Category Archives: Writers

I am my first book (at my first festival)

September 10, 2016 Michael Burge 2 Comments

UNDER the general theme of ‘belonging’, the 2016 Brisbane Writer’s Festival (BWF) set itself up with few boundaries, and writers have been rushing to traverse the intentionally unfenced territory across the city.

“We were inside the building. We belonged, inasmuch as new students belong in new classrooms when they change schools.”

As an independently published author, I was pleased to find the door open to my memoir, which has national significance for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex (LGBTI) equality movement. It was written in Queensland about the battle to maintain my next-of-kin status after the death of my same-sex spouse in New South Wales in 2004.

But my indie book about stigma – Questionable Deeds: Making a stand for equal love – has been regularly stigmatised across its first twelve months in print. Locked out of traditional publication and several literary events, awards and festivals, it nevertheless made it into BWF through the generosity of director and CEO Julie Beveridge.

On opening night, emboldened by a glass of quality wine and rallied by a brilliant welcome to country, my husband Richard and I managed to be the first to meet Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk as she left the stage.

The Premier was generous with her time, listening to my thoughts on independent publishing and allowing us to update her on the national marriage equality campaign. It was indeed a privilege to have her interest and spark a few new ideas about the future of publishing – and marriage – in Australia.

I am my book, it seems. Where it gets access, I follow.

CAROLINE'S CRIMES Journalist and author Caroline Overington. — CAROLINE’S CRIMES Journalist and author Caroline Overington.

Turning to crime

The next day, journalist and author Caroline Overington came to Wynnum Library in my part of the world – Brisbane’s Bayside – to talk about her latest psychological thriller The One Who Got Away.

Overington immediately engaged and challenged her audience, noting there were just a few men in a crowd of women. I laughed with the other guys. I reckon we knew we were not the typical Overington crowd. It’s her journalism I find plenty in common with, and what the heck, I was there to support the festival that supports me and comes to my doorstep. Who am I to be picky?

Caroline proved a very disarming presenter on the deadly issue of crime, explaining how coverage of two crucial Queensland legal cases – the trials of Gerard Baden-Clay and Brett Peter Cowan – led her deeper into fiction writing than she’d ventured before.

Her reason? As the author, she gets to ensure the perpetrator “really gets it”. We all laughed, but it was a knowing ripple, considering the way the legal system all too often works in real life.

I was the one who got away when I had to rush from Caroline’s session into the city to appear on a BWF panel discussion at the State Library of Queensland.

Crying into my book

The LGBTI-themed ‘The Right to Belong’ was something of an experiment, giving oxygen to themes Julie Beveridge told me BWF had often been asked about.

Authors David Hardy (Bold: Stories from older lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender & intersex people) and Heather Faulkner (North of the Border: Stories from the A Matter of Time Project) joined me and moderator Emile McPhee of the Queensland LGBTI Legal Service.

We each presented our titles, all non-fiction dealing mainly with the national struggle to maintain LGBTI identity in the face of legal and cultural oppression.

Faulkner and Hardy’s works document through images and words some critical LGBTI histories, particularly Queensland’s Bjelke-Petersen years. They are groundbreaking in their scope.

I had not planned my appearance but had a short section of my book to read if the mood took me. Just before I began to speak, Heather read a letter from a friend who couldn’t be there.

That gentle and powerful message tipped me over the edge almost immediately, and I struggled to recover. My late partner’s death was 12 years ago, but the echoes of the struggle to honour our relationship without him still run very deep. The chances that our story would never reach anyone because of the crippling impact on me, the vessel of the story, were all too relevant in the light of the other authors’ work.

Wondering what on earth I had done by blubbering my way through an extract about the day I gave a live submission to the Human Rights Commission a decade ago, I thanked the audience for letting me come to share part of my story.

I am my book, after all. When it cries, so do I.

We need to talk about Lionel

On the way home across a darkening Moreton Bay, a friend sent me a post published that day by writer Yassmin Abdel-Magied on her reasons for walking out of US author Lionel Shriver’s BWF keynote speech the night prior.

In it, she called-out Shriver (author of We Need to Talk About Kevin), describing the first 20 minutes of the speech as: “A monologue about the right to exploit the stories of ‘others’, simply because it is useful for one’s story.”

This has been an issue for many Australian writers – me included – for more than a decade.

assmin_abdel-magied — WRITER WALKING OUT Yassmin Abdel-Magied.

“I can’t speak for the LGBTQI community, those who are neuro-different or people with disabilities, but that’s also the point,” Abdel-Magied wrote.

Cue my right to belong in this argument.

The event that saw three Queensland-based LGBTI authors discuss our work had not been the classic writer’s festival offering.

Authors and audience blended. LGBTI had come to see their own. They asked questions of us and we of them. There were no celebrities and plenty of spare seats.

We were inside the building. We belonged, inasmuch as new students belong in new classrooms when they change schools. It’s an incredible honour, yet there’s a sense that it’s very embryonic.

