French pirates raided the English coast, killing, raping and stealing? I thought that ended with the Vikings!
I’d heard of the deserted medieval ‘plague villages’ – and loved Penelope Lively’s Astercote –  but Matthew Green reveals that there’s more to the story. After so many people died of the Black Death, there was a labour shortage. The peasants started getting uppity. Enclosing the commons and turning to sheep grazing became a much more attractive proposition for landowners. The villagers were turned out of their homes.
Among the loss and sadness, it was good to read that though in 1964 the Liverpool Corporation simply bulldozed its way to what it wanted, the vanished village galvanised the Welsh into protecting their unique language and culture. English plans to drown other Welsh valleys were unsuccessful, and the Liverpool Corporation apologised in 2005, saying ‘What happened to the people of the valley was wrong.’

Green’s coda to the tales of these eight places is a little grim. He writes:
Many of our communities, it is unpalatable to say, are ghost-towns-in-waiting. In amongst the tales of human perseverance, obsession, resilience and reconciliation, and in the pleasure that can be found in  the ruins of lost places, this book has contained its fair share of horror. But it only goes up to 2021. A sequel, on the shadowlands of  twenty-first-century Britain, would be darker still. That…could be an apocalyptic volume indeed, with swathes of Britain more shadow than land.

…if you are a parent, you do something called “parenting”. “To parent” is a goal-directed verb; it describes a job, a kind of work. The goal is to somehow turn our child into a better or happier or more successful adult – better than they would be otherwise or (though we whisper this) better than the children next door. The right kind of parenting will produce the right kind of child, who in turn will become the right kind of adult.
Of course, people sometimes use the word “parenting” just to describe that parents actually do. But more often, especially now, “parenting” means something parents should do…
I’ll argue that this prescriptive parenting picture is fundamentally misguided, from a scientific, philosophical and political point of view, as well as a personal one. It’s the wrong way to understand how parents and children actually think and act, and it’s equally wrong as a vision of how they should think and act. It’s actually made life worse for children and parents, not better.

The Gardener and the Carpenter by Alison Gopnik opened my eyes and reinforced my prejudices – at the same time!
A prejudice against the word ‘parenting’, for a start. As Gopnik argues, it’s a relationship, not a job. Now, it’s turned into a massive money-making opportunity. Over the years as a bookseller, I saw so many books by ‘experts’ published, pushing so many theories and making so many dollars as fashions and fads came and went.  The ever-expanding ‘parenting’ category! So much guilt and confusion! In my social circle, I saw people bonding over what they called ‘parenting styles’ (or philosophies or ideologies) and I saw the fallout when they differed.
I too agonised at times, with a horrible, searing mother-guilt. Was I just too lazy to do all that after-school stuff, the coaching, the lessons, the practice? Maybe. But basically I was convinced that it didn’t have to be that hard. Gopnik argues for less structure, not more. She gives convincing evidence that children (more or less, depending on their age) are meant to be messy, exploratory, unpredictable and wildly creative. I wish I’d known all this brain science when I was teaching, and when our son was young, and I would not have stressed so much about pack-up time.
Gopnik’s book entrenched my opposition to NAPLAN and all standardised testing for young children, too. Has it come to this, when large numbers of people seem to believe that ‘education’ is all about learning for tests, so that parents can rate and rank schools? There is a case for saying that standardised testing is politically, not educationally, driven. There is now so much new scientific research on how children learn, so why is it that we adults still want do things in the same old ways? The ABC is advertising “Reading Eggs” – an early learning program on a screen – for 2-to-6 year olds. 2-year-olds? Really? Shouldn’t 2-year-olds be playing? Gopnik would tell you, yes.
As an aside, somehow or other, our son was always absent from school on NAPLAN day.

The Gardener and the Carpenter is short and the sciency parts are easy to read but I found it a satisfying deep dive into this most basic of human relationships. Gopnik provides plenty of evidence for her views from the study of human evolution and all sorts of recent scientific research into learning and brain development. The take-away concept is stated in the title. She says that childcare is not best performed as if the parent is a carpenter making a chair. That’s because there is no correct way to do it; there is no blueprint to follow in order to obtain a predictable outcome. It’s much more like gardening, where you provide the best environment, you protect and you guide…but obsessive measuring and controlling won’t really help things along.
I thought this book was fascinating. Not just because I’m a parent. How children grow and mature within their families is the raw material of fiction.  Am I overstating the case if I say that the relationships between parents and children are at the heart of all the comedy, drama and tragedy in the world?

