the rachel papers

Artist couples and the politics of envy

2012-01-19T13:52:00.028+11:00

This week, my family has gone to the beach for a holiday, without me. On the couple of strange, formless days that I have spent at home without them, I have been writing. But I have also been digging out those twisted clumps of mouldy, neglected clothing compressed into the bottom of the washing basket, and hanging load after load of these long-forgotten items on the line.

I know that when my partner is home alone for any length of time without me and the kids, the idea of performing this kind of task wouldn't even enter his head. Instead, he would have focused all his energies on his creative work and come up with the goods, in a far more substantial and satisfying way than I ever seem to achieve.

Last week on Triple R's Aural Text program, Peggy Frew and I had a long chat about a 2003 article, "Envy", written by writer Kathryn Chetkovich.

Chetkovich is the wife of literary superstar Jonathan Franzen, and what starts as an astoundingly honest personal story about professional envy goes on to encompass so much more about the nature of creativity, particularly that desire for a sense of "permission".

She and Franzen (who she only refers to here as "the man") met while they were both struggling early-career writers. Not too long into the relationship, though, she was still struggling, while his efforts had produced an international smash-hit.

She quickly realised that, for her, struggle means battling the external demands and the dilemmas that chip away at her confidence. For Franzen, writing may at times be a struggle, but his sense of conviction remains intact.

When two artists live under the same roof, one of two things is eventually bound to happen: success or children.

After that, a couple often has to draw upon every reserve of generosity in order to keep supporting each other's work and not become bogged down in resentment and competition.

Chetkovich notes in the article that in the time it took Franzen to draft several hundred pages of his novel, she had penned a 15-page story, a short play and part of an "inadequate" screenplay. Under normal circumstances, that wouldn't be such a bad effort, surely. But she was comparing her output to the behemoth that was The Corrections.

When you have fallen for another artist, you are confronted by what Chetkovich calls "its peculiar calling card": the fear of what you want for yourself. And she is extremely honest about the impact of her husband's success -- the proof that the world wanted and needed his work -- on her own creative life, and on their relationship.

She admits that she sometimes withdrew from him emotionally and sexually as a form of revenge; that at times she wanted to drag him down and see him fail. "That if I could not be happy I was ready to make us both miserable."

How to mantain a sense of equality and not be mired in envy when your partner's success only serves to highlight your failure? What does it mean when you are no longer your partner's best and purest champion?

When the British rights to The Corrections are sold, "The part of me that was his girlfriend put her arms around him and told him how happy she was, and the other part, the miserable writer within, kept her distance," Chetkovich writes.

But what Chetkovich also exposes in her remarkable article is those differences that persist between male and female writers: the inner conviction men seem to possess about their right to create; the way women are held back by their desire to be attractive and likeable; how easily they are drawn into a life dominated by caring and servitude; the ever-present fear that writing is an unnatural occupation for a woman, and that unless her work is doing good in the world, it is mere self-indulgence.

All these elements generally make women's hold on their creative convictions far more tenuous than that of their male counterparts. Franzen's previous wife gave up writing when their marriage broke up; but if she had found success first, Chetkovich feels sure that Franzen would have kept writing with the same robust resolve he had always possessed.

"What I envied were what his talent and success had bestowed on him, a sense of the rightness of what he was doing," she writes. "I wanted what women always want: permission."

Hosting RRR's Aural text show today

2012-01-11T09:38:00.004+11:00

Peggy Frew and I are having a turn in the hot seat at Melbourne's Triple R studios for a couple of weeks, co-hosting literary program Aural Text, usually hosted by Alicia Sometimes and Lorin Clarke.

Today we will be chatting to music critic Michael Dwyer and feminist writer Monica Dux, among others.

We will also be playing some spoken word and tunes with great lyrics.

Tune into 102.7FM today (Wednesday), noon-2pm, if you can.

2012: the year when no means yes

2012-01-06T22:51:00.017+11:00

I’ve been forced to realise something about myself over the years — partly a fault of personality, partly a result of experience, especially the experience of motherhood: I am really bad at withdrawing from the hub of the action.

I should have understood this about myself long ago, being a kid who always did my homework on the loungeroom floor, wrote her uni essays at the kitchen table, then became a journalist who relished working amidst the noise and chaos of a bustling newsroom. Ever since those earliest working days spent seated next to the crime reporter, with his bloody wireless tuned in to the police CB all day, I have never been able to work in complete silence.

As a mother, though, this tendency seems to have has found its full expression. Anyone who has read The Divided Heart knows that I have found it exquisitely difficult to withdraw — physically and psychologically — from my family in order to focus on my own solitary work. And, whatever else it is, writing a book is usually a long and necessarily isolated slog.

I have never set up very effective boundaries between me and my kids, who know just how easily they can exploit my tendency to become easily distracted by their demands. It doesn’t help that I am a very slow writer, and one who easily loses confidence.

Where duty and distraction end and procrastination begins, I don't exactly know, but turning from my children, shutting myself away to write, never seems to get any easier. And when you're caught between a difficult sentence and a pile of dishes, a bit of hearty scrubbing can suddenly look so satisfyingly achieveable.

Admittedly, I have never really set up effective boundaries between me and the rest of the world either. Mothers and writers do have one thing in common. They are both constantly called upon to do things out of the goodness of their hearts. We endlessly volunteer our time to causes that, no matter how worthy or interesting, don’t pay, and don’t help us to remain focussed on the things we want and need to do for ourselves.

No matter how fast, or self-assured, any writer is, at the end of the day the words have to be put down on paper. And that requires focus. If I learned anything from writing The Divided Heart, it’s that there is no substitute for discipline — and this is probably truer for mothers than anyone.

So I have decided to make 2012 my Year of Saying No to all the fluff that can fill a life and lead to nothing. Which I hope will in fact make it the Year of Saying Yes to the things that count, as opposed to the things that just distract me from what's really important (including the kids, of course).

Anyone who wants to join me in Saying No this year, jump on board and I will take it upon myself to keep reminding you of your pledge. Happy New Year!

The gutsy and wonderful Amanda Palmer

2011-12-17T00:37:00.003+11:00

Artist-mothers, there's a new MAN in town...

2011-11-25T17:45:00.035+11:00

A couple of weeks ago, I was approached by two incredible women, dancer Jo Pollitt and artist Lilly Blue, to help them launch their online Mother Artist Network (MAN).

Jo and Lilly are the editors of BIG Kids Magazine, a gorgeous mag jam-packed with creative ways of inspiring kids to respond to the world around them though story, art and film. There are also interviews, photos and a free print contributed by a contemporary artist.

Their aim was to produce a magazine that encourages "bravery, imagination and generosity" (hence, B.I.G.) through collaborations between children, parents, artists and diverse communities.

Looking through this mag, I ended up spending a whole morning just doodling and making pictures with my kids -- something I haven't done for ages (usually too busy, too much work/housework to do, blah blah blah...). One activity in the book is to have a go at your own BIG logo, and this was mine:

Bit fiddly for a logo, I know, but I got a tad carried away...

The Mother Artist Network blog is an offshoot of the BIG creative project Jo and Lilly have embarked on, a place that invites an ongoing discussion about creative practice and motherhood.

As I've said in my little launch rave over at MAN HQ, if Lilly and Jo's glorious magazine project is anything to go by, MAN promises to be an extraordinary forum for artists to share their experiences of navigating mothering and the creative process -- a place to flee to when the littlies are finally asleep and you're in need of some solace and inspiration from kindred spirits!

If you want to contribute, email all artwork/stories/rants to info@bigkidsmagazine.com with MAN in the subject line and they will post the material as part of the series. They are interested in "work/questions/artwork that invite response and talk to the 'divide' or otherwise of the ongoing mother dance".

Look forward to seeing you there...

An interview about The Divided Heart (three years on...)

2011-11-14T16:46:00.007+11:00

It's funny how things come in waves. I haven't been approached for an interview about The Divided Heart for a while, and then I suddenly received three requests all in the one week.

All the requests were for great websites/blogs run by impressive creative types. I will link to the interviews as they are posted, but the first cab off the rank is a chat with bookseller Nina Mansfield over at typset, a blog offering "book dirt for book worms".

I am always surprised when women without children tell me they loved The Divided Heart. It's really heartening to know that it spoke to them anyway, whether they're wrestling with the question of whether or not to have children, or because they found it emblematic of broader questions about what it means to be an artist, or at least live a creative life.

Nina apologised for her "rambling" questions, but they weren't at all. They were very thoughtful -- and it was nice to have the chance to revisit some of the issues.

It's funny, too, that she used the pic above with the post. It wasn't until after I published my book that I realised "the divided heart" most often gets used in a religious context. Ah well, it's all about the internal conflicts that come with devotion, I guess!

Something beautiful for a Friday morning

2011-11-11T10:55:00.002+11:00

Vale Sarah Watt

2011-11-07T22:17:00.025+11:00

As most of you probably already know, artist and filmmaker Sarah Watt passed away on Friday. Readers of The Divided Heart often mention her chapter to me as one that especially spoke to them. The photo to the left is the one she sent me for possible use in the book -- Sarah with her kids, Clem and Stella.

Sarah was easily the most unassuming, down-to-earth artist I've ever met. She had the pure creative spirit of someone who makes art because she has to -- as a way of coming to terms with, but also celebrating, the world around her. And by that I mean the ordinary world. The mundane, the suburban, the everyday was her territory -- a reminder that there's beauty, solace and humour to be found everywhere.

The last time I saw her was when Sally Rippin and I attended the opening of her film My Year Without Sex at the Sun Theatre in Yarraville. I laughed so hard I was weeping through the whole thing. Afterwards I told her that it had been like watching my own family on screen -- but funnier. Later I tried to express in an email to her how much I admired her unique talent for describing what lurks just beneath the surface of daily life.

I'm so glad now that I sent those messages while she was here to receive them. Like many, I hadn't realised how sick she had become until very recently, hearing her husband William McIness speaking of it on the radio, and her death seemed very sudden.

As McInnes said, she was incredibly courageous. But so is he, I think. It is rare to hear someone talk so openly about their love for their partner and her bravery in facing her own death.

After seeing My Year Without Sex, I interviewed Sarah (over the phone) for a profile piece for The Big Issue. She told me that all of her work is about “the most basic stuff of life. How you get through your day; how you find meaning.” She was interested in the way we absorb the precariousness of existence — “the randomness of good fortune and catastrophe”.

Sarah had all the difficulties and distractions common to women artists, as well as profound struggles with grief and illness. But despite that she stayed very true to the art she wanted to make. Her art and films are bursting with heart, with her over-active imagination, her steely eye, her playfulness, great sense of the absurd and anxiety-fuelled whimsy.

Few artists have made work that has affected me like Sarah Watt's. I am already grieving the films she might have made next. It was just luck that allowed me to meet her in person.

After hearing that Sarah had died, I re-visited our conversation in The Divided Heart. For all who fear their domestic, suburban lives are not the stuff of art, let Sarah Watt be your inspiration.

The hows and whys of writing

2011-10-28T20:17:00.027+11:00

The Guardian recently launched a 'How to write Fiction' series, with all sorts of famous writers giving us their tips. As always, the comments thread can offer as much as the actual articles.

But I found this piece from Meg Rossof on 'Finding Your Voice' really helpful, because the notion of "finding a voice" has plagued me ever since I started writing.

I have never really understand what it means to have a "writing voice" and so I feel very intimated every time I hear writers discuss the matter like it's a given -- as if a real writer will have developed a writing voice they know and can rely on.

So I found Rossof's demystification of the term very comforting -- especially her emphasis on the importance of living deeply in order to write deeply.

She says: Self-knowledge is essential not only to writing, but to doing almost anything really well. It allows you to work through from a deep place – from the deep, dark corners of your subconscious mind. This connection of subconscious to conscious mind is what gives a writer's voice resonance.

You can of course completely overdo the "how to" thing. As with parenting, I try to limit how many guide books I read and largely go with my instincts. (I'm also very selfish when it comes to my limited reading time and want to spend it indulging in novels, not slogging my way through detailed parenting guides, though I'm sure some of them have a lot to offer.)

My mum, who was a nurse and very much self-educated, told me from an early age that if I wanted to understand myself better, look to the philosophers. Pop psychology books will try to offer shortcuts, but unless you've arrived at those revelations yourself, it won't stick. Common knowledge to most of us grown-ups, I know, but an important message to me as an adolescent.

It helps to compare it with maths. At school, even if I was given a method and could use it to get the right answer, it just didn't stick until I did actually understood how the method worked. I was one of those kids who drove my teachers crazy by constantly asking "Why?".

I suppose it comes down to the difference between knowledge and wisdom. In other words, deepening the questions rather than looking for the answers, and being prepared to discover that you might become less rather than more certain of what you know. The ideal place for a fiction writer to be coming from!

In the same way, you're probably far better off reading other people's novels, and getting a sense of how other writers build characters and structure a story, than looking for answers in how-to books, which can just be another way of avoiding putting in the practice.

But I am a total sucker for hearing writers talk about the process of writing. I remember finding Kate Grenville and Sue Woolfe's Making Stores a total revelation when I read it years ago.

And when I go to Varuna, the writers' retreat in the Blue Mountains, it takes all my will-power not to just curl up on the couch and work my way through its enormous collection of Paris Review interviews.

On that front, I also love The Write Tools, a series on Damon Young's blog where authors and artists talk about the tools/visual aids/substances that help them get their words and pictures down on paper.

And while I'm spruiking, I found Jane Sullivan's interview with Ann Patchett at this year's Melbourne Writers Festival particularly interesting. Hearing about Patchett's approach, I suspect she'd be in total agreement with Meg Rossof about the most important things for a writer to do: "Live. Take risks. Seek wisdom. Confront the unconfrontable. Find out who you are."

Illustration (at top): Jirayu Koo

Life as art

2011-10-18T10:25:00.015+11:00

I expect the blogosphere has already been going crazy with this one. But it does raise some interesting issues...

As you've probably heard, performance artist Marni Kotak is planning to give birth in front of a live audience at Microscope Gallery in Brooklyn.

Not surprisingly, The Birth of Baby X has seen the artist accused of "narcissism", of “exploiting” her baby and even of child abuse.

Kotak says she sees the performance as an assertion of authentic personal experience in a world that has become consumed by an unreal hyper-reality. "As an artist, I am most concerned with the question of how one can have and convey a real experience. I believe that our most intriguing performances occur when we are not aware that we are performing."

More specifically, she says "The Birth of Baby X" is about "addressing the assumptions about the way birth in our culture is viewed".

"I hope that people will see that human life itself is the most profound work of art, and that therefore giving birth, the greatest expression of life, is the highest form of art,” she told the Village Voice.

She is also planning a post-birth conceptual art project, dubbed "Raising Baby X", which will "help us think about and develop a greater respect for the intricacies of child rearing".

Hmm. Well, I guess that's one way of keeping your creativity going: just turn everyday life into a performance.

But why does living need to be a public act? And is it really art?

I have to admit, I've never been entirely comfortable with the notion of giving birth as the ultimate creative act. Of course, it is the ultimate act of creation. Amazing, yes. And profound. But the incredible beauty and wonder and mystery of nature is something that exists in and of itself. Plants will still be sending out their seeds and animals will still be giving birth whether humans are there to witness it or not. Surely art is our response to this world we find ourselves in.

As for Marni Kotaks' performance: What does it say about our desire to always be on show in order to create meaning in our lives? Does this only take us further away from being present, in our own body and our own life, or do you dig her idea of letting it all hang out in public?

Certainly life doesn't get more real than when you're giving birth. And if there's ever a time when you're going to turn inwards and lose all self-consciousness, it's while birthing.

Though I wonder if that will be true of Marni Kotak...

Cock-forests and sausage fests

2011-09-14T12:55:00.030+10:00

A couple of weeks ago, I went to the launch of the Stella Prize — a new Australian prize for women's writing, modelled on UK's Orange Prize.

A group of women felt inspired to establish the prize earlier this year in response to the announcement of yet another all-male shortlist for our premier literary award, the Miles Franklin (aka the "sausage fest", as blogger Angela Meyer called it back in 2009, another all-male year).

An audible collective groan could be heard among women when the 2011 shortlist was released: since the Miles Franklin award began in 1957, it has only been won by a woman 13 times. Ironic for a prize established through the will of someone who, like so many female writers of her time, felt it wise to publish her books under a male name and is best known for her novel My Brilliant Career.

Stella Miles Franklin (hence the name of the new prize) knew first-hand the role major literary awards can play in enabling writers to continue their literary careers. She herself struggled to make a living as a writer and was the beneficiary of two literary prizes.

So what is going on here? In a country where some of our best-known and critically acclaimed authors are women — Kate Grenville, Helen Garner, Joan London, Toni Jordan, just to name a few (all of whom published books in 2009) — why is their work so under-represented when it comes to Australia's literary prizes?

For more dismal statistics regarding the gender divide in lit award recipients, check out Sophie Cunningham's thoroughly researched essay, "A Prize of One's Own: Flares, Cock-forests, and Dreams of a Common Language" in Issue 6 of Kill Your Darlings journal. There she also discusses the shocking new stats on the disproportionately low number of books by women being reviewed in the world's leading literary publications (something I ranted about in an earlier post).

Thankfully the Stella Prize, which will be awarded to the best book (as deemed by the judges) written by a woman that year, will go some way in redressing this inequity. But the questions about its need to exist remain...

Critic and editor Morag Fraser, who sits on the Miles Franklin judging panel, has insisted the judges are not deliberately favouring books written by men. But then what explanation is there for this obviously skewed outcome?

Could it be possible that, even in the year 2011, an unconcious bias persists? At the very least, this is surely a question Australia's editors, judges and critics need to be asking themselves.

The Most Mentally Sexy Dad comp finalists announced

2011-09-08T10:37:00.009+10:00

I know -- this may be the most awkwardly named competition in history. And perhaps even one of the silliest. But I'll take the Most Mentally Sexy Dad competition over 'The Farmer Wants a Wife' any day.

Over at MMSD HQ, the five finalists have been announced. There were 73 entrants in this year's competition.

As organiser extraordinaire Clint Greagon says:
...Even though we've built this idea into a contest to help promote what we reckon is a very positive message, the bottom line is that every entry is a winner.

In the end we're simply celebrating great Dads who do what they think is best for their families and think that gender role stereotypes were only created to provide gags for 1950s sitcoms. They're also having a bit of fun and providing some great male role models.

Reading the entries for the MMSD comp turns me into a watery mess every time. Whether the winner is the man who "can leap tall piles of toys in a single bound (and pack them away afterwards)", the one who "likes to schedule - can you believe that?" or the one who allows his partner "to dream, without trying to rein me in", what these men clearly have in common is that they put their families first.

The entries describe men who are totally there, alongside their partners, in dealing with the full catastrophe: work, kids, housework, illness... whatever comes the family's way.

It's a celebration of what a modern family can look like when both parents are taking an equal share of the load -- and the results seem to be a lot of laughs. And a lot of good loving, if you know what I mean...

Image: Most Mentally Sexy Dad entrant Ian

What does a creative life look like?

2011-09-02T10:36:00.010+10:00

It is apt that a brief quote from Virginia Woolf posted on Damon Young's blog, darkly wise, rudely great, would launch a discussion about the nature of a creative life.

In despair at not travelling more, Woolf laments: "Here we toil, reading & writing, year in year out. No adventure, no travel; darker grows the fog. Here, by some invisible rope, we are bound."

To which I responded that "toiling, reading and writing, year in, year out" sounds like my fantasy existence!

Of course Damon, being a philosopher driven by the spirit of inquiry and interrogation, doesn't let you make these statements without calling on you to confront their implications!

His response: "As for the freedom to write, it's easy: just sell the house, give up your job, and brace yourself for the creative joy of relative poverty!"

Much as I can crap on about the details of my own life, this is surely a common dilemma among creative types. Please help save the comments on Damon's post, 'A Weevil in a Biscuit', from being my own personal therapy session and have your say...

What is your ideal version of a creative life? Does it have to be all or nothing?

Image: Virginia Woolf, by Roger Fry, c.1917

Just Kids: the book Patti Smith hoped people would read and say was good

2011-08-30T15:09:00.017+10:00

I have long been an admirer, if not an actual fan, of Patti Smith. Musically, that brand of New York punk has always left me a bit cold, though I am in awe of its spunk and its energy, and also the poetry at its heart. In truth, I have always felt faintly overwhelmed by Smith, as one of its gutsiest performers.

So when a friend convinced me to read Just Kids, Patti Smith's memoir of her affair with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, I wasn’t expecting it to really speak to me.

How wrong could I have been? This book moved me to tears. Buckets of them. And not just because of the tragedy of Mapplethorpe’s early death — though that made me terribly sad — but because it really shook me up. It was cathartic reading.

Some might enjoy her story for its picture of the New York art scene in the 1970s, which was pretty out there and full of amazing characters. But for me, what was really moving about this book was its story of profound connection between two people, both of whom epitomise artistic integrity.

Reading about the relationship between Smith and Mapplethorpe, it is difficult to avoid the feeling that they were fated to meet. Their relationship was intrinsic to their development as artists — especially for Smith, I think, as the less overtly ambitious of the two. Though I suspect she would have found her way, her confidence as an artist was much more fragile than his, and he gave her huge amounts of encouragement and belief.

Whatever drew them to each other, their initial encounters were certainly uncanny. Mapplethorpe was really the first person Smith met when she moved to New York — albeit briefly, until by sheer coincidence he again turned up to save her from an awkward situation — and became arguably the most important.

What also strikes you about them is the egalitarian nature of the relationship. He was domestic and nurturing, and in a scene peppered with phonies, they had a true meeting of minds.

There is no doubt that Smith and Mapplethorpe were innately talented, but her story reminds you that creativity is largely about commitment and passion. Their devotion to their work — and to living creatively — is all the more inspiring because they are both so unpretentious about it.

Perhaps what surprised me most about this book was its lack of cool; as Smith says, they were “too busy trying to pull enough money together to buy lunch” to be conscious of making a grand political or cultural statement.

Though their sexual relationship couldn’t last — Mapplethorpe eventually settled on his homosexuality — their connection retained its purity. It was deeply romantic and it sustained them both.

As you may already know, Smith is pretty legendary among mothers for letting her career take a backseat for a time while raising her daughters. As her much-adored husband died not long after Mapplethorpe, she also spent those years dealing with enormous grief, something she says has "put her on another plane" far more than mysticism or even intelligence.

