Susan Green

I have been reading the new Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks. An intense language experience. Something that I first realised many years ago, when I was first beginning to write as an adult, is that specific vocabularies, the real words for things, the precise and pointedly correct words for things and about things, add power and weight and beauty. Margaret Attwood’s Life on Earth was the book that showed me this. It’s probably more than thirty years since I read it, but think I remember the heroine worked in a museum. There were all sorts of sciency words. They were wonderful.

Landmarks is a book about observing, really looking and seeing. About finding the words and metaphors and similes that are right, tight, apt and precise for the humanly-observed, -walked, -worked, -sailed, -climbed, -loved world. Words for waves and rocks and cliffs and paths and mountainsides and stones and rain and hail and winds… A quob is a shaking bog in Herefordshire. Kynance is Cornish for gorge. And a gloup or glupe is an opening in the roof of a sea cave through which the pressure of incoming waves may force air to rush upwards, or water to jet and spout. That’s in the Hebrides, Orkney and Shetland.

I have often felt that I should should should learn the names of plants and birds that inhabit this place where I live and that I love so much. And at the same time I’ve resisted, because (1) I am lazy and it’s too much trouble and (2) I have thought that loving can be looking; it doesn’t need to be naming. But thinking about it, I realise that naming is loving and knowing. For instance, there’s a plant called Veronica perfoliata (I just looked this up!) but its common name is Digger’s Speedwell. Diggers are miners; so that plant was named by them during the goldrush. And I guess it was named before that, by the Dja Dja Wurrung people who were here first. What, I wonder?

 I was weeding in the garden earlier. I know oxalis and cleavers and dandelion, but that’s about it. What were the two  plants I was so ruthlessly removing? I felt with my hand and wrist and arm and back the difference between them. You grasp the grass (grass? which grass?), making sure you get all the blades in your fist, and pull. Sometimes you have to tug a bit, or rock the clump of grass, to get the roots to give. Then it comes up out of the ground in a hearty, satisfying way. You have to shake off the soil – again, heartily. When you’ve pulled a few, your tub is nice and full. It’s a fun thing to weed. The other one is not a robust experience at all. It’s more of a fine-motor thing. You have to pick the main stem, and pull gently or else the fine sticky filaments that are its roots just cling to the soil and most of it stays there. You can weed out the grass quickly, but this one needs patience for its fineness.

Perhaps I will give them my own common names – Easy-Out Grass and Little Stickies, perhaps.

Well, I failed on the ‘Sunday is blogday’ front. Perhaps it’s ‘Blog once a week.’ So here it is.

My other attempt at discipline is a sort of 4/7 rule…work on my novel four days a week. No matter how little it is – and at present it’s very little, only a couple of hours each session – it all adds up. The main thing, for me at present, is to get going. I’ve had quite a hiatus between finishing Verity Sparks and the Scarlet Hand and starting in earnest on this project.

I am still dipping into The Forest for the Trees. It’s a library book, and falling apart. I spoke to one of our lovely librarians last week when I re-borrowed it, and asked, What will happen to it if it’s removed from the shelves? I do hope they don’t just throw it away. I might have to steal it first!

Here’s Betsy Lerner again, on the perennial problem of ‘Can’t Get Started’.

I believe that the writer who can’t figure out what form to write in or what to write is stalling for a reason. Perhaps he is dancing around a subject because he is not ready to handle it, psychologically or emotionally. Perhaps he is unable to pursue a project because doing so would upset his world too much, or the people in it. Maybe not writing, maybe being driven crazy by the desire to write and the inability to follow through is serving some greater goal, keeping some greater fear at bay. Fear of failure is the reason most often cited to explain why so many aspiring writers never realize their dreams. But I think it’s the that same fear of failure that absolutely invigorates those who do push through – that is, the fear of not being heard.