I had planned – one of those New Year’s resolutions – that this year I would do a monthly roundup of everything I’d been reading. Obviously, I haven’t. I haven’t even done the bare minimum once-a-week book review that I also resolved upon. But at least I did write most of the titles down. There there were a few that got away, and I deliberately didn’t include the books (mostly novels) I put down after a few pages or a few chapters, nor the ones I only skimmed and skipped.
Maybe I should have noted them too.

A friend and I were talking about puzzles. You know; at our age, keeping the brain active with puzzles is supposed to ward off impending dementia. We’re both into Wordle and he also does a sudoko, which really gives his little grey cells a daily workout. He suggested I should try the sudoko too. I said I can’t do anything with numbers; it makes my head hurt. “I was always crap at maths,” I added. I laughed.
And he pointed out something interesting. While people have no shame about saying they’re hopeless at maths (in fact, like me they will laugh merrily), reading is different. Nothing to joke about. Or rather, people might joke about the fact that they never read books (strangely, I met a few of those – quite loud and proud about it, too –  while working in a bookshop) they are less likely to broadcast the fact if they can’t read. Illiteracy carries a real stigma. Problems with self-esteem and confidence proliferate along with the practical difficulties.
My friend, like me, loves to read. It’s an unusual week when I only get through one book; more often it is two or even three. On holidays, it can be a book a day. But he is more likely to read a book a month. It’s because, he told me, he’s a slow reader. Not only because he likes to make sure he fully understands what he reads, but because he reads every word. He’s always been a bit shocked about the way I skip and skim. Once he asked me what my reaction would be if a person read one of my books in that way (I wouldn’t care, was the answer). The fact is, he finds reading a rewarding but not easy activity.
I asked if he’d had trouble learning to read.  Not at all, was the answer. He  just never got fast. On the other hand, initially I had a lot of trouble. Failed at John and Betty, remedial reading, kept back in preps. Yet once I got the hang of it, I became a voracious breakneck-speed bookworm, and still am. A puzzle.

One of the books that I skip-read and didn’t include in my list was Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolf. She’s a cognitive neuroscientist and scholar of reading. A library book I chose for the title (Proust! Plus Squid! plus, the words ‘brain’ and ‘science’, which are catnip to me). It was fascinating but hard work and so, running out of puff, I skimmed and then gave up. However skimming gave me a few lasting insights which I was able to bring to the conversation with my friend. The major one is that reading is not easy. Understanding written symbols is a huge and complex task. Our brains were not set up for this particular activity at all; it’s way, way beyond the range of our original abilities. We taught our brains to read only a few thousand years ago – not a long time in the span of human evolution and literacy has changed the way our brains are configured. They are still evolving. (As to where digital culture is taking our brains – that’s another question…) Wolf’s discussion of dyslexia led me to another insight. The bare bones of reading is decoding. The other part is fluency. So you can be a competent or even excellent decoder, yet still read slowly – word by word – like my friend.

I gave it a crack. I made myself read each and every word. Each and, the, if, so, he, she, it... Reading like this would permanently destroy my pleasure in fiction, that’s for sure. It made me realise that my usual reading experience is sometimes too fast  – so that I don’t always take in all of what I’ve read. Not that it matters; there’s an addictive quality to  breakneck reading and I love being pulled along at speed by a real page-turner. I finished Richard Osman’s The Man Who Died Twice in a day! More often, though, it’s a mix of darting ahead and hovering, often skimming a paragraph or a sentence, sometimes going back. If the writing is beautiful – as it is, for instance, in Michael Ondatje’s Warlight or Emily St John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility – I have to force myself to slow down and pay attention. Or (better) read the book again.

It is not often that I reflect on the act of reading. After fifty six years of practice and with many hundreds (thousands?) of books and articles read, it seems…well, natural. My conversation and the not-really-read Proust and the Squid show that that’s not the case at all.

