Collecting Stories
Merry Christmas, dear blog readers!
Thank you all so much for the lovely congratulations messages last post. I’m looking forward to sharing more about the process of publication as I experience it for the first time.
I’m taking a break from blogging for a few weeks, and will be back towards the middle of January.
I wish you all a wonderful Christmas with your loved ones!
Dear blog readers, I have some news! I’m thrilled to share with you that I’ve been offered a publishing contract with Allen & Unwin for my middle-grade verse novel, Y is a crooked letter!
This book began life 11 years ago as a picture book, then turned into a middle-grade novel, then metamorphosed into a verse novel.
That’s 11 years of words – cutting, rewriting, adding, deleting, rearranging, polishing, choosing, discarding, speaking, scribbling – until I finally had something that sung.
I’m so excited to be working with Allen & Unwin! I have attended a few of their courses through the Faber and Faber Institute, met their wonderfully talented editors and read so many, so many of their beautiful books. It is an honour to be connected with Allen and Unwin, and I’m looking forward to a creative collaboration with their lovely publisher, Anna McFarlane. Dream come true!
So grateful to my agent, Danielle Binks, for signing me, giving me such wise counsel in her writerly feedback and in navigating me through the process of pitching to publishers and negotiating deals. She is a gem!
Y is a crooked letter will be published in June 2023, and I look forward to sharing more of the publishing and writing process with you next year.
And stay tuned – I may have more exciting news early next year!
There are art journals – and there are art journals. My art journal – well, it’s more of a collection of notes, scribbles and diagrams than a beautiful object to be placed behind museum glass one day.
I created my art journal to collect all my ramblings about my young adult verse novel, Even the ocean. I have three sections – one for general notes, and one each for my two protagonists.
My art journal is a great place to be messy – something which is absolutely essential to the creative process but not always appreciated by my editorial brain. So my art journal gives me permission to doodle, record scraps of ideas, work through plot problems, add images, tuck secret notes inside envelopes, research – all non-linear, imaginative, daydreamy ways to follow my story.
This art journal concept has worked so well for me that I am now in the process of making another two journals – one for a new middle-grade idea and one for a new young adult book. I think I’ve found my process!
Hannah Kent’s Devotion is one of my favourite reads for this year. It’s historical fiction, beginning in Prussia in 1836 and continuing with an ocean journey to South Australia.
It’s the story of Hanne, a fifteen-year-old girl who feels she is a disappointment to her mother as she’s not quite ready to think about marriage, and she’s not like the other girls her age who are already planning their married futures.
When she meets Thea, she no longer feels so alone. She’s grateful Thea and her family, like the rest of their Old Lutheran community, have made the decision to leave Prussia for Australia in order to practise their faith without fear of persecution.
I was halfway through reading Devotion one night when I read a few pages and decided that what I was reading was too impossible to comprehend. Clearly, I was exhausted and I should put the book down and go to sleep.
When I continued reading the following night, I realised that I had not misread the previous chapter. No spoilers here but goodness, that section was breathtaking!
Kent’s writing is lyrical and evocative –
Now. years later, sitting on the lip of this valley, I can make prayer beads of the trees that crown me, the small living things glimpsed if I am still and silent. Red gum, blue gum, quandong, stringy bark. And the birds, ever here, ever singing, a liturgy to govern the hours towards gods of cry and shriek and call.
Devotion was my suggestion for our bookclub – I’m sure other bookclubs would enjoy reading it, too. It is also a beautiful-looking book with a textured, linen-like cover and an embossed design, like the whitework Hanne’s mother teaches her. It’ll be a book I’ll read again in a couple of years.
And the winners from last week’s giveaway are:
Congratulations to all the winners – I’ll be in touch!
I have been generously supported by the writing community recently – in particular, Kate Forsyth, Nova Weetman, Emily Gale and Bren MacDibble.
So I am giving away a copy of their books! I have my own copies of their books – and I think you should as well!
To enter, please leave a comment below – tell me about a book you’ve read recently and loved. Three winners will be drawn out of a kitchen bowl next Thursday, 25th November and each sent one of the three books mentioned above.
Good luck!
The teenage protagonist in my young adult verse novel is a street artist. For a few months, I’ve been researching street art from my laptop, unable to go out past my 5k zone into the city. And as much as Ms Google and Mr YouTube shared their vast stores of information with me, it wasn’t quite the same as experiencing street art in person. So last weekend, I ventured out – my first post lockdown excursion – to research Melbourne’s street art scene with a tour from Blender Studios.
Our guide, Kaspar, a street artist, was both knowledgeable and entertaining. We started with Hosier Lane, Melbourne’s only legal place for street art. I really loved Kaspar’s bird – the cocked yellow head against the darker feathers.
We walked around the corner, saw Lushsux’s peeling Yoda, the paint peeling thanks to previous artists’ paste-ups put up with wheat paste. We also admired an ostrich Elvis by John Murray, as well as an installation wall.
The tour finished at Blender Studios, with a chance to look at the artists’ works in progress, admire Kaspar’s skateboard art, see a few more winged creatures on the walls.