One of the questions from the floor urged we panelists into some much-needed future thinking: how does the LGBTI community open itself to the kind of mainstream attention that engages the publishing economy in the book and media trade to back us?

The answer relies on readers ‘walking out’ on the kind of media and publishing that marginalises LGBTI stories, and finding us regardless. It also relies on people finding their way to writer talks that might not interest them at first glance.

Within the same 24-hour period, Yassmin Abdel-Magied and I had done just that.

I am not my next book

Caroline Overington and I had the briefest of conversations about books for, by and about women, particularly in Australia.

“I don’t believe I will leave a mark in territory I do not already inhabit or have to fake.”

I was engaged because I am venturing into territory that Lionel Shriver tells me I have a right to enter, and Yasmin Abdel-Magied suggests I do not: creating a 19th century, Irish-born, female protagonist based on the life of a real woman in Colonial NSW whose unique achievements left almost no trace.

Shriver’s point – that fiction writers fake it anyway, so why should there be a limit? – is valid up to the line that Abdel-Magied drew in the sand so effectively in her response.

Access to publication for genuine voices must precede the “colonisation” of identity with inauthentic fictional voices, no matter how effective or sincere.

But I would add there has never been a better time for those voices to reach audiences through independent publication regardless of the notion of access. I’m living proof that if they’re loud and genuine enough, such voices are increasingly being heard.

I am writing a book that is not me.

As a gay, Anglo-Saxon, Australian man with a Maori great grandfather, I don’t believe I will leave a mark in territory I do not already inhabit or have to fake. Inequality is an overriding theme in my writing; it’s a roughly hewn stone with as many slices taken out of it as there are writers.

As someone who may be required to independently publish it, I am keen to write something popular. If that takes artful, empathetic imagination and skill, then so be it.

Reviews, Writers

Madeleine’s heroines not so black and white

September 2, 2016 Michael Burge Leave a comment

A Writer’s review of Madeleine St John’s The Women in Black.

“St John is reminding Australians to lighten up.”

“BUT she is a woman, although an Australian, so you know it is never after all only amusement on the part of a woman. The heart is always engaged, and so may be broken. And it will be my fault.”

So says the brilliantly observed Lithuanian anti-hero of this book, the divine Magda, marking out the emotional territory of Madeleine St John’s first novel.

Just out of school and awaiting her final examination results, when suburban Lisa takes a summer job at the city’s best department store in the ladies’ fashion section she encounters an array of women, their lives united by donning the same black dress on the shop floor.

Despite the uniformity of the title, St John fashions remarkable characters. There’s Magda, a ‘continental’ in charge of haute couture who embraces not only her love of high fashion, but continually reminds everyone around her about their good fortune to be living in a place such as Sydney at a time such as 1960.

Her unbridled positivity is counterpointed with the lovelorn Fay, past marriageable age but still dreaming despite everyone’s fears for her; and Patty, married and childless, confused about how she got into both states.

It’s Christmas, it’s hot, and the scene is set for conflict.

Yet it seem to take an age to arrive. Akin to the work of Jane Austen, The Women in Black avoids a classic story arc, as many comedies of manners do, and attempts to frame human behaviour in other ways.

Austen managed to instill her novels with light-hearted digs at the class system, the marriage game and how close genteel women in reduced circumstances come to ‘falling’. But where Austen does let some of her characters take the leap, in The Women in Black St John keeps her cast of women away from the brink.

I was reminded of Dymphna Cusack and Florence James’s seminal wartime Australia novel Come In Spinner as I was reading. This is not a surprise – both books focus on the lives and loves of a cluster of colleagues in a well-populated place of business in Sydney.

But I found myself yearning for Spinner’s stronger sense of drama. Exploring womens’ rights, abortion, prostitution and female identity, Cusack and James’s book courageously formed a much-needed stepping stone for the advancement of literature about women in this country. They were egged on by Miles Franklin, author of the much earlier My Brilliant Career, who the authors acknowledged as the ‘godmother’ of their collaboration.

Both novels include deft portraits of mid-century Australian marriages from a woman’s perspective. The sense of expectation and powerlessness, the giving and withholding of intimacy, the desire for equality that seems beyond reach, and the sense of being let down by and in competition with other wives and mothers in the pursuit of unattainable perfection.

“A political novel in the same way that a cartoon can be political.”

Yet I was met with a constant sense of Madeleine St John smiling at my reactions. Where I settled into another chapter anticipating Magda’s plan to capture a guileless Aussie gal into something sinister, like the white slave trade so often feared where immigrants were concerned in the 1950s, St John instead creates wonderful and humane character portraits of three-dimensional and extremely funny ‘reffos’, or, as we now call them, refugees.

St John was in her fifties when The Women in Black was completed, and it’s the book’s sense of maturity that makes it a worthwhile read.

