An homage to Mike and Lili

The Centre for Youth Literature has got more teenagers into reading, connected more young adults with more books and authors, provided more thought-provoking professional development for teachers, librarians and writers, than any other program in the country.  It's been constantly innovative and constantly evolving.  (It's also delivered the most fun touring program a writer could ever hope to be a part of, but that's another story).  It's been able to achieve all of this because of the enthusiasm, intelligence, passion, love and sheer hard work of the people that have created and sustained it - the redoubtable Agnes Nieuwenhuizen, Mike Shuttleworth, Lili Wilkinson, and now Paula Kelly and Susan McLaine. 

Artswork might be rewarding, but it's hard yakka.  It's hard to see chunks of money always going to sports programs, when a sliver of the same would run a reading/writing program for years.  It's hard having to fight for and justify each crumb of funding you get, having to spend as much time applying for and acquitting grants as doing the work you're funded for.  It's hard to raise the profile of an activity so pivotally important to our sense of culture, place and self as writing in the face of newspaper cutbacks and general editorial disinterest.  And then there are the actual writers.  Writers are a notoriously whinging, tempestuous and temperamental lot: it can be hard listening to folk complaining about who got what and how someone else deserved it more, being depressed about their lack of sales or prizes, and pining for writerly utopia, comprised of time, money, a garret and/or red wine (okay, so maybe that was just me.  But you get my point). 

So people who can always find the joy in what they're doing - who manage to sustain their love for their work  - are rare and should be prized.  And people who wave the flag for the importance of YA and all who sail in her are equally rare, and are our true national treasures.

Hence my unutterable sadness that CYL is losing Mike and Lili.

Aside from her organisational feats, Lili has created and maintained insideadog, which is the best website for teenagers who love books anywhere, ever, IMHO, and is as funky and interesting as Lili herself.  Through her own blog and her thoughtful engagement with others', she makes sure we keep interrogating the way we think about YA writing, writers and everything else in between.  She's leaving to be that most elusive and lucky of creatures, a Full Time Writer.  I eagerly await the brain babies she creates.

And then there's Mike, the man who had to leave Western Australia because he hadn't read (or was that didn't like?  I forget) Cloudstreet.  Mike has been a champion of my work, and for this I have always been grateful.  He has also been a sanity saver more than once, and one of the delights of my Melbourne sojourns is coffee at Mr Tulk's with Mike.  It's a shame CYL can't bottle his fine and nuanced knowledge of contemporary YA literature before he goes.

I know people have to move on, and, after eight years, Mike and Lili have done more than their fair share for YA literature in Australia.  They have encouraged us writers to push the boundaries, write to our limits - to take pride in what we do, and make sure that we get to meet our audiences once in a while.  I know that CYL is still in good hands, and it will still run great programs. 

But still.  I'm sad.

And on behalf of those of us who've had the privilege to work with you, I want to say thanks.  As if it is enough.

What I'm reading/have read/am about to read

Note to self: don't take photos in front of curtainless windows.

The books:

Line of Sight, David Whish-Wilson
Broken Glass, Adrian Stirling
Wintergirls, Laurie Halse Anderson
Girl Saves Boy, Steph Bowe
The Three Loves of Persimmon, Cassandra Golds
Equator, Wayne Ashton


And on the train this week, people read: Zambezi/Kathryn Fox/Jodi Picoult/Blood Born/Star Seeker/Persuasion/The West/Time.

Moments of grace

* This week I struggled with the beginning of the junior novel.  On the train I wrote opening lines, scenes, dialogue.  They clunked, or were brittle.  The words didn't go together.  Nothing worked.

Eventually, demoralised by my scrappy notes, I stopped struggling.  And then, as you might guess, it came.  A beginning.  Maybe not the beginning, but a beginning I can work with.  For me, having a workable beginning is like a composer deciding on a key signature.  If you pick the wrong one, it's never going to sound right.  Like using a minor scale to write a happy song.

*  I did two whole-day workshops this week with the Youth Literature Days run by the fabulous Fremantle Children's Literature Centre.  I love doing these workshops, although somehow discussion of the battles of writing doesn't come about - maybe because for most of these kids, they're so full of words, images and snap, crackle and pop that struggle is a way off.  But the students did great work, concentrated work.  I so wish they'd had programs like this when I was 14, 15. 16 - the luxury of guided writing, the value of hearing what your peers have done, knowing there are others like you out there. 

*  At the end of the last Youth Literature Day, a girl came up to me.  She told me about her friend, who had had a terrible home life, had really struggled with some serious, serious problems.  'Your book Skating the Edge was the only thing that stopped her from killing herself,' she said.  'My friend just wanted you to know.'

*  My old touring buddy Bill Condon was one of the winners of the Premier's Literary Awards (on which subject, you really must read this).  Really and honestly, it couldn't have happened to a nicer bloke.  Bill is one of those people who has just been getting on with writing gritty, real, funny books for teenagers without fanfare.  Excellent stuff all round.