After her album Gone Again was launched, and before she had written Just Kids, a 50-year-old Smith said: I'm very proud of my new record, and I wouldn't put it out unless I was. The last thing I want to do is inflict a piece of mediocre art on the planet. But I've also, as a single mother of two children, got practical reasons I've never had to consider before. I still have a part to play in rock 'n' roll, and I'll do that, but I'd love to write a book that people would read and say was good.

I read that book. And, yes, it was 'good'. But it was also so much more than that.

Peggy Frew on writing and motherhood

2011-08-28T15:12:00.021+10:00

A member of my writing group, Peggy Frew, is about to publish her first novel, House of Sticks (Scribe), which won the 2010 Premier's Award for an Unpublished Manuscript. I have known for years that Peggy is a writer to watch, and so it's very exciting to see her getting the attention she deserves -- and this is just the beginning...

If you read this blog because you are interested in mothering and art, then you have to read House of Sticks, a novel that wades into this territory with great insight and honesty. And if you want to know more about Peggy and her work, look out for my profile piece in an upcoming edition of The Big Issue (September).

For a taste of just what a brilliant writer Peggy is, you can read one of her short stories in the current fiction edition of The Big Issue magazine. I got hold of a copy yesterday at the Melbourne Writers Festival, and (from what I've read so far) it's packed with great stories.

Without wanting to steal the article's thunder, there were some chunks of the interview I did with Peggy that didn't make the final cut. Inevitably we spoke about writing and motherhood in detail that might leave the average reader cold, so much of that got left out of the article. Instead, you can read those bits here:

What Peggy Frew said:
Somebody who read the book, a published author themselves, wrote me this email saying writing any novel takes such determination and dogged hard work but, in the case of House of Sticks, it also takes courage.

It's not like it's a memoir where it's all about the bravado of exposing your own dark life or something. I think people think it's brave because ... it's taking a subject that a lot of people wouldn't think is worth writing about. It was what I was compelled to write about; I didn’t think strategically at all. You do connect with what's going on at your life at the time. I didn't set out to be brave or controversial; I just wrote it because the characters and the scenario came to me.

Almost everybody lives in a home, a lot of people have children, so how can it not be a valid subject to write about? Family is a key matter for a lot of writers. But it's the mother and baby thing that mean people put it in that pigeonhole. Now I'm a bit worried it's not going to be taken seriously because it's "only" about motherhood. Fortunately, my next book is far removed from that.

The initial urge [to write] is really unfocused usually. It's almost like a bodily urge, really, like a need to eat or something. But with working on a novel then it very quickly moves beyond that and it actually becomes a slog; I have to shape that initial outpouring into something. And then you have to commit to it and it becomes a task that you don't necessarily feel compelled to do at all. It's like that Dorothy Parker quote: "I hate writing, but I love having written."

If the book's there and you want to write it, you have to. There is definitely room to be a mother and make art. The main reason for me to keep writing is that I’d be a less happy person if I wasn't and therefore a worse mother.

Once you've had a child, you have to live with a sense of responsibility and therefore hope. You can’t just be selfish and you can't just give up on the world. It hasn't stopped me from confronting horrors, but my children are still really young. I haven’t had to justify anything about what I’m doing yet.

I recently read The Slap, and there’s this really great bit in that where a character talks about a friend who has this theory that there are three genders: men, women who have had children, and women without children. So men stay the same, while women are almost two different species. I thought that was really interesting. Though I think having children does change men as well.

I heard an American author on [Radio National's] The Book Show and he was a doctor who had become a writer of fiction and he talked a lot about working in hospitals. In the middle of this interview that was quite kind of high-brow, he said, "I feel like there's one thing that changes your life and that's having children. I feel like that's changed me profoundly and I'll never see the world the same way again." It was almost jarring when he said it. I totally didn't expect him to say something like that because men so rarely mention those things.

I’ve never had anything but support from my family. I think the fact that Mick [Turner, Peggy's partner] is a painter and musician himself means that he has respect for art and he understands that what you produce -- of course it's tied to you and who you are. And there are elements to that book that are based on real experiences and real feelings. But I think probably because he's done it himself, Mick understands that when you take real experience and make it into art, you do fictionalise it. You take a moment in which you felt a particular way, and you inflate it and heighten the drama, and explode it out into a huge story. There's a kernel of truth that relates to your real life, but it doesn't mean that the big story is real life. I think he just gets that. Well, fingers crossed he does, because we could be in big trouble otherwise.

We're both really productive. I imagine it would be really rough if one of you was going great guns and the other was dealing with writer's block or whatever. But we haven't had to deal with that yet.

In the book, [main character] Bonnie idealises Mickey [a musician and free spirit]. She is Bonnie's opposite. She's the living myth. It doesn't matter who you are, everyone has someone like that in their life, the people you idealise. I know I do with other mothers. In the school playground you see those other mothers who look really relaxed and calm and their like life is together and they're really well dressed and their kids seem really well behaved. You feel like they're somehow living this other life.

Parenting's like anything else — some people are just really good at it. My biggest issue as parent is containing my own frustration.

I've got one day a week [to write]. Otherwise, I write in small spurts — evenings, maybe twenty minutes in an afternoon if [third child] Fraser goes to sleep. And on the weekend I might lock myself in a room for an hour.

When I went on that writers' retreat I had six whole days and I wrote about 7000 words. That's comparable to what I’d write at home if I was really in to something and writing every night. It was just that [at the retreat] I had lots of time to go on walks in between and I felt really refreshed and relaxed, but the actual output that wasn't that different.

I’ve been so much more productive since I had children than I was before, but that could just be a maturity thing. ... I was really lost in my twenties. It [having a family] has worked really well for me. I wouldn't change anything at the moment about my writing practice. Actually, I would change something: I would love to have, say, two hours every mid-morning when I just went in to my study alone. But I wouldn't want to go into an office every day and write all day.

Life and reading, reading and life

2011-08-17T12:46:00.033+10:00

I was honoured to be among those approached by author/publisher/blogger Karen Andrews, aka Miscellaneous Mum, to contribute a spiel about the most life-changing book I’ve read in the past ten years.

If I'd know the company would be so illustrious I might have tried a bit harder! The result is a wonderfully varied list of books that is about to become the pile on the desert island that is my bedside table.

I have always been a big fiction reader. Apart from books read for study or research, I can probably count the number of non-fiction books I've read "for pleasure" on one hand. (OK, maybe one hand plus a foot or two.)

Most of what I know about art, politics, religion, human nature -- if not learnt through living -- I've learnt from novels. What I love about fiction is the depth of insight you can gain about what it was like to be a human being alive in a certain place, at a certain point in time. And I suppose being partial to a domestic drama, no-one can plumb the nature of relationships and family life like fiction.

As I mentioned to Karen, I have been forced to recognise that the books which really resonate with me tend to reflect or deepen my understanding of my own experience, as opposed to taking me into totally other worlds. Even as a child, I recall being slightly suspect of books in which animals talked!

I have often worried that this is a limitation of mine. But lately I've decided to just sit with the fact that there is something in these stories that I still need: that is feeding me. And I expect that one day this need will be expelled and I will feel ready to open myself to less familiar territory. A kind of graduation from the internal to the external perhaps.

My theory is that all writers exist on a spectrum that runs between pure observation and pure imagination. When author/artist Antoni Jach recently put this idea to a masterclass I'm involved with, I was surprised that most put themselves at the imagination end. Me: I confessed to being about 80% observation and 20% exaggeration (by which I really mean embellishment).

Interestingly, the list of books on Karen's blog is about half-half, when it comes to fiction versus non-fiction (not that it's a competition -- especially nowadays). But either way, all evidence that books really do change lives is fascinating, and heartening, stuff.

A few absurd things that happened to me last week…

2011-08-03T15:00:00.005+10:00

Monday: Very, very nearly got hit by one of those 300-tonne skateboarding rhinos while riding to work. Who could have known that there would be a second tram directly behind the one that had just passed me?!

Tuesday: Had 10 minutes to woof down my lunch and (ideally) read my book while sitting in the car. Spent entire 10 minutes trying to find the page I was up to.

Wednesday: Had a very efficient 15 minutes with my accountant doing my tax return. Just long enough for some fucker in a truck to back into my car in the laneway outside. And drive off!

Wednesday (2): Got the times of my children’s parent-teacher interviews mixed around — hence, managed to miss both of them.

Thursday: Took four little girls to the first ballet class of the semester… (each week I pick up said four girls from school at 3.30pm, change said four little girls into complicated ballet outfits, shove said four girls into ballet studio by 4pm, spend next half an hour trying to sort out whose school uniform was whose)… only to realise that I had forgotten to enrol my own child. She and I went and had a hot chocolate.

Friday: Literally wasted half an hour ransacking the house searching for my favourite coat, only to realise my partner had put it away in the cupboard. Of all places! Sheesh…

Hmm, think riding a bike might require clarity and focus. Hell, think life might require clarity and focus.

Sorry for the silly post... Will try for something more profound next time.

On synchronicity and my man turning 40...

2011-07-20T14:39:00.026+10:00

When I was 22, my friend Katie and I saw a terrace house to rent in North Fitzroy, across the road from Edinburgh Gardens. It was the stuff of our dreams.

We were determined and strategic -- rather than wait for the inspection date, we decided to knock on the door and attempt to ingratiate ourselves with whoever was inside.

As we approached the front door, dressed to impress in our cobbled-together faux office-worker outfits (I seem to recall that I was wearing a white suit of all things!), we caught sight of someone familiar sitting on the internal stairs of the adjoining terrace. He was leaning against the wall, talking on the phone with his feet up on the banister.

I had met him once before, a few years earlier, at the Uni Bar in Canberra, where we had both grown up. At the time I had decided he was an arrogant prick and had been harbouring a rather too intent dislike for him ever since. Funny how strong feelings sometimes have to go one or the other.

The tenant set to move out of the house Katie and I wanted to rent happened to be playwright Hannie Rayson. As a VCA graduate, she took pity on two entirely transparent young art students searching for a house to rent and recommended us to the landlord.

The rest, shall we say, is history...

(Left: The kids I ended up having with that not so arrogant after all and in fact rather delicious man living next door.)

Yesterday that man on the staircase turned 40, and I was privileged to wake up next to him for the I-don't-know-how-many-hundreth time.

Not a bad way to spend a life.

(And many years later, just to come full circle, the darling Hannie Rayson launched The Divided Heart. If only I had a recording of her incredible speech! Does anyone remember it? I was too nervous to really take it in but I do remember that she was brilliant and hilarious.)

Ellis unleashes his "wowser-feminism" conspiracy theory

2011-07-07T12:23:00.036+10:00

This ludicrous article from Bob Ellis is barely worthy of comment, really. Except I, along with hundred of others, can’t help myself.

Clearly The Drum saw it as an easy means of courting controversy and therefore traffic to its site. And on that front it worked, inspiring a huge reaction.

Ellis has created his own unique conspiracy theory that “sexual complaint” is “being used to bring down left-leaning and Liberal-reformist artists and politicians”.

According to Ellis, so-called “wowser-feminism” has gone too far in its agenda to kill off the Left — the “Strauss-Kahn Moment” being the final straw.

Note: “left-leaning” is a very broad category in Ellis's book. It seems all artists and politicians cut down by scheming women conveniently morph in to "left-leaning" types once aligned against a common enemy: the wowser-feminist.

I mean, what has the world come to? When did it become legit for women to ruin the blokey fun of Ellis and his mates?

After all, it wasn't that long ago that you were allowed to come on to your secretary at the office Christmas party and it was all a bit of a lark. Hell, in some countries it’s still the done thing to “deflower” the 12-year-olds in your village.

And paedophilia is only a bit worse than schoolyard bullying, isn't it? Playwrights and filmmakers have raped the youngsters in their acting troupe for centuries. It was all in the name of Art, for god’s sake.

Ellis seems to be suggesting that sexually predatory behaviour is just a by-product of creative genius or political brilliance. That we should ignore the crimes of important figures if outweighed by their cultural contribution.

This article is absurd on so many levels. It's all very well to say that some matters are private issues that should not bring into question someone’s ability to do their job; another thing altogether to say we should avoid making people accountable for their blatant abuse of power, breach of responsibilities or, indeed, criminal acts because it may put at risk their future masterpieces or capacity to solve Greece's economic woes.

Yes, there are times when the public, or media, reaction outweighs the misdemeanour in question (the downfall of Labor minister David Campbell after his car was spotted outside a gay resort being a case in point). But, sorry, when did feminists have anything to do with that?! What of the genuinely scary problem of governments increasingly under pressure from the Christian right?

To chuck a series of complex and sometimes severe events in to one bag for the sake of a "neat" argument is not only stupid and offensive, but also undermines any serious (and more interesting) conversation we could have on the subject of private morality versus public good, or on the legislation of behaviour.

No, sorry, my heart does not bleed for an extremely powerful politician who tries to force himself on a woman (and friend of his daughter no less) during an official press interview.

Why, yet again, are women being made responsible for mens' bad behaviour? Are we really meant to believe that for hundreds of years countless famous but hapless blokes have been at the mercy of feminists with an agenda to orchestrate their downfall, especially if they're of the liberal variety?

As for Polanski, surely his story better illustrates the way rich and powerful men manage to avoid paying for their crimes, rather than the opposite — “35 years of harassment”, “despite his evident genius” — as Ellis sees it.

I don't use the word misonyny often, but this crazy little article smacks of it.

Surely great men of genius can find a way to change the world without sniffing their female colleagues' chairs or raping their underage muses.

Taking the Naipaul test

2011-07-04T14:27:00.021+10:00

I'm playing catch-up again, so apologies if it's all ho-hum, yeah yeah, she's banging on with yesterday's news again...

But for those who haven't already heard, there was a bit of a scandal in Britain recently when writer VS Naipaul asserted that there is no woman writer he considers his equal – even, or perhaps especially, Jane Austen. Just all too much sentimental "feminine tosh", apparently.

His reasoning: that not being the "complete master of a house" translates to a woman's writing too. Hmm... naturally.

Suddenly Damon's study showing that, when it comes to good writing, it's them beards that make all the difference isn't looking so mad after all, is it?

As part of Naipaul's wild (or should that be pompous) claim, he added: "I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me."

He's not meaning to be unkind, though, he says. There there, dears, don't go weeping about it or anything, will you? It's not your fault that a gal's world view is, by nature, so "narrow"...

As a response, the Guardian has created the The Naipaul test: Can you tell an author's sex? -- so while you can't hope to match Naipaul's penetrating insight, you might come to a better understanding of why men do it better...

For those who feel inspired to comment below, only rational responses please, and perhaps share with us which VS Naipaul book has affected you most profoundly. (You can jog your memories here).

Why does mother still equal full-time housekeeper?

2011-06-20T16:39:00.026+10:00

Ha ha, not surprising there's 190 online comments (and counting) in response to Kasey Edwards' article in the Age today: Is sharing the chores such a daft idea?

As she says: Motherhood is what I signed up for. What I — and many mothers I know — didn't sign up for was the job of full-time housekeeper and cook as well.

Another recent article on the front page of the Sunday Age said that at the birth of the first child, a woman's housework lifts from about six hours a week to about 15 hours — while a man's does not change at all.

Worse, you know these roles have really solidified when that division of labour doesn't shift even after she has returned to work.

As that story goes on to say: Research shows the norm in two-parent Australian families is that women do 70 per cent of the housework. Even as women's workforce participation has steadily increased since the 1970s, and the average Australian family features a full-time working father and a part-time working mother, women carry about three quarters of the domestic burden.

In her article, Edwards cites Susan Maushart's revelation in The Mask of Motherhood that after the birth of her first child, a woman's entire domestic workload (including childcare) increases by 91 per cent to an average of 55 hours and 48 minutes per week.

By contrast, her partner's workload increases, on average, zero per cent.

Extraordinary, isn't it?

According to stats, the only time the average Australian father actually lifts his housework rate is when his relationship ends! How tragic is that?!

Quite rightly, this issue just ain't going away.

If your man defies this picture of the 'average dad', consider entering him into the Most Mentally Sexy Dad competition, and we can celebrate those men who are showing the way forward! Seems they're still in the minority, sadly.

Porn and feminism continued...

2011-06-18T15:48:00.012+10:00

I have been meaning to get back to the porn issue ever since my previous post sparked so many thought-provoking comments (and great links - see here for those interested).

And today being a day that I've only had to reheat my cup of tea once (so far), I am finally getting on to it. That said, I started this post at 10am this morning and now it's almost 7pm, but we get there in the end, don't we?...

Some of you may have since watched this fairly heated discussion on SlowTV between Gail Dines, Kate Holden, Catharine Lumby and Leslie Cannold. It's worth reading the comments as much as watch the debate.

Among the responses to my post, were these questions from Damon Young: Can women dress in lingerie and not be objects of a 'male gaze'? And when they dress in slacks, blouse and jacket, and grow their pubic hair, do they necessarily avoid this 'gaze'?

I think what he's asking is: Can anything or anyone avoid some objectification? And can banning porn fix this inevitability? (Am I right?!)

Not being an academic, I come at these issues from more of an intuitive/experiential position, and so perhaps using Mulvey's term was a bit throwaway and lazy of me, though the idea of girls being raised to be conscious of the 'male gaze' (and even exploiting the supposed power that this gives them) has always made sense to me...

Is there anything wrong with a woman wearing lingerie with her partner because it's fun to play a role, to play with the 'objectification' or 'distancing' this creates? No. That's not what I'm saying.

But surely there is a big difference between that and an anonymous woman in lingerie being spread across a billboard to sell soft drink...

And another big step away again to a porn video in which a woman is exploited and abused for the sake of turning people on.

And I don't think the issue is whether the actors involved feel empowered or not; perhaps the porn model is happy in her work and perhaps she's getting paid squillions for it, who knows. The point is - if there is a narrative of vistimisation and degradation, do we want this to go unquestioned?

More to the point here, shouldn't parents be aware of the increasing need to help contextualise the sexual content our children might be coming across on the internet?

I don't agree with all Gail Dines says, I sometimes feel repelled by the way she says it, and I'm not sure that all of her proposed solutions are workable. But I respect her concerns that young people might be coming across complex sexual material before they have the maturity or experience to process it or put it in perspective regarding what's 'normal', or real.

I'm not anti-porn as a whole, but I do sympathise with Dines' broader concerns about the 'pornification' of mainstream culture - that is, the way the pornography industry has influenced pop culture and risks distorting our concepts of sex and sexuality.

I think there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the normalisation of hardcore sex acts, and the promotion of unrealistic expectations about how we (especially women) should look, is a growing problem. This, to me, is a matter worthy of our concern and people shouldn't be dismissed as prudes or wowsers for raising the matter.

But mostly, I see it as part of a general drift away, culturally, from what's real; from the joy of blindly feeling our way into things, no matter how clumsily, from a place of curiosity and self-discovery.

The ready availability of extreme porn, and the impact that seems to be having on some people, I see as part of the general problem of internet-induced distraction and dissatisfaction (as you, Damon, discuss so well in your book) - a lack of genuine connectedness and integrity about the way we live.

I don't know the answers, or where this leaves us. Except perhaps with the question: How are we, as individuals and as a society, going to learn discipline and self-restraint in an era of all-too-instant gratification? And I'm not talking about real-life sex here!

Birth art... but not as we know it

2011-06-10T13:09:00.015+10:00

When Jasmine Proust and Tilly Morris asked if I would launch their exhibition, Birth.Art (as featured in The Age on Saturday), I trusted them enough to say yes. But a terrifying vision of purple pastel mandalas and pregnant goddesses did flash through my mind...

Thankfully, my worst fears haven't been realised (not that there isn't a place for a bit of pastel power on occasion...). In contrast, I'm loving just how edgy and witty the Birth.Art works have turned out to be.

As Tilly says:
This show has it all; from rude plants to fluorescent private parts, from inter-species breastfeeding to the theatricalities of the most common birthing arena in the Western world – the hospital.

Come and celebrate birth in all its glory. Argue with theologians and atheists, adopt a possum baby, drink some wine...

Birth.Art
ACU Gallery, 52 Brunswick Street, Fitzroy, Melbourne
Launching Tuesday June 14 (6-8pm), runs until June 30 (Wednesdays-Sundays 12-5pm)

No prizes this year, ladies? Blame natural causes…

2011-06-07T16:43:00.012+10:00

Hey, you know that serious debate we’ve been having about why so few women win literary prizes?

Apparently geneticists at the highly respected H.G. Wells Institute for Sex and Gender have finally worked out why.

But don’t take my word for it. For the full story, visit philosopher Damon Young’s trailblazing blog (and possible front for the illustrious above-mentioned institute)…

Genius or ironing? The female dilemma...

2011-06-06T12:47:00.017+10:00

The trouble is that most women are much more interested in getting the darn ironing under control, or shopping for something cute to slip into when hubby gets home from the office. Guys are just a whole lot more likely to be geniuses.

Ouch!

Who noticed this comment from Joanna Murray-Smith in the weekend paper's M Magazine in response to the question of why there are not more Australian female playwrights working for major companies?

Joanna is probably the most prolific and courageous writer I know. One minute she'll casually mention that some subject or dilemma has peaked her curiosity and the next... wham bam how the f**k does she do it? -- there'll be a new Joanna Murray-Smith production on that very theme opening at the West End or some such place ...

We all know she's one of Australia's chief theatrical exports, and that the reliability of her output means among her brilliant successes are some brilliant failures (or at least lesser successes) -- just as it should be.

In fact, she is a bit of a genius... though I know she wouldn't really give herself that tag.

I can't help feeling, though, that she very consciously threw this one out there. It's quite a statement, and Joanna certainly doesn't seem to mind stirring the pot occasionally.

Who is it directed at? Whether it was partially tongue-in-cheek (or entirely sarcastic, as Simmone suggests), I certainly still felt the bomb exploding under me!

Is porn a feminist issue?

2011-06-03T14:25:00.021+10:00

I save my online TV-viewing for when I have a big pile of washing to fold. Which is great for killing two birds with one stone -- but not so great for being up to date with what's going on in screen-land (although monster piles of washing do seem to form with ridiculous frequency!).

So I'm always making comments on things when the debate's all a bit last week (this one included) -- apologies for that. But I'm curious to know who among you watched the Sydney Writers' Festival panel on ABC's Q&A a couple of weeks ago? And, if you saw it, what did you think of the porn debate?!

I have always had a lot of time for Leslie Cannold and her writings, but I found her attack on fellow feminist Gail Dines a bit confounding.

From all I've heard from Dines, a professor of sociology touring Australia to promote her book Pornland, she is basing her views on extensive research. Whatever you think about porn, she is presenting valid evidence that it is distorting some people's expectations of sex.