FEBRUARY
Millions Like Us Virginia Nicholson
The Thursday Murder Club Richard Osman
Real Estate Deborah Levy
Mothers, Fathers and Others Siri Hustvedt
True Stories Helen Garner

MARCH
Once Upon a River  Diane Setterfield
Burning Questions  Margaret Atwood
Orwell’s Roses Rebecca Solnit
Linnets and Valerians Elizabeth Goudge
Journal of a Solitude,  Plant Dreaming Deep,  House By The Sea  May Sarton

APRIL
Writing a Woman’s Life Carolyn Heilbrun
May Sarton Margot Peters
Stranger Care Sarah Sentilles
With the End in Mind Kathryn Mannix
At Seventy May Sarton
Moondial Helen Cresswell

MAY
Warlight Michael Ondatje
40,000 Weeks Oliver Burkeman
I Didn’t Do the Thing Today Madeleine Dore
Novelista Claire Askew
Writing with Quiet Hands Paula Munier
The Friend Sigrid Nunez
The Writer Laid Bare Lee Kofman
The Violet Hour Katie Roiphe
Sempre Susan Sigrid Nunez
Piranesi Susannah Clarke
What Are You Going Through Sigrid Nunez
Breath James Nestor

JUNE
Second Place Rachel Cusk
Canticle Creek Adrian Hyland
Love Stories Trent Dalton
New and Selected Poems Vol 2 Mary Oliver
Telltale Carmel Bird
Bedtime Story Chloe Hooper
The Way It Is Now Gary Disher
Give Unto Others Donna Leon
A Gentleman in Moscow Amor Towle
The Other Side of the Bridge Mary Lawson
Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Family Patrick Radden Keefe

JULY
The Golden Egg, Falling in Love, The Waters of Eternal Youth, The Temptation of Forgiveness Donna Leon
Black Cock’s Feather Maurice Walsh
A Woman Named Smith Marie Conway Oemler
Sea of Tranquility Emily St John Mandel
The Man Who Died Twice Richard Osman

We have streaming service BritBox now, so we’ve been bingeing on British crime and comedy. When I had a few days to myself, I also indulged in re-watching the literary adaptations the Brits are so famous for. I started with the 2007 version of my best-beloved Austen novel, Persuasion.

There was a lot I liked. Penry-Jones’s Captain Wentworth looked and sounded just right. The contrast between the Wentworth’s circle and Anne’s appalling father and older sister was delicious. But Hawkins’ Anne – for me – was all wrong. She is described somewhere in the book as ‘an elegant little woman’ and Hawkins – with her open, eager, expressive face –  is not.  And whoever thought it was good idea to have her running (and running…and running…) through the streets of Bath, disheveled and without her bonnet (shock, horror!), in search of  Captain Wentworth?

Out of curiosity,  I searched out the 1971 version on You Tube.
Ann Firbank played Anne; Bryan Marshall played Captain Wentworth. This Anne is composed and elegant but I found it hard to discern the yearning and loneliness that make this character’s late-blooming love story so poignant. The drama was muted, in part because the production pulled back on vapidity, vanity and snobbishness of Sir Walter and Elizabeth Elliot. These two were not the truly horrible human beings of Austen’s book. I felt like laughing gently at them rather than loathing them. Not nearly as satisfying.

The 1995 Persuasion with Amanda Root and Ciaran Hinds on DVD completed my research.
Root’s Anne radiates intelligence and self-awareness. She meets her family’s neglect and stupidity with forbearance and kindness – though she is no pushover – and she faces loneliness with grace and dignity. She hides her loneliness and yearning; she is confident and competent in her care and kindness for family and friends; and her slow blossoming as she makes new friends who appreciate and love her is quite moving. It is a “dark” production. Unlike the other two which are light and sparkling, rooms are dimly lit, the costumes look like clothes that have been worn, and Hinds’ Captain Wentworth is serious, mature and craggy rather than handsome.

Also, unlike the 2007 version, this one was true to the understated passion of the book’s closing chapters. There’s a scene in which Captain Wentworth listens as Anne and Captain Harville talk about love, constancy and gender roles.
Captain Harville tells Anne that “all histories are against you, all stories, prose and verse.”  “Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story,” Anne responds. And says, finally, to end the argument, “All the privilege I claim for my own sex…is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone.”
This is when Captain Wentworth writes Anne a beautiful letter.
I can no longer listen in silence. I must speak to you by such means are within my reach. You pierce my soul…
Sigh.

And there’s now yet another version, just out, which stars Dakota Fanning as Anne. I’ve been reading reviews and they are almost universally bad; the UK Spectator’s reviewer reckons everyone involved should be sent to prison! Anne as a Bridget-Jones style desperate singleton, crying in the bath and drinking wine from the bottle? Please, no!
I know I will probably give in to curiosity and watch it eventually, but for now, I am re-reading the book.

…as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all those millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.

