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Vincent van Gogh (as a yoof): a hero to many – imagine being able to meet him.
It is a big adventure, this writing life. There’s the adventure in the stories: characters experiencing things, discovering things, learning things; overcoming and becoming.
Then there’s the adventure of conceiving stories, writing stories, redrafting stories (repeat ad infinitum if necessary), before sending them out until an editor takes a shine to a particular piece and puts it amongst his or her pages. Then there’s the adventure of feedback. Who will like what? Or will no-one like any of it? Or will there be no feedback at all?
But there’s more: the places writing has taken me, as in real places. A homestead out of Braidwood. A gatekeeper’s cottage in Launceston. The writers’ house at Bundanon beside the Shoalhaven River. The monastic Varuna in the Blue Mountains. And, most recently, the Australian Defence Force Academy, courtesy of UNSW Canberra.
Then there are the people I’ve met, other writers, artists of all kinds. The conversations over coffees, lunches, glasses of wine, dinners even! It doesn’t take me long to be enthralled by those who are far ahead in this game; I become besotted. It is, to tell you the truth, one of the most exciting things: to spend time with extraordinarily creative souls.
I have been so fortunate. A highlight?
In January 2011, as part of a piece for the Canberra Times, I found myself in the Sydney home of eminent contemporary – or ‘pop’ – artist Martin Sharp. All morning we talked about the things that mattered to him: his great love of Vincent van Gogh, Tiny Tim, and, a little surprisingly, UK talent-show contestant Susan Boyle; about how he thought the best art came from school children; about how his thinking has evolved, his relatively newfound religiosity. ‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘conservative thinking is radical.’ This from the man who was once involved with Oz Magazine, whose London editors would end up being jailed as part of the infamous ‘Obscenity Trials’.
At midday, after he farewelled me, as I walked up his driveway, I thought – and I distinctly remember it – that this would be go down as one of my favourite days. Here was a great artist, but one without a skerrick of pretension. It was as though I’d just spent the morning with a slightly kooky but utterly charming uncle (who chain-smoked).
So, dear writing, thank you for the adventures thus far.
And, dear Martin Sharp, thank you for everything you gave us.
(First published in Panorama, The Canberra Times, 14 December 2013.)
You may have been in the presence of a writer – any kind of artist – during the moments after they’ve read a review of what they’ve created. If it’s a good review, as in the reviewer has come down on the side of the work, the producer of that work will be happier than they’ve ever felt before in their life, or so it feels at the time. If it’s a bad review, as in the reviewer has not come down on the side of the work, the producer of that work will be more miserable than they’ve ever felt before in their life, or so it feels at the time. Either way, however, why does it matter so much? Is it really that important? Shouldn’t the artist have sufficient confidence in their practice and work to enable a mature and reasonable response to a review, no matter what judgements and conclusions might have been made? And isn’t it true that the work is not the person behind it, that there’s a separation to be made? Isn’t this the best kind of protective mechanism?
As someone who’s had their work reviewed – sometimes positively (every so often amazingly positively), sometimes nowhere near as positively as I’d dreamt – I do understand these things. Even if I wish I didn’t, that I was strong and big enough not to care.
Perhaps all this matters because every artist simply wants a considered response, for it’s taken days and weeks and months and years, sometimes decades, to create something they consider worthwhile. It is wonderful when family and friends and sympathetic others say they enjoyed the work, that they were moved, that it ended up meaning a lot to them. But there’s that other kind of response, from someone whose job it is to consider context, goals and ambition, technique, and ultimately make some kind of evaluation of worth against the broader cultural register. An authority, an expert has given the work a close reading, and a pronouncement has been made. It would be difficult to find an artist who didn’t appreciate this kind of response to what they’ve created, even if they’d like to suggest otherwise.