Her particular concern is the availability of porn to young people, who may not have the maturity to discrimate between the kinds of sites and images they come across.

Certainly I know that I have already been shocked by some of the sexualised and sexist advertising that has popped up alongside otherwise very innocent kids' games on the web.

To align Dines with wowsers and Christians seemed particularly unfair.

I agree with Cannold that the issues of women's exploitation and inequality are bigger than "Brazilian waxes" and there are more obvious issues to campaign over. But to me this ignores the fact that the pervasiveness of porn (and Brazilian waxes) are symptomatic of the broader issues for young women -- all part of the way the porn and beauty industries exploit women's sense of physical inadequacy, and warp some men's perception of what's normal.

I'm not sure the impact of porn is such a "fringe" thing, as Cannold suggests -- separate to the more concrete aspects of women's lives. Are they not all part of a general problem for women of having to constantly battle unrealistic expectations of themselves and their bodies?

Cannold says she's worried about activists getting caught up in protesting against Brazilian waxes over more important issues. Personally, I'd be more concerned about young women not becoming self-empowered activists in the first place because they're too busy having Brazilian waxes (much less campaigning against them)!

Without wanting to sound like a conspiracy theorist, the beauty industry exerts a very real control over women. How much of women's time and money gets invested into fashion and beauty that might otherwise be invested into self-education and personal development? Let alone feminist action.

Anyway, as Dines says, she is one person focusing on a single issue. That doesn't mean she holds it up as the only or even the most important issue for feminism. But there does seem to be a very fine and confused line between women's sexual empowerment and exploitation, and I think it's not a trivial matter for debate.

Apparently, after her appearance on the show, Dines said, "I felt like I had walked into an adolescent boys' club with everyone sniggering about pornography."

(There was also a very interesting debate about the reponsibility of art and artists... Though I think Michael Cunningham got a tad over-excited about being allowed to use the word "fuck" on Australian television.)

Love to hear your thoughts!

And while you're at it, check this out!?! Something for my next post...

Oranges are not the only fruit...

2011-05-25T14:05:00.016+10:00

I should just get a t-shirt printed with the words, "Hey, I heard this great thing on Radio National yesterday..." on it, so when people see me coming, we can skip the preliminaries...

In fact it should be the name of my blog, really. (Hear that, Radio National, if you're looking for an official blogger, I'm your gal...)

Anyway, to cut to the chase, yesterday's Book Show offered up yet another round of particularly enlightening conversations.

The first about the latest push for Australia to have a literary prize for women, partly inspired by the fact that not a single female author has made the shortlist for the Miles Franklin for the second time in three years. It has been won by a woman just 13 out of 50 times since the prize began in 1957.

A passionate bunch of Australian women writers and publishers have started a campaign to establish The Stella Prize (represented by the mango, just to explain the pic above), an equivalent to Britain's Orange Prize.

Following that was this (not unrelated) discussion about a new study exposing a huge gender imbalance in 20th century children's literature. Apparently, on average, boys are almost twice as likely as girls to be the main character in kids' books!

Divided Hearter Sally Rippin was among the commentators on this matter.

Also, all the way back in the first week of May, Ms Danni "finger-on-the-pulse" Landa tipped me off to what is now of course the word on the street ('scuse the pun).

Yes -- Slutwalking. At that point, I had no idea what she was talking about, let alone what was to unfold...

There have been so many meaty articles, debates, conversations on this issue since that I couldn't list them here (though you could do worse than start with Clem Bastow's explanation here). But how great it is to hear them!

Whatever the complexities that exist around the use of the word "slut", around raunch culture, about porn and cosmetic surgery and the hero worship that goes down around sports stars... all of which are vital debates we need to keep having...

The fact remains: rape is a hideous crime, which no woman deserves or "asks for". One which forces so many women around the world to live in fear.

I'm not sure of the official site, but you can find the details for Slutwalk Melbourne here.

An exchange of thoughts on Emma Donoghue's Room...

2011-05-17T12:53:00.019+10:00

Long time no see! Sorry about that... Thank you to anyone who is still checking in with me or contacting me about The Divided Heart. So much to talk about...

But first, I was recently approached by Harry Bingham, writer and founder of UK-based The Writers' Workshop and The Word Cloud, an online writers' network (which looks like an amazing resource) about doing a blog exchange.

He had come across my initial response to Emma Donoghue's novel, Room, which I'll re-publish below.

Room is one of those books that inspires fierce debate, and how cool is it that we can now have these debates across oceans and time zones and with people we would otherwise have never met. So thanks to Harry for getting in touch. And to my mate Sally Rippin, who always knows which books to lend me just at the right time!

Here's the exchange... as Harry says, "Get stuck in yourself. Tell us why we're wrong. or right. Or anything." On his blog or mine or, even better, both... (Although, I think it's worth saying -- while there isn't any great detail about the plot here, unless you've read the book or at least lots about it, there should be a general *spoiler alert*.)

My initial post:
Have any of you read Emma Donoghue's Room?

The difficulty with talking about this book is that there’s almost no way of doing so without giving away key plot points.

Nevertheless, I can say that I can't remember the last time I read a book that had me so gripped, and affected me so physically! At one stage I was reading in the bath and was so utterly compelled to keep reading, the water went completely cold around me and I didn't even notice.

I had some small misgivings — perhaps only to be discussed with those who have also read the book, in the comments, with a 'spoiler alert' — but they didn't take away from its overall impact.

The main reason I am mentioning the book here, though, is because I think it’s a great example of a novel written by someone who has used their access to a child's way of talking and seeing the world as material for writing.

Some of us have more access to our 'child selves' than others — or at least memory of what it was like to be young — and I'm not trying to suggest that you cannot understand or write from a child’s perspective unless you have kids… but it sure does help.

The authenticity of this book's five-year-old narrator's voice — with it's cute grammatical errors and limited perspective — suggests close observation of her children.

I also felt great admiration for the 'Ma' character, who shows such remarkable creativity and discipline in raising and educating her child, under the most horrific and potentially damaging circumstances. And at the same time, this focus and need for routine that he requires has been her saviour.

Admittedly there were moments when I felt frustrated by the five-year-old narrative — not the character himself, who remains loveable throughout (quite a feat in itself), but the way his viewpoint kept you at a distance from the central horrors of the story.

But then I realised that this avoids the sensationalism that its theme could easily have exploited, and that this book is much more about the force of the parent–child bond. It raises all sorts of questions about the nature of freedom and about a child's needs. Also their capacity for fierce love and courage.

Harry's comment:
Well, what a book! More than that, what an audacious concept. To take the true-life Joseph Fritzl story and fictionalise it – what a tasteless, ill-judged act that could have been.

And Donoghue’s Room is not seedy, not exploitative. What's more, Rachel, I think you’re right about the voice. This for example: 'I choose Meltedy Spoon with the white all blobby on his handle when he leaned on the pan of boiling pasta by accident. Ma doesn’t like Meltedy Spoon but he’s my favourite because he’s not the same.'

No question, that’s beautifully done. 'Meltedy', not Melty, or Melted, or even meltedy. And the imprecision of 'the white all blobby' (Jack’s phrase) but the precision of Ma's 'pan of boiling pasta'. The personification of the spoon. But above all that achingly touching phrase, 'because he's not the same'.

And yet, I ended up not liking the book, and here's why. If you take a subject of such darkness to write about it is your responsibility as an author – as a human – to honour the darkness. To follow the logic of your own storyline unflinchingly to where it leads.

But it seems to me (and I want to avoid spoilers) that Room evades every hard question. At the end of the book, everyone's fine. It was a bit weird adjusting, but only a bit. Jack and Ma had some difficult moments, but give them a few weeks and it's all over.

The book seemed like a Disney version of the truth, like wishful thinking. Do we honestly think that a pair who had undergone what Ma and Jack had undergone would not be severely scarred by their ordeal? Of course not. We know that people who suffer much less trauma are permanently injured. Donoghue's faultlessly appealing telling lifts her over and away from the painful question of what is actually being told. I think if you write about Fritzl, you need to deal with Fritzl. Donoghue writes beautifully – and I don’t for a second begrudge her success – but it’s not a book I’d recommend myself.

And finally, my comment on Harry's comment (since he kindly gave me right of reply):
I agree that if Donoghue had been writing a non-fiction book about Fritzl, then she would have had certain clear responsibilities. But surely as a fiction writer, as long as she is not directly harming or exploiting anyone, her main responsibility is to her story; and to fulfilling her own intentions as best she can.

I suspect what compelled Donoghue to write Room was curiosity about how a mother might manage in such extreme circumstances. After all, alongside the more horrific and traumatic elements of these stories is the question of how a person might cope with the boredom and banality of long days in captivity without going mad. For a mother, this would mean the trials of dealing with the day-to-day needs of your children in the most deficient of circumstances.

Like you, Harry, I initially had similar misgivings about Jack's innocent viewpoint keeping us at arm’s length from the true awfulness of his and Ma's circumstances. But I concluded that this was one of the book's main themes: a mother’s instinct to protect, and the limits of her power to do so. For Jack, their world, though at times confusing, was also comforting in its confines; it was all Jack knew. And therein lies the kind of questions I think Donoghue was seeking to explore.

Besides, on the matter of darkness, I don't know if you can get much grimmer than the image of a naive boy hiding in a cupboard and counting the number of times the bed squeaks as his captor–father rapes his young mother.

I agree the book hits some false notes in its second half, particularly the response of Ma's family, which at times seems too casual and careless. And it's true that we don't get a full sense of Ma's suffering, but again I think Donoghue is more interested in looking at the impact of the inevitable disruption to the intensity of the mother–child bond.

There are plenty of other, often much more sensationalist, sources out there if you're looking to rub your nose in the sickening reality of these real-life cases. But Donoghue was perhaps trying for something more poignant with her novel.

I think the fact that we're debating these questions is enough of a reason to recommend Room as a gripping and thought-provoking read.

Giving yourself permission to write

2011-03-08T22:24:00.012+11:00

Recently I had the pleasure of interviewing Jane Sullivan about her new novel Little People (published by Scribe, out in April) for a feature that should be in the next Big Issue mag.

As well as a novelist, Jane is a prominent literary critic and Age columnist.

Little People is a rollicking, theatrical feat of imagination. One highly original Australian novel!

But you can read more about her book in the Big Issue story...

Both being working/writing mothers, Jane and I inevitably fell into talking about the struggle for finding time to write, but only a brief mention of this issue made it into the final cut of the article. So I thought I'd share Jane's words in full here...

The shift between journalism and literature is like a little switch that goes on and off in my head. I love writing about books and writing, which is my specialist field. They work in tandem quite well but I must say there are days when I wish I had more time.

It’s often a relief to get to the fiction because it’s fun to make things up and indulge yourself. But at the same time, it’s very, very hard. With fiction, I’m never sure what I’m doing. It’s much scarier than non-fiction.

Sometimes it’s good to have that discipline of the journalism. You have weeks when the fiction’s not going that well, you feel a bit lost, and you feel at least you feel you know what I’m doing here — I can write these words, I can get this money and I can see my byline in the paper, and I think well that’s done. And I get an immediate response from readers, which is nice, and you don’t get from fiction, which talks so many years.

Unfortunately the thing that always gets shelved if you’ve got a lot on is the fiction. It’s not like you’ve got a deadline next week, which is a shame.

Now I have a studio at Glenfern. Just having a little space where you can go and no interruptions — no one asking if you can give them lifts or give them money, and you don’t have to jump up and put the washing on or do a meal and the phone isn’t ringing or every five minutes you check your email — you don’t do any of that, you just sit there and write.

Everybody should have somewhere like Glenfern to go. The trouble with a room of one’s own for a woman is it’s usually in the house where everyone can bust in and interrupt you, and if a mother you can’t very well say ‘No, go away.’

So it’s very hard to get a room of one’s own which isn’t a room where everyone else comes. I don’t know the answer for that really.

I’ve talked to young men who are working, supporting their family, and so have similar pressures that women have. But women internalise that [mothering] role so much that it’s very hard to say to ourselves, ‘I am a writer and I am entitled to some space to work on my work and put that first for a while.’

It’s very hard to do that when everything else in your life is saying ‘I am a wife and mother and I need to earn money and all that’s so important, and writing is something I do when I’ve finished doing all those other things.’

Perhaps that’s where the difference lies in that men, on the whole, are better at giving themselves that permission.

Literature still a male domain, it seems

2011-02-12T12:38:00.020+11:00

Another article circulating among us thinking women (and men) lately is the Guardian report on a shocking new study showing that leading literary magazines favour reviews written by men about books by men.

Fellow reader/writer Danni -- who calls herself my "newspaper article stalker", which is a very self-deprecating way of saying "one seriously on-the-ball woman feeding me great material" -- sent me this article for blog comment.

It's taken me so long to get round to writing anything that I suggested to Danni that I may as well just post the emails she and I sent back and forth on the issue... So, here we go...

DANNI: I'm sure it comes as no surprise to female writers that males dominate the literary world. This research has given the issue some coverage. All the major outlets in the study say they will make changes but it will be interesting to see who actually does.

Some of the comments are ... I can't even begin to think of a way of describing them without expletives. From the TLS: 'Not too appalled ... authorship is not 50/50...' and this piece of patronising gold: 'And while women are heavy readers, we know they are heavy readers of the kind of fiction that is not likely to be reviewed in the pages of the TLS.' Utter bullshit!

The idiot continues with this lovely morsel: 'The TLS is only interested in getting the best reviews of the most important books.' The not so hidden meaning there that women not only don't write important books but are actually incapable of doing so (and reading them too so it seems!)

The whole tone of the article reeks of a thinly disguised antipathy ... or perhaps I am over-reacting because I am tired, because my son is sick and I was awake all night ... oh no, it wouldn't be that, it must be 'cause I'm on the rag!

RACHEL: I promise I will write something about this ASAP. I am still shell-shocked by juggling my new 4-day working week (UGH! Creative life? What creative life?!) and my youngest's first week at school, so know exactly how you feel.

But the article definitely deserves a response. Apart from the bullshit quotes you mentioned, what I thought was most telling was the last quote, about women perhaps not having the confidence. That, to me, is getting at a real hidden problem.

DANNI: It's the confidence thing and its also a time thing. How much of a lack of confidence can be attributed to lack of time to spend on work? The majority of women just don't have the time, even those without kids seem to be constantly obligated to others (not allowed to be the brooding artist). I think generally there is the confidence in ability but because there is just not concentrated time available so many women think that their work will be inferior ... but I am not sure that that is the case as your book pointed out on so many occasions. Having copious amounts of time does not necessarily equate to quality work (although it would make life a lot easier!).

And beyond all those things, is the pure and simple fact of ingrained institutional discrimination ... not the old-fashioned kind: it's not malicious; it's unconscious. These publications don't have women writers because they don't ask for them. There are plenty of women artists available for consideration, who would be honoured to contribute to these magazines, but no one thinks to commission them.

Anyway enough of this! Got to go do the bloody shopping!

RACHEL: Yes, I completely agree! When I read the mention of confidence, that's exactly where that took me, too: why does no-one ever mention the fact that women have so much less TIME for such things; that they are so obligated elsewhere... which affects everything women are in a position to do? I might just post our convo on my blog. But first, I'll finish emptying the dishwasher...

As you can see, Danni pretty much said it all. But to go on (as I do)... there are all sorts of invisible issues here. Certainly I know for myself that I would love to be reviewing more books, but barely get time to read the things, let alone write about them.

It's entirely plausible that fewer women are putting their hand up for these (let's admit it, usually badly paid) tasks because non-work time is spent doing housework, buying school uniforms, driving little people between football clinics and swimming lessons... Down time, if any, is ideally spent asleep (or, preferably in a bath, if not feeling too guilty about the water-use).

I, sadly, find it almost impossible to justify time spent on activities that are about more elusive, long-term goals, like establishing a name as a writer.

As one insightful commentator put it: "Novels, poems, plays-----labours of love extracted in the hours between near nonstop other jobs."

That said, I was still gobsmacked by the the stats showing that, among authors reviewed by the New York Review of Books in 2010, 83% were men. As for the London Review of Books, 74% of books reviewed by in 2010 were by men, and their reviewers: 78% male.

Perhaps publishers should start sending their books out wrapped in brown paper!

Interestingly, Granta claims it commissions equally between men and women, but still ends up with a bias (featuring 65% male writers).

We know women read and write quality literature. So is it that women writers are still dismissed more readily; or is it that less women are submitting their work to journals because of these other, less tangible barriers, i.e. lack of confidence, lack of time?

Statistics start the conversation, which is good, but the causes can be harder to get at...

And then you get comments like the one we've mentioned above, from the ed of the Times Literary Supplement -- "And while women are heavy readers, we know they are heavy readers of the kind of fiction that is not likely to be reviewed in the pages of the TLS" -- and you realise that sometimes it's just a plain old case of overt sexism, alive and well.

You can check out the full study, conducted by Vida, US organisation for women in the literary arts, here.

Writing the child's voice

2011-01-24T22:53:00.014+11:00

Have any of you read Emma Donoghue’s Room?

The difficulty with talking about this book is that there’s almost no way of doing so without giving away key plot points.

Nevertheless, I can say that I can’t remember the last time I read a book that had me so gripped, and affected me so physically! At one stage I was reading in the bath and was so utterly compelled to keep reading, the water went completely cold around me and I didn't even notice.

I had some small misgivings — perhaps only to be discussed with those who have also read the book, in the comments, with a ‘spoiler alert’ — but they didn't take away from its overall impact.

The main reason I am mentioning the book here, though, is because I think it’s a great example of a novel written by someone who has used their access to a child's way of talking and seeing the world as material for writing.

Some of us have more access to our ‘child selves’ than others — or at least memory of what it was like to be young — and I’m not trying to suggest that you cannot understand or write from a child’s perspective unless you have kids… but it sure does help.

The authenticity of this book’s five-year-old narrator’s voice — with it’s cute grammatical errors and limited perspective — suggests close observation of her children.

I also felt great admiration for the 'Ma' character, who shows such remarkable creativity and discipline in raising and educating her child, under the most horrific and potentially damaging circumstances. And at the same time, this focus and need for routine that he requires has been her saviour.

Admittedly there were moments when I felt frustrated by the five-year-old narrative — not the character himself, who remains loveable throughout (quite a feat in itself), but the way his viewpoint kept you at a distance from the central horrors of the story.

But then I realised that this avoids the sensationalism that its theme could easily have exploited, and that this book is much more about the force of the parent–child bond. It raises all sorts of questions about the nature of freedom and about a child's needs. Also their capacity for fierce love and courage.

I’m sure many of you have read it, so would love to hear your thoughts...

(And sorry not to respond to the very thoughtful comments on the previous post yet... will get to that ASAP).

Parenting: East versus West

2011-01-17T21:25:00.026+11:00

My friend Sally Rippin today sent me this extraordinary article by lawyer and writer Amy Chua, called Why Chinese Mothers are Superior.

This story has attracted more comments (nearing 7,000 at last count!) than any story previously published by the Wall Street Journal, and has set off a fierce debate on so-called Eastern versus Western parenting styles.

It has waded into parenting territory at a time when there are various hot-button debates going on about whether modern kids have too little freedom, too much praise, too little real competition, too much pressure, too little responsibilities and so on, and so on.

Funnily for me, Chua's article is the first thing I've read since returning from a beach holiday (yesterday) where I deliberately focussed on being less controlling and less fearful in how I deal with my kids; to give them more trust, more room to explore their own boundaries and learn from their own mistakes. Holidays are a good time to work on that stuff!

I don't really understand the motivation for the kind of parenting Chua describes. While I sympathise with the need for discipline, and the role parents play in helping their kids to learn the benefits of hard work, her approach seems dangerously extreme to me.

Doubtless her "Eastern model" is a way to create children who have great technical proficiency. But for what? Where is the fun and the joy? And what of the role of creativity and the imagination?

Surely without that, you risk shaping an immature child, confused about their true motivations, who might be able to pay a note-perfect Rachmaninoff but can't invest it with any real emotional sensitivity, let alone create anything original of his or her own.

I'd love to know where you guys sit on this issue... And, while you're at it... on this one too!

The Unspeakable

2010-12-19T23:46:00.012+11:00

"I shouldn't have had them." ...It's such a huge thing to admit. And perhaps it was only a fleeting regret. Or perhaps it wasn't...

These were the words spoken by a friend of writer SA Jones, which led her to write a very interesting guest post for the Kill Your Darlings journal website. It raises the "taboo subject" of feeling regret at having children.

If you can snatch yourself a few moments to check it out, it's worth reading on through the comments, where readers have cited some stunning poems on the theme of maternal ambivalence...

Divided Hearts on the radio

2010-12-09T16:51:00.008+11:00

Hey there loyal friends

Apologies for the lack of recent blogging. Rest assured, I have not run out of things to say yet... so watch this space.

In the meantime, Clare Bowditch is interviewing me (there's a little role-reversal for you) next Monday at 8.30pm on local ABC Melbourne 774AM.

She's doing the 7-10pm slot every night next week, BTW, so tune in.

We are going to have (yet another) chat about how to juggle family responsibilities with creative urges; the value of passing on creative expression to our children; the social benefits of creativity... That kinda thing.

It's a talkback, so please do call in if you can and tell us your own experiences/ideas on these matters. Be lovely to hear you (kind readers still checking in on me).

Dads and domestic labour

2010-10-08T11:58:00.013+11:00

Yesterday the winner of the Most Mentally Sexy Dad comp, which I helped judge, was announced on Radio National’s Life Matters program.

I think it’s great when something started as a bit of a lark among friends finds, quite by accident, that it has tapped in to the cultural zeitgeist — and that is definitely true of this comp.

It has offered a really positive way in to discussing what can otherwise be such a banal, bogged-down issue for couples — i.e. who does what around the house.

Here is a bunch of couples changing the blueprint for what constitutes a contemporary family life; men who are fully up to negotiating with their partners how things are going to run in terms of work, housework and childcare.

In fact, I think the Most Mentally Sexy Dad competition might be one of the more powerful campaigns we’ve seen in calling on men to move beyond the lip service that gets paid to respect and equality towards acting like they mean it. Not for some abstract ideal, but because it is meaningful to the women and children they love, and gives their relationship a better chance of long-lasting passion.

What was so touching about most of the entrants was their basic awareness that to show true love and commitment to their partners meant sharing the load. In fact, they took this for granted.