Emily Mandel St John’s Station Eleven was one of my favourite books of 2014. Given what happened to us all in 2020, it now seems eerily prescient; the premise of the novel is a pandemic, the “Georgia Flu” which sweeps over the planet with devastating speed and kills most of the population. With what seems to be St John’s trademark style, the novel loops around in time and place and between characters. The pandemic sections are harrowing; her vision of the future is not as terrifying as that of Cormac Mcarthy in The Road, but it’s scary enough. Her 2020 novel, The Glass Hotel, was more realistic, following a woman and her conman husband as his Ponzi-style scam slowly crashes and burns, eventually unleashing a whirlwind of damage and tragedy.

In St John’s latest book Sea of Tranquility, we are back to the future, by way of the past.

It’s 1912. Young English ‘Remittance man’ Edwin St Andrew is a bit of a lost soul, idly travelling around British Columbia, when he has a strange, other-worldly experience in the rainforest which makes him doubt his sanity.

Then the reader is in 2020, revisiting Mirella and Vincent, characters from The Glass Hotel. Next, we move to 2203, when there are colonies on the moon, a radically reconfigured geo-political landscape and a famous writer called Olive Llewellyn is on ‘The Last Book Tour on Earth’ as yet another new pandemic takes hold. When she returns to her home on the moon, it’s into lockdown. Then, 2401, the population lives in giant domes and a detective called Gaspery-Jaques Roberts is hired to investigate a ‘time anomaly’ – which involves Edwin, Mirella, Vincent and Olive.

Though it sounds like sci-fi or speculative fiction – and in a sense I suppose it is – it’s not weighed down with tech. It’s the people I cared about. I loved the way Mandel anchored their strange and futuristic situations in life as we know it, now and in the past.

It’s shocking to wake up in one world and find yourself in another by nightfall but the situation isn’t actually all that unusual. You wake up married, then your spouse dies over the course of the day; you wake up in peacetime and by noon your country is at war; you wake in ignorance and by evening it’s clear that a pandemic is already here. You wake on a book tour with several days left to go, and by evening you’re racing towards home, your suitcase abandoned in a hotel room.

I also loved her beautiful prose. Sentence by sentence, Mandel’s writing is lovely.

What it was like to leave the Earth:
A rapid ascent over the blue-green world, and then the world was blotted out all at once by clouds. The atmosphere turned thin and blue, the blue shaded into indigo, and then – it was like slipping through the skin of a bubble – there was black space.

I am not going to give away any spoilers about the plot – the ‘time anomaly’ – the weird event that so spooked the young Englishman in 1912 and reverberated through the centuries. The plot was puzzling, and fun and thought-provoking, but what I was left with was a kind of gentle wisdom. Life can be tranquil in the face of death.  No star burns forever. Somewhere, for someone, the world is always ending.

Telltale is composed of two different kinds of narrative. One is warp and one is weft, and I am not sure which is really which. Will the threads hold? What patterns might I work across the surface? Will the metaphors crumble into useless dust? One thread speaks of books read and sometimes written. And also of things that happened in my life. The other speaks of a journey of the heart, a pilgrimage through the patchy history of the world, becoming a  poetic thread that runs through the whole narrative.

In 2020, the coronavirus suddenly and dramatically took over our lives. It was an unsettling and scary time (and it still is, but most of us seem to be living with the grim figures now instead of obsessing nightly). Carmel Bird used the enforced isolation as a gift. She writes that ‘confined to my library in what seems to be a strange and dreamlike way’, she set out to explore the world of books on her shelves, to revisit the pages she turned in childhood, to trace the patterns and recurrences in her art and life.

The house is my labyrinth, but I am not looking for the way out. I am looking for the way in, the way in to myself. One result of the constrictions is the firing of a special type of joy and energy. I am mining and I am weaving and I am brewing.

Books such as Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Stories from Uncle Remus and Cole’s Funny Picture Book launch the writer on a journey of discovery that leads far and wide both in literature and her own life. But as she reminds the reader, memory is not usually chronological and so this memoir can skip from sun-drenched family picnics to WWII concentration camps to the dark history of genocide and erasure that shadowed her birthplace, Tasmania.
Like all of Carmel Bird’s work, Telltale is highly original. It’s stylish, playful and occasionally very moving. She herself uses the metaphor of a tapestry, and if at times I found it hard to follow her thread (“Yes, but where is this going?”), inevitably there was the aha! moment, when the pattern – subtle, intriguing and unique –  emerged satisfyingly from the background.  It’s a book to read slowly, and to re-read.

