The sparrow on the birdbath

Scenario: in jail you will have two options – a pad and pen, or an endless supply of novels. What do you choose?

Inconsequential

‘I just have to write; I have no choice.’  It’s a perplexing statement, mostly because it’s just a little too grandiose, even for me.  And self-important.  It’s as though writing for some people is as critical as breathing and eating and sleeping and loving.  But writing isn’t that important.  If, say, Helen Garner doesn’t produce another book the world will keep turning: people will go to work, they’ll marry (if they’re allowed) and have children; there’ll be wars and earthquakes and floods and famine.  Certainly, if I don’t write another word it simply won’t register in any part of the world’s consciousness.  And the teenager down the street who’s busy scribbling away as you read this?  She’s as inconsequential as a sparrow standing on the lip of a backyard birdbath.

What I know

Do I have to write?  I don’t know.  What I do know is that I have to exercise on a daily basis otherwise my brain turns in on itself.  I know that an hour in the garden or cleaning out the chook-shed cheers me up no end.  I know that a good couple of hours reading leaves me feeling connected to life in a way that’s so deep and intimate it’s almost frightening – in a good way.  I know music can resonate and elevate and move my bones like nothing else.  I know that a blue sky, especially the sort we get in this Southern Tablelands part of the world, can stop me in my tracks.  I know that when an Australian politician over-simplifies a complex problem to play on our most base fears I want to throw the coffee-table through the television screen and make the whole thing blow up.

When breaking

But do I have to write?  Every so often, perhaps a couple of times a year, I tell myself to have a break from the writing room, to just spend a few days reading on the couch, and drinking coffee in the sun, and walking the dog up the hill, and sitting by the fire with a glass of wine in hand and a record on the turntable.  For a day, as I’ve said before on this blog, it’s bliss, it really is, and for a couple of days it’s beautiful.  But then I start to get edgy: it just doesn’t feel as if I’m being productive; it feels as though I’m not living deeply enough, that time is passing me by, that I’m not making the most of everything that’s on offer.  At some point I’ll find myself on the couch scribbling away at a notepad – more than likely it’ll be an idea for a novel or novella or short story, or it might be the draft of a First Word for the Canberra Times, or a post for these here Under the counter parts.  After a day of this, I’ll find myself back at the desk and working on a whole new project.

No different

But do I have to do this?  Perhaps I’m addicted to the work of fiction: the heady rush when it’s going well; the gut-wrenching frustration when it’s all going to hell in a hand-basket.  Maybe I like fictional worlds better than real worlds, that what I make up is more interesting that anything that I can actually touch and smell and feel.  Or it could be the love of fantasy, even the contemporary-realism type of fantasy that I like to do.  Or the love of playing – is make believe simply better than make do?  It could be that I just like setting goals and achieving them (as if that’s all it takes to create a story and have it sent into the world), so in the end I’m no different to someone who wants to swim faster in the pool.

Something bad; becoming dreams

This morning, while feeding the chooks, I subjected myself to a highly fictitious scenario (trust me on this): I’ve done something bad, have been given a prison term, and offered the following two options: a pad and pen; or an endless supply of novels.  I’ve put a lot of thinking into finding the right answer, and I’m almost 100% certain that I’d take the endless supply of novels.  Because in prison I’d want to escape into the fictional worlds on offer, they’d be worlds so carefully and lovingly and painstakingly and skilfully created by others, and I’d appreciate – I’d need – them all very much, reading would be my saviour.  And I think there’d be relief in this, that I didn’t have to do it anymore, that I could just enjoy the words and sentences and paragraphs and chapters and characters and predicament for their own sake.  Except they’d mean more to me than that, wouldn’t they: the novels would sustain me, they’d become my dreams.

A choice while free

So, do I have to write?  No, but while I’m as free as a sparrow on the lip of a backyard bird-bath, writing is something that I love to choose to do.

Everything and nothing is sacred

David Malouf’s ‘Complete Stories’: grandly handsome, in every possible way.

Empty days

There are times – like these last two days – when I feel as though I’m the luckiest man alive, because I’ve been starting the mornings reading on the couch in my library room.  For some, luck might be scoring that high-paid job, or travelling overseas, or being able to fill the house with the boundless rush of children, but for me it’s reading, it’s stillness, it’s silence, a book in my lap, a real book, one that needs to be held, one that has pages that have to be turned.

