Please join Alan Brough at a celebration at the State Library on Friday 20 March, 4 - 5pm when he announces the the top five books, as voted by Victorian readers in the State Library of Victoria’s Summer Read program 2008-9, and voter’s prizes.

Experimedia
State Library of Victoria
328 Swanston Street, Melbourne

RSVP by Wednesday 17 March 2009

Telephone                   8664 7555
email                          learning@slv.vic.gov.au
book online                summerreadawards.eventbrite.com

Thanks Carolyn for your thoughts on books having a life of their own because books have readers and that readers bring their own lives to the books they read.

As part of the free Summer Read events across Victoria, Carolyn will be appearing at:

Royal Botanic Gardens Cranbourne, Cnr Ballarto Rd and Botanic Drive Cranbourne on Wednesday 4 February 2009, 10.30 – 11.30 am.
Author event to be followed by wander around the Australian Garden (limit 50 people)
For more information phone Cranbourne Library 5990 0150 or book online at http://summerread9.eventbrite.com

Grampians Road Halls Gap (behind Brambuk Cultural Centre) on Saturday 14 February, 2009 from 1.00 pm BYO picnic and chair (Author appearing at 2.30pm). Children’s activities provided and light refreshments provided at the event conclusion.
For more information and phone Horsham Library 5382 5707 or book online at http://summerread38.eventbrite.com

Vote for Cups with no Handles or SMS CUPS to 13 46 88

I go to visit my mother in San Francisco every couple of years. In anticipation of one of my visits, she had cleaned out her closet and sorted all the things she had kept from the growing-up years of her four children. My pile of memorabilia was a treasure trove to me: all the letters I had ever written to my mother, photographs, a music box, a necklace that I had made in second grade for her, and two very special books.

The first book was one my mother must have read to me a thousand times when I was little: a pop-up edition published by E.P.Dutton & Co. (no date) of Winnie-the-Pooh and Eeyore’s Tail by A.A.Milne. It has a spiral binding and cardboard covers and boasts that it is a “new full color [sic] edition with four pop-ups”. It begins: “The old grey donkey, Eeyore, stood by himself in a thistly corner of the forest, his front feet well apart, his head on one side, and thought about things. Sometimes he thought sadly to himself, “Why?” and sometimes he thought, “Wherefore?” and sometimes he thought, “In as much as which?” – and sometimes he didn’t quite know what he was thinking about.” I love that beginning. It makes me wonder how much that book has to do with how I write now.

I suspect the second book my mother saved for me has even more to do with how I write now. It is the first real book ever given to me to read to myself. It was Christmas 1953 and I had only just turned eight. I remember distinctly that I was not overly pleased to get a book for Christmas, a book 238 pages long with hardly any pictures, certainly nothing in colour. I was not a precocious child. I could read perfectly well, but I avoided it as soon a something better came along. Even though I knew that the author of this book was my grandmother’s friend, whom I had met several times, I couldn’t give two hoots about it or her. Finally, my parents made me sit and read non-stop for at least a half-an-hour every day until I finished the book. after the first few forced sessions, I was sucked in and didn’t need to be reminded to read. The book was Little House in the Big Woods, originally published in 1932. It was the first of the Little House series that made my grandmother’s friend, Laura Ingalls Wilder, famous. But, the only thing I remember about the author was that she was very, very old. In fact, Wikepedia says she was almost 90 in 1953.

For a person who remembers being ambivalent about this book, I was amazed to find, when I re-read it last week for the first time since 1953, that I remembered almost every word of it.  And I was amazed to see how important the detailed stories about a small family surviving pioneer life in Wisconsin were to me. One reason may be that we had a pioneer log cabin just like the little house in the book in our back yard. It had a heritage trust covenant on it and we were not allowed to touch it, except to protect it. I longed to play in it, but I was really only allowed to look. Ms Wilder’s book allowed me to put people into our little house and to imagine the life there. It allowed me to imagine bears and wolves and deer and even Indians, who I already knew about since another of our friends had an Illiniwek burial mound in their back yard. The stories in the book were so vivid because they were real. In fact, they were exact descriptions of how to do things like make a hat out of straw, or stick a pig, or smoke venison, or churn butter, or make soap, or, best of all, tap a tree for maple sugar. It does not matter than none of the trees in our yard were maple trees, they all got tapped by an eight-year-old to see if sugar would come out.  This book taught me to imagine the lives of others, and it made me infinitely curious about the way people lived and the way they did things.