These men aren’t just “babysitting” the kids or “helping out” around the home, but fully engaging in the realities of keeping the family juggernaut afloat, emotionally and practically, so that everyone has more time for their own interests and for each other.

Hopefully it won’t have to be such a conscious shift for the next generation, and there won’t be a need for such a competition, great as it’s been.

I also have an article on this subject — the division of domestic labour — in the latest issue of Kill Your Darlings.

The editors have ensured me my next copy will arrive in a plain brown paper bag after the previous one gave my son terrible nightmares. The poor darling thought I was reading a manual on how to kill off him and his sister!

It took me days to convince him that he could trust me enough to tell him what his bad dreams were about. Oh dear…

Ms Bowditch and the PM

2010-08-19T16:53:00.011+10:00

Among the many great achievements of the women featured in The Divided Heart, the smokin' gun that is Clare Bowditch recently scored an interview with our first female PM.

You can watch an edited version of that conversation here.

She says her approach was to use the most of her "lay-persons status", and try to talk from the heart about all the same things we talk about at our thinking-people dinner parties.

"So yes, I did grill her on most of the big ones, as respectfully as I could (we had about an hour together in total)," she said. "On a lighter note, she touched my Lucky Cricket Ball, and even showed me how to improve my impersonationa of her with the "Karate Chop Talking Technique": see!"

Hope that cricket ball is secretly magic...

And while you are under the spell of our bewitching Ms Bowditch, please consider purchasing her new album "Modern Day Addiction" at your local record store or with two bonus tracks via itunes--that'd be here.

If you want to read a little about the album's design (another collaboration with Kat McLeod), Lucy Feagins has a great interview with Clare on her fabulous blog, The Design Files.

But the album is not all style. In fact it's all about substance!

Feminism and motherhood

2010-07-30T13:39:00.008+10:00

The organiser of the Cherchez La Femme IV: Feminism and Motherhood event on next week asked me to suggest some themes for the evening.

This is the little rant I sent her:

OK, feminism and motherhood. I will definitely be able to give the personal account, I suppose, as I am no academic, though I have certainly given the subject a lot of thought.

To me, motherhood seems to be the final frontier for western feminism. It's the point at which it all falls down! (Hence, the conflation of motherhood, perhaps.) Women can be going along very nicely, and then *bang* they become mothers, find themselves alone all day with babies, drowning in domestic chaos, and wonder when they agreed to all this. (That's not to say that we don't all have to deal with the realities of life, or that having babies isn't also lovely, but I do think it is the point at which men's and women's lives can cease to resemble each others' in all sorts of confronting ways.)

All that lip service paid to equality still doesn't seem to translate into the private sphere. Mothers are still the ones taking it all on, keeping their families afloat, emotionally, domestically etc., even though they are also (often equal) financial contributors.

Mothers are under an extraordinary amount of pressure from all sides. Society has not kept up with their expectations and then they are blamed for it--either punished for being a nag, or not a good enough mother, or not a dedicated enough worker... That's the guilty, vulnerable space backlashers step into and exploit--women (usually) who have decided that those old roles and divisions of labour made so much sense after all and wouldn't it be easier if we all just scuttled back to the kitchen. Which no doubt it would be... but at whose expense?

So yes, structural change is necessary. But also how do we go about changing men and women's own hard-wiring/patterns of behaviour? Will structural change send enough of a message to men that they will start putting on that load of washing without being asked?!

What do you reckon? If have other ideas of pressing issues that should should be covered, please let me know.

Thank the Lord it's being held in a pub. I think I'll need that drink!

Feminism in the pub

2010-07-20T15:01:00.010+10:00

Cherchez la femme is a French phrase meaning "Look for the woman".

It originally referred to any case where a man behaved badly, out of character, or brought about his own ruination: look for the woman – she will be the cause. He will either be trying to impress her, possess her, or free himself from her clutches.

Don't ya love it when women are blamed for men's behaviour?!

Nowadays, in English usage, the phrase has come to mean "Look for the root cause of the problem".

No doubt both definitions will come into play at these regular "feminism in the pub" sessions in Melbourne...

Cherchez la Femme is a monthly digest of pop culture and current affairs from a feminist perspective. With regular guests and audience participation strongly encouraged, its organisers have created something more dynamic than a lecture, more stimulating than bingo, and more useful than shaking your fist at the sky.

As you know, women are not funny and feminists have no sense of humour, so I’m afraid there will be no comedic element. Take your medicine.

These sessions are on the first Tuesday of every month. The next one is on 3 August with the topic: Feminism and Motherhood.

I will be having a bit of a rant, along with Natasha Ludowyk and Louise Keogh, and anyone else who wants to put in their two bobs worth.

(Mothers are never short on opinions, so should be a feisty evening!! Or you could stay at home occupying yourself in a more demure fashion a la mademoiselle above...)

When: Tuesday, 3 August 2010, 7–9pm

Where: The Fox Hotel, cnr Wellington St & Alexandra Pde, Collingwood

Cost: $5 entry

Mentally Sexy Dads on Life Matters

2010-06-25T16:59:00.007+10:00

If you didn't catch it this morning, you can now listen online to today's ABC Radio Life Matters talkback program, all about the Most Mentally Sexy Dad comp, of which I am lucky enough to be a judge.

My fellow guests, philosopher Damon Young and writer/competition organiser Clint Greagan are two very impressive blokes, as were the callers.

As producer Amanda Armstrong said: "It reminds me once again that there’s a quiet and positive revolution in gender roles happening out there."

Badinter and the tyranny of motherhood

2010-06-22T12:15:00.020+10:00

When I first spotted this article about French feminist Elisabeth Badinter, I thought perhaps finally someone had put words to a largely unarticulated feeling I’ve had for a while: that in the push to reassert the value of mothering, a very self-sacrificial model of motherhood has re-emerged.

(The time it has taken me to get round to writing this ridiculously long post could be proof of Badinter’s point!…)

But in reading the article, although some of her arguments are sound, I think she has the wrong targets in her sight. And more than that, I couldn’t help feeling that her ideas are a denial of all that’s lovely about parenting.

For those who haven’t read the article (Badinter’s new book isn’t available in English yet), the central gist of her argument is that the rise of a new version of the “good mother” is creating unforseen levels of guilt and self-sacrifice among women.

A “subterranean ideological war” is how Badinter describes the push for so-called “natural” mothering, which she associates with breastfeeding, co-sleeping, the use of cloth nappies and other “masochistic” practices.

Ecologists, breastfeeding advocates and paediatricians are responsible for this return to “naturalism”, depriving couples of their sex life and even driving down birthrates, she says.

There is no doubt that when it comes to modes of mothering, there have been strong trends over the years — ranging from foolish advice to sinister attempts to control women’s behaviour.

But blaming breastfeeding “zealots”, the environmental movement and even babies themselves (mothers' "Great Oppressor" is how Badinter describes them) seems misguided to me. Sometimes it’s a case of weighing up a baby’s wellbeing against a mother’s sanity, certainly, but I would say there is now a pretty solid consensus on the benefits of breastfeeding that isn’t just a disguise for pushing women back into the home.

Badinter is speaking to women, like herself, who can afford wet nurses and nannies. Breastfeeding troubles aside, bottle-feeding can only liberate a mother in the way she describes if there’s someone to hand the bottle over to.

As for ecologists, I get very tired of the idea that environmentalists have some vested interest beyond the survival of humanity and the planet. It's hardly fun to be peddling the notion of our impending self-annihilation. (Just a little communist plot to drive us all backwards…) For Badinter’s generation, baby formula and disposable nappies might have been among the keys to liberating mothers. Now many of us are recognising them as part of a deeper crisis.

(And we know that milk powder has hardly proved liberating for third-world women, where far more horrific motives were at work in its introduction, with tragic results.)

For Badinter, feminism has always meant aiming for equality with men in terms of sharing in their privileges. But since the 70s, women (and some men) have begun to question many of the values attached to those apparent privileges. It has perhaps been one of the greatest surprises for older generations of feminists that, given the choice, many educated mothers are actively choosing to stay at home or work part time.

Rather than blind allegiance to fashion, could it not be women’s own instincts that are driving the take-up of natural birth, co-sleeping, staying at home during the early years and other forms of “attachment” parenting, at least in part?

The difference now — and this seems to be what Badinter fails to recognise — is that for most middle-class women, these are often active, informed choices rather than the result of a lack of options or a response to society’s expectations.

And many women are embracing motherhood as a significant part of their identity — for good reasons, as it is one of the few truly transformative experiences in life, and offers a unique opportunity for self-knowledge.

That said — yes, we’ve all seen examples of attachment parenting gone too far, where parents have failed to set the kind of boundaries that children and, arguably, parents need. But are these really the majority?

Surely the fact that twice as many women are childless now as were 30 years ago has more to do with a mix of choice, birth control and circumstances than an increase in fear about what mothering will entail.

So what does this mentality shift (which I agree with Badinter exists) represent? Is this move to more intensive modes of mothering about informed women making choices that match their instincts? Or is it driven by guilt? Part of a backlash against feminism’s “false” promise that we could have it all?

Worse, in trying to have it all, have women decided it’s just all too hard? That the lack of real choices is causing them to fall back on the path of least resistance?

Another question: is the pressure educated families now feel to run a sustainable household (food gardens, shopping locally…, i.e. time-consuming) falling at the feet of women? (For another post, perhaps…)

The pendulum is definitely still swinging...

Badinter may have children (three, in fact) but the tone of her argument has the same whiff of repulsion as her mentor's, Simone de Beauvior, who couldn’t even stand the sight of a pregnant woman.

While I wouldn’t have minded outsourcing the hours I’ve spent combing nits out of my children’s hair or the endless loads of washing that form like a monster in the corner — and though I am frequently frustrated by the lack of time for my own interests — I wouldn’t actually choose a more distant relationship with my children, a la the French model, even if I could afford one (in the form of a nanny).

Therein lies the bind for so many mothers.

In a sense, Badinter is suggesting that if you want to be truly liberated, you have no choice but to be a “mediocre” mother”. But most women don’t want to have to choose between being an involved parent, being engaged in meaningful work and being an active participant in public life — let alone having strong relationships and creative lives.

As Badinter says, the French have got it right with their state-funded crèche system. Whatever you think of her idea that the state makes up for men’s “deficiencies” (clearly French women gave up on men long ago, if Badinter is anything to go by), it is a system that respects women’s right to selfhood.

Surely there is an argument for progressive naturalism? In a form that doesn’t negate women’s independence and self-realisation.

As Christy outlines so eloquently here, in targeting children as the "tyrants" holding women back, Badinter lets the real culprits off the hook — that is a state and economy that still fails to properly support women's needs and rights.

I have whacked this out, and it's a bit of an immediate reaction to the tone of Badinter's argument. I also have a lot of sympathy for some of her warnings... But that will have to keep for a later post...

Mother or masochist?

2010-06-17T16:51:00.007+10:00

Many of you would have seen this story about French feminist Elisabeth Badinter in last weekend's Australian.

I had to nick the page from my local cafe because I had three kids vying for my lap as I was trying to read it. But finally got around to finishing it and have covered the paper in my fervent scribbles. Will try to weave them into a coherent response... Next post...

Reconciling the creative and maternal 'selves'

2010-06-07T15:04:00.005+10:00

Thank you to those who responded to my “How do you do it?” post.

You’d think writing The Divided Heart would have quelled my curiosity about this — but I am just as fascinated as ever to hear about how people organise their lives, especially when it comes to parenthood and creativity.

I know that everyone’s lives are different — some of us work, some don’t, we have babies or grown-up kids, we have supportive partners or no partner at all…

But these are some of the possible strategies I took (and will hold on to) from what you wrote:

- When the kids are asleep that's your time. Don't do chores at night.
- Ask your parent/s to stay for a week and give you some time.
- Routine is the key; see it as work, sit down and work, work, work.
- Sequester a number of hours on Saturday and Sunday mornings when you refuse all other engagements and commitments.
- Continuity; two or three times a week, go off early in the morning to a local cafe for an hour, forsaking a shower for writing.
- Prioritise and work to a study-like timetable; like budgeting, but with time.
- Act as you would if self-employed: go to the computer and ignore the dishes/laundry etc, the same way you have to if you go out to an office with a boss.
- Catch public transport as consistent time for yourself.
- Set the kids up with their own craft cupboard so they can help themselves to what they need.
- Think about changing the medium you work in so it can be left safely about.
- Teach them to use the toaster and butter bread.
- Ignore the housework for as long as possible.
- “Gift” yourself a regular art class or course when overwhelmed by the day-to-day work and “should do's”; then you’ve paid for it and it is timetabled.

I loved the image of Emma standing inside her pined-for studio, inhaling the aroma of leather and saying, “Hello studio, I miss you”.

But as she says, her “lil girl deserves a whole lotta cuddles from her Mum while she's so small”.

Perhaps this is what Frances is getting at with her question to me: “What did your mother fight for, Rachel?”

And her statement: “I suspect that the answer lies in Alix Kates Shulman: what mothers won't tell their daughters is that they will fall in love with their children.”

Frances (and Shulman) is right — no-one can explain to you how much you will love your own children. That is exactly why I struggle so much to reconcile my creative and maternal selves (which of course are not totally separate but do have competing urges at times).

It has taken me a long time to come to terms with the fact that I will not be giving my kids the kind of “ideal” childhood of my fantasies.

They deal with a lot of chaos, and maybe at times they pick up on my stress and frustrations. But I love them to death, and they know it.

If I had to pin down what my mum fought for, as a woman and activist of the 70s, it would be this: that I get the chance to make the most of my choices — including, but not only, the choice to be a mother.

I struggle with the limitations imposed by motherhood — that is true. That does not take away from how much I love my children.

What did my mother fight for? A situation in which women can love their children, and enjoy being mothers, without it having to mean a total negation of the self, as it too often required in the past.

Music, my love

2010-06-06T00:07:00.014+10:00

I wonder if all artists are secretly (or not so secretly) envious of artists working in other art forms. For me, it’s music. As someone who writes and occasionally paints/draws, I am always conscious of music’s greater power; of its innate capacity to transport in a way that all other art forms aspire to but rarely attain.

Like so many people, I feel profoundly deprived in not having a good singing voice. I play the piano, and that’s lovely, but it’s not the same as being able to use your own body as your instrument of expression.

Recently I went to see Jen Cloher and Jordie Lane at my local, the Thornbury Theatre. Since then, Jen Cloher has been rocking my world. (Jordie already had a hand on the cradle.)

I’d heard Cloher on the radio a couple of times before this, but it wasn’t until I saw her live that I was properly switched on to her music. I’d forgotten how good seeing a someone perform live is for finally “getting it”, whatever it is a performer has to give.

In the case of Cloher, it was a revelation. How rare to see that combination of ferociousness and vulnerability.

I am now in that heady stage of infatuation with her latest album, where I just can’t get enough of it. I know that intensity will pass, but right now she’s singing the words that I need to hear.

When I listen to Cloher’s songs I get that absurd sense of disbelief that no one has written them before now; how is it that something so perfect would not have existed, would not have been made tangible if this person hadn’t been there to create it?

This thought always triggers a wild mix of gratitude and melancholy in me. The kind that has me pulling over to the side of the road and just taking in a big deep breath. Because I can. Because I've been given a life.

Ain’t that the wonderful thing about art: that strange sense of cathartic relief that comes with hearing/viewing/reading something that releases you; that reminds you why art is essential to the self.

How can you describe the effect great music has on us? I don't have the words. I just know what I feel: that music shatters you just as it makes you whole.

I killed the bird
With the bird
Killed the song
With the song
Killed myself
(Jen Cloher, "Birdsong")

How do you do it?

2010-05-27T13:11:00.017+10:00

OK, now I don’t want to compete with Reservoir Dad’s Most Mentally Sexy Dad comp (woops, I almost wrote “Most Sexually Mental then” — an entirely different contest, I should think…) but I have a little, non-competitive request for my wonderfully inspired and resourceful readers.

When I set out to write The Divided Heart, I was trying to be the next best thing to a fly on the wall. I wanted to know how other people “do it”, meaning maintain a creative life and raise a family (I really do mean to stay out of the bedroom with this post!).

People always ask me what I learned from meeting and talking to the artists in the book. And my usual answer is that, above all (and many of you will have heard me say this before):

YOU need to give yourself permission to be an artist (or creative worker of any kind). No one else is going to give you that permission — especially if you haven’t already staked a claim for it in your own heart and mind.

For mothers, this means being very strict with ourselves, which can be half the battle. It means carving out time, against all odds, to devote to our creative practice — because it’s the thing that connects us to ourselves.

For me, I only feel half alive if I’m not writing. When I’m not writing, I become horribly distracted, preoccupied and downright cranky — not very fun for anyone who has to live with me.

Unfortunately, that means I am all too regularly in this pent-up state, gazing longingly at my writing desk from what feels like a gaping, frustrating expanse. Most of the time I can't even see my laptop, it's so covered in a growing piles of bills, notes and press releases all vying for my attention...

It seems I am still failing that most basic domestic obstacle course. How to dodge the washing basket, unmade beds, grocery shopping, unread school notes, paid work, volunteering, exercise, waxing of a leg (or two)… and make a beeline for that desk, sit down and start wrestling with the blank page.

So…

In the interests of sharing, I’d really love to hear from you about how/when/where you work. What has to be in order for you to get down to it? Or is it to hell with order — you just ignore the housework and get on with the creative stuff?

Do you involve the kids? Do you wake up at 4am (hopefully without the kids!)? Do you do most of your work in your head?

I really want to know what strategies other parents have for making time for their own creative work. Give me your best tips for keeping this little thing called art alive. In other words, HELP!!

Wolf at the Wheeler

2010-05-24T16:13:00.006+10:00

As many of you would know, Melbourne's Wheeler Centre now has a fantastic website featuring lots of videos of their events and interviews.

A couple of weeks ago Naomi Wolf appeared at the Centre, and you can check out what she had to say here:

I liked her comment about how the mainstream media jumps on any chance to play women off against each other (i.e. her trumped-up dispute with Germaine Greer) -- that there is a “weird cultural erotics” attached to women fighting amongst themselves.

Must remember that one...

Women and friendship

2010-05-21T16:36:00.004+10:00

The other day my friend Ms Treasure (and she is a treasure) sent me a story about a UCLA study which found that when women experience stress, their instinct is to gather up their children and seek out other women.

Before this, scientists believed the hormonally induced “flight or fight” response was a universal response to stress.

When women are stressed, more oxytocin is released, which produces a calming effect — what researchers have dubbed the “tend and befriend” response. Men’s testosterone levels reduce this effect of oxytocin.

Two female scientists stumbled across this idea talking one day in a UCLA lab.

“There was this joke that when the women who worked in the lab were stressed, they came in, cleaned the lab, had coffee, and bonded,” says Dr Klein.

“When the men were stressed, they holed up somewhere on their own. I commented one day to fellow researcher Shelley Taylor that nearly 90% of the stress research is on males. I showed her the data from my lab, and the two of us knew instantly that we were onto something.”

Their discovery that women respond differently than men to stress turned five decades of stress research on its head.

Not only that, the researchers found that female friendship was good for women's health, and might explain why women live longer than men. Strong social ties reduce our risk of disease by lowering blood pressure, heart rate and cholesterol.

Apparently the more good friends women have, the more likely they were to be leading a joyful life.

Ah, how lovely... Not that I needed proof that my women friends were special.

Can housework be sexy?

2010-05-19T11:26:00.013+10:00

Perhaps it depends who's doing it!

I have a post about the link between sex and housework on the Most Mentally Sexy Dad Comp page today.

I know you all have plenty to say on this issue! Love to read your thoughts...

And while we're on the subject, I urge you all to read this great op ed piece by the ever-inspiring feminist poster-boy Damon Young.

It is also running on page 15 of today's Age newspaper.

His statement "I'm a feminist because I take my wife's selfhood seriously" is music to my ears. More than that, though, he translates that belief into action.

Yoghurt and strawberry

2010-05-10T16:52:00.005+10:00

I hope someone in your household took Mothers Day seriously.

Mothers Day never quite lives up to my fantasies, i.e. a day when no-one lets me lift a finger and instead someone gives me a massage -- or maybe even leaves me alone for a few hours.

It doesn't help when junior footy starts at 9am. (And every Sunday at 9am for the rest of your life...)

The kids did wake me at 6.30 very excitedly with a lovely breakfast in bed -- a bowl of yoghurt and honey, sitting inside a baking dish full of lollies. Obviously their idea of the best breakfast you could ever hope for!

My yoghurt was topped with a single strawberry. I later found the rest of the punnet’s worth of strawberry leaves dumped in the sink... All pretty cute, really.

The quest to find Australia's Most Mentally Sexy Dad

2010-05-06T13:54:00.010+10:00

I am honoured to be joining the team of illustrious judges for the (now international) Most Mentally Sex Dad Competition.

The comp was established by blogger Reservoir Dad as a bit of a local fun and has become bigger then Ben-Hur (probably not quite the right reference, sorry), even featuring on the Today Show last week!

It's based on the oft-repeated statement by mothers everywhere that the sexiest thing their partners could do is unstack the dishwasher.

As Reservoir Dad puts it:

Dads are beginning to realise that they have to take some responsibility for maintaining the passion in their relationship. The days of killing a beast and lolling around the campfire are over. Life is more complicated, busier and cluttered.

As Barbara Pocock, director of the Center for Work and Life at the University of South Australia, said, Australian working women found resentment over housework killed libido.

"If the resentment factor was high, that's when their sex life was not great. The best sex aid a man could use was a vacuum cleaner."

This quote inspired the Reservoir Dad team to coin the term Mentally Sexy to attribute to Dads who are the opposite of the men Barbara Pocock was talking about.

A Mentally Sexy Dad is more family orientated, more aware of his partner’s needs and simply a better husband and father.

Dads, this is your chance to have some fun, impress your partner (and your mates!) and win some great prizes. Are you Australia's Most Mentally Sexy Dad? Send your entry to Reservoir Dad and let's find out...

My partner (who is sexy in every way) has been looking a little nervous about my new role...

Who's chicken?

2010-04-10T18:16:00.015+10:00

My kids have been playing out on the street a lot lately. It’s school holidays and so all the neighbourhood kids have come out of the woodworks and spend their days kicking footballs between driveways and disappearing into each others’ houses.

This is, I know, the model of a positive childhood — the kind of our memories; the kind people spend so much time lamenting the loss of. And in theory, I’m all for it. Certainly I was one of those kids that spent my early years building BMX bike tracks in the bush (no helmets back then), or eagerly visiting the homes of kids who were allowed to watch tele and eat chocolate biscuits.

