Susan Green

The theme this week is bits and pieces.

I have been trying to impose order on my bulging filing cabinet, and so I’ve had a purge. Lots of paper went straight to the bin, while a small pile for ‘keep’ and a bigger one for ‘?’ slowly formed. In the ‘?’ pile are many clippings and scribbled notes and pictures torn out of magazines and even (I’m a little ashamed to admit) books. Not library books (isn’t that annoying? how can they sleep at night?), but ratty old books from Op shops and second-hand shops.  I will keep some some amazing black-and-white images of the Lascaux caves and the Venus of Willendorf which must have come from a book on pre-historic art; a few unfortunately rather stained full-page advertisments from 1950’s women’s fashion magazines for clothes and especially corsetry (a preoccupation of mine; more later); and a set of illustrations from some Victorian historical novel involving gloomy castles, sadistic jailers, fainting maidens and ghosts. These last smell very musty and odd. I have put them aside for The Scrapbook Project.

Lots of writers keep notebooks. One writer that I know has a stack of notebooks spanning her entire long writing career, and she can go back to them to find any clipping or quote or picture or reference that she remembers, or  even half-remembers… They’re all there.

I do envy her, and would like to have a similar reference, but my efforts in the notebook department have been pretty sporadic. I have a few very lovely blank journals with at the most only twenty pages in each actually used. Scraps of paper seem to be more my style. So, for me it’s scrapbooks; I can paste in the pictures and clippings AND the scribbled quotations.

Because my mother, who died in May 2008, was both a hoarder AND a born archivist, I have inherited a mass of beautifully organised files relating not only to her own, Dad’s and her three children’s personal histories, but to her many interests. History of many varieties – family, local, Australian, English, ancient Roman; artists; writers; Australian literature; children’s literature; detective fiction; gardens; architecture; travel… on it goes. She used those A4 binder books, and either slipped the cuttings in or pasted them onto a sheet of paper. I’ve just bought a stack of large kid’s scrapbooks and a couple of glue-sticks. Now all I need is a couple of rainy weekends and the project will be launched.

I’ve always enjoyed reading what writers say about their working life. A room of one’s own, kitchen table; biro, pencil, pen; paper, computer; strict routine, when inspiration strikes…  Though that last phrase brings me to a little quote I’ve got pinned up above my writing desk. ‘Temperament is for amateurs’. That’s from Edward Bawden, a prolific English artist, illustrator and graphic designer.  I copied the following (found on a scrap of paper in my files) from a biography of the American writer Katherine Anne Porter.

You need to find somewhere in the house, a work room that no one has occasion to pass through or come near. And no one to ask anything of you until two o’clock in the afternoon. You know perfectly well what it takes: uninterrupted meditation and long hours of steady work.

The difference between mere adventure and a real experience might be this. That adventure is somethng you seek for pleasure, or even for profit, like a gold rush or invading a country; for the illusion of being more alive than ordinary…but experience is what really happens to you in the long run; the truth that finally overtakes you.

I believe we exist on half a dozen planes in at least six dimensions, and inhabit all periods of time at once, by way of memory, racial experience, dreams that are another channel of memory, fantasy that is also reality…I believe that a first rate work of art somehow succeeds in pulling all these things together and reconciling them. When we deliberately ignore too much, we make a fatal mistake.

Chinese saying: The land that is nowhere, that is the true home.

From “Katherine Anne Porter: A Life” by Joan Givner (Simon and Shuster, 1982).

This is how I became a reader, and then a writer.

Reading came first, but not easily. Perhaps I started school too young – only 4 – but my mother always told me that I had had all sorts of readiness tests done, and I should have taken off like a shot. She blamed my teacher, Miss Benson.