Other authors, who came much later into my consciousness, and whom I have always assumed were of great importance to and influenced me more than any other authors were Hemingway, Steinbeck and Faulkner. The things I like most about all those writers are the details with which they describe the lives of their characters, the way they revealed the characters by showing what they can do, how Nick, for instance, could spin a fly in “Big, Two Hearted River”, how Ma made the stew in an unemployed workers camp in Grapes of Wrath, how Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy went after Tommy’s Turl in “Was”. These authors show. They don’t tell. And, whole worlds are revealed.

When I work with people, I get them talking by asking them to tell me how they do something. With Daryl Tonkin, who wasn’t sure he was so good at telling stories, I put him at his ease and at the same time learned how he organised a story and what words he used, by asking him to explain the skills and tools needed to be a tree faller. With Bette, who did not see the reason for telling much about her mother since her mother had no real interest in politics, I asked her to tell me what her mother cooked her large family for dinner during the depression, where the food came from and how she got it when there was no money coming into the household. Bette gave me enough information for three chapters without realising it. It is the detail of people’s lives that make the stories of these two characters so readable and full of meaning.

Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder was the beginning of this great curiosity for me. Once I read her book, I became an enthusiastic reader and read every pioneer and Indian book I could get my hands on as a kid. And there were plenty. Two years later I read Gone with the Wind, which I thought was the fattest book ever written, and after that I felt I could read anything put in front of me. Which I did.

But, when I began writing my own books, I went back to the lessons I learned about writing in that very first book my parents gave me in 1953. Isn’t it a wonder that my first real book set me on a path from which I never wavered? I would not have discovered this if my mother hadn’t saved Little House in the Big Woods for me and if I hadn’t picked that old book off my shelf to read when the State Library’s Summer Read program encouraged me to think about my first book.

The other day, when I was being interviewed by the local paper covering the Summer Read event I will participate in at the Botanical Gardens in Cranbourne, the reporter asked me how I became interested in writing about the people I write about.

“You mean ordinary people?” I asked.

“Well, yes,” she said not having read either Cups with No Handles or Jackson’s Track.

“Because ordinary people often live extraordinary lives,” I said.

“Oh, that’s good. I’ll use that,” she said.

As a writer, I work with real people who tell me their stories. Usually, they are people I know, country people, far from the madding crowd. I consider the work I do collaboration and both my subject and I are always listed on the cover of our books. The people I work with tell me as much of their story as they think is important and then I draw them out. For instance, Daryl Tonkin, who was the storyteller in Jackson’s Track, only wanted to tell campfire yarns about the feats and skills of men at work in the bush falling trees. He didn’t think he was important enough to be part of any story. His daughter and I convinced him otherwise and I set to work asking questions that allowed him to delve deeply into his own life with the Kurnai people of Gippsland. In Cups with No Handles, the book that is one of the Summer Read books this year, the subject, Bette Boyanton, wanted to tell me a linear tale of how she became a political activist and what she achieved. The only stories she was ready to tell were those that lent themselves to her political education. But her family wanted me to find out more than just that. Her niece said to me, “She needs to say something about our grandmother. We don’t know about her. We need to find out.” Her daughter said to me in a fit of anger over a confrontation she had just had with her mother, “She’ll never talk about us [her kids]; you have no idea.” I thought, there is a story in the personal here that will make this woman’s memoirs dynamic. Feminist that I am, I thought, the personal is political. Bette didn’t really believe that, but I felt that to be true to the emerging character, she would have to learn. As she began to respond to my questions, she learned.

So, it’s my job as a writer to find the extraordinary in the ordinary. Maybe by extraordinary, I mean the truth. It is my job to find the truth in people’s lives. But, truth is a tricky business. Many people believe that memoirs are like a biography or a meticulously researched kind of history. Many people mistook Jackson’s Track for history. Bette herself in Cups… thought that it would be good if we included historical accounts of World War Two or the Great Depression or the Menzies Referendum against Communism. I told her history books were for that; ‘we will only tell the parts that you experienced, the thoughts you had about your experience, and how historical events moved your life along’. Because they are about experience and are narrative constructions based on memory, Memoirs are closer to Fiction that they are to the Record, to History. How, then, can it be that I think I am finding the Truth?  (I could go on forever about Memoirs, Biography, History, The Record, Oral Testimony, Truth. In fact, I have written a thesis about it. It’s called Jackson’s Track Revisited and can be accessed for free and downloaded in Pdf version from Monash University ePress.)