So why do I find myself thinking (and having to work so hard not to behave) like one of those uptight modern parents we all rail against? All my own issues about control — or, more specifically, the lack of it — come up in the face of having to loosen the reins on my children. And the older they get, the harder this gets.

I understand the importance of freedom, of risk, of making your own mistakes... only now, when it comes to my own kids, I find myself in a constant state of low-level anxiety about their safety. What do you do as a parent? Do you decide what you can happily live with and only let the reins out only that far? Or do you give your kids more freedom than is always completely comfortable, and take responsibility for finding a way to live with this?

Last week I had three extra kids for the day (plus mine = five). At one point, two of them wanted to play footy out the front, while three wanted to cook muffins with me. We started baking in the kitchen and I kept checking on the two outside every few minutes, which got pretty tedious after a while.

In the end I hauled them inside and let them play games on the computer so we could get on with finishing the muffins. Really, I didn’t feel so good about sticking two 8-yr-old boys who were perfectly happy playing sport outside in front of the zombie-box for my own convenience — but I just didn’t feel I could ensure their safety (boys, balls, a road...) and I was sick of trekking back and forth.

When the rest of us had stuck the muffins in the oven, another one retreated to the study. I checked on them. The computer game they were playing looked pretty innocent: little chickens chasing other little chickens or something. It was one my son had played a few times at a good friend’s house. In the scheme of things it looked quite sweet and old-fashioned. I gave them another ten minutes.

A few moments later, I had a traumatised child running to me in the kitchen, asking me if that’s really what they do to baby chickens. “What do you mean, darling?” I asked her. “Was there something in the game?” “No, we won and then there was a video of people killing baby chickens. And they were so mean to them.”

The game was part of an anti-KFC site, dressed up like a site safe for children, but on closer inspection a clever way of drawing them in and then exposing them to some horrific images. I’m all for questioning the practices of multi-national food chains; and I’m all for being honest with kids about the way animals are dealt with so they become meat for our consumption — if and when they are in a position to take this information on board. But this was a sinister and underhand way of getting at children without parental awareness.

I felt completely naive and careless. A child in my care was traumatised, all because I thought, ironically, that she would be safer in my study than out on the footpath. I know most of us use the occasional bit of television or computer time or whatever to ensure a few controlled moments of sanity — a chance to keep our child quiet and in one place while we have a shower or make that phone call or whatever.

But in this case, this decision had come back to bite me on the bum. At the risk of coming over all moralistic, if there is one area worthy of uptight parental control, it’s the internet. As for the neighbourhood adventures, I'm still trying to work that one out...

P.S. My CAE writing intensive, Making Stories: Creative Lives, is on again 1/2 May. If you are a parent and you are trying to make space for writing, this course is for you!

Writing intensive for mothers

2010-03-04T10:27:00.002+11:00

I am running a weekend CAE course in Melbourne on the 20/21 March called "Making Stories: Creative Lives".

It'll be lots of fun. We will look at published writing that uses motherhood as a central theme, and learn how to translate the experience of mothering into stories, articles, essays or memoir.

We will be sharing stories and articles by Helen Garner, Grace Paley, Doris Lessing, Rachel Cusk and many more who have used the experience of parenting to great effect in their work.

Please let anyone who you think may be interested know. Babes in arms are welcome, and for the rest of us I'll supply the jelly babies!

Sat 20 Mar: 10.00AM-4.30PM
Sun 21 Mar: 10.00AM-4.30PM

Venue: CAE Building A
21 Degraves St, Melbourne
Fee: $230.00 - Code: HAT54901

More on the thorny Megan Basham argument

2010-02-18T12:30:00.009+11:00

In response to Frances's comment on my previous post (and thank you everyone for your thoughts)...

I think it is all too easy to equate an argument against the ideas of someone like Megan Basham with devaluing motherhood.

It is exactly because I am concerned about the kind of society that I want my daughter — and my son — to inherit that Basham's ideas concern me.

It is not her assertion of the worth of being at home and involved with family that is at issue here. It is the emphasis and attitude of the argument that I find disturbing: the idea of women (and she only ever refers to women in this role) putting their energy and focus into supporting their husband’s career so he is free to earn more.

I strongly believe in a woman’s right to choose to be at home, or to have flexible working arrangements — and, just as importantly, men’s right to work-life balance and to be involved with their families.

It is the tenor of her argument that bothers me. To me, it seems this kind of theory has lost rather than gained perspective on what’s important, as the ultimate goal seems to be money, as opposed to finding ways to live well and stay connected to each other and your children. It buys into an economic system that is inherently unfriendly to work-life balance for both men and women (excuse the over-used term).

In terms of role-modelling, I want my kids to see both me and my partner focused on the things that are meaningful to us not only as parents, but as individuals — which includes loving and nurturing them, as well as nurturing ourselves and each other.

In a sense, I am the kind of woman Basham is speaking to — my partner works full-time and I work part-time. I work for money but also because I get personal satisfaction from it. I work part time because I want to be with my kids and because I can’t imagine how to keep the household running and retain some sanity otherwise.

Of course those of us who stay at home full or part time already support our families in all sorts of ways. By default, I do more washing/shopping/hands-on caring than my partner — though when he's around, he does these things too.

Every family chooses what they need to do to keep themselves functional and financially afloat.

But there are limits to this supporting role — I do not want it to take over my life, or my psyche. I don’t want to set up a dynamic that turns me into my partner’s devoted backer/servant, freeing him up to go out and conquer the world and gather more pots of gold.

After having my babies, I stayed out of the workforce as long as my family could afford for me to, and wish that could have been longer. And since then, I have been privileged enough to only need to work part-time. I breastfed both of my babies until they were 2.

I don’t think any of what I’m saying is an argument against the value of these things. I think parenting is one of the most important and complex roles any of us can have — that is exactly why I write about it so much.

In answer to your question, Damon, my ideal would be for both my partner and I to work part time, so both of us could have more time with the kids and more time to spend on our creative interests — and paid work could take its place as one, but only one, of the necessary and fulfilling aspects of our lives.

Modern Marriages of Convenience

2010-02-15T16:53:00.008+11:00

We are in the middle of major renovations at my house right now. Unfortunately nothing fancy — more like a getting back to zero scenario (sealed walls, doors that close, upgrading the 70s mushroom brown paint, though that won’t stop me downing a few glasses of serious bubbly when it’s done).

As a result, we currently have no internet access at home. We have been spending our nights, once the kids are asleep (on the loungeroom floor), listening to the radio and painting walls. It has been strangely cosy and kind of a relief to be barred from the computer for a while.

The only downside is that I keep hearing things on the radio I’d like to comment on without the time, or easy means, to post something.

One subject I seem to keep hearing (and thinking) about is the issue of mothers judging other mothers. I am flagging that up as something I want to write about.

But more urgently—despite being about six months late on this one—I recently listened to the repeat of Megan Basham talking on RN’s Life Matters about her book, Beside Every Successful Man.

It could be seen as one of a spate of post-feminist books coming out of the US over the past decade about “modern marriages”.

You can read an article I wrote for Arena Magazine back in 2004 on this subject here.

Also, definitely listen to Monica Dux's great follow-up comments.

Basham is arguing that, since most mothers are choosing not to work full time, they may as well shift their focus on to supporting their husband’s career, as this makes economic sense all round.

Hers is the kind of conservatism that can dress itself up as pure “reasonable-ness”.

She seems flabbergasted that anyone would feel troubled by what she sees as a simple idea: the idea that you help your husband’s career so that more money is flowing in for the whole family.

We all know that statistics show most mothers of young children choose to stay at home, at least part time. This in itself is not in itself a controversial notion (though the basis for that choice can be very complex).

It is Basham’s leap to the idea of exploiting the “marriage premium”, as it’s called, that is so disturbing.

Her “supporting your husband” idea is based on “personal experience” (ie. as a woman surrounded by other women married to men with high earning capacities) and economic data that shows the presence of a “wife” at home has a positive impact on a man’s professional success and income.

The economic argument is a no-brainer. This is the division of labour that has traditionally characterised the neo-liberal economy. But at whose expense?

Hasn’t she watched Mad Men lately?

Basham quotes data that shows a man with wife at home will make 20–60% more than single man with the same job/credentials. The more hours a wife works, the smaller that marriage premium, or “advantage” becomes, she says.

She calls this teamwork.

This is surely the most expedient notion of teamwork I have ever encountered. Instead of a partnership being about individual growth and development, it’s about privileged couples milking the current system to suit their economic ends — no matter the impact on women generally.

She says women who do want to work full time and get to the highest levels should be able to, without a glass ceiling preventing her — but she doesn’t acknowledge that her argument is one of the very ideas that creates such ceilings.

It is all about encouraging an economic system that sees people get ahead by working long hours, unimpeded by family responsibilities — the very thing feminists have been trying to transform for three decades.

It is this deeper, underlying conservatism that poses the real danger for women. Along with the whole tone of the argument: men and women reverting to their most traditional roles; leading separate, if mutually serviceable, lives.

Personally I don’t want to be at home all day alone with the kids from 7am till 9pm and a husband we only see on weekends, sacrificing my own interests to his career purely so that he can make us some more money.

Is that really what life is all about? Is that the life my mother fought for me to have?

After all that, you better hope he won’t leave you for a younger model…

Is there such a thing as women's writing?

2010-01-17T18:25:00.013+11:00

There was the most wonderful article, “A Voice of Her Own”, by Rachel Cusk in yesterday’s Age newspaper about “women’s writing”. It is one of those pieces of writing that makes me want to shout ‘Hurrah!’ because someone has found a way to express things that I have felt in my bones but not managed to describe to myself.

I love Rachel Cusk's work. When I read her novels, I feel like every sentence is teaching me how to write. I discovered her non-fiction book, A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother, late in the process of compiling The Divided Heart, and it was a complete revelation to me — full of the kind of brutal honesty she advocates in the article.

At the time, her book stirred up all sorts of controversy and was vocally rejected by certain readers repelled by its rawness, or what they saw as its indulgent self-obsessiveness, just at that moment when a woman is supposed to be giving herself over without reserve. As Cusk says (somewhat obliquely): “She can find herself disowned in the very act of invoking the deepest roots of shared experience.”

I think it will take me at least two more reads of her article to fully comprehend all that she’s getting at (it is refreshingly dense for a newspaper article), but I urge you all to read it. I think it spoke to me particulary now as I have found myself in a strange state lately when it comes to writing. Not merely feeling stuck, but actually silenced, somehow, by the realities of life.

Funnily, this state descended on me following a period where I was writing furiously, and now I find myself having to not resist, but just wait for the emptiness I've been feeling to once again be invaded with words.

What strikes me in Cusk's discussion of women’s historical “silence" is the idea that it may not always have been characterised by conscious frustration, but rather by the dominance of a culture that makes a woman unknowable to herself, that bars a woman from realising herself.

There was a gap in what women were able to imagine and their lack of “wordly power” to enact it, she writes. “Yes, she might produce literature out of this conflict in her being. But she is more likely to produce silence.”

She describes a Doris Lessing story about a mother of four who begins to want a room of her own. She doesn’t know why she wants it or what she wants it for, but the desire for a space where “no one can get at her” becomes an obsession. A designated room in the house doesn’t work: the kids can still find her there. So she regularly starts renting out a room in a hotel.

Cusk’s point is that the woman in the story doesn’t go to this room to write bestselling novels. Or to create anything at all. Perhaps the most powerful “women’s writing”, she is saying, is that which describes its opposite: women’s silence; the experience of someone who does not have the means to articulate the source of her own restlessness to herself.

When I read Cusk’s A Life’s Work, I remember finding it intriguing that she didn’t specifically identify herself as a writer, or suggest that a lack of time for writing might be a central cause of her frustrations as a new mother. At the time I saw it as a kind of oversight, especially coming from someone with such keen self-knowledge.

With this article, though, I see it was possibly deliberate. A way of universalising her experience for the reader, but also trying to get at what is, in actuality, a more general sense of confusion about what it is and means to be a woman feeling the “integrity of her life” suddenly at risk.

For contemporary women, “Marriage, motherhood and domesticity are regarded as so many choices, about which there is a limited entitlement to complain,” she writes in her article. In other words, now that we are equal, superficially at least, we are also successfully disenfranchised. As women, we no longer have a powerful, unified movement to join when we find ourselves thrust into situations that make us realise our lives are, after all, still defined by the fact of being a woman. All the more shocking for modern women who have convinced themselves of their equality, and fiercely protect this belief.

Cusk’s idea that this might be the reason for a writer to “risk taking femaleness and female values as her subject”, could entirely describe my own impetus for writing The Divided Heart.

As she says, it is the work that deals in the eternal — motherhood, domesticity, family life — that the most honesty is needed, and that you can expect the strongest rejection, because so many women don’t want to return to these questions, or admit that their lives might be affected by them, or lose some of what they feel they have gained from effective assimilation.

I have a dear friend (one of five siblings) who tells a story about watching some video footage of her family and suddenly being struck by what their lives have meant for their mother. She turned to her and said, “But Mum, we’ve ruined you!”

Her mother’s answer: “Yes, but what a way to be ruined!”

When it comes to thinking about the "integrity" of my own life, this anecdote often comes to my mind.

Where's Santa when you need him?!

2009-12-28T18:41:00.005+11:00

Phew! I barely survived that Christmas period--I don't know about you. The Santa fantasy must have been invented by desperate parents who never want to enter another shopping mall again as long as they live. Imagine how much more relaxing (and affordable) Christmas would be if Mr Santa Clause could only keep up his end of the bargain...

All that fluoro lighting seems to have killed off my brain. So luckily for me (and you), rather than write a lengthy post here, I can refer you to this piece philosopher Damon Young invited me to write for his fabulous blog series in which authors and artists talk about their favourite tools...

A poem from Cate Kennedy to share

2009-12-03T22:45:00.015+11:00

I seem to be constantly apologising lately for my lack of blogging action. This week, though I have a particularly good excuse, as I am doing an intensive novel writing masterclass--which, as it suggests, intensive!

It has been a rather humbling, daunting, confronting experience spending all day in a room full of accomplished fiction writers, when I feel like such a beginner, still trying to make the transition out of non-fiction and into fiction--and not just short stories, but a whole book. It has felt a bit like vomiting in public sometimes, sharing this very raw material so openly. (Sorry--that's not a very pretty picture, is it?)

What has really helped my (numerous) crises of confidence, though, has been the number of amazing messages I have been getting about The Divided Heart this week. I think this book must have just about the loveliest bunch of readers any book could hope for! I so appreciate the openness and generosity of spirit with which people write to me. Thank you Divided Hearties.

In the meantime, I just want to share this wonderful poem that writer Cate Kennedy (speaking of the wildly accomplished) sent me some time back after reading The Divided Heart.

I was sitting at my desk wrestling with a piece of writing one day, when up popped a message from Cate (that's her in the pic above), with this poem that summed up so exquisitely the very feeling I was struggling to articulate: the way children call on us/teach us to be present to the here and now--which is what is both so challenging and so wonderful about them. It was one of those synchronous moments.

Cate was one of the first women I approached for an interview for my book, only to discover she didn't then have children. (I felt mortified that I had been so presumptuous. Something about her writing had made me assume she was a mother.) She has since had a daughter, and now I wish I could do a second version with her in it!

(P.S. Just before you read the poem--for those still thinking/blogging/obsessing about housework issues, my sister has started a new blog, Work, Love, Play, and her latest post offers another interesting angle on the matter...)

THE ZEN MASTER
Cate Kennedy

I have written this
with a body stretched and sore,
stitches swollen, torn by a crowning head
tongue thick with painkillers
and in the next room a cry for milk
to set my heart off like a caged bird against my ribs

And I have written this
dragging with me a lead apron of grainy exhaustion
page prickling through a stinging mist, mouth metallic with adrenalin
while she sleeps, frowning, tender as a camellia

I have written
all I could, in a gluttonous scrawling haste
hearing her call for me, crawling through the other room
written it washed with guilt, the soup burned to the saucepan
snatching just five illicit minutes to myself, for godsakes, just five

And I have written
as she sat under my feet pulling what’s hoarded from the shelf below
cringing at the sound of tearing paper
until the computer connection suddenly went dead
and she – gummy, triumphant, seated like the Buddha –
held the cable aloft, and waved it like a prayer flag

And I have written, like today,
as she stood by my leg crying with frustration
beating a tattoo onto my thigh with both hands
her face transposing everything, urgently seeking my eyes
demanding I turn away from this pointless thing
because out there, the whole humming world is waiting
See, says her fervent outstretched finger, see there
is the outside
trust me
everything you need is there

tell me you wouldn’t rise,
given that call,
and follow her
helpless and ardent
as a chastened disciple.

Innocence and experience

2009-11-24T22:54:00.011+11:00

Thank you for those lovely comments on my last post.

I agree with composer Christine McCombe that sweeping statements about art and motherhood are dangerous. I wanted to avoid the term 'artist-mother' in The Divided Heart for this reason, but inevitably it was used just for the sake of convenience. That said, whether or not mothering has a direct impact on the themes of your work, there could be few more life-changing experiences, both in a material and emotional sense--and it is hard to imagine this not affecting your work, or at least your process, in some way.

As Christine writes on her great blog, she feels like she's now embarking on her 'Creative Life, version 2', post-baby. It is such an interesting transition when that often liberating permission to retreat from art/work after becoming a mother slowly gives way to a new creative urgency. "I find that I am approaching things in a different way, partly because of the imperative of time and partly because of a shift in the way I think about what I am doing and why I am doing it," she says. That about sums it up, doesn't it?!

As for the language we use around art and motherhood, it's fraught. I certainly had two women refuse to be in the book because they didn't want to highlight the fact of being a woman in the eyes of the public, let alone being a mother.

More broadly, on that matter of how we talk about mothering to those who aren't parents, I have two old friends who are pregnant for the first time at the moment, and I really have to watch myself--to just take a step back and let them have their own experience without imposing my 'worldy' own. And to just listen to them talk about their expectations without being smug (something I remember hating other mothers do before I had my own babies). It's amazing how hard this can be: to find the right balance between offering advice and not being a know-it-all.

When I was pregnant and ran into parents I knew on the street, they tended to talk in extremes: either telling me it's the most wonderful thing you'll ever do; or prepare for your life to be fucked--no sleep, no time for yourself etc. Now I know that it's both these things--and everything in between--and it probably just depended which day I caught them on as to which feeling was dominating.

Ha ha--just now I've opened to a page in my notebook and found my 7-year-old son has started a list called: "People who are as smart as me." It's a very short list, I can tell you. And my name's certainly not on it. Ah well, I must be doing something right, 'cause he certainly doesn't lack confidence, does he?

From one mother to another

2009-11-18T10:08:00.011+11:00

I have had a number of readers contact me almost apologetically to tell me that they initially avoided reading The Divided Heart because they had assumed it would be a negative take on motherhood when they enjoy having kids so much.

Fortunately, they have come to read it anyway — because it was recommended to them, or in one case because she was on the judging panel for one of those many prizes it didn’t get.

So it is lovely when someone gets in touch to say the book defied their expectations. And even more exciting when someone tells me the book inspired them to get moving with their own work, or even fed directly in to their art.

One example is this fab-sounding exhibition at the University of Florida. Four Squared is an exhibition by four artist-mothers and their experiences of making art amongst the chaos of raising young children.

Motherhood is also the theme of their art – “the push & pull of motherhood, domesticity and creativity. It is work created on an emotional rollercoaster, while burning the midnight oil, with the use of favours from friends, with the constant awareness of dishes to be washed.”

Most recently I was contacted by Iranian-born, British-raised, LA-based photographer and mother, Parisa Taghizadeh. She has made a series of works entitled “Mother”, one of which is in an upcoming show in New York, MOTHER/mother at the A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, New York.

MOTHER/mother is an exhibition of work made by artists from around the world within the years immediately following a pregnancy or the birth of a child.

If you are lucky enough to be visiting the US over the coming months, these shows look well worth a visit.

Just the other day, I came across a review of The Divided Heart that ran in the April issue of Art Monthly (check out the great cover!). Reviews by artists always make me nervous, so it was great to read Denise Ferris’s comment that the book made her feel “uplifted”.

“This book normalises the mother and artist combination by presenting women who continue to practise their craft in spite of social or their own confused expectations to choose one role over the other,” she writes.

“These women have continued to make work in spite of difficult personal experiences, and in spite of potent mixed emotions, self-doubt, confusion and exhaustion. To continue to work as an artist is not always as seamless as we hope. And that is the reality presented in this book.”

One criticism, though, was the lack of single mothers and gay parents in the book. Funnily enough, there are both in The Divided Heart. Perhaps it’s an indication of just how universal the issues around art and motherhood are that this wasn’t more obvious.

A portrait of the artist as a mother

2009-10-30T15:44:00.012+11:00

I hoard my clean washing (note I say ‘my’, meaning ‘my family’s’, hmm…) till it reaches a pile big enough to justify a night spent folding it in front of the box — which in my case, not having a telly, means a DVD on the computer.

Having finished the first series of Mad Men — and since this week’s pile had grown to a size equalling a full feature-length movie (see how fun it can get?!) — I decided to watch Alice Neel, a haunting documentary about this extraordinary American painter.

Neel made portraits — of friends, family, lovers, poets, artists, and ordinary people... anyone who crossed her radar — infused with emotional intensity, her sitters challenging the viewer with their direct gaze.

I actually wrote a long section about Neel in The Divided Heart, which was cut out in the final edit. Embarrassingly, my first draft of the book came in at over 120,000 words, more than double that requested by the publisher, so there was plenty of material left on the cutting-room floor, so to speak, much of it investigations into women artists I admire.

As a woman and single mother, Alice Neel (1900–1984) did it tough, but remained utterly dedicated to her art.

The question of whether her obsessive devotion to painting — and the instability that came with that — was to the detriment of her children becomes the unintentional focus of the film, which was made by her grandson, Andrew Neel.

Neel spent much of her life on welfare and was isolated as an artist until the late 1960s and 70s, when the women’s movement embraced her.

In the film she says: “I always felt in a sense that I didn’t have the right to paint because I had two sons and I had so many things that I should be doing and here I was painting.

“… I wanted everything. I didn’t want just art; I wanted everything. Everyone wants everything but then they have to get practical and settle for a certain amount. But maybe I was never that practical.”

Neel lost her first two children, one through death, the other taken from her for complex reasons. These traumas permeated her work, its themes of motherhood, loss and anxiety, for the rest of her career.