All these questions and issues will be discussed on Friday 18 October 2013 at a forum organised by the Childers Group, an arts advocacy body for the ACT region (and beyond). The forum, which is better described as a ‘Q and A-style’ panel discussion, will include participation from Centenary of Canberra Creative Director Robyn Archer, Chief Executive Officer of Ausdance National Roslyn Dundas, eminent author Marion Halligan, Artistic Director/CEO of the Street Theatre Caroline Stacey, longtime Canberra Times stalwart Jack Waterford, and Editor of BMA Magazine Ashley Thomson, amongst others. If you’re in or near this neck of the woods, and you’re worried about what’s perceived to be fewer opportunities for truly independent and robust review (the sort that is beyond simply online opinion), then you may well want to drop in and get involved. For more information, head on over to the Childers Group website.
Here endeth the community service announcement.
And if you hadn’t already gathered, I’m a member of the Childers Group. A foundation member even. Never imagined that I’d be a foundation member of anything. Other than Melancholics Anonymous.
One of these jugglers might also be a writer. With any luck.
Exhausted already
Writers make good jugglers. There’s the juggling of time to write and time to earn money and time for family and friends and time for your own mental health, which being a writer is more than likely quite precarious. There’s the juggling of ideas: fine ones, not so fine ones, appalling ones. There’s the juggling of character and plot and point. There’s the juggling of words, getting them all exactly where they need to be so that magic is the result. Oh my, I’m exhausted already. But we’re not done yet. There’s the juggling of writing fiction and non-fiction and poetry. In terms of fiction alone, there’s the juggling of the writing of novels and novellas and short stories and micro-stories, and, those slipperiest of beasts, prose-poems. It’s enough to make you want to chuck it all in and become something simple, like a duck-farmer, or a grower of daffodils.
Hooked
For some reason, after twenty years, I haven’t yet chucked it all in, although I do think about it every second day, every single day if things aren’t going well, which is usually the case, if I’m honest with myself, and honest with you. I began my writing life, as in with seriousness and an almost religious sense of purpose, in my early twenties as – drumroll please – a poet. I wrote a poem, miraculously it was published, so I wrote another, and miraculously that, too, was published. Remembering that I loved reading short stories as a boy, I wrote a story, which was short-listed for publication; that it didn’t end up in print wasn’t the point – I was hooked again by words and their meaning, and by play, and by dream.
Wait, there’s more
Since 1994 I’ve had over 40 short stories published, including in literary journals such as Meanjin, Overland, and Island, and in the USA. In 2003 my novel Remnants was published by Pandanus Books. In 2011 and 2012 respectively, my novellas Fall on Me and I’m Ready Now were published by Blemish Books. Okay, now I’m just boasting. Wait, there’s more. Wanting to expand my readership, and add another string to my bow, in 2007 I began doing freelance work for the Canberra Times, primarily for the paper’s weekend magazine Panorama and its First Words column (along with Marion Halligan), as well as feature articles. Clearly not having enough to do, in 2009 I started this blog, ridiculously named Under the counter or a flutter in the dovecot, which was selected for archiving by the National Library of Australia. I still write a post for the blog every Saturday morning.
More life
Despite now working across these different modes, my mission hasn’t changed: I’m still just playing with words and their meanings. No matter what form there’s nothing like crafting and re-crafting until a piece hangs together, everything in its right place, it all makes sense; with any luck it might engage readers, perhaps – with an extra dose of luck – it might even move readers.
Ever since early 2010, when I spent a month in Launceston as a writer-in-residence courtesy of the City Council (as written about on this blog ad nauseam), I’ve written everything by hand. My handwriting is truly appalling, which, oddly, helps – I’m forced to slow down, to think about every mark on the page, but I’m also forced to follow my head and heart and gut. When writing like this is both mental and physical work, you want it to be worthwhile in the end – for yourself and the reader. These days, everything, even blog-posts, even articles for the local writers centre magazine, is first written with pen and pad. Because it’s better this way: there’s more life.
