Went travelling for about 4 weeks. The jet lag coming home in winter is murder. Below is a recipe for getting through Sydney’s short days and cold nights when the body clock is upside down:
 |
Ye Olde Factory /upside down
Hanson Concrete, Blackwattle Bay
|
1. Toasted sandwiches. Butter two pieces of
bread on the outside. Make the sandwich inside with slices of cheese and tomato; (add pickles or mustard or ham if desired). Cook in a cast-iron
skillet, on medium heat. Turn sandwich over with tongs and brown the other
side.
2. Make one of these whenever the stomach calls for
it. The beauty of this meal is it fits any time of day or night without seeming
too obviously out of place. Toasties can be eaten for breakfast or in the middle
of the night.
3.
It’s warming food for cold weather, and
comforting. Helps with adjusting to missing the good times and people you saw
on your trip.
4.
Delve into a stack of books. I load up on them
in the USA because they seem cheaper there. I get them at bookstores, airports,
wherever I see one that I haven’t found in Australia.
5.
A trip to one of Sydney’s libraries for backup
supplies also helps. Because what else is there to do besides read in the
middle of the night when your body thinks it’s daytime?
I’ll share some thoughts on books that helped me
through recent weeks.Mystery, history and biography, my favourite genres, combined. The book also shines light on the craft of writing (a focus of ‘Australia Road’).
Poor Harper Lee, who couldn’t get out her next book after her prize-winning best-seller To Kill a Mockingbird. She tentatively titled the next book she was working on, ‘The Reverend’, about an African American man in Alabama who apparently murdered quite a few relatives before he died in the 1970s.
Reverend Willie Maxwell wasn’t officially convicted, but the story is quite chilling. First, Casey Cep drip feeds us the crimes. (Don’t read the prologue, btw, if you don’t want a spoiler. I only read prologues and introductions after finishing a book, because I like everything to be a surprise.)
The events took place in Lee’s home state, and called to her as a perfect topic for a nonfiction narrative book in the style of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. Lee’s thorough research and her meticulously typed notes for her friend Capote had helped him write his true-crime masterpiece. She wanted to try to repeat the process, for herself this time.
When a single chapter of Lee’s ‘The Reverend’ was finally seen 40 years later, by an heir of the Reverend’s lawyer, it was a fictionalised account, not nonfiction. No other pages were ever seen by anyone, apparently.
The second half of ‘Furious Hours’ covers biographical details of Harper Lee’s life. Cep has done some great original research and it is a springboard into my own views of ‘what went wrong’ for Lee.
Everyone Lee met in Alabama, during her years of researching The Reverend, said she was a really nice person. It probably didn’t sit right with her, as a well-bred Southern woman, to write freely about living persons. Although she was outside of society’s norms in some ways, she still considered herself well-raised.
And she knew the little fictional lies Truman employed in his opus. She told people she scrupulously wanted to avoid telling anything other than the exact truth in her planned book about The Reverend. But it seems it made the book impossible.
Harper Lee had been threatened with a lawsuit by some neighbours after ‘Mockingbird’ came out, so she knew she had to be careful about libel. She had set ‘Mockingbird’ 25 years prior to the time of its publication; but ‘The Reverend’ was to cover the present and immediate past. So there was no shirking possible legal ramifications.
I believe an insightful, fictionalised book about such frightening and dramatic events in an Alabama town would have been welcome. It’s really too bad Lee couldn’t see a way out of her puzzle. It isn’t known if she actually wrote the book (perhaps in a fictional style) and then destroyed it (there were rumours of destroyed manuscripts). Or did she get bogged down in notes, research, and an insistence on perfection?
Cep’s book ‘Furious Hours’ is a cautionary tale for writers. It shows how deadlines and money influence a writer’s output. Prior to ‘Mockingbird’, Lee was working in New York City, doing a daily commute. She had published some short pieces, dreaming of completing a longer work. Then, a couple of her friends gave her a large chunk of money for Christmas, with instructions that it was to support her while she wrote a great novel.
She got down to business and finished her now-famous book in a short time. (She also had a great agent and editor whose insights shaped ‘Mockingbird’). Importantly, Lee viewed the Christmas money as a ‘loan’, promising to pay her friends back. She used her time fruitfully, aware of a time limit, and with a drive to be successful in her writing.
Sydney author Mandy Sayer wrote an interesting article on ‘The Writerly Advantages of Having a Day Job’ for the NSW Writer’s Centre magazine ‘Newswrite’ (Autumn 2019). Many famous authors, including Australian writers, feel that having a ‘day job’ keeps their lives whole and their writing inspiration intact. Debra Adelaide took two years off to write after getting a big publishers advance, and wasn’t productive; Peter Goldsworthy confessed that a two-year grant to write, inspired in him instead, two years of writer’s block.