I’m in a writing lull, which sounds bad, as in I’ve lost some kind of fire.  But the fire is there; it’s still burning, raging even, it’s just that a manuscript has been completed and sent to my publisher and I’m not yet ready to start a new project.  So I’m filling these deliciously long, slow empty days with reading.

Where reading happens

Reading happens all over the house: there’s lap-top and iPad reading at the breakfast-/lunch-/dinner-table; there’s living-room couch reading; there’s writing-room reading, the conscientious, studious sort; and there’s bed-time reading.  But the reading I enjoy the most is the sort that happens in the library room, which I also sometimes call ‘the front room’ or ‘the fireplace room’.  When it’s really good, both the reading and the room, it’s cold and wet and windy outside, and I light the fire, pour myself a coffee, and cover my body with my grandmother’s black and red and yellow mohair blanket and get lost in the words.

David Malouf and the smell of smoke

Yesterday and this morning the words have been written by David Malouf: The Complete Stories (Knopf 2007).  It’s a grandly handsome book, in every possible way, and, at over 500 pages, it’s big, it has such weight – you need two hands to read these stories.  Sometimes, when the story is a long one, almost novella length, and I’m far too engrossed to rise for a break, I prop up the top of the book on the repositioned piano stool, which is the perfect height for the task.

Ah, the words on the page, Malouf’s words: searching, circling, yearning, but they’re always so warm; they take you in and have you.  Crafted but not overly crafted; satisfying, so very satisfying – days after living for such a brief period with these stories, the people of the stories stay with the reader, demanding just a little more time, a little more understanding, because they’re complex, and their predicaments are complex too – but they don’t wallop you; they’re intelligent, but never clever; they’re absolutely finished but not always perfect.  All the while there’s the fire crackling and hissing and popping and creaking away, the heat coming before waning, a thin fog in the room, sometimes even a sting in the eyes, but always the smell of smoke on my hands from getting the fire going in the first place.

When it’s as good as this

Perhaps it’s the stillness I love the most, and the silence, the sort of silence that seems to embrace that which is made by the fire, even enhanced by the fire.  And enhanced by the words, David Malouf’s words.  What does it mean to read like this?  Yes, it’s transportation, and communication, entertainment even.  It’s a good, worthy, even noble pursuit.  And, with the fire, there’s a kind of romance to the whole practice.  But there’s much more to it.  There’s depth, great depth, and illumination, everything stripped bare, everything and nothing is sacred, you can’t hide, the words will come for you – yes, you – in the end.  Exposed, that’s it; we’re all made raw.  Despite the fire and the blanket and the coffee and the couch, it’s uncomfortable to read.  When the reading is as good as this.

In Dickson in May

Attainable perfection: on Meanjin’s Canberra edition, March, 2013

Eminent Australia literary journal Meanjin does a job on Canberra – both come out winning.

One anthology (two anthologies)

It’s beautiful in design, it feels good, actually it feels perfect – how it all holds together in colour and shape and form and texture.  A glistening cover, inside the gorgeous black and white and sometimes sepia images, and thoughtfully composed essays and short stories and poems and memoir from some of Australia’s best writers – Geoff Page, Marion Halligan, Alan Gould, Susan Hampton et al.  It’s hard to imagine a more lovingly constructed object.  Which is utterly apt for an anthology with Canberra as the theme.  Meanjin should be congratulated for getting together this particular edition, and the context couldn’t be more fitting – Australia’s national capital turns 100 this year.  And for having the guts to do it: across this crusty, leathery old country of ours there isn’t much love for the little southern city, and, rather predictably, there’s a persuasive view that nothing much happens there beyond political and public-sector hot air, and, so the story goes, there’s nothing much of literary note either, which is, of course, complete bollocks.  There’s another anthology about Canberra out at the moment, The Invisible Thread: one hundred years of words (Halstead Press; editor Irma Gold), and that more than proves the point.

City living

I lived in the ACT for the best part of 25 years, from 1987 to 2010, and these days I’m only an hour away.  I moved to Canberra from Sydney by choice, to go to university and start my adult life.  However, university wasn’t the real reason: it was about escaping a city that had leached into my bloodlines (I have ancestral connections to that part of the world dating back to 1797) but had also overwhelmed me with its hedonism and dark heart; moreover, it was about putting myself in an environment which I believed would open me out so that, at last, I might be properly alive.  I knew little about Canberra beyond what I’d gleaned from a handful of trips to visit family friends, but I knew it was different in look and feel to anywhere else I’d been.  Even as a child I understood the territory to be fresh and forward-thinking, and this appealed to someone who was born and bred amongst the well-heeled conservatism of one of the wealthiest parts of Australia, and I had the sense that a new way of being in the world was required.

