Remembering This

As I’m writing this, it’s been three days since the Mildura Writers Festival ended and it keeps resurfacing in my thoughts. I think I’ve just about summed up how much I loved the festival, but I felt the need to sit down and write about the feeling I’m experiencing now in the wake of the festival. Above all, I feel creatively nourished, and spiritually reaffirmed.

 

I can’t imagine a version of myself that isn’t a writer because writing seems to overlap with virtually every facet of my life. It is the lens through which I view the world, the perspective I assume when I am meeting a friend or seeing family or sitting in class or watching the news or scrolling through my news feed or taking an afternoon walk through my neighbourhood. I think that writing fiction, though I am not directly writing about my own experiences, is my way of tracking my own narrative, of making sense of my life. Any given project that I am working on is inevitably a zeitgeist of my preoccupations and the stimuli influencing me throughout the era in which I am writing it. The writer in me is constantly awake, and he is constantly excited.

 

I believe there is something deep inside us that registers when we are heading down a path that simply isn’t the one for us. I have felt it once, and it forced me out of my comfort zone and onto a new path which immediately just felt right. And I feel reaffirmed in the afterglow of the writers festival because that deep sensation of alignment has been particular prominent the past few days. It doesn’t mean that everything is going to be easy – but it does mean that it’s going to be worth it.

This is the ethos with which I am walking into the future. I’m just excited to see where I go from here.

 

Reimpression

The last day. The contradiction of return, I realised as we sailed on a paddle steamer down the docile Murray River, is that it’s never truly the act of coming back – it’s going forward, because even in a familiar setting it is a new time, and so there is an inevitable newness about everything.

That’s how I feel as this second round of Writers in Action comes to an end. In a sense this was a return to a subject I loved dearly the first time, but that is where the similarities ended. This year has had a new class of people, a new program of writers, a new venue for some of the events, and at the risk of sounding self-righteous, a new me, because I’m not the same person I was a year ago. It was really lovely to take this subject again and be swept up in an entirely fresh and exciting experience all over again.

Our last day as a class began back at La Trobe 29 Deakin and culminated in lunch at The Office. The time in between we spent on a paddle steamer, emptying ourselves of distracting mental matter and drifting into the world of words. I ended up liking only about two sentences of what I wrote but that wasn’t really the point – it was such a calming and productive exercise, tuning ourselves in to the sound of the water and the tranquillity of life along the river, and it’s something that I’ve never really managed to do before so I am happy to be able to carry this newfound skill with me into the future.

 

I think last year the most significant thing for me was simply being in the company of writers in this way that I’d never experienced before. This year I had that same sensation to a degree, but having already been to a writers festival and understanding how it works, I feel like this time I’ve been able to actively receive all of the wisdom and advice the writers imparted throughout the festival and can work to implement it in my own writing – and that, I think, is one of the greatest gifts an event like this can give.

Revelation

Sunday was the final day of the Mildura Writers Festival, and it began with the last speaking event, which was the La Trobe University Annual Lecture delivered by David Malouf. An unrevealing title, I didn’t really know what to expect from this final verbal address.

What I found was a revelation. David spoke about the act of being a serious writer, defined by their insistence to write only that which can be considered entirely part of their personal, unique body of work. In elaborating on this, he explained the importance of resisting the temptation to write about that which is popular and current, that for which the commercial world would reward you. He further stated how crucial it is to write that which is personal and unique to a writer, that which the writer truly wants to write and wholly fits into their body of work, even if it means declining a potentially greater financial outcome.

I’ve been speaking about all of these moments during the festival that truly struck me, and I stand by each one. But David Malouf in this moment seemed to collect all of the sentiments conveyed over the past three days and deliver them in one electrifying lecture.

I have a short story collection on file that I completed two years ago and have left unpublished. I usually don’t like to talk about them because the truth is that I rushed them in order to achieve the finished product as soon as I could, and was left feeling totally dissatisfied with the quality of the stories. Nevertheless, I was desperate at the time to be published so I submitted my collection to three different publishers, and was predictably rejected by all three. But as time went by I realised it was a blessing not to have those stories out there, that my first public writing impression is yet to be made.

