10 Quick Questions*

What was your earliest inspiration to write?

I was born with an ear for stories. Composing (music, songs, poetry, plays) seemed a natural thing to do, rearranging found objects into new structures.

Who is your favourite book character (any book) and why?

I’m going to be cheeky here and pick one of my own – I don’t think you ever really love a book character as much as one you have created. At the moment it’s Clara from Only Ever Always. She is brave and stern and fierce, but so vulnerable and has an enormous capacity for love. Her very existence is a philosophical conundrum, and I like that in a girl.

What is the best feedback a reader has ever given you?

Before my first novel Undine was published, Random House sent the manuscript out to teen readers for feedback. One girl answered the form questions in a positive but fairly perfunctory manner, but then added a note at the end saying she couldn’t put into words how the book had made her feel and how it was unlike anything she’d ever read. Her speechlessness was very touching.

What was your favourite picture book as a child?

John Brown, Rose and the Midnight Cat. I find it impossible to put into words how that book makes me feel, and I suspect it's more in the pictures than the words. So I'll tell you about another book, an odd little number called The Little Slipper Man. It’s a German picture book, quite nihilistic, about a miniature invisible man who no one can see. One day he steals a pair of psychedelic slippers (his little stalk legs slipping around inside each one) and runs down the street and feels very special and important until he realises everyone is looking at the slippers and not him. So he goes back into the meadow, disappears into the long grass and continues his insignificant, inconsequential existence. Not sure, now I have recounted the tale, why it appealed so much. I must try and track it down.

What are you reading right now?
Reading has been a challenge this year. I've wanted desperately to do it, but I am short on space. Avery sleeps in our room during the day and we only have one living area so in winter when the girls are home I have nowhere to go. Still, I am managing to find some reading spaces. This year I've been reading books concurrently, frustrated by how long it takes me to get through a book. I always have one or two collections of short stories on the go because I am enjoying them so much and sometimes I can even manage a whole one in a sitting before the baby cries or the television fires up or a child wants a snack.

I am reading quite diversely in terms of genre, though looking through this list I see that nearly everything is Australian, except for The Lottery. I had a deep craving about a month ago for Australian writing, which is what led me to seek out Patrick White. I am hooked, and plan to read another after this one. The only other I've read was The Vivisector in my early twenties. I am keen for recommendations.

Novel: Patrick White The Aunt's Story
Non-fiction: Melbourne by Sophie Cunningham and Kinglake 350 by Adrian Hyland
YA: Merrow by Ananda Braxton-Smith
Audiobook: The Secret River by Kate Grenville
Short Stories: Little White Slips by Karen Hitchcock and The Lottery by Shirley Jackson

If you could set a story in any time or place, where would it be?

44 rue des Écoles, on 25 February 1980.

If there is one book you wish you’d written, what is it?

The Gruffalo. I greatly admire those effortless rhymes. How gloriously smug Julia Donaldson must feel, and so she should.

If you could sit next to any historical figure on a plane, who would it be and why?

An ordinary person with a tale to tell from any period in history (which is why I like Malouf’s Ransom so much).

If you could give one sentence of writing advice what would it be?

Interrogate reality.

Which literary quote best defines you?

“There is an extraordinary charm in other people’s domesticities. Every lighted house, seen from the road, is magical: every pram or lawn-mower in someone else’s garden: all smells or stirs of cookery from the windows of alien kitchens.”
C.S. Lewis, Time and Tide, 16 June 1945

*Originally answered for the Ballarat Writers and Illustrators Festival, though I've updated my reading list.