Much of this Canberra edition of Meanjin focuses on built form and town-planning, which is both unsurprising and perfectly reasonable for a city famous for being designed from the ground up.  And it was certainly a resonating experience to undertake my first degree, landscape architecture, in a place where landscape and architecture are so important.  However, these things are not what I enjoyed the most; these things are not what have ultimately made me remember my time in Canberra with great fondness, often love.  In Canberra I discovered who I was, I met people, I fell in love.  Critically, it seemed – and still seems – a place where pre-judgement isn’t the preferred modus operandi.  Is there really much difference between getting drunk or getting stoned?  Do we wish to demonise people who sell sex and people who pay for sex?  For some years now, Canberra – the society of 380,000 people, not the hollow, hill-top political machine – has been asking the question about whether or not marriage is about gender.  And isn’t it time that the nation stood on its own two feet and became a republic?

Town living

Two old mates, three big rocks, a mountain range off screen, as is a great modern city called Canberra.

Almost three years I moved out of Canberra into neighbouring regional New South Wales.  Why?  Cheaper housing – most writers can’t afford big-city mortgages, even the rent.  And I appreciate small-town life.  And old stuff.  Canberra has a rich heritage – Aboriginal, natural, and built – but it’s not the crumbly, slightly depressing sort.  And I’m a big fan of the crumbly, slightly depressing sort.  So these days I live in my little old 1895-era cottage called Leitrim, and I spend my weekends patching up cracks that keep appearing in the walls and I collect firewood for a fire on these cold, damp nights, and I’m as happy as Julia Gillard on a Sunday arvo sitting on the couch in her jim-jams with a glass of red while watching Bruce Willis bash it up in Die Hard.  I love walking down to the mainstreet to visit the post office, which is a truly spectacular late nineteenth-century marvel, and doing a few transactions in a bank where the people know my name, before wandering home through  hidden laneways.  When Goulburn’s good, she’s heart-stopping spectacular.

The future

But still I visit Canberra regularly, weekly in fact, and a hump-day highlight is careering through the rolling back-road Southern Tableland landscape, listening to music (the latest Frightened Rabbit has been getting a good run, which make me laugh in this context – the road’s awash with roadkill) and when I cross the border into the ACT it’s always a joy, a hopeful joy.  Because to me that’s what Canberra is about: the future, and how we can craft it anyway we like, even as a society we can do this.  We can honour the past, live in the Brindabella-boundary present – if you’ve never been around to see snow on those ranges then you’re missing the quintessential south-east Australian experience – but keep eyes open to move forward.  It’s this youthfulness that I admire about Canberra – how my own youth once became a kind of ‘manhood’, whatever that is – and the unashamed optimism.  And the fact that many of my friends still live there.

And that perfection might not be so unattainable afterall.

Hope amid the silence

What’s on the other side of silence: darkness, or hope? Or might it be both?

Silence is golden, so the cliché goes, a cliché being a cliché because at its core it is true, or partly true. But the fact is silence can also be a shadow, more, a shifty, dark, impenetrable black mass. Of all people, it’s our fiction writers who know about silence, know it only too well.

We need silence to read, to immerse ourselves in the work of others, to learn, to admire, to be moved. But we also need silence to dream and think and plan our own stories. We need silence when we’re about to jump over the edge – what a cliff it is; will we fly or fall? – and put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, however it has to be done. We need silence as the words begin to flow, as the characters and their story twist here and there, sometimes everywhere. We need silence when everything starts to unravel: when characters misbehave or fade into the fog; when plots tangle like lantana; when the whiteness of a blank page or screen becomes blindness.

Somehow, miraculously, if the gods are on our side, it comes together in the end, the story is finished, and perhaps, just perhaps, someone wants it enough to make it public, to launch it out into the world.

And then – and then what exactly?

The silence changes form, that’s what, the darkness comes, the blackness. After those days and weeks and months and years of sculpting, unearthing, fossicking, erasing, reshaping, losing, winning, turning, straightening, polishing, to the point that the fictional world is now as real as the world down the street. But once the finished words are on the published page, more than likely – oh this is the terrible truth – nothing will happen. The sun still rises, the sun still sets, and in-between there’s the same old hours.