As Cep describes it, Harper Lee was able to write ‘Mockingbird’ using a deadline and a financial commitment to her friends. Then, after she made bags of money from the book, she couldn’t keep the same sort of commitment or deadline for HERSELF that she had once made to her friends.
Open-ended free time seems not to lead to good writing, at least for many people.
Especially, open-ended free time that contains no drive to make money. More limited segments of time seem to be ideal (I’m mixing observation of Harper Lee with Sayer’s discoveries).One other observation: Cep says Lee wrote letters to nearly everyone of the thousands of people who wrote to her saying they loved To Kill A Mockingbird. Lee was too polite not to acknowledge mail. Think of all the time that took. It’s like today’s temptation/obligation to get caught up in emails and social media…*
*Note: any mistakes I’ve made in facts about Harper Lee while interpreting Casey Cep’s book are my own, not Cep’s.
&
Another book I read during the wee hours of jet lag was ‘Calypso’ by David Sedaris. I had picked it up in one of those great two-story Barnes and Noble bookshops in the USA. (I know they aren’t ‘independent’ sellers who deserve support, but I love the atmosphere in such a big retail palace of books. A kind of Bunnings or Home Depot for book lovers. But with lots more windows, comfortable chairs, and carpet.) In paperback on one of the featured tables, ‘Calypso’ looked like a bargain. And it’s pretty short, an added attraction.
Sedaris has the power to make readers laugh and cry.
His memoir-type stories are mostly ‘true’ but he does give hints that he exaggerates for comic effect. Maybe he exaggerates for sad effect too, because sadness is certainly an element in some stories. (And I hope he is exaggerating for gross-out effect because one chapter in particular is truly disgusting and I needed a lot of time and space to get over it. I can only hope it wasn’t true.)For writers, his book can be an inspiration. He sometimes describes his working habits and it sounds like he carves out a space for himself and his work, even while on vacation. He keeps a desk and writes every day. Perhaps one aspect of his success is: the short-ish episodes he writes are usually published as standalone essays (in places like the ‘New Yorker’) prior to being collected as a book. So he isn’t trying to make a huge opus where hundreds of pages need to hang together, the work dragging out over months and years.
One chapter had a moving description of how he and his siblings, as children, would tell funny stories to their beloved mother, vying to make her laugh. She encouraged them and instinctively helped them craft their delivery, as they learned to emphasise which parts were funniest, and how to pace. (The usefulness of trying to please someone.)
Sedaris’s mastery of comical writing is unparalleled, I think. I first heard of him when I stumbled into a free session at Sydney Writer’s Festival around 15 years ago. He was being interviewed, and he read a segment from one of his books. It was so funny that I was intrigued and became a devoted reader. Now he travels the world giving readings to audiences who pay top dollar for tickets.
@
And now for a story about the Sydney Writer’s Festival, which continues to bring audiences to authors and artists. And it mixes books with built heritage! Too good.
I attended in May, before my recent travels. Usually one of my most favourite events of the year. But I didn’t go in 2018, the first time they held it at Carriageworks. I pined for the magic of the Wharf, the old location where venues hovered over sparkly water, combining danger and dreaminess. ‘I don’t like change’, my inner whinger says. With this year’s festival being at Carriageworks for the second year in a row, I realised the change wasn't temporary so I better suck it up.
The new venue is those iconic buildings you see from the train out of Central toward Redfern and the west.
Row after row after row of brick warehouses with repeatedly zig zagging roof lines, and endless arched doorways, plus delightful round windows. Formerly they were workshops filled with people (I’ll guess they were mostly or all men) working to fix our trains and keep the railways in top order. Now, an example of ‘adaptive re-use’ of heritage buildings, they are fairly access-friendly, grounded spaces with enormously high ceilings. |
Carriageworks - Eveleigh
photo by Petrina Tinslay, published at Afar.com
|
Saturday 4 May 2019. The authors I went to see were not familiar to me – that’s one of the great things about the festival, exposure to new writers.
3.00 to 3. 40 pm. I listened to Australian author Sophie Cunningham, and watched her fascinating sign language interpreter. She shared ideas ‘On the Bloomsbury Set and Ideas of Bohemia’, which have absorbed her while she researches a book (as yet unfinished) about Leonard Woolf, husband of Virginia. I have never read anything by Cunningham, but I appreciated her thoughtful, rational and engaging approach and it felt like the session ended too soon. Her latest book ‘City of Trees’, nonfiction, might be good to check out.
Funny things I noticed: festival organisers wanted us to simultaneously turn off our phones yet send twitter messages and insta and other things with particular hashtags. A later session didn’t say ‘turn off phones’ it said ‘turn down screen brightness’ but keep up the twittering. They really want us to help with their advertising! I don't comply. Furthermore, I admit I do my best not to spend money there.