In the film, her remaining, adult children have a complex relationship with Neel — loving her as a mother and friend, full of admiration for her work, and yet both nursing hurts that have profoundly shaped them as people.

“I don’t like bohemian culture,” her now very right-wing son, Richard, says. “People are hurt by it. I was hurt by it. People who are engaged in it don’t care about, or feel responsible for, those who are around them, or who depend on them.”

Her second son, Hartley (now a doctor), was badly abused by one of Neel’s long-term partners, and Richard’s father, communist intellectual Sam Brody. It is not stated directly but is suggested that Neel ignored this abuse because she desperately needed Brody’s belief in her as an artist at a time when her work had fallen out of public and critical favour.

And yet, through all his sadness, Hartley has the insight to say: “If she had been satisfied with the paragon of what women were supposed to be in her era, she would have accomplished nothing. She might have been the greatest mother and housewife and all that… [but] this was the other side of the coin in terms of the way Alice saw things. She didn’t want that stuff.”

By the end of this, I tell you, my washing was neatly folded but my heart was a complete shambles.

Cop this--apparently women can't write good sex

2009-10-21T23:31:00.015+11:00

I realise this is veering into completely different territory, but I was just wondering if anyone took any notice of the recent debate fuelled by the comments of Kate Copstick, the new publisher of British magazine Erotic Review, who said women a not naturally good writers of erotic fiction?

You may have heard her talking to Ramona Koval and Linda Jaivin on Radio National’s Book Show a few months back.

Basically Copstick (what a name, eh?) said she doesn’t want her magazine “drowning in oestrogen”. That women “complicate, they add layers to sex, and sex in the Erotic Review I think is a beautiful, pure thing which deserves to be written about, celebrated for itself, and it doesn’t need a subtext, it doesn't even need a context.”

She also complained of young women who think they’re writing about sex but are actually writing about sexual politics, which is “not very sexy”.

“The Erotic Review is not there for women to have a go,” she told the BBC. “I don’t believe in equality, I believe in elitism. I want the very best writing and women are not passionately devoted to sex.”

What do others think about this? Surely it’s a bit scary that the owner of the world’s leading erotic journal has concluded that only men can write sex well.

Or is she just judging from the perspective of her predominantly male readership? (Maybe female readers would like a bit of context and subtext if she was interested in catering for them. After all, her target reader is "a dirty old man with two PhDs"...)

Surely some women are passionately devoted to sex (at least some of the time). And besides, when sex becomes “complicated” does it automatically cease being a beautiful thing?

Isn’t erotic fiction without any subtext or context really just porn? Albeit perhaps well-written, literary porn, as Copstick would argue.

I'm not really sure of my stance on this one, but I'm intrigued by this argument nonetheless...

The burden of time

2009-10-12T11:38:00.006+11:00

Sorry that it’s been a while between posts. I have been on a family holiday. And I use that word advisedly. I mean, I do appreciate a change of scene and all, but ‘holiday with children’… more like shifting the whole shebang to somewhere with fewer distractions and less support.

At one point, I even found myself fantasising about having myself thrown in gaol for a couple of weeks (months?). I was thinking new exercise regime, learning a new language, perhaps even one of those creative writing courses they teach in prisons nowadays…

Sorry, I exaggerate (a little). The holidays were mostly fun. And how good to have a couple of weeks without the crazy school/kinder/work/drop-off/pick-up/make someone’s lunch/dinner routine. But, oh, how I miss a lazy morning in bed reading a book...

So back to reality. Or perhaps the reality we create.

In the post today, I received a review copy of the latest Buddhism for Mothers book, the somewhat awkwardly but straightforwardly titled Buddhism for Mothers of Schoolchildren by Sarah Napthali.

I have to admit I have not properly read the original book, though other mothers mention it in conversation all the time. But I took a quick peek at this new one, read the first line of the first chapter (titled ‘Stress’ — ha ha, why would that be?!) and think I have to read this book.

“Mothers of schoolchildren can have a tense relationship with time and, in some cases, an obsessive attachment to using it efficiently,” writes Napthali.

Isn’t this the wonderful thing about writing — someone else always manages to describe some emotion or thought or idea you believed was just your own particular neuroses, and suddenly you realise it’s a common, explainable feeling?

Tense would be putting it mildly, for me. I have a perverse relationship with time — almost as perverse as my relationship with housework (and very much related).

I now find myself regularly writing time as ‘TIME’. Sorry, I’m not yelling, exactly, but time has come to be one of those hugely loaded terms for me. One of those big words, like LOVE or MONEY.

As I wrote in The Divided Heart, I don’t think I even had a relationship with time before I had children. Now that every moment alone has to be bought, borrowed, begged or stolen, I feel like I’ve gone to the other extreme — unhealthily attached to making every minute count.

Which of course only becomes it’s own burden — because even when you’ve “decided just to relax” (how’s that for an oxymoron), you’ve still got the clock ticking in the back of your head.

Multi-tasking has become such a habit for me now that I find myself doing it obsessively at times when it is just not useful. For example, when trying to write — which would actually benefit from a bit of single-minded focus.

It can become a tad ridiculous when you find yourself trying to brush your teeth, make a phone call and do the dishes at the same time. And, no, unfortunately I am not making that up! It wasn't until the other person answered their phone that I realised it just wasn’t going to work.

The neverending housework debate...

2009-09-20T13:39:00.004+10:00

So much juicy stuff in those housework comments. My partner and I went out last night and your feedback gave me the strength to wade in to this thorny territory and try to decide on some solution.

I have wondered whether if I didn’t work, I would feel clearer about this. Would it be a case of, ‘OK, he works to bring in the money; so this is my job.’ But that ignores the fact that being home with kids is as much of a full-time job.

My feeling has always been that if there is still work to do in the evenings (as there always is), then let’s just get in there and do it. Together. It’s not like as a mother at home, you’ve been slack all day and just haven’t completed your jobs in some allotted work hours. Household chores can roll on and on without end most of the time.

What intrigues me is all the underlying, unconscious assumption at play. I know my partner considers us equal in his conscious mind, but how hard is it for us all to really get out from under the backlog of history that has shaped us and our in-built cultural assumptions?

A writer friend of mine was saying the other day that it’s kind of sad this situation where we know that in many ways that traditional division of roles worked for a good reason. But at what cost?

The problem is our economy still relies on having someone looking after the house, but women now have different expectations for their lives — that they will be able to fulfil all those needs and desires that once had to be suppressed.

You just should never have taken “that bite of the apple”, another (male) friend said. There is no turning back now.

So why are we stuck half way? We have (tacitly?) agreed that it is not fair for either gender to be stuck in those old-fashioned roles without choice, but somehow that full exchange just doesn’t seem to have occurred, especially domestically.

Home Girl’s comments about feeling that the domestic space will be seen as a reflection of her state of mind really resonated with me. So much about having children is surrendering to a lack of control. But this is something I struggle with every day.

As for Susan's comment that anyone can do the laundry but no-one can paint that picture is so true, but always comes with a big 'but' for me (unless you can pay someone else to do your laundry)...

So many times people have told me to ditch the housework in favour of creativity. But how long can that go on before everything just starts falling apart? And at what point is that just not conducive to anything?

I have spoken to other writers who say they have come to terms with the fact that the house has to be clean before they can settle down to writing — and that’s just the way it is.

When I am completely bogged down in housework, though, and can see the creative work retreating further and further from my grasp, the thought that really gets me down is that, at the end of the day, no-one will congratulate me for this. Have you ever heard at a funeral the line: ‘She kept a beautiful house.’ Well, maybe that happens.

But you are far more likely to be remembered for the grand-scale, publically recognised work that you did. Doesn’t this just sum up history for women?

Oh, God, I could just go on and on...

But thank you all so much for your inspiring comments. Women never cease to amaze me with their wisdom and insight!

Anyway, this is the way the conversation went: ‘Can we agree that we put the kids to bed at 8. We decide what jobs have to be done tonight and what can be left for later (i.e. the weekend). We go hell-for-leather getting them done, with the pact that we will aim to have them done by 9 or 9.30. Then we both stop and get on with what we want to be doing. Full stop.’

How does that sound?

He agreed. Will keep you posted...

From the local to the global

2009-09-18T11:27:00.005+10:00

I love the comments I got about my last post and I am definitely going to respond to them in my next post (don't worry -- I haven't done with housework yet!!)

I know this seems a long way from that issue. But I just feel compelled to get down my somewhat wayward thoughts on this larger catastrophe we are confronting...

At my writers' group last night we ended up having a very lengthy discussion on art in the face of climate change. Does it make writing a novel, for example, pointless -- or is it in fact the most important thing we can do right now?

One of the group mentioned a comedian she heard the other day who said he's just waiting for the day when we destroy ourselves and the planet can get back to doing what it does best -- existing. Without us.

This idea sets my head spinning ('scuse the pun).

Humanity’s presence on this earth raises the most fundamental questions about existence.

What is it all for?

Does this planet need us? Almost certainly not.

Do we need this planet? Absolutely, yes.

Would this planet be better off without us? In our current mode of operation, yes.

So why are we here then? Is there something meaningful about the human ability to comprehend beauty, to reflect on it, to translate it into art, which perhaps then deepens our experience of it?

Is beauty meaningless otherwise?

Is it not enough that plants and animals exist for the sake of existence, feeding off each other and living in a kind of harmony, albeit based on an often brutal, primitive exchange?

How could humanity be the only creature created with such a fatal flaw — the capacity to destroy the very thing that sustains us?

Are we just an experiment — one that will make way for a better version in the future? A version with some genetic wisdom, some intrinsic understanding of the need for respect for this earth?

But then how could this experiment ever be repeated? Could the same precarious conditions that provided for our evolution ever exist again?

Has our so-called ‘civilisation’ not in fact relied on the most brutal exchange of all?

If it wasn’t for my children, I could almost be content with the idea of humanity wiping itself out, as if we have proven that to be the natural order of things. We have proven our unworthiness.

Apart from love of children, though, is my love for art and ideas. Imagine a world with no art or ideas.

And for art and ideas to thrive, first we need the freedom provided by food and shelter.

I know I’ve been scaring a few of my friends lately with my dark thoughts. But these are the questions that are keeping me awake at night.

Scientists are telling us that if we achieve a global agreement on climate change in December at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, we may be able to save the Barrier Reef, stop 100 million people from being displaced and minimise the number and intensity of cyclones, bushfires, floods and droughts.

A Climate for Change is a fantastic site co-ordinating action on climate change. Check it out.

The housework blues

2009-09-15T16:25:00.007+10:00

I have been getting the serious housework blues of late. There are weeks where I feel I work, I hang out with my kids, I clean, I clean, I clean... and that is the substance of my life.

My partner 'helps out' and feels I don't recognise all he does. Perhaps that's true. But maybe that's because no matter what he does, I seem to do so much more!

He will certainly do the jobs that I ask him to do, but once that's finished, he goes back to what he'd prefer to be doing, while I seem to just find more and more chores to deal with until I basically drop from exhaustion--emotional exhaustion, largely, as I find myself in a state of constant suppressed rage.

As a friend of mine said to me the other day, if she has a spare 10 minutes she will use it to clean, while her partner will pick up his guitar.

It feels like a trap: to be forced into becoming the kind of nag no-one chooses to be, and then punished for it by the very person we feel has pushed us into this role.

I put off raising the issue for as long as I can stand, because I can hardly bear finding myself back in that all-too-familiar, intractable and horribly mundane debate that never seems to go anywhere.

Why can't men see that the fact this issue is so common might mean it's not just his partner's particular uptight neuroses he's dealing with?

It's a terrible thought, because I love my partner so much, but sometimes I even think it would be easier to be a single mother, because then at least there would be no-one else to blame or resent, and life would have a clearer order. But I know that's just bullshit, too.

Sadly I feel like I've been facing the choice of maintaining the house, or maintaining a writing life. Again and again, I seem to be coming up against this struggle to give myself permission to write; to just drop the other responsibilities and make writing a priority. I am sucked back into this working mother/housewife vortex that seems to have a stronger and more forceful pull than the delicate thread of creativity which, for me, is so easily broken.

Is there a solution to this problem? Have any of you found some harmony in your households when it comes to this matter? I would love to hear about it...

Talking 'bout my Divided Heart...

2009-09-11T17:37:00.002+10:00

For those of you in Adelaide, I’m going to be talking with Cath Kenneally on Radio Adelaide’s Arts Breakfast tomorrow morning at 9.30 (your time), 101.5FM.

Hope she’s nice to me so early in the morning! I’ve done a bit of this radio stuff now, but still it scares me witless (to put it nicely).

Now, to caffeinate or not to caffeinate myself first, that is the real question… (Tune in if you can.)

Family Guy

2009-09-10T08:51:00.009+10:00

Some time back, curator Brett Adlington contacted me to say that he thought I might interested in an exhibition he's been working on for a few years -- and that is now on at the Lake Macquarie Art Gallery in New South Wales.

I was--and am!--and have been very remiss in not posting about it before now.

It's called Family Guy, and the idea emerged for Brett when he was home full time with his kids while his wife worked. He said he was struck while waiting at the school gate by how many fathers there were picking up their kids, unlike when he was at school, but that the hours between 9 and 3 made him realise "how in many ways things hadn’t changed that much, and that being a male at home with kids in the day was a pretty lonely experience."

Which made me think that, although it can be a pretty isolating experience for mums too, at least we have each other. Women are great at forging those networks of support in a way that doesn't come so easily to most men.

Brett started thinking about visual art through history, and the fact that most of the works depicting scenes of domesticity and family were by female artists. He then wondered if many male artists have created work that reflects the changing ways in which men involve themselves in family.

Hence, this fascinating-sounding exhibition, Family Guy, on now until 11 October.

The exhibition draws together work by 14 contemporary male artists, examining the way men see themselves today as fathers, sons, partners and brothers. Some of them illustrate the experience of being a new father, while others describe their separation from family members, particularly children.

Artists include Vernon Ah Kee, Alan Jones, Alex Kershaw, Richard Lewer, Shandor Marosszeky, Laith McGregor, Ben Quilty, Aaron Seeto, Ian Smith, Kris Smith, Martin Smith, Roderick Sprigg, Christian Thompson, Jamil Yamani.

Bravo Brett!

The new you

2009-09-02T23:53:00.011+10:00

Today I was standing in the toilets at my daughter’s dance studio putting on some mascara, in the vain hope that it would make me look more awake, when one of the women who works there stepped out of a cubicle.

“Sorry,” I said sheepishly, stepping aside so she could get to the sink. “One of those things I never seem to manage to do before leaving the house in the morning...”

“I know,” she said. “That’s one of the reasons I’m not ready to have children yet, because I see all the mothers here and I know what it’s like. So hard to maintain your own life.”

“It’s still your own life,” I told her. “It’s just a different life.” And part of me believed me — in fact knows that this is life, real life, perhaps more real than I ever would have known it otherwise (in the best and worst senses of the word).

I sometimes find myself arcing up at this notion of “maintaining your own life”, perhaps because I feel its sting: the implied criticism levelled at women seen as losing themselves in mothering. Not that this was the tone of the woman I've mentioned — it wasn't at all — but I have felt that pressure to prove that I can readily separate myself out from my kids without missing a beat as if it shows some kind of strength of character, some self-respect.

But, at the same time, another part of me felt a little disingenuous with the “different life” comment — like I’d just trotted out one of those lines us all-knowing parents employ to hearten prospective parents.

I knew exactly what she meant about that struggle to do your own thing — and admit there are times when I feel completely absorbed by pointless imaginings of what I might be achieving if I didn’t have kids.

Last weekend I had one of those days when I had work deadlines looming, but the day was dominated by the kids' various activities. I spent the whole weekend feeling hamstrung, not quite able to get at the thing preoccupying me (workwise) and struggling to sink into just being present with the kids. Those are my most miserable days — the ones when I really feel like I’m failing on all fronts.

“Oh, I know I want to have children,” my dance studio friend assured me. “That it’s probably the most beautiful thing you could do in life…”

“You know, people without children have good lives too,” I said. It’s an obvious thing to say. And true. But also something I feel I can say with complete authority now, having been on both sides of the equation — before and after children.

As I’ve said before, now that I know what parenting asks of us, I have more sympathy than ever with the choice not to enter into what is an altogether more intense and intensive life.

But now that I’m here, I can’t separate my life out from that of my family in that convenient way that the modern world likes us to do. By that I don’t mean that I don’t relish spending time alone (which I do!), that I don’t value my time with friends or that I have lost sight of my own interests and career. It doesn’t mean that I want to talk about my kids all the time. It doesn’t even mean that I wouldn’t mind the occasional pedicure.

What I’m getting at, I suppose, is that I refuse to pretend that mothering hasn’t changed me — which it has, entirely. In some ways for the better; in some ways, no doubt, for the worse. Whatever I do or say or think has, absorbed within it, awareness of this altered reality.

And so, yes, it is a different life. In some ways less free. In some ways more. The "most beautiful thing you could do"? Perhaps.

Opping on

2009-08-22T14:54:00.019+10:00

Damon Young alerted me to this article by Helen Razer suggesting that "comfortable parents" can all tut-tut about Cotton On because as a brand it's a bit cheap and nasty, but that a "crass t-shirt is no less offensive than a tot in head-to-toe Prada".

(Although, funnily enough, I think Cotton On had earned itself a bit of cred lately -- at least, before this saga shot it down in flames. It's a weirdly nuanced thing the way these kinds of "High Street" brands (as the Brits call 'em) can redeem themselves from time to time.)

Anyway, as I said in my comment, I agree with Razer that parading babies around as billboards or status symbols of any kind is pretty off -- and that, yes, we're all prone to this kind of consumer hypocrisy to lesser or greater degrees. Though a pretty minuscule percentage of parents (even those in the comfortable category) could afford to dress their kids in Prada, even if they wanted to.

But this brought us to the issue of op-shops, Damon linking us to this story by sociologist and blogger Ruth Quibell, who reminds us to look beyond our bargain-hunting instincts and remember why and how op shops exist.

When it comes to the very fraught ethical questions of how, where and why to shop nowadays, op-shops have long been my get out of jail free card, or so I thought. (Though I've never bought fur, even second-hand, and never bartered either, I promise.)

I was just talking to someone last night about how you now have to expect to pay pretty much the same amount at oppies as you would for new gear -- but that you're hopefully paying for better quality stuff, especially when it come to kids (well, mine anyway) who seem to trash their clothes faster than I can stuff the little would-be nudists into them, as well as buying a bit more ethically, just by the nature of the wares being second-hand, and hopefully putting your money somewhere useful.

That said -- though (as Ruth points out) I know people who shop at op shops aren't just the very poor (there are even those running op shop tours now!) -- I would struggle to dress my kids in similar quality clothes bought new. The choice would be op-shop or the likes of Target, where I do admittedly shop from time to time, but always means wrestling with that ethical problem of whether to buy cheap imports made in China that fall apart in the wash and were probably made by a kid about the same age as your own.

The other issue is the way op-shops now get trawled through by some funky vintage outfit across the road who then on-sells for three times as much -- for profit, not charity. Where does everyone sit on that one? All part of keeping the whole thing ticking along, or just ripping off the everyone involved -- the charities, the poor, and the bargain-hunters alike?

... Oh dear...

Sorry, this post was started half an hour ago but was interrupted by my daughter stepping into the study looking like she'd spent too long on a horse. Yep, pooed her pants. Sorry, I know, that's a bit gross, but in the interests of truth and honesty about this parenting caper... Phew -- lucky the pants weren't Prada!

My my... (and cotton off)...

2009-08-14T11:01:00.016+10:00

The lovely Mia Freedman has posted about The Divided Heart on her massively popular blog, mamamia. She has described it as a “book that changed her life”, which has made me feel quite overwhelmed. Thank you Mia!

But equally overwhelming (for very different reasons) was her next post about clothing label Cotton On's tasteless new line of kidswear sporting 'slogans' like "I'm a tits man", "I like big boobs and i cannot lie", "I'm living proof my mum is easy" and - no, I'm not joking (though they think they are) - "They shake me"!

There is no excuse (not even "we're just being funny") for turning children into platforms for sick adult jokes and sexual innuendo.

So, so not on.

Stay-at-home versus working mum--how has it come to this?!

2009-08-11T12:54:00.025+10:00

Divided Heart artist Sarah Tomasetti once told me that when she became pregnant for the first time, one friend’s response was: “Congratulations! From here on in, everything you do will be wrong!”

We all know that motherhood and guilt may as well be interchangeable terms, but this seems to be doubly true when it comes to the issue of work.

A while ago I was chatting to Charlotte Young, co-editor of Barefoot Magazine, who admitted to me that she used to be pretty hard-line on the issue of whether or not women with young children should work. She wouldn’t be alone, among the educated middle-class women I know, in feeling that babies and toddlers should be at home with their parents and not in childcare. More than that, I would say there’s a largely unspoken but palpable disapproval of preschool-aged kids being in full-time care at all.

Like breastfeeding, the modern ethic says that thinking, conscientious parents will stay home with their babies — and with good cause. I too have felt the terrible pang when seeing tiny babies at childcare centres and the sense that it is just not right. But I also understand that it’s highly likely they are there because their parents feel they have no choice.

This absence of choice, though, is something I think we tend to reserve for the battling working class.

What of the woman who is on a strong career trajectory and feels she can't drop the ball? Or one who simply finds she's climbing the walls at home with small children? In my experience, this is often treated not only as short-sighted and un-evolved, but a definite moral failing.

When talking to Charlotte, she seemed a bit surprised by the fact that I, as a middle-class woman, might not have a choice about whether or not to work. Which got me thinking about whether I would still work, given the choice.

I held off going back to work for as long as my family could afford it (basically, until my kids were in turn at least two), and then have worked part time. But, within my immediate circles, I have found myself to be in a minority of women whose families actually rely on their income (in my case, it would be that or sell the house).

Since my son has started school, I have become increasingly conscious of the gap between those mothers who are in the paid workforce and those who are at home full-time. (And believe me, I know that caring for children and running a household is a huge workload in itself — one which unfortunately doesn’t go away whether you are also in the paid workforce or not.)

Something I have noticed myself doing, when talking to mums in the playground, is to play down the fact that I actually enjoy my work — as if this is some terrible admission that I don’t value mothering enough, or that I have taken a selfish path. Sometimes I wonder whether, in the (generally positive) push to reassert the value of mothering as the very important thing that it is, we haven’t lost sight of the fact that work is also meaningful in women's lives — and that that’s ok.