Miss Benson had beautiful light fluffy hair and I loved her because she was so pretty. I loved her even though she was often cross with me, and once I even wet my pants in front of the whole class because when I asked her urgently ‘Can I go to the toilet?’, clutching at my crotch and hopping about, she kept me waiting until I got the phrasing right. (‘Please may I …’)

Our key text in Preps was a reader called ‘John and Betty’. They jumped and ran. They had a cat called Fluffy and a dog called Scotty, who also jumped and ran. I failed to learn to read (or Miss Benson failed to teach me) in Preps, so I went into the less than bright class, a Prep/1. I failed there too, so I was sent off to Remedial Reading with the Infant Mistress. I can’t remember her name, or much about her, except that she was an older woman, not pretty, without fluffy hair. I used to sit right in front of her, staring straight ahead between her legs, utterly fascinated by the stockings gartered just above her bulging knees, her pale thighs and saggy knickers.

I didn’t learn to read from her, either, and by Grade 2 my mother, who had been a primary teacher, lost patience and taught me herself. Her method ignored John and Betty. She bought some Puffin books – proper story books – and read part of the story and then left it to me to finish. The breakthrough text was called Rom-Bom-Bom and it was something about a tiger and a drum. It turned out I could read after all.

With the immense confidence that gave me,  I thought I could then read anything. From the bookshelf I picked Ulysses by James Joyce (it had a lovely curved bow on the spine), but I couldn’t make head or tail of it; I moved on to Oblomov by Goncharov but got a bit bored. I did better with Orlando by Virginia Woolf, and read perhaps 20 pages before I lowered my sights to children’s books. I must have read Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess near the end of Grade 2, when I was 7, because that was when I wrote my first story. In the book, the heroine Sara tells the littler children at her school a fairy tale about princesses and mermaids. In post-modern terminology, I appropriated Sara’s tale, and wrote:

Once a princess sat on a old white rock and stared at the bluey-green water. Out of the sea rose four Mermaids with flashy silver tails. The Mermaids swam about in the crystal-green water and dragged after them a fishing net woven of deep-sea pearls. On it stood a prince who said to her “Will you come down under the sea and marry me?” The princess sat on the white rock and stared in amazement and slowly said “yes’. So she stepped onto the carefully woven net and the Mermaid dived under the sea. The Mermaids left them on the pure white sand in the middle of a shiny gold cave and swam away. The prince picked up a handful of sand and sprinkled it over her. Immediately she grew a tail. Soon they were married and lived in a palace made of pink coral and pearls and shells.

I still have that story. Very neatly printed in brown biro, with an illustration of prince and princess with tails and crowns outside the coral palace. Beginning writers are often exhorted to write from experience, and in a sense I was.  I was still so very close to the fairy-tale world of my earliest childhood. Plump and sturdy, with dark almond eyes, black hair and fat red cheeks, I was nevertheless a princess. Why not? And a mermaid, too. The sea, with its waters both bluey-green and crystal-green, was just over the sand-dunes outside our back gate. I spent hours and hours swimming underwater, following little fish, with my hair waving around my face like black sea-weed. When I was very  little, in stormy weather, I sometimes thought I saw my sister mermaids riding the waves far out beyond the pier.

I didn’t hit my stride as a reader until Grade 3 at Campbell’s Creek Primary School. The classroom was fully supplied with Enid Blyton’s Secret Seven series and, even better, in the library, a dim, imposing room with lots of dark wood panelling, were the Billabong books by Mary Grant Bruce. I was off and away, a serial reader.

And sometime in Grade 3, I also became a writer. That is, I fell in love with words. Not just stories; words. I tried my parents’ bookshelf again, and found something with a likely-sounding title. The Reluctant Dragon by Kenneth Grahame. I opened it and read:

The masterful wind was up and about, shouting and chasing, the lord of the morning. Poplars swayed and tossed with a roaring swish; dead leaves sprang aloft and whirled into space; and all the clear-swept heaven seemed to thrill with sound like a great harp…

I think that’s all I read. I still have not read much further. I didn’t want to or need to then. I wrote:

The winds woke up

From their summer sleep

And tossed the leaves about.

Still wet with dew

The grass was swaying

From left to right.