In one of John Barth’s books – I think it might have been End of the Road – there is a scene where a fellow is sitting on a park bench reading Dostoyevsky. Another fellow comes up to him and asks him what he is reading.

“Crime and Punishment.”

“What kind of a book is that?”

“It’s a novel; fiction.”

“Oh, I don’t like fiction. I only ever read the truth.”

“This is the Truth.”

It’s that kind of truth I am looking for. I am looking for a true character, the complexity and intricacy of a human being and the way she/he live her life.  It’s a universal thing. A Universal Truth. And it is endlessly fascinating.

I reckon I have finally found the key to the truth when my subject experiences a kind of epiphany, the kind of thing that happens when they see how history played upon their lives and made them do the things they did or see the things they saw, when they say, ‘I never knew that about myself!’ In Daryl’s case, it came when he realised how his brother’s behaviour made him think things that weren’t true; or in Bette’s case, it came when she saw how her grandmother’s rejection of her mother’s choices in life was even more of a motivator for Bette than her political beliefs. Once the storyteller gains insight, the story comes pouring out. It is my job to listen and listen well. Then everything falls into place.

What I look for is that core truth that lets the character emerge. It’s Literature. It’s Truth in the Dostoyeskian sense. That’s why my books read like novels.

I had a wonderful compliment yesterday. A person recognised me as the author of Cups with No Handles and came up to tell me that she thought it was a wonderfully Australian story told in the idiom with a kind of freshness and accuracy that she doesn’t come across often. Well, my buttons nearly popped because I am not a native Australian speaker.

I first came to Australia from Chicago in 1968. Although I wasn’t a backpacker for I had landed a job at a private school in Ballarat, I was on an adventure fresh out of university travelling as far away from home as I could get. When I disembarked from the BOAC aeroplane and stepped onto the tarmac at Essendon Airport, I heard myself being called a Yank for the first time in my life. So naïve was I that I wondered how the stranger speaking to me knew I was a Yankee from the North and not a Rebel from the South. (I blush to think of that now.) I was called luv and thought it was a compliment; I heard the word sheila used in such a way that I didn’t know what it was; I heard phrases: too right, bewdy mate, she’ll be right, no worries, flat out, fair dinkum, fair go – all spoken in the broadest accents; I heard the upward inflection at the end of sentences that made me think people were asking me questions at every turn; I heard strange syntactical constructions that made the English words of my own language unintelligible to me. Rather than despairing, I was excited to realise that Australian was a different language from mine and that the dynamics of this new language – the syntax, the inflections, the words and phrases – were fascinating. I set about learning it.

As much as by speaking with new friends, I learned the language by immersing myself in the literature. At first is was the books that my friends threw at a ‘new chum’: Randolph Stowe’s To the Islands, Tourmaline, Merry-Go-Round in the Sea; Henry Lawson’s short stories, especially “The Drover’s Wife;” Joseph Furphy’s Such is Life; Henry Handel Richardson’s The Getting of Wisdom; A.D. Hope’s poems, “Australia” then “Death of a Bird” and through him Judith Wright. And then I found books for myself: Manning Clark’s histories were coming out volume by volume and then came a new re-print of The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney, all three volumes in one paperback with a gold cover. I remember lugging that around for weeks so I could read it on the train going to and from work. It was when I discovered Patrick White and read The Tree of Man that I felt I was beginning to know this country and its language.  I wrote my first play using Joseph Furphy’s Such is Life to guide me. I wasn’t conscious of it at the time, but I know now that I wrote No Place for a Woman, based on a Henry Lawson short story, in order to learn the language and discover the ethnography of the original Settler Australians. By that time I wanted to know not only the language but the past so I could plant my own roots here. I knew I had begun a project that was never going to end and leaving this new place I had found to live in was not an option. Interestingly, an American woman named Lucy Frost who teaches at Tasmania University and must have come to Australia about the same I did, must have been doing the same thing I was. I discovered her book, No Place for a Nervous Lady; voices from the Australian Bush, years later.