Freezing winter weather, just right for curling up with a good murder mystery. And lucky me, I have friends and family who pass theirs on, so I have a stack of books on my shelf and I have just finished one of the recent crop of Australian rural crime novels.
I’ve read one book by this writer before, and it was good.

This one? It had enough suspense, a good couple of twists and a major red herrings. Some of the characters strained belief, and the motivation for the crime was a bit tired but these are not in themselves deal-breakers. But broken the deal certainly was.  Because of the setting. It just felt bogus. And in this genre – you can think of Jane Harper’s The Dry – the location, the  place, the setting is vital. It’s a major character, one of the elements we read this stuff for. Hell, this book was even named for the place. It’s where the backstory is, the past that underpins the present;  it’s where the locals were born and bred and old division fester, and where the newcomers collide.

This? A tick-a box  – or maybe pick’n’mix? – of wildlife and landscape.  A small country town that didn’t ring true – not its characters, its street or business names, or its local politics. The sloppy naming of localities and geographical features made me so grumpy!

Grumpy, grumpiest… Am I asking too much of commercial fiction? This was the  same feeling I get when there’s an Australian character in an American film, and the accent’s wrong. Or the Aussie-ness is bullshit and outdated. “Get it right!” I mutter to myself.
Was this book Australian commercial fiction with an eye to overseas  – US? – consumption? Where they wouldn’t have a clue?

Recently I finished Candleshine (I do hope that’s the title, because I like it so much), my first children’s book in five years. Hooray! It’s sitting pretty for a couple of weeks before I do that final read-through and (hopefully) final polish. It jumped the queue; I had the first draft of an adult novel sitting there also, but I’ve not been able to return to it after the first lockdown in 2020. Too grim.
The genre could have been nudged towards either literary fiction or crime. Place was key…it’s set in a small town surrounded by bush and state forest, which looks lovely but conceals poverty, disadvantage, violence against women and children, sexual abuse. There’s a crime, a cover-up. Reading the disappointing crime novel – not going to name it! – made me consider my choices in the abandoned manuscript. Was I guilty of bogus-ness, too? Were my place names believable? Did my farmer’s land use reflect reality? and would my pub in fact not exist due to the changing patterns of rural lifestyles? As a fiction writer, you imagine things. You make them up. Is it actually really, really hard – harder than I think –  to get it right?

Coincidentally, I found part of an article I’d clipped more than five years ago. It was about Alice Munro. If there is a spirit of time and place, she is its high priestess.

In spite of herself, the writer has remained loyal. She is loyal to place and the past, faithfully and  perpetually reconstructing it, so that no-one, having read her, would ever again say, “What’s so interesting about small-town rural Canada?” She is loyal to the truth, getting the detail precisely right in every phrase and world, so that people, habits, objects, scenes and places that are lost and gone in the real world remain alive on her pages. (“It was more concern she felt, it was horror , to think of the way things could be lost…”) She is loyal, also, to her chosen form, masterfully working and reworking it all her life, so that no-one in the world would say, “Why didn’t Alice Munro ever write a novel?” or “Why would a short-story writer win the Nobel Prize for Literature?”
from
Alice Munro’s Magic Hermione Lee
New York Review of Books, Feb 5-18 2015

In my case, it’s The Writer Laid Low!

You all know the great divide.
Supposedly, on one side, there are the plotters, who use whatever it takes – writing tools like Scrivener, index cards or charts or corkboards – to create a structures, goals, timelines. This way, they can write calmly from A to Z. They never let unruly plotlines tangle, or recalcitrant characters deviate from the plan.
On the other, there are the creative, free-spirited ‘pantsers’. (From ‘seat of the pants’. I seem to have read this first from American writers, and I don’t like the term –  maybe I’m a perv, but it sends my mind straight to underwear. Perhaps wingers, from ‘winging it’ is better). These pantsers apparently write and write, starting at the beginning and finishing where they type THE END, believing in the flow of their creativity and expecting all the while that it will all work out.
I’m not sure that it’s quite so neat. I certainly lean more towards the winging it side of things, but I always know my ending. I have key scenes in mind. I may not do the explicit and systematic planning but I do fill notebooks with – well, notes.

When last I posted on this blog, I’d just finished my new children’s book, Candleshine. I was polishing before sending it off to my editor – and feeling pretty damn good about the whole thing. Oh, there were a few issues. Little niggles. Things that didn’t quite make sense. I’m aware of the shortcomings of my more lax approach and I’m the first to admit that I have a history of creating insanely complicated plots. But it hung together. The characters were adorable. The ending was just on the right side of tear-jerking… The editor loved it. Which was so encouraging. We agreed: I just had to fix the niggles and resolve the issues.