It’s been accused of being anachronistic – a story about 1950’s sensibilities published in the 1990s – but St John had lived through enough of the twentieth century to blossom as a keen observer when the same rising conservatism reared its head ahead of the millennium’s turn.

With great gentility and pathos, she frames this emotional and literal austerity so it can be seen for what it is: overblown panic built on first world problems.

Like Magda, St John is reminding Australians to lighten up. The threats we perceive are not those that consume other parts of the world. We would do better to look at what’s actually in our lap, which is ultimately what all of the women wearing the uniform black – and their husbands and fathers – are brought to.

In that sense, I define The Women in Black as a political novel in the same way that a cartoon can be political, using a light touch when exploring serious issues. If the planned screenplay of the novel follows St John’s lead in this manner, and not simply her comedy, it will be worth watching.

This article appears in Michael’s eBook Creating Waves: Critical takes on culture and politics.

Reviews, Writers

Bloodletting basics with Helen Macdonald

August 20, 2016 Michael Burge Leave a comment

A Writer’s review of Helen Macdonald’s ‘H is for Hawk’.

“Macdonald courageously takes herself, and us, beyond our traditional blinkering on cruelty, hunting and killing.”

WHEN I closed this book, I felt free. Helen Macdonald can write. She can write the bejesus out of life, but this read left me like I imagine her goshawk Mabel felt: attached by a string while tamed to her mistresses’ arm, listening for her cues.

Much of this taming comes from the way Macdonald argues her case for weaving the bulk of her story into that of author T. H. White, also a falconer who wrote about similar stresses in his pursuit of the sport.

As soon as she mentioned White, I thought: Oh no, another writer who overlooked his homosexuality, but it’s in there, although Macdonald (like many other writers before her) completely avoids the fact that for his entire life, acting on homosexual desires was a criminal act in the places White called home, and writing about them would have led to the kind of notoriety that ended Oscar Wilde’s career.

White was a genuinely tortured literary closet case like W. Somerset Maugham, Henry James, Joe Ackerley, William Plomer, Christopher Isherwood and E. M. Forster. Let’s not forget they had their closets built for them by proactive buggery legislation that saw thousands blackmailed, attacked, jailed and subjected to electro and chemical aversion therapies.

Their natures cannot be left un-analysed at ‘cruel’. To do so is to join the terrible tradition of casting stereotypically evil, sibilant villains.

White was always tethered to society’s arm, on a very short string, fed tasty morsels that never satiated the lust for hunting in the woods for his heart’s desire.

Macdonald observes how this caused White pain, but still she made him into her unwitting antagonist, without exploring how legislation and culture contributed to his battle against his nature. This renders her book, and some of her arguments, instantly questionable.

Helen Macdonald did strange things in her grief. We all do, although I feel sure she didn’t write about the bulk of them in this book. We hear snippets about her falling for a man in the wake of her father’s death, failed jobs and difficult house moves, but these potentially interesting storylines are buried under her attention to White.

By the time she puts into words what one of her friends says – that White was just a “silly man” – it’s too late, her book is almost over.

As an observation of Macdonald’s grief after the death of her father, it makes for interesting storytelling. Macdonald grieves for the man who taught her to love wildness and wild places, and the loss of British innocence in the wake of its wars.

Escaping her pain, Macdonald’s childhood attraction to falconry sees her pursue a father figure – White – into the forest, where she loses herself almost entirely.

Her descriptions of place and emotion are incredible, they made me want to laugh with recognition of human frailty and cry for our endless recklessness and our ultimate vulnerability when it comes to our fragile grasp near the top of the food chain.

And her reticence around falconry, its context of killing and its anachronisms, are as strong and replete as her appeals for its place in human evolution.

“She leaves falconry hanging in the air as a paradox, for us and her.”

What H is for Hawk does best, I believe, is call into question our relationship with all creatures, domesticated and wild. It’s not possible to read without analysing the projections and limitations we place on companion and working animals, from dogs and cats through to kept birds. Macdonald courageously takes herself, and us, beyond our traditional blinkering on cruelty, hunting and killing.

The title it reminded me of most was Alice Walker’s The Chicken Chronicles, a memoir that revealed the journey Walker took, via her chooks, to better understanding the need to be loving in her relationship with her daughter.

Macdonald could never succeed in building similar bridges: her father, and T. H. White, are dead. She leaves falconry hanging in the air as a paradox, for us and her. Avoiding the sentimentality of her childhood literary favourites, like Watership Down, not even Mabel’s story is resolved, and the titular hawk’s ultimate fate is left to a footnote.

That is exactly what grief is like. It makes no sense, and follows no patterns. In this regard, Macdonald’s book deserves attention.

This article also appears in Michael’s eBook Creating Waves: Critical takes on culture and politics.

Michael Burge Media

Category Archives: Writers

I am my first book (at my first festival)

Madeleine’s heroines not so black and white

Bloodletting basics with Helen Macdonald

Journalist, artist, author, designer, digital publisher and mentor

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Journalist, artist, author, designer, digital publisher and mentor