Birds and Balloons

The other day I was at my daughter’s dance class when I ran into writer Lisa Gorton, one of those extraordinarily gifted people too over-qualified for anything but poetry. We were both on the “art and motherhood” panel at the Melbourne Writers Festival and I was quite in awe of Lisa’s poise. Last year she published two books, Cloudland, a fantasy novel for children, and Press Release, for which she deservedly won the Victorian Premier’s Award for Poetry.

Lisa told me that she had been in a café recently when she overheard two women taking about The Divided Heart — which is such a flattering thing to hear. While we were talking another mother jumped in to ask if I wrote TDH, as she had several friends who had been stirred to revisit their art and rethink its importance in their lives after reading it. That was pretty special feedback.

We had a brief chat about that sense of frustration at the work always feeling off there somewhere just out of reach. When a story idea comes to me it often arrives, in a sense, fully formed; graspable — if only I can just grab the string and hang on for dear life. If too many distractions get in the way, I start slipping and all too often that hot-air balloon — so beautifully shaped, containing whole worlds within, but so easily popped — deserts me altogether, flying off and taking with it all that excitement I felt at its possibilities. That is a heart-breaking moment.

I hope Lisa finds a way to clutch one of those strings and keep dragging that balloon around above her head no matter how inconvenient to be attached to something so fragile when life is so full of thin doorways and jagged edges — and you constantly need two hands to tie up shoelaces and that kind of thing! Just hang on by your teeth, I say, if that's what it takes. I, for one, can’t wait to see what Lisa produces next.

In the meantime, I can recommend a book I’m reading, Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, which was recommended to me by writer Susan Johnson, and which I keep hearing about, coincidentally — perhaps because there is a new local edition of this book available. For example, see this recent post by Loobylu.

Also my illustrator friend Kim Fleming today introduced me to this extraordinary photographer, Joey L. If you take a look at his breathtaking images, you will see why there’s no need for words — and why they are worth sharing. I love his notion of the “dignified portrait”, mentioned on his blog.

OK, I am now escaping to the seaside, hopefully out of the 43˚C (107˚F) heat. I have been cooked well enough this past fortnight. Good luck to us all!

Art, money, family, life...

Who else noted Sonya Hartnett's answer in The Age yesterday when asked if she keeps a diary? "No. Like Truman Capote, I am physically incapable of writing anything for which I won't get paid" was her answer. Hmmmm. Am I jealous? Yes. Very.

For me there is still a stark contrast between the writing I do for money and the writing I do for myself, i.e. that I love.

In one of the repeated conversations I have with my partner on the subject of our mutual creative frustration (he music, me writing/art), the one thing that differentiates us is that he is not currently in a position to make money from his music, which he does around the edges of full-time work. And in a way, that has its own freedom.

I, on the other hand, feel a constant tug-of-war between writing for money (freelance articles etc) and writing for myself (short stories etc), both done on top of my part-time day job.

These questions of how/where art fits within a family dynamic are an area of constant fascination for me. How do you calculate what's 'fair' between couples, especially where children, a lack of money and a need to make art (or pursue any passion) are in the mix? To me, this matter is endlessly complex and fraught.

From a feminist perspective I also find it humming with ambiguities. Are there areas of life where women still benefit from the persistence (even resurgence) of traditional arrangements--the assumption that men will be prepared to work full time, which gives some women a certain freedom of choice about when and in what form they will work?

I am aware that it would be hugely controversial for my partner to say that he is giving up work to make music full time and to hell with the consequences. Whereas I can imagine my women friends, at least, applauding me if I were to make the same declaration. And yet, there are times when I would love to swap--he work part time, me full--but, for all his support, I don't entirely trust that he could really take over the rest. The cooking, cleaning, the pick-up and drop-offs... the holding of a thousand little threads that keep this household operation ticking over.

I have a lot of female friends around me whose creative lives are in a sense supported by their partner's willingness to be the reliable breadwinner. I think this is an enviable position to be in--though that's not to take away from the amount of work these women do around the home, in terms of housework and caring for kids, which is in itself a full-time job.

I am not going to attempt a review here, but Susan Johnson's novel Life in Seven Mistakes has some extraordinary passages on this theme, as does her memoir, A Better Woman, which I quote in The Divided Heart. The trajectory of the conversation (page 211-212) between the main character Elizabeth, a potter, and her husband, a wannabe filmmaker, is so familiar to me as to be painful to read. "Are you going to give up making pots and get a real job so I can give up work to become a genius filmmaker?" he asks her. Ouch.

Also a compelling read on this theme is Wendy James's wonderful novel, The Steele Diaries, about a woman who as a child was adopted by patrons of her famous parents, both obsessively driven artists working in the 1930s. In it, there is a letter from mother to daughter (I have lent the book to someone, so can't tell you the page number, sorry) that powerfully sums up the situation for a woman artist who cannot reconcile her maternal and creative selves, particularly in an era where women artists had to show their capacity for single-minded determination in order to be taken seriously. I hope that much has changed.

Oh, and you must go and see Sam Mendes' masterful new film, Revolutionary Road, for a truly devastating picture of what can happen to a woman who needs more than a domestic life.