Why I Write

As part of National Young Writers' Month 2011, I answer a couple of questions here about why I write and what inspires me. Funnily enough when I was talking I felt like a babbling fool but watching the video I actually sound a bit like I know what I'm talking about. Bwahahaha.

Anyhoo, National Young Writers' Month is an excellent idea. Instead of focussing on competition or product, it's all about process. Sort of like Nanowrimo or Blomomofo (or whatever it's called - the blogging every day for a month thingy) but writers set personal goals for what they want to achieve, with the opportunity to join what I'm sure will be a very warm and supportive online community. Learn more about it here.

I really love Express Media because a lot of interesting people are involved with it (including many of my ex-students - bright and shining stars that they are), and they provide real support and genuine opportunities for young writers. But mostly I love them because the lighting in that video is SUPER flattering and it makes me look ten years younger. Hurrah Express Media!

In honour of National Young Writer's Month I am going to set myself a modest goal of writing three short stories in June. I'll let you know how I go.

Timeline: Coming of Age

1990 - I am 15. Jim Henson and Roald Dahl die (oh gods of my childhood) and the first Macdonald's opens in Tasmania (I am vegetarian). I watch Pink Floyd's The Wall concert live on television commemorating the fall of the Berlin wall. The Cold War is almost over, but the Gulf wars are just beginning.
1991 - Stores stop stocking vinyl records, though many households (like my own) do not yet own a CD player. This is the height of the cassingle era. The crackling sound as a vinyl record begins to play becomes a sound of my childhood and I learn the particular skill of knowing exactly how long to rewind a casette for to relisten to a favourite song.
1992 - Unbeknownst to me on the other side of the world, the first SMS message is sent by Neil Papworth to Richard Jarvis, wishing him a Merry Christmas. It will be ten years before phones are small enough and cheap enough to be interesting to young people, and eighteen years before I will buy one for myself.
1994 - A second commercial television station begins broadcasting in Tasmania, which brings total number of stations airing in Hobart to four. Around the same time they stop "closing" the stations at midnight with a religious "thought for the day" and the national anthem.
1995 - In Hobart all day Saturday trading is introduced. I am pleased about this, being at this stage of my life pathologically incapable of getting out of bed before midday. (Now I think it would be quite nice if all the major stores closed at 12 on a Saturday and remained closed till Monday morning.) My boyfriend of the time helps me sign up for my first email address.
1996 - This is the year I move to Melbourne. The use of the word Internet enters common usage. Bob Brown is elected as the first Green, and first openly gay, Senator. The following year the state laws in Tasmania that discriminate against homosexuals will be lifted. This is also the year Martin Bryant killed 35 people in what had been a pleasantly boring tourist destination of my childhood and altered the landscape forever.

I have been thinking about this lately. To me it felt like the world came of age when I came of age. Lost its innocence alongside me. The explosion of capitalism, the proliferation of the mass media, the commodification of childhood, the emergence of the Internet, the changing political landscape and the mainstreaming of environmental issues. I was not longer the protected child, and the world was no longer designed to protect and shelter me - this was all too clearly brought home by the horrific murders in Port Arthur (I can't bring myself to use the inflammatory and sensationalist word "massacre"). Oh course in 2001, around the time Martin and I were talking about getting married overseas, the second airplane crashed into the twin towers as we watched on live tv, and the world really did seem to sever in two - Before and After. But it wasn't all bad. Generations of discrimination ended, and continue to end. Vinyl made a comeback. The Internet and the telecommunication revolution lives up to its promise to connect us, to bring the world closer together, to give people a voice in countries where they have been previously voiceless, to offer a model of true democracy.

And surely every generation must feel this way as they reach adulthood - that they have the seen the world grow up. My father was a young man at the end of the second world war, a returned sailor, heady and powerful with relief to be alive. My mother came of age in the 60s in country Tasmania, and though she tells me it was a lot more conservative than in other parts of the world, she came of age in a world where she could have increasing control over her own body and choices - she wrote her Masters thesis (after I was born) on the confluence of women's employment and access to contraception (though she had been basically forced to quit work herself by sexist maternity leave policies in the Tasmanian education system in the 70s).

The world grows up again and again - perhaps it grows older and wearier and more cyncial, or perhaps it is always being unshucked, and what's underneath is always new and raw and vulnerable. My children are innocent in the face of it (yes, despite ongoing wars, and earthquakes, fires and floods, and Tony Abbott, and the rise and rise of commercialisation) and at the moment the world reflects their innocence back to them.

Who knows what will happen when my children come of age. What beast will emerge from the outgrown skin? What will the cracked mirror show? The best and the worst, I suppose, of humanity.

Happy Anniversary Martin

We have been married for nine years and together for thirteen. We have three children - I still feel shocked writing that. We have lived in seven houses (one of them twice, several years apart). He has done a four year degree and changed careers midstream - it was a huge gamble that has paid off in more ways than we could have imagined. I have written books, done a Masters, started this blog, gained and lost 15kg.

An anniversary is a measure. Measures of time - how many people have we made? What have we done? How far have we come? Far enough, for sure, but always in intricate movements, like a dance, round the hall, back in each other's arms before nightfall.

We're not rich. We don't have a new couch or a house with spare rooms. But we have enough. We have the right amount.

At the end of the day, we're happy. What more could we ask?

Found objects

Una: The government writes all the songs. The government wrote the songs when he was a kid.

Fred: Mum, I think you're the most normal thing in my crazy mixed up world.