Amongst the silence – the good sort and the merciless – there has to be hope. That the story, being like a prayer or a chant or even just a simple little wish, will go and do good things. Perhaps in response someone will say a kind word, even a blunt but honest one, and this will make the writer’s day. And it just might be enough to send the writer back into the silence one more time, to dream up another story, to do it all again. Despite themselves and everything they know.

(First published in Panorama, The Canberra Times, 20 April 2013.)

The Blemish Novella Story Part 16: reviews and wine and news and links and thanks

The Canberra Times reviews ‘I’m Ready Now’ – wine ensues, as does a hangover (and, despite the hangover, much thinking).

Beneath everything that’s been going on – finding a way of paying the bills, covering the cracks that have been appearing in the walls, the death of a divisive UK matriarch, the barrage of daily emails, dodging kangaroos – there’s been a simmering story: how is I’m Ready Now faring in the rapidly shrinking world of literary reviews?

For an excellent but sobering analysis of the current book-review situation in Australia have a read of ‘Parallel Fates’ by Sybil Nolan and Matthew Ricketson, which was recently published in the new and much-needed Sydney Review of Books.  I’m just eternally grateful that I’m Ready Now, a story about two difficult people making difficult decisions, a novella by a regional writer and published by an independent press, has managed to be reviewed at all, first in BMA Magazine, then Whispering Gums, and now The Canberra Times.

As ‘Parallel Fates’ makes clear, book reviews are extraordinarily important: they provide a thoughtful, dispassionate and contextual critique of a writer’s work; they offer advice and feedback to a publisher; and they help connect books with readers.  Without book reviews, especially the articulate, erudite and fearless kind, there can be no viable literary culture – writing is as much about response and contribution as it is about creation.  They can also help to toughen writers, who are, no doubt, innately sensitive souls, and they help to educate readers, encouraging the broadening of interests.  The book pages, however, particularly those in the mainstream press, appear to be dwindling.

But what of the review in The Canberra Times – is it any good?

Well, it does have this to say:

Writing novellas might seem a little anachronistic or studied, a bit like playing the harp, say, reading Henry James, or listening to LPs. In Featherstone’s hands, though, the novella form becomes an opportunity for concise, intense, concentrated emotion. For him, 156 pages are plenty to introduce plot twists, to give characters depth and feeling, to juxtapose emotions, and to colour his settings with textured, intriguing detail (Mark Thomas)

Which is very generous and resulted in the drinking of wine.  Lots of wine.  Far too much.  And a hangover the size of a bastard country.

In other I’m Ready Now news, Blemish Books has produced a podcast of me reading a short (3-minute) extract, there’s an interview I did with ArtSound FM, and if you’re in a book club you may be interested in the reading notes that have recently been made available and the associated discount offer.  So the good ship I’m Ready Now, skippered by the tireless Blemish folk, keeps sailing despite some challenging seas, and here’s hoping that the wind remains in the sails for a little while longer.

As always, thanks to everyone who’s said a kind and supportive word – I appreciate it very much.

Inviolable standards: seven truths about the novel

Milan Kundera: the unbearable lightness of having drunk far too much coffee.

‘Novel = heightened story.’ (Philip Larkin in Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, 1941)

‘There are four ‘appeals’ of the novel: (1) the appeal of play; (2) the appeal of dream; (2) the appeal of thought; (4) the appeal of time.’ (Milan Kundera in The Art of the Novel, 1986)

‘I think that novels tend to fail not when the characters are not vivid or deep enough, but when the novel in question has failed to teach us how to adapt to its conventions, has failed to manage a specific hunger for its own characters, its own reality-level.  In such cases, our appetite is quickly disappointed, and surges wildly in excess of what we are provided, and we tend to blame the author for not giving us enough – the characters, we complain, are not alive or round or free enough.  Yet we would not dream of accusing Sebold or Woolf or Roth – none of whom is especially interested in creating character in the solid, old-fashioned nineteenth-century sense – of letting us down in this way, because they have so finely tutored us in their own conventions, their own expansive limitations, to be satisfied with just what they give us.’  (James Wood in How Fiction Works, 2008)

‘If it is the job of the novelist in part to document an era, to define what is ‘novel’ about their time and to interpret in new ways that which they see, then it makes sense that the best novels are the ones that work hardest at tearing up the foundations of the world as we know it, shifting away from convention, spotlighting the marginalised, and imagining and re-imagining this life and the world.’  (Slightly paraphrased from a review titled ‘Unpicking the Universe’ by Louise Swinn, Overland Issue 189, 2007)