A couple of weeks later and I’m dealing with something (knitting analogy ahead) that feels like this:

Each time I repair a dropped stitch (a plot hole,  an out-of-character action, something that doesn’t make sense, utter drivel), my fix just creates another problem. I’m torn between unravelling the whole thing and re-knitting, or just chucking it in the bin. How has it come to this? I’ve written ten novels. More, if you add the disgraced manuscripts forever on the naughty seat.  Perhaps what I need to do is find some way of combining the two approaches. I need a more reliable way to plan and structure – that’s bleeding obvious. But it will have to be a way that works for me. Which means that  – as with my notoriously free-from knitting – I will just have to learn from my mistakes, learn from those who’ve been there before me –  and figure it out for myself.

It’s obviously too late now… but I have a renewed interest in books on writing for writers.My son asked me what I wanted for my birthday, and I said ‘books’. I gave him a few suggestions –  all books on books and writing – and he gave me the lot.
I wanted Graeme Simsion’s  The Novel Project after a good review from Kate Constable, who wrote that she was finding it useful. The blurb promised that if I follow his structured approach, I will be able to “start each writing day with clarity and purpose”. I will find myself “progressing steadily toward the best book…(I’m)…capable of.” Which sounds wonderful. But it’s too late for my current tangled web. I started to read Simsion’s excellent advice…and despaired.
So I have laid it aside to read AFTER I’ve wrangled this book into shape.

Instead, I read Lee Kofman’s The Writer Laid Bare: Mastering Emotional Honesty in a Writer’s Art, Craft and Life. It’s an honest, wild, sometimes funny and sometimes painful examination of Kofman’s own life and practice. Big, generous, passionate – I wolfed it down like I was eating something hearty and full-flavoured (moussaka, a beef casserole with red wine and garlic). Some of what she writes about living while writing and writing while living is so familiar. It almost made me cry. There’s a relief in knowing I’m not alone in my struggle.

I loved the way Kofman melds memoir and instruction or advice. For me, this is the best way to learn; to start with the  personal  – the emotional and mental and physical lived experience – and then go on the intellectual.
Kofman insists on the personal.  Just look at the words in the subtitle, ‘Emotional Honesty’. In chapter called The Writer’s Body, she describes an unsatisfactory morning at her desk.
It is about the rain in Melbourne when I begin writing: the sky has been deceptively cloudy since the early morning. I say ‘deceptively’ because the sun is still finding its way through the fluffy celestial bedding, smudging this summer day with a sandy haze. The heat in the air reminds me how much of Australia is on fire right now….

Kofman continues to describe her anguish about the fires. And how it’s mixed with domestic concerns – a botched electrical job, dinner, packing for a holiday. She can’t get to the inner stillness she needs in order to write. She perseveres. She tries her strategies. She reads from Helen Garner’s diaries for inspiration. She copies quotes from a book she’s just read into her writing journal… In the end, she gives up and goes for a swim.

…a serenity descends. Words begin forming in my mind of their own accord… The words come and come, fleshy, exerting insistent and pleasurable pressure on me, just like the water as I move through it. Eventually, the pressure grows so powerful I bolt out, dry myself impatiently, sloppily and race back home, to my laptop.

She writes: Sometimes when the mind is recalcitrant, nothing but the body can save us.

(I don’t swim; I walk. When I used to give talks for children, I always showed a picture of our dog, Gus – and introduced him as my best ever writing aid. Walking daily is my unstructured thinking time. Often after a walk, a knotty problem would simply dissolve. It seemed magical. Sleep can be the same.
Over the past six months, a combination of health issues slowed me down. My daily 50 minutes around the gardens shrank to half that, a couple of times a week. Maybe the lack of walking time is showing up in my manuscript. Maybe now that I’m walk-fit again, the niggles and issues will unkink…)

The Writer Laid Bare is full of insights, humour, good advice and honesty. It’s a writer generously showing how she writes, not from some Olympian height but warts (electrician, dinner, climate change, children) and all. Great to devour and then dip back in to. Plus a marvellous selection of quotes from writers scattered through the text – and reading lists at the end.

Lee Kofman The Writer Laid Bare: Mastering Emotional Honesty in a Writer’s Art, Life and Craft Ventura: RRP $32.99

Lee Kofman is a writer. teacher and mentor based in Melbourne.