Sunday, I’ve decided, is Blogday. No excuses, just do it. Once  a week is nothing, really: in a recent tour of the blogiverse – looking at young writer’s blogs – I see that for some of them it’s EVERY DAY. My goodness. But then, it seems that they are perhaps using their blogs as a kind of public warm-up for their other writing.

Which is something I wouldn’t want to do. Though I am about to return to a little trick I taught myself during my first stay at Varuna, the lovely Writer’s House in the Blue Mountains. I found it very hard to get down to work and so I insisted to myself that I write a practice page before I got stuck in. The practice page could be anything at all – a journal page, a long description of the house and garden, a whinge, a rant, a homesick howl, a poem. Somehow it helped. I really really hope it helps again.

Because I’m feeling rather unsettled, and it’s partly to do with the impending launch of Verity Sparks and the Scarlet Hand. I’m so looking forward to it. Buda, the wonderful Historic Home and Garden in Castlemaine – where some of the book is set – is hosting the event. The distinguished writer, editor and essayist Carmel Bird is launching the book. Friends will gather, and we’ll all have afternoon tea together. The new Verity, with its beautiful pink peacock-adorned cover, will take flight into the world of readers. It will be lovely.

And at the same time, I’m dreading it. I know I’ll spend the entire morning feeling like I’m about to vomit. Under the bedsheets, probably, if it’s anything like the last launch. What if no-one comes? What if no-one likes my book? What if…
Oh, shut up, Susan! It’s sad, isn’t it, because so many writers would love to be feeling sick and nervous and unsettled. It’s a privilege and – not to downplay my own hard work! – it’s partly luck when anything gets published, and more luck when it actually strikes a chord with readers and sells.

Here’s a passage from a book I’ve been reading recently – The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers by Betsy Lerner.

Before I entered publishing, I believed, like most people, that the life of a writer was to be envied. As one of my heroes, Truman Capote, wrote, “When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip.” Now I understand that writers are a breed apart, their gifts and their whips inextricably linked. The writer’s psychology is by its very nature one of extreme duality. The writer labours in isolation, yet all that intensive, lonely work is in the service of communicating, is an attempt to reach another person. It isn’t surprising, then, that many writers are ambivalent, if not altogether neurotic, about bringing their work forward. For in doing so, a writer must face down that which he most fears: rejection. there is no stage of the writing process that doesn’t challenge every aspect of a writer’s personality. How well writers deal with those challenges can be critical to their survival.

Yes indeed. Anyway, I’m attempting to gee myself up. I say, “Don’t worry, it’s only a book.” My friend Tony says, “Get over yourself, Suze.”
Edward Bawden says, “Temperament is for amateurs.”And my wonderful husband says, “It’s not all about you. It’s about Verity.”

And so it is.

Here’s me on the steps of Buda (42 Hunter Street, Castlemaine) where the official launch will be held. It’s from 2-4 on Sunday 12th July. After the launch, there’ll be afternoon tea and a tour of the house for those who are interested. All welcome!

Do I need more books? No, not really, but I can’t resist Op Shops. A few weeks ago, I exited the Salvos shop with a pale grey mohair cabled jumper, a stripy T-shirt, some old knitting patterns and these.

And then there was the Friends of the Library sale. I only happened upon the library sale by accident – I’d forgotten it was on – and turned up very late in the day. In time for the bargain box offer. $5 for a whole box of books.I got:

The Art of Eating by MFK Fisher
The House in Northam Gardens by Penelope Lively
In Full View: Essays by Lily Brett
Quicksands: A Memoir by Sybille Bedford
Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life by Karen Armstrong
The Garrick Year by Margaret Drabble
The Book of Latin American Cooking by Elisabeth Lambert Ortiz
Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, A Game of Hide and Seek and The Wedding Group by Elizabeth Taylor
Dancing with Empty Pockets by Tony Moore
An Affair of the Heart by Dilys Powell
Trouble by Fay Weldon
The Haunting by Margaret Mahy

What riches! Silly of me, there was plenty of room in my box but still, I was a bit modest in my selections (thinking of shelf space) and left half a dozen Leon Garfield hardbacks there. It is sad to see Smith and Devil in the Fog and the others deleted from the collection, but I suppose it must be. They’re the books of then, and they need to make way for the books of now. They were so beautifully made, designed and decorated with marvellous illustrations and covers by Anthony Maitland. See below.