‘[Here are the] inviolable standards: (1) a writer must give the maximum amount of information about a character: about his physical experience, his way of speaking and behaving; (2) he must let the reader know a character’s past, because that is where the motives are present and the behaviours are born; and (3) the character must have complete independence; that is to say , the author with his own considerations must disappear so as not to disturb the reader who wants to give himself over to illusion, and take fiction for reality.’ (Milan Kundera in The Art of the Novel by Milan Kundera, 1986)

‘Literature that’s worth reading should tell you something that you didn’t know, and at the same time make that knowledge indispensable.’  (Dorothy Johnston in The Canberra Times, 19 July, 2008)

‘Novels are always about time.’  (Margaret Atwood)

I went to the woods

‘I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,
to front only the essential facts of life,
and see if I could not learn what it had to teach,
and not, when I came to die,
discover that I had not lived.‘

– Henry David Thoreau

The best one

1.

It was the phonecall I never wanted to make, but I had to do it, I had to press the buttons, I had to organise the appointment – I had to get this done.

2.

So I did: 9.45am, that would be the time.  I hung up and went back to the mini camp-bed beside the dining-room table.  I rubbed his belly, scratched his chin, rubbed his belly again.  I felt his back legs.  Were they cold?  No, they were warm, or warmish.  Was he purring?  If he was, he was doing it quietly, only for himself.

3.

We haven’t always been the best of friends; in fact, to begin with, he was nothing more than a replacement.  Our first cat, Cooper, died at six months while being de-sexed – the vet said something had gone awry during the operation, a reaction to the anaesthetic maybe.  Two weeks later, which was too soon but these things happen, we found a black and white kitten in a pet store and home he came.  His fur was coarser than Cooper’s, and overall he seemed more unruly, wilful.  Still he settled in, and we settled in with him.  His name?  Sam.  Which was short for Sambuca, because of his black-and-white markings.

4.

He came with us when we moved house a year later, to a place just around the corner, so I spent thirty minutes driving the streets of the suburb to give him the impression that we’d actually moved kilometres away.  For two days I kept him inside so he’d get used to his new digs, but eventually I bit the bullet and let him out – I remember being thrilled to the point of incredulity when a moment later he appeared at the front door as if wanting to be let straight back in.  Sometimes he slept on the bed, sometimes on the couch, often on the dog’s bed, making a point about that – his superiority.  Often he sat on the armrest of the couch and took a swipe at the dog, just because he could.  In winter he stood in front of the heater, warming his face and chest and belly, his eyes closed.

5.

‘A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not’ – Ernest Hemingway

In adulthood, however, he became a horror.  No matter how many bells I put on his collar he’d catch birds – magpies, currawongs, cockatoos; early one morning he even brought home a semi-comatose chicken.  He was remarkably agile: he could jump straight up as high as the Hill’s Hoist as if he had little rockets on his feet.  Twice I invested in a collar that would emit a high-pitched squeal the nano-second before he’d launch an attack, but he still managed to catch birds.  And I hated it.  Under a bush beside the front door was a spray of feathers – it was a death cave, and I hated this too.  He also fought with other cats, and got abscess after abscess, forcing me to pay $300 a pop to clean him up.  One day about five years ago a neighbour came around to politely complain about Sam.  ‘He’s a lovely cat,’ she said, ‘and he visits us a lot, but he also attacks our cats, and we have to take them to the vet.  We had to put down one of our cats after a fight with yours.’

From that day onwards Sam was curfewed at night.  Which he hated as much as me.  Around two or three every morning he’d want to be let out, which I couldn’t do, so I’d lock him in the other part of the house.  Which he hated even more.  He’d thump at the hallway door as though he’d made fists out of his claws; some mornings it sounded like he was taking a running jump and flinging his whole body at the door as if he felt sure he could barge his way out.  The more I kept him in the house, the more he sprayed the curtains, the corners of the bed, even the hi-fi speakers that I’d bought as a present for my 40^th birthday.  The more I kept Sam inside, the more he shat everywhere – due to the layout of the tiny Canberra house he didn’t always have access to his kitty-litter, which was in the laundry.  Eventually I decided that each night I’d lock him in the double garage so I could get some sleep and didn’t wake each morning to find a nice pile of shit in the kitchen.  I thought that I’d get another complaint from the neighbours because out there he meowed incessantly and banged on the metal door.  Thankfully, after some weeks, he became used to sleeping out there, and I got used to sleeping through the night again.