Of course, I read many, many Australian books other than those I have named. Dame Leonie Kramer (for better or for worse) was spear heading a push for recognition of Australian literature back then and I dove in headlong. Publishers took her up on it and there have been so many great books… How can I begin to name the ones that influenced me over the years? Anything by Christina Stead or Helen Garner or Kate Jennings, Inga Clendinnen’s Dancing with Strangers or Tiger’s Eye, Kim Mahood’s Craft for a Dry Lake, Tim Winton’s Cloud Street, Rodney Hall’s Island of the Mind, Lionel Fogarty’s poetry. I have to stop; I’ll keep going forever. My favourite right now is Alexis Wright’s Carpenteria. I think, in that book, she has stretched our language, made it more Australian (Aboriginal) than ever. I love opening it on any page and reading passages out of it. It is a masterpiece.

Oh, dear, I haven’t said anything about Australian film (Peter Weir) or Australian theatre (Jack Hibbard’s Stretch of the Imagination), which was also coming into its own in the seventies. What a dynamic and expansive time it was to be learning this language.

When I moved down to the city from Ballarat, I found an evolving language that was wonderful. It had an international lilt, with clipped pronunciations and clever constructions. In St Albans, where I taught, my favourite sentence, usually spoken by boys in the back row was, “I didn’t do nuthin, yeah but, Miss.” I got along with the kids I taught and was invited to their houses to have dinner with their migrant parents. Because I was a migrant myself, I had much in common with them. My interest in their life before Australia and their reasons for leaving the old country plus their struggles with the Australian language meant that I was constantly having people tell me stories.  I became a good listener: a person will tell a story if there is a listener. I found I could write their stories if they wanted me to – say an explanation to a lawyer or a letter describing a situation – and they felt as if they had written it themselves. “How do you do that?” they asked. Well, I didn’t know. But, I reckon being tuned into the sounds of words had a lot to do with it.

When, almost thirty years after my study of the language had begun, I was asked by his daughter to help Daryl Tonkin tell his memories of life on Jackson’s Track, I knew I could do it. I tuned in to his way of speaking very quickly. That book, Jackson’s Track, Memoirs of a Dreamtime Place, was a sensational experience for me. Cups with No Handles; Memoirs of a Grassroots Activist came next and I am getting lots of great feedback from readers; the Life of Eileen Harrison, Kurnai artist, is almost finished and a couple of new ones are on the boil.

The project I began that February day at Essendon Airport is certainly not yet finished.

As Jeff and Nam have written, and every other writer knows, procrastination is something those of us without a ‘day job’ have to face. With procrastination comes anxiety, guilt and evasive behaviour. 

I have just come back to this warm climate after freezing to death in Europe for almost six weeks. It was wonderful in Paris, but wonderful also to throw off the layers of jumpers and skivvies and singlets, hats and gloves and scarves when we stepped off the plane in Melbourne. While I was away, I took a break from my writing. I shut away the manuscript I am working on and left my SLV instructions for Summer Read blogging on top of my closed and turned-off computer. It was not easy leaving that computer behind, but I did. All the while we were away, I kept telling myself that when I got back home, I would hit the ground running, finish the last chapter of Eileen’s story, get all my blogs done at once, and prepare for the impending Summer Read gigs. 

Did I do that? 

No.

I did turn on my computer the minute I got home but only because I had felt like  part of my body had been left behind when I left it on my desk six weeks earlier and I needed to re-attach myself. I turned it on, but instead of working I read the New York Times. Then I mucked around with e-mails until my jetlagged brain couldn’t take anymore. I glanced at the blogging instructions, turned away with a moan and collapsed on the couch. I’ll get to it when I know what day it is, I thought. But… the next day was no good. We had to watch the inauguration, an important historical occasion we rationalised. We couldn’t allow ourselves to miss the moment when the helicopter flew the former president away from the seat of power so we could believe that, at last, the world was in safe hands. Then came the tennis. Down to Melbourne to sit with our friends in Hisense (I wonder how long that name will last) Arena in the blistering sun and watch Serena defeat that tiny girl with more power in her racket than seemed possible. We stayed until Tsonga won his match. Too long. Back home we caught up with country friends at the Japanese place in Inverloch and then it was imperative that we participate in urgent anti-desalination plant activities, rallying as many people as we could through the phone tree to attend yet another protest at Williamson Beach.