Garfield was an author who liked cemeteries and churchyards and burying grounds. As do I. As a kid, I spent hours wandering and playing and even picnicking in the Castlemaine Cemetery (which, confusingly, is in Campbell’s Creek). When I moved back to the area in my late twenties, I lived only a couple of doors from the cemetery, and it was one of my favourite haunts. Yes, joke intended. I’ve already written about my love affair with that cemetery, and at last (in Verity Sparks and the Scarlet Hand)  I’ve been able to put a scene set there in a book. Are there many instances of cemeteries in junior fiction? It’s the stuff of a PhD, but I’ll have to leave that to someone else. One title for the research list is this odd little paperback (in the Op Shop, of course).

Last but not least, the new Verity is on its way. Release date is early July. I got my copies last week.

I’ve been reading:
King Death’s Garden by Ann Halam
Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
Radical Acceptance by Tara BrachCabinets of Curiosities by Patrick Mauries
The Wood for the Trees by Betsy Lerner
Quarterly Essay : Dear Life by Karen Hitchcock

If you were at our house, you would have just heard a very angry rant, full of expletives and delivered at higher volume than necessary. In other words, I was shouty and sweary and cross. Why?

Searching for a front-cover image of the fantastic book I’ve just finished, I came on a review of such gob-smacking stupidity that I just exploded. As my husband calmly commented, there are people out there who just don’t understand. They don’t realise that what makes fiction so wonderful and so valuable is that it can do the impossible. It can get us inside someone’s head. Inside someone’s life. Thoughts, feelings, experiences; the whole catastrophe.
This reviewer, probably a perfectly competent person in her field (which, by the way, is dementia), just didn’t get it. So literal-minded, that she objected to the first person narrative on the grounds that there is no way a woman with dementia could have written it down. She suggested a device for getting around this problem – it could be presented as an audio-taped interview. Yes. She did. I am going to resort to this – !!!!????
But perhaps now I should calm down a little, forget the silly review and tell you about Elizabeth.

My good friend KK – a voracious reader, if ever there was one – pressed Emma Healey’s Elizabeth is Missing on me more than a month ago.  “You’ll love it,” she said. And every time I spoke to her, she asked if I’d read it. I just hadn’t got around to it. So at last, when it was a rainy weekend and I couldn’t get out into the garden, I started…and  found that it is one of those rare beasts, the un-put-downable book. It’s a genre-bender, too. Another rare beast, and booksellers and publicists love them because they scoop up two different camps of readers.  This one is both an insight into the fragmented mind of a dementia sufferer and a murder mystery set in post-war England.

The heroine, Maud, is convinced that her friend Elizabeth is missing. She is determined to find her.
The thing is to be systematic, try to write everything down. Elizabeth is missing and I must do something to find out what’s happened. But I’m so muddled. I can’t be sure about when I last saw her or what I’ve discovered. I’ve phoned and there’s no answer. I haven’t seen her. I think. She hasn’t been here and I haven’t been there. What next? I suppose I should go to the house. Search for clues. And whatever I find I will write it down. I must put pens in my handbag now. The thing is to be systematic. I’ve written that down too.

Elizabeth lives near the  neighbourhood where Maud grew up. As Maud returns again and again to look for Elizabeth, finding clues, writing herself notes, she revisits her past.  Memories – fresh, intact and full of detail – show us Maud’s life just after the war with her parents, their lodger Doug, sister Sukey and her new husband Frank. They take us back to the terrible time when Sukey went missing. And against the odds, Maud solves the 70-year-old mystery of her sister’s disappearance.

Healey gets us inside Maud’s damaged mind.