And the reason I’m bringing this up is that David’s sentiment has proven to be true in my own life. Because those stories were not reflective of who I am, were not the way my body of work was supposed to begin forming. I think I knew that at the time but could never articulate it as brilliantly as he did. Those stories were an experiment that failed, and they allowed me to start something that I wholeheartedly believe will succeed.

Towards the end, David summarised the overarching message of his lecture in one fantastic sentence: “I’ll take less money and stick with what I want to write.”

Thank you, David Malouf. I left that building after the lecture knowing that I, too, would abide by that principle, and would hold it like a lantern as I head slowly further through the thick fog of the writer’s life. I would love nothing more than to become as good at being me as you are at being you – you, who have travelled through that grey writer’s life fog, and thrived.

 

Reward

On Saturday I was sitting in ‘Prose and the Poetry of Life: Nick Gadd and Olga Lorenzo’, listening in a state of bliss to Olga reading from her novel The Light on the Water, when I suddenly realised that I had been approaching this convergence of minds in a way that was far too convoluted to draw any productive conclusions about the Mildura Writers Festival.

As with most new realisations, I was excited and I began to think about it: all of these writers have walked in with vastly different bodies of work. Tony Birch prefers writing the short story to the novel and is an academic writer in the field of climate change, while Olga Lorenzo prefers the novel and is informed by her background in journalism. Sunil Yapa wrote about the 1999 World Trade Organisation protests in Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist, and Emily Bitto wrote about the lives of artists in 20^th-century Australia in The Strays.

Jan Owen and Les Murray are both poets, though with vastly different styles and preoccupations. Richard Denniss is an economist who utilises writing to break down complex concepts and terminology and inform the average reader about the state of the financial/political sphere. Nick Gadd is immersed in the fascinating world of psychogeography, and David Malouf flits between the poem, the short story and the novel with the grace of an Olympic skater throughout his body of work.

In a broader sense than I’d been thinking before, I realised the festival celebrates the unique individual mind: each of these writers bring something different to the festival, and throughout the weekend each writer is valued for bringing that unique thing from the solo space of writing and reading into the social arena of the festival where their ideas and perspectives can be shared with, and can inform an entire audience of people. Likewise, the audience is valued for their distinctive perspective through the Q&A sections of each event, which give readers an opportunity to offer their thoughts and opinions on the works and topics being discussed.

I felt so good after this thought crossed my mind. It was such a life-affirming thing, to realise that in a world that is quite genuinely and constantly attempting to fit people into a particular mould, the writers festival remains this sanctuary where everyone is rewarded for being just the person they are.

Realisation

Friday’s events offered up many fruits for gleeful pondering, but one in particular was precisely to my taste. The event came at the end of the day, at which point my body was beginning to curl into itself with exhaustion, but throughout ‘Writing Across Genres: David Malouf, Olga Lorenzo and Tony Birch’ I flickered back to life as the authors spoke about the writing process and the result of sending a piece of work out into the public sphere.

All three writers reflected thoughtfully and informatively upon the act of writing. Olga Lorenzo meditated upon the impact her journalist background had upon her fiction writing, so much so that her first draft of a novel was written almost entirely in ‘journalese’. Olga suggested that the phenomenon of writing and reading can be explained by the fact that “we are desperately seeking to step outside our skin and connect with somebody else”.

Tony Birch expressed that his natural affinity is with the short story as opposed to the novel. He explained how his writing process begins with a story: “I think when you know [you have something to write] is when you can’t shake an idea, it keeps tapping you on the shoulder”.

 

David Malouf proposed that “the novel’s satisfaction is that it can really create a version of an experience”. He spoke about the moment a reader latches onto a particular writer, often as a result of the former recognising in the latter something they haven’t seen in any other writer before. He conceptualised the relationship between reader and writer as a contract, by which “the readers come on board” and the writer is entrusted with the task of faithfully guiding them through the story. It was like a spoken realisation of that thought I’d carried into this festival – to hear the reading experience articulated in the terms in which I’d been thinking of them was almost surreal.