We still seem to be on a bit of a pendulum swing away from the (equally important) feminist push for women’s right to work, which had the unfortunate fallout of leaving some women feeling ignored or shamed for wanting to stay home. I don’t know that we’ve got the balance right yet.

Surely it’s a great thing that most women now feel they can make a genuine and active choice about whether or not to work when their kids are very small. And that those women who need or want to work have access to meaningful jobs.

So why are we still in this place where women feel so guilty, no matter what they do? Who do they perceive to be judging them — their partners, friends, children, society as a whole?

Women are beset with such an avalanche of mixed messages — from the media, politicians, our mothers, our workmates and friends — that it can be almost impossible to dig our way back to our own intuition on things, or to feel solidly confident in our decisions.

A shame, when there’s so much to celebrate — like the fact that I can sit here musing on this subject while my washing machine chugs away, a pot of soup is bubbling away on the stove, my daughter will soon return from a playgroup which is today being hosted by a dad, and my son is down the road at the great local school where his teachers last year got a big fat pay rise in recognition that what they do is not “just women’s work”.

It's 3.30...

2009-08-07T15:50:00.012+10:00

It’s 3.30, and I'm imagining my son leaving his classroom and making his way out into the schoolyard. He will find his way to after school care, or they will find him. He is an autonomous being. His own person, with his own life to live.

I know that. So why am I so frequently struck by this notion and so destabilised by it — the thought that my children are at this moment out there in the world where I can’t see them?

It makes me feel like a constantly unravelling ball of string — the further the kids roam, the more diminished I am, but the more liberated also. I find the levels of trust and faith I have to employ as a mother overwhelming sometimes. If only freedom — mine and theirs — didn’t seem to come at such a price!

Yesterday my daughter’s kinder teacher told me she was being targeted for bullying by a little boy she’s known her whole life. That day he had tipped a vase of flowers over her head, and when he was told that it was now his responsibility to clean it up, my daughter offered to help him.

This broke my heart — even more so, somehow, after a full morning of such appalling tantrums that I was driven to think: ‘Jeez, you’re lucky I love you so much, because this is the kind of thing that drives less adoring people to murder children!’ (Can anyone describe those unbearable hours when a child won’t stop whinging and screaming and throwing things at you? At those times, some part of me is forced to shut down, just in order to cope.)

I still worry that I haven’t got the guts for it. That I don’t have what it takes to override my own desperate fears in order to give my kids the space and trust they need to grow. That I haven’t got the discipline to avoid succumbing to lazy strategies — or rivalling my children’s behaviour with equally juvenile behaviour of my own.

Nothing rang more true for me than the wonderful Mindy Sotiri’s notion that parenting requires “a superhuman effort. Sometimes a more than superhuman effort.” Oh, how I agree with that! Superhuman effort — on a daily basis. And I have the great luck of having children without significant problems.

This is a very sentimental post, isn’t it? Must be the afternoon light…

Who's in Control?

2009-08-01T21:44:00.012+10:00

I re-watched Control recently, the biopic about Joy Division lead singer Ian Curtis.

I've watched a lot of films about male artists, and it is always fascinating to look at the impact of their obsessiveness — and their fame — on their family. This one is no exception.

In Control, which tracks the short life of cult figure Ian Curtis, there is a party scene where a woman talking to Curtis's wife enviously acknowledges how famous he has become. “Not to me,” Deborah Curtis smiles. “I still have to wash his underpants.”

Here, the music scene is a masculine world; Deborah is the long-suffering, marginalised wife, bearing the brunt of her husband’s creative talent, while he winds up the tragic hero, despite his domineering behaviour towards his wife and almost total negligence as a father.

Although the teenaged Deborah was also writing poetry when she met her future husband, he was always the focus of the relationship, she has said. “I don’t remember him ever asking to see what I was writing. That’s partly my own fault — I stopped writing after we got married. But I think he was so powerful that our lives were sort of centred around his art, and what he was going to do.”

In her response to the film, British novelist and art critic Bidisha argued that: “Great men attract subservient women and are forgiven for their unkindness because of the marvellous gifts they present to the world”.

She accuses recent artist biopics, such as those celebrating Bob Dylan, Jackson Pollock and Ian Curtis, of passing off acts of rebellion, arrogance and cruelty as reflections of greatness in men, while female artists are “neurotic nut-jobs … called by their first names” — think Sylvia, Iris, Frida — almost always in thrall to some more famous (though, history shows, not necessarily more talented) man.

Do you agree with this? Can anyone recommend some positive biopics about artists who wove their art into full lives as partners and parents?

One wonderful antidote is The Beaches of Agnes, French New Wave filmmaker Agnès Varda's film-memoir (currently showing at the Melbourne Film Festival) about her very full life as an artist and mother.

Placing herself amongst extracts from her films, and images and interviews recalling her past, the unstoppable Varda offers a fascinating and playful account of her creative work, her feminism and her family life.

Save Aussie Books

2009-07-23T10:46:00.007+10:00

Between homebirthing, uranium mining and whether or not Michael Jackson was murdered (oh, sorry, everyone was over that one before it began, really, weren't they?), there's a lot to be fired up about at the moment.

But top of my list right now is the issue of parallel imports for books--because there's still a chance we can do something to stop the Government going ahead with these ridiculous changes.

If you haven't heard much about the proposed changes to local laws on the importing of books, I urge you to take a look at Saving Aussie Books to find out more about the devastating impact these new laws will have on the Australian publishing industry.

Despite an outspoken campaign by authors, publishers and even many booksellers, the Productivity Commission last month recommended the Federal Government lift all restrictions on parallel importation of books on the basis that it will result in cheaper books for Australian consumers.

Publishers and authors would retain territorial copyright on works for only the first 12 months of a book's life, after which time booksellers could purchase any edition from any source in the world. Foreign editions characteristically pay a much lower royalty.

The US, Britain and Canada all support territorial copyright for books--so why would we put our own authors and industry at risk?

Writer Sally Rippin told me she was talking to a NZ author recently who said the independent bookselling scene has been annihilated there because of the introduction of these same laws.

One of the other risks of this new globalised market is that publishers will probably prefer bland books that can easily cross borders.

As writer Sheryl Gwyther has said: “Do you want to see Australian children reading books without Australian content and Americanised with Mom instead of Mum or faucets instead of taps, and vacation instead of holiday?”

Children’s writer Mem Fox agrees: “It’s tantamount to firing the entire writing workforce in Australia and outsourcing it to other countries, who will in turn change the vocabulary and cultural references that the outsourcing country finds difficult to grasp.

“This, in its turn, would mean in our case that particularly Australian books would not be published. … No go for a book like Possum Magic, then, with a huge loss to readers and local cultural capital.”

Fox earns 5% for each book sold — 64¢ on a $12.95 paperback of Possum Magic. Losing territorial copyright would reduce her royalty to 29¢. “It makes my old WorkChoices contract look like a gift from a fairy godmother,” she says.

Australian publishers including Text’s Michael Heyward, Scribe’s Harry Rosenbloom and Hardie Grant’s Sandy Grant have all defended the current system, crediting it with creating the “energy” in the nation’s most successful cultural industry and encouraging publishers to nurture their writers.

The changes would transform Australia from a publishing centre to a marketplace, Grant has warned.

Gwyther is leading the Saving Aussie Books campaign to increase the pressure on the Federal Government to reject the commission's report. “This corporate campaign to do in Australian authors and small independent publishers and bookshops is being ably run and organised by the giant corporations,” she says.

“Are we prepared to let Coles and K-Mart monopolise the economic, political and cultural agendas?”

Please get involved. This issue is too important to ignore.

Counting our Blessings

2009-07-20T23:35:00.016+10:00

Ana Kokkinos’s upcoming new feature, Blessed, is a film that gets under your skin. In fact, it is easily one of the most powerful documents on motherhood that I have witnessed, and for days afterwards I was sucking in my breath and fighting back tears each time it came to mind (which was often).

Adapted from the award-winning stage play Who’s Afraid of the Working Class?, the film tracks seven children from five different families over 24 hours as they roam the suburbs and backstreets of Melbourne. The film then switches to the mothers' stories, following them across the same day as they work to keep their families intact and their children safe. All these characters are disempowered in some way, but universal is that each is bound by the force that connects mothers and their children.

Each young person is in some form of danger or distress due in part to their mothers’ distraction as she struggles with her own issues. As for the children, there can be no real understanding of the impact of their actions on their families. The storylines intersect tenuously but with powerful results.

While some will experience this as a film about poverty, or about racism, or the perils and confusion of adolescence — all of which are true — to me, this film is ultimately one about motherhood — in all its overwhelming pain, tenderness, ambivalence, fear. And profound love.

Writers Andrew Bovell, Melissa Reeves, Patricia Cornelius and Christos Tsiolkas have adapted the play for the big screen, and while its history is at times detectable, it did not take away from the compellingly gritty cinematic experience. The film replaces some of the more overt polemics of the play with deeper psychological portraits of the characters, with Frances O’Connor, Miranda Otto, Deborra-lee Furness and Victoria Haralabidou leading an exceptional ensemble cast.

Be warned: Blessed is a film which will make you feel like someone’s cracked open your ribcage, taken hold of your heart and tried to wrench it from your chest (or at least given it one almighty twist). There are moments I found literally painful to watch. But like all good art, it leaves you with a profound sense of what it is to be human.

(Sorry, bit of a formal review--but that's one of the things I do in my other life as hack for hire...)

Blessed is on as part of the Melbourne International Film Festival and opens nationally 10 September. Hurrah for the recent/current spate of great Australian films! I will be doing interviews with some of Blessed's cast and crew later in the week and will post links…

Who said 'footy mum'?

2009-07-10T17:21:00.014+10:00

I have recently discovered that I've been keeping some of my friends amused by the fact that I can now talk football.

I have to admit, on this matter, I have been a bit surprised by my own capacity to adapt. But what do you do when you have a seven-year-old who is so utterly obsessed with football (in our case, AFL, being Melbourne), your only hope of a decent conversation is to start talking shop?

My son is now a walking encyclopaedia of footy scores. Perhaps he’ll hit 13 and we’ll suddenly be plunged into the ins and outs of his favourite music (bring it on!). But for now, it’s all “So, Mum, who is your fourth favourite footy player?”

May as well have an answer.

Even more amazing (to myself and others), is that I have now completed my first Auskick training certificate. Yes, I actually know how to put spin on the ball. It was that or stand around shivering on a frost-encrusted oval at 9am on Saturday morning. (Goodbye weekends…)

I have to admit, this Auskick set-up is impressive. I understood what one of the other mothers meant when she said: "We could learn something here, Rachel. Us lefties — if we were as well organised as Auskick we'd have kicked out Kennett two years earlier."

When our son first started showing an interest, my partner warned me about mothers like me. "You'll have to hang out with those footy mums...". "Oh, God, you're right," I thought. "Shit, no."

Now look at me. There is that simple thing that, as a mother, I want to be enthusiastic about whatever my kids are enthusiastic about — to genuinely engage with their interests and support their endeavours. It's just that when I thought about having babies, I stupidly envisaged that they'd be a bit like me — bookish and introverted.

Ha, ha, parenthood 101 — your kids will be their own going concern.

At this stage my son is too young too be aware of the suspect culture that exists on (and all too often off) the field. But it doesn’t take much to know that aggression is inherent to the game — exactly the thing that has always made me rail against it.

I can admire the athleticism involved, but what of the masculine (read, sexist) culture so evident in a sport like AFL? How do I counteract this at home when it is so much a part of the scene?

We don’t have a TV, thankfully, so I don’t have to deal with my son coming across programs like the Footy Show (so aptly described by the fabulous Catherine Deveny as hosted by pigs in suits for pigs in suits).

And fortunately my son has chosen to support a team that is on a serious losing streak, which not only makes me a tad more sympathetic but, for him, has enforced some useful lessons in humility.

The other great thing about my son’s age group is that there are still girls doing the Auskick training alongside the boys and this so far goes unquestioned. I am full of admiration for those fearless girls in their pink trackie-pants who can cut it with the best of them. What a shame all their visible role models have to be male.

In Melbourne, being part of the footy culture is like joining a club ('scuse the sort-of pun) — one that almost everyone else has already signed up to but to which I was almost completely oblivious, before now. Everywhere we go, if Griffin has his footy gear on (which is most of the time), people will tussle his hair and mumble: “Go, tiges!” (For those in the know, he is a Richmond Tigers fan, if that wasn’t already clear.) I can find this ridiculously endearing.

Right now I feel torn between wanting to support my son in his genuine love of the sport — which to him is about physical striving and personal achievement — and my concerns that the dominant culture in AFL is one that is in strong part to blame for the conduct of so many of its players. Even if it is working to change its ethos.

Plenty of women do love footy, I know. Funnily enough, on the fan front, AFL seems a pretty egalitarian sport. But just like I think it’s a form of denial to say that women’s magazines are just a bit of fun that don’t impact on women’s self-esteem, I think footy culture has problematic implications for our broader culture.

Anyone else out there confronting how to raise a son who loves footy and respects women? It was not a challenge I was expecting...

Doctor knows best, sweeties

2009-07-03T18:16:00.015+10:00

Yesterday I received a text from the darling Clare Bowditch to tell me her blood was boiling.

The source of the heat was this unusually soft interview on Radio National's Life Matters yesterday with the first female president of the National Association of Specialist Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (NASOG), Dr Hilary Joyce.

I suppose there was no point expecting that a female gyno would suddenly be transforming the entrenched, male-dominated attitude of the profession. But Dr Joyce may as well be a man, considering the paternalistic attitude she has towards “our women”. So much for the milestone.

Statistics must be maintained at all costs, it seems — after all, women can’t be trusted to make sensible, considered choices about the kind of birth they want to have.

“What is important is that the wonderful obstetric safety record of this country is not undermined by any … alteration in delivery of models of care.”

The fact that we enjoy the safest services in the world is directly attributable to the majority of births being medically led, according to Dr Joyce.

Homebirths are chosen by a “tiny percentage” of the Australian women, she claims, but receive undue attention largely because “of the over-representation of tragedies that occur”.

She has "grave concerns" about those “willing to put themselves and their unborn children at such risk” by avoiding medical intervention.

“We mustn’t be looking at turning the clock back in any way to perhaps more so-called natural childbirth…. It’s essential that there’s a doctor in the loop.”

And then the hypocrisy to complain that the Government is taking away a woman’s right to choice in getting rid of the safety net for private hospital birthing!

Medical intervention is not required in the vast majority of births, and midwives are trained to assess the risks. To imply that a return to “natural births” would be a return to the mortality rates seen at the turn of the century is misleading in the extreme.

While occasionally a baby dies during a homebirth — and this is desperately sad — is this a good argument for ruling out homebirths altogether as an option? Babies also die in hospitals.

I have had one of each — a homebirth and a hospital birth. Both have their place. Surely what’s most important is the right for women to make informed choices about how and where they give birth.

It is taking away this right that will send us back to the turn of the century for women.

You can read Clare's very eloquent open letter to Minister Nicola Roxon here. And if this issue matters to you, please sign Homebirth Australia's petition.

Writing, Shoes and Men Who Get It (not the shoes thing)

2009-06-27T17:56:00.016+10:00

Well, writing might not pay the bills, but at least it can win you a new pair of shoes!

Yep, I dashed off one of those “tell us why in 10 words or less…” things, and next thing I know some shiny Oxford ‘brogues’ land on my doorstep (thank you marie claire).

Just when you thought I couldn’t be so frivolous.

I can’t really afford to follow fashion, so it’s lucky I don’t have time to shop, but I have to admit that I’ve been coveting a pair of this style of shoe ever since I saw them on one of The Sartorialist's subjects (a Sydney woman, in fact — see Friday, May 08, 2009). My partner's not so sure about them — says they're a bit sexy/prim, whatever that means — but who cares. You think he'd be grateful I was getting out my uggies occasionally.

I am a bit of a compulsive viewer of the Sart’s site, partly because it is one of the only fashion forums that doesn’t leave me feeling completely inadequate. It’s full of beautiful people, to be sure, but is also as much about character and style as it is about clothes.

So those of you who write — you may as well try using your skills to win free stuff. I know a writer who has had far better success than me, winning holidays and more (admittedly, her husband’s a marketing manager, which must help a bit.)

But last year I did win a weekend in a hotel in the same kind of comp. And for those of you with small children and minimal childcare options, you know how mind-blowing that was! We had no choice but to palm the kids off for the weekend, catch the tram into the city and rediscover what Melbourne has to offer the footloose and fancy-free nowadays.

Once I’d gotten over the fact that a Hairy Canary gin and tonic now costs more than $10 (is that what happened while I was (not) sleeping?), it was a bizarre thrill to be alone together with nowhere in particular to go and no need to wake up before 7am the next morning.

Just quickly on another matter, I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Glendyn Ivin, the director of new Australian film Last Ride, for the AFI website (story should be on the site early next week). His spectacular and devastating film about a fraught father–son relationship opens nationally on 2 July and is well worth the price of a babysitter.

To my surprise, he and his wife (a dancer) had actually read The Divided Heart. We had a chat along those lines and because I couldn’t fit his generous and insightful comments in the AFI article, I’ll put them here:

Yes, it’s very interesting making a film about parenting and about a father trying but failing miserably at being a good parent, and then having those same thoughts on a very different scale at home, in that I haven’t been there, and when I am there I’m in an incredibly distracted or stressed state or freaking out or just thinking about other things other than what I should be thinking about.

I must say I have an incredibly supportive wife and supermum who has just held the fort, so to speak. I can’t speak highly enough of her. If it wasn’t like that, it would’ve made my job much more stressful and hard to deal with. It’s kind of easier, dumbly, for men to say, ‘This is what I’m doing’, and it must be incredibly hard for a woman who’s being a mum because they have a lot of other baggage that comes along with it.

Good on you, Glendyn.

Babies or brains?

2009-06-07T21:38:00.012+10:00

I was on standby last week to speak on Radio National's Life Matters in response to a couple of articles that appeared in the Guardian earlier this year: Rachel Cooke's Dummy Mummies (which was reproduced in the Australian Magazine--you may have noticed it) and Polly Vernon's Why I Don't Want Children.

Unfortunately the producer couldn't get the "key talent" (always nice to know where you stand!) to come to the party, which is a shame, because I had prepared myself for what could have been a really meaty discussion on the children versus no children debate--if such a thing exists, which for these women it clearly does. Both these articles raise loads of questions about what they see as society's current obsession with babies.

I understand that women who do not want to have kids feel that society treats them as abnormal. This word "selfish" gets bandied about--which to me seems as absurd as describing the decision to have babies as a "selfless" one. Of course it's true that once you have kids, your own needs and desires are forced to take a backseat a lot, in fact most, of the time. But to say the urge to have children is a selfless one just seems a ridiculous over-simplification of what is usually more a complex primal and physical urge than a lofty, well thought-out decision to step off centre stage or to give back to society or some such thing.

Similarly, it would be a misguided person who has a baby to make them happy. We all know there are plenty of good reasons not to have kids; all the stats tell us as much. But happiness can have a pretty limited definition, and I suppose a lot of the meaningful things in our lives offer both great joy and big risks and the potential for great despair.

On an issue as big and loaded as having babies, surely we can all respect each others' decisions and be a bit kind to one other? Can't we?

I have to admit, for all the sympathy I have for her frustration, I recoil at the vitriol that Polly, in particular, reserves for modern mothers, as she sees them. In her article, she writes:

I really don't like what parenthood does to grown-ups. This latest generation of parents - oh, it's odd, isn't it? I like the ones I know. Mostly. They're OK, because they're my friends - I chose them, they are by definition better than those parents I don't know. (Even if they aren't - I know for a fact that they were better, once, back before they had children, and I reckon they'll resume something approaching normal service once the buggers have gone to school. Won't they?) But modern parents en masse? That pampering cult of Bugaboo-wielding, Mumsnet-bothering dullness?

Spare me. Spare me the one-track conversations. Spare me the self-righteousness, the sense of entitlement (you, with the toddler-on-wheels: astonishing news just in! You don't have pavement priority over the rest of the world!). Spare me the pretensions of martyrdom and selflessness. (It's my experience that parenthood doesn't make anyone less selfish. Humans simply extend the sphere of their selfishness when they have kids, so that it embraces the kids and dishes out a fierce battering to the rest of the world. Also - no one has a baby out of selflessness. You really want to be selfless? Adopt, lover.)

"...something approaching normal service..." Jeez, I know she's being witty and all, but what a way to think about friendship!

Surely just as bad as thinking that all women who don't have children are selfish, over-ambitious monsters is the assumption that all mothers had a lobotomy in the birthing suite.

Also, isn't it the case--and this is more in response to Cooke's piece--that people who talk of nothing but their kids, and have no way of gauging the interest (or otherwise) of the person they're talking to, is no different to the person who can talk of nothing but their job, with no sensitivity to their audience? In short, boring and insensitive people are boring and insensitive people, aren't they?--no matter what they bang on about; and interesting people are interesting people. Even after they have children! That is my experience, anyway.

I think the issue of childhood and raising children is a fascinating and very significant one, for all of us. We all have to live in this society with other people after all, and all people were once children raised by adults, thinking or otherwise.

Basically, I think it's fucked that a woman can't, in this day and age, choose not to have children without feeling a target for some kind of judgemental attack. But why the need, then, to turn around and pass similarly simplistic, scathing and defensive judgements on those of us who do have kids? I'm all for healthy debate, but I have to admit it also saddens me that women seem to have this infinite capacity for turning on each other.

Will they forgive us?

2009-05-28T14:09:00.009+10:00

I have just had a message from author Charlotte Wood, who I was lucky enough to meet at the Sydney Writers Festival last week, and whose powerfully insightful novel, The Children, I have just started reading (more when I've finished).

Charlotte was reading this blog (bless her) and came across the earlier post about the ethics of writing about those we love. Being such a "tricky area", she has just written her MCA thesis on it -- focusing strictly on fiction, and called Forgive Me, Forgive Me: Ethical Anxieties in Fiction Writing.

She says: "The most interesting part of it was interviewing other writers, from Helen Garner to Robert Drewe to Tegan Bennett Daylight about their views on the ethics of writing fiction using real people's lives as material. Meanjin is to publish a 10,000 word essay extracted from my thesis in its December 09 issue."

This is bound to be a fascinating read! And quite a coup to get some of those authors' comments, I would think -- though if you meet Charlotte you'll understand the powers of her charm!