I kept my phone out for the entire tour, taking notes, taking photos. Kaspar patiently answered my many questions about grids, techniques, stencils caps, cans, community service and so on.
Full of my research and inspiration, I rewrote another draft of my novel in three days, focusing on the street art thread, before sending it on to my agent.
It was so wonderful to be out and about, talking to experts, seeing the art up close but also stepping back to admire it from a distance. My experience totally energised my writing, adding a lot more detail and nuance.
Talking with Kaspar, meeting a couple of other artists at the studio, all led to a greater understanding and appreciation of this art form which gives so much vibrancy to Melbourne.
Blender Studios run street art tours in the city as well as spray can classes where you can take home your own art. I must confess to doing a bit of Christmas shopping in the studio…
While I’m a writer, I love learning from other art forms and other types of artists. The other participant on the tour with me was an engineer who took a week off work to focus on his acting. Creativity in all forms, all mediums – sprayed with the tshhh from a can, lines delivered with presence, sculpture shaped from clay, a quilt designed with an intuitive sense of colour and pattern, a meal presented with care and attention to detail, a violin solo with a grace note – it all inspires me.
When a friend told me that she was reading a book that didn’t use fullstops, quotation marks or capital letters at the beginning of sentences and it sounded like a poem, I knew I had to read it. Bernadine Evaristo’s book Girl, woman, other was published in 2019 and won the Booker Prize that year.
It’s about 12 girls/women/others centred around Britain, each with their own section so we are instantly taken into the minds, hearts and lives of all of them. The 12 characters have lives which intersect each other’s, sometimes in familial ways, sometimes through friendship or work relationships. The last chapter brings it all together.
I loved the sense of floating through the book, feeling as if I were on a meandering river which flowed its way through the different stories. The lack of ‘proper’ punctuation certainly added to that effect.
The stories, connecting past, present and future, connecting women of all different sexualities, class, education, financial means, are compelling. The characters are sad, humorous, tender, angry, passionate, invisible, loud, scared, defiant, shocking, desperate, creative – and so much more.
So now I am following my friend’s lead, and telling you, my friends, about this book that doesn’t use conventional punctuation and reads like a poem. I hope you feel like you need to read it, too!
Such a fabulous book title – The seven husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid! Miss 15 and one of her friends both enjoyed this adult novel, and I did, too.
Loosely based on Elizabeth Taylor’s husbands, the book begins with glamorous Hollywood actor Evelyn Hugo, ready to share her life story with an unknown magazine writer, Monique Grant.
Evelyn recounts her Hollywood career, and her choices to marry and leave her seven husbands. Monique’s story is woven in between Evelyn’s tale. As a reader, you just know that there must be more of a connection between Evelyn and Monique, and the big reveal is absolutely surprising.
Miss 15 warned me I’d never guess the plot twist, and she was right! It was the perfect ending – both surprising and inevitable.
This would be a fabulous summer read – engaging characters, a compelling plot and a fabulous Hollywood background from the 1950s to 2017.
Domestic abuse is not an easy topic to write about or research. I’ve almost finished reading Jess Hill’s See what you made me do, the 2020 Stella prize winning non-fiction book about domestic abuse. I’ve also almost finished watching the Netflix series Maid, about a young American woman who ends up homeless with her two-year-old daughter, running out of options to find a home. I’ve been talking with a friend who works for a centre supporting women and children who have experienced domestic abuse.
There’s a small thread of domestic abuse in my young adult verse novel – I’m rewriting it now. The thread is only small, no more than 2,000 words over a few sections but it is so, so, so important that I write it based on research. Even though my thread involves minor characters and their story is entirely fictionalised, I don’t want to misrepresent the women and children who face domestic abuse.
Even though the Netflix series is fiction and Hill’s book is non-fiction, even though the Netflix series is American and Hill’s book is Australian, there are startling similarities. Did you know that it usually takes a woman seven attempts to leave her abusive partner?
I usually read a non-fiction chapter in the morning, and I’ve been watching Maid at night – it’s a grim way to bookend my days. But it’s important not to turn away from these realities, to bear witness to what so many women and children experience.
If I were to take away one thing from my research, it’s that – as Hill explains in her introduction – domestic violence is not an inclusive enough term. The emotional and financial aspects of coercion need to be included as well so domestic abuse rather than domestic violence is a more accurate term.
If you or someone you know needs help, you can call 1800RESPECT or 1800 737 732.
The Year 12 English exam is less than two weeks away. Many students all over Australia but particularly in Victoria and New South Wales have spent a decent chunk of their year studying from their bedrooms instead of the classroom. Here are my top seven tips for VCE English students, based on my knowledge of the Victorian curriculum and my experience tutoring VCE students. And my experience with my Yr 12 son!
Good luck, wonderful year 12 students who have already been through so much! Back yourself! You have been writing text responses for a few years now from Year 8 or 9 – you know how to do this. Slow your breathing, focus your thoughts, hear your teacher’s voice in your head reminding you of what you already know. You’ve got this!