Chained to the wheel

So here's this week's thing: every week's thing, come to that.  As I may have mentioned once or twice, I work full time, which leads to a very fragmented writing life.  I'm trying to rewrite the beginning of a junior book, and the more I rewrite, the more I delete.  I pick apart every sentence the moment it's on the page.  But the main problem is that I don't know where I'm going.  With the book.  With writing generally.

Maybe I should write and not think.  Maybe I should have done NaNoWriMo (when?).  Maybe I should give up this thing.  Maybe I should have become a lawyer.  Maybe I have run out of things to say. 

The usual.

And then I find this picture.

It's my great-grandmother, Isabella.  Behind her is the house she lived in for nearly forty years.  When her daughter Freda (now 95) gave me the picture, she said she couldn't believe the house was in the photo: it was shameful to be that poor, it still made her cringe to look at it.  As a young woman Isabella went to the Boer War, apparently to find her brother, and nursed on the ship on the way home. Then she married a rural widower 28 years her senior, was spurned by her husband's first family, took in washing to help, walking for miles over the hills near Roelands with baskets filled with other people's dirty laundry.   She died at 65, exhausted. 'She had a hard life, my mum,' says Freda.

And here I am, worrying about a book I don't have to write.

Eternal soundtrack

Inspired by Mike and the 'geezer jamboree'(!), I'm mulling over what music I'd want to take to the hereafter.  You're supposed to be limited to seven songs, which makes things tricky.  My seven tunes today might well differ from my seven tunes tomorrow.  Today's pick, in no particular order:

Tuxedo Junction, Glenn Miller
A Town Called Malice, The Jam
Tinseltown in the Rain, The Blue Nile (It's sheer accident these first three start with 't'!)
Sing, Sing, Sing, Benny Goodman (also handy because it lasts 9 minutes)
Dancing Queen, ABBA (you knew ABBA had to get a look in, didn't you?!)
Subterranean Homesick Blues, Bob Dylan
A Day in the Life, The Beatles

 What are yours?

When your best just isn't good enough

I don't know whether it's because of the amount of US television/music/movies our culture is saturated with, but it seems to me that Australians are becoming as obsessed with success - usually measured in tedious material terms - as any of our North American counterparts.  It's all about being a winner, fulfilling your potential, reaching your dreams.  If you don't have - or strive for - a great career, a fabulous family, and a whole pile of Stuff, there's something wrong.  (Or maybe that's just living in a big mining town, I don't know.)  We're expected to aim high, and if you miss, it's your fault.  You're not talented enough, determined enough, focused.  It's all about you.  You're in a race, and there's no dropping out. 

This attitude has become attached to writing, too.  If you don't win prizes, write bestsellers, get grants or make a living from it, there's something a bit sad about you.  You should be out there promoting, getting your name known, increasing your sales.  The more people buy your books the better, right?  Aren't you going to be the next J.K. Rowling?  Not going to do NaNoWriMo?  A thousand words a day, fifty thousand words a month - write until you're sick of your own words?*  What kind of writer are you?

So much of what is important about writing is so easily lost.  The pleasure of making a story take shape, of massaging a sentence until it is supple, of going beyond what you think you can do.  The physical delight of your hand moving on a page.  The satisfaction of printing out new pages, still warm from the printer. 

Writing is not a competition.  The point of writing for me - aside from its intrinsic satisfaction - is communication.  We're telling stories, sharing stories. 

Finding connections. 

Getting real.

If writing isn't about that, you'd be better off becoming a lawyer.** 


* I'm not dissing NaNoWriMo, but I wonder how there can be joy in it.
** I'm not dissing lawyers either.  Some of my best friends are lawyers :)

Things in spring

1.  I have started a new kids' novel.  I felt despairing after my no-more-YA pronouncement; then I had more ideas for YA novels; but I returned to despair knowing I don't have the time to bring the ideas to life.  So I took my notebook on the train, and en route to work I wrote down any and every idea that entered my head, hoping that one of them would be for something shorter and more manageable.  One was.  It has grown legs, and now I'm seeing if it will be able to run and leap. 
2.  It's planting season.  If you'd told me ten years ago I'd develop into a mad keen gardener I would have sniffed and told you you must have the wrong person. My one failed attempted at growing basil (basil!  how hard could it be?!) convinced me I was a brown-thumb.  Enter husband with mushroom-compost-toting abilities, a bunch of newspapers and giant pots, and presto, a (food) garden has been born.  (Only food - the rest looks like the overgrown jungle it is).  For the last few weeks every meal has contained our potatoes, broad beans, spinach, herbs, onions, spring onions, leeks, and the garlic isn't far away (Doust, are you paying attention?!).  The Good Life indeed.
3.  I've been cycling around the lakes in my suburb, delighted by the baby ducks and swans, the swarming insects in the trees, the abundant blue of Perth spring skies.  By the fact of being able to cycle at all, given that I couldn't for so long.  The joy of skimming over footpaths, bending into curves, pedalling through the warm air, feeling strength returning.
4.  John Lennon would have been 70 today, and I didn't need Google to remind me of the date.  He talked before he died about how life would be long, that he would have decades of creativity ahead of him.  A reminder to waste no time - creatively or otherwise.