And while we're on the subject of Meanjin, having just spent a heavenly week at Varuna: The Writers' House, I actually had some time to read (and stoke the open fire and cook breakfast for one, i.e. just me -- amazing what a treat that is), I had a chance to read the latest issue of Meanjin, which includes a devastating and exquisitely written piece, "Losing Iris", by Barefoot Magazine editor Rachel Watts about the sudden death of her almost three-year-old daughter. Then, through my tears, I also read the interesting discussion between Sophie Cunningham and Nam Le.

In the meantime, check out Charlotte Wood's fabulous blog.

The most devastating love of all--or love and nits (take your pick, ha ha)

2009-05-14T10:44:00.023+10:00

Kate Cole-Adams, whose intoxicating novel Walking to the Moon I have recently finished (and highly recommend), wrote a wonderful piece for The Age on Mothers Day.

I was saying to a group of women the other day that I feel that my children have simultaneously made and destroyed my life. I think I may have shocked a few of them, as I sometimes do with my confessions. But when I say these things it is not a response to the minor irritations or lifestyle inconveniences that come with having kids — which are superficial, if at times very real — but all due to the devastating love I feel for them. Which is, of course, also what's so wonderful about motherhood.

(Though I did love Kate’s daughter’s comment when she found out her mum was penning a story on motherhood: “Say that the worst thing is nits.” It is difficult to explain to non-parents how whole weekends can be lost to the military operation that is nit elimination. But if I say “We’re having a family night in tonight — pizza and a movie”, it’s probably a euphemism for “The kids have got nits (again).” Grrrr. I can become quite obsessed — which my partner loves teasing me about, as he thinks the natural evolution of the nit-picking monkey is probably the modern sub-editor.)

Anyway, more seriously... in reading Kate’s article, I had a realisation — something that I suppose was obvious but that I had not really articulated to myself (as all the best revelations often work). It was that maternal ambivalence is not a state of being torn between love and hate for our children (meaning not them so much as what they've done to our lives) — but is a state entirely borne out of love.

It is precisely this love for my children, being so excruciating, that I can feel has ruined me. This acute tenderness and sense of responsibility is something us mothers are never free of, and almost impossible to imagine until you’re in it (unless you have the brain of Lionel Shriver, in which case you decide definitely not to procreate).

It is this maternal state — the sense of having your chest broken open, leaving you utterly exposed — that Kate describes so brilliantly in her article.

Yesterday I had to meet with my son’s principal to discuss the fact that he’s showing signs of becoming an anxiety-prone perfectionist. Ah, jeez, now where would he have got that from?! It can be so demoralising to realise that you haven’t avoided passing on your own worst traits. I had to use all my strength not to burst into tears in her office.

But, as I also told the same group of women I mentioned above, if I have any philosophy of parenting (I have never been much of a strategic thinker) then it’s to make sure my kids know how much I love them, always and ever, and to keep talking. I figure if we keep loving and keeping talking, we will all be ok (fingers crossed).

P.S. Thank you to Hannah Colman for posting this really fun interview we did a while back on great feminist blog The Dawn Chorus. Rare to get a chance to explore these ideas in so much depth.

Art versus life (have I used this one before?!)

2009-05-05T23:12:00.014+10:00

I know there are people out there who live extraordinarily creative lives. Their whole existence is an artistic project. They are their own work of art!

For me, though, art and life (while obviously reliant upon each other--well, art on life, anyway) can feel in constant competition for my attention. In a recent interview, I found myself saying that I feel like I'm making little choices every day between having a good life or a writing life! Which sounds stupidly dramatic, but unfortunately is the way it can feel to me sometimes. There doesn't seem to be enough time for professional work, creating a beautiful home, cooking good meals, organising activities for the kids, school committee meetings, keeping up with friends, occasionally saying hi to my partner in the hallway, enagaging with world and all its political/environmental/social/financial crises etc etc... and having my own creative life too.

As you can probably tell, I've felt like I've lost my mojo a bit lately on the writing front. Though my garden is looking pretty wonderful. I know it's all so predictable, really, to have these times when the mountains of self-doubt seem too huge to conquer (or bypass) in order to forge ahead. It's a bit like that inevitable moment during childbirth when you hear yourself saying "I can't do this. I don't think I can go on!" and it's almost laughable (if it wasn't so painful), because you've been told there will come a moment when you will feel/say this and that's considered a good sign.

Does the same go for writing? Can it be considered a good sign? Let's hope so.

Happy Mothers Day for Sunday everyone! It'll be hard for my kids to beat last year's handmade papier-mâché soap-dish--stored in my secret box of treasures for fear it will disintegrate upon use. Hope you all receive something equally precious.

The artist I met in Venice

2009-04-22T22:06:00.016+10:00

Since writing The Divided Heart, I’ve been surprised (in a very low-key way) that no-one’s ever asked me who is the male European artist I mention in the conclusion to the book. So obviously you’re not all dying to know — but I’m going to tell you anyway, because he is such an important artist for all sorts of other reasons.

When I was 21 I did the backpacking through Europe thing that us Australians do, and while in Venice, my travelling companions and I decided to take a ferry to the island of Giudecca.

There, in a restaurant, we happened to meet New Zealand painter Thomas Lauterbach and Austrian artist and architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser (1928-2000), who’s work you probably recognise, even if you do not know his name. (They helped us to order after catching us struggling to communicate with our Italian waiter.) He is probably most famous for his incredible block of flats in Vienna, known as Hundertwasserhaus.

Here is not the place to write about this encounter in any detail, but it meant my friends and I had the great privilege not only of meeting this phenomenal person but also of visiting Venice’s largest private garden, which Hundertwasser then owned. He took us on a walk amid antique statues, along trellised walkways and veiled nooks, to arrive at an old Istrian stone water gate overlooking the Venetian lagoon.

Once a tame English garden, Hundertwasser had let it run free, its knotted undergrowth a wild mass of nettles and brambles, a site for his ecological experiments, including humus toilets. I have since discovered that Hundertwasser’s decision to let the garden become overgrown was controversial, as you can read here if interested.

The garden has a fascinating history — apparently a place that countless writers (Maeterlinck, Proust, Rilke, James) visited and where ‘Alexandra of Greece’ (otherwise known as the Queen of Yugoslavia) famously went mad. The giardino edino, as the estate is known in Venice, was also the location of a famous quarrel between an unknown American and a young school friend of Cocteau called Raymond Laurent, which climaxed with Laurent committing suicide on the steps of the Salute church.

Hundertwasser, as I mentioned in The Divided Heart, treated his whole life as an artistic project. As an environmentalist he was visionary. Central to his work was his rebellion against “the tyranny of the straight line”, which he saw as inorganic, sterile and Godless. He believed in making the world a more beautiful place, and his architectural designs included rooftop gardens and bottle houses and flush-less toilets.

He spent much of his later life living in New Zealand, on a rural property in the Bay of Islands, where he fought hard for the right to be buried in his garden of the Happy Dead, under a tulip tree.

There is so much I could say about Hundertwasser — more than I can fit into a short post here — but I was and continue to be full of admiration for his determination to use the universal language of art to make political statements, whether it be for peace, ecology, against nuclear power, or for buildings befitting humanity and nature. He was an environmentalist well before such a thing as the environment movement existed.

I think Hundertwasser is constantly underestimated — mostly, it seems, because he was considered an exhibitionist and blatant self-promoter. (He was a nudist for a time a la Lennon, in the name of peace.)

But I, personally, feel blessed to have met him.

The ethics of writing about those we love

2009-04-05T23:19:00.015+10:00

I have found myself having a lot of discussions with people of late about the ethical problems of writing about our families — those thorny issues of boundaries and consent.

Writers, particularly, rarely avoid writing about the people they are intimate with. So, do we have a responsibility to ask our subjects’ permission to publish material about them, even if fictionalised?

And can’t we just be satisfied with writing something down? Why do we need to go and publish the stuff?

Can there really ever be an ethical code of practice for artists?

Gabrielle Carey made the interesting comment about her latest book, Waiting Room: A Memoir — that she kept it in her bottom drawer for several years before publishing it. Sometimes it’s just a matter of timing.

I do my best to write now, think later. If I think too much about what so-and-so will feel, I’d never write anything at all. But I do find myself regularly minimising the document on my computer when my partner walks into the room.

I have sometimes worried about what my kids will think of The Divided Heart, should they ever read it. I hope they see it as a record of how much I love them, as much as anything else. But there’s a risk they’ll have a very different view, and I have to live with that.

My seven-year-old son is very aware of the book and recently drew a picture of me with a bubble from my mouth saying: “The Devided Heart” and then an arrow to a drawing of a book, with “Mama’s book” written above it. I felt kind of wretched that he was celebrating my book without being old enough to really grasp its theme.

Fellow blogger Elisabeth has a fascinating discussion of the 'writing about family' theme on her blog, Sixth in Line, and notes that it is closely related to that other big area of literary controversy: the fact vs fiction debate.

You may all have heard about the furore in Britain over Julie Myerson’s book about her 15-year-old son's drug addiction, which led her to throw him out of the house. You can watch a painfully squirmy BBC interview with her here, in which Myerson mostly works to justify her decision to publish the book — only really digging herself in further.

Gabrielle Carey made an interesting comment in response, that instead of Myerson trying to justify her decision on other grounds, why can't she just say "I write — and that’s what I do?”

Keeping it real

2009-03-27T14:16:00.012+11:00

Some of you may have seen Clare Bowditch’s goosebumpingly impressive turn on SBS’s Insight program a couple of weeks back, arguing for the right of women to choose how and where they give birth. Independent midwives could have no better poster-woman for their cause. She did us all proud (especially her mum--seen holding her hand there during the show)!

Read more on Clare's site.

While a woman who chooses to give birth at home must pay thousands of dollars yet elective caesareans remain cost-free (to the family, not the system), we do not have real choices in this country.

Worse—now the option for a family to use a private midwife at home is set to disappear altogether.

As of July 2010, all midwives in Australia will require insurance to be registered.

Hospital-employed midwives are covered by their hospital’s insurance policy or by membership of the nurses’ union. Private midwives need to be insured too but currently no insurer is willing to provide insurance.

The Government supported private obstetricians with insurance but now refuses to help private midwives. Private midwives will have to cease homebirth practice, move overseas to work or face prosecution (jail).

Homebirth will be driven underground. Some women will birth at home alone without skilled, professional support.

If you feel strongly about this issue:

1. Please sign this petition.

2. Watch the "Save private midwifery" video at Homebirth Australia.

3. Write to the Health Minister, Nicola Roxon and your local Federal MP.

Whether you would choose homebirth or private midwifery for yourself is not the issue. This is about real choices for all women.

If women lose this option now, they are likely to never get it back. Between this and the embarrassing lack of paid maternity leave in this country, things are not looking good, gals.

(Will return to literary matters next post... Have had my father-in-law staying with us, which has meant no access to the study/internet for a week. Quite refreshing--but not so good for the blog-action. Back on track next week...)

Head and heart

2009-03-15T22:35:00.011+11:00

Sorry, it's been a long time between posts (had a crazily busy week!), but I wanted to say how fascinating the comments have been, particularly to my post on approaches to creativity.

As mentioned by Simmone, Lia's Hill's book, The Beginner's Guide to Living, apart from being a remarkable take on the search for meaning, is also a wonderful example of what Simmone, and Lia herself, has described as "method writing". Basically she went and did what her character would be doing (within reason)--travelled on trains and described what she saw, went to the library and looked at books or met strangers on the street... She basically lived inside her character's skin for those months she was writing the book.

I interviewed Lia for a story, and what was also fascinating was that she had her youngest child still at home with her, so he just trundled around with her and she talked to him about the big ideas she was exploring in her novel. That's one way to write and mother simultaneously! She's an inspiring woman.

Also, talking about the search for meaning, today I had the chance to go to a preview screening of Sarah Watt's new film, My Year Without Sex, and I was so moved. It was so refreshing to see ordinary (all-too-recognisable!) suburban family life on film, without it being either romanticised or quirkified or given dark undertones. Here again, the search for some overarching "truth" that is the human condition, amid the pressures of everyday life.

Sarah has such a talent for poignancy; her films speak to that part of ourselves that gives rise to both laughter and despair, sometimes simultaneously. I suppose by that I mean our hearts. There's this wonderful line in the film where the main character's husband tells her that she has a "gift for emotion". I wonder if that's been lifted straight from life, because I think that's Sarah's gift too.

I so loved this movie--and it made me laugh, lots. Today's screening was full of cast and crew and others involved in the film's production. I went along with my dear friend Sally Rippin and she noted that we were sitting next to the pole dancers! (Very funny--I won't tell you where they fit in the plot.)

One other thing--I listened to this wonderfully frank and generous talk by Helen Garner about what is commonly called writer's block, but which she describes as the necessary state of "unsentenceness" that must precede the first sentence of any new work. It provided much solace--and ties in with lots of the things we've been talking about here.

Happy International Women's Day!

2009-03-09T14:24:00.006+11:00

Did you know that in Russia men buy flowers for all the women in their life on IWD--in recognition of their contribution to communistic construction?
In fact, IWD is very much tied in with the principles of socialism, the first one observed in 1909 in the US following a declaration by the Socialist Party of America.
Demonstrations marking International Women's Day in Russia marked the first stage of the Russian Revolution of 1917.
Just a little history lesson for you. Now, where are the flowers in recognition of my ongoing push for a domestic revolution around here (think global, act local)?! Funny--no-one seems to have noticed...
Oh, and happy Labour Day too. Hope you're not working too hard--or at all, ideally.

Who's paying for you to be an artist?

2009-03-07T17:31:00.029+11:00

I have been having an interesting blogersation of sorts with Daniela after she wrote about The Divided Heart on her blog, LingoFranko. As you can see in her review there, though she had kind words for it too, she felt the book didn’t quite get to the meat of things, and I was keen to know what she thought was missing.

I bugged her to give me the “big questions” she would liked to have seen posed, and her response raised some themes which I think are indeed meaty — and which I think are central to the book but perhaps not explored as cuttingly as some readers wanted.

Her list has really got me thinking (all over again) about this eternal question of children’s versus parents' needs — summed up, I suppose, by her question: “Is art is more important than children?”

The other related theme is the cost of being an artist — financial and emotional. Who is footing the bill, on both counts? Hers are confronting questions: Whether it is fair to expect to be supported as an artist; whether artists take more than they give.

Then (yes, here I go again), as I was folding the washing last night I listened to Radio National’s Book Show segment on Literary Dynasties, about writers who came from literary stock. The conclusion was that having an artist-parent was more blessing than curse, at least for Virginia Woolf, Martin Amis and Dorothy Hewett's son Tom Flood — who were the writers discussed/interviewed.

But my ears pricked up especially at the comment from Kingsley Amis’s biographer that Amis snr, and his son Martin like him, was a serious writer because he put his work first — before anything else, including family. Both leave other people to deal with the trivial matters of life, like how to make ends meet. “They just put their heads down and work.” Martin would never have opened a bill in his life, the biographer said.

At the International Women’s Day morning tea I spoke at the other day I said that one of women's strengths in my field, the arts, is that they are learning that to be an artist doesn’t require being a self-absorbed ego-maniac; you can be a loving, nurturing human being and still make exciting, powerful, engaging work.

That said, the women I see really succeeding in the arts are the ones who expect — don’t just ask, but expect — their partners to take on an equal load. They are the ones who fully embrace motherhood, but who can also express the milk, hand over the bottle and walk out the door when required. It’s amazing as a woman how much gumption this still takes.

As one of my heroes Catherine Deveny says, when fathers are with their children, they are not babysitting. They are fathering. I agree with Catherine that women need to make this a basic expectation — not a request — if we are to move forward. For artists, who already struggle with giving themselves the permission to take their own work seriously, this is all the more important.

I can’t respond in full to Daniele’s questions here, because it would take too long. But I would agree with her that of course there are times when children’s needs have to come first, especially when they’re little — if she’s putting her head on the chopping block with that one, as she says, then mine’s there wincing right beside it. I also think there are ways of maintaining a creative life and being a committed, sensitive parent, no matter how fraught at times.

I also, though, think that if you have a creative need, then to quash it for the supposed sake of your family is to ultimately make yourself sick. And that is not a good model of living for children to witness. Sometimes it’s not as clear as children’s versus parents’ interests, because the happiness of both is so bound up together.

As for the financial side of things, I think it’s dangerous to suggest that art should only be made where and when it pays — partly because it is often impossible to know if a creative work is going to make money or not. In the arts, the exchange is rarely that clear, and apprenticeships can be long and thankless on that front — but they have other rewards. Much like raising kids. If women, or men, have a partner who is willing to support them in their decision to make art, well lucky them, I say.

On the other hand, I agree with Daniela that life is give and take, and it is important to be aware of what you ask of others in order to do what you do. I guess this is exactly my criticism of the traditional male artist who forced all those around him to be in discreet service to his creative genius.

There has got to be a middle way between self-absorption and self-denial for the artist-parent — and children can only benefit from a parent's commitment to that endeavour.

The nature of creativity

2009-02-28T21:46:00.006+11:00

Just a quick post as I am launching Barefoot Magazine tomorrow (see upcoming events to the right) and must get my beauty sleep (which is a euphemism for must work out what the hell I'm going to say, it being 10pm the night before and all).

I expected to write my 'speech' during the three hours of freedom meant to be provided by a birthday party today, which instead turned into three hours of monitoring my over-sensitive 6-yr-old, who didn't get enough sleep last night (the joy of sleepovers) and ended up repeatedly bursting into tears because the wind blew his hat off or some such tragedy.

Anyway, my dear friend and fellow blogger, Kim, alerted me to this talk by author Elizabeth Gilbert, which I think you would all find fascinating in the light of what we have been talking about lately.

The rest of you have probably already discovered the fantastic world of TED--which hosts these great presentations--being such media savvy types, but it was a revelation for me.

I have to admit I have up until now avoided Gilbert's bestselling Eat, Pray, Love, but perhaps now I'll reconsider... Love to hear your thoughts.

Vague thoughts on the difference between acting and writing

2009-02-21T23:14:00.015+11:00

Having written a hell of a lot of non-fiction in my life, when it comes to fiction I feel like I am still wading blind. I have not yet learned to have faith in what I think gets called "a voice"--my voice--to the degree that I can just get on with telling the story. I feel as though, no matter how long I have been putting pen to paper, I am still learning the most basic lessons.

Lately, I have been struggling with what I was describing to my partner as "restraint"--meaning, how to know where you, as writer, end and the reader begins. How to judge when enough is enough? We all know, as readers, how much more powerful a story is that leaves space for your own knowledge and insights to rush in.

My partner has done a lot of acting and so I often ask him for the actorly equivalent to my writerly problems--it's amazing how often ideas make more sense one step removed from the subject at hand. He said, "Well, it's all about being present, isn't it?" And I am still trying to get my head around what it might mean to be present as a writer.

Of course my partner tells me the solution is to meditate, which is his solution to everything--"letting go" being the key. (And I suspect he's right, though I immediately start thinking "When am I going to find time for that?!".)

I was talking to our resident philosopher Damon Young recently about a fiercely intelligent friend of mine who studied drama but was always struggling to "bypass her intellect", as she was being instructed to do. I told him I find this fascinating about acting--that it requires a different kind of intelligence, more physical or instinctual than intellectual. In writing, too, I am still trying to understand the role of instinct, and how to get ideas to sink beneath the surface--to drive the action rather than tell the reader what to think.

"Fiction involves the intellect, but, yes, it's not calculative, analytic," was Damon's response. "Fiction is informed by what you know, by how you think, but it's a very different kind of process. I think acting is similarly divided from academic work, though the aspect of embodiment--like dance--is more crucial than in fiction."

Then today I read this wonderful quote in the paper from actor Ralph Fiennes--currently starring in The Reader, which I can't wait to see:
"I think [acting's] about openness and being present. Thought and analysis are not good. Instinct is your engine. I once had an argument with someone who said that acting was an intellectual process. I said that it wasn't that at all; it was closer to sport, where you are open to the next moment. I'm not a sportsman, but I have played enough sports to know that you have to be absolutely present and in full possession of your skill. The acting I like is very transparent."

What a great analogy. As for how that translates to writing, I am still giving it some thought. But I can only guess at what it might feel like to be "in full possession of your skill". Exhilarating, I imagine.

What children say at times like this

2009-02-14T23:17:00.012+11:00

Yesterday my son asked me:
"Who invented dying?"

He is very interested in the difference between nature and God--and whether there is a difference, and if there is a God, what form he/she/it might take.

"I suppose nature invented dying," I answered, with all the authority of someone increasingly at a loss to explain anything.

"Well, I don't really like it that nature did that," he said.

And we all knew just what he meant.

Victoria's bushfires and our Bev

2009-02-11T22:19:00.016+11:00

We have a wonderful babysitter we call our "gravelly old groover". There is no-one else like Bev (that's her in the VW with my Freya in the back). She has a colourful past, having run Carlton restaurants and partied with rock stars in her youth--she even came up with the riff for a big hit, though she never staked her claimed to royalties. She is one groovy granny.

In all the years she has worked for us I have never once heard her raise her voice. She is seemingly unflappable. Bev is not one of those babysitters who turns up with her magazines and hopes the kids will mind themselves. She comes complete with a new stack of library books and activities and stickers and all the paraphernalia she has gathered, tailored to their interests, and from the minute she walks in the door she is completely dedicated to the kids.

Four other mothers and I take turns each week to host our 'playgroup', which means Bev and one mum mind the kids while the others have a break or work or do whatever needs doing. It's a great system--and a lovely chance for a chat with the precious gravelly one. This week was my turn, and of course Bev and I wound up discussing the bushfires--the trauma and sadness and our fears for the future in this harshening climate.

"I have been worried about these things for years, Rachel," she said to me. "Since the seventies I have been terrified about what the future holds for these kids." Bev only had one child--and for the first time I discovered that this choice was made because of her concerns about the world she was bringing him into. But now she has grandchildren, of course, and that has only brought it all up again.

She told me that this was the reason she decided to become a childcare worker--because she wanted to dedicate herself to giving as many children as she can the most magical possible childhoods, because they will need to carry that sense of joy with them into the future and "the horrors" they will be confronting. She had never told me this before. I walked into the kitchen and shed a few tears, and then I made us both a cup of tea and helped the kids into their fairy costumes. I will never be able to explain to Bev how grateful I am that our kids are among those lucky enough to be in her orbit, sharing in some of that joy she so passionately bestows.

Check out Our Community for ways you can contribute to the bushfire relief cause. Watching the community rally in support of the bushfire victims has made this not only a terrible but also a moving and heartwarming week, hasn't it?