A decent dose of honesty
There are, however, subtle differences between the various forms of prose. Short stories, of course, are a cousin of poetry, so every word has to do more than one job. In the writing of a novel there’s greater opportunity for exploration and multi-layering and depth (and that awful flipside of getting tangled up and lost). Novellas are an especially peculiar creature: neither a short story nor a novel, they have their own prospects and hurdles; but in some ways I feel that this in-between mode is my natural home, because I’m an in-between kind of guy in an in-between stage of my life. Writing for newspapers requires turning down the literary fireworks and turning up general accessibility, although I still like strong characters, some kind of plot, a decent dose of honesty, and perhaps the odd writerly trick to create a spark – there’s nothing like an email from a reader saying that my work brings freshness to the newspaper. And there’s the writing of blog-posts, which can be more a terrific whoosh of words, maybe even something experimental (why not?), but still I like to make sure it’s as fine as possible.
A writer must have wine
One side of all this that I’ve become better at over the years is choosing the best form for an idea. Is there enough in it for a short story? Or perhaps there’s a lot in it and could run the marathon length of a novel? Or perhaps a novella might rein it in? In terms of creative non-fiction (which is my euphemism for journalism, because I really have no idea what I’m doing), is it something for the First Words column or a feature or an opinion piece – where in the newspaper might it belong? Blogging is interesting, too. When I first started Under the counter or a flutter in the dovecot I committed to never self-publishing fiction on the thing, and I’ve held to that commitment, so it’s a place for everything but fiction. Except there’s something else about blogging: every so often, if I try harder, I can get the piece up a notch or two so that it can first be published by a journal that pays. Because, quite frankly, I need the money – a writer must have wine.
Writing is writing is writing
Despite all these years of juggling and practice and more juggling, writing is still about play – playing with words and their meanings – and dreams – dreaming up characters and predicaments, or imagining a non-fiction piece into existence and making a contribution to the broader cultural discussion. Scottish comedian Billy Connelly once famously said that ‘funny is funny is funny’. Perhaps I can echo Connelly by somewhat less famously saying that writing is writing is writing.
*
First published in ACTWrite, the monthly journal of the ACT Writers Centre (August 2013).
Some novels do amazing things. This is one of those novels.
Violence is never far beneath the surface, it’s always just over the horizon, it rarely leaves us alone. Surely one of the best means we have of examining our innate capacity for violence, to survey its insidious possibilities, is the novel. And surely one of the most astute English-language novelists whose primary focus is violence, particularly the lingering impacts of civil war, is Aminatta Forna.
Born in Glasgow and raised in Sierra Leone and Britain as well as in Iran, Thailand and Zambia, Forna’s previous novel was The Memory of Love, an awful though not inappropriate title for an astonishing work. This was a complex and multi-dimensional examination of the consequences of war in Sierra Leone, a country with which Forna clearly has a profound affinity. The novel was shortlisted for the Orange Prize in 2011 and won that year’s Commonwealth Writers Prize. The Hired Man, despite again delving into war, is a lighter, simpler work, and, due to a miracle of literary achievement, is an even more potent piece of story-telling.
Set in Croatia, and spanning the shaky decades leading up to 2007, The Hired Man has as its central protagonist a forty-six-year-old man called Duro Kolak. Duro lives alone, enjoys the company of his two dogs, and gets by doing odd jobs around his small hometown of Gost. A sometimes reticent soul, he is an adept observer of human relationships, but his real passion is hunting. Indeed, it is telling that on the first page of the novel there is Duro seeing a new arrival in town:
I trailed the bird lazily through my rifle sights and that was when I noticed the car. A large, newish four-wheel drive, being driven very slowly down an entirely empty road as though the driver was searching for a concealed entrance. I lowered the gun so that I had the vehicle fully in my sights but the angle and reflection of the sun made it impossible to see who was driving.
The woman who is driving is Laura…
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Keep reading over at the Sydney Morning Herald. Originally commissioned by the Canberra Times and published on 3 August 2013; thanks to Rod Quinn.
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.
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 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.