Below the wild flowers

Filled the grass with colour.

Oh wicked winds!

What magic do they bring!

What magic! It was like magic with words and I have never forgotten how exciting it was.  I was going to be ‘The Reluctant Blogger’ but I think ‘The Reluctant Dragon’ fits just right.

I WAS A TEENAGE FASHION VICTIM!

It's True! Fashion Can Be Fatal

Fashion Can Be Fatal is the first – and only – non-fiction book I’ve written. The lovely, witty and very kind Robyn Annear is a fellow Castlemaine resident and author of the award-winning Bearbrass (about early Mebourne), Nothing But Gold, The Man Who Lost Himself, A City Lost and Found, and children’s non-fiction book Fly a Rebel Flag. (Robyn’s website is at robynannear.com). I was talking slightly self-pityingly to her one day about the big gap in my publishing record –  five or so years since my last book – when she suggested I approach children’s editor Sarah Brenan at Allen&Unwin.

A&U were doing a non-fiction series called It’s True! They wanted manuscripts that took a quirky, fun look at history.  So, encouraged by Robyn, most trepidatiously and tremulously (in common with lots of mothers, I’d lost a bit of confidence while in baby-land) I sent off an exploratory email and the rest, as they say, is history. Well, my history, anyway.

I put myself in the book. (Why? Because I could). I’m Fashion Victim#12.

It was 1974. I’d saved for months to buy a pair of bright red platform shoes They had 6-centimetre heels and I thought they were fantastic. When I was invited to see a movie with friends, I dressed up in my best outfit and my brand new shoes. I looked great. There was only one problem: the shoes. I kept falling off them and they gave me blisters. it was like wearing a brick on each foot. The whole evening was a disaster. I never wore them again.

Red shoes. Red shoes are dangerous and alluring. Red shoes dance you to delight and oblivion and madness. There’s a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale called The Red Shoes, a 1940’s British film starring Moira Shearer called Red Shoes and a book by Carmel Bird called Red Shoes. David Bowie in ‘Let’s Dance’ implores his lover to put on her red shoes and dance the blues…etc, etc, etc. I was a hulking fourteen-year-old, in Form 3 at Karingal High School, wearing grey flares and a red top and making the debut of those bloody red shoes at the Pancake Parlour in Bourke Street and there was no delight or delirium to speak of that night. That is why, when I see from time to time the rebirth of seventies fashion – platform and wedge heels, flares, skinny-knit jumpers, tiny shrunken cardigans, the dolly-cut, smocks, shirring…need I go on? – I am not tempted: I was there the first time. But enough about me…

Some of my other Fashion Victims were real people – like Isadora Duncan, strangled by her scarf in a car accident in the South of France, and the 146 Triangle Shirtwaist Company workers who were locked into their workrooms on the top floors of a ten-storey New York building and died when fire broke out. Others were made up. Like Mlle Adele Derriere entering rooms sideways due to the width of her panniers, and Lady Gertrude Gormless squeezed breathless by her extreme corsetry.

The book is a bit of fun, and I enjoyed the research enormously. I used the library, bought a few books (like the fantastic Encyclopedia of World Costume by Doreen Yarwood full of her adorably awkward black and white pen illustrations) and Googled. Googling was great, but I had a few surprises. Typing in ‘Beaver Trade’ was not a good idea. ‘History North American Fur Trade’ got results much more appropriate to the dear little kiddies.

A&U got Queenland illustrator Gregory Rogers to do the illustrations. I thought they were perfect. And here’s a little story about illustrators, authors and the six degrees of separation.

A very pleasant man walked into the bookshop where I work, and was chatting to the owner. He and his partner were on holidays, staying with a friend, looking around… He’d just had a picture story book published, he told us. And another coming out soon from Allen & Unwin.

“So do I,” I chimed in.

‘It’s called Fashion Can Be Fatal, ” he said.

You could have knocked me down with a feather boa. “I wrote it!” I said. Mutual amazement ensued. How’s that for coincidence?