Walnut and nutmeg cake

The recipe for this cake has a curious method, where you rub the butter into the flour, spice and sugar and then pat half of this flour mix into the cake tin. You then mix the rest with the wet ingredients and chopped walnuts to make the rest of the cake. It means you end up with what is almost a pastry base, very thin, which gives the cake an excellent textural dimension: a crunchy, bitey, buttery, sugary bottom. The rest of the cake is soft and fluffy, a little caramelly from the brown sugar, balanced by the earthiness of the walnuts. The original recipe called for pecans but I had walnuts and I suspect this was an improvement - pecans would be sweeter but they're a little prissier, don't you think? We had this cake for morning tea and it was lovely as it was: unadorned, washed down with tea or coffee. But if you wanted to serve this for dessert (and I really think you could), then I think a thick sweetened yoghurt would be a perfect accompaniment. If you really wanted to go the whole hog and ice it, then a cream cheese or sour cream frosting (like you'd use on a carrot cake) would be the best match. The recipe suggested dusting with icing sugar. The cake is VERY nutmeggy. (I grated my own. First time. I liked it.) Una loved it, Fred not so much.

I did my "rubbing in" in the food processor so it ended up quite fine and I thought it was way too dry to stick together, but once baked the base was perfectly firm and solid, I suspect I could have done a lap of the house with it in my hands and it would have held together. I guess some of the moisture from the rest of the cake mix seeps in.

Ingredients

2 cups (250g/8oz) SR flour

2 tsp ground nutmeg

125g (4oz) butter

1.5 cups (345g/11oz) brown sugar

.5 tsp bicarb

1 cup (250ml/8 fl oz) milk

1 egg

.75 cup (90g/3oz) chopped walnuts (pecans, almonds...I don't see why you couldn't use any nut)

1/ Preheat oven to 180ºc (350ºF/Gas 4). Grease and line a 20m springform tin. Sift SR flour and nutmeg int a bowl (I never sift) and add the chopped butter and brown sugar. Using your finger tips, rub the butter into flour mixture until it resembles fine breadcrumbs. (I did this in food processor).

2/ Place half this flour mix into the cake tin and press it down until base of tin is evenly covered. Press it down smoothly (using back of spoon or hands).

3/ Combine egg, bicarb, milk, nuts and add to the remaining flour mix. Stir till mixture is just smooth (except it won't be smooth because you have chunks of nuts in there, stupid recipe)

4/Pour this walnut mixture over the crumb base of the prepared tin and smooth surface with spatula. Back 35-40 minutes or until skewer comes out clean. (In my whizzbang fan forced oven I needed the full 40.) Set cake aside for at least 10 minutes before transferring to wire rack to cook.

Recipe from Family Circle Quick Mix Cakes circa 1996

Lines written to amuse Una on holidays

Under a figtree,

never seen by waking eyes,

a fairy girl creeps.

Petunias and daisies grow wild in her

eyes, she is

all flowers and cobwebs.

Remember her name? It’s on your

lips, like a half kiss.

You are 10 months and 10 days old

A month ago you would get yourself up on all fours, rock back and forth and then collapse onto your tummy with your arms and legs elevated, balancing on your torso, as if you were trying to fly or swim, kicking your legs behind you. Though I also wondered if that was your impersonation of walking, from a horizontal perspective. A few weeks ago you began the labourious art of synchronising your arms and legs, and a sort of plodding on all fours began. Now you are an expert, speeding around the loungeroom. With crawling came the ability to sit yourself up on your own and it is surprising how much more human this makes you. In the last few days you have learnt to pull yourself up onto your feet at the couch, but once up your locked knees are stuck, and you can't sit yourself down again.

When you crawl sometimes you stop and press your ear against the floor, listening.

In the last few days you have sprouted your first tooth.

Your language is all music: repetition and intonation and emphasis. 'Na na na na na?' you ask me, with rising intonation. You punctuate our conversations with "yeah" or "oh?" The only word, used regularly and in context, is 'boowa' for a breastfeed. But there is also a recognisable greeting: 'Aiii!' or 'Ai Deh'.

You feed yourself, and eat all sorts of things - avocado, tuna sandwiches, pasta.