‘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
Fancy that: a wall of readiness
The build-up
You know, six months out from a book launch, you just can’t wait for the big day – it’s all just too exciting. Then there’s the week of the launch and you start counting down the sleeps. But then the morning comes and you think, why the hell do I do this? It’s the nerves: will anyone turn up? But there’s also the anxiety around a story, and the people of the story, who have been private for so long, years, all of it being made public: will the words and their intent come alive for readers?
In the end, people do attend book launches, and the book is officially sent out into the world, and you wake up the next morning and think, Wow, what a night; did that all really happen? Thank you so much to all those who came long to the launch of I’m Ready Now at Electric Shadows Bookshop in Canberra on the Thursday just gone. A packed-out independent bookshop is always a thing of beauty.
McEwan on the novella
Chris Wallace: no bullshit. Which was appreciated. By a lot of people.
I’m Ready Now is a novella, and some people have asked me what this strange beast is all about. It’s the million-dollar question – if there can be million-dollar questions in the world of literary fiction – and many have tried to come to a definition. Back in October of this year, Ian McEwan wrote the following in The New Yorker: ‘I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction. It is the beautiful daughter of a rambling, bloated ill-shaven giant’. It’s a great line. But in a feature I wrote last year for The Canberra Times on the novella, John Clanchy dived deeper: ‘Whatever we call it, the novella isn’t a novel that’s run out of puff; it isn’t a short story that’s meandered beyond its natural length and lost its way. I like working with the novella because it shares some of the most attractive features of the novel – its expansiveness, its multiple layers of theme and plot – at the same time constraining them with features normally associated with the short story: intensity of focus, singularity of narrative voice and architecture, discipline of length. But all the while remaining a distinct species, not a hybrid.’
Two sibling novellas on a shelf – what is it that they’re saying to each other?
What some are thinking
As to the launch itself, a huge thanks to journalist and writer Chris Wallace for cutting the metaphorical ribbon. What’s the best thing a launcher can offer a writer? A close reading. And no bullshit. Chris, who is infamous for calling a spade a spade, offered both. Amazingly, there’s already a review of I’m Ready Now: it’s over at the unstoppable literary blog Whispering Gums. What I love about the review is that it begins with some reflections on the launch, and the independence of these reflections make them more valuable and interesting than anything I can do here. But the writer of the review, Sue Terry, also gets the books, so much so that she concludes that ‘I’m Ready Now is about living imaginatively and about liberation, but it is also about how the past can stall us if we don’t get it in the right perspective’. Those last few words, about how the past can grind to a halt if we don’t frame it correctly, really do get to the heart of the book.
Heartfelt thanks
‘It was a dark and stormy night…’ Hang on, this novella’s already got words in it. No need for any more.
Thanks again to everyone who came along to the launch or sent warm wishes. Special thanks to Marion Halligan, Karmin Cooper, and editor Nicola O’Shea who really helped to bring I’m Ready Now to life through offering very astute suggestions. And, of course, much gratitude to Greg Gould and Lesley Boland from Blemish Books for publishing I’m Ready Now (along with Fall on Me last year). I can only write what I want to write, and what I’d like to read, which means that I may never have the biggest readership in the world (though one can dream), so it’s brilliant that Blemish has made such a commitment to me as a writer and to the novella as a form of story-telling. What now? I just hope that I’m Ready Now is read. One final time: thank you. Until we meet again.
Your copy is here
I’m Ready Now can be purchased through your local bookshop or you can order it directly from Blemish Books – that link will take you straight to Blemish’s online store.
Let’s be honest: when all this started I had no idea what I was doing. But it’s best we go back a bit.
In the autumn of 2009, I spent a month as an artist-in-residence at Bundanon, Arthur and Yvonne Boyd’s gift to the Australian people on the Shoalhaven River just south of Sydney. On the last night the other artists and I had a few drinks and shared stories of our time in the glorious creative isolation as well handed out business cards and email addresses and website URLs. I had none of those things – really, how committed was I to writing? By the time I’d driven home, I resolved to at least get the internet put on at home and set up an email address.