 

Revolutionary

I’ve decided that I’m going to write more detailed blog posts about moments over these five days that really stand out to me, rather than writing a single post for an entire day and dedicating just a snippet to each event as I did last time. So, the focus of this post is Sunil Yapa in conversation with Richard Denniss, which took place on Thursday night.

Richard Denniss began the event by confessing that he judged Sunil Yapa’s novel, Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist, by its cover, and his ruling was that it was chicklit. He then elaborated that what he found beyond the cover couldn’t be further from his presumption. The novel surrounds the World Trade Organisation protests in Seattle of 1999, and Richard, who is an economist by profession, revealed that reading it took him back to that time in his own history. Richard reflected that he was attending the rallies himself, a period of his life he had forgotten but which the novel helped to unearth. Given the focus with which I am observing the festival this time around, I was delighted to hear Richard’s unique experience reading Sunil’s book.

Richard then handed the floor to Sunil. Sunil Yapa is warm, intelligent and engaging. He spoke about the novel first, revealing that one of the challenges was developing empathy for all of his characters in the story. But empathy soon became the focus point of the conversation, throughout discussions on protests and social change and the state of the world. Sunil expressed concern about the idea of a revolution hinging upon violence and aggression. Instead, he proposed that caring about other people is a revolutionary act – kindness and compassion is a revolutionary act. Those words really struck a chord in me, and I realised that we were listening to the voice of a revolutionary.

I haven’t yet read Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist, but I will say this: I am someone who spent the better part of three years believing that I was going to be an accountant for the rest of my life before unceremoniously launching that idea out of the window and exorcising the aftertaste with a university course that far more closely suits my interests. But after Thursday night I can confidently say that if anyone can persuade me to read a novel surrounding issues pertaining to the economy, it’s Sunil Yapa.

Remembering 'Remembering Babylon'

In getting myself into the mood of the Festival, I’ve revisited one of my favourites by David Malouf, Remembering Babylon. The book was first recommended to me by my cousin a couple of years ago, but reading it this time around left a far more pronounced aftertaste in my mind. The story, set in the mid-1840s, explores the tension between British colonisers and Indigenous Australian peoples, and reading it after taking the subject Postcolonial Reading last semester really illuminated the dynamics at work in the narrative.

Through the character of Gemmy Fairley, an English boy raised by Aboriginals who as a grown man attempts to reintegrate himself into a group of European colonisers, Malouf explores the ways in which the notion of the Empire informs the colonisers’ perceptions of identity, of self and the other, of known and unknown, with startling precision. As such, Gemmy epitomises the conflict between cultures resulting from the British colonisation of Australia, a fact reinforced by the suspicion with which the colonisers regard him.

Malouf is obviously passing a comment upon the historical events that inform Remembering Babylon, yet he avoids doing so in a blatantly didactic manner. Instead, the story flits between characters’ perspectives, delving deep into their lives – their fears and desires – to relate Gemmy’s emergence and absorbance into the group of settlers from a number of different angles, allowing Malouf to maintain a distance from the narrative without becoming an absentee author.

Malouf’s Remembering Babylon is a book that stays with you. It’s a timeless reminder of the importance of preserving history, the importance of reading – and of remembering.

 

Image reference:
Grigg, J 2009, Remembering Babylon, book cover, Caustic Cover Critic, viewed 14 August 2016, <https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLZYfvh0BNJ8D_OMfgZfhiax5ynMUG7iVCaICUlcpnMFh5Nimjo0oxMgPeAspqeKirMAmSe-SMCJPdXO65QL3fkcdWpBYsF2oR8Bn7-WqovNK_eNXYGUpCRgtayAQtC7oz_Wwh65L_xOI_/s1600/9781741667684.jpg>.