Talking Books

Last year Audible contacted me through my Twitter account and said "hey, thanks for following us, you're special, we're special, have a free audiobook" only not quite like that, I'm paraphrasing. So I signed up, chose my free audiobook (Revolutionary Road) and then didn't quit my membership so they kept giving me credits but started charging me, which I really hate, but by then they had me hooked and that right there is a cautionary tale in which I am a sucker, but also, a happy one. I know, I'm also confused. If you don't want to sign up for a monthly credit, but you are interested in listening to audiobooks, find out what your local library has to offer - I can download Bolinda audiobooks straight from the website of our regional library. Martin and I take it in turns to spend the audible credits, but we source audiobooks from other places too.

I was commuting into Melbourne Uni (either in the car or drive and train) when I got my first book, and so I mostly listened while I traveled. I was completely drawn into Revolutionary Road, gutted by the ending, and totally addicted to the narrator's voice. That's what it's like when you get a good narrator, an addiction, and you make any opportunity to feed that addiction.

I thought perhaps when I lost the commute I might lose the audiobooks, but then I got diagnosed with gestational diabetes. The stories I listened to roaming the hills in spring twilights were from the collection The Ladies of Grace Adieu by Susanna Clarke: English fairy and folktales set in very dark, English woods, but in my imagination, in the gloaming hills of my bushland, with the distant razor toothed fire burnt hills, and the moon rising from them.

And I still listen, when I'm walking, in bed at night, when I'm cooking, during night feeds or when I'm just hanging out in the house with Avery. Avery finds them soothing too. Together we've listened to Margaret Atwood's Dancing Girls (which I bought for $4.95 as part of an audible special, which they seem to run once or twice a year), Elizabeth Strout's mesmerising Abide With Me and The Help by Kathryn Stockett. The Help was sensational, the narration so perfect and compelling that I can't imagine reading the book. It seems to me that to read it would be to miss out on some of the depth, the nuance, the pure pleasure of the writing - the cadence of the words, the Southern voices, the deep characterisation that flows from the mellifluous voices. Cannot. Recommend. Highly. Enough. If audible are still offering a free credit to new listeners then I really recommend The Help as a gateway drug. 18 hours and 6 minutes of pure pleasure.

Sometimes I listen for an hour, sometimes for five minutes. Sometimes I dip in and out, sometimes I make opportunities to listen. It is a different pleasure from reading, yet it has revitalised my reading - after reading Abide With Me I went back to Olive Kitteridge also by Elizabeth Strout which I'd put down a few stories in and raced through the rest.

Each time an audiobook finishes I feel bereft. I grieve the loss of those particular voices in my head. It's been two or three days since I finished The Help and I am not quite ready to commit to the next one. I felt the same way after Abide With Me. It has to sink in - it's really over. After Revolutionary Road I honestly felt I might not ever be able to listen to anything again. I was shocked, appalled, gutted.

But of course, tentatively at first, I always begin again: words fall through me and I live again.

Strangely, Undine, Breathe and Drift are all on audio too. However, I have never listened to them. I am almost ready to. I flicked through Breathe last night and so much of it I've forgotten, those words I agonised over, wrote and rewrote, now adrift from me.

I Scream

I won an ice cream maker. It's fancy. A while ago I came to the food pornographer's blog via flickr (but I can't remember what I was looking for) and stayed a while, reading this gorgeous post about her family Chinese New Year celebration and desperately wishing she would adopt me. Anyway, she had a competition for an ice-cream maker supplied by Kitchenware direct, and I entered and I won! Me! And it was very exciting, because I don't often win things.

Although I said the first ice cream I would make would be an indulgent vanilla one made with eggs from our chookies to serve alongside the blackberries that grow wild in our garden, by the time the ice cream maker arrived (surprisingly prompt) and we'd finished the crappy ice cream we already owned, the blackberries were few and far between. After I announced my win on Twitter my friend Ess-jay linked to a stash of ice cream recipes she'd bookmarked on Delicious. The one that caught my eye was David Lebovitz's Brown Bread Ice Cream. The stars aligned, the ingredients were all to be had and lo, my first batch of ice cream was born, still using (of course) eggs from the chookies. (Speaking of the chooks, Fred has recently learned how to hypnotise them. It is a sight to behold.)

The best thing about this ice cream without a doubt is the crispy bits of bread. I thought they would go soggy after a day or two in the freezer but they have retained their biscuity crunch. The worst thing was not being allowed to sit in the pantry and eat all the sugary cinnamony buttery bread crumbs with a spoon. I used a whole grain bread from our local bakery. It's a lovely dense dark bread. I used light cream cheese and low fat milk (because that's what we had) and the ice cream doesn't seem to be compromised at all. I used low GI raw sugar with crumbs and, as David suggested, a mix of soft brown sugar and caster sugar for the ice cream. I had a moment watching the thin custard sloshing around where I thought "there is no way this is going to come together and be ice cream" but it did of course. The ice cream maker was great to use, it feels very sturdy with one big button and no fiddly bits.

I am still on my low GI diet, and have trained myself to eat ice cream out of a tiny bowl, one intended for dipping sauce. I get about two desert spoons worth of ice cream in it and I have to say, it's enough. Ice cream is an acceptable food in the low GI universe as long as it's not too sweet and not too fatty, the ice cream maker is great because I can control the amount of sugar I put in. We have three soft skinny bananas that are destined for great things this weekend. I am excited about more experiments, I have a lot of cooking mojo at the moment, but am sometimes disheartened by the fact that I can't eat too many sweets.. I see a lot of icy treats on our immediate horizon. Thank you TFP!

Hey you. Yes, you.

Sh! Come over here.

You have to wait till August to read it, but meanwhile have a look a the new cover.

Isn't it shiny pretty new?