Here is a write-up I did for a Colour Box Studio event

Event: readings and interview with Kirsten Krauth, author of just_a_girl

The first excerpt read by Kirsten Krauth from her debut novel just_a_girl is stark and exposing. The 14 year-old protagonist Layla is on her first meeting with internet acquaintance youami33, for whom she strips naked and attempts a seduction, until he makes a premature departure from their hotel room, presumably unimpressed by her trying-to-be-suave sex talk and her lack of hymen. Exposure in a digital age is a thread that runs through tonight’s discussion, and Layla is the bold teenage voice of the present.

Watching a debut novelist read from her first book is exposure in a different context. Kirsten addresses the issue when she tells the story of her first exposure in front of a crowd - a day at school when her favourite teacher put her in the centre of a cruel experiment and then asked the class to analyse and discuss aloud the emotions that she showed throughout. It took some time to recover from that trauma, and I imagine reading from your first major work must feel a little similar, but on your own terms.

The crowd however is a friendly one, and crime novelist and tonight’s interviewer Angela Savage has an ease with people that means the interview flows more like a conversation. There is a warm communal feel. We are seated in Colour Box Studio’s front shop, opposite the large window to Nicholson Street. Scented candles peer over the proceedings, people are perched on chairs and milk crates and cushions, the little heater blasts air to warm bare floors and cold ankles. At one point an audience member makes motions to interrupt the interview and visibly catches herself in time, but is immediately ushered by both Kirsten and Angela to contribute to the discussion. This opens the floor to the sharing of various memories of teenage gossip from the pre-Facebook era, and there is a general reflection that however cruel the rumours of the eighties and nineties, the internet renders an ease of distribution and a permanence that was heretofore unmatched.

The session is punctuated with little stories which Kirsten came across during her research. There is the modern tragedy of a teenage girl afraid to walk down the street of her small town because her misguided sexting photos are displayed on a webpage titled SLUT, made by a boy who won’t take it down despite pleas from her and from her parents. Then there is the weirdly triumphant tale of a 15 year-old selling naked pictures of himself on the internet, and only getting found out when his mother discovers the $5000 in his bank account. Kirsten is clearly fascinated by this phenomenon, and her interest and enthusiasm are infectious.

One of the most unexpected facets of the evening is the depth of examination of the actual process of writing and publishing a novel. Angela extracts the various stages of Kirsten’s journey – from the initial inspiration in eavesdropped conversation on long train commutes to Sydney, to the great leap of faith in quitting a regular and well paid job, and the stroke of genius in applying for a research masters in creative writing, because research masters are free. Kirsten speaks about her careful choice of a gentle mentor, the great benefits of having enforced three thousand word monthly deadlines, and her joy at reaching the stage of a 30,000 word novella, though no-one, she adds, would ever publish a novella from a first-time author.

The novella became a novel and finally the courting process began: agents at soirees handing out business cards with their praise, publishers with year-long waiting times for the grace of a reply. When picked up by UWA Publishing, Kirsten found it particularly difficult to go through the structural edit, the part where you kill (or save!) your babies, by deciding major stylistic and plotting issues, inserting or removing flashbacks, establishing chronology of events. The on the line edit was easier for her: here words are pruned right down, but Kirsten had done much of the pruning herself already, in order to establish the book’s three distinct narrative strains.  

The discussion of publicizing is interesting because the event at Colour Box Studio is a living example. Angela speaks about the importance of promotion online, and indeed tweets about the event as Kirsten speaks. This provokes the onset of a twitload of shared experiences on engaging with hashtag explosions on Twitter, from the comic to the recent pro-abortion filibuster. Taking criticism is a recurrent theme, it being the disgruntled spouse of publicity and exposure. Kirsten is charming when she talks about quietly giving critics her own ratings out of five, with two stars (generous) for ‘ probably didn’t even read the book’, and five stars (reciprocal) for the reviews that celebrate her work. 

The night ends with questions, and this part is even less formal. The talk turns to Tadashi, the Japanese male character who orders a love doll online and carries her around in a suitcase. The female audience is furiously curious about the love doll concept and about the men who prefer them to real women (are all women similarly fascinated by their own rejection?). Tadashi openly projects his fantasies onto this inanimate object, just as Layla’s mother Margot projects hers onto the local preacher and her newfound religion, and I have to wonder how much of dreams and goals and self an author projects onto her characters.