To be frank, it was always good to feed him in the morning and then kick him out again – sometimes literally.  I distinctly remember thinking that looking after Sam was a burden: all work, not much joy.  Really I only spent a few hours with him every evening, before jailing him in the garage.  In the column I write for The Canberra Times I began referring to him as Cat the Ripper, because it was like living with a murderer.  But each year I took him to the vet to get his annual jabs.  He got a cancer on his nose, so I got that fixed; it came back so I got it fixed again.  When He Who Is More Of A Dog Person moved to his own place, there was Sam, snoozing beside me on the couch – when he wasn’t out and about causing complete and utter havoc.

Even though Sam was de-sexed at six months (a different vet did the honours this time, obviously), I spotted some kittens over the road who looked distinctly similar to Sam.  He Who Claimed Not To Be Fond Of Sam But Couldn’t Help Giving Him Long Tender Cuddles pointed out the impossibility of Sam siring anything, but one day, as we were walking back from the shops, he said, ‘What’s Sammy doing in that garden over the road?’  I said, ‘That’s not Sammy.’  And he said, ‘Oh shit.’  Later a vet would tell me that if a cat is de-sexed very young a testicle can remain inside, meaning that he could still do the deed.  Which would also explain the spraying.  So he was a lover and a fighter and a hunter.  With the cutest face.  When he wanted something.

Did I love him back then?  It’s hard to say that I did.  If he went missing for a night or two I’d go out with a torch and search the gutters for him.  I could always tell if he wasn’t feeling the best because he’d spend the whole day on my bed.  If I went away for any period of time, I’d always get a cat-sitter and make sure to leave detailed instructions.  I’ve found these on the computer; here’s a cut and paste:

• he gets dry food in the morning, about a cup and a half;
• it’s best to leave him outside all day, even if he wants to come in;
• but he must be kept inside at night otherwise he gets into fights; he’ll start meowing around 5am, so you can let him out then and he’ll probably come back an hour later for food; personally I find it best to put him in the garage at night (he’ll meow but don’t worry about that) and then let him out in the morning;
• if you want to get him inside, bang a can with a spoon – he’ll come in pretty quick; and
• warning: Sam meows A LOT!  Don’t worry about it – he’s just very chatty. If you ever want to shut him up, give him some watered down milk or, again, just put him in the garage.

But was any of this love?

6.

In 2010, when I decided to quit more-or-less fulltime work and move to Goulburn to put writing and related activities at the very core of every week (up until then it was a matter of waking at 5am to write), amongst the hundreds of decisions to make – which real-estate agent, which renovation, due to all the travelling I’d be doing soon should I buy a new car, if so, which one? – I didn’t make a decision about Sam, because I didn’t know what I wanted to do with him.  If someone had offered to take on Sam, would I have accepted?  Probably.  More than once I thought that if I got him up to Goulburn but he then did a runner and disappeared then so be it, in fact it would be a relief.

He settled in – slowly.  Initially, despite the yard being small and contained and with plenty of nooks and crannies, he seemed frightened of the outside, which was odd for a cat who was used to ruling the world (he was actually quite shy around humans, only really engaging with the two of us).  In the end his innate bravery got the better of him and he ventured out the back door.  Which was good, because I was adamant that with this new house, which is actually a very old house, I wasn’t going to have him spraying everything and shitting all over the joint.  Thankfully, in my part of town there are no cats and the only birdlife is an unruly gang of sparrows, so he could be outside as often as he wanted.

I remember the first time I had to go away for a couple of nights.  I set up an automatic feeder and left him to fend for himself.  Would he hang around?  On my return, I found him standing in front of the corrugated iron shed that passes as a garage, meowing as loudly as ever, demanding – yes, demanding – to be let inside or be fed, or he just wanted to chat.  I think it was James Joyce who said that no one loves a conversation more than a cat.  He put on weight and I wondered if he was pinching food.  So we eased into a regional-town rhythm, both of us enjoying the slower pace of life and the distance in the air.  Visitors commented that Sam looked more ‘chilled’ than ever, which perhaps was because his owner was more ‘chilled’ than ever (though there’s nothing ‘chilled’ about a piece of writing that isn’t coming together, or maybe there is, the shivery chill of the still-born).