Now, at last I am once again before my computer. I am actually writing my first blog. I am procrastinating no more. As Jeff said, a writer has to set aside a certain time each day to work or it doesn’t work. We have to put fences around ourselves with set times and set routines because writing is difficult and it is so easy to put it off. I don’t find writing hard and agonising as Jeff says he does, but I find the intensity, the deep focus, the zone you have to get to in order to write exactly what you want to write difficult to find some days. When I get there my body tenses up, I lose track of real time and place and enter another world. In my journal, which I keep erratically, I wrote down a comment by Peter Carey way back in 1997. He said, “A certain nagging ache lies behind all but the most exhilarating moments of writing. Invention remains the difficult part. Most writers I know can’t invent for very long. They can write for a long time, but they can’t invent. After three or four hours, people have done most of the inventing they can do. Then you sit down and do the craft things. But mostly you are exhausted.”

I find quite a few exhilarating moments in writing, possibly because of the kind of work I do, unravelling other people’s lives, finding a narrative strand and shaping it to bring out meaning. There are often moments of epiphany followed by great excitement and urgent writing. In my book, Cups with No Handles, when Bette momentarily questioned her dedication to the Communist Party, wondering at her father’s grave if she had done the things she had just so he would love her best, it was an intense moment. For Bette’s daughter, Gina, that admission changed the whole story.  I was in a zone when I wrote that up and it was exhilarating. When I finished that story, I looked up, time had passed and I was exhausted. 

Mostly, writing takes tenacity, perseverance and patience. All those things are hard; they are why we procrastinate. But, you know, all the while we are procrastinating, we are thinking. I heard John Clark say at a party here on Phillip Island that he is always working, “twenty-four seven.” Me too. Once you start on a project you never stop until you write the last word. 

And, how do you get to the last word? You keep going forward day after day until you have finished.

Then you re-write.

Carolyn Landon is next Summer Read author blogging from 31 January to 4 February.

Carolyn Landon was born in the US and came to Australia in 1968. She taught in the Victorian State School System, and has recently completed an MA in Biography and Life. Carolyn is currently working on the life of Aboriginal artist Eileen Harrison.

Her book Cups with no Handles is one of the books on the Summer Read shortlist.

Cups with no Handles tells the true story of Bette Boyanton; a woman who struggled to overcome the disadvantages of poverty, lack of education, inequality and poor health, to become an inspiring feminist and environmental activist. This memoir gives us an understanding of social and feminist history in the twentieth century, and what gives a life value.

As part of the free Summer Read events across Victoria, Carolyn will be appearing at:

Royal Botanic Gardens Cranbourne, Cnr Ballarto Rd and Botanic Drive Cranbourne on Wednesday 4 February 2009, 10.30 – 11.30 am.
Author event to be followed by wander around the Australian Garden (limit 50 people)
For more information phone Cranbourne Library 5990 0150 or book online at http://summerread9.eventbrite.com

Grampians Road Halls Gap (behind Brambuk Cultural Centre) on Saturday 14 February, 2009 from 1.00 pm BYO picnic and chair (Author appearing at 2.30pm). Children’s activities provided and light refreshments provided at the event conclusion.
For more information and phone Horsham Library 5382 5707 or book online at http://summerread38.eventbrite.com

What Carolyn says about summer reading

“The words ‘summer reading’ immediately send my mind to the beach at Torquay from Jan Juk to Zeally Bay where we lie on the warm sand every January year in and year out and read books. We only put our books down when we get too hot and have to run into the surf or swim around the buoys at Cosy Corner to cool off. One summer I had both Charles Waterstreets’ memoirs – Precious Bodily Fluids and Repeating Leaving – with me, and a woman reading near me noticed. She told me she knew Waterstreet and what a wonderful man he was and how glad she was people were reading his clever books. “That’s the great thing about Australia,” I said. “Someone always knows someone and you never feel like a stranger. I love these books and will cherish them.”  They now stand together on my bookshelf with sand in their pages and they smell like summer reading.”