Writer in Residence

That’s it then. Three weeks of blogging comes to an end, and it’s been very.

So, what awaits you in the upcoming month? A poet who loves soccer and writes verse novels and, more recently, “real” books, like the getting-very-good-reviews Rhymin’ Boy. I’ve known Steven Herrick for a long time now, and I know you’re going to enjoy hearing from him. Just make sure he doesn’t waste too many posts droning on about:

1. Soccer
2. Manchester United
3. His personal exploits on the soccer field
4. The Socceroos
5. Middlesborough/Crystal Palace
6. Goals he’s scored
7. Goals he’s set up
8. Goals he had nothing to do with, but would have scored if he’d been in a better position, except at fifty his legs are starting to go, he’s not as young as he used to be, and anyway those Hazelbrook Hawks are a bunch of mean-spirited, cheating thugs who are in the pocket of that referee who lives in Lawson, which is practically Hazelbrook anyway, and anyway the Gloria Park surface is a bloody goat track.

Keep him in check, is all I’m saying

It’s probably fortuitous that I’ve finished blogging as of this weekend, since Book Week starts tomorrow, and I’m about to go on the road for the next three and a half weeks. I mean, I know they have computers in Queensland, but I’m going to be pretty knackered, I think, doing the same author talk three times a day for over three weeks. Not that I’m complaining - being a writer is all I’ve ever wanted to do - but getting on the blog every evening will probably be the last thing I feel like doing.

What else awaits for the rest of the year? I’ve got several projects due to come out: Hunting Elephants in October, a Quentaris book from Ford Street at some point, plus two books to finish by the end of the year. So it’s going to be busy.

And if Town happens to get on the Inkys shortlist, you could do me a huge favour and vote for it.

And please, come and see me on my personal blog, which can be found at headvsdesk.blogspot.com.

Thanks to all of you for coming here so often to read my blatherings, to contribute to the competitions, and to challenge anything you didn’t agree with. For those of you who come here as readers, I’d like to encourage you to read a wide variety of different writers and genres. For those of you who come here as interested writers, I’d like to leave you with a quote from Byron:

A drop of ink may make a million think.

It’s true.

Out,
James

(PS: Congrats to Sonya Hartnett for winning Book of the Year in the CBCA awards, and to John Heffernan and David Metzenthen for winning Honour Book.)

It’s been hard, picking from the haiku entries. There were a lot of them, some of them great, some of them … well, let’s just say that some of them were great.

Now, I can reveal that Laura almost cost herself a copy of Town with all her ‘I love jack Heath’ and ‘Dale Thomas is such a hotty bleugh bleugh bleugh’ guff, but she pulled it together for this:

He eats like a pig
But swims a million times faster
You’re a legend, Michael Phelps.

And since I kinda like the idea of sticking goggles and a swimming cap on a pig so it can race a huge American with a pronounced lisp, ears that defy aqua-dynamic theory and shoulders the size of hams, I’m going to give it to Laura. I also think there should probably some kind of reward for persistent and repeated attempts. I mean, would Michael Phelps have won eight gold medals if he hadn’t gone in eight races? That’s a lot of races, no? And Laura wrote a lot of poems, some of them - well, one of them, in fact - an award-winner.

I’m blathering now. Laura, You won. Well done. And thanks to everyone who entered. My last post (sniff) will go live some time on Sunday, with a Steve Herrick-style poem to ease you into a month of posts about soccer.

Out, J

I figure I’ll have my turn as well.

driving round and round
looking for a place to park
dad’s already cross

in the produce hall
pumpkins huge as kettle drums
that’s a lot of soup

cows all in their stalls
black eyes watching as we pass
‘Ma, look at the humans!’

chips and pluto pups
fairy floss and fizzy drinks
(the whirlybird can wait)

fireworks
high above the stadium
whistling, bursting flowers

families heading home
arms full of of showbags and toys
toddlers sleep in prams

After the minor disappointment of Town not turning up on the Victorian Premier’s Awards shortlist last week, I feel majorly chuffed to announce that it’s been named today on the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards shortlist, in the Young Adult category.