For the first time I began to enjoy Sam’s company.  He was eleven years old now, and I’d sit in the backyard and have a coffee with him, the two of us staring at the chooks; he barked at them when they first joined the yard but soon realised that being behind wires they were out of reach.  I’d find him sleeping all over the house, sometimes on the bed, which was always a pleasure.  He had the softest white belly, and a chin that needed scratching, and I was the man for him.  Sometimes he’d sleep in the dog kennel, because it was near the back door.  Each week I’d have to go down to Canberra for a couple of nights, but he’d always be around when I got home, almost always just in front of the shed, as if waiting for me.  In the shed I’d set up a cosy nook out of boxes and an old woollen underlay that was meant to be for The Old Lady of the House before he commandeered the thing.  There’s a potted plant at the back window, and sometimes I’d come home to find it knocked over; I’ve always blamed the wind, which can be severe, but now I wonder if he used to sit there waiting for me.

In short, I could imagine us growing older together.

7.

Last winter, just after dawn, there was a commotion in the backyard.  Beneath the wattle was an explosion of feathers; Sam had a pigeon in his mouth.  But what was that in the fig-tree beside the shed?  A large brown hawk.  What was going on?  Had the hawk dropped the pigeon, much to Sam’s delight?  Or was the hawk trying to get at Sam’s catch?  Or was the hawk after the chooks?  (He wasn’t after Sam, was he?)  Whatever the case, I managed to get Sam to let go of the pigeon, but the pigeon was too badly injured and died shortly afterwards.

A few weeks later Sam started hanging around the shed and staring into space – he looked lost and confused.  Even when in the house, he hid under tables or chairs; if there was as sudden movement he leapt for cover.  I hadn’t seen the hawk again, but that didn’t mean that he wasn’t around.  When Sam walked, he looked low down in his back legs, almost like he used to do when out on the prowl.  No longer could he jump up to his comfy cubby in the shed.  And his voice had changed: it was no longer deep and strong but high and scratchy.

One morning he came into the house and went all the way to the library, where his tail twitched and a pool of urine flooded out from beneath him.

8.

The vet retained Sam in hospital while a bunch of tests were run.  They all came back negative.  The vet concluded that Sam had had a stroke.  However, cats, he said, are extraordinary in their ability to recover and compensate; with a good diet (no seafood apparently), a daily dose of a painkiller called Metacam, twice-weekly vitamins, and tender loving care, Sam could continue to age well into his very senior years.  Except Sam didn’t recover.  Within days he was by now walking as if paralytic, flip-flopping all over the place.  He could get up the back step for breakfast, but only just.  He had two preferred spots in the garden, one under a lavender bush, the other under a rosemary bush, and he managed to get to these places but it was a struggle.  But how determined he was.

Even though his back legs continued to weaken, he seemed mentally more alert: his voice returned; sometimes he purred after being fed – and he ate more than ever, though sometimes he lay down beside his bowl as if he simply didn’t have the energy to move away.  But usually he eventually managed to get around to the camp-bed where he’d preen himself; more often than not he preened The Old Lady of the House, too, something she adored, and maybe he did as well.  One morning I heard Sam opening the sliding door into the laundry so he could see if he’d left any biscuits behind.  But mostly he just slept, either on dog’s camp-bed or outside under the lavender or the rosemary.  Some days I carried him inside so he could eat or sleep with The Old Lady, and some times I carried him outside.  If the weather was turning foul, I’d carry him back inside.

Last Thursday I had to drive down to a Canberra Critics Circle event, but a massive wind and rain storm came in.  Back home, Sam was outside – would he be able to get himself to cover?  What if I came home to find him still lying in the garden, soaked to the bone because he couldn’t get up?  Thankfully he’d managed to get himself to safety, but strangely he no longer used the kennel.  Every time I put him in there he staggered back out again as soon as I turned my back.  These days he spent the night sleeping in a drift of leaves beside the kennel.  Was he improving physically?  No, he wasn’t.  Not at all.

9.

Saturday night.  Another storm came through so we left him inside.  Around 5am I heard a soft, unsteady shuffling and dragging sound.  Sam had got himself down to the bedroom doorway because he needed to be let out.  I got up, called for him to follow me, but he could barely move.

I carried him out the back door.

10.

A decision had to be made.  On one hand, the vet had made it clear that an old cat should just eat well and sleep well.  Sam did these things.  Just because he was now partly disabled didn’t mean he wasn’t happy; any pain he was in was ameliorated by the Metacam.  But I spent most of Sunday in the garden, Sam not far away under the rosemary bush.  He slept stretched out, not curled up.  Sometimes he hugged his legs as if trying to will them back to life.  But was he really sleeping?  His eyes were half-open, or half-closed, staring at something in the near distance.

11.