By October of that year, I had indeed got these things, but I also had a website designed, and I set up this blog. I knew next to nothing about blogging other than it might be a good way of sharing news, if, that is, anyone was interested. So here we are, in October 2012 and it seems almost impossible to believe that Under the counter or a flutter in a dovecot (which is, to be frank, a ridiculous name for a blog, a ridiculous name for anything) is heading into its fourth year.
It’s probably as good a time as any to reflect on the positives and challenges, so let’s do it, the reflection thing.
On the whole, I’ve enjoyed my time in the blogosphere, even if most of the online energy appears to have shifted to Facebook and Twitter, leaving blogs to feel just a little old-fashioned, which to a certain extent suits me fine because I’m an old-fashioned kind of guy. Thankfully, when I started this thing, I promised that I’d post only once per week, and I’ve kept to that, more or less. Is it true that at the beginning I had no idea what I was doing? Yes, it’s true, and I still might have no idea, although I have come to think of this blog as a diary that I write with other people in mind. But it’s not a personal diary; I’ve been fairly keen to focus on writing and literature, music, other arts activity, and some quirky investigations into those little things that happen in a day that might have deeper meanings. Like the last days of a chook.
I’ve enjoyed asking myself during the week, what will I post this weekend, what’s happened or happening that others might be intrigued about? There’s a discipline to that, on a number of levels. I’ve also found it fun to try out different things: writing music reviews (which is surprisingly difficult), trying to approach technology in new and weird ways (the On the other side of the city ‘survey’, and what sprung from it, has been a highlight), and it’s good to know that every one of the fifty or so First Word columns that I’ve written for The Canberra Times is stored here, and the features I’ve written have also had a second life online, meaning that the artists I’ve interviewed have been able to link to them (The Canberra Times has only very recently made Panorama, the paper’s weekend magazine, available electronically).
Plus there’s been the great pleasure of getting to know a number of the regular readers of Under the counter – all of whom, it’s amazing to realise, aren’t from my real-world community, some are even from overseas. In a way, you are modern-day Pen Friends, or maybe that should be Keyboard Friends. Some of you have become significant contributors to Verity La, that other part of my online life, and for that I thank you. And, of course, there’s the handful of blogs that I comment on regularly, because the posts are frequently excellent and thought-provoking – have a look at the blog-roll to the left for the links. Some of these blogs, for example Whispering Gums, are becoming influential, particularly in the funny little world that is literature, and that’s a great thing – a strong and sophisticated writing culture comes from articulate and erudite public discussion about creative practice (even if that observation and the sentence make me sound like a wanker).
What about the challenges? There have been times, it’s true, when I’ve been all out of ideas, though this can also be a positive, as it’s forced me to still produce something, even if it’s a hastily put-together collage that looks like a six-year-old did it. A key part of my blogging routine is commenting on other blogs – I can hardly expect readers to comment on this blog if I don’t comment other blogs. Do comments matter? Yes, they matter. I do want to know what people think; I do want to know if readers have been moved, and a comment is a sure sign of that. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank each and every one of you for commenting – it’s made my day. But it can be exhausting – and time-consuming – to find posts that I want to absorb and comment on.
It was – and continues to be – most gratifying that the National Library of Australia selected Under the counter for archiving in-perpetuity (if that isn’t a tautology) as part of its PANDORA program. To think that maybe, just maybe, a researcher will stumble across this little old place in a hundred years time is a bit special. There’s no doubt that without the commenters commenting and the National Library’s interest I would have stopped long ago – there’s only so often you can call out into the digital abyss. And there have been times when I’ve wondered if the end might be in sight; in fact, to be completely frank, I can see the end right now. I won’t keep this blog going forever, nor should it just keep rolling on and on and on. But I’m not done just yet; there’s a bit more fuel in the tank, even if the engine’s developed a rattle.
Many many thanks again, and here’s to a bit more Under the counter or a flutter in the dovecot. For the time-being at least.
Under the counter or a flutter in the dovecote 