When I reach the creamy wall I find that dust swirls here too, but it rises in the light and the air is cooler. I pull up a sitting thing, for sitting on. In a minute I’ll have to go back. There’s something I must do. I cant remember what it is just now, but I know it’s important; someone will tell me if I ask. The filled breads, the stuffed and buttered breads, are cut into squares, and my stomach growls, but I can’t work out what I’m to do with them. I watch a man take one and bite into it, his fingers crushing, his lips sloppy. I feel queasy, but copy him all the same, cramming the things into my own mouth. It slips against my tongue, cold and sharp and foetid at once. Someone comes at me, smiling, and I move hastily out of the way, into the kitchen, where the oven’s on, humming its own low, laughing comments, wearing its own hot black clothes.

Elizabeth is Missing is moving, heartbreaking, funny. Astonishing, fascinating. And it’s a first novel. Read it!

I’m finding that autumn is like spring. After this recent rain, all over the garden plants that died off over summer are poking their heads up and starting to live again. Like Mary in The Secret Garden, I’m excited. I keep heading outside to scrabble around in the mulch and dirt to see what’s happening.

She kneeled down and leaned out of the window as far as she could, breathing big breaths and sniffing the air until she laughed because she remembered  what Dickon’s mother had said about the end of his nose quivering like a rabbit’s.

‘It must be very early,’ she said. “The little clouds are all pink and I’ve never seen the sky look like this. No one is up. I don’t even hear the stable boys.’
A sudden thought made her scramble to her feet.

‘I can’t wait! I am going to see the garden!’

She had learnt to dress herself by this time, and she put on her clothes in five minutes. She knew a small side door which she could unbolt herself, and she flew downstairs in her stocking feet and put her shoes on in the hall. She unchained and unbolted and unlocked, and when the door was open she sprang across the step with one bound, there there she was standing on the grass, which seemed to have turned green, and with the sun pouring down on her and warm sweet wafts about her and the fluting and twittering and singing coming from every bush and tree. She clasped her hands for pure joy and looked up in the sky, and it was blue and pink and pearly and white and flooded with springtime light that she felt as if she must flute and sing aloud herself, and knew that thrushes and robins and skylarks could not possibly help it. She ran around the paths and shrubs to the secret garden.

‘It is all different already,’ she said. ‘The grass is greener and things are sticking up everywhere and things are uncurling and green buds of leaves are showing. This afternoon I am sure Dickon will come.’

The long warm rain had done strange things to the herbaceous beds which bordered the walk by the lower wall. There were things sprouting and pushing out from the roots of clumps of plants and there were actually ehre and there glimpses of royal purple and yellow unfurling among the stems of crocuses. Six months before Mistress Mary would not have seen how the world was waking up, but now she missed nothing.

For most of Better Than Before, I really enjoyed Gretchen Rubin’s company. She’s chirpy, cheerful and positive. She reads children’s literature. We share  a genuine pleasure in de-cluttering. We find stationery shops blissful and like nothing better than a list compiled in the morning with all its items crossed off at night.  “Me too!” I kept thinking. “Gretchen, you’re my new best friend.”
Well, up to a point. And this was is it.

One night, Eliza and I had a long conversation about homework. She lay on her bed while I prowled around the room in search of clutter to clear. I stashed blue nail polish, threw away empty gum wrappers, put books on the shelves and put away clothes as we talked. (I find light clutter clearing very relaxing. Eliza tolerated this activity).

But Gretchen, that’s not your nail polish. Not your room. Not your space.

I too have done my fair share of ‘organising’ other people’s belongings. My son, like Gretchen’s daughter Eliza, had to tolerate my raids on his bedroom until he was old enough to protest and resist. My husband has always resisted, but nevertheless he’d had shelves, files, boxes, bags, magazine holders thrust upon him in my quest to streamline his stuff. Until I realised that it was my problem, not his. I still drop the odd heavy-handed hint about how nice it is when you cleanse your wardrobe of worn-out and rarely worn clothes, but I don’t steamroller any more. It’s easy to imagine there is some kind of moral high ground in orderliness, but there isn’t. And there are better ways to use my energy and reforming zeal.