When she speaks about just_a_girl, you can see Kirsten’s care for each of her characters, and her particular pride in their distinct voices: Layla’s choppy speech, punctuated by tangents and expletives (fuckadoodle!), Margot’s long flowing prose, and Tadashi’s more simple and poetic style. With the completion of a novel, the letting go of these characters and what they represent is enforced. Kirsten tells us that by the end she was ready to let go, even though she worries sometimes for them, the characters, and hopes she left them with enough strength at the end to make it where they want to go.

The evening, while small and quiet, manages to do what Colour Box usually does, to be just a little bit inspiring. I leave with designs to read the book (now half way through), watch Lars and the Real Girl (happily downloading), and maybe even after that to put pen to paper myself. 

I can't write because...

Today I went to a creative writing workshop run in one of my local art spaces as part of their writing and performance programme. It was aimed at beginners really, with a string of clever little exercises to get you started on writing or to overcome writer's block. My favourite was the one called "I can't write because..." where essentially you write those four words and then keep writing. Here is mine with some extension:

Chapter one. I can't write because I write all the time at work, and in that writing I document exactly how things are, how people are, how they look and how they dress and how they speak and how they behave and how they say they feel and how I think they feel, and all of it is like painting a picture of something that already is. I have never been artistically inclined but I imagine it like life drawing - trying to get your pencil to skim as close to the curves of a person or a vase or a jam jar, and your goal is accuracy, trueness to life. And what I would like to write is something different, something that evaporates up from reality's cold pool, steaming up until the kettle whistles. They say that fiction is truer than fact. That, and you have to wait patiently for facts to happen. Oh, and confidentiality, of course.

Chapter two. I can't write because I don't have time. And when I do have time I get scared and bored, scared of being bored, and bored of being scared, and I make great lists of plans of lists of things to do. And soon my time is snapped up in the business of being busy. And it only leaves little nuggets of time when my mind loosens out and the writing will come.

Chapter three. I can't write because I feel selfish. There must be a million great works lying unpublished or even unwritten because the writer could not bear to listen to himself thinking for extended periods of time. He couldn't expend all that ink on his own views, gifting them to a diversity of characters, spreading himself out into tens of other humans of physical descriptions he has imagined up for himself. Locking himself in his room for hours on end to stand on the soapbox in his own mind and shout inspiring things to the world. It's a luxury and an arrogance and an addiction. And I want it/ can't have it.

Art and other forms

A few Saturdays ago I went on an art crawl, a four-hour guided walk through Footscray, my local suburb. Footscray is the capital of the West, a multicultural hub, and owner to the charming nickname Foot-scary. The tour visited four newly established artist-run art spaces where committee members and artists spoke on their space and their work. The best was a piece called ‘Extended Families: a collection of collectors’ collections’ in an art space just opposite the train station I use to get to work. The space was a box-like room with only one portrait style picture on the right side. The tour group crowded in, lining the empty white walls, and the artist (whose face featured in the portrait) started to speak.

This girl was skinny and hipster and incredibly articulate. She described her piece, which centred on a black ‘catalogue’ book on a low shelf opposite the portrait, although the whole work involved the portrait and the white walls and the empty room. She spoke about her motivation to examine the idea of collection of art - growing up in a family of collectors, a father who she joked ‘loved his objects more than he loved his children’, attending the two auctions of her French grandfather’s art collection but missing his funeral, because of the timing and the distance.  She then detailed her process – stalking and contacting collectors and asking them to describe the favourite object in their collection, the text of which description then featured in her ‘catalogue’, and her own unexpected glee and triumph as she ‘collected’ these elusive people and involved them in her art.

My immediate reaction to the girl’s monologue (a term that sounds appropriately literary but not appropriately communicative) was to question why she is an artist. Why isn’t she a writer? Why isn’t she a speaker? Walking into the room I hadn’t even noticed the slim black book perched on a low shelf opposite the portrait. I hadn’t noted that the empty walls were notably empty of objects, that there was a tension opposite the two poles of the room (the portrait and the book), that the portrait was not the focus but the final touch, the collector surveying her collection, the artist surveying her work. I hadn’t clocked any of that, until I was told, because to me words and speech are by the far the most effective medium, and the words and speech of this girl painted (to borrow a word, from form to form) a much better picture than the visuals did.