We watched Last Orders that night, just Sam and me, the movie of Graham Swift’s Booker-winning novel about a bunch of old mates driving to the coast to scatter the ashes of one of their own.  It seemed appropriate.  For two months now Sam hadn’t been able to get onto the couch, so I picked him up off the camp-bed.  He rested his front paws and chin on my thigh, my black track-suit pants becoming stuck with his white hair.

12.

He ate breakfast well, chopped steak, some biscuits, some meat and gravy, his daily dose of Metacam mixed in.  When he was done, he managed to get all the way from the laundry to the camp-bed.  He preened The Old Lady of the House, then lay down beside her.  I wrote for a while, went back to check on him, went back to writing, but checked on him again.  Then made the phone-call.

13.

‘There is nothing more you can do,’ said the vet.  ‘You’ve done everything for him.  You could have another couple of days with him, if you want, but really there’s only one option.’  I said that I didn’t want another couple of days, because I’d already made the decision.  ‘Okay,’ he said, his voice softening, ‘let’s do this.’  He explained what would happen.  ‘It will take about ten to fifteen seconds.’  He disappeared into a backroom for a minute.  Sam hid his head between my side and the crook of my arm.  The vet returned with a syringe and his assistant, a youngish girl with a rolled-up towel in hand – I could tell it would be a pillow.  The vet got down and looked at Sam in the eye, scrunched his ears; perhaps the vet said something I couldn’t hear.

14.

As Sam’s body relaxed, my mouth, my throat, my chest – all of me, so it felt – sucked in air.  I began to weep.  The vet’s assistant handed me a box of tissues that had been there all along.  I went to go, but turned back and stoked Sam’s soft, warm head one last time.

15.

The yard seems less without him.  Whenever I open the back door I expect to see him there, waiting to be let in.  I look for him beneath the lavender or the rosemary.  Sometimes I feel sure that I can hear him lapping at the water-bowl beside the dining-room table.  I still find his white hair on my clothes, particularly my black track-suit pants.  I’ve got rid of the food bowl, but I haven’t been able to get rid of the half-full bottle of Metacam and the half-full bottle of vitamins – these things remain on the top of the fridge.

16.

The afternoon before he went, I took photos of him in the garden, more photos the following morning, him and The Old Lady of the House sitting together on the camp-bed, then just him lying alone, hugging his legs.  I haven’t looked at these photos yet, but I will.  I’ll put the best one on my wall.

The fine art of survival

Patrick Mullins and Cara Foster from Canberra’s Burley Journal – what’s the future for projects like this?

We all know the literary superstars – Kate Grenville, Christos Tsiolkas, Gillian Mears and Nam Le, just to name some – but far fewer know about the literary journals that provided these writers with their initial appearances in print, getting their carefully crafted words to readers but also, critically, the attention of publishers.

Since the 1930s, Australia has been fortunate to have a plump literary underbelly of journals and magazines, some generously funded by governments and donors and professionally produced, others the result of one or two people who tirelessly spend their evenings and weekends at the kitchen-table sifting through submissions, sweating over layout and design, scouring proofs, and stuffing envelopes to get their hard work out into the loving hands of readers. Many of these journals have come and gone or evolved into entirely new beasts – here in Canberra we are fortunate to have the new Burley journal; more on this later – but the ubiquitous digital revolution is causing significant change, and our beloved journals are dropping like flies.

What are these ‘journals’ of which I speak?

There are the big guns, such as Southerly, in operation since 1939, which makes it Australia’s oldest literary publication. Meanjin began in Brisbane in 1940 but moved to Melbourne in 1945 and is now an imprint of Melbourne University Publishing; it’s highly regarded nationally and internationally for its excellent writing. Then there’s the grand dame, Quadrant, which entered the fray in 1956 and is proudly ‘biased towards cultural freedom, anti-totalitarianism and classical liberalism’; poet Les Murray is the longstanding literary editor.

But for every eminent literary journal there are many that struggled and struggled and ultimately gave up the ghost. HEAT, which aspired to be both magazine and book, was published from the Writing and Society Research Group at the University of Western Sydney. In its final edition in 2011, founder and editor Ivor Indyk wrote: ‘After fourteen years of continuous publication the sheer physical intractability of the magazine, and its limited circulation, weigh heavily upon its publisher, especially at a time when the electronic medium beckons, with its heavenly promise of weightlessness and omnipresence.’

Keep reading at The Canberra Times.  Thanks to Stuart Barnes, Phillip Edmonds, Ivor Indyk, Patrick Mullins, Ralph Wessman, Jeff Sparrow, and Natasha Rudra.