For  instance, working on my next novel.

Every now and then I torture myself with a self-help book.

Usually I borrow them from the library, but this one I actually bought, on a whim, in Dymocks in Collins Street when I was in Melbourne last week.

Actually, I’ve just realised that last time I was in Dymocks I bought a self-help book too: a book about what I should be eating  called Eat Real Food.  I really needn’t have bought it  – the title says it all. And I eat very well, anyway. What was I thinking?

I know that if self-help books really worked, there would be no new crop of advice each year. There’d be no need. Everyone would be vibrant and healthy, fit, mindful, cancer-free, happy, rich, blissfully wedded, empowered and spiritual and all the rest of it. I see self-help books all the time at the shop where I work and manage to resist their siren song very well, thank you. All that aside, Gretchen Rubin’s exploration of habits has been thought-provoking and even a prompt to action. When I first started this blog, I promised myself that I would post on my blog once a week, on Sundays. I haven’t kept that promise. Too busy, too tired, forgot, nothing to write about, uninspired…

Posting on Sundays needs to become a habit. So here goes!

 I’m reading:
Better Than Before by Gretchen Rubin
Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain

It’s Anzac Day. Red poppies. Parades. Talk of sacrifice and death. A recording of the Last Post and the solemnity of “Lest We Forget.”

On Anzac Day itself we were never at school, but I remember sitting cross-legged on the floor in the prep/1 room, listening to Mr Taylor, the grade 6 teacher (and an ex-serviceman) tell the story of Simpson and his donkey. I started to cry.

That was in 1963. I am old enough to have had a grandfather who fought in WWI and a father who fought in WWII. My mother’s father, Harold Goddard Harris, was an Englishman who emigrated to Australia with his family to farm at Kilmeny in Gippsland. He joined the Australian army and fought in France. He was gassed at Passchendale and was never entirely well after that. He died in 1939, when my mother was 16.  She adored “Daddy Harold”, never got over missing him and talked about him often.

My own father was 18 when WWII broke out. He was rejected the first time he tried to join up – at the medical, a heart murmur was detected – but he was able to find a chemist who supplied some kind of drug and the second time was lucky. If you can call it that. He served as a cartographer and was in the army for five years. He used to tell us funny stories about camp life but not much more than that. He was an artist and after his death his trove of wartime watercolours, painted mainly in Far North Queensland, the Northern Territory and New Guinea, were donated to the War Memorial in Canberra.

My brother and sister-in-law, Charles Green and Lyndell Brown (yes, I know) were official war artists in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2007. I opened the Age arts pages this morning to find a large colour reproducation of one of their paintings, Portrait, Corporal Dianne Cuttler, Kandahar 2007 and an interview with Lyndell. In it, she says that in taking up the commission, it “…felt like we were completing a circle of family history.”

I have just finished reading the last two books in the Montmaray trilogy and I’m gobsmacked at how skilfully Michelle Cooper has woven so much social and political history into these involving novels. They’re the journals of Sophie FitzOsborne, a member of the royal house of tiny (fictional) Montmaray, but Cooper’s research is marvellous and so with a light hand and a gift for an exciting story, we’re immersed in the tribal rites of aristocratic society in the late 1930s, the effects of the Spanish Civil War, the British flirtation with fascism, appeasement, the League of Nations, espionage, rationing, the blitz, the Kennedys, the RAF…and, this being after all a novel for young adults, love, longing and sex.

Funnily enough I’m (still) reading this.

Lord Berners was the model for Lord Merlin in Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate and the story of the Mitford sisters is a part of Sophie Osborne’s Montmaray journals…

I’m reading:
Greatly Daring by Brene Brown

Here is the cover for the new Verity novel, which is due to be released in August this year.