You are fascinated by your hands, more so than any of the other babies we have known. Sometimes you carry on whole conversations with gestures. You have three different waves.

You have discovered your pointing finger. You like to touch things - prod prod. You like to touch your pointing finger to my pointing finger. 'ET phone home?' I ask you.

You smile and smile. You are happy to be carried around by your sisters, held under the arms and hauled about the house or the park or the garden. Your brown eyes crinkle with amusement.

Watching your eyes turn from blue to brown has been a fascinating display of colour. For some time your eyes were both blue and brown, an impossible colour, but after many months they darkened to a convincing brown. Your brown eyes are a connection that only we share - mother, son.

You sleep pretty well during the day, except when you don't. You wake often at night. I don't mind. I look to the girls and know somewhere along the line they learned as you will learn. When you wake around midnight, I bring you into bed with me.

You are the child you will become but you are still a little unfamiliar. I wake in the night with you beside me. It dawns on me in the timelessness of dark night - slowly, then with a jolt of memory - that the baby beside me is a boy baby. A moment later I remember: it's you.

Why don't grown ups cry?

Recently you said to me "Why don't grown ups cry? Why don't you ever cry?"

Amazed, I said "I cry! You've seen me cry."

You said, "Have I?" And again, incredulous, "Have I?"

I have sat down on the floor beside you and sobbed, from tiredness or grief or anger or hunger or because my blood burned with sugar. I have cried from hopelessness, because I am terrible at motherhood, because loving you hurts. Because I used to be one thing, and then when you were born there was a tearing, a splitting, like antarctica calving an iceberg, you split from the continent and I lost a part of myself and I must bear that loss over and over. You have borne witness to two pregnancies, and overfilled I leaked tears. You have seen me cry in public, in cities all over the world, in Paris by the Seine, in London as we crossed the street, in Helsinki, in Hong Kong. I have cried because you have used up all my oxygen with your hunger and your need and your love. I have cried because you would not sleep, would not eat, would not leave, would not stay. I have cried reading you sad stories and watching movies with you on my lap. From love and from pride, from exhaustion of feelings, I have cried.

It is a strange trick of your memory that you have forgotten all this. For the first time I wonder if you have repressed these memories, if you have actively chosen to forget. Or perhaps the mind cannot hold what it cannot process, the impossibility of a mother who melts like snow. Perhaps this is why grown ups don't cry.

We taught her to email and our profit on't...

Verse Novel in Miniature*

1.

Walking in Clifton Hill

River dank,

Blossoms sweet with promises

I meet...myself

2

My young self walks past

Meets my eyes and looks away

She does not know me.

3.

I have become

In these familiar streets

A stranger to myself

4.

Though there's things to do,

This day I tread in her steps,

Watch her daily life

5.

She visits the shops

Buys bread and cheese

Takes an hour

To choose a video

And then goes home

Through yellow light

6.

Three cats drape themselves

In the garden, at the door,

Their eyes blink open.

7.

My husband to be

Young like the child of my husband

On the front porch lights up

8.

They smoke cigarettes

And weave dreams from smoke and air

In the park across the road

I am in darkness

9.

The park around me

Grows greener, richer, deeper

Until I am all but lost

to myself.

She looks out at the dark.

____________

*This semester I am teaching a Young Adult fiction group as part of the creative encounters subject at Melbourne Uni. Last week we did a class on verse novels. We talked about voice in YA fiction and how the verse novel as a genre foregrounds voice.

'I sing the song of myself,' wrote Walt Whitman.

I think this is why the verse novel has been so readily adapted for the YA market. We experimented with the form through writing exercises (or provocations as one student called them) and because I was encouraging the students to be very honest and personal (the verse novel strips back descriptive writing and tends to convey in a simple pared back way raw emotional experience), I participated. I set them the task of writing a verse novel in haiku. As you can see I have departed from rigid syllable structures in terms of haiku. I haven't really edited what I wrote in class, so this is, indeed, very raw.