This experience reminded me of my visit to Mona, the private art museum founded by Tasmania’s gambling mogul and eclectic collector, which hangs off a bay just North of Hobart. On entry to Mona you are given a personal ipod that scouts for your location within the museum and pulls up a list of nearby artworks. On selecting the artwork of interest, you get a variety of options including hearing from the artist (you get earphones too), reading a brief critical account of the art (brilliantly entitled Art Wank) or listening to a musical piece that either the artist or the collector (I assume) have chosen as complementary to the art. The result is staring at a painting of Melbourne burning in a great fire while listening to a noisy punk classic and finally understanding that the term multimedia refers (ingeniously) to a multitude of mediums, a multitude of forms.  

Considering the artist’s speech about ‘Extended Families’, I have come to appreciate her skill and to realise the deficit in my own reaction. Realising my deficit is usually something that I hold against art. I hate it when you see a picture and don’t understand and there is no effort to explain and you can only assume that your ignorance or poor sensitivity is holding you back from this whole world of wonders. This experience was different: it was inclusive. Here the artist could and did communicate in many different forms, using one to enhance another, and one that she used happened to be the one I appreciated. It was pretty impressive, but some people are just lucky I guess: they can write about music AND dance about architecture.

Driving Lessons

Driving lesson number one was post-call pre-sleep peri-darkness falling and me not being able to see the accelerator pedal, which in retrospect is probably the best of the three pedals to be out of sight. We drive around the suburb. A horrible man in a black hatchback beeps like a motherfucker as I botch my first turn and Bob my driving instructor says don't worry darling in an accent and I love him. Then Bob pulls the car over and hatchback man speeds past with a long hard beep like I have just run over his toddler. I feel tired and start to cry. I am hoping it is too dark to see my toddler tears but Bob knows and says if it happens again we will put the hazard lights on and leave the car at the junction, hop out to chat and laugh on the footpath and wait until we are good and ready to get back in. 

Driving lesson two is a Saturday morning and I went to bed early last night and today I can see all the pedals. I drive right down the big straight road toward the sea and get all the way to fourth gear which is awesome. I grip the steering wheel too tight so when I change gear I always veer to the left because my right hand is unresisted and when Bob tries to right me he has to push real hard on the wheel. By the end of the lesson I have pains in my arms but I feel like a grown up. All I need now is eight more lessons, a box of toothpicks and Ryan Gosling. 

Irishness

Not long after arriving in Melbourne, I went to visit the Immigration Museum. This was primarily for the Leaving Dublin exhibition which is a collection of photographs of Irish soon to be emigrants posing in places in Dublin that hold significance for them. There were places which were significant to me too, like Meeting House Square where i used to go to the weekend food market to buy chorizo and coffee and fruit scones. Each emigrant was identified by a first name, a profession and a destination of migration, and all were tied together by a brown suitcase which they perched on or leaned against, working as a kind of motif. There were video interviews with all the subjects where they told their story, but the best part was there was a booth where visitors to the museum could leave their own stories, and a screen where they displayed videos from people who had. There was an old man who had lived here for decades and raised a family with his wife who recently died. There was a tiny wrinkled old woman who thanked Australia for her many happy years. All had accents you could cut with a knife, and I loved it. I thought about recording a message but did not because I am shy and also I felt like a fraud because I had a job at home in Ireland and I left anyway. 

I went to a Travel Writing festival in the university last weekend, which was less a festival than a series of lectures. I mainly went to hear the co-founder of Lonely Planet talk (their headquarters is in Melbourne, a few kilometres from where I live; he is English and fun) but I also attended a seminar on supermodernity which apparently is a term used in architecture and anthropology that describes places that are non-places (transit lounges in airports was the best example I could understand). The female speaker spoke about the relationship between Aboriginal people and the land, calling it 'the primary connection', and it occurred to me that Australians, the settlers, are a landless people, and that this makes their national identity sort of tenuous. Those who plough ahead to forge an Australian identity have to do so at the expense of sensitivity toward the people whose land they took and whose descendants are now living in conditions of child mortality and substance use that rally closer to the statistics of a third world country than the wealthiest country in the world. Those who are sensitive toward the treatment of Aboriginals can only work within a framework of shame and hush about their nationhood, pickled in weird positive discrimination policies, and in my limited experience the whole thing really does not coalesce into anything cohesive. This sounds romanticised but I remember seeing a friend at home walking the land his family has farmed for years and years, and somehow that holds a real significance that even I can feel and miss, if not fully understand (with mouth full of chorizo and coffee). 