The complete YA shortlist:

• Requiem for a Beast - Matt Ottley
• Marty’s Shadow - John Heffernan
• The Push - Julia Lawrinson
• At Seventeen - Celeste Walters
• Town - James Roy

The winners will be announced on September the 16th. Fingers crossed!

Often HSC students working on major works or English Extension projects ask me about short stories, and how best to approach them, so I thought I might write briefly about my feelings on this tricky writing form.

Before I wrote Town, I never thought I could write short stories, and I know exactly why that was. It was because I always believed, as many do, that a short story has to have a big, Jeffery Archer twist at the end. And some do. Many of the best ones do.

That was a big problem for me because I’m not a plotting, planning kind of writer. I like to take a character, ask what they want and who they are, then start telling their story for them, confident that in most cases a plot will come out of it. But that plot often doesn’t include a twist in the tail, so I’ve always felt that if - by definition - a short story needed one of those twists, I wasn’t the writer to provide it.

Then I read that a short story can be nothing more than a ’slice of life’, and I was liberated. Think about that amazing story Singing My Sister Down from Black Juice, by Margo Lanagan. Hooley dooley, what a story! Dark, spooky, visceral, terrifying in a slow, tar-pitty kind of way. But there’s no twist in it. It’s a slice of life (and death) that simply gives us an insight into a community, a world, a society, a character.

Once I got my head around that notion, I was away. A couple of the stories in Town have twists, but most of them are simply glimpses into the lives of young people from a fairly generic, regional Australian town. And by using different characters who popped up in one another’s stories, I hoped to create some kind of authentic social fabric, complete with misunderstandings, rumours, powerful moments and banal, mundane, utterly boring days and evenings. (Writing about being bored is harder than you might think!)

And ambiguities. The other day a student asked me, ‘In the second-last story in Town, you don’t tell us if Nick is gay or not. So is he?’

My response? ‘What do you think?’ And that’s the point of this kind of short story - to provide just enough info and insight that the reader processes it in the same way a player in the drama might. As humans, we are incorrigible sticky-beaks, and a good short story fulfills that need.

Well, my time within the dog is fast drawing to a close, but I think there’s time for one more competition before I shove off.And the theme is…

Haiku!

I know, I know, please don’t groan, because I’d lke to show you a new perspetive on haiku.

Here’s what haiku is believed to be by pretty much everyone: 5-7-5 syllables.

Wrong.

Also, traditionally, haiku was supposed to be about nature, and contain a ’season’ word.

Not any more.

Let me address the nature/season question first. These days haiku (and the other Japanese forms) can be written about pretty much anything - your eMac, your Eye-pod, even the i-mail you’ve been getting from that person with whom you’ve been stepping out. So you can cut loose on that one. And the wonderful thing about such a poetry form is that it almost always a snapshot of a scene and a story, rather than an actual story in itself. It’s very economical, which also makes it a useful exercise for your prose writing, which should endeavour to be economical as well.

Now, to the biggy - the syllable question. Counting syllables on your fingers, then finding the right word to fit is just as restrictive as rhyming poetry, which is another favourite amongst amateur (and bush) poets. Counting syllables will often force you into using a less ideal word than the one you wish you could use.

Beverly George, who is Australia’s foremost haikuist (yes, it is a job) tells me that there are two models of haiku that are far more useful.

Model 1: the first two lines set up the picture, and the last one brings it home with a twist, or a punchline, or a summation.

in the produce hall
pumpkins huge as kettle drums
that’s a lot of soup

In this case there is a 5-7-5 pattern, but that’s accidental. Honest.

Model 2: a setup or title line, followed by two lines that explain or exand on it.

fireworks
high above the stadium
whistling, bursting flowers

That one’s 3-7-5. But that’s not the point.

So, in the Olympic spirit, Competition 3 is a haiku based on something to do with the Beijing Olympics. Make it cultural, political, patriotic, sporting, emotive, cynical, whatever you like. Judging will happen around dinnertime on Friday.