Although I hadn’t previously been to the Carriageworks venue for the festival, I’m a seasoned visitor from the Wharf, and I knew the drill about lining up for free events. I asked the woman manning the velvet rope if I had time for a coffee and she said ‘probably, if you don’t go far’. When I got to the coffee cart there seemed to be dithering so I said ‘please give me a coke from the fridge, here’s my money now’ and eventually they did, which was quicker than waiting for a coffee. I knew I had to get back to the queue and seconds mattered. You don’t want to be that person who the rope lady blocks, as she says ‘I’m sorry, we have to stop here, the venue’s full’. I’ve been that blocked person, which is why I was rushing and nervously drinking a coke when I would have rather had a hot coffee since it was cold outside.
But that made it weird because later I was the only person drinking a coke. I don’t normally even drink it, so I was drinking it slowly, kind of nursing it as the saying goes. At one point, Cunningham paused then randomly mentioned ‘Coke drinkers’ in an example of something she was saying, and I felt self-conscious, like she was singling me out (she probably wasn’t).
But yeah, so happy I got in and happy I got a seat, even if I had to perch with a coke on my knee. The lady next to me had a few bags of books and a big bunch of gum leaves wrapped in brown paper at our feet which she asked me if I minded. No way do I mind.
Nothing’s getting in the way of my joy at being at the writers festival.
Not even the atrocious sound system (later I heard the media criticised this) which I actually thought was a mistake, ‘Surely this won’t last, the session next door with loud applause is ending and soon we’ll have our peace and quiet’. But no, it seemed that on the other side of the curtain, the microphone was passed from speaker to speaker, each of whom we could hear. If I had paid money for the session I was in, I would have been annoyed. But since it was free, nothing was a problem, and really, our speaker was so engaging and her sound levels seemed alright so I was able to tune out the other hall talk. And I was so lucky with a good seat pretty close to the front. Lucky, lucky me to be at the writers festival.
4.30 to 5.30 pm. Nigerian author Oyinkan Braithwaite with interviewer Rebecca Harkins-Cross, chatting about Braithwaite’s novel ‘My Sister, the Serial Killer’. This session cost money but the ticket office had a kind of half-price, last minute sales system in place which was great. It seemed like a good chance to hear a speaker from Nigeria, so far away.
Not having read this book, I had heard critics say it was good. I thoroughly enjoyed seeing and hearing Braithwaite, a very likeable author.
As I listened to the interviewer describe the book, it brought to mind the ABC tv show Killing Eve. A beautiful young female serial killer; lovable yet despicable, extracting devotion from women, and luring men to their deaths. The interviewer seemed to think this was a wholly unique idea, but I was thinking to myself, ‘have you not seen Killing Eve, then?’ (I confess a fascination with that tv series.) Whether unique or not, this kind of plot is certainly startling.
The weirdest thing that happened in the session: two different people– first the interviewer, later an audience member – asked identical questions about parallels between ‘My Sister’ and the book Jane Eyre. Were the similarities deliberate? No the first time and no the second time. Braithwaite said however, that she has read that classic a lot because it’s a favourite.
In the lobby I got a free Sydney Morning Herald and a Gleebooks Gleaner (it’s always free, a great resource listing new books). I reminisced about the old daily festival paper ‘The Far Queue’, lol (get it? You may have to say it out loud.)
I didn’t see the ‘@thefestival’ newspapers, the free, UTS student-written paper (which might be entirely online this year. Actually they’ve probably been replaced by twitter etc). A few years ago I contributed stories to ‘@thefestival’. That was fun: writing about authors and books, not being paid but getting credit and publishing experience.
 |
Walsh Bay wharf/ piers, old Festival location
Photo by Majestic Water Taxis
|
Here is a random list of great international and local writers I’ve seen through the years at the Sydney Writers Festival: Kate McClymont (SMH muckraker), Michael Connelly (LA mystery writer), David Sedaris, Sarah Blasko (song writer). Caitlin Doughty (undertaker-writer), Federal MP Chris Bowen (he had written his autobiography). Susie Orbach (‘Fat is a Feminist Issue’), Gloria Steinem, and Louis De Bernieres (Red Dog).
Aboriginal elders Ruby Langford Ginibi, Archie Roach, and Pat Dodson. ZZ Packer, African American writer. Australian author Ashley Hay interviewing an English woman who wrote about women locked in castles or towers in medieval times. (The range of subject matter is astonishing.)
Australian icons Ita Buttrose, Don Watson, Helen Garner. Jennifer Kent (The Babadook, film); and prize winners Ali Cobby Eckermann and Carrie Tiffany. Two then-Best Young Writer award winners: Alice Pung, and Michael Mohammed Ahmad.
Aviva Tuffield (Stella Prize co-founder), Kate Mosse, (British founder of Women’s Prize for Fiction), Tim Soutphommasane (Race Discrimination Commissioner for Human Rights Commission at the time).
Looking forward to next year's festival.