Finally one of the best things for homesickness was Dad sending me poems in Irish like this one about Henry VIII which he sent on St. Patrick's Day and prefaced by saying 'I shouldn't like this since I have three Protestant great grandparents': 

Magairle Annraoi Ri

Na thracht ar an mhinisteir Ghallda,

Na ar a chreideamh gan bheann, gan bhri,

Mar nil mar bhuan-chloch da theampuill,

Ach magairle Annraoi Ri

It took me weeks to google 'magairle' and it turns out it means testicle. And this short poem for bruised hearts about people who come to visit often or less often:

Goirim do shláinte a mhinic a thig

Goirim do shláinte a mhinic nach dtig

Is trua nach é minic nach dthig

A thigeann chomh minic le minic a thig. 

Four reasons why I love Girls

It has been so blogged about that I am embarrassed to add my voice to the clang. But embarrassment is natural, refreshing, and often constructive, hey? Let's go…

1. The sex. Is like how I know sex. I don't know where all the rest of on screen sex comes from but hell I've never seen anything like it. Maybe that is what all men are imagining when they are fucking and that's ok. But TV should show some real shit every now and then because TV has been around for ages and it really should be better already. Lena is the Hunter S. of the 21st century.

2. The heroine. Sure she is a pain in the arse. But in an oh God I am a pain in the arse, people are collective pains in collective arses, kind of way. Of course she could pull that doctor in that playsuit. That doctor was a sad and lonely man in a big and shiny house. Why wouldn't he indulge a twentysomething who banged down his door and took off her clothes? And for those who were appalled at how she dares to get her tits out in a non-erotic way, I agree, how disgusting! I think that every morning in the shower.

3. The lines. Adam and "OCDC". Jenna the "dumb hipster". Everything that Shoshanna says. Everything hilarious that reflects how those girls live and how they worry about how they live. Everything that pokes fun at itself.

4. The boys. Because I love Adam the weirdo and loving boys is a part of heterosexual girl existence. The same goes for wanting boys to rescue you when your book deal goes to shit and you've perforated your own eardrum with a cotton bud. Does that make you weak? Does it make you not a feminist? No, fuck off. To explain my expletive I was going to speculate about how boys probably want the same things in their own different way, but the point is that I really don't have to, because desires and behaviours shouldn't be held up to the standards of another. That is feminism, those are Girls. Bring on Season Three.

Differences

- I write all the time at work. I read clinical documents to get a sense of someone's background, based on interviews and observations and I jot down a summary of these, with bullet points for issues I need to address in my own interview, and after the interview I write down my own findings from interview and observation. I notice that I can usually remember people's answers to my questions but can rarely remember what they look like, scarcely enough detail for a basic physical description so mine always end up saying 'casually dressed gentleman of stated age with moderate self care' and this covers anyone and everyone, female gender excluded because I can usually notice if you are a woman. 

- I meet Australians of all colours and shapes and sizes, newly and oldly immigrated, with varying senses of entitlement, belonging and identity. I wonder if I get more of the racist ones, because I'm white, and I pity the people who by their prejudice have chosen me over an Indian doctor of much greater knowledge and seniority. I listen to the chest of a Vietnamese men ashamed of his swastika tattoo and I wonder if the Nazis envisaged this situation. I learn that comments I hear and cast aside about people not being 'European' are not so subtle examples of not so casual racism, and I wonder whether I am oblivious because of naivety or convenient ignorance or both. I notice when I get the train to the East that all the commuters are white and this jars like my own train line would if I and it were in Dublin. I fancy a Sri Lankan Australian. He's gorgeous and taken. 

- I listen to talk about Kate Middleton's baby and wonder why tens of thousands of miles don't stop people from caring. I look forward to the day off for the Queen's Birthday. We've already had a bank holiday Monday for Labour/ No Labour Day and for Australia Day. My housemates refuse to celebrate the latter. I celebrate St. Patrick's Day and drink four pints of Guinness and get excited about Galway GIrl. Despite, or because of, my kindred spirits here, I sometimes feel lonely. Loneliness is a whole deep ocean; mostly I get to parasail the surface and skim my toes in the waves, quick dry my saltwater tears, and it is beautiful. 

- I try to write in empty cafes but they keep taking away my empty coffee cup and offer me more and more coffee, until I cleverly order cake and leave a stubborn piece on my plate that gradually deteriorates into a large to small crumb, and more cake? No thanks, I'm just trying to steal your atmosphere, leave me alone. The service, like the coffee, is pretty good in Melbourne.