Out, J

Big congrats to Alyssa Brugman, Justin D’Ath and Brigid Lowry for getting onto the YA category shortlist of the Victorian Premier’s Awards with (respectively) Solo, Pool and Tomorrow All Will Be Beautiful. The list was announced today.

Has anyone here read any of these books? What did you think?

When my first book came out in 1996, my friend George gave me a congratulatory gift. It was a piece of A4 paper, adorned with my name, a photo of me, a picture of my book, and some stuff about me and my novel. ‘Gee, thanks, George,’ I said, sightly bemused. ‘What is it?’

‘This? It’s your website,’ he said.

‘Oh, thanks,’ I replied. ‘Um … what’s a website?’

The digital revolution has brought about a whole new lexicon. iPod, iPhone, iMac, motherboard, modem, blog, download, upload, online etc are all words which meant very little until a few years back, or less.

Frankly, I’m not interested in those words (except iMac, one of which sits proudly on my desk). I’m more interested in discussing the words for which the meaning has changed. Mouse, scroll, rip, burn. Browsing used to be something you did in a shop, a program used to be something you watched on TV, and when Frou-frou was a little girl living in England, a macintosh was a raincoat.

But I’m even more interested in the words which have not only changed in meaning because they’ve got a new frame of reference, but have changed form, such as from a noun to a verb. ‘Access’ used to be a noun. It’s more often a verb these days. Likewise ‘network’. And ‘drive’ used to be a verb, now it’s a noun. So is ‘add’, as in ‘Thnx 4 the add’.

Or consider this sentence for a mo: ‘If you’re not sure, just google it.’ (We don’t even bother with the capital G any more.) Or: ‘Don’t waste your money - just Skype me.’ Or simply: ‘Text me.’ My grandparents wouldn’t have understood any of the above sentences.

What would your great-great-grandma have made of this sentence: ‘I jumped online and googled it, and eventually found what I was looking for on some blog, so I downloaded the plug-in onto my USB flash drive, then emailed the admin and told him I was going to bookmark, Digg and Del.icio.us his MySpace.’ Whaaaaa….?

So, what other words have evolved in the last decade or so?

As promised, the announcement of the winner of the constructionist poem competition. Thanks to everyone who wrote a poem, several poems, or, in one case, enough poems to send the insideadog server into ventricular fibrillation .

First, the Sydney Swans Award for flooding into attack in the hope of winning by statistical advantage goes to J-nee for her ten (10) entries.

J-nee is also the winner of the Pwease Pwease Pwetty Pwease Award for the most overtly sucky-uppy poem of all (James Roy, family man … if only I could read one of his books). Well you can, J-nee. It’s called a bookshop, and the title in question will set you back about $19.95.

Joanna and LauraXD are going to have settle for splitting the Kenny Bania Award for Explaining the Routine, with Joanna telling us who Andromache was, and Laura explaining who Dale Someone is (like we even care).

Shanz, I’d love to send you a copy of Town for your political stadium reference, but unfortunately I suspect that the Beijing smog - sorry, fog - is going to kill you before the book gets there, so not this time.

I also really like Aidan’s repeated use of the word ’spunk’ in the face of accusations of political incorrectness, and for creatively using the word ‘like’ in this way: Like, the best band I’ve heard in a while

But the winner, on this occasion, is Jessie, for this little nugget of goodness:

Wings
Supple and renascent
Arcing gently
Like tremors on the surface of the air
If only they belonged to me

So congratulations, Jessie - a pristine copy of Town is heading your way. Enjoy!

Thanks again to everyone who entered - a new competition will be up again very soon, which will finish on the 14th.

Out, J

Further to the last post…

I was listening to the football on the radio the other day, and I heard Warren Ryan relate this story.

Disgruntled player, to referee: ‘What would you do if I called you a cheat?’

Referee: ‘I’d send you off.’

Player: ‘What would you do if I thought you were a cheat?’

Referee: ‘I can’t do anything about what you think.’

Player: ‘Then I think you’re